hi people. i have been straight up not checking in on the forum this summer, mostly for good reason. warm weather usually means i'm less online and going outside and getting some vitamin D

so with that in mind, I thought i'd open up a thread to check in: what/how are ya'll doing this summer?

so far, I've been to a few concerts (blink 182 and pierce the veil, rosie tucker, and glass beach). I went to the beach a few times both here at home and when traveling home to the east coast USA. went on a few hikes and hung out with friends.

if you don't respond to this thread, i'll assume you're out having fun. if you do respond to this thread, please let me know how you're having fun. THANKS

for the real ones, here's the previous version of this thread to look back at last year and compare:

https://basementcommunity.com/threads/173

i've been working a lot of the summer, seeing friends both old and new in my hometown, and honestly just eating out a lot! also i've been keeping up with house of the dragon every week with my friends so that's been a ton of fun + listening to some new music.

i end work soon, but there's not much time left before i have to go back to school but i kinda wish i had more time to hang out with people. i'm truly a spring/summer girlie at the end of the day

glad to hear other people are enjoying the sun!

Learning/refreshing HTML5 and CSS3.

I'm currently reading Html & Css Design & Build Websites by Jon Duckett, what is quite nice to read.

that was the first programming book i ever owned too, it's nice.

i also recommend checking out https://codeacademy.com, i think it's probably one of the best sites for getting some hands-on experience and they introduce new concepts in simple ways.

Oh, I wish! I've been crunching away at developing my own game to make it somewhat presentable for SAGE2024. If I get approved, I get another month to iron out the quirks and add a proper AI (not that one) to the enemy mobs before the expo actually opens, but right now — and for the next two days — it's a grind. I'm pretty proud of how it's shaping up so far, the new backend I've been pouring over with a fine-tooth comb that I built this year have been working wonders.

forgot to respond to this, but this is very sick! what got you wanting to make a game and what tools are you using to program it?

I've been watching a lot of Jonathan Blow clips on youtube and it's got me itching to try game development, but I don't know if i'm ready for that leap yet.

edit: maybe you answered these questions in your devlog, I'll have to go through it and give it a read!

Nice! I will check that out!

I bought a xbox 360 slim! It came with 15 games and 4 controllers, what is nice for co-op. Its very fun to play on, especially the co-op splitscreen mode!

Okay, small storytime: When I was a teen and "indie gaming" was not a thing yet, there was an avid little dev scene built around easy-to-use engines such as Scratch, GameMaker, Clickteam Fusion and the like, with said engines letting developers easily share their creatons to their own website like the now defunkt YoYoGames Sandbox or the still operational The Daily Click. Most people just had fun making MSPaint shovelware, some talented folks made genuinely good games, but there were also many with more ambition than talent: they wanted to make the next GTA or the next Sonic or the next Mario. I was a lurker, mostly messing around with the engine — GameMaker 8 in this case — that I didn't really understand fully yet, but always wanted to be part of this. Essentially type #3, just in hiding.

BuKnight is supposed to be a return and an homage to both this little niche era and the japanese homebrew dev scene that it has a lot of things in common with. It's supposed to be free from the influence of today's derivative indie scene and YouTube-tutorial-ware, going for a more DIY, unconventional, mishy-mashy approach. Which is why I do weird stuff like playable mobs or enemies in-fighting as different factions.

As far as tools used:

• Game engine — ENIGMA¹

• Art — Krita

• Sound — I get midi and sound files off of commonly used japanese resource sites. ¹ I'm probably the only person who uses the engine to any serious gamedev purposes.

surviving the heat wave

My SAGExpo booth is now open along with everyone else's. Lots of games this time around as well, it seems like there are more entries every year.

summer went great for me this year. i practiced socializing with real humans during the summer. my effort didnt go to waste, managed to make a lot of friends in uni from the day 1 :DDD learned a lot of cool new technologies. created small programs for my myself in the free time. they make my life a lot easier. started reading non-technical books. though i havent read a lot yet. just the 3 books from mass effect novel and a sherlock holmes book.

im looking forward to the next summer now :)

I just worked all summer lol

My Summer was OK, I did some really cool stuff (Going sailing and doing an Ocean Passage was a big highlight!) But most of the time I was just grinding away at work.

I went out hiking on Saturday and the weather was glorious, there were tons of dragonflies and other cool insects out and a few deer, all this week its been horribly cold and wet and everyone seems annoyed for no reason, I guess Summer is officially over now.

My summer highlight https://birb-site.neocities.org/subpage/articles/100km_hikev2

Other than that, a lot of cycling and running. Few comfy days spent grilling and some quality time with frens

Basically I joined up with a group and crewed a Yacht for a couple of weeks, we sailed around, those of us that hadn't done any sailing before got trained up as we went, and towards the end of the journey we did a trip across the open ocean, not a big distance, but a couple hundred nautical miles, away from any land. It was really exciting but the trip was pretty hard, I came home more exhausted than I'd left.

Can't wait to do it again, sailing is really expensive though....

Heh, all of things i wouldn't think that it's expensive. I'm a bit afraid of big bodies of water, so I don't think I will ever go for smth like this. Thanks for explaining, when you said "Ocean passage" I thought that you're taling about going to a different continent by boat

That sounds really cool, I'd love to sail the open seas as well sometime.