This Devlog
Hey everyone!
Some of you may remember me from back in the day. I lurked the early verge forums, haunted the irc channel, and contributed as a coder and musician for various verge games and game compos. To be honest, that’s an all too succinct and flippant way to describe the emotional and intellectual influence the community had on me. It was an aspect of my life that with me from middle school throughout my early twenties.
It may be little surprise then, that from there I went on to work in the games industry in several studios before eventually founding my own (with fellow verger Skall - although weirdly we never actually met online before meeting professionally).
Those were good years.
Since then due to shifting priorities - 'life - my job is no longer directly tied to games development. I rarely get a chance to code. I haven’t done music in years. When I got my first professional gig I began to lose touch with the community, and when I took a job outside of game development a decade later I lost touch with those creative aspects of myself entirely.
But I don’t want to lose them. It’s fitting then, that my journey to rediscover those aspects of myself begins here - where so much of it started - on verge forums.
I see home on the horizon.
Project: 16-bit Style RPG
Falling in love with JRPGs as a kid. Spending a decade with verge contributing to them. Pretty funny then that I’ve never actually worked on an RPG of my own in a serious way. I began work on one with a friend. The main reason I’m invoking the arcane binding magic of Gruedorf is to add a little weight to making continual progress with this one.
We decided to move ahead with Unity. The last time I used Unity was years ago within my game studio, and we basically stripped it down to the system level. A cross platform media layer much like SDL. Of course, back then there was barely any support at all for 2D in Unity. This time we want to embrace the Unity3d way
with more zeal.
To that end, this week I wrote a custom asset importer for Aseprite files. Custom asset importing is a relatively new feature available in Unity and the API is still experimental - but the workflow advantages are amazing. It’s nice to be able to open and save a file in Tiled or Aseprite and have Unity import it within the same pipeline as any other built-in asset. Luckily, the format is well documented.
Drag and drop an ASE file into the the project and it’s imported and ready to use. Lookin’ good, Janus.
Project: Music
I also want to make music a part of my life again. It’s getting embarrassing to launch dosbox every time I want to compose, so I think it’s time to modernize my tools. Renoise is a more modern composition tool that still embraces the ‘music tracking’ modality. I bought a license.
I’m going to try to have a new song ready each week to link as part of my Gruedorf submission. If anyone reading this has any requests in terms of themes and style I can base my weekly thing on that and maybe we can help each other out.
I was never good enough to do music professionally for games, and I’m a lot worse now than I once was, and I’m still learning new tools. That being said, if you were looking for someone to do music for a project I’d be interested in that too. Noodling is fun, but composing with a goal in mind is more fun.
No week precedes this week in context of the devlog so I’ll be posting an oldie from a compo game I did with Thrasher. This was an attempt to crib the style of Warsong from the Sega Genesis.
Project: So many others
I don’t know what the future may hold. There’s certainly no shortage of fun projects I could work on. But first and foremost is just to make continual progress - to timebox that dev and music work each week. I just need to keep putting one foot in front of the other. Gruedorfing. I imagine I’ll have ‘lost’ by this time next week 
