Finally finished Keeper. What a beautiful experience the whole way through. I didn't find everything, I might make an attempt to do so at some point in the future. But it's the kind of game that I need to sit with for a bit after finishing. I love that lighthouse, and I love that bird.

A lot of particle effects in Psychonauts have this "Start pasting PE Room output here." comment. I can only imagine "PE Room" (Particle Effect Room? Particle Edit Room?) was some kind of tool that'd let them easily put together particle effects. A bit of a shame we don't have whatever it is.

I really need to get around to playing Keeper proper. It looks like such a beautiful game.

Very surreal video to see. Proto-Eddie looks quite strange. Almost looks like 90's CGI despite being created in 2005. It's tragic that despite their aesthetic being part of the original pitch, Faction C got axed. Fletus deserves justice.

I'd like to apologise for the lack of updates on Astralathe, or really anything Psychonauts related, as of late. I found myself being roped into helping with a project called "Primelock", serving as a "what if" mod of Valve's Deadlock if they'd never changed the theme from the sci-fi "Neon Prime".

Bc of Astralathe I've decided to hand redraw the model textures. I started with Raz, ofc, and have gotten through 1/2 of them so far. Behold HD Raz:

To honor Ozzy's larger-than-life rock and roll legacy, we're making Brütal Legend *FREE* on itch.io: doublefine.itch.io/brutal-legend But this incredible deal will only last for 666 minutes, as the prophecy foretold. So get yourself clicking, before it disappears like a demon in the night... 🤘 🖤

With some determination, I've managed to staple on support for loading textures from PNG, BMP and for some reason JPG files. TGA also works, though was technically already supported by the engine.

I've just released version 2.1.1 of Astralathe. This is a minor update that just fixes a reported issue preventing the Microsoft Store release of the game from launching with Astralathe. gitlab.com/scrunguscrun...

The @offtherpg.com demo is very good, and I think all the updates are nice. I think the only new track I actually dislike so far is Flesh Maze Tango. Where the rest of the OST seems to aim to capture the same vibes as the replaced track, this one is really different and I don't really get why.

Full Throttle released 30 year ago today! How do we know that for sure? That's... a really good question! Our support-wizard @kestrelpi.bsky.social recently dug through the internet to figure out: hey, when exactly did this game release? Read about his adventure: www.doublefine.com/news/when-wa...

I've been working on a small side project recently, unrelated to Psychonauts. However, it's really been selling me on the potential for using Godot as a frontend builder for tools. Better than WinForms/WPF by a long shot. Considering it for a potential GUI for Oatmeal.

Believe it or not, this is what "progress" looks like when working on Astralathe.

I've just released a new version of Astralathe. This release brings some nice features such as autohooking (removing the need for the launcher) and a brand new Lua function hooking system for modders. The full details can be found on the release page here: gitlab.com/scrunguscrun...

Nothing a little editing magic can't fix

It's Psychonauts' 20th anniversary. 🧠🧠 🤯 What can you even say! It feels like yesterday butalso one hundred years ago. Double Fine took a big swing on our first game and let's be honest: we kinda nailed it? Thank you all for your love and support over the years. We love that you love Raz so much!

Happy 20th birthday to Psychonauts. I stressed out a bunch over what I could do for the occasion to top last year but I couldn't come up with anything and decided to just not worry too much about it. I'll have cool stuff when I have cool stuff. I may have something interesting ready soon.

I was looking through my bookmarks out of curiosity (because I love to bookmark stuff to remember it and then forget about it) and I saved all the tabs I had open while working on Psychonauts model conversion under a folder called "week of pain". Fitting.

The next release of Astralathe will include a feature to make precise changes to scripts easier to do (no more replacing an entire script file to change 1 function). I wrote the docs ahead of time: gitlab.com/scrunguscrun... It's tentative so feedback on the docs and the system itself is welcome!

I've uploaded the video I made for Psychonauts' 19th birthday last year to YouTube so it's no longer trapped in obscure places. I still look back on it fondly, despite it very much taking an excessive amount of blood, sweat and tears. www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ZM4...

I've uploaded this here: www.youtube.com/watch?v=4A_P...

multi_prim_test. This was a very early test level that I built while developing custom level support for Psychonauts last year. It originally started as just 2 differently textured platforms to test multi-primitive support in Oatmeal. This version was built on the 19th of April 2024.

One of the most visually interesting quirks of Silent Hill 4's interface font, partial lack of serifs on certain letters (i, u), might have been a happy accident by what they used to generate the font atlas, as both the original Bitstream's Transitional 521 and game's "smallfont" both have those

too beautiful for this world #cohost

I didn't have any kind of fun Psychonauts modding gimmick for Christmas, nor will I have one for the new year. That being said this year has been monumental for it and I still can't believe how far we've come. Let's see it we can top it next year, hm?

