August the Dodecalope @ Ringoid Labs

Hello, world. bitkin.org - demo access is now open

The dodecalope, in color! A deeper teal, offset by the same blue flannel shirt and Jupiter-symbol tee.

I'll color this later, but I wanted to sketch this idea out for revising August here. Swap a pair of wings for a third set of arms, change the head to be more jay-like with a tall crest (and lose the redundant ears), and this is feels more like me.

Rathalos from Monster Hunter (big red fire-breathing wyvern thing) keeps showing up in crossovers (e.g. in FF14 and in Super Smash Bros Ultimate). I think it's the same one every time; a poor lost predator who drifts through the cosmos and just randomly wreaks havoc wherever it goes.

I figured out what was nagging at me about my persona (August, as seen in my current PFP). I'll warm up today with a redesign, though not before lunch and some errands. I also keep getting distracted by side projects. XenoWorks ("productivity for aliens") is trying to come back into focus.

illustration, login, magazine (1987) archive.org/details/logi...

Took some time to design a replacement puzzle I liked, so that's all set to code up this coming week. Meanwhile I think I need to play around with layouts for the Elseways Gazette, because it's coming up to where I'll want to start that going.

Sketch I did earlier of a random Elseways squirrel and some typographical design for Origin Park, which is the big green rectangle in the middle of the city that holds gardens, playgrounds, walking paths, and bandstands. It connects a lot of the city's areas and is a common place to meet up.

Comics. There are more diverse voices and ideas in comics now than there were even 25 years ago, and it's helped open up the medium for a real variety of stories to be told beyond superheroes punching each other.

It's really quite easy to help artists feel encouraged to show you more of the things that're sitting in their heads :D

More vegetarian options in restaurants and supermarkets. Far, far less public smoking and a de-emphasis on cigarette culture. And, from what I have heard: bullying is FAR LESS tolerated in schools!!

Fun fact: We're also seeing the same sort of backlash against trans people! No, there isn't an "epidemic" of transness. People are just more aware of it now, and accordingly a bit more able to (and less afraid to) transition. bsky.app/profile/jude...

There we go. Fit it in neatly at the bottom of the left nav (that's a tiny sliver of the big final puzzle on the right; consider that a sneak preview).

A bit of Elseways lore: since the whole setting is one self-contained city, the sports leagues that most fans follow are all at the high school level. There are cross-town rivalries going back decades.

Picotron has a "shared data" feature that I should be able to use to make The Last Word split across multiple cartridges that share save data. It's not that I don't think it would fit in one (one cartridge can hold a lot), but being able to release it one chapter at a time would be very helpful.

I sometimes worry about my art being too strange or obsessive over unusual traits (like my by-now-standard extra limbs), but then I remind myself that the kind of people who appreciate those things don't have enough of them available because I'm like that too. I make things I wish existed.

Needed a break from Bitkin, so I started to work out how to do palette stuff in Picotron. I'd like parts of the game to fade in from this parchment-orange background to the "ink" ramp of colors, and it turns out there's a straightforward way to make that effect happen.

In light of the PHP stuff going on, I should mention that Bitkin is completely unaffected; it's all JS (based on React, Typescript, and Vite). There's no PHP in there at all. In fact, it's a static site - all of the answer checking and progress saving and so on happens locally in your own browser.

i've recently heard that some ai bros want to make an smw central alternative because we don't allow gen ai content on the site. here's my direct response to those people. "who owns rom hacking?" and other questions ai poisons us with shoujo.gay/who-owns-rom...

Took a break from coding the last puzzle to get caught up with Taeko Tashiyama, who's off on her first assignment with the Cosmos Corps, testing water for pollutants so they know how to fix it. Her family wanted her to stay home and help run the resort, but she always wanted to get farther away.

I can't remember if I've mentioned it before, but this album comes as close as anything I've heard to really capturing the feel of Elseways as a setting. The last two tracks are my favorites, but they're all great. insaneintherainmusic.bandcamp.com/album/insane...

That's one more milestone: all the story text of Bitkin Act 1 is in. It's getting closer to release. I need to spend the rest of the week writing code and putting the actual final puzzle in. Still on track for the Nov. 2 release, and I'm no less nervous about it.

One time, we got an unsolicited package promoting a game history slopsite like this. It proudly declared that the PlayStation 5 was the "first five-dimensional game console"

They didn't send us stickers with our mail-in ballots, so Patch had to improvise. She'll need to take that sticker back off her DataFrame to get any more work done, though.

Co-signed! That’s what libraries are for, and they do pay us! Never apologize!

✨️Reference vs Art✨️ While we've used a lot of references to keep our dinosaurs as cartoony-realistic as possible, two mostly stick out: @twarda.bsky.social making clay models of Popoeilo the Azhdarchid and intro Lambeosaurus for the more tricky shots of the animated cutscenes in Zniw Adventure!

Sketched a version of Pikachu in line with my dream last night; this didn't literally appear, but I don't remember of the actual designs well enough, so I decided to "backport" the most famous one to how it would've looked in that retro setting. Weird little electric rat gremlin!