halfcourtyeet

[halfcourtyeet]

AI Prompt, a Poem

Make me a game.

Make it a 4K open-world roguelike MMO with Soulslike combat and ray-tracing. Give it survival-crafting mechanics in a Battle Royale setting, medieval fantasy in 3D. Make epic battles against Skyrim-style dragons where you can do anything you want. Make sure your choices matter, and that every NPC has a rich backstory covering their entire life. Detail deep lore for warring kingdoms, factions, clans, guilds, towns, taverns, caves, dungeons, and oceans. Give me epic PvP battles and endless skill trees. Make me the best game of all time. Entertain me.

Control+A, Backspace.

Make a game jam game where I meet three people on a Discord, and one of them is really sus and we cut them out pretty early, but the other two are genuinely cool people and one of them ends up being my husband a year later. Make it so day 1 is really frustrating, but I learn a lot about how to play guitar in a really short time, which is a real breakthrough for me since I've been trying to learn for years. Make it so on day 2 we have a decent concept but have gotten out of scope, but by day 3 we have something that is pretty close to a decent prototype on it, and we end up getting a little game that PC Gamer covers in their monthly roundup in August 2021.

Live my life for me. Achieve what I feel I cannot. Deliver me from effort, Baptize me in convenience. Shield me from the fate of action.

Show me my life lowres, with bad anatomy, bad hands, text, errors. Show me my future in flat color, with three legs, wrong hands, wrong feets, wrong fingers, deformed legs, abnormal, malformed, deformed, disfigured, mutated, with extra limbs, inaccurate limbs, missing limbs, floating limbs, disconnected limbs, long necks, long bodies, mutated skeletons, long skeletons, bad proportions, mutated hands and fingers, poorly drawn hands, malformed hands, poorly drawn faces, poorly drawn asymmetrical eyes.

Justify my sadness, my anger. Justify my bad habits. Explain my reasons in a way I can understand, appreciate, in a way I can use to convince others. Justify my peoples' existence over others. Enable me.

Is there any way you can show me my life without making me look like a monster? Can you make me feel loved, or feel beautiful? Lie to me.

All I beg of you is to reduce my hopes and dreams, my loves and fears, senses, thoughts and ambitions, to scarcely less words than there are on a kid's menu. Use me.

[halfcourtyeet]

This Week's News, 5/25/25

Been a minute!!

Album released... Did a very quiet game jam this weekend. Going to be getting back to gamedev stuff. Not sure about SRPG stuff yet.

That is all! :3

If I had news, I forgot what it was. I tried marketing my album on TikTok but I was showing my face (with a mask on). Even then, it just felt uncomfortable to be showing my face on the internet, so I took the videos down again.

I'm conflicted on resuming work on my SRPG since so far it's not really grabbing me in the way other game projects have. While discussing it with a game jam buddy, I brought up another, older VN/Dungeon Crawler idea set in Arab Spain in the 11th Century, during the Golden age of Islam.

Knight vs. Princess

look man I hate AI art... and this is all stupid as hell. this was last summer and tbh i dont know if id use it now. its incredibly useful but with all the layoffs and stuff in the name of AI I am increasingly torn about using the tech to even test how something looks.

With that said, here is an AI facsimile of an idea of the main character, Arezki Ag-Siman. He is a faris in training, a knight in the military ranks of the past-its-prime Emirate of Cordoba. In this historical fantasy setting, he would also know some cool ass Islamic magic or something. Originally trained to be a merchant and to speak many languages, his life dramatically changes course after mysterious circumstances put him onto the rare and noble path of Islamic knighthood.

More AI art. Sorry. Fuck man I hate AI art. Anyway here's Eda of England, who is an Anglo-Saxon princess and overall Kawaii MF. She knows Christian alchemy and was raised in a cloister. The idea is, Arezki somehow goes north to the British Isles and meets Eda, who is running away because this is all during The Anarchy, crazy Norman invasion stuff, 11th century Britain stuff. Some political rival group wants Eda dead, so she escapes into a cave that leads to a vast dungeon. Arezki follows her, with her would-be assassins also in tow.

