tumblr is adamant about showing me (a) thumbnails of the same few people on “tumblr live” and (b) twist’s latest comic at the top of my dash no matter what i do. like the dashboard seems to be simple chronological except that this comic is stuck to the top?? i do not understand this website

Maybe if i make more posts i can bump it down

edit: lol they only let you SNOOZE tumblr live?? so they know people want to get rid of it but they’re adamant about making you see it anyway. fucking incredible

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the evolution of lexy, from the original jam game (#1) to what she looks like now (#4)

(well actually she looks a bit more colorful now because i’ve changed the palette since i took this screenshot, but it’s nice to have the comparison only be across shapes with the palette the same)

the #2 sprite was drawn shortly after i released the jam game and was just What She Looked Like for several years. i drew most of a whole sheet of various lexy forms based on that.

but eventually i thought about how i draw lexy (as in, non-pixellated), and how it doesn’t really look like #2 at all, and how #2 doesn’t really have a silhouette it’s just kind of a Block, and what if i could do better, and i should at least give it a shot

and i came up with #3 and it was kinda dumpy but it was something and that was interesting

and after much tweaking i ended up with #4

and i was crestfallen

because it was so, so much obviously better than #2, and i knew in my heart immediately that i would have to scratch all my lexy sprites and do them all over again, and they are so time-consuming and it would set me back so far. like i don’t want to spoil everything right off the bat but to give you some idea, the old lexy spritesheet is 2688×1040

but anyway i did that and the game looks ridiculously better now. which makes sense because i drew the original sprite like 2 years into drawing at all and now it’s some 6 years later

i made a side blog for @fox-flux. i don’t know why exactly — on cohost i just use a tag — but i guess i’m like A/Bing here

a weird thing that can happen is for people to follow the game blog when they don’t follow me, which i think happened on twitter

fox-flux:

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after many bumps in the road there is at long last a

fox flux DELUXE free demo

which has been described as “longer than i expected” and “how the fuck do i get that heart??” and “am i supposed to be able to do this”

this is my little puzzle-platformer about turning into things and collecting candy. i’ve been working on it for a long time and it’s still not done but i hope you enjoy what there is so far! especially because one day it will be done and it would be cool if you bought it

sorry everyone it seems like tumblr just straight up refuses to put paragraphs inside list items even if i explicitly write them out as html, which is why that last post is practically a single unbroken block of text. i guess i will edit it to use unicode bullets or something?? absolute clown website

it’s wild to see myhouse having escaped the orbit of Doom People, because so much of it specifically riffs on doom in a way that is laser-targeted at Doom People, to the point that i just wouldn’t have expected it to be nearly as interesting if you don’t pick up on that stuff

right from the outset, “my house” is even a recognizable genre, because doom was among the first approachable platforms for creating a 3D space, and if you give random people the ability to create a 3D space then many of them will just try to recreate their own house. (i want to say jp lebreton even made an effort to play through every house map on the idgames archive at one point, though hell if i can find it now.) there was in fact already a “myhouse.wad”, from 1995!

frankly it’s incredible that someone (or someones) put so much effort into this map and then had the gall to simply post it on doomworld as “myhouse.wad”, because that is a thread title that guarantees the fewest possible people will bother to look. there are posts in the thread where people outright admit that they only checked because they were surprised how many replies a “my house” wad got.

so anyway, okay, the “classic” doom wad experience is that you download a wad, it contains exactly 1 map, and it has zero custom textures or music or other frills. most wads from the 90s are like this; if you’re lucky you might get a bad midi rendition of a metallica song. nowadays there are texture artists and musicians and everything collaborating on full map packs, but “just a map” is still kind of the default mapping experience and is recognizable to anyone who’s been around doom for sufficiently long.

and myhouse riffs on absolutely every aspect of this:

• the music is the MAP01 music, Running From Evil, which is just the music you get if you supply your own map in the MAP01 slot and do nothing else. so a ton of 90s maps had this same track as their background music, so everyone has heard it a zillion times. it is ingrained into so many people’s skulls. subtly fucking with it is a great way to fuck with the player

• the house uses only stock doom 2 textures, or occasionally light modifications of them. again this is just what you get if you make a map and don’t supply any other resources, so the stock textures are very familiar. only later, with sufficient poking around, does the map introduce new textures, which really help sell the impression of being swept away to Somewhere Else

