First Updates

Hi! It’s been awhile. So, remember when we said there may be post droughts sometimes? Yeah, we weren’t kidding. Funny that happened right after the first post... Anyway! What have we been working on?

Well... For the first few weeks after that first post, we did some Rain World modding, and contributed to the Community Level Editor. We said we wouldn’t post as much about modding, so that was already a bad start! But yeah, basically, we added a new material type and two new effects to the Community Level Editor, which was fun to do. But other than that, what else have we been doing?

Project Updates

ABSI-4

Well… The ABSI-4 Analog Synthesizer project ended up being put on pause. Tragedy, I know! We really want to work on it, but, we just had so many delays due to complications with a chip being SMD only... Basically, a few months ago, we realised we needed LM13700 chips. Turns out, they discontinued the DIP version of those chips years ago. So we ordered a new soldering iron (we wanted to switch to lead-free and our current iron couldn’t do that), and also ordered the chips. The place we got the iron from, which is usually reliable, took over a month to send the iron. Why? Because something else in the order wasn’t in stock! Rediculous.

Then, when the iron FINALLY arrived, we find that we had misplaced the chips! They had gone completely missing, and they had to be ordered again. So after they finally arrived, we procrastinated for like a week before finally deciding to solder one to an adapter that we had designed. As expected, it kinda went terribly - we have a condition called “tremor”, which is basically constant involuntary trembling of the body, particularly the hands. It’s usually very slight and doesn’t affect everyday tasks, but it SURE impacts soldering. Even through-hole soldering is complicated by tremor. So, needless to say... we had a bad time soldering that. But we did it! ...Then that’s where the project got put on hold.

I think we just got overwhelmed by remembering all the work we have to do for the project and the constant delays killing motivation for the project. We’re also forced to go between our mother’s and father’s house twice a week, despite being an adult, and we cannot bring our electronics equipment and supplies over to his house, which is the additional motivation killer that ended up slowing this project to a stop. It’s sad, but we do want to get back to it someday. We will be receiving disability pension soon, since yes, we are disabled and eligible for that, which might revive the project. We want to invest in a hotplate for reflow soldering, so soldering SMD parts is not an issue.

We’re also thinking of cutting down the scope significantly for our first synthesizer project. We may make the ABSI-1 first, which would be monophonic and without patch memory, also missing other features planned for the ABSI-4. It’s saddening we have to do that, and we do really want a polyphonic analog synthesizer, but currently the work may be a bit too much, because every parameter is basically required to be voltage-controlled. You need that for patch memory anyway, which is another thing we really wanted, but for now we’ll leave that for when we have a working monophonic synthesizer, then we can go polyphonic.

But what we actually have done for the project so far? Well, currently we have the VCO and the VCF implemented. That’s all. There’s also MIDI control from the microcontroller, but yeah, that’s all. We needed the LM13700 chip for the envelope generator, as well as for voltage-controlled parameters and modulation. Since we were using LM13700s anyway now, we decided the VCA should use it too. But yeah, in the ABSI-1...All of that can kinda be ignored, due to the relief of the voltage-controlled parameter requirement. Which means we kinda went on that whole LM13700 debacle for no reason? Well, it’s nice we at least have them now. Perhaps we’ll end up using them in the ABSI-1 anyway, and we can slowly convert everything to be voltage-controlled.

A Legend From Shadows

A Legend From Shadows?! What’s that?!??! Well, remember that shelved game we mentioned, OuroborOS? Well, that was originally intended to have sub-games - one of which being “A Legend From Shadows”. Long story short, we kinda got too attached to that sub-game and developed its lore a little too much, to the point we decided it should break off from OuroborOS and be its own thing.

Well, it’s not entirely its own thing... It’s complicated. So, basically, it’s actually technically part of HATE IN THE MACHINE now! The reasons are lore-heavy which we cannot share, though one of them is the final boss we have in mind. We kinda made a whole theme for it and... Yeah.

It is a bit conflicting though, because A Legend From Shadows and HATE IN THE MACHINE are so completely different, and we’re afraid that any fans of A Legend From Shadows will hate HATE IN THE MACHINE, for being so different and not A Legend From Shadows 2? Even though, A Legend From Shadows is technically the spin-off, it just came out before what it’s a spin-off of!! Well, assuming it actually does release. But yeah, HATE IN THE MACHINE is basically baked into its lore now, and we don’t know what to do about it. So, for now, it’ll remain like that.

But enough rambling, what do we actually have to share for it? Well, a few things, but it is VERY early in development, so not much.

These are the protagonists. The magenta hooded figure is The Reaping Dark, and the red cat is The Midnight Sun. The Reaping Dark is the actual player character, with The Midnight Sun just being a secondary party member. They are what are known in-universe as "Prime Elementals". There is another party member planned, but they won't come in until much later...

