Remy's October Newsletter - 🏝🍬💿🖱💿🎶 (Patreon)

Quick note: After writing this newsletter, I had the idea to make another desktop pet thing to go along with it, exclusively for you my supporters! That's what you see on the picture above, and you can download it here!

Please let me know: Do you like this? Would you like it if there were a themed desktop pet for every new newsletter?

Quick update about the above: I fixed a bug on this desktop pet, and I added a config file so you can modify the number of discs and the frequency of events, and the scaling of the program. The download link above will give you the latest version.

Hi everyone!

Yet another month of this horrible modern age going down! France is back into lockdown with very alarming covid cases and deaths numbers, and with a government that is somehow even worse (read incompetant and fascist) than the one we had during the first lockdown.

Nonetheless, it's up to each and everyone to try and make things better, so let's not despair and do just that!

First, a quick note about Explorers, my Alakajam entry from last month. I finished the post-jam version, but didn't upload it yet.

All the changes I wanted to make are made: the new titlescreen, camera improvements, a lot of optimization, sound effects, birds, and more.

However, I've been thinking about releasing it along with a "deluxe" version, which would have some sort of bonus feature or content, for those who would like to support me. Obviously, this is interesting for me because it would be an additional revenue stream for me. Not that I expect this idea to actually bring me a lot of money, but still, the thinking is: any would be better than none.

And of course, the regular, still complete, post-jam version of Explorers will be released for free, on the Pico-8 BBS and on my itch.io. My goal is certainly not to take away from those who can't or won't pay, but rather to create a better incentive to support me.

Needless to say, if I do go ahead with making this "deluxe" version, all of you will get it for free as supporters of my Patreon, as is only fair!

That's all I have to say about this for now. I would like to get this done before December because I do think releasing anything during that particular month is a terrible idea. At the latest, Explorers should be released during the last week of November, with or without a "deluxe" version.

My main focus this month was Sugar! I'm getting solid progress done, so much so that I actually made and released a game with it! (we'll get to that)

I finally finished refactoring the gfx subsystems and doing the lua integration for them. Well, almost.

One feature that I had in the older version of Sugar was 'printp', a function that let you draw text with user-defined outlines and shadows in a way that was optimised for just that purpose. But I made a significant change to my font system: all fonts are now stored in the virtual memory, along with graphic surfaces. (like the screen and spritesheets) For this, I completely rewrote how fonts and glyphs are stored, and... broke 'printp'. The way I had optimised it is no longer valid, and I am faced with a choice: either spend more time to try and reimplement it with a different optimization method, or drop the feature altogether and move on to more pressing tasks.

I've chosen to drop it temporarily and go back to it later. That function was really useful, you almost always want an outline or a shadow on your text. But I really want to take care of other, more essential systems first.

Another graphics feature which slowed me down was 'aspr', a function that renders rotated sprites. The older version of Sugar actually had an incomplete implementation of that function, just because I got so frustrated with it, I must have dropped it and then forgot about it. So I took another swing at it and ended up spending an entire week on it.

One of my issues, as it turns out, was that the cosinus function I was using was not as precise as I thought it was, and it was fairly slow on top of that. After some googling, I found some excellent C++ code of for a polynomial-based implementation that was both faster and more precise than the standard C cos() function I was using. And the best part: this implementation abstracted out PI, which is perfect for me because in Sugar, like in Pico-8, angles go from 0 to 1, and so that's what the implementation is using.

This change already made my rotated sprites look much better. But it still wasn't perfect.

For some reason, I was obsessing over finding a way to implement this function with the fewest floating-point variables possible, using almost exclusively integers instead, because integer operations are faster. Well, after a week of struggling with this, I ended up turning a bunch of integers into float variables, and, with all my earlier tweaking, the result was perfect. And with that the sprite subsystem was complete!

And so with the graphics subsystems functional, I made a quick temporary lua interface for some input functions and some audio functions, and started making something for the Disc Room Game Jam!

The game Disc Room was coming out in October, and so its publisher Devolver Digital organized a two weeks gamejam with the two themes Disc and Room.

I love the work of each dev on the Disc Room team, so I was really excited to participate in this jam! And besides, I really wanted to make something with Sugar, and I did manage to make it usable for the occasion!

I quickly had the idea of making a sort of desktop pet thing, where you'd have sawblades bouncing around on your screen, and it would let you do whatever else behind it, you would just have to dodge the sawblades while doing it. Thus was born DISCTOP!

