Remy's April 2020 Newsletter! ⛳🍬🏝📰🕹🎶 (Patreon)

Hi everyone!

What a month eh? More like non-month amiright? It feels like we're in this weird place in time that kinda doesn't exist, but also still does, kinda like when the daylight saving time-change hits and you get that free non-hour. (you can use it to gamejam too btw)

Anyway, despite everything, things are still happening. Personally I haven't been up to much. I'm mostly trying to relax and not let the situation affect my mood too much. So I've been playing some games with friends, and watching online videos, and just trying to enjoy my time while staying inside. But I still did some things!

Castle, who are still employing me, have been taking a new direction, making a mobile app to make and play tiny games, all on mobile. For the game making part, it has a pretty basic scene editor, with some very limited visual coding. It has built-in physics and touch controls (you can drag objects and detect taps and presses) and all-in-all it's just enough to start making some very small games with it. The app isn't out publicly yet, but I've been asked to try and make things on alpha builds of it, and that's most of the game stuff I've been making this month.

So here's one thing I made inside the app for example: RANDOLF!

This ridiculous game has three basic obstacles and a variety of semi-generated structures to play these obstacles with. Each time you load the game, you have a new level.

This game really pushes the visual coding to be honest. Making this was not comfortable, especially because the editing side of it is lacking optimization at the moment and so it gets very slow as you add things and it can be pretty frustrating in general.

Still, I'm actually very happy with that game! This is certainly the best thing I've made on the new Castle app, for now at least. And to be honest, it's been difficult to find another idea (that can be done in the app) to top it off.

I've also been working a little bit on my engine SUGAR! It's been a while since the last time you've heard of it, but it's always been at the back of my mind all this time!

And I've been working on something some of you might get excited about: Lua scripting!

Yes, after spending so much time making games in Lua for Castle, it's pretty hard to seriously consider making games entirely in C++ again. So I've started integrating Lua scripting and making bindings with the SUGAR C++ API.

And no, SUGAR will not end up being another Fantasy Console, however it will have an integrated console! As-in, you'll be able to open up a console to type Lua commands as an overlay in the SUGAR window, while the game is playing. That's my current goal anyway. :)

I'm also thinking of adding integrated tools for viewing (and maybe editing) spritesheets, palettes, maps and fonts, and maybe just maybe I'll be adding a music tracker at one point... We'll see about those though, no real decisions have been made on that front yet. With a bit of luck you'll see more of these ideas in the next few months!

I've actually only devoted a few days to this during this month so that's all I have on that for now!

Earlier in the month I've also made some more progress on my 'voxel' Island Maker! I didn't really finish it, and I'm starting to question if I ever will, but I did add some new materials, animated some of them, added an island exporter and importer with Caslte's post system, and I added island procedural generation to have something you can start from to make your own island!

I wanted to add a way to add text to your island in this game, so that each island could have a little story on it, but I didn't get around to do it yet. Since Castle have been focusing so much on the new mobile app I'm questioning the worth of making anymore things for the old desktop app. Chances are I'll get back to it if/when Castle gets back to developping the old app... Or when I manage to make it compatible with SUGAR's Lua integration. ;)

Oh and also, Pico-8 0.2.0 came out!! Sadly I didn't get around to make anything with it yet, but!! I'm very honored to say that with this update, if you use the commend 'INSTALL_GAMES', my game Embrace will now be installed along with other extremely cool Pico-8 games! Pico-8 has been a huge part of my game development journey and that my game is now part of Pico-8 in a way is genuinely mind-blowing to me. It feels good for sure!

And more Embrace news! This month it also got featured in the 3rd INDIEPOCALYPSE bundle and zine, along with 9 other small games! The bundle is 15$, you get executables for all the games, and it directly supports the gamedevs involved! Check it out!

I was saying that I've been playing a bunch of games, so let's talk about that!

