hi, how's march treated you? personally my 3ds died at noon on the 1st, so we were off to a dreadful start. it's an issue with the speaker cable, which is an insane thing to kill a console. worst of all? i couldn't even open it up to check the damage, these screws are prissy. i've seen people say philips #00 is fine and you just need to push down harder, and others that you need a jis driver, and apparently the reality is that jis is a standard like iso is, not a different bit, and that any Quality philips (like the one within iFixit Sets, have you tried not living in the global south?) should work on jis screws no prablem, my cheap driver set might be an issue here — though that doesn't quite explain why the outside set of screws (the ones nintendo is fine with laypeople messing with, because they're the battery cover) comes out just fine. funnily enough i saw a post on reddit where someone managed to remove just the same two screws as i did. much to think about. in any case, even once inside it's kinda of a 50/50 on whether reseating the cable will work or the whole things needs replacing, and this cable is buried deep into the console and the part itself needs to come from china... what a fucking nightmare. so yeah my days as a 3ds warrior might be over.
by the 4th, i'd written a mini visual novel engine, love letter. i talk more about it after the blog intro, as usual. took it for a spin with the microgame like an animal, which also gets a mini devlog. i'm quite happy with both of these so please check them out ^_^
uh yeah so it's been a loooong month. not necessarily a good one. chuckles darkly. but that's a fairly normal state of affairs innit?
new on the site: dating of the future is awesome, the agatha christie shonen — danganronpa: trigger happy havoc, gemini capsule archive, everything i didn't play in 2025. yuuuup.
so! love letter was made in love2d in under 48 hours (for the original release. i've given it a couple updates, nothing too drastic or taking away from the core vision, dw i have scope creep on a short leash) and everything i now know of lua (it's not much) is due to this. which is so fucking fun to think about. i was aiming for videotome feature parity basically, and the end result kinda lands between og vt and vt:adv. it's tiny and cute ^_^
and uh. i had this idea because i found out about löve potion, an implementation of love2d on the 3ds. i thought it'd be fun to port one of my vns to the 3ds, but the couple love2d vn engines i found (romance and lovebook) were just poorly documented and unwieldy to me. so i figured i probably could take matters into my own hands. with my 3ds perishing literally two days after i came up with this possibly ill-advised idea, i haven't touched that specifically, but the engine seeds had already been planted...
to actually code the damn thing i initially relied on the code for these two engines and vt. mostly vt, whose logic is really easy to follow, and i'd poked at while making four fangs. in short, the script gets loaded line by line into an array (table ☝ in this case), and then each item is displayed as you hit the advance button. regex (string matching ☝) looks for commands, and string manip turns stuff into variables i can use and makes sure the syntax doesn't actually render in-game. that's the "draw the rest of the owl" part, obviously, but it's a fairly simple and manageable owl to draw. it might not scale, but if i wanted a robust engine i'd just use renpy and not reinvent the wheel.
in fact, since playing a few more visual novels that weren't made with renpy, i've gotten a little more lax in my standards. that may not be the right way to put it. renpy is a marvelous engine and i think a masterwork of accessibility! but it's possible to have a perfectly cromulent experience playing a vn with much less. from yu-no we have the not distinctly colored nametags and instant text reveal, from umineko the absence of ui and 1/2/3 speed control (and iirc images not changing during rollback). 'tis all good. more on this later.
a fun thing about this project is that handholdy introductory tutorials like how to löve don't give a fuck about any of this. they're all platformers or shooters or some shit that doesn't help me in the slightest. sheepolution's guide doesn't even have a menu tutorial. and when searching up specific questions people are so eager to recommend libraries, which i very much didn't wanna use. so it was just the docs for love2d (a little too spartan for my tastes) and lua (unofficial, but quite good. programming in lua less so), and some learnxinyminutes for good measure. it made me feel more accomplished hehe :). i also feel tutorials tend to be a jumble of aesthetics and logic, and i value logic a little higher. it was kind of a similar situation as with maintain'n'fuck.