This is a VERY VERY early prototype of the battle system. Like, rediculously early, and you can tell that. But hey, at least we have background acid! Yes, that's what its called in the files. Most battles will have unique acid backgrounds. Honestly, we should be focusing on this battle system more right now, but the motivation just isn't there. We want some actual gameplay in the overworld first...and what I mean by that is work on story so we can make regions.

Speaking of the overworld, here's some overworld. Once again, very early prototype. The tileset is actually palette-based, greatly reducing the amount of tilesets we may need. You see, Godot's tileset system kinda sucks! A lot! But we put up with it. Plus, working with palettes can be fun.

Also note The Midnight Sun’s movement - Unlike other RPGs, party members do not follow the player’s movements exactly. Instead, path-finding is used! There are still some complications, Godot’s navigation system also needs some polish, but it’s good enough for now. Now why use path-finding? Well, first - we want to add overworld obstacles and, well, gameplay. At a certain point, the typical follow the player exactly may not be ideal…

Plus - and this is a huge bonus - we can add more character to the party members if we wish, such as reacting to the environment, or even wandering a little if you stay still for too long. Overall, to us they feel more natural like this, and it wasn’t that much effort to implement anyway. Actually, we partly went this route because we didn’t want to implement recording the player’s movements and such. It just felt like a silly solution when we could just use path-finding that Godot already has implemented.

There is also a working dialog system that we kinda over-engineered, but for now we feel like that’s not worth recording a video and sharing here. It’ll show up in a future post showcasing something else, I’m sure.

I wish we’d have a more gameplay-oriented game to develop partly so we could do early-access on it, as in our personal opinion early-access is not a good idea for story-based games unless it’s split into bite-sized chunks like DELTARUNE is. But here we are, stuck with developing a story-based game again... Stories are actually REALLY hard, so don’t be surprised if this completely fails or doesn’t even release at all. We kinda just want something to work on. And yes, this is what’s distracting us from continuing on the synth...

Oh, and if you want music, here is a track we uploaded on YouTube:

STILLCAST?

So... What happened to STILLCAST? ...I don’t know! We kinda, just, lost motivation for it completely, with no explanation. You see, we kinda needed to make a custom 3D level editor for it...and that is always the most grueling work.

The truth is, this is just the nature of our projects. Why we are like this? No idea! ADHD might be one. We do have it, but man, it is hard to just work on one thing for more than a month. There’s also scope-creep - you think we would’ve learnt our lesson by now? Nope!

Honestly, we may try to seriously just make a super short game, one that can be made in a month or so. We’d love to do that, but we just have no ideas - and therefore no motivation to make it happen. Maybe one day...

If you’re wondering, STILLCAST is a puzzle game about using a stationary beam of light that you can move. Specifically, that beam of light is from a flashbulb. Why the light stays put after you move the flashbulb is quite lore-heavy... No seriously, there is an in-depth science to it, because we can’t for the life of us make something that doesn’t have a lore explanation.

But since I’m feeling nice, we’ll share some old videos of STILLCAST. ~~We’re so lazy we’re not even gonna upload them to the site and just embed the discord links directly... Hope the links don’t die one day!~~

(Edit: They died the next day. Isn't that amazing? We re-downloaded them and uploaded it to the site, so they'll stay permanent.)

That’s All

Whew... That’s all. Who knows, maybe we will get back to STILLCAST some day. Maybe... But for now, we’re kinda, well, honestly clueless on what to do? Sure, we’re working on A Legend From Shadows, but I’m not entirely sure if it will actually come into fruition. We are highly unpredictable when it comes to this.

For plans for the site itself, we’re thinking of adding a place to upload our music. Though, since none of it would be DRM-protected, we’re afraid of people stealing our music and using it without permission that way... Or, god forbid, claiming it’s their own music. Really hope that doesn’t happen!

We’ll consider that super-short game plan, if we can even come up with an idea. We also need to avoid small ideas becoming large... A lot of our larger projects started out like that. Though, never with a one-month project. We just have such large desire for a game with a complete story that we just, overlook the fact we actually haven’t uploaded a game before.

We love story in games, and although we do enjoy gameplay too, what we usually come up with is better suited for larger games. It’s a shame, but I’m sure we’ll get there eventually. They always say, start small - the thing is we’ve been making games for years. So what do we do? Because we do have a lot of experience, just not of actually completing something, which I guess is the point. Hm.

Well, bye bye, and see you next post! ...If it isn’t in another month’s time. Sorry about that. I’m sure we’ll get another post out sooner. Ideally we should be uploading smaller posts but more often. We’ll see how things go.