At the very beginning of April, a new Risk of Rain 2 content update arrived, with the big addition of 'Artifacts', which are essentially unlockable gameplay modifiers. I sorta felt like unlocking them was a bit of a chore, but the modifiers themselves are really cool. Several modifiers are comebacks from the original Risk of Rain, like 'choosing the items you get' or 'no chests, but monsters drop items instead', and then there are some new ones like 'every 10 minutes, your doppelganger (clone) appears on the level and tries to kill you' which I really like, or 'every level you're swapped to a random character' which is pure chaotic evil.

It's definitely very interesting and for sure adds replayability to the games... in-so-far as you don't grow sick of everything outside the base gameplay mechanics, since you are still going to fight the same monsters in the same environments, and by the time you unlock all the artifacts, that might just happen.

I might sound bitter and that's just because I had high expectations for this update, and even though the content is there (and very good too), for me, unlocking it all quickly became an obsession that turned out to be tiresome and frustrating, instead of fun. I blame myself, and it's not changing my opinion that Risk of Rain 2 is the best action game I've ever played,

After spending too much time unlocking artifacts too intensely, I grew tired of that game and moved on with my life. And so I went to my Itch.io library, to look for something else to play. That's where I saw PETRI which I decided to launch, maybe for just the third time since I bought it.

And I did not remember it was this good! It's a very simple thing, some will call it a toy rather than a game, but it is mesmerizing! It consists of a population of bacteria whose behavior evolves as you poke it with your cursor. Its Itch page describes it as "an exploration of emergent organisation".

It even has an evolving soundscape to go with the changes happening on screen. This game is definitely 'something else', and I absolutely love that. It's 1$ and I think you should buy it even if it's to launch it just once and never again.

But then I still had to find something else to fill up my quarantined time, so I played Terraria again! That game was my first Steam game, I bought it the day it came out, I was very excited, and in April of 2020, I've played my 1000th hour of it, which is to say that I like Terraria a lot.

This game is actually receiving its 'final' update on the 16th of May, 3 years after the last update, and exactly 9 years after its original release. It's promising a huge lot of content and changes and I think that I may not do anything else than play Terraria during the few days after this update comes out.

I guess I should learn my lesson and try not to have high expectations, but I mean come-on this is the game I've played the most ever by a very large margin and it's getting potentially its largest update yet! How could I not be excited??

So yeah, you'll definitely read about the update in the May newsletter for sure.

To finish up, some music things!

First, Pedro Winter, frenchman and CEO of Ed Banger Records, put out El Principito Mix, mixing a narration of the classic french novel "Le Petit Prince" over soft house techno music. I found it surprisingly graceful and a really great way to rediscover the novel. The narration is in french, and sadly there are no subtitles for it on the video, but hopefully you can still appreciate it even if you don't understand the language? (sorry :/)

And then another french thing ("cocorico" as we say in France) but this one less language-intensive: the musician Myd (who made All Inclusive and Muchas) has been doing daily mixes live on Youtube every morning for a solid half of April. He took a break then, but he's now back for season 2 of Comyd-19! It's on every Monday and Thursday at 9:00 GMT+2 (Paris time) now and everytime there's a really good guest playing a 30 minutes show after Myd's live mix. It's good and I recommend it! You'll have to catch the lives on his channel but he usually leaves them uploaded for some time before removing them. (he's playing a lot of unreleased material from other people and doesn't want problems)

In a very diffrent style, this month I discovered that KEYGEN CHURCH had released an 18 minutes track in December of 2019. It's classical-leaning synthwave black metal and you may not have ever heard anything like it before, and it's good. It's very good. I like it a lot. Check it out.

That's all I have to recommend you just now, but I also want to mention that Bandcamp have been removing their cuts from sales on their website to support artists on at least two occasions lately. It's not an on-going thing, but in general I really think that Bandcamp is the best place to support artists you love, as it's much much more direct than having them earn from streaming services. Better yet, Bandcamp is an ad-free website hosting a very wide diversity of music, great to discover new musics in styles you may not even know yet. What I'm saying is: Bandcamp is good, use it and support artists you like!

And that's all for that month! This newsletter is coming a little late, sorry about that! I hope you found what you read interesting, and more than that I hope you're safe and feeling at least OK.

As always I want to thank you immensely for your support. You rock!

Take care and have a nice month of May!

Remy 🍬