Remy's February Newsletter - 🍬📦📜🌿🐒🏁🎶 (Patreon)

Hi everyone!

This month again I devoted all my working time to SUGAR! And it is coming along! I have a working version of it, which I have been sharing with Benjamin Soulé, and I've already started making various tweaks based on his feedback. There is still a lot to do, but things are going forward!
 

At the start of the month, my priority was to make the engine operational, so that I could send it to Benjamin who I had kept waiting for it since November.

In last month's newsletter, I wrote a small list of immediate priorities for the engine. Let's see how that went:

• ✔ finishing the documentation
• ✔ implementing the run / stop / resume / reload logic
• ✔ implementing some basic folder browsing (cd and ls commands)
• ✔ adding some lua utility functions
• ▢ modifying the lua source files to add mathematical shorthands and bitwise operators
• ▢ reworking the audio subsystem to make it more interesting

Not too bad! All the checked things in this list were done before the middle of the month too, which is when I sent out a first version of Sugar to Benjamin.

There were quirks in each of the tasks, and in particular the folder browsing commands, which have made me use a library from C++17 for the first time in the project.

In C++ there are mutliple 'standards' which are labeled by their year of declaration. But any one standard usually takes a few years to really take roots and be used by most platforms. Because yes, the platform you are targeting has to support the C++ standard you want to use. Otherwise, it won't work.

Until now I had been dilligently using the C++11 standard, (11 as in "from 2011") because that one added some very useful utilities to C++ and is generally taken to be available on the "important" platforms in our day and age.

However, there has never been a standard library for navigating filesystems until C++17. So either I chose to use C++17, or I had to handle each OS I would have wanted to target separately, using their platform-specific libraries instead. And that would have been a lot of work for little value.

So I went with C++17, thinking that if I ever want to target a platform which doesn't support it, I could very well cut away the portion of the engine that handles navigating filesystems and still have the engine working without it, using the C++11 standard. We'll see if that ever needs to happen and if I'm right to think it won't be a huge issue. (🤞)

Besides this small adventure of C++ standards and libraries, the rest of the list above was fairly mundane:

The run / stop / resume / reload logic was mostly a matter of defining a state of running, where we call the lua functions _update and _draw every frame if they exist, and then reset each of SUGAR's systems when reloading, to free up allocated assets and clear up the various states that need it.

The lua utility functions are either renamed from the standard Lua libraries, or written directly in Lua by yours truly.

Finishing writing the documentation was of course the most tedious thing! But it is done, and if you are curious, I'm attaching it to this newsletter so that you can download it and take a look for yourself! Of course it's very much going to evolve over the next versions of Sugar, and I certainly should add some more free-form explanations besides the listing of API functions.

And I also finished the boot animation for Sugar, which you can see above! It's missing sound for now, but that will come when I get to rework Sugar's audio system.
 

After doing all this, I sent out SUGAR version 0.0.0 to Benjamin and we started doing some back-and-forth discussing feedback and ideas!

Benjamin has been working a lot with Pico-8 ever since it came out, and even before it came out! He has been looking for an engine where he could keep his Pico-8 workflow, but also break free of its limitations. And that is pretty much what I am making, so we got to talking last year after realizing that we lived only an hour's drive apart from each other. We met and did Alakajam 10 in last September, where Explorers was born!

He convinced me that I should let him try the engine whenever I had a first working version, and that he would be very happy to provide feedback. Fast-forward 5 months, and here we are!

From there, I've done a certain amount of bugfixing, but also added some quality-of-life features, like ctrl-R to reload, remembering the last project you were working on and loading it automatically on launch, or making it possible to omit the ".lua" extension of a file when loading it.

Benjamin also had me add back the audio system which I had set aside for reworking, and make an export-to-exe feature, so that he could use it for Alakajam 11! (which was last weekend as I write this)

For the audio system, I reworked what I had a little and made it available through the Lua API. I still want to rework it more in the near-ish future, but there hasn't been time for that yet.

The export-to-exe was more work than I anticipated, and I didn't quite finish it yet. But I did manage to produce a first sketchy version for the jam, and it did its job well enough!

I then tried to participate in Alakajam as well, but I was too exhausted and ended up giving up on my first idea, and then a second one. You need rest before jams, it turns out!

But Benjamin did finish his entry! Using SUGAR!! And you can play it!!! It's called The Monkey Idol, and it is a Tetris clone where you have to uncover little statues! It's well done and nice to play, you should definitely try it! (also please ignore the graphic bug on the Sugar logo when launching the game if it's still there)
 

At some point before that, I made some new wallpapers with Sugar! They are a combination of a voronoi algorithm and some improvised life-automata. It was a fun little break from working on the engine itself! Check them out! 

