Soooooo it's been a hot minute hasn't it? Yeah, it's been a bit.

More of the same. I met a good friend from here IRL, who goes by the name ELSIF or Siytron. They're a cool peep. Met them at a local BBQ. Otherwise, I've just been keeping on.

Someone commented on the banner, and what people didn't realize is I totally made the logo for this site.

…Okay not really. I messed with it a bunch, did some stuff, made mockups back when I more regularly designed graphics and UI. These days I mostly do programming and stuff. The gradual exchange of art and programming has been fascinating, to be honest.

So, let's talk about it.

For years, I just wanted to do art. Draw, paint, color, whatever. I'd always mess with it, and my skills always involved landscapes and stuff. Abstract designs, UI, and whatnot were always my go-to. People? Animals? Characters? Ehhhh not as much.

I'd eventually get into music, which would eventually be a recurring hobby of mine, but for the most part, art reigned supreme. I couldn't comprehend programming, it was confusing, and I just couldn't make it work. Nothing stuck. No matter how hard I tried, I'd follow tutorials, nothing would work, and no matter how much I tried to ask for help, I either got the type of people who would say "LOL that sucks, look it up, try harder", or I just was absolutely miserable with articulating the "right" question to ask, describing what it is I tried to do. It is what it is.

So I'll always doodle up ideas.. Maybe doodle up Zelda-esque maps for a game I wanted. Side scroller levels. Use colored pencils to create the kind of art, usually 16-bit-esque stuff on paper, that I'd want to see in a game. Talk about ideas, write them down, but otherwise my strengths were mainly putting pencil to paper. Or brush to canvas. Or to cardboard. Or vinyl. Yeah, I'd paint on all manner of materials.

And then I encountered this thing called Game Maker. I found the Game Maker Community, or "GMC" as it was called, and early on, I also found a funny place called 64Digits. Or 64 Digits? I dunno, but I was always shy and quiet, so I'd lurk, was never big in the community.

I'd poke around, mess with stuff. The closest thing to a "finished" game I made were some poorly drawn (but not terrible) edits of the 1942 tutorial game. Modified the HUD and everything into my game obsession at the time – StarFox Assault. Made HUGE Arwing and Wolfen sprites (they honestly weren't bad; I'm being hard on myself), grabbed some MIDIs from VGMusic (holy crap, the site is still up! I'm very happy to see this), and hey - I made a game! …Okay, so the child version of me could say that. Looking back, I'd just smile, nod, and go "yes you did, kid. Yes you did…" and then continue on my way.

I'd poke around, try to make things. I'd mess with Drag 'n Drop – DnD, and eventually I decided to start making stuff for real. I never could get platformers to work, but shoot 'em ups were a big thing I liked. I remember the first thing I tried making that turned out alright… called "YAS World". Long before we had terms like "YAS QUEEN", I came up with the name after seeing the Japanese name for the game Journey to Silius – "RAF World". I had been wanting to make "Yet Another Shmup"… so "Yet Another Shmup World". YAS World. Very witty, I know.

I had been determined, to 'sketch' my code in DnD, and slowly transition and learn how to re-create the behavior as scripts with GML. I was determined to minimize DnD to only the simplest, trivial things, and before I realized, I was building entire systems for the game in GML, only referencing the code and documentation. If I didn't know how to do something reading the docs helped me work out a solution! And I started to figure out how to work with other people's engines but that was always a tricky issue for me, one that still haunts me now.

OK, so this coding thing isn't too bad.

But then I hit plateaus, so I decided "eh, I'm good for now." Oh how I love ADHD. Not.

Years later I found myself starting to work with someone to try to develop a game - a zelda-like game, which I ironically was starting to passively build an engine for. I forgot what I was calling the engine, but it was a blend of Zelda and Boktai gameplay elements. I was going to figure out "multi-level" environments in an isometric style, a mix of combo-attacks and just a bunch of gameplay elements I liked in the games I've played - basic platforming elements, Mario & Luigi style? Maybe. Puzzle adventure like in Zelda? Yup. Screen Transitions, Zelda-style? It would have been a thing. Stealth and wall sneak mechanics? Yeah. Damage? Yup. Bomberman-esque bomb placement? Why not!

This was all up to the end of high school and then during my short stint in College, and then into adulthood, working a crappy retail job (that is, all retail jobs are crappy – I don't make the rules).

I got far but not far. I had then started to fragment the engine. One fork (before I knew what forks were) of the engine was going to be used in my own attempt to remake and remaster the game Deadly Towers. I sorta liked it. My mom played the heck out of it, and I thought "Why not remake it in a way that has quality of life improvements and just generally better gameplay and story?"

Didn't get far.

Fast forward many, many years, and I had been messing around here and there, slowly easing up how often I'd draw and paint. I ran out of space for it, had moved in with my uncle after losing my house some time during this stuff, found myself more involved in the furry fandom, always trying to do tons of different things, had ups and downs with depressions, had boyfriends, girlfriends, nonbinary partners, whatever, and all in all, stuff and things happened.

Eventually art became an occasional hobby, with me doing music a bit more for a time, and then…

JavaScript lured me in with sweet words. And cookies.

