Weekly Report (2024/05/17)

Current Improvement Project (Piano Chords)

This week I didn't manage to get a lot done, I think I only did 3 or 4 piano sessions. I'll explain why a little later.

I started composing an instrumental song. I'm using FL Studio and the challenge is that I can't manually set notes, I can only record them and play them on the piano. I want to go for a work in progress speed-draw kind of tune, something similar to Star Verse's "Koen and Aster Song"

For now I've only managed to play 8 compases where I do simple arpegios of the G7M chord and the Gb7 chord. The next part includes doing those same chords but playing each note for a quarter tone at 80 bpm. It has been hard, I'm a little stuck there, but I'm improving little by little, with every session I'm closer to what I want it to sound like.

Weekend Projects

I gave up with the 3D renderer in pico8. I tried to do the doom approach, but drawing the floor texture proved impossible with the tline function. But I was really salty because of it and managed to make a function called mapcircfill which is the same as the map function but with circles. It may be good for transitions and effects in the future.

I also added making particles to the list of things I want to do in pico8. I found a video that explains how to do it. I'll give it a watch and see what I can take from it.

I worked a little bit on this website and moved some sauce recipes to its own thing. I usually visit my own website to look at my recipes, so this will make it easier for me to find them.

I also wrote two pages of session 6 for my PMD OCs page! I'm really close to finish with session 6 and move on to sesion 7. I'll try to do that tomorrow, as tomorrow and the day after are holidays where I work.

I think that's about it. Oh yeah, I also added some more content for mi.

Projectea

We started working on the GDD this week. I'm like the group clown the way I'm memeing all over the place. But I'm pretty motivated with the project, it sounds fun and it will be a good experience working with people in a more healthy environment than work.

I'm not doing game design stuff, but I want to do art and music direction. So I compiled some art styles I think would go good with the idea the others have developed and presented them. I also compiled a short list of fonts we can use and made some mockups in ms paint of the game scenes. Also also I included some reference pictures for each mockup and idea I explained.

I almost forgot, I also made a list of software we can use for creating the assets. I only put open source or free software in there, as we don't have like a budget aside from our pocket money. For music in particular I pitched using LMMS but everyone who will work in music already has FL Studio, so we are going to use that in the end. It was a cool surprise because I'm learning FL Studio from my piano sessions.

We finally had an hour and a half long meeting where we compared our versions of the GDD and developed a joint vision of the project. It was really cool that all of us were mostly on the same page in regards to gameplay and artstyle. I have a good feeling about this group. I hope we have fun.

Out of the Routine and into the Unknown

This week I didn't do nothing out of the rutine.

Music

I've been listening to Hintshot's "Your Eternal Reward" album, from his YER TF2 video. I've also been listening to Tim the Little Music Fox's "Flow Island" album.

Other

I obsessively finished both seasons of Mashle: Magic and Muscles. That was the main reason why I missed so many piano sessions. I got home, watched like 7 episodes every two days and went to bed.

It was really unhealthy, but the anime was so good! The humour was really cool, and I love stories where the characters have defined weaknesses and have to find creative solutions to surpass obstacles. Mashle ticks all those boxes, as it is pretty ridiculous most of the time, the ways that Mash avoids using magic are always creative and funny.

This week I also finished Break the Game. It was a fun little game about our relationship with characters and stories. The writting was clearly done by someone whose first language wasn't english and didn't have other people proof read what they wrote. But hey, game development is incredibly hard, and doing a game of that scale by themselves must have been really difficult. I should know, I made a 2-hour long rpg.

So yeah, that's another game off the list. It has like an interesting arg element and secrets to be discovered. But I don't have the time or motivation to get into it.

I'm also taking a break from playing videogames for a while, they feel more like a responsibility than a hobby. I'll probably get back to them in a couple of months.