Remy's May 2020 Newsletter! 🐤📐🕹🛩⛏💿📰 (Patreon)

Hi everyone!

May was another month of mostly self-confined slowness if I'm honest. The lack of social interaction and of walking (which tends to be my most physical activity) has been hitting me pretty hard. So I chose to take it easy and indulge in a lot of Terraria, which received it's final update in the middle of the month! (more on that later)

Towards the start of the month, I finally picked up the newly updated Pico-8! With it I made two tweetcarts, textured-quad and textured-tri snippets, and two attempts at making a new game, both of which I quit for lack of motivation to do anything whatsoever. Here are the tweetcarts:

Tweet is here! 

Tweet is here! 

This last one actually took a few days to make fit inside the 280 characters tweet limit. And two more days after I put it online, it dawned on me that I absolutely didn't need to use the new tline function at all, and that I could have saved quite a few characters by simply using the sspr function instead. But regrets do no good! I'm still very proud of how I managed to use tline here!

And talking of tline, if you're wondering what a textured quadrilateral and triangle looks like, take a look:

You can find the code for these right there on the Pico-8 BBS and you can use them as you will in your own projects! If you look below it, freds72 uploaded his own version of the same thing and his does look a little better, but it's also a little slower, so you make your pick. :P

For the two games I mentionned, here is how far I got with each. Both games seemed interesting on paper but I simple did not have the will to get into making an entire videogame, even a Pico-8 one.

And finally, last of the things that came out of my brain, to the computer, via my fingertips, this month I give you @MoaiEmojiBot!

It's a Twitter bot, it uses the great CheapBotsdDoneQuick, and every three hours it tweets a randomly composed emoji landscape with Moai (the Easter Island statues) in them.

It was pretty fun to make and it felt good to put something finished out there! You can find @MoaiEmojiBot on Twitter, and you can view its source on the CheapBotsdDoneQuick website!

And so we move on to things I enjoyed this month! Starting with a surprise, a game that was in early development when I was just starting out as a gamedev myself! Jet Lancer, the over-the-top 2D dogfighting (it's planes fighting, not actual dogs) game came out this month!

Terraria wasn't out yet and I had no idea what to play at that point, so Jet Lancer was very welcome, and it did much more than fill the gap. This game plays very tight, in a good action game way, and it has a ton of personality. The bosses are really cool, the variety of the missions really keeps things interesting and the slow trickle of new enemies as the game goes on is really satisfying. And besides all that, it looks amazing, and it sounds amazing too.

This is great game and if you like 2D shooters or action games in general, I recommend you don't miss out on it! You can get Jet Lancer on Steam and Nintendo Switch.

But then Terraria's update landed and I sadly had to drop Jet Lancer to give my soul to the game that had already absorbed a thousand hours of my life in the past 9 years, since it came out.

The "Journey's End" update is the last big update that will come to Terraria. (if you believe the developpers anyway :P) It adds some >1000 items, some new enemies, two new bosses, two new NPCs, a lot of new worldgen elements, a lot of rebalancing/reworking existing things, some entirely new gameplay mechanics, two news gameplay modes, one of which featuring new UI to set time, weather, difficulty, and duplicate "researched" items (another new mechanic), a bunch of visual improvements, and then some more stuff. It's huge. It's really huge.

To put it in perspective, you may like to compare this Terraria 1.0 trailer from 9 years ago, to this Terraria 1.4 trailer from last year. (for the update that just came out) This is one game that has come a very long way.

I realize this may already seem like I'm trying to sell you the game, but my point really is that I'm very happy to finally be able to play this update. Having played Terraria from its release day, the state of the game after this update feels crazy to me.

And so yes, I've played it quite a bunch, and yes it's very very good. The picture above is one of my bases I built in the game. One of the new gameplay mechanics encourages you to build a few "towns" at different spots in the world, and it worked on me, since I currently have 5 different towns, each of which I've had a lot of fun building and make look pretty.

The most mind-blowing addition to the game remains the new "Journey" game mode, which basically lets you play the game however you want. You can change the difficulty at any time, you can change the spawn rate, you can deactivate collisions with enemies entirely, you can set the time of day and weather, and you can duplicate items. But you can't just create any item in the game, no for each item you have to "research" a number of it (destroying it in the process) before being able to duplicate it as much as you want, from a pretty well done UI.