• if you take the exit, you go to MAP02, Underhalls. this is the expected experience because doom wads replace what’s already there — you’re not really supplying a “new map pack” or anything, you’re overwriting a map from the original doom 2 progression. (there are ways to fiddle with this now, but in vanilla doom 2, the level progression was hardcoded.) so the “ending” of a no-frills single-map wad is always, always to transition to Underhalls. the opening shot of Underhalls is practically like seeing the credits. so roping Underhalls into the experience is completely unexpected, because Underhalls is the sign that you’ve escaped back to regular doom

• the super shotgun is “hidden” in Underhalls, in probably the best-known super shotgun location in the whole game, because it’s the first time you can get it

• incidentally Underhalls itself feels uncanny, because the player camera height is higher than usual to make the house’s proportions feel sensible. (part of the trouble with exact recreations of real spaces in doom is that the camera is weirdly low.) i was actually convinced that myhouse included a modified Underhalls, but no, it’s stock doom 2 Underhalls, it just feels off when you’re slightly taller

but wait, there’s more

• silent teleporters are a feature from boom, a very early doom derivative that added a number of helpful mapping features and is basically considered only half a step beyond vanilla. so shifting between two versions of a space without interruption isn’t completely unexpected. it’s only later that the portal use becomes more obvious

• although if you’re especially canny, you should notice that the second version of the house shows both the upstairs and downstairs windows in full, which is impossible — doom cannot do room-over-room. (in fact this is accomplished with a semi-obscure zdoom feature called sector portals — essentially, the whole second floor and the space outside it are a separate area, and the “ceiling” of the yard becomes a view up through the “floor” of that second space.)

• swinging doors are a hexen feature (polyobjects) that gzdoom inherited. (heretic and hexen were modifications of the doom engine, and zdoom started out as a merge of all three codebases into something that could play all three games.) they might also be in other fancy engines (eternity?), but they are very distinctly not a doom thing. if you’re deeply familiar with doom’s limitations then they’ll jump out at you immediately, but if you’re looking at doom like it’s any old 3D game then maybe not so much

• recreations of other humble real-world locales are also a somewhat common theme, and remind me in particular of Doom City, from way back in 1995

• a very common desire for players is to “uv-max” a map, i.e. reach the exit on ultra-violence with 100% kills and secrets. if you can’t do this, the map is (reasonably) considered broken. it is comically impossible to do this in myhouse, and anyone with the skill to create the map would be acutely aware of this

• the extra weapon frames look to be borrowed from the well-known smooth doom, which adds extra frames for everything and is just pretty dang slick overall. so it’s not merely “ho ho, got you, smoother weapons” but specific integration of another familiar project

• this might be reaching a bit, but mirrors are specifically a nightmare in zdoom’s software renderer because they work by rendering all visible geometry as if it were physically present on the other side of the mirror — and if there be any actual geometry back there, it will also get rendered and you will have a big fucking mess. so a mirror in the middle of a room is a laughable idea. this is somewhat less of a concern now that the hardware renderer is basically the default, but it’s still a spectre looming over the very concept of mirrors, so the way mirrors play out in myhouse is very funny to me

there’s probably more, like, the way it intercepts noclip is a stroke of genius and not something i’ve ever seen done before. but i hope you get the idea

immediately after making that last post i get followed by a blog named “eeveelol” which has zero posts and is only following me

and look, i don’t know, it’s really hard to convey what it’s like to perceive a sniper’s laser sight on me whenever i am on this website. i try to tell myself “well there’s only one sniper among millions of other people” but somehow it’s not reassuring

sometimes i think about trying to make use of tumblr again but like. well for one i don’t even know who i know who uses it still

but also my associations with tumblr are mostly about callouts, from a time when blocking didn’t even meaningfully work, which made them this inescapable plague because people just had like half a dozen ways to put things on your screen that you couldn’t prevent.

like the post history of this blog is currently mostly people spewing vitriol and me being angry about that and spewing it right back, which is just unpleasant all around

but even before that… i think of stuff like posting about styx’s then-incurable illness, which he was swiftly dying from. because i always liked trying to be open about personal things, and i liked the idea of keeping some kind of record of a major thing, even if it was a catastrophe. but now i associate that with someone misunderstanding the posts and straight up accusing me of killing my cat.

(by the way FIP is no longer a death sentence — there is an antiviral called merely GS-441524 that is not FDA approved for vet use because of some corporate malarkey so you have to get it yourself but it is unbelievably effective, this sounds so fake i know but it is extremely real and there are even like facebook groups where people pass their unused doses around)

anyway i guess that sort of thing makes it hard to dive back in

i cannot believe how much foone posts on here it is unreal. i followed them like two days ago and they are already 60% of my dash

what if i’m pissed off AND not paying attention. did that ever occur to you