sraëka-lillian

playing a pipe puzzle game on the kids section of the CBC website for some reason (the reason is i wanted to play something with pipes) that gets absurdly hard in the last third. you have like 12 seconds to get things in place before water starts flowing and if a source isn't connected to pipe by then it's game over, so there's no time to play around and see how to connect things before you die and the board resets. you can only rotate pieces clockwise and not very quickly either. even once you know the solution entering it is a real scramble. just brutal... i wonder how many people have ever seen the end of it...

i wish this one had credits so i could find out what the music is, it totally slaps. way funner game. a canned applause sound effect plays when you clear a level and it feels terrific, and they get hard way faster because it wasn't made for cbc dot ca slash kids. it's also got a neat optional element of giving you more pieces than you strictly need to solve the puzzle, but if you find a way to fit those extraneous tiles in you can score bonus points for fun... https://www.crazygames.com/game/pipe-puzzle

playing a pipe puzzle game on the kids section of the CBC website for some reason (the reason is i wanted to play something with pipes) that gets absurdly hard in the last third. you have like 12 seconds to get things in place before water starts flowing and if a source isn't connected to pipe by then it's game over, so there's no time to play around and see how to connect things before you die and the board resets. you can only rotate pieces clockwise and not very quickly either. even once you know the solution entering it is a real scramble. just brutal... i wonder how many people have ever seen the end of it...

Been playing free itch games non-stop for almost three weeks, here are my reccs:

• A Circle of Charity - half hour of extremely harrowing and excellent queer despair
• Joey Wamone's Normal Bedtime Routine That Is Definitely Not a Recurring Tooth Decay Nightmare - masterpiece of good kaizo jokes
• doomsday dreamgirl (18+) - queer despair kinky deer girl smut, extremely hot
• Victim Doll (18+) - queer despair robot guro smut, extremely hot
• Sylvie Lime - masterpiece explore-y platformer with a lot more going on under the hood than you'd expect
• Butterfly Soup 2 (you should play 1 first though) - I adore these characters with my entire heart
• with the last moonbeam - beautiful knytt-y gba homebrew platformer from the creator of bitsy
• Ten Tales from the Records of the Adamant Gambit - ten intimate stories in a really lovely fleshed out setting, strong command of tone and humor

Had another three week itch bender, have some more Certified Bangers:

• Polly the Frog 3: Billy Bullfrog's Decree - These games continue to be very cute and good one-sitting platformers; one of the few devs out there that make me wanna 3D games. The final boss is a little too hard, otherwise this is an adorable little journey.

• Kitten Milk Replacer (18+) - Very nice sister game to A Circle of Charity. Some of my favorite stories out there about getting caught up in your own martyr narratives, a theme really close to my heart.

• If On A Winter's Night, Four Travelers - Drop-dead gorgeous obviously, but it's the excellent artfully directed character stories and the subtle wry sense of humor that really make this game for me.

• Winter (18+) - Controlled and subtle and precise story about two queer characters in a messy grimy kinky relationship, very excellent.

• greasemnk++ - Great art and music and extremely chunky fixed encounter resource management rpg tactics. Gets super-duper-hype at the end which I was surprised and delighted by.

• Quantum Entanglement (18+) - Some of the dramatic parts could've used another edit pass, but nobody does character banter and hilarious environment interactions like Saint Bomber (Embric of Wulfhammer's dev) and the density of it here still made the game sing for me.

• TRAUMAKT~4.SEXE (18+) - It's very fun to play Winter, Victim Doll, and TRAUMAKT and watch the games get increasingly loud and horny and exuberant. It's legit inspiring how much this game delights in its weirdo kinky smut scenarios and wearing its influences on its sleeve, finished with a huge grin on my face.

• Queen Beast (18+) - It is impossible to overstate how appealing the (90's fantasy ecchi OVA-inspired) art in this game is to me. It's like an electrode applied directly to my lizard brain, it never stopped blowing me away and making me smile. The great triumph of Queen Beast is that the writing manages to deserve art this good; it's a strong, complete story full of great jokes and characters.

i've been using primarily haxepunk for game development for the past five years or so. it's a lightweight haxe framework based on flashpunk, for those who remember that. it's widely considered dead; the website 404s, the last update on GitHub that wasn't by me was in 2020, and the #haxepunk channel was (annoyingly) deleted from the haxe discord. there's basically no resources available online anymore, except for a guide i wrote on getting started with it and the API docs that i reuploaded.

the thought i had that inspired me to write this is that even before the weeds of disuse grew around haxepunk, i think the main reason people wrote it off as dead was that it wasn't getting updated anymore. but i think the reason for that is that it was done. aside from a couple of very minor bugs i've caught and fixed, it's rock solid and feature complete; i've never found myself wanting anything it didn't have. and in my mind, the quality of being finished and stable far outweighed any speculative benefits it could have attained from continued work on it.

all this is to say that i think the quality of being finished is sometimes conflated with being irrelevant, which is weird because we've all experienced a thing we liked getting worse because the pressures of capitalism demanded it be developed past the more or less ideal form it had already arrived at.

if i had a bigger heart and more time i would take it on myself to get haxepunk's website back up and running and merge all my fixes into the main branch, but i suspect it'd be more work than i anticipate for not much payoff, so i haven't. which also maybe points to the problem of totally functional FOSS tools being dependent on a single person's continued unpaid labor...