August 2025
Inspired by ratrogue’s dev log, I decided to have a go at logging some of the things I work on, play and watch.
Game Dev
Watched The Anti-Compulsion Loop Series: Gradius Origins Review. The first third talks in great detail about the design decisions and limitations of the original Gradius games. The video is targeted at STG/shmup fans and makes a lot of assumptions about familiarity with various mechanics and terminology, making it hard to recommend to a general audience.
Wrote a partial NES / famicom game inspired by the Tachikoma robots from the Ghost In The Shell manga / movies. Thought this would be interesting because Tachikoma designs are more about their movement and personality than static visual appearance, so I put some effort into procedural animation. Not a total success and certainly not a complete game, but I’m pleased with how the player character moves and animates.
Played
Bought and played through the excellent Touhou Luna Nights, a pixel-art platforming metroidvania where the protagonist can slow and stop time and throw hundreds of knives. Time control is needed to solve a few puzzles, and normally passable water becomes completely solid when time is stopped, serving as a barrier or floor. As the game progresses you encounter enemies and puzzles that only move or attack while time is slowed. Elements of bullet hell reflect the touhou origins, and the humour is particularly good. I’d recommend this to anyone, though maybe it’s a little too difficult for some?
I also reinstalled Warzone 2100, an older RTS that is still kept updated as a community supported open source project. An absolutely ridiculous tech tree lets you research and design varied vehicles and weapon combinations that support many different play styles, many more than is typical for the genre. There’s a good mix of difficulty options too, though the AI is pretty poor in certain respects.
Other Media
Started watching ‘Neon Genesis: Evangelion’ with my son. Not sure how appropriate it really is for a 10 year old child but so far we’ve both enjoyed it. I’ve started the series a few times previously but never made it beyond the third episode.
Found a list of recommended sci-fi novels and grabbed a bunch at random on my ereader. For the first time in the five or so years I’ve had it, I have had cause to delete books. Some of the recommendations were clearly AI generated - meandering conversations that repeatedly loop back and make no sense whatsoever. The AI coverart should have served as a warning. Felt like I took some psychic damage just trying to read these. Of the ‘probably written by humans’ books I tried, ‘Neural Wraith’ by K.D. Robertson was best. An attempt at a detective noir story that had a small cast of human males and thousands of feminine robots whose descriptions largely centred on their breast size. For some reason that is never fully explained, all of the female robots are in the city are in love with the protagonist. But there was a passable story in there too. My main takeaway is that the list or recommendations is garbage.
In music, I preordered ‘Smoke and Fire / Summer of Love’ by Oversight, a jazzy drum and bass single that’s a bit more bright and cheery than my usual dnb listenings.