Of course I had to slap some fancy graphics onto the idea, and so while the gameplay code is quite very simple, I spent two entire days nailing down the graphics, with the right colors, the right effect, the right magic numbers and operations, the disc sprites, and the appropriate amount of optimization for a program that you'll want to run on top of other things.

Besides this, I also had to make various tweaks on the engine itself to make everything work. This is the first project I've made since reworking everything in SUGAR, so I didn't expect it to go buttery smooth. It was ok though! With the right google searches, and some print-based debugging, I had everything working properly, and in particular the screen-size, transparent, click-through window that can still check on mouse state, and also can become non-click-through on demand.

Once I got all this figured out, I made a timer bubble which you can bat away with the mouse. Since this is an overlay, I didn't want it to hinder whatever was beneath it, so it was important that any UI can be moved or hidden. The timer shows the current time since the last death, your best time today, and your best time ever. The latter two are stored... in a png file.

Currently, SUGAR does not have an API to output text files, but it does have an API to export surfaces as pngs. (priorities) So I made do, and encoded the timer data and the settings into the pixels of a surface, which I then saved as a png file! At least it makes it more difficult to edit the save!

With all this, I also made a small menu that appears when you use the middle-click. This menu lets you set the difficulty (you can choose between 1, 3, 5, 8 or 16 discs), set the sfx volume, hide the timer, and shut down DISCTOP.

At the end of the last day of the jam, I added the sound effects Doseone had provided for free for the jam, and made a super quick title-screen. Then I built the itch.io page so that it harnessed some of the energy of Windows XP and its era.

And there you have it, DISCTOP! Please do try it and let me know what you think of it!

I do think I'll make more desktop pets in the future, it's a lot of fun!

And that's all the work stuff for this month! For November, I'm going to step back a bit at first because the DISCTOP week was pretty intense. But then I'll still be working on SUGAR, and hopefully I can make something of Explorers!

So let's talk about Disc Room!

I've only played it for a little over 2 hours, but also that's the time it took me to get to the first "ending". And I loved it!

In Disc Room, you enter small square rooms that (usually) fill up with a set of deadly discs which you have to avoid. The game has quite an impressive collection of different discs, with corresponding behaviors, which are usually really easy to parse from a few seconds of observing them. This easy learning, and the subsequent predictability, are I think, core to the game, and really make it the tight arcade puzzle game that it is.

It's a game where you die a lot. But here it doesn't mean you're failing a lot. Dying is a core mechanic of the game, it's what you need to do to advance. You have to die from each disc type to unlock it in your disciary. You have to die to unlock the next rooms. You have to die to specific discs to enable new abilities. You have to die before going to the next room.

But even when you die from failure, failing to achieve a particular goal, because of the predictability, it's always on yourself and usually, you know immediately what went wrong.

And so death in this game answers a question I have asked myself a lot: how do you make death, or even the notion of losing, a positive thing in a game? In Disc Room, death is made satisfying by being:

• at the core of the game
• more than just a mechanic of failure
• fair, consistent and easy to parse

But that's not what I love the most about this game, what I love the most is how much it respects your time.

Because death happens every 10 to 40 seconds, the game is constantly taking breaks from itself, for you to catch a breath, eventually check your progression, and decide if you want to continue or stop there. Moreover, the game has a few different ending points. The first one being the ending on normal mode, which I personally achieved in 2 hours and 20 minutes, without completing every room. That's not a lot of time to finish a game, but it was enough for me to be satisfied already, and if I do want more there is plenty more to play through with a hard mode, all the unlockables, and the hardcore challenges.

On top of all this, the game is of course meticulously well designed, looks really great, and has killer sound effects and soundtrack, as you would expect from the roster of devs behind this game. If you cannot tell yet, this is a huge recommendation from me, Disc Room is great and you should play it.

I didn't really have a music album which I obsessed over this month like I usually do, so instead I'll tell you about what I'm listening while writing this!

Not Pop, by True Cuckoo, is... not like anything else? Every track of the album takes inspiration from something, a genre, or an idea, and makes something different of it, something quite unique. Cuckoo is a very talented musician I've been following for the last few years, and he really does have this uniqueness that I love in arts. He's an aficionado of synthesizers and quite the reference for that too, you can find more of him on his Youtube channel!

And that's it for this month! Sorry for being a little late on writing this. As I mentioned above, the last week of October was particularly hectic for me, so I needed to rest a bit for the first November week. Still, I hope you enjoyed reading this!

Thank you all for your lovely, continued support! I hope you like DISCTOP. Rest assured that there will be more to come from me soon-ish!

Have a nice month of November!

Take care!

Rémy🍬