I wanna get a group together for the Splatoon 3 Splatfest next weekend. I'm planning on being on the ghost team. Is anyone interested in joining on that?

Mimigas are absolute underrated CUTIES and I had such a wonderful time drawing this lil guy <3 ✏️ Commission for lagombi! Thank you so much! 💖

keychain comms!!! please message me if youre interested or have any questions. these will be open until around the 15th or if i get a Lot of interest (so more than like, 5 slots)

New post: “Look, just fucking use Mastodon already” https://giants-club.net/articles/just-use-mastodon/ A short, unnecessarily profane rant about modern social media, not really serious but not really a joke, either. With apologies to McSweeney’s.

Trying to think if there's a better use for my MediaWiki installation than documenting an RP group that doesn't do stuff anymore. I already set up novasquirrel.com/world/ as a standalone thing that just focuses on my own worldbuilding, and that's probably better when collaboration isn't needed.

Thinking that maybe my feelings about the viability of working without a game engine are actually influenced a lot by the strong debugging tools that you get for free by making a game that can run in Mesen, and just how simple the systems my games are built on actually are.

I got to play Sliding Blaster 2 over Mesen netplay and was surprised to see that it does support two mice that way, though mouse control isn't friendly to lag. We spent a lot of time just goofing around and pretending the bouncing characters were like the DVD logo, or moving in silly ways.

Working on the versus mode in Petal Crash for Game Boy Color again, now working on finishing the garbage mechanic. Instant drop garbage was already in because of Trash Trial, so I implemented the normal kind, with targets for where garbage will fall in a few turns. #gbdev #homebrew #gamedev

Something that happens to me pretty often as I write Game Boy code is that I'll write a conditional branch to skip over a return or a call, and then go "oh right I can just make the call/return conditional" You would think that my 6502/65816 familiarity would cause more issues but it's mostly this.

I hope SAGE 2025 gets me some feedback on Sliding Blaster 2, since I don't think many people have actually played it yet. A lot of people have told me the graphics are cute though, and compared the art style to lots of different games (none of which I've played much of.)

I've been using my Raspberry Pi Zero W as a baseline to compare against for writing software that works on very weak hardware. Seems that if I want to do that, and have a GUI alongside arbitrary graphics, a pretty reasonable design is to use Qt with a custom widget that draws itself with QtPainter.

I think a lot of my interest in old computers is actually part of a larger interest in getting computers with low specs to do interesting/useful/entertaining work, which also applies to single board computers. Though I am also separately very interested in computer history and old Windows aesthetics

I wanna figure out if anyone I actually know and am friends with is going to Anthro New England 2026 so I can potentially figure out who to room with and who won't be super busy with preexisting plans. I don't want to room with a stranger (tried it and it sucks), but don't want to room alone either.

Game dev is really a "for fun" thing for me, but sometimes tasks come up that happen because they're needed rather than because they're fun in themselves, and they can end up just feeling like work. Sometimes I can find enjoyment from solving interesting problems within them though.

Extending my Furnace to Terrific Audio Driver project so that it can also accept Impulse Tracker files wasn't too difficult, though there's still work to do and everything needs to be tested. Internally it converts the file to Furnace-style representation and then converts again to MML.

My tracker experience is mostly in Famitracker, Furnace, and SNESGSS, and I was surprised to see that a lot of other trackers treat effects in a very different way, likely because a single effect column means more complicated behavior is needed. I'm used to effects sticking until explicitly stopped.

I think in order to make more progress on my SNES shooter game, I need to think about what a complete version of the game would look like and how it would be structured, and do some planning. I'll also want to polish things up graphically and audio-wise of course.

Here's a Brionne Maffi by @funnyhat12.bsky.social using the design I made. Always a big fan of the way she shades rubber, making it look real.

When I did the big refactor that made Tilemap Town entities all generic and able to be nested arbitrarily, it was really funny that players could exist in other players' inventories, but that's opportunity for mischief as people realize that's something you can do.

I'm glad to see the Game Bub crowdfund doing well; it's up to 57% and plenty of time left. I did end up backing it because I want to support open hardware, even if I have many GBAs already. And it's just a cool project in general.

Here's my #SNES mouse-controlled shooter game so far! It's definitely far from being 100% done, but it's in a state where I feel comfortable showing it off and having people try it out! Multiplayer and regular controllers are supported. forums.nesdev.org/viewtopic.ph... #gamedev #snesdev #homebrew

It's happened a bunch of times where I encounter a MIDI or chiptune version of a song *first* and then much later find the original it was a cover of, which is funny because it feels like I'm finding a fancy remix (as people often do with game music), but that's actually just how the song sounds.

I underestimated how much sound effects add to how a game feels, even if the sound effects are very simple and placeholder-ish. I have my SNES overhead shooter in a spot where I should be able to have a demo for people to play with soon, since I put in actual level progression and some missing stuff

POV You're on a date with Xenia

art for NovaSquirrel

I played with using The Games Factory 2 to make a program that would work on Windows 98 (it was yet another Conway's Life) and I looked into Open Watcom, but actually it turns out I can just use a modern (32-bit) version of MinGW, and it's just down to what Windows API functions are called.

