NOW THAT I'M BACK and feeling great, i wanted to give a big update on my plans for the rest of this year. i owe you guys two postmortem posts now that i released 2 new games (oops!) but those will have to come later... first, is the big thing i was thinking about during my brief vacation last month haha
what if i put all my games on steam
soooo steam lets you customize developer pages now, and i made mine CUTE!!! this is what it looks like right now:
but as you can see... this makes it look like i only have 4 vns... which really bothers me as someone who has made SO many vns by now...! because of this i was like... i gotta buckle down and get the rest of my games on here!!!!!!! (entirely motivated by aesthetic reasons hahaha)
the main factors that have stopped me from doing more steam releases in the past are:
it's a lot of time and energy that could be better spent on making new games
most of my games are already available for free!! you can already get them!!! you don't need steam to download a game!!!!!
because of steam's rules, i can't distribute the same thing at a lower price on another storefront, so i have to add bonus stuff to the steam version and think of it as a deluxe edition
because of needing to add content, i also have to take translation into consideration, which means updating in a way that adds as little text as possible because the translations are a lot to manage if i need to do a bunch of them
in short: steam wasn't really worth it unless it was a big enough game to actually sell. BET was my first and it made sense at the time, and because of its popularity it is my main source of income to this day! everything else in comparison, i'm happy to continue putting out for free just so everyone can play them... i make enough money to live comfortably, so i don't need to worry about every game making a profit... i just wanna be able to distribute my art easily...
BUT WOULDNT IT BE SOOOO CUTE IF ALL MY GAMES WERE ON STEAM?????? FOR THE SAKE OF MY DEVELOPER PAGE!!!!!!!
so i figured for the rest of this year i could try to do one a month, that way it can be like a fun event! which nomnomnami game will drop this month? wow, how exciting! so i scheduled everything out and we're gonna try to make it happen...
first up: charm studies!
the store page for this was approved the other day but i haven't made it live yet. if i was smart i'd just do that right now so you guys could go wishlist it and maximize the numbers or whatever but i don't really care about that (i'm not ready to make it live but probably next week i will, i still have to submit a build and everything anyway...) wtf why am i opening with the boring stuff--I'M ADDING SO MANY PUZZLES!!!!!!
in a lot of picross games i've played, they have special puzzles made up of smaller puzzles (10x10 in this case) so you can do big pixel art with them, and i decided to reuse my balatreat tarot art to test if i could make them... AND IT WORKED?????? oh it worked so well!!!!! i put all this together toward the end of escape from wormwood's development (before i started making date senbei lol) because i wanted to make a build that includes it so i could send it to the person i hired to make the steam trailer...
ANYWAY in order to make these, i had to make black and white versions of the art like this:
it's 60x80 pixels, which makes 48 10x10 puzzles... which in the game's code, looks like this
for generating the numbers, i used the same site as when i originally made the puzzles for this game, it converts images to binary! 1/0 is whether the square is filled or not, and then.. the puzzles just work...! they just work!!!!! it's that simple!!!!!!!!!
i do have to test them one by one to make sure they're solvable, but i love solving nonograms so it's relaxing~ just like an hour of this:
then i edit the 1s and 0s for any puzzles lacking in hints, and at the end i get to see this as my reward!
i added a few more original puzzles as well (spoilers???) but the 10x10 grids are really such a small space to draw in... the 15x15 ones are more fun to design but since it still lags quite a bit i started with these ones...
i have a feeling the steam reviews will be harsh on the larger puzzles for being laggy, and part of the reason for adding the special puzzles was so there could be a lot more content, which i foresee as also being a complaint since... picross players really like to have a lot of puzzles to do... luckily, i have many more balatreat tarot art i can convert to new puzzles so i hope i can add enough to keep the gamers satisfied!!! it's pretty fun and satisfying to add them, so i'm happy to do it. (for release day it'll just be cassia and senna tho haha)
I THINK IT'LL BE GOOD!!! that's my main project for this month, aside from wrapping up puppergeist stuff. and then i can start getting the next game ready for steam which... hehe, you'll find out next time~ 4/30 launch for charm studies on steam, yaaay!!!
various other updates
my moxie plush came in the mail! i hadn't heard any updates from plush wonderland in a while and was just thinking i'd email them to ask what's up, but then moxie showed up at my door... so they are indeed being sent out!!! i hope everyone gets theirs soon too, no sign of treat/mochi/trick yet but i'll post about them once they're here. i'll post pictures of moxie on my blog so everyone can see! (you can expect that a little later today probably)
i'm planning on updating my character gallery pages over the next week or so since i've fallen behind on doing them. salt and pepper's pages are half finished so they'll be the next to be added, someone requested eleni and kamilla, PERIWINKLE STILL DOESNT HAVE A PAGE UP... so yeah there's lots to do but i'm ready to burst update them, i looove to write the comments sections hehehe.
syrup 2's korean translation was finished this morning, so i will be updating syrup 2 soon as well!!!!! i have a lot of random bugfixes to make but no new story content yet... not ready to tackle that stuff yet... but the last update was the timber stuff, so it will be nice to put out another update even if it's only some minor changes.
speaking of translations, i'm starting to send out the files for escape from wormwood, yay! since i mentioned on the gamepage that i was open to adding them, i got a lot of emails from kind fans, which... is nice, but...! a lot of them would be first-time translators and often for languages i already have a dedicated person for, so i need to go through and respond to everyone especially for the languages i already have someone else handling. i don't want people to do any work for free since going forward i'm kind of assuming i'll be selling all my games on steam and don't want to exploit anyone's labor, but then if i'm paying for it i need to ensure a certain quality level and.... ahhh i thought things would be easier finally working with games that were so much shorter again (since my previous releases were big things like syrup 2, nwt, and return to ash) but ohhh there's always a lot to consider with adding translations. i need to formalize the process more so there aren't so many unknowns because the unknowns are what make me to anxious to try to think through and solve the problems, which leads to translations being delayed, which hurts international fans! sorry everyone who's waiting on translations!!! i'm gonna figure it out and make things happen!!!!!!
WAHHH okay i think those are all the major things i'm tackling this month. i stored up so much energy not posting a lot last month, now i have too much to say... thank you for reading, you can expect an escape from wormwood postmortem on monday~!