Alright last AI image I promise. This one I didnt generate unlike the others, just was looking on DuckDuckGo and it's flooded with slop nowadays. But this one was... Oh my god it thinks its arm is its tail. May God have mercy on us all.

At the bottom of this dungeon, amidst ancient Germanic monsters, ghosts, ghouls, etc. lays Taeli, The Last Pharisee, a great dragon from the times of Jesus Christ, who has rested here guarding a great deal of ancient treasures for hundreds of years. The true antagonist of the story, she kidnaps the princess and manipulates all sides of this conflict as best she can.

Taeli's tragic backstory is, she is the last of her kind. The blessings of Jesus allowed her, a simple salamander, to grow and grow over time, so she is secretly in love with the Christ she once met in passing.

As she got older, she searched the lands far and wide for a human that would accept her like Jesus, but on being cast as a monster, eventually gave up in the British Isles and now lives deep in this cave, a wise but misanthropic hermit.

So what?

Your goal as Arezki would be (with occasional help of the Princess) to use awesome magic and chivalric action-skills to defeat monsters and make your way through the dungeon. A lot of pretext, I know. But I find historical fantasy pretty fun, is all.

Okay, wasn't really news, but I am lowkey considering this instead of my current SRPG idea. Idk, just gripping me more.

[halfcourtyeet]

This Week's News, 5/22/25

I actually have news, I just need to remember to post it.

Maybe next week!!! Or like, tomorrow? Lol

[halfcourtyeet]

This Week's News, 5/12/2025

MY ALBUM IS OUT - marketing, and the album cover

yeah. check it out!!!!!!!!!!!! I'm so proud of myself for finishing this project and I hope you get a chance to listen, if not outright buy the album whole. It would mean a huge amount, and I think you'll find its diverse mix of industrial, noise-ish, rock, hip-hop, and R&B tones very pleasing.

I'm really interested in marketing it now. My idea is I'll go onto Tiktok in clown makeup and do some cute marketing thingies about it.

Wait, what do I mean by that?

I mean like, I asked around for ways to market my stuff and was recommended the tiktok of bbno$.

It's a little lowbrow, okay, but look how he just kind of.. takes whatever song he currently has out now and adapts his memes around it. I think that's something I could easily do, and isn't a bad strategy off the bat.

But also TF2, lol

I have been taking songs from my album, specifically the booty-bangin' bonus track LittleBittyKitty, and micspamming on my local TF2 community server using Soundpad. And I think it has resulted in at least one album sale, which is pretty funny if you think about it. It's a revolutionary strategy.

I don't have any footage of my endeavors at the moment, though I might later, so here, go watch Team Fabulous 2.

More about my album

What do you want to know? What do I care to explain?

I wrote about some stuff related to my album last week, but I must say, it's a relief to finally have it done.

How about I take some time talking about the cover?

I was initially wanting to make an album cover featuring two styled versions of myself- Monalise, who would be me but in a dark/black dress, glasses and feminine makeup, and Tom Dalton,

Here's a sketch of him. Basically just like, my shadow self or something.

These are the two characters that the album, a concept album by nature, is supposed to revolve around (besides regular appearances from Me as just, me, rapping about what I'm going through).

But I really was dead-set on releasing my album on time (Saturday 5/10) and at the last second intuited that I really wouldn't have time to do the photoshoot I wanted. My guitarist (who is also basically my photographer) was out of town, and I feel like I'm in a family situation where I don't exactly feel like I can dress in fem, even for an occasion like this.

So, instead, I got out my chessboard and headed for the backyard grill.

The first few photos I took really don't capture the fire at its peak, which was terrifying. It was a hot, dry evening and my family had just left to run some errands, and though I don't think I was in immediate danger of the backyard burning, I did find that my rough pile of sticks, dead leaves, and ripped-up Whole Foods bags burned extremely well.

As for the content of the cover, I think some lyrics from the Epilogue should sum it up enough:

Internal issues bleed over to the external Inside every being, a battle rages eternal

The contrast of the news headlines and newspaper noise surrounding a pretty basic chess situation between white queen and black knight (Mona and Tom, in a goofy but symbolic way) felt like a good way to show that these issues I'm dealing with on the album are indeed internal, and I face them in a storm (a "rain storm", if you will) of external crises and lowkey existential threats coming outside of me.