It was a good month for Sugar! Things are moving forward at a solid pace! It's quite encouraging!

So here is my updated list of priorities for the month ahead of me:

• Finishing the export function of Sugar
• Fix all the bugs that turned up during Alakajam
• Participate to 7DRL!
• Add in some map functions (like Pico-8's mget, mset, map, etc)
• Rework the audio system
• update the Sugar webpage because it's terribly out-of-date!
• Start working on some simple tools for the engine, like maybe a map maker!

Moving on to games I've played in February!

The game Voidigo, by Semiwork Studios, came out in early access!

It's a top-down action roguelike shooter which has been in development for a few years, and it seemed to have some strong Nuclear Throne influences, (and I do love Nuclear Throne) with neat and colorful graphics! That's what had drawn my eye to it when I first saw a gif of it on Twitter, and I was very happy to finally be able to play it!

But sadly, it was a disappointment for me. Voidigo is, in fact, quite far from the Nuclear Throne formula. Of course there will be simalirities, being a sort of free-form bullet hell with generated, destroyable terrain, but the game loop feels very different. In fact, I felt it was closer to more convoluted roguelikes like Enter the Gungeon or Wizard of Legend, which I really don't enjoy as much.

I do have to say that when it comes to action roguelikes, I mostly always have this opinion: the game could be simpler. I shouldn't have to navigate a bestiary of monsters, spells or weapons. If it's an action game, please give me the action and do not break it with the roguelike. Nuclear Throne proves that it is doable and that it works extremely well. To me, an action roguelike should have a very smooth game flow in terms of user experience. Otherwise, I probably won't like it.

And that's mostly how I feel about Voidigo. It does look nice, (but confused at times, with the colorful graphics clashing together) and there is certainly a lot of potential in the game, and it is in early access, so improvement is very much possible. So I'll have to come back to it in a few months and see how it evolves.

Personally, I won't play it again before it gets a few updates. But, if you like Enter the Gungeon and/or Wizard of Legend, well you might like this one too!

But hey, speaking of Nuclear Throne, my personal hero Jan Willem Nijman, together with the rest of the Minit crew Kitty Calis, Dominik Johann, and Jukio Kallio, released a new game!

Minit Fun Racer, is a... fun racer set in the world of Minit.

Riding your scooter, you have to get through a very chaotic city road, and then a particularly cluttered desert, and to the beach beyond. But of course, it is a Minit game, and so you have a time limit, which, if it runs out before you kill your character on the many obstacles littering the ground, will end your run.

It's simple, it's a little witty, it's got very good 1-bit graphics, it plays well, the progression is both uncomplicated and satisfying, AND all proceeds from the game's sales go to charity.

I love it. I'm a sucker for simple well-oiled game design. If you're anything like me, you should definitely try it!

I don't really know what music to recommend this month! I've been listening to a lot of Justice again and not so much of anything else. You might have heard Daft Punk have officially retired, which is certainly a loss for the electronical music scene, but personally I mostly enjoyed their earlier works, and they have been pretty much inactive since their last release in 2013 (!!) anyway so, I don't think anything really changes? A future lost? Can you loose what you don't yet have? Anyway, enough philosophizing! If you somehow have never listened to Daft Punk's Discovery album and their live album Alive 2007, I do recommend those!

Moderator is going to be releasing a new album in March, and there are already two tracks available on Bandcamp. I feel like I already wrote about Moderator in a previous newsletter, so I'll just say this: it's instrumental hiphop brought to a new level of ambience and storytelling. I was very impressed with their album Sinner's Syndrome, and I am very much looking forward to hear the rest of the new album Midnight Madness on March 21st!

Ok, that's it for this month! In March I'm going to keep working on Sugar, and hopefully make something good for 7DRL!

Thank you very much for your continued support! Your support is one of the reasons that let me do what I do, so really I'll never thank you enough! I'm hoping to bring you all more things to play, read, and enjoy in the months to come!

Here are the names of the 3$+ supporters!

★Blas, Joseph White, Tom Brinton, rotatetranslate, Anne Le Clech, Andrew Edstrom, bbsamurai, Paul Nguyen, Dan Rees-Jones, Joel Jorgensen, Marty Kovach, Flo Devaux, berkfrei, Jearl, David Cole, Elias Alonso, Raphael Gaschignard, Eiyeron, Eliott, Sam Loeschen, Gio, amy, Cole Smith, Simon Stålhandske, slono, Gruber, Pierre B., Sean S. LeBlanc, vaporstack, Jakub Wasilewski

Have a nice month of March!

Take care!

Rémy🍬