btw how i handled the main menu was with a variable called gamestate. it just holds a string, either "menu", "game" or "end". i wanted to minimise if statements / nesting, so this is what i settled on:
gamestate = "menu". and in this state the function to advance text doesn't do that; instead it changes the gamestate to "game".game, functions related to advancing and rewinding the script can run (those in turn handle syntax parsing and all that stuff). while in this state, esc changes the var back to "menu" (which also reloads the script and starts over). reaching the end of the script sets it to "end".end of course displays the end screen, and behaves similarly to the main menu. your only option here is to hit esc to exit.the draw function just has if statements for the menu and end screens, easy peasy.
throughout all this, return was a really important statement to control the flow of things. i kinda forgot it existed for a bit and ran into silly problems.
anyway uh yeah. this was a cool project, i wasn't expecting it to be so straightforward and quick (it was fully functional within 24 hours! what! the second day was just about niceties and stuff). i've also wanted to use love2d for a bit so it was cool to have an excuse. don't think i'll really touch it (or lua) again tbh, if i need a non-renpy engine i'll just use godot, and i'm not sure lua has any casual applications for me — if i need some sort of automation i just use python (a language i don't know, remember!, but that i like much better. it's zero-indexed, for starters. and if statements don't have all that cruft. brother "then" is always implied don't waste my time 🙄).
despite my fondness for a certain comic, i'm not a control freak. what i am a freak for is reliability. i have profound distate for software that shifts under me, which is why ignoring my phone's pleads for updates is part of my daily routine. as such it feels good to have a tool that i understand completely and that will only change when and how i desire it. sure, you're welcome to fork it and go crazy, that's the beauty and point of foss, but no one's gonna make me use it.
love letter is, i suppose, opinionated in the sense that it's first and foremost my hole made for me. this means the things it "lacks" compared to the platonic ideal of a vn engine are things that i found i could well do without etc etc. it also means it fits my values. wow that sounds so lofty. but well, i guess that's the way to put it.
for example, i wanted to implement saves. i've never done it before and thought it'd be fun, and i don't think it'd be particularly difficult. but love2d cannot create files in the game's own folder, and the thought of dumping things in the user's ~/.local/share/love/ felt yucky. i wanted it to be self contained. oh i'm sure i could use lua's io directly instead, but (going back to the last paragraph) i decided it just wasn't that big a deal.
love letter's default appearance is based on how pretty much every single one of my vns looks: black background, cg up top and textbox below. saves me, personally, the hassle of thinking too hard about ui.
i do realize some people might want a textbox image though; that's easy to implement directly in main.lua, during the love.draw() function, or the fun way: by using the sprite slot for that. see, i really didn't wanna call the secondary image a sprite; it's just easier to remember. but it's just an image you can position arbitrarily, same as the "background". i personally see myself using it for a frame (like in bertha). sure it's easy enough to put that into main.lua, but it's nice to have options that don't mess with the engine
and while the engine was made with this target audience of one in mind, it's naturally a human-scale software. what i mean by this is that it's simple for someone else with minimal programming knowledge to understand what's going on as well as i do. there's some 400 lines of code, the logic all contained within a single file (well, i'm still using a framework instead of raw lua but gimme a break ok... let me make my point...). on the other hand, i don't even know where to begin investigating renpy, i can't fit it all in my head at once.
so yeah. i find tiny tools both cute and pleasant to use. and turns out pleasant to make too, which is where things get dangerous lol.
related (a bit): my website is one binary, on miniaturization.
the game is literally 150 words so just play it rn (unless you're reading on lynx or something) and continue with the blog later. the mini devlog is obviously longer than the game itself, even if not by much.
god i love tiny projects. i got this idea after seeing the omegaverse yuri jam, but since it's so far away and what i had written was just a burst of stream of consciousness i got antsy. i'm not really attached to omegaverse either so i figured i'd file off the serials somehow. well, this means i keep to my vampire-scifi cycle lol.
not being tethered to a jam also means i finally got to work with synthetic images again! i went through all that trouble setting up ganbreeder only to not use it for anything afterwards... since this is specifically a robot's fantasy it made so much sense to go machine vision with it, and i also wanted to keep the game kinda weird.
