giwake

game developer, I think?

  • they/them

i make games and music, sometimes.

profile picture by @thewaether!!!

moving to https://bsky.app/profile/giwake.bsky.social


terrycavanagh
@terrycavanagh
Aepoh
@Aepoh asked:

What prompted you to go back and update VVVVVV? I know this was a while ago but it was so unreal seeing an update for a 10+ year old game on my Steam Library that I still regularly come back to now and again.

oh, if this is about the update yesterday, I just finally got around to enabling steam cloud saving on the backend. It hasn't really been tested but I think it'll be ok

I released the source code to VVVVVV on it's 10th year anniversary (a few years back now!), and since then there's been an active community of people keeping it up to date and working on various enhancements, which is amazing. I try to keep as involved with it as I can.

Our big exciting project right now is a localisation update - I've enlisted the individual translators from Dicey Dungeons to localise it into 18+ languages. That's wrapping up soon and should hopefully be out in the new few months!

As for why update it at all; idk, VVVVVV's a very personally important game for me. It's my precious baby and it gets whatever it wants.


iliana
@iliana

Somewhat relatedly, 404 Media posted an article today about Ethan Lee, who ported VVVVVV and other games to Mac/Linux for Humble Bundle way back when, in which he suggests that the ability to preserve playability of games is to... continue to maintain them. Which seems obvious when said out loud, but maintenance isn't free.

In my opinion VVVVVV is a pretty good case study of why releasing source code to games goes even further in that goal of game preservation; a while back I ended up building the source code and ran into a graphical issue on macOS (due to a newer version of SDL that supported Metal), reported it, and it got fixed by someone (hi @InfoTeddy!) who has spent an incredible amount of time on the game since its source release. But even if a small community of folks fixing the game hadn't built itself up around the source release, it still gives someone the opportunity decades from now to fix it and run the game without having to find a system from the time period.

(I also happen to have gotten a whopping two lines of code into a future release of the game to make speedrun autosplitters that read game memory a bit easier on platforms that require position-independent executables. But that's less to do with game preservation and is more just neat.)


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in reply to @terrycavanagh's post:

I didn't even know it got another update the other day. I can see why it's special to you (and to me). It was one of the old school indie games that took off into the mainstream back in the day alongside others like Super Meat Boy and 1001 Spikes. Still very re-playable and has that instant appeal. One day I want to finish all of the officially included mod levels.

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