I'm Jeron (rhymes with Erin). A trans girl, apparently. I dabble in basically everything. World Record Holder. Girl-King of cats. Fledgling Goddess of Hunger


Interact with me? Yes, I luv it


List of games I think are cool


ChickenHat
@ChickenHat

It's called Kura5 and it's a fangame for boktai, a series of gameboy games notable by most for two things: being spearheaded by Hideo Kojima and also making use of real world sunlight to charge the protagonist's vampire slaying Gun Del Sol weapon. The latter is achieved via a "solar sensor" that's built into the game's cartridge. As a fangame, Kura5 takes place in boktai's greater universe (specifically post Shinbok good ending for those in the know) while also mish-mashing a bunch of mechanics I liked across all four of the games together. A lot of people from the ye ancient boktai fandom hopped on to help me out early on, so now the game has a lot of really nice things for it. (Like portraits, a custom OST, and an actual story) In place of the solar sensor, I coded a system into the game called "WeatherSync" that grabs your area's local weather, which is then simulated into the game's world. This system works by taking your machine's IP Address and feeding it into the Geo Plugin API which gets your rough coordinates to feed into OpenWeatherMap (OWM). From there the game takes the json output from OWM and parses it to alter in-game sunlight levels, humidity, temperature, precipitation, etc. However, if your weather is too extreme for the game or if you feel uncomfortable having your location be used, you can turn it off and play with a built-in mild weather pattern. One final feature I think is worth sharing is that, thanks to a tiny script put together by Prof9, Kura5 can also accept passwords from Lunar Knights. If you beat the game, you can transfer the password you got into Kura5 to get a reward for it, like Lucian's sword or Aaron's Knight gun.

I wanted to post this onto here because cohost so far seems to have a good community of developers who work on interesting projects, and I appreciated how people would create longer posts talking about things they're passionate about. Well, here's mine!

If you want more Kura5 specific stuff, the tumblr for it acts as a de facto website, while the itchio page contains what we've completed of the game so far. While the game isn't fully complete, 4/5ths of the game is on the itch page. Or, if the intro blurb interested you in boktai at all and you haven't played the games yet, fire up your favorite GBA emulator and give 'em a try!

(And if you do end up playing I hope you have fun. I myself have gotten a lot of enjoyment making funny fanfiction game and making friends with people in the fandom and the two main characters Annie and Emil are very good they are my kids and I love them very much ;;)


mGBA
@mGBA

Also, for those not in the know, Boktai was produced by Hideo Kojima. Yes, that Hideo Kojima. Have you ever wanted a game about vampires and light-powered guns with stealth elements? Not something you've thought of before but now you're desperately craving it? That's Boktai!

The Solar Sensor hardware on the cartridge is not emulated in some emulators, so you'd need to use a patched version on those emulators. But you know what emulator does support the Solar Sensor hardware? mGBA does, and has for years. You can even bind keys to adjust the levels manually if so desired.

Another fun fact: the Solar Sensor claimed to only work with real sunlight and not artificial indoor lighting. How did it accomplish this, you might ask? Well, it's not a light sensor. At least, not a visible light sensor. It's secretly a UV sensor! So yes, you can fool it with a blacklight.


ChickenHat
@ChickenHat

(In addition to a blacklight, a plasma ball works too!)


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in reply to @ChickenHat's post:

This is so cool!!! I don't even know anything about this series it just seems like a neat project 🥲 And i recently had an idea for a sort of fanfiction game as well but had never seen anyone do anything like that, so this is very inspiring

Do it! Tbh I think fangames that also act as fanfiction (expanding the universe or being bonkers transformative) are super important.

And yeah they're hard to spot by consequence of being for a specific fandom audience but they do exist. (Like I'd say the Undertale fandom sort of perpetuates itself off of fanfiction games that explore AUs/Fanlore since the original game was picked clean of stuff to fic about.)

I could never get the solar sensor to work well while reducing glare from the Sun on the GBA's screen, so I didn't get far in the first Boktai and played the second one with a solar sensor patch. Your solution of using someone's IP address for their local weather is inspired. I wished for just such a system on the Wii in a hypothetical Boktai sequel there, since they already had a Weather Channel, but sadly that never came to pass. I'm glad that fans like yourself are making this! Thank you!