busy busy (roundup 2)

i’ve been a busy bee

Whew! It’s been pretty busy recently for me. Headlines of Melon Life include: Bean to Me at Steam Next Fest, Bean to Me at local game events, a ramp-up in my freelancing schedule, some upcoming meetings with academics… phew! It feels great though, and I feel like I’m accomplishing a bunch of goals.

In leisure time, I’ve still been playing tons of UFO 50, but I also started playing Can of Wormholes at my friend’s behest. If you like tile-and-position based puzzle games (e.g, Stephen’s Sausage Roll, Baba Is You), please pick this up and try not to read too much more about it. It’s delightfully weird in so many ways.

I’ve also been really getting to grips with my new Olympus OM-10 camera! I’ve finished my first roll, and the roll of Portra 160 I acquired through a mystery bundle and was too nervous to waste in a fixed-shutter-speed, fixed-aperture camera is finally loaded and ready to shoot. Most of the advice I’ve seen online and in photography books suggests that Portra 160 has a good exposure latitude, and that it’s OK (and possibly even beneficial) to overexpose it by a stop or more. I’m sticking with setting the OM-10’s auto shutter speed up to shoot it as if it were an ISO 100 film; overexposing it, but not enormously. I’m hoping that’ll lead to some nice-looking shots and prevent me from taking anything too muddy or underexposed on the expensive stock.

I’m anxiously awaiting the Factorio 2.0 update and Space Age DLC; while I’ve never been the most efficient factory builder in that game, nor ever tried to make a megabase or managed to take on the difficult mods, I have a huge soft-spot for automation games, with Factorio being my original love and still my favourite of the bunch. As someone with a special interest in and skillset that revolves around game optimization, it’s also a fascinating case study of just how much stuff you can cajole a computer into doing if you organize it well and be mindful of the very real physical constraints in the interplay of hardware and software.

As I mentioned earlier, there’s been more interest in the freelancing arena; I’m very excited for the possible leads I’m following right now. As I wait to hear back on those, and as I sweat under the anticipation of Bean to Me’s launch, I find myself itching to get to work. I can’t really do much more with Beans just yet - I need to wait and see what feedback I get from people playing the demo. Mainly I’m looking to make sure there aren’t any showstopping bugs, and to find quality-of-life things I can help with in a post-launch patch.
So, day-to-day, I turn to my side-projects! My Pingolf GBA port is a little further along, but I’m tinkering with it very slowly. I find myself wanting more and more to set up some kind of development stream for my 3D first-person rocket-jumping-ish acrobatic puzzle platformer that I’ve been fiddling with in Godot… I need to figure out a schedule for that. Maybe for a couple of hours on quiet weekends, and upload the streams to YouTube afterwards? It’s something I used to do, and I want to do it again. Even moreso after watching this lovely talk from the developer behind ESA and Baba Is You on how motivating it can be:


To round out this post, here’s some links that made me smile and/or think:

  • Thought I Saw Someone I Knew – Mysterious doppelganger..?
  • On being a great gift-giver – I often struggle to think of what to get people, even when I know them well. I don’t want to contribute clutter to their life, but I don’t want to only give consumable gifts. There’s inspiration here for everyone.
  • a few thoughts on memoriapolis – The idea of a city-builder that goes from antiquity through to the modern day, where the housing and land use evolve naturally and without the player directly placing and removing housing is fascinating. This post really made me interested in new ways to express the core ideas of a city-builder without its focus being purely on mid-20th-century USA city planning.
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