Also, why the smoke/fire in general? something something world is burning. I had a cut Interlude that gave more hints, as well as a description on the Bandcamp page, but I felt like the album would be more fun as a puzzle on repeated listenings without a lot of rather obvious stuff in that Interlude.

Not to explain away the symbolism or anything, but it's okay, the album is still under the radar, this blog even more so.

Notably, this is my first major music project where I (or some facsimile of me) didn't end up being featured on the cover.

P.S. Every platform (Soundcloud, Bandcamp, Spotify)

Wait, what's next?

I would like to get a full-time job or a more stable job in the meantime. That takes priority, even over any game dev I'd like to do. Plus, it will take some significant amount of energy to get the ball rolling on marketing this album, so I'd like to start doing that too.

That's all for now.

[halfcourtyeet]

This Week's News, 5/4/2025 (late)

Not much... EXCEPT MY ALBUM IS OUT SATURDAY!

Don't have much to share but this funny demo. I'm not tagging this one because it's silly.

Will get back to SRPG stuff when album is done.

[halfcourtyeet]

OK, you can have a little more news, as a treat

As I move forward to putting out my album, I want to talk about the process behind making it.

At some point I'll go thru the whole process from my second EP until now, but I want to talk about the idea of a female alter ego.

I had begun toying around with this as a musical idea as far back as 2020, when I came up with a newjack-swing cover of Rondo Alla Turca by Mozart.

My brother's friend practiced and performed this incessantly, so over the years some sort of absurd, jazzy cover bloomed in my head.

In the original mp3 of this, the intro had a string section to add drama and make the initial listening more palatable, but since I no longer have access to Native Instruments' string sections, this is unfortunately lost to time.

The chattering crowd in the beginning comes from the idea that there was to be a pre-song skit where I'm nervous to go on stage, for a Napoleon Dynamite-esque talent show. All hope seems lost, until a friend of mine prods me to "bring out Monalise," my girl alter ego who sings the entire song instead. At the end you would hear a flurry of cheers for my shy but ultimately impassioned performance, not unlike the aforementioned movie above.

Alas, it never came to be. A lot of songs from this 2018-2024 period could never coalesce into a proper project, at least not until Monalise vs. Tom Dalton, which is... coming soon!! Next couple of weeks I promise lol.

What it did give me though, was the idea of me putting on different "masks" that showcase different moods of myself, which the upcoming album leans into much more. Aw man, I'm so excited!

[halfcourtyeet]

This Week's News, 4/27/2025

Perhaps the most un-news-ful news week yet? I mean, I've gotten a LOT of mixing work done on my album... Currently, I am just too lazy to show you, haha. Maybe that's because the time to release it is so soon at hand.

That's all. Posting for consistency.

[halfcourtyeet]

This Week's news, 4/20/25

30 minutes left!!! 30 minutes left for me to do this.

Oh shit now it's 13 minutes.

This week I did nothing until Saturday night when I recorded 3 different tracks for the album. Tonight I did a bunch of mixing and am proud to say I am probably releasing this in the next 2 weeks.

Really need to start working on an album cover.

Other than the work I've started to put in on the album (recording, finishing arranging and doing mixing for 11 songs, 5 main-sies 4 interludes and an intro and outro) nothing else this week. I've been doing personal stuff and also just been a real mess, and it takes effort to revert a course like that- especially if you're rudderless.

Take care and happy Easter, everyone. He is risen!

[halfcourtyeet]

This Week's News, 4/13/2025

WHY IS THIS IN MY DRAFTS?? 😱😱

Happy Homestuck day. Tweaking less this week.

You may be disappointed this week, but there's no real news. Music work is coming along, but really I've been sorting out my life stuff more than anything.

Little demo I made to try to demonstrate utility theory concepts. However, the distance calculation is bugged right now.

The Enemy's code for deciding who to attack is pretty cool though, if you care to check it out:

Basically takes each potential target calculates two normalized scores (between 0 and 1) based on two things:

How low, proportional to their max HP, is the target's current HP?

