Digital Beast Plus+

Doom 2 Raytraced complete. It honestly got me to finally finish Doom 2. Loved all the little added touches, hidden things, and upgrades the mod had.

Doom 2 RT continues to be gorgeous at points.

Still noodling on this. Wasn't happy with the lighting from a gameplay perspective after taking on some bots. Much brighter now.

tldr: here's a story and a video about the coolest thing that's every happened to me.

So, as you may have seen, I recently made a website called One Million Checkboxes. It had...a million checkboxes on it. But the bit was that they were global - checking or unchecking a box changed it for everyone on the site immediately.

The site was (shockingly?) popular; hundreds of thousands of players checked over 650,000,000 boxes in the two weeks that I ran the site. It made the New York Times; there's a Wikipedia page. The whole thing was nuts.

About a week into running the site I thought I'd been hacked. And a few hours after that I was sobbing - extraordinarily proud at some brilliant teens.

I've written up the story on my blog and made my first youtube video about it!

Originally I wanted to crosspost the whole thing here, but there are enough images and gifs in the blog (and enough emotion in my voice in the video - I keep crying thinking about it!) that I can't really do that here. Sorry!

Anyway! Hope you enjoy the story :)

Just got run over in the Coconut Mall parking lot by Iwata's Mii in Mario Kart 7 on the 3DS, and honestly it was nice seeing them again.

the thing abt endless tough love gamedev editorials abt how artists must Learn Business Or Die is that they're always presented as a serious, unromantic, critical perspective on the industry, while at the same time holding to a far rosier vision of capitalism than most of its proponents: i'm pretty sure actual WSJ types have long accepted that the role of markets is to multiply inequality and that doing so means fostering an endless condition of crisis, boom n bust irreality etc. the idea of stable, sustainable, sensible markets has been as much of an empty crank hobbyhorse for the last two decades as calendar reform or restoring the bourbons, a utopia for management that nobody either above or below them can afford to believe. so it's funny that what passes for cold, realistic wisdom in the space is sort of on the level of a new substack post every two weeks called Time For Dreamers To Face Facts: The Only Way To Succeed On Steam Is By Reclaiming The Eleven Days Stolen From Us By The Pope.

After Dark - Meadow

That ending! How dare you! Great level.

Honestly, Petersen is my hero.

The brutalism of Doom 2's maps run through high level ray-tracing is beautiful.

Got these dumdums pressing buttons to open the bridge and Quad room.

This is so cool. The bots are playing!

Found an amazing guide for getting bot support up and running on a map. Nightdive made a really swish in-game tool for doing this, making it easy.

Demoscene.css!

A few months ago @Halceon commented on a @lucasarts-places post in appreciation of how nice some of the gradients looked in those old VGA games. In a fugue of agreement I carefully isolated a few of them in a paint program, to sort of examine more deeply what I admired about them. The process of doing that made me think, hm I'll bet I could recreate those with code. And over the next few months I went down a fairly enjoyable rabbit hole of learning how to implement various color blends, gradient shapes, pattern dithering, and digging up hundreds of interesting color palettes and combinations from old games as well as modern pixel art.

The result is this bot. It'll post twice a day, once at sunrise (PST), and again at sunset. To keep the output fresh, it draws on several different gradient generation, color picking, and rendering methods and pulls from a large internal library of color palettes and "ramps" (runs of progressive color blends) - I'll explain more of the technical details in a followup post.

If the colors and blends of old 8-bit and 16-bit games and paint programs are burned into your brain, you might recognize some of what comes out of this code. If not, simply enjoy the colors. Thanks for following!

Mr. Do laughed in the
face of disaster at the
arcades. Now he's ready
to clown around at
home. It might be his
last laugh if you're not
careful. Just like the arcade
game, monsters and
their henchmen are out
to do in Mr. Do. And it's
up to you to try and fend
them off with a powerball
and goodies galore.
If you can, squash the
monsters with huge
apples. Or knock them
dead with your trusty
powerball. Slow down the
henchmen with cherries.
And try to escape through
a maze of tunnels on 99
different screens.
Now do you have what it
takes to keep Mr. Do from
being done in?
For Commodore 64,
Apple Il series, Atari and
IBM PC & PC/JR systems.

I'm proud to finally be adding a deathmatch map to the pool for Quake. 27 years late, but I made it!

I will eventually eliminate all the 'get stuck on a random corner' from this map. I swear it by the DM gods.