Leonard Somero

finished a build in time for #LDJam, but i plan on continuing the story further. >> verysoftwares.itch.io/gathering << featuring hand-drawn art and full voice acting for the first time in a verysoftwares production! #gamedev #solodev

preview of first encounter in Butterfly.exe #love2d #gamedev

a glimpse into my commercial bullet hell project, Butterfly.exe. you clear an attack by grazing (nearly touching) bullets. the number up top is the amount you have to graze. #love2d #solodev

seems like the tactics part of this prototype is going to form around scanned shapes, so i've implemented shape storage (right sidebar). #tic80 #gamedev #solodev

there's a few directions i can take this in, but i'm driven by a vision of a turn-based tactics game in a platformer setting. #tic80 #solodev

rapid fire round of level designs for a yet-non-existent game. #tic80

my new music disk that plays song sections in random order, resulting in new performances on every listen. verysoftwares.itch.io/modal-suites... there are 6 song 'suites' in an experimental breakbeat style.

How children think about video games: "I wanna press a button to make a thing happen on screen or speakers." Adults: "We will make the most tremendous MMO-RTS-FPS hybrid the world has EVER SEEN! We will raise $10 000 000 from VCs and declare loudly that we will declare a release date in September!"

only moshing i need is datamoshing

Presenting my new 1D Pacman game, with pure, focused gameplay. Drop your thoughts or high score below! It’s a little time thief—play wisely! 🕹️ https://beep8.org #SoloDev #beep8 #GameDev #indiegame #IndieGames

Cosmo mod's event system coming together. ...i get that the prompts are really annoying, but it's just a rough proof-of-concept to show that they -can- work. #solodev #gamedev #DOSember

i don't often talk about myself because i feel that my creative works are already a sufficient introduction to my personality.

'kidekone EP': youtu.be/nVkozicGWtc 10 minutes of räväkkä #chiptune, composed by yours truly under the 'silkyheart' alias! featured on modarchive.org as well!

just got sent the motherlode of posca markers, holy shit

Journey upward with Aether Spire! 🌌 Thrilled to unveil this stylized MOBA VFX. Features a celestial compass decal, towering crystal monolith, vibrant cyan ether, an infinite light beam, & drifting star-fragments. Loved crafting this! #GameVFX #StylizedVFX #RealtimeVFX #VFXArtist

designing dialogue bits for Level 2 of Cosmo's Computer Adventure [4:33] no time to subtitle but you can tell i'm havin fun youtu.be/qzxRT4xwwro #solodev #gamedev

Cosmo has roughly 260 actor types that can be spawned, with instances having globally contiguous id numbers. figured i could introduce events that respond to just ids. this does mean that you might initiate a conversation with a fruit you just picked up, and i am thrilled by the possibilities.

released a cosmical ambient set that lasts for 12 hours. 1ku15uu5.bandcamp.com/album/12-42-16

if you have Telegram, you are now invited to explore some 16 GB of archive footage from me, mainly from verysoftwares game projects. t.me/werywideos #gamedev #solodev #indiedev

my retro-style, static website is starting to look p neat! feedback welcome: somero.live figured i needed a persistent home for my works #indieweb

Level 2 of Cosmo's Computer Adventure is more of a traditional Cosmo platforming level, albeit with previously-unseen dialogue bits with enemy characters. screenshot from my custom-made level editor #solodev

Level 1 demo of my narrative mod for @apogeeent.com's Cosmo's Cosmic Adventure: youtu.be/aT73Fl-bylQ?... ...along with a helpful pinned comment! #retrocomputing #gamedev #solodev

took a little selfie

rkgk

here in Retro Game Jam there sure are a lot of omoshiroi gadgets.

in the TIGSource Forums era, we were discussing how far game engines are gonna go eventually. there was a vision that someone would just write a prompt and a complete game would come out, followed by contemplation about what it will mean to make games if that's ever possible.

i changed the default message you get in Cosmo when hitting a damaging object for the first time. forgot there was a second part to the prompt too

boutta spend the weekend at Retro Game Jam here in Oulu. greatly enjoying the aesthetic of a remote forest dwelling containing forgotten tech. #retrocomputing #gamedev

sneezed so hard i jumpscared myself

they're called numbers cause they make you numb.

life is putty to me

#LDJam game's looking like this at the moment. it's very functional, there's little friction left for implementing the story beats. you can see for yourself, i've just cleaned up the codebase: github.com/verysoftware... #gamedev #love2d

first screen of my #LDJam creation silly narrative game with hand-drawn artwork #gamedev #solodev

top minds of reddit: "don't make this kind of game! the market is saturated!" which market? where is that market? merely a personification of data. no, out there are only unconnected individuals, waiting to explore your take on interactivity.

since i'm making progress on my Cosmo mod i went ahead and made a public repo: github.com/verysoftware... feast your eyes on C code predating ISO standards, and weird EGA tricks with Assembly routines #solodev #retrocomputing

glitch jumpscare when a familiar level suddenly didn't load properly

for my Cosmo modding project, i've been working on a level editor. i can read and display the game's map data now, which is pretty awesome, but nothing is actually editable yet. glitch art ensues at the end #gamedev #solodev #retrocomputing

alrighty, debug screen's looking pretty sharp! i spent a lot of effort on this, and while it's not a critical gameplay feature, it let me 1) practice structure for 80s C code, 2) get to know Cosmo's mechanisms better, and 3) write useful handlers i'll need later anyway. #retrocomputing #solodev

my brilliant attempt at a debug screen for displaying all Cosmo entities by ID

bang! broke 400 followers on itch. there's been an influx of new attention, i suppose 'Jimi can not read' got picked up by some streamer again?

with the help of the reverse-engineered source code by Scott Smitelli, i got Cosmo's Cosmic Adventure modded to an extent, changing the title screen and music. this combo seems like it could be from an actual shipped product

very much the same with game genres, i don't start out with a ready-made pitch like "i want to make a zombie FPS", it's always a process of discovery starting from some fundamental oddity like "how to measure health without numbers". maybe this means my games are more fun to make than to play.

"what genre of music do you make" i don't know. i just wanted to make music, to play with shapes of sound. i didn't stick to a template from some tutorial video, i figured out what works for me by making a lot of weird experiments. sometimes a track aligns with a genre but that wasn't the goal.

i was going to make a post, but a big account also made one, so i've chosen to delay mine.

a little chiptune from 2016 called "never o'clock" it's not gonna be on the album but it's a good composition (original .xm file available on modarchive: modarchive.org/index.php?re...) #chiptune #trackermusic #milkytracker

I rediscovered an archive of my tracker tunes from 10 years ago 😁 it's 2½ hours of material that I barely even remember composing. I started polishing the best ones for a coherent release.

You can now watch me gush LIVE about the most obscure Windows 98 games: www.twitch.tv/softmagus

Having creators and their output quantified by followers, likes, view counts and such always makes me feel like I'm competing against others and losing. It's a feeling I need to consciously fight when browsing a site like Bluesky.