What is Roxy doing with my money????? (Patreon)

Howdy! Today I want to write an update post of sorts, because it's been a while since I made an actually game dev related post, and I don't want people to just think I'm taking the money and like, buying a bunch of SNES games with it or something.

My Hot Website

I've been spending some times making some necessary updates to my website, which you can now find at https://cyansorcery.com ! I've been working on moving away from fxsql.com, because people actually thought it was really spooky. So, I'm hoping this new domain is much more approachable.

The standout feature of my new site is the Gallery, which has a bunch of art that I've made posted to it! I've been working on uploading past artworks, but it takes a while. I'm hoping to upload pretty much everything (including stuff that hasn't seen the light of days in years) but this is a project that will take a while, so I'm doing it here and there.

I've also made improvements to my Commissions page, adjusting the formatting and making it overall much easier to read the commission terms as well as see my current queue. The previous "Examples" page has been replaced with the Gallery, which holds a bunch of commissions I did under the #Commissions tag. This should hopefully make it easier for people to know what I do and what I can do for them.

Eventually, I would like to have it like I had it before, where the commission form is on my website rather than using a Google form - it'd put me in a more professional place than Twitter, which is using a Google form for their overpriced "enterprise" API access LOL

(Side note: tag browsing allows you to see only pictures of my fursona, which I've figured out a lot of people like.)

Commissions

Speaking of commissions, that's where a good amount of my time has been going as well. Since my Patronage went down due to the economy and also putting Shield Cat on hiatus, I've been having to do commissions to make up the lost income. Those who saw my taxes post will know that I've been trying to figure out that whole situation, and it's been kinda a mess. A lot of people did come through, and I appreciate that, but I'm still not where I need to be yet. Hopefully, I'll figure that out.

Cosmogelica

Yes, I'm still working on it! I was hoping to have more progress done on it by now, but a lot of bad stuff happened in February and early March that just really threw off my groove and ate into my time. I don't want to talk about the bad stuff, so please don't ask.

Aside from that, I wasn't working on it as much because I wasn't sure about the future of it. As it turns out, "add stuff until it's done" isn't a great way for me to develop a game. To that end, I've been focusing on changing it to be more of a "Story Mode" experience, with the existing Endless mode as an alternate play mode. This allows me to give the game structure and to be able to have a clearly defined list of checkboxes to complete to be like "ok, this is what I have to do and then the game is done." Also, I can use stuff from the Story mode in the Endless mode, so everyone wins!

I posted a video where you can see me testing it out. The stage is... kinda garbage and full of 69s and among us, but the important thing is that it's predefined. I'm really excited about the gameplay opportunities this will present, and it'll allow me to add more stuff than I could in endless, such as gems you have to collect to activate the bonus stage or something (I will put collectibles in any game I touch, sorry.) I'm also thinking about branching paths and whatnot. The overall idea is something like the first Star Fox on SNES, where you have different stages to play, but overall you play about 6 of them.

(Side note: Don't get too excited about the "Story" because it will basically just be "You are Monica and you need to destroy this space gel because these guys are putting it everywhere." I'm mainly after the structure lmao, I have Shield Cat for story.)

Since the last build, I've also been working on stuff like boss transitions (which, it took a lot more alteration to the code than I expected to add a boss phase) and the aforementioned Story mode (which, it took a lot less alteration to the code than I expected.) I also have made 3 new songs, with a couple more in the works now. Nobody will be able to say the game doesn't have music! Speaking of which, I also changed the music system to use Gamemaker's new looping music system. I can't use this system for Shield Cat, but I was at least able to use it for Cosmogelica (Reason I can't is because it doesn't work with sync groups, which Shield Cat uses.)

Aside from that, I've been working on a new Hires mode. This Hires mode allows for subpixel movement which makes the gameplay a LOT smoother, while also still allowing me to render stuff at low resolutions. In this video, you can see how it works, and the difference it makes as I toggle between the two rendering modes. I had to do a lot to fix the gel and meteors so they rendered at a low resolution instead of at a high resolution, because that was just weird looking.

Shield Cat

I don't really have anything new to talk about with Shield Cat, except that it exceeded 3000 wishlists. The game is on its way to becoming whatever the game version of a popufur is! Publishers are still trying to get their hands on it, but they're like weird NFT publishers so I don't want to let them touch it.

Social Media

Boy this Twitter thing sure is a mess, huh. If you're somehow only following on Twitter, be sure to check out my links page to find other places to follow me, because I genuinely believe that Twitter is not long for this world. Also, you can join my Discord Chatroom if you like! If you're a Patron and you have your accounts linked, you can see the secret channels................. also I post gamedev updates there so 👀

The Twitter thing also disrupted my ErrGraphic bot, which has been discontinued on Twitter but lives on on Mastodon and Tumblr, and hopefully Cohost whenever they introduce their API. I took the time to rewrite my bot system while I was doing this, since I was still using the ancient code from when I hosted some ebooks-style bots for myself and others, as well as Precognatable and the Panel de Pon bot (remember those lmao) so yea I guess that also qualifies as "things I've been doing."

Conclusion

Well, that's about it! I can't think of anything else to add for now. Hopefully soon I'll be able to put a new Cosmogelica build. I wanted to do a demo sometime in February or March, but as I mentioned before, that was a tumultuous time, which really set me back and put me behind on working on the game and commissions. Hopefully I can put the demo soon enough and it'll attract more Patrons that will allow me to focus on completing the game. Cosmogelica was intended only as a short little project that's within my scope to do so I can have it done and out there and say "Look, I can actually finish a game too!" but also, I want to make sure it's the best that it can be.

Also, I'm sure there's some other stuff I've been doing that I forgot, but I was doing it!!! You'll just never know............................

Thank you for reading!