Weekly Report (2024/06/02)

I didn't have time to make last weeks report, so this week I'm doing a 2 in 1.

Current Improvement Project (Piano Chords)

These two weeks I had one week where I was able to make a lot of progress in the piano sessions, and one week where I did below average. I managed to do a total of 8 sessions between last week and this one (Finished session 71).

I started working on a song to keep things fresh, but that turned into arpeggio practice. I've been working on improving at playing at a consistent tempo and playing chords in different ways. Progress has been made, I notice improvement every 2 sessions of practice or so.

The last two sessions I've tried playing "Run Away Fugitives" from pokemon mystery dungeon rescue team. I has been super fun, but I think I need to practice scales again for a bit, I'm forgetting about them.

I'm not sure where to go from here though. I'll try to define a scructure with steps and tangible goals for the song instead of improvising in the moment.

Weekend Projects

Dungeon Generator

I made a small dungeon generator in Pico8 for my PMD solo roleplay stuff. It has been months since I last played but hopefully I'll be able to play soon again.

Anyways, here's the generator in action:

A gif showing a piece of software generating images with different sized rectangles connected by lines in a 3x2 grid. Some of the rectangles have icons inside.

So yeah, it makes rooms along a grid and connects them together by paths. After finishing the generator I worked on ways to hopefully use it during playtime. I hid all the rooms except for one and you can click on a room to reveal it.

Here's how that looks like in a bigger 4x4 grid:

A gif showing the same software as before, but now there is only one room visible at the beginning. As the mouse hovers over different cells of the grid, these are highlighted and revealed shortly after. When all cells are revealed it leaves an image similare to the gif from before in a 4x4 grid.

You can also modify rooms by hovering over them and pressing "z" on your keyboard. I made it this way so I can generate visualizations more easily for when I'm writting sessions in my PMD OC's page.

A gif of the same dungeon as the one in the gif before. The mouse moves to a cell and the icon in that cell changes a couple of times. This process is repeated 3 times.

PMD OCs Page

I finished writting session 6 and 7 of the PMD page, only like 7 more to go. I also added a glossary page with terms I use in my sessions, a links page with websites I like and started working on a rulebook on how to play solo.

I think I will probably stop working as much on that and start working on a quickstart guide so people can pick it up and play immediately.

Pico8 gamedev tools

I added some gamedev tools to my Pico8 arsenal. I made particle systems, screenshake and 2D perlin noise. These add a lot of possibilities for effects and procedural generation, if I ever get inspiration to do a small game I can do so more easily now.

Here are some gifs.

A gif swoing a pixelar icon of a poochyeena shaking a little with 1 second intervals. A gif visualizing randomly generated 2D noise with colors on a 16x16 grid. It kinda looks like terrain height maps.

I don't have a cool screenshot of the particle systems because I didn't made it do anything crazy. But trust me, I used cool functional programming stuff so its versatile and easy to use.

Projectea

We had a meeting with the team to assign tasks to start making progress on the game. My tasks are: making 2D and 3D assets, and setting up the base of the themes.

I already started working on the assets, we met with another member of the theme and made a template for creating consistent looking characters. Next we jumped right into it and made our first character placeholder asset man:

A screenshot of a simple 3D model of a bald person with bushy eyebrows, big eyes and a black beard in 3/4 view.

Out of the Routine and into the Unknown

I went to buy a birthday present to a friend during the week and decided to eat somewhere new. I went to Tommybeans! Its like subway but for tacos and burritos.

One thing I noticed is that the instructions are not super clear. On subway they ask you type of sandwitch, type of bread, length, cheese, vegetables, sauces and spices and you're done. On every subway I've gone to the employees never assumed I know this and always ask me for the next step.

On Tommybeans I knew nothing about the process, and it lead to a lot of awkward stares from the employees. They would ask me "type of rice" and I don't know the options so I had to ask "what are the options?" and that happened every step of the way. On one point my tacos were passed to a different employee who was managing the second part of the process and they just stared at me for some seconds before realizing I didn't know what to do.

The food was a little expensive, more than I would have guessed, there were no obvious price tags so that was weird. The tacos were also very hard to eat, every bite on one side of the taco made everything spill out from the other side. They did gave me a lot of handkerchiefs which I needed, it was messy.

The food was pretty good, they warned me many times the food was spicy but it was really good, I guess I also have above average tolerance to spicy food (not super high tho). The rice and meat was pretty delicious, the cilantro cream tasted like cilantro which was expected. It was nice, but if I go again I'll ask for my food to go into a bowl.

Other

I made some lizard wizards while I was chatting with a friend.

One quickly drawn little lizard with a wizard hat, robe and a staff. It has angry eyebrows. Two of the same drawing of lizard wizards as the prevous image. One of them is color shifted so its skin is red and its clothes are green.