So uh I mostly did front-end stuff for a time. To backtrack an already scattered story, I had dabbled with HTML on and off for years, starting with a short time I made a pretty cool (by young kid standards) website for my neopet (back when they allowed pet pages and actually felt like an online game and not a microtransaction-fueled slop-fest, though that could be me as an adult looking at the site now, unable to have the patience to work with it again, so I hope I'm actually wrong about my assumption), and so I always poked around. It was easy, and one description of HTML (and CSS) was "a language for visual designers". And that was all I needed. I got used to it, and eventually found myself starting to learn and figure out - struggling like hell in the process - how to code with JavaScript.

Fast forward to now, and I work at a financial services company, one that services credit cards (fraud, customer service, that kinda stuff), and I started to mess with making small "apps" to help me do my work on a system that was inadequate (for me… spoiled with nice computers, using a crappy virtual machine that barely ran and was reset every night was not great). The first "app" was a draft saved in outlook. It had things I frequently did and folder locations to open, and I'd copy/paste this stuff. I then worked out how to transition it to a fancy little web page to have some references. Then I worked out how to write the right JavaScript that would generate the snippets and copy things, without having to make a proper web app. And it just spiraled "out of control" into a very nicely featured app… which got me noticed and into some better positions (not the best positions in the company, but enough to move up and have me be valued).

Outside of the office, I kept messing around, wanting to build things. I had long since stopped using GameMaker (then Game Maker Studio, 1.4 or whatever it was) and had dabbled in Unity and Unreal, but couldn't wrap my head around it, so I would find myself messing with JavaScript anyway…

So I'd build sites, and silly little projects here and there, and then something came to the public that, in my opinion, was way too soon.

AI.

Mind you, I've been lagging behind the wave of tech. I'm a really nice front-end dev, when people want Full Stack Developers that can design and prototype, and implement to a final product, and can talk to the back end and work with a Database to generate JSON payloads to talk to five APIs at once, but then scale with customer growth to provide 10x return on investment to SCALE SCALE SCALE AND - *ahem*.

Needless to say, I'm good, but not great.

Let me pause and double-back a bit.

Working with my friend, Siytron, we had worked on a game for a competition. We called it Deep Freeze, a refraction puzzle game that I really really liked. That was the most successful project I've made, and it was fun working on it.

Now, fast forward to the recent times…

AI is a thing, and whether you love or hate it, it's here.

I love what it can do, and absolutely despise how people misuse it – whether it's companies stealing content (or "legally" obtaining stuff because it's technically legal and nya nya you can't catch me cause I'm not breaking the law HA), or because people are lazy bums and can't do even a fragment of what they ask AI to do, so god forbid they have to fix something, they don't even know how to begin to tell AI what to do – and swear "oh AI can fix it, I don't need to know how".

UGH.

I've built a few projects with the help of AI. I have used AI to help me learn ideas and concepts (being able to ask autistic af microquestions without judgement is so nice), I've used it to clean up and organize my code, and I've used it to better document my stuff, and I've used it to help me work out systems. It's great for doing a lot of the small easy stuff, and guess what?

I can parse through and fix it if I need to.

If I can't understand a thing, I don't have AI generate it. I'll ask it questions, I'll have it find web pages and online places for me to ask questions I'll even figure out what questions I should be asking, but I try to avoid having AI generate things I can't fully understand at the time.

As for the projects, I've accidentally built a CMS while building a website for a community (built a site, then added features for non-developers to work with like a nice clean UI, then added accounts so not just anyone can access the site, then added user management, the ability to add and remove pages and WHOOPS - I built a CMS).

I started seeing if I could re-create the Gen I pokemon games with their glitches in HTML, CSS, and JS.

I've been building a companion tool for the Mega Man Battle Network games (though the app has been on hiatus for reasons)…

And on a whim, I tried getting into a thing I hadn't touched since being a kid. Romhacking. Specifically for Sonic the Hedgehog. The climate for working with that has changed over the years with tools like SonLVL taking the place of many older and very dated tools. Unfortunately, they're very much built for Windows. Fair enough.

Except when mother nature decides your computer is going to get a little zap.

I recently lost my PC during a thunderstorm, leaving me with a MacBook - which I was going to switch to as my main, leaving my PC (which had Windows and Linux on it) as my "mess around" machine. Any games, apps, or experiments that weren't Mac friendly would run on there.

Except now I can't. And the MacBook is an M1 Pro machine. Apple Silicon. ARM. No Intel, so no normal Windows on a VM.

So not even a week into messing with romhacking, my PC dies. In a fit of nerd rage, I do the only sensible thing…. start building my own editor.

So my most recent project that has been getting a lot of interest has been a tool called HyperSonic, so far. It's not released fully, outside of semi-private testing, but otherwise it's been coming along steadily.

All while my iPad sits, collecting dust, rarely used except for the occasional doodle.

Oh how life changes. Sometimes I long for the days that I gave up on programming and I just drew, though. Simpler times. For some of the time my dad was alive. My mom was alive and didn't have cancer.

Though, if they were still around, I'm sure they'd be proud of what I've managed to do.