repeating digit birthday!
my yearly post arrives once again at the ripe old age of 33
I’m 33 years old today! That’s as many as three elevens, and that’s just dandy. As is my wont, I’m hammering away at my keyboard to get my birthday thoughts enscribed and on the internet for all to see. It’s been a pretty good year so far! I like to break the previous year apart into little bits when I do this, so here we go again:
Day-to-day Work Stuff!
My game optimization services freelancing gig has been working out well for me this year! I’ve been helping lots of nice and lovely folks get their games running fast and smooth on the platforms they like. When I got started doing this as a freelancer early last year, I wasn’t sure if it would entirely work out, but it’s been great. I’ve been able to keep the lights on, work on interesting things, and help people - and that’s all I really wanted!
Things have also been ticking away in the Very Evil Demons co-op too! Nothing huge for us, but nice bits of prototyping work and mentoring work here and there, also with lovely people! So all in all, my day-to-day has been trundling along rather well!
Projects, Projects, Projects!
I have been snowed under by in-flight projects. It’s been a lot of fun, but also a little bit more stressful than I’d like trying to spin all these plates. I think my capacity for personal projects along with everything else in my life is probably around three; any more projects than that and I can find it a little paralyzing trying to choose what to work on, and less than that I can find it difficult to stay super focused. Something unique for me this year has been that most of the projects were and are longer term things; I think I should make sure I have some smaller ones in rotation to stop myself from feeling entrenched.
As for the projects themselves, probably the big-ticket one was my recreation-slash-fangame of a certain part of Deltarune Chapter 3 on the NES!. This one took about three months and was a hell of a lot of fun. In true melon style and spirit, instead of writing a proper project page for it and a blog post about how I built it, I instead have decided to try and take on making a video about how I made it, which, uh, is proving to be quite a lot of work to edit together. The VO runtime is about 45 minutes, so… I might split this up into separate parts…
I’m also participating in Quake Brutalist Jam 3 this year! I love working in Trenchbroom and making maps, so it’s been really fun to build something with the all-new total conversion the QBJ3 organizers put together this year. It’s probably going to be my biggest and most detailed map yet!
And I still have a bunch of things to do for various unannounced things, and I really need to get back to working on my little first-person-acrobatic-shotgun game, and and and-
Playing Videogames
Oh yeah! I played a bunch of games this year so far. Amongst many, some standouts I wanted to say somethin’ about!
- Deltarune Chapters 3 and 4 - how do Toby Fox and the team keep doing it? How do they keep managing to perfectly thread the needle between comedy and mystery, text and metanarrative?! I can’t wait to find out what happens next. I mean, obviously you know I liked this, since as I already mentioned I spent 3 months making a fangame for it on a console older than I am. As you do!
- Skin Deep - hilarious and detailed comedy imsim. You probably have seen stuff about it on my blog before!
- Hollow Knight Silksong - brutally difficult at the start, but opened way way up for me once I explored some more and got a bunch of tools! Saw most of the endings, and finished it out at 92% complete. Fantastic movement, combat, art, and vibes. A truly worthy sequel, and you can really feel the love poured into every centimeter of it.
- skate. beta - a fun game to have little chill hangout sessions in; still nailing the skating feel, still has a bunch of funny comedic physicsy things you can do. I wish EA didn’t own it.
- Donkey Kong Bananza - I just finished this the other day! A very different take on 3D platforming from the Mario Odyssey team. Top-notch gameplay, if a bit mentally fatiguing in extended sessions from going 100% ape at all times. Highly recommended to make gorilla noises and yell as soon as you see a banana on screen. Kind of surprised though, that to me, most of the level music wasn’t super memorable?
- PEAK - This is real fun to play with friends, but I think I got the most out of it was actually playing it with people I was freelancing for. Two of my clients this year had PEAK multiplayer sessions where they invited me, and I think hauling eachother up a mountain and feeding eachother maybe-poisonous berries is actually a great way to bond and get to know people better.
Food and Cooking
I’ve been eating a lot less red meat this year due to a few different factors, and that means I’ve spent a lot more time cooking with alternatives like tofu. One thing I’ve been enjoying a lot has been making what my girlfriend and I call “the crumblies” - by grating up firmly pressed tofu into shreds, dousing them in soy sauce and marmite, and then frying until crispy and crumbly, you get this really tasty minced-beef-like stuff. It’s a great ingredient to mix in to make chilli, tacos, or bolognese and it keeps super well. It’s has a really robust savoury flavour that’s surprisingly meatful!
In addition to this, we got a Panasonic bread machine at the tail end of last year after being frustrated with short-dated supermarket bread, and it has been awesome getting to enjoy freshly baked bread every few days. We’ve really been putting the machine through its paces; where it really shines is the ability to put in all the ingredients late at night and program it for the morning, so that I can get up and take the fresh loaf out and have a slice at breakfast. We’ve made a few different types of loaves - a cheese and jalapeno loaf, an olive and herb loaf, and so on, but our standby right now is a 50-50 white flour and wholemeal flour mix with toasted seeds. Lots of good flavour and texture, and perfect when thickly buttered with soup.
Wrappin’ Up
Well, I think that probably wraps things up for this post for now! I swear I’ll get back into blogging more often, it’s been real fun writing this post. Have yourselves another good year, friends!!