Managed to have a big enough event on Tilemap Town yesterday with enough people that we ran into a problem where it's difficult to keep track of multiple activities/conversations happening on the same map, all in the same chat log. I added a feature to let you focus the chat by names or by distance.

The 65c816 has a lot of flexibility in how you use its features, which makes it hard to give advice, but I'm realizing that for a SNES action game the big impactful choice you'll make is whether you want to use X, Y, or the direct page pointer as "this" and a lot of other stuff then falls into place

I made a blog post with a bunch of Tilemap Town updates: blog.novasquirrel.com/tilemap-town... Some updates include per-character pronouns, a command to show short animations on the map, a volume slider for music, and tutorials page. I made a lot of small tweaks to make everything nicer/easier too.

Kroger had Calypso Paradise Punch Lemonade for sale, so I got it and tried it. I think it's actually pretty good, rather than "fucking minging" as I saw it reviewed. But I also got two more flavors so I'll see if I also like those too.

The Game Bub Crowd Supply campaign is live! And it's been redesigned with a new horizontal design. You can now back the campaign to get your very own pre-assembled Game Bub! www.crowdsupply.com/second-bedro...

I like how my Pokémon fanfic does something original instead of being yet another Pokémon Mystery Dungeon Story, but that also means that if people are looking for more of the most common thing they're not finding it there. Though if they just wanna see talking Pokémon adventure together I have that

Seems that it's a lot harder to get people to read a thing you wrote than to look at a thing you drew, which I expected going into writing, so that's fine. A few friends *really* liked my story so I can just write it for me and them hehe. Mass appeal is never the goal of anything I make.

It was exciting to see a difficulty select on the minigames on the Tamagotchi Paradise, because I imagined the option to play a game on there that actually gave me a challenge, but in reality higher difficulties just give you less time or fewer lives and it's the same, as far as I can tell??

Here's a draft of the first three chapters of a fanfic I wanted to write since last year, involving characters from Earth finding themselves in a setting based on the 1997 Pokémon Gold/Silver demo, transformed into cut Pokémon designs: drive.google.com/file/d/1CWJH... Excited to write more of it!

I think my 256K SNES game is not where I would've wanted it to be in August but maybe if I actually add some progression and actual levels that's going to change my opinion on how far along it actually is hehe. I took awhile to get back to it after Art Fight, drew some, and wrote some of a fanfic.

Seems like a tricky aspect of turning a new game into a social activity is that if you don't want to get spoiled, you'll play through the whole game before trying to go into the message boards/chats to talk about it, but then at that point it's hard to remember what you thought about while playing.

One advantage of a rubber critter over a pooltoy one is that swimming is actually a viable thing, as opposed to just floating on the surface. Which is important when you're going for something in the Popplio line or similar.

pokemon_gold_beta

I think most of my interest in old computers is actually in old operating systems, rather than particular hardware, and it's more focused on 95/98/XP than anything from the 80s. I think it'd be fun to make some stuff that would run in 98 and/or XP at some point, and I looked into my options there.

Tilemap Town didn't have file uploads from 2017 to late 2024, so custom graphics had to go on another service like Imgur. I noticed that the TOS made it clear they really don't like being used as a CDN, and they do some blocking based on headers and IP ranges, so I went and migrated most things.

I have a small Second Life space next to Circuit La Corse I've been renting but never really did anything with? I think I wanted a roadside ice cream shop or something and never built it. I decided to spend almost half the land impact on a large Sylveon, and put my Conway's Life board. #secondlife

Wanted to draw something relating to that Spaceworld 1997 Pokémon fanfic stuff I wanted to do. Did you know Remoraid can learn Flamethrower? And Bullet Seed and Charge Beam and other moves you don't expect on a water type, but I thought this was the funniest option. #pixelart

The original version of Petal Crash for PC uses 5-color character select portraits, and the GBC port used 4-color portraits at first because they're much simpler to implement. It now has the full 5-color portraits, using multiple palettes and some sprite overlays. #gameboy #homebrew #gbdev

it's heckin' MINTY !!! It was fun to draw in this more chunky pone Did you know that Tabitha St. Germain voiced her? She's gonna be at Everfree Northweeeest ;D #ponysky #bskyart #mlp #mylittlepony #mlpart

Trying to explore using more advanced shading to make an object feel more real, and specifically trying to give off vibes of "this would be fun to stim with." There's some more techniques I want to try playing with later on, but I'm very happy with this start! #pixelart #toyfur #rubberfur #furryart

It's Sherbet! I wonder if she has any sherbet... attack on @novasquirrel.com !! #artfight #art

I got my e-Reader cards and now it's time to start practicing so I can get really good at Exo Attack. I'm sure I can get past round 17 if I'm more careful and use the shield more strategically. I've been camping in the corner and letting the bubbles float up. www.retrodotcards.com/leaderboards...

I drew Maffi as a toy Brionne recently and I had fun trying to set up the design to be recognizably Maffi but also recognizably Brionne. "Cord tail wrapped around a different kind of tail" is a fun solution to having two different tails that are otherwise mutually exclusive. #pixelart #toyfur

Now that I'm done with Art Fight for the year I wanna keep up the momentum and keep drawing for myself now and then. I want to try and practice poses and expressions, which probably means lots of Alex since she's pretty easy to draw already. Putting her in situations, trying new perspectives.