Remy's March Newsletter - 🍬🛸➰🕛🎶 (Patreon)

Hi everyone!

My month of March was divided between Sugar and my newly-released project NFTc, the Notable Flying Typing companion!

Writing this after everything else: I forgot to mention that I made a new page for Sugar, with updated info! That's what you're seeing on this picture!

This month I did a lot of fixes on Sugar! There were a few instances where the engine would crash, but mostly it was unexpected behaviors here and there, tiny issues to squash one by one. It's crazy how bugs turn up once you get someone to test your product.

Besides all those small fixes, I managed to finish the export feature! It still only exports to Windows for now, the rest will come eventually.

The way it works is that Sugar packs the user's project's info and all its assets into one file, and then produces an pre-generated exe file (along with the necessary DLLs) which will load the info file and run the game! The result is a folder which only holds five files: the executable, the info file, and three DLLs, which I'll be trying to get rid of eventually.

And that's what I did instead of doing 7DRL! But it's ok, I think I was too tired to make a video game at that point anyway. And also it means I was able to get it done in time for Benjamin to use it for his 7DRL entry: Beasts of Mehetia! Do try it out, it's fun and has really interesting game mechanics!

At about that time, the Twitter discourse around so-called cryptoart and NFTs was happening. If you're not up to speed on the subject, the short version is that it's a technological trend which let's artists sell "originals" of their digital work for crypto-currencies. (i.e. made-up money which can be sold for real money) But this also happens to be a major ecological disaster and a bit of a pyramid-scheme. Read those linked articles if you want more argumentation, I will leave it at that here.

In any case, this was a pretty weird time, as there quickly formed two sides on Twitter: pro-NFTs and anti-NFTs, and the exchanges were understandably tense. (it is Twitter after all, not a good place to have arguments)

But we can still have fun, and so a few sales of non-NFT digital art happened, mocking actual NFTs. Most notably there was this GIF sale by @animtree, and then Knobs For Turning (KnFT) by @davemakes, where you could buy and rename knobs.

This inspired me. And so I decided to make a new desktop pet!

The Notable Flying Typing companion (NFTc) is a desktop pet that reacts to keystrokes, with a variety of effects!

At first, I was going to make it so people could "buy" effects and it would unlock them for everyone. I loved the idea of having a few people (with the means to do it) support the project for everyone's enjoyment.

Sadly, I actually spent too much time on the project for the effects to have reasonable prices that could each be paid by one person. The goal was to get a small influx of money from this project, and I didn't really want to shy away from that because money influx has been lacking since I've been spending more and more time on Sugar.

So in the end I went with a crowdfunding approach! With steps that unlock each effect in the program, and anyone can contibute however much they wish. And to keep the spirit of mock NFTs, and also to encourage bigger contributions, I'm selling 25$ buyer certificates with a unique code. (which does nothing, and is advertised as such)

Using itch.io's sales/bundle interface, I can have a progress bar on the crowdfunding and the sum of the contributions so far. I just had to set up a sale that would last 10 years!

I set the crowdfunding's goal to 2000$, so that it could make up for some of the time I'm spending on Sugar as well, and also the time spent managing the project after its release, updating it etc... Which is definitely going to spread in time, because after 4 days, the crowdfunding is shyly closing in on 200$, just 10% of the goal.

That's ok. I'll leave it running, and if we do reach 2000$ one day, then the project will have paid for itself, and so I will make it free forevermore!

In any case, as Patreon supporters you already contributed to this project, and so you get access to it for free! Just use this link to unlock it for yourself! 

Now that this project is released, (I released it on April Fools day, of course) I will be going back to working on Sugar! With all the bugfixes out of the way, I can work on actual features again! I still want to add custom operators and shorthands to the lua scripting, and I have some work to do on the audio side of the engine, and I really really want to support post-processing shaders! These are the bigger tasks I want to get done in the near future. Maybe I can get them all done in April, but we'll see!

I haven't played too much videogames this month. The weather has been really nice, so I've been enjoying the sun instead!

Still I tried out Loop Hero, which was released at the beginning of the month. I didn't get too far into it, I "only" played it for 5 hours, and it seems I only scratched the surface. To be honest, I think that's why I didn't keep playing it. 5 hours to scratch the surface tells me this is a game which takes a lot of time to play. Why do so many games require such commitment??

At least, in Loop Hero, you can pretty much quit at any time, whatever is happening in the game, and you'll be able to get back into the game wherever you left it. That's good, but still I'd rather stop playing during a downtime in the game, which exists but only seems to happen every 45~60 minutes and probably gets even further apart as you get deeper in the game...

All this being said. The game is really good! The gameplay loop is definitely very solid and so the game wears its name proudly with good reason. The mechanics make up a quite unique take on the roguelike formula which I like a lot. The graphics are utterly gorgeous, incredible pixel-art sprites and characters. The audio is good and convincing. This is a quality game, for sure. And the unique mechanics make it an interesting play whether you are usually interested in roguelike games or not.

I wish it wasn't so drawn out in length, but still Loop Hero is an easy recommendation for sure!

Ok, music now! Moderator released their new album Midnight Madness! I love it! I wrote a bit about Moderator last month, but now that the album is here, I have to renew my absolute worship. It's instrumental hip-hop at its finest. Moderator is such a master of samples at this point. Defintely worth a listen or twelve.

L'Impératrice released their new album Tako Tsubo! It's french indie pop music! It does have french lyrics but I think the musicality should still be very enjoyable even if you don't speak french. It's very good!

I recently discovered this band called Jungle, which apparently is pretty well-known already! But I had never heard them, and they happened to release a new single "Keep Moving" in late March, and yeah it's really good! I find it hard to place but I'd say it's electro-pop music with both rock and hip-hop influences. Yeah, that could be a lot of different things, just give it a listen!

Ok, that's it for this month! It was pretty good! I'm glad I could make a new project happen from start to finish with NFTc! And Sugar is still moving forward! All good to move into the next month!

A month of April which will see more work on Sugar! I don't actually have anything else planned yet for April, so maybe it will just be all Sugar up to May, but we'll see, I'm not saying no to another short side-project!

As usual, thank you so very much for your continued support! It really helps a lot!

Here is the list of those supporting me with 3$+ pledges at this moment:

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

Have a nice month of April!

Take care!

Rémy🍬