Well I'm still making youtube videos, still working on indie game dev stuff, still trying to draw better, and still working on unix related projects to build the best desktop environment I can.
Indie dev is just tons of man hours, especially with writing, art, music, level design, and of course, building the engine from nothing other than some backends like SDL and lodepng. It's been an experience that's changed me a lot in more ways than one. The amount of sheer hours I've put into this project has been absolutely off the charts compared to what I've done in modding; but I'm glad to be taking this step and growing stronger every day.
(Yes, I'm working on two games, the not TideWalkers one (Called Val's Venture) was just a physics test thing at first to implement walking code instead of just swimming, but is going to be a full 2 level game)
I'm also digging deeper and deeper into the unix community, I thought people who just dug into libs of core system functions and filed bug reports, and actually *used* those functions to write basic programs to work in your custom bash scripts, was something for completely demented people. Turns out I'm now one of them lol. I've written a wrapper that makes keyboard modularity possible, and allows programs that previously didn't have re-mappable shortcuts, remappable. I'm also re-working how the keyboard is used in part, stuff like mapping TAB to alt, and making it when you press and release alt by itself you get tab. Also making caps lock escape on press/release but Win on hold. (if any of this interests anybody reading this, then you might want to check out
my GitHub) This combined with using tiling window managers that completely remove the need for a mouse; has been a super fun project to work on. Technically the only programs I still need a mouse for are art programs like aseprite and krita, and discord since there aren't any ways to access some options. There's also vim, and general twm stuff, and using cli everything but that's a whole 'nother deep dive to say the least. I'm going to work on re-implementing the mouse into my config for more casual usage, with custom things mapped to all 8 buttons on my epic GAMER mouse, but we'll see how that turns out a bit later on.
Moving on
I don't really have much to say about my art, except it still sucks 8 months later; but I mean it just takes a lot of time and effort to get to a level I'm going to be happy with. At least I'm spending most/all my time practicing fundamentals and studying professional work. I'm still missing a lot of understanding of actual weight and depth of the human body in particular, but I'll eventually get there if I keep putting in the work and studying.
I've also managed to pick up gaming again somehow. I did a play-through of Super Mario sunshine after 8 years, and damn it's still a good game. Other than that I've been playing a lot of Slap City (smash like fighting game) and it's been a very charming experience. There are a few complaints I have about it, but overall it's been a very positive experience. Since I recently ripped all my Gamecube and Wii games, I've been playing them on my wii, and even got a cool homebrew loader running
The virtual library has opened up my access to games and made me more likely to just start playing a random one just by pressing A while hovering over it.
I haven't much to say about my music, as I just have the .orgs I've made last year, plus the stuff in the TideWalkers Demo. I need to spend some serious time learning more about composition later on, once my art is in a better place, and Val's venture gets closer to completion.
So yeah, I've been super busy with things, and that's not even mentioning that I've changed jobs recently (for the better thankfully).
Well this is probably my longest post on this forum.... so I'll stop here.