Devlogs

The Space Between the Pixels

What is time? What are days? I have it on good authority that today is Labor Day, so Happy That, I guess. Things are still crunchy and are going to be crunchy for the foreseeable future. Recently my time has been monopolized by Real Life Stuff and Not Making Indie Games, which is a bummer, but there’s a light at the end of the tunnel at least. Meanwhile, I have emails that are over two weeks old that I haven’t answered or even looked at yet, so that’s the world I’m living in right now.

As I mentioned last week, we’ve been getting things moved to a new apartment over the last couple of days, and just yesterday, I got my home office arranged and ready for recording new Let’s Make episodes. Our last place was nice, but this one is a little more affordable and more accommodating of our imminent newborn, due early November. The pets seem to be adapting to the move better than they did last time. More exploring, less hissing and hiding.

Since branching for Gunmetal Arcadia Zero a few weeks ago, I’ve been neglecting Mac and Linux, as I haven’t had cause to produce builds on these platforms in the absence of weekly deliverables. I’m hoping to get the ball rolling on in-dev builds again pretty soon, especially now that those are one of my Patreon rewards. I did at least get the Zero repository synced, built, and running on those platforms last night, so it should be a simple process to keep them updated week to week in the future.

I’ve been trying to make gaming a part of my daily routine again recently, as it really hasn’t been in probably literal years. Right now, I’m replaying Earthbound for what might be the first time since its release twenty years ago. It’s not as immediately relevant to Gunmetal Arcadia as some of the other games I’ve been playing (Castlevania: Symphony of the Night and Super Metroid), and I’m not sure whether I’ll have the patience to finish it, but I am enjoying revisiting it with fresh eyes, and I’m pleasantly surprised at how good the writing is. I don’t think eleven-year-old Kyle fully appreciated it at the time, but in retrospect, that game really has earned its legendary reputation. That being said, it’s a little bit more of a grindfest than I remembered, so I may set it aside in the coming weeks and look for something that will more directly stand to influence Gunmetal Arcadia. In particular, I’m somewhere in the middle of playthroughs of Monster World IV, Super Adventure Island II, and Dark Souls II: Scholar of the First Sin that I need to ever finish.

I had a spark of inspiration the other day regarding the design for the procedural narrative elements of Gunmetal Arcadia. I haven’t really talked much about my ideas for the implementation of those concepts beyond the high-level pitch, in part because it was still a little fuzzy in my head. I’ll save the details for Wednesday’s video because I think it’s better suited to a conversational ramble, but in short, I feel like I’ve landed on a design that will be far easier to implement and tune and will fit more naturally in the context of an action-adventure platformer than what I had been previously envisioning.

As a reminder, I’ll be bringing Super Win to a couple more local events soon: