bottomless cheese rolls

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archives: 2023 | 2022 | 2021

< 22/09/24 | 00:46 > : guess it's the post blackwell update

five months, three blackwell replays and eleven complete playthroughs of other separate adventure games (well, almost, still halfway through broken sword) later and i have yet to learn to love a game again

anyway, sometimes i forget how easy it actually is to update the website

not much of particular note happened in the past months. i've mainly been spending my time either putting together my final thesis proposal for my phd (which got accepted btw) or meticulously playing point and click adventure games and keeping a log and rating on the side. work on my adventure engine kinda halted a bit as between my work and my phd there's only so many hours in the week. progress is slow but its there. besides, i've done way more in the way of "development" in areas other than code, well, i guess it'd be design. story and planning and whatnot

i think i'm managing to settle into a rhythm around here. a few months ago i moved again, this time into a pretty nice studio flat. has a little yard and everything too, it's a definite upgrade over my last place in the uk. still gonna have to be here for another couple years but it's all good for now

hmm, struggling to remember what else i wanted to mention here. i spent like 40 minutes dicking around in gimp making the image above and all my thoughts drained out over the blending mode dropdown menu. shit. it's like 2 am too so whatever i'll just head to bed soon enough

i've kind of been avoiding this website because i came up with a list of changes that i feel like i'll never get to make, then also a list of things to make that plug into those changes. and the snowball rolls. so i've just shelved the whole thing in my mind until time clears up a little. don't really like that currently the only activity this is seeing is the diary updates but it's better than nothing until i unpack and clean everything up

listening: the cardigans - my favourite game

< 20/04/24 | 00:37 > : blackwell edition

i kinda crashed for the past couple days but hey, my thesis group meeting went pretty well

i've been playing through the blackwell series for the past week or so, particularly these past two days when which i took for rest. something about them, they click very well with me get it get it. i love them. i'm about to start the last game, the blackwell epiphany, which according to howlongtobeat it's near four times the size of the other games. it's been just about everything i've had in mind for the past few days. the adventure log (a notebook i keep by my side while i play adventure games) is quite full of blackwell right now. i play adventure games with a pretty analytical eye, both trying to dissect the engine and see what makes it tick, as well as the game design itself. but with these? while i do stop to jot down my thoughts with a same-y frequency as usual, it just feels, hmm, smooth! like i'm just me and the game, playing! they're just, nice! i like 'em! i'm excited! i hope to see more of lauren some day!

it has been quite a while since a game engaged me like this

i'm pretty tired.

listening: you know the song by now

< 21/03/24 | 09:58 >

good morning website, what a day!

it's all been well and decent on my front. haven't been really feeling the last few days to tell you the truth. i tend to stay away from this website in these periods since i don't want to bring this here, but i can already see another four months with no update and i need a break from not writing my thesis group report/literature review hybrid anyway

been extremely emotional for monkey island 2 again lately lol. my friend played the first mi at my request and enjoyed it surprisingly much. never really had any issues with it too which is (kind of?) surprising for someone with absolutely no tangent to computer games in the past. i'm extremely interested in hearing others' thoughts and perspectives on the games. if you, dear reader, are interested in playing and letting me pick your brain about it, email me, i'm dying to hear your thoughts

on a vaguely related note, i resumed work on my game engine. finding time to work on it is a bit difficult but i enjoy putting the effort in. i scrapped the previous version i on here prior. since it was my first time both making a game engine and working with haxe/heaps, a lot of mistakes accumulated as well as experience and learning how i could have made designed it better, i started it from scratch. i knew this was gonna happen, it's usually how it goes. the new version is so far similar features-wise but that overengineered stupidly obtuse config system is thrown out the window. good riddance

a bit of a different design philosophy this time is that i'm going to wholly ignore features i'm not going to directly use in a little demo game i want to make. so really i'm just working on a game and keeping a lot of reusable code aside in a different project to act as the engine. anyway, it's fun. i'm both excited by making it and by the prospect of having this tool to more easily make games i want to make later

thank you, beginner's guide. had it not been for playing this i don't think the little fire in me would've burned hot enough to push through and make the effort to resume to work on games again

hm, i think i'll stop short for now, just wanted to check in again really