Deadlock ended up being recorded as my most played Steam game of this year, but I know for sure that if had been launching Psychonauts through Steam while working on Astralathe and such, it would have certainly dethroned it. A shame, would have been fun to see it here.

🧵 I was idly messing around in Psychonauts and managed to find a mildly interesting bug. In this case, I was messing around in Ford's lab and happened to bump the cobweb loom. I got a line from Ford but... his dialogue portrait isn't there.

Massive leak from a parallel world

I found a couple of bugs I missed in Astralathe 2.0. I've just pushed a couple new versions to fix them. Funny enough, 2 were emotional baggage related and all of them were widescreen related.

There was an issue with one of the downloads for the Astralathe 2.0 release on GitLab that made it 404 that I've just fixed. I opt to blame GitLab for this one, because they changed their link format for attachments which made it annoyingly harder to attach builds as artifacts

🧵 I was planning on releasing version 1.9 of my Psychonauts modding and enhancement plugin, Astralathe, very soon. To my surprise it turns out that today I'm actually going to be releasing version 2.0 instead. Astralathe beta 2.0 is available right now from the GitLab releases page. (Linked below)

🧵 I was planning on releasing version 1.9 of my Psychonauts modding and enhancement plugin, Astralathe, very soon. To my surprise it turns out that today I'm actually going to be releasing version 2.0 instead. Astralathe beta 2.0 is available right now from the GitLab releases page. (Linked below)

As a small follow-up thread, the most common reasoning for this I've heard (including from developer Erik Robson) is that it might've been a precaution to avoid potential stigma in Japan. The four-fingers situation over there's a bit complicated.

🧵 How many fingers does Raz have? Can you remember off the top of your head? To narrow it down - does he have 4 or 5? Maybe you can figure it out by remembering how many fingers another character has? Ford? One of the P2 interns? I promise this is going somewhere interesting (at least if you're me)

I have been analysing the fingers of Psychonauts characters for 4 hours

🧵 The kids' cabins area is really small. While decently dense on account of being filled with a bunch of platforming elements so you can explore it and learn, it's generally quite simple. Surely such a tiny, relatively unremarkable area of the camp can't contain many secrets. Right?

Even in the final game, the main Lua script responsible for handling basically everything Raz-related is simply called "Dart". On top of that, all his textures are under a folder called "Textures/Characters/Dart", labelled "newdart".

Did you know that Raz wasn't the original hero of Psychonauts? That was D'Artagnan or "Dart." He made it far in the design process. From running and jump cycles to tightrope walking, we have a folder packed with many of those early animations. Look at his hat flop as he runs!

I should write a tool to let me write posts and threads threads in one UI and then crosspost them simultaneously to both BlueSky and Mastodon as well as generating a Jekyll blog post.

In this post I talk about how TK changed during development. In the final game, there's actually a handful of Lua functions for changing how TK works. While some do nothing, we can actually get a partial glimpse into TK's older functionality by disabling the targeting requirement. It's kind of neat.

Waterloo World is a neat level. When you boil it down, it is largely a standard item puzzle level with some novel platforming, but its scale gimmick and theme makes it very memorable. But there's a timeline where we got something very different.

I've been in the process of using BlueArk to mirror all my posts from The Awful Website™ to here. It's... not perfect. A bit scuffed, but functional as an archive for the most part. For some reason for embedded tweets it *did* post them as reposts but also included the Twitter link to the post?

Oh neat, Bluesky added a native thread composer. Well I was using TOKIMEKI for it before but now I REALLY don't have any excuse not to be posting stuff here. In fact there's a good chance this'll become the main space now.

I recently played through and finished XCOM: Chimera Squad. I've always been one of the game's defenders despite opinions seeming to generally range somewhere between "not good" and "meh" among my friends who like XCOM.

I figured out that TOKIMEKI exists, which does have the thread building support I so miss. I don't like its overall layout but I will absolutely use it just for that feature. So yeah, expect my Psychonauts stuff (and more!) to be mirrored here with increasing frequency in the future.

I'm really happy with how the next Astralathe release is shaping up. The goal is to have the next release include Discord rich presence, ImGui menus and restored debug drawing which are 3 features I've been working on separately.

And that's debug tri rendering now working! With a couple of niche exceptions that's basically the whole suite of the game's debug rendering functions now restored and working for the first time on the Windows release build!

Somehow, I failed to put 2 and 2 together and realise that the "TS:" labels that would show up whenever I turned on the collision visualiser actually stood for "Trigger Sphere". I only realised it just now as I got sphere rendering re-implemented.