妖怪世捨て人

Well, 2020 has certainly been a year. Given the amount of stuff that's happened, and especially the big changes in my life around Kandria, I thought it would be interesting to write up a review on the entire year. I'm not going to go month by month, but rather just give an overview on the many things that happened and how I feel about it all, so don't be surprised if I jump between things a little bit.

Kandria now has a Steam page! Please visit and wishlist! It would help us a lot to get the game promoted on Steam. As a result of the Steam page and other unexpected changes, this month was pretty hectic, too, so there's a lot to talk about.

October somehow flew by really quickly for me. It's already November, and we're nearing the end of the year, too. Just thinking about that is making me reminiscent, but I'll have to hold off on doing my yearly wrap-up for another two months! Who knows, a lot more can still happen in that time. Last month marked another release for Kandria, and this month marked the start of Kandria being an actual team effort!

A new month, a new Kandria update! First of all, a new prototype version is now up for download. As always, you can get it here. A short list of major improvements:

Another month already. Fortunately there's a lot of stuff to talk about for Kandria this time around, so I hope you're ready for a beefy summary!

It turns out that sound processing is pretty difficult. I've been hacking away at an almost from-scratch rewrite of Shirakumo's sound systems for the past few months and it's caused a lot of anguish.

This month marks the release of the Kandria 0.0.2 demo! It also marks a change in focus, but I'll talk about all of that in a second. First, if you want to give the demo a try, you can get a copy here: https://kandria.com/prototype

Last month I outlined a very rough timeline for the future development of Kandria. In the past month I managed to implement the first two of the tasks listed there, namely some very deep fixes to the game engine, and the improvement of the pathfinding AI. I'll try to boil these changes down to make them easier to understand.

Another month already gone by. Unlike last month, I have managed to work on a few things this month, though it isn't much yet. So, in order to bolster the content a bit, I thought I'd also talk about the rough roadmap I have for Kandria.

It's a new month, and that usually means I'm supposed to write a monthly update on the progress with Kandria. Thinking about that though made me feel very depressed because I realised that I hadn't really done anything at all for the game, all of April.

It's April! … already. Man alive, March shaped up to be quite the month, didn't it. For reasons you can probably already guess at, not too much progress was made this month, but after the splash of excitement that was last month, I don't feel too bad about that. Well, actually I do, but I'll try my best to tamper my disappointment and just move on.

Another month has flown by, and this one has turned out to be much more exciting than I ever anticipated! Primarily this is due to me making a surprise decision to try and apply for a grant to help get this project funded. This prompted a lot of changes, which I'll talk about today.

I think it's time for another quick update on the game! There isn't all that much to go through, as I've been rather occupied with other matters, such as university exams. Besides that I've also been struggling with figuring out the core story, setting, and direction I want the game to go in.

It has been a while since I last wrote an update on my game project, Leaf. It's also now been a year since I first started to work on it! I think it's about high time I talked about what's been happening, and what I plan to happen in the near future, too.

Last year I, mostly on a whim, decided to make a small physical desktop calendar. Much to my surprise quite a few people were interested in it, even some from Japan, China, the US, and various countries in Europe. However, last year was pretty stressful, as I came up with the idea for the calendar a bit too late, and had to really hurry to get it all together in time for the new year. This year I decided to try again, and fix the mistakes I made last year.

Recently there's been a few changes to the libraries I maintain, as well as to the new libraries I publish. I thought that these changes would be of general interest, even if you might not use my libraries at all.

It's been two months now since I started to do daily game development streams. I've been trying my best, but it is time for this to come to a close. In this article I'll talk about the various things that happened, why I'm stopping, and the future of the Leaf game. Strap in!

This article was originally published on GameDev.NET. In it, I illustrate a new particle system that was developed for my Lisp game engine, Trial. It contains quite a bit of graphics stuff, but also a lot of Lisp. I thought it would be worthwhile to share it here as well. For those unfamiliar, a particle system deals in orchestrating a lot of very similar things (particles). The challenge is to efficiently draw and update these particles.

That didn't feel as long as it was. A month ago I promised to do daily streams of game development. So far I've held true to that. I'm sure I won't be able to hold that true forever, but I'll try to keep going for as long as I can. In this one month alone, a lot has changed for the game though!

Starting tomorrow I will be doing daily live game development streams for my current game project, Leaf. The streams will happen from 20:00 to 22:00 CEST, at https://stream.shinmera.com. There's also a short summary and countdown page here.

Common Lisp has a big standard, but sometimes that standard still doesn't cover everything one might need to be able to do. And so, various implementations offer various extensions in various ways to help people get their work done. A lot of these extensions are similar and compatible with each other, just with different interfaces. Thus, to make libraries work on as many implementations as possible, portability libraries have been made, and are still being made.

It's already 2019, and last year I decided, for the first time ever, to sell some of my art. Apparently more people wanted to buy my art than I expected, so I thought it would be a good idea to write a bit about it all and my future plans.

Recently there's been a bit of a storm brewing about a rather opinionated article about game development with Lisp. After reading Chris Bagley's very well done response, I thought I'd share my perspective on what it's like to actually make games with Lisp. I'm not writing this with the intent on convincing you of any particular arguments, but rather to give some insight into my process and what the difficulties and advantages are.

About two weeks ago I said to myself: “You like games, don't you, son? Why don't you try making one yourself again for once? Just something simple, a platformer maybe. Just make a game and don't spend all of your time writing an engine and all that crap that isn't the game itself.” And I replied to myself by spending the last two weeks writing an engine. But, I still really want to make an actual game, so this entry is going to be about that.

A while back I wrote a bit about my adventures with a game engine technique called Geometry Clipmaps and my difficulties in implementing them. After spending what was supposed to be a week wherein I create a game fixing and completing an implementation of the Clipmaps instead, I think I'm now ready to talk about it. I'll also try to answer the questions I posed in the previous entry.