Autumnotopia

things have been so stressful and busy for me lately x_x now 'set up a personal website with an RSS feed' has been added as a task to finish before the end of the month..............

Cover by konstantinos korakonero

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The latest edition of Indiepocalypse (the monthly alternative game anthology I run) is now out! If you don't know what Indiepocalypse is I wrote a starter guide!

The games in this month issue (as seen in the trailer) are

Trail of the Wretched by Xavier Bell, Jason Reagen, Khoa Ho​

A visual novel about the journey of a photographer stumbling through the worst week of his life. It's hard to capture the beauty of the world with a gun held to the back of your head.

CRUSHCRUSHCRUSHCRUSH by Lex Kim Bobrow​

CRUSHCRUSHCRUSHCRUSH is an interactive abstract horror experience/interactive poem dealing with themes of sexuality, emotional abuse in romantic relationships, religious trauma, and mental health.

let the lights bleed by @ednaarel

A short exploration of the effects of being objectified and the way you can lose yourself to please others out of fear of being alone.

I PROMISE I AM WORKING ON THE GAME | machina carerulea by manonamora

"Come aboard the struggle bus..."

I PROMISE I AM WORKING ON THE GAME is a interactive exploration of a writer's block.

"Hello, Blanche... Do you remember what happened? No... Well... That's fine"

machina carerulea is a short sci-fi retelling of Bluebeard

estherbunny444 by mumupoque

A 3D, highly surreal adventure game about a sad trans girl named Sue falling in love with her two-headed friend Esther.

Wherein She Completely Cuts Herself Off from Reality; A Parabolic Emotion from Recovery into Despair by Kimera Royal

Explore forms of alienation, grapple with repetition, microwave a sandwich. Features three small poetic games and three small poetic poems.

Cow Life Sim RPG by @pajamaBeeVegan, @politepigeon, Vince Alan, Jaco, Kristyn_Art, Kusabii

You've set off on a voyage to Snoutsville and the world is before you! Explore the area, embark on quests, or make your own adventures! Level up unique and innovative skills and experiment to find the best training methods. Collect and create cool items! You can do anything when you are a cow!

After the Janazah by @obsidiancastle

The Adhan is calling - it's time to visit your Baba. A 5 minute interactive fiction set at an Islamic funeral. Written with the constraint of 500 words.

Slot Waste by Vinny Roca (pickpanpuck)

Slot Waste is a 3D first-person simulation of a mysterious factory production line. In this episode-length art game, navigate linearly through a series of 10 mini-games and discover what actions will move the production process forward. Complete each sequence and be rewarded with detailed real-time animations that connect each stage.

Alongside grotesque creatures and strange machines, take on your role as the spirit of the factory and bring the production process to completion…but will it really ever end…?

And newly commissioned for Indiepocalypse!

In Sun-Drenched Gardens by @dumplingsquid & @far

A narrative maze. Lost in Her Sun-Drenched Majesty’s verdant and terrible gardens, with only the dubious guidance of flowers, a sole reveler seeks to escape. In a crowded train car, two strangers meet, talk a while, and then part.

My Practices:

1. Create the repo first, then begin the project. It's just easier for me.
2. Use a free online service provider, for offsite backups and to quickly move between machines.
3. Use git-lfs. It's not really necessary with small GB Studio projects, but it's a good habit to get into.
4. Make frequent, small commits. Typically this means, every time I change an asset and/or add/alter some code, I immediately stage and commit; this makes it much easier if I need to step backwards later to figure out when I broke something, and also means I don't have to remember what I just did for very long.
5. Push occasionally, after a significant amount of work is done, usually about once every 30 to 60 minutes. This means it's easier to back out and remove commits in the rare case when I decide I shouldn't have done something in the first place.
6. In general semantic versioning is sensible but it may be too fine-grained for most GB Studio projects. I tend not to assign version numbers at all until I'm sharing the game with testers, when I begin at 0.1-beta. When I release, that's 1.0 and every subsequent release gets a tag.
7. Keep the following simple .gitattribute and .gitignore files.

⌗ GitHub Language Detection
design/* linguist-documentation
⌗ Normalize Line Endings to LineFeed

*.md text=auto

*.text text=auto

*.txt text=auto

LICENSE text=auto
⌗ LFS

*.mod filter=lfs diff=lfs merge=lfs -text

*.png filter=lfs diff=lfs merge=lfs -text

*.sav filter=lfs diff=lfs merge=lfs -text

*.uge filter=lfs diff=lfs merge=lfs -text

*.vgm filter=lfs diff=lfs merge=lfs -text

*.wav filter=lfs diff=lfs merge=lfs -text

*.zip filter=lfs diff=lfs merge=lfs -text

[Bb]uild
*.bak
~*

I think that frequent, small commits are the most important of these. Here's an example of my commit history:

Confused? Read on for a brief intro & tutorial!

Feedback welcome!

Happy to announce the 2nd volume of writing by game designers on their own games is now out! Read it here for free:
https://afterjourneysend.substack.com/p/volume-2-is-out

This volume is happy to feature:
John Ellis (https://x.com/FeverDevJohnny) - Orbo's Odyssey
Stephen Gillmurphy (https://cohost.org/thecatamites?page=0) - Anthology of the Killer
Quinn K (https://quinnkdev.tumblr.com/) - NO ME: The Future Is ours
Lena Raine (https://cohost.org/kuraine) - ESC
@npckc (https://npckc.net/) A YEAR OF SPRINGS
Linker (https://cohost.org/Linker?page=0) / @linkerbm - Elephantasy
Xiri (https://x.com/akaxiri) - HITM3
Lily Valeen (https://cohost.org/ItsMeLilyV) - BOSSGAME
And me writing about Sephonie again!