On This Day 5 Years Ago, I Made The Very First Commit Of My First Game, Crazy Critters Attack! Its Been

Completely reworked the in-game UI of my game Crazy Critters Attack! I chose a more industrial style for the UI with big metal buttons, caution tape and LCD screens. I also docked the level progress to the left side of the screen instead of leaving it as a weird tab below everything else. Lastly, I picked some new fonts! Before I was just using one of my computer's built-in system fonts, and now I'm using Rubik and IBM Plex Mono.

Here’s that game I mentioned finishing yesterday!

From its Itch page:

Monster Parlor is a game in which you run a beauty parlor for monsters, where you have the privilege to make them into something a bit more charming! Strike up a conversation, convince them of your ways, and earn some charms of your own.

itch.io

Monster Parlor by MetaphysicalMonsters, Small Bug Games, Twelve Pens, CoByte

Make monsters beautiful

Made in a 72 hour game jam (2023 Winter Melon Jam) by me, @cobyte @smallbuggames and dogoryx!

Bonus fanart for my own game

The main campaign's now playable to completion, with me having spent a couple weeks going through and testing it all to make sure its broken ass scripting was no longer ass or broken.

Total playtime to complete the main quest (and this is with me rushing through it) was about 11 hours. Note this is just making sure the draft works, the final campaign will obviously need more effects, voice acting, full cutscenes, etc.

event horizon background concepts/style test

Artists: what program do you use?

Any Adobe program

Clip Studio Paint

Procreate

ibisPaint

Gimp

Krita

Autodesk Sketchbook

FireAlpaca