This is genius to me because the duplication is extremely freeing for a lot of repetive tasks that you'd normally have to get through in the game, but also the research mechanic keeps you tied to the regular game progression which makes up a lot of the fun Terraria has to offer.

In general, this new gamemode really crystalizes the developers' semi-hands-off approach to letting players do whatever they want from the very start, in part to make up for the game's shortcomings. For example, you were always able to take any character from one generated world to another, making sure you could find all the items you wanted, in case some items didn't generate in your first world. It has also always been up to you to play either in hardcore (permadeath), mediumcore (death is punishing but your character does come back), or softcore (you just lose money when you die, no big deal) and the game would play just the same. In a later update they added a fishing game mechanic, which felt very different from the rest of the game, but they made sure that it was totally optional, that you could play through the entire game without it. In fact, in the game such as it is now, you have quite a few routes you can take to complete the game progression and I'd say it's half about what you find in the random generation, half about your own preferences as to how to play.

So having this new mode that can free you from grinding, but only if you want to, that can shorten waiting for an event, but only if you want to, and lets you have infinite materials for building things, and you do want that, it feels like legalized cheat codes, and it makes a ton of sense for this game. And I love it.

I haven't actually gotten through the entire game progression since the update came out yet. In fact I'm confident there's a lot of additions that I haven't come accross yet. I'm taking my time with it, building unnecessarily pretty things and over-exploring. It feels good. Did I mention I love Terraria?

Some music now!

This month I rediscovered Cassius' Ibifornia album, and then I listened to it a lot for two weeks. Cassius is a french duo of pretty prominant electro-rock and then electro-house producers Philippe "Zdar" and Hubert "Boom Bass", since 1988. Both have been pioneers of the french electro scene and they have produced songs for a ton of other famous artists, and their own albums have always been original and very qualitative. Ibifornia in particular is my favorite album of theirs. I'd suggest listening at least to Go Up and The Missing. It's very good.

Sadly Philippe Zdar passed away last year just before the release of Cassius' last album Dreems. On top of being a pioneer in his field and community, Zdar has always shown himself as passionate, kind and open-handed. He will not be forgotten.

In a fairly different style, Genevieve Artadi has released a new single, Living Like I Know I'm Gonna Die, and it is fire. Genevieve is most known to be a vocalist with a very soft and unique voice, but she's also a producer for her own songs. She's worked with a few different artists and with Louis Cole they are the band Knower which makes very good electro music and even better lives.

The new single from Genevieve is her best single yet in my opinion and it will be part of her new album Dizzy Strange Summer coming out on the 17th of July.

Before ending this newsletter, I want to write a bit about racist police violence in the light of Georges Floyd's murder by the police in the US on May 25th and the events that are following it, and currently on-going.

Racist police brutality is very real in the US, and the same can be said in France. Among other victims, Adama Traoré, a french black man was chocked to death by policemen 4 years ago and his family was subsequently persecuted by the police, and there still hasn't been a prosecution against the policemen, despite the family demanding it very vocally, and the organisation "Justice Pour Adama" which is essentially our french Black Lives Matter. More recently, in the last 3 months in fact, the poorer racialized neighborhoods in France came to riots in part because they were taking the heaviest blow from the covid epidemic due to poorer living conditions, and because of the unrestricted racist police abuse that was taking place at the same time.

It's no secret in France that a huge majority of the police votes for the french far right party, and there are reports of the chaotic and negligent police organization encouraging their violence, especially under our current government and especially since the Yellow-Vests protests in 2018 and 2019.

The fact that litterally nothing has been done to address the police's behavior, the fact that the people at the top of this organization are still in office, and the fact that Didier Lallement, a known fascist, was promoted to chief of the Paris police in March 2019, all these facts are nothing short of insulting and infuriating.

All this to say that the riots going on in the US are not only vastly justified, they are also resonating with other parts of the world where badly-covered dangerous fascist police is a reality. And so I ask, if you haven't done so yet, please do support the protests in the US and around you. You can start from this page. If you don't know where to look/give, I'd suggest this page to split a donation accross many organizations.

That is all I have for this month. These are some particularly stress-inducing times, so I encourage you to take the time to relax and do fun things (maybe play Terraria?) if you can afford it.

I do hope you found all this interesting! I might make a Patreon post with some SUGAR news towards the middle of the month, so look out for that!

Otherwise, I'll see you next month! Thank you very much for your continued support, you're the best!

Take care!

Rémy 🍬