the music came together very quickly because i didn't really need anything fancy or long, and i just reused "in-house" samples. there's four "instruments": my good friend the mallets plugin, two breath samples, and an edited theremin that was just the right length. i used the same technique for rough dynamic music as in four fangs: just an extra bit of drums that plays as a sound effect. absolutely no control over the rhythm but i think it never sounds egregious, and it gives the music more variety (not that such a short game needs that) without dealing with crossfades and shit.
now just don't ask me why i used breathing instead of some sort of mechanical whirr. ah eto... bleh ^_^". i did try out some mechanical samples — fan hum and a wii booting up — after realizing what i'd done, but i just didn't like it as much!
there isn't much else to say since it's literally 150 words. it just speaks for itself. the title is referencing nine inch nails via a tumblr post, of course. maybe? i can't find it lmao. "i wanna fuck you like an animal i wanna feel you from the inside but all i've got is this awesome pussy". there's also i wanna nut in this boy so bad but i got a coochie. "like an animal" is very apt though, methinks.
a robot dog i drew for the love letter demo. i got into a bit of a robot pet rabbithole again... i haven't been very dilligent about putting my miscellaneous art here but i've poked at an oc design to live vicariously through images.
anyone have a spare aibo lying around...
also made another dress (and cute underwear!) for my doll... it's quite cute. it's kinda funny sewing in this scale because i'm used to real person clothes so i'll think "oh this needs a little ease, she's so small i think 2cm should do" — brother half a cm would be enough, it adds up throughout the pieces... that's why the dress has tucks down the front lol.
there's more photos of her on tumblr, including her original outfit from when i made her last year ^_^ dolls are one of those interests of mine that kinda comes in bursts, but she does make me happy. i find soft dolls / stuffed animals really soothing and yall know i love a miniature... in my dream world she has a little room on my shelf. for now it's just the loveseat (roughly followed this tutorial, used papier mache though), but i do want to make a trunk for her clothes and a folding screen to hang some paintings from and really give it a sense of space. a little desk and chair would also be supremely cute. but she's kinda big all things considered — at roughly 1:8 she's more of a fashion doll than the usual miniature / doll house scale of 1:12, so that'd be rather cluttered. i see no option but to make an actual miniature diorama.
also went back to the 3ds painting style to see if could make it really work on azpainter and i'm pretty happy with it. updated commission info to match, in case you want something like this for yourself :thumbsup:
and finally, a chibi comm for cognitive on fr ^_^
i've started a little early on april's vn, which is fate/stay night (2004). i'm some ten hours in. i need to kill shirou with a hammer it's not even funny. the story itself is fine, i'd say it's like a 7 so far, but i fucking hate the protagonist!! this was originally gonna have a female protag, and like. during the prologue the protag is tohsaka rin and it's just a glimpse of a better world. but i'm getting ahead of myself, you'll have to wait for my full thoughts on this game. well. i'm pretty sure i'll read just the fate route because this is a long ass game and i truly genuinely hate shirou. you don't understand. the thought of going back to the start, with him having lost any potential character development? nah.
i've also started what i'm lazily calling sol's debutniverse (named after friend of eggbug's debutniverse), where i watch pilot episodes of supernatural teen tv shows from the 2010s and thereabouts. everything that was Of My Time but i did not participate in. there aren't too many of them thank god, i think i just have shadowhunters (2016) and true blood (2008), which i think is dubiously teen. i suppose once upon a time (2011) counts too. eh.
also chainsaw man ended this month, which rather took me by surprise. i knew it was winding down but when i actually opened mihon and saw 30 pages i was like. oh. it's over. and yeah i liked the ending! to be perfectly honest, other than the asa-heavy start i didn't really love part 2 very much. i think in no small part due to fujimoto reading better in burts than in chapters, probably. but yeah real good ending!!
reading brief interviews with hideous men (david foster wallace). really fucking good prose, but rather exhausting. and pondering an official dnf of trans girl suicide museum (hannah baer) because it just kinda feels like reading the blog or maybe — and this is worse — substack of the whitest woman put on earth. being self aware does not help all that much girl.
see you soon!