How far away are they, by tile, from the Enemy? (with a quick A* pathfind.

It then takes the geometric mean of these two numbers, and whichever target produced the highest number is the target the Enemy attacks. Pretty cool, right?

I am so surprised that there is exactly one video about this online. However, I have talked to Rez Graham, a former Sims 4 game AI engineer and big proponent of using Utility Theory for game AI. Unfortunately his fantastic and accessible talk on this subject is locked for now in the GDC vault, and I only got to see it with privileged access from another person. Maybe I should change that, either by reuploading or teaching...

But that's it from me this week, save some Fire Emblem. I was gonna tell you about my DOOM wad, wasn't I? Either next week, or not at all. Too much stuff going on with me right now for that.

I have been active in my communities, though

On some cool forums and stuff, yeah. It's neat.

Okay, see you next week.

[halfcourtyeet]

This Week's News, 4/6/25

Not a huge amount happened this week, but on the other hand I guess I'm not surprised. And yet, now that this is all written... It kind of is a lot of stuff.

If I can be a little bit honest with you,

I May Or May Not Be Tweaking Out

But hey, who isn't? Either way, I don't know how anyone in the US is getting work done at a time like this. I'm doing my best in spite of everything.

Let's get to the roundup.

Why Does Your DOOM Level Look Like That?

Because I'm cool is why. I'm breaking new ground all the time in these Damn Domains.

But seriously, I've really enjoyed using dev textures for my levels. I used them in the last map I made, but I've switched to the more saturated version of the dev art texture pack.

It's very satisfying to not only be able to put something down in a level, but to also know that it's for sure a placeholder. And I find the busy work of texturing and lighting at the end of a level's development surprisingly preferable to doing it simultaneously alongside level design and playtesting.

What's going on with these poor monsters, you ask? We'll talk about it next week when I go over the theming of my levels.

How Would YOU Solve Permadeath In An SPRG?

Yes, you. Specifically. And before you ask, yes, I am still thinking about SRPGs.

This is a conversation I had on a small indie dev forum, and I really liked the conversation I had. I watched a bunch of Youtube videos about it beforehand, centered around permadeath in the Fire Emblem games. Here's the main points:

Permadeath has been in the series since the very first entry.

The game compensated for it by having characters get minimal development outside of initial recruit conversations, and giving you many, many units to use if one dies.

Since Fire Emblem 4, characters (the ones not on the front of the box) began to be much more fleshed out, both in story and in gameplay, which discouraged letting units die. The game was harder (but not impossible) with lost units, and the story was less interesting, and typically units began to have more and more of a merit to being kept alive (needing certain units to unlock hidden chapters, items, or even recruit other characters.)

This trend continues steadily across the series: Notably with Fire Emblem Awakening and its direct predecessor New Mystery, which introduced the “Casual Mode.” In this mode, units don’t actually die permanently, they return at the battle’s end safe and sound.

Finally, the recent Fire Emblem: Three Houses puts so much stock into your characters, with so little options to replace them, that the permadeath-embracing “Classic Mode” is all but a formality.

I don’t know what Engage is doing. Not playing that toothpaste-hair game.

And my opinions:

I always hated the double standard with enemy versus player units. You can invest in your own, but 99% of enemy units are faceless goons that your characters gladly slaughter in dozens, if not hundreds. It always struck me as dehumanizing.

I never really felt like the games embraced the mechanic, despite the series being so known for it. Characters don’t get a bonus from being vengeful at seeing friends and family die. They don’t mourn the units past maybe the moment they expire. They don’t even get to recover the bodies and possessions of the dead unit.

I’m interested to see alternative approaches. I heard Dark Deity gives struck-down units a permanent scar/wound that hampers their stats. Maybe some way to protect the characters you care about most? Later FE games introduced basically a turn-by-turn rewind mechanic, which I’ve grown tired of as a band-aid to a deeper problem.

Some responses, if you care to read:

All this is set against the backdrop of me finally reaching the last chapter of part 1 in Genealogy:

It's getting real.

Album News

Ain't no album news.

(nah, but I did get some crucial vocals recorded after like, weeks of putting them off.)

Now it's time for something new on this blog I haven't done before. Get ready for the:

Where I show off cool stuff that I find, or stuff me and my friends are working on!

First a big shoutout to the Levitating Little Kitty you see there, as he was gracious enough to use his likeness for that image.

Nathaniel Jones: Strategy Game Longplay Demo

Look how far this man has come. It may be a bit hard to parse because of the placeholder art, but make no mistake: There is a full-blown Strategy RPG in the making here, and NJ should be super proud of his work in just a few months.

Dice'n Goblins: A Dicey Dungeon Crawler

Someone in a forum I'm in made this, and it's just fucking awesome. It's so impressive. Please check it out, it just came out on Steam and there's a demo.

That's all for this week. Keep on hoppin'.

[halfcourtyeet]

This Week's News, 3/30

My DOOM level is out!

https://www.doomworld.com/forum/topic/152121-manufacturing-conflict-single-map-10/

It took about a month, but I think it's pretty fun. I think there's still plenty of good edits to make, and I'm grateful that I've gotten a few people commenting on it. If you want, give it a play and see what you think.

I'd like to keep making levels, as I have a friend who's interested in doing a 10-map WAD. But most of the levels won't be as big as this one. They can't, haha.

I'm still thinking about strategy games

This video is amazing. We haven't heard from Bunnyhop's George Weidman since the end of 2023, when he was talking about Pentiment.

The video has direct ties to the SRPGs I love, and overall traces a blisteringly deep lineage connecting the ancient Greeks to Napoleon to the US MIlitary to... you guessed it, Advance Wars and Fire Emblem.

There's a lot of game design gold in there, stuff to bounce around in my head as I finally try to finish part 1 of Genealogy of the Holy War, which I have picked back up, for better or worse.

For my album: I think I need to give up on recording real instruments for my album (horns, strings)

Uhhh, I guess that's just a video. Here's the audio above.

This is currently what the virtual instruments sound like at their best, and I'm sure most people would agree that's fine. I think I just need to work with them more to make them sound as good as possible. There is still at least one or two people that want to record with me that I'll happily pay, and I have plenty of guitar and bass work from my friends.

But besides the people I've already brought on, I can't really afford it, nor do I have the time right now. And I've had a few songs grind to the halt over waiting for string parts. So, forget it. It'll be easier if I just arrange it myself virtually so I can finish the project sooner.

To be honest, I have been at times feeling very inspired about my album, but other times it feels like it's a school project. I'm trying to keep the energy high because even though I've been working on it on and off for 4-5 months now (and for a music project, that has the effect of losing a lot of passion along the way), there are still a lot of parts of it that are super important to me. Still a very personal album. You'll see.

That's all for now, see you next week.

[halfcourtyeet]

This Week's News, 3/22 (And SRPG Dev Lore)

Hey. I'm going to try posting regularly on what I'm working on creatively. It's always very satisfying to show my friends, but now I'm wondering if I ought to keep a log of it.

We'll see if this pans out, but here's some stuff in the meantime.

I went to GDC

(pretend there's a photo here. I hit the image limit on Tumblr.)

It was awesome. Those who know me have probably seen the photos of me with Tarn Adams and Derek Yu. It was a seriously great event, much more chill this year than usual. I feel like I met less people, but made stronger connections overall.

If it wasn't 11:30 at night I'd draw a picture of bunny me with Tarn.. I wonder what Tarn Adams' fursona would be. Let me know if you're reading this.

I've really enjoyed getting to know devs in the Bay Area. Since I came home in September it's felt really lonely, but in the last few weeks, it seems like everything changed, and I couldn't be more grateful.

This DOOM level's coming along

This is like a 15-20 minute level. That's a pretty long level. If you look closely, you can see I'm revealing a secret to you when you play it.

I'll be releasing on Doomworld, most likely. It's not my first foray into DOOM either, as I made a 5-level WAD in 2020. As a summer project, it was really my first attempt at doing a somewhat long-term project in games, since it took (to my memory) 2-3 months.

Concept Album is coming along, too

Damn that's blurry lol. Sneak peek of some of the collage I'm doing for an album cover.

I didn't do much music work this week, but I am still working on my concept album. A lot of it was just talking to people about it at GDC, without revealing too much.

To be honest, I've been listening to a lot of great songwriters lately, and it's making me want to rewrite a lot of the raps on my album.

What is the album about? I can't say. It's very personal and introspective, and kind of about light vs. dark.

If it wasn't for the damn concept album I'd be working on my SRPG again

You go, girl!!

I learned so much over the past few weeks, not just from my new pal Nathaniel Jones, but from plenty of other people about Game AI and how to make a strategy RPG.

For context, when I return to this midway through the year (assuming things are still stable enough to just work on games), It'll be my... technically 5th attempt lifetime to make a Strategy RPG engine.

You know, I almost feel like showing you each of the 4 times I tried to make a strategy RPG. Next week's blog isn't gonna be nearly as long, I'm letting myself have that.

Attempt 0

So this all started when my Game Systems professor had us play a game called the Battle of Dan-no-Ura. It was an old Japanese electronic board game, and we were assigned to make mods for it. In many ways, it was like a strategy RPG. All units moved on one team's, then another. There were some really cool mechanics related to movement advantage based on turn (water flow) and zone-of-control. Our mods involved a "comeback" system and cards that increased the "drama" by having certain things happen.

But the whole project got me back into Fire Emblem. I played most of the remake of the first game on SNES on our apartment's big-screen TV, while my roommate watched. And to be honest? Aside from a few really tough missions, I felt like it super held up. The simple gameplay, vibrant graphics and strong cast of characters (now considered archetypal and serving as blueprints for many future characters in the series) drew me back into the series in a way I didn't know was possible. I had finished Fire Emblem for the GBA back in 2022, and always enjoyed Advance Wars as well... And spent dozens of hours in Final Fantasy Tactics, which is my favorite game of all time... Maybe I should have seen this coming.

Well, what came next was, my Game Programming Patterns professor wanted us to do some sort of topological grid-based game for a programming patterns final. It didn't even have to be a game- it just needed a few specific criteria like a domain-specific language (DSL) in the code (internal or external), and a few other features like on-the-fly translation. This build doesn't seem to have any of that, but you can see what started to form.

Attempt 1

Going into my capstone in the second of the 3 quarters of the school year, I really wanted to try to do an SRPG, but with in-battle gardening mechanics. Here's one of the only prototypes we made, and that it's broken should tell you something about how things were going otherwise.

Attempt 2

Started from scratch and achieved the most pedestrian gameplay in a 6-day solo coding marathon. Proud of how fast I worked, but it fell apart fast. This was in like, the last two weeks of that capstone class, which is not when you want to barely be getting something running based off of someone else's tutorial.

I have a lot of thoughts about these first two attempts, but it's getting late and I'll have to go over them someday. But yeah, overscoping and boilerplate and not knowing architecture or doing enough research on architecture, will burn you bad. Also burning out will burn you bad. I burnt out super hard in the middle of my senior year of college.

Attempt 3

This was after I got home in September, and is built out of Attempt 2's code. Okay, this also deserves its own like, separate article, because I started trying to do video devlogs during this time, but once again, burnt out hard. Still trying to do Fire Emblem with plants though.

Gave up, burnt out again, released a PICO-8 game on Steam, and now we're in the present.

Attempt 4

Yeah, they're from an asset pack- but man, do those characters look spiffy! And behind the scenes, started writing a story i was really excited about. But of course, things went south again.

The new issue I ran into on my latest attempt was trying to polish too much before I got the bread-and-butter (Enemy AI, pathfinding, equipment, etc) working. Also just did the architecture in ways that are really frustrating to debug. This is about when I met Nathaniel Jones from above, who has been absolutely cooking at making the same sort of game, and has been incredibly generous in sharing a dialogue with me, and giving me tips for how to code all these damn systems.

Lately I've been talking with Nathaniel about SRPG dev extensively. Since I'm on break from actually working on an SRPG right now, I've just been figuring out how to ambiently plan to do it next time, which will be technically the 5th attempt. But only once this album is done. So, that's where I'm at.

Thanks for reading through all that. Remember: Fall down seven times, stand up eight.

Let the sauce of the JPEG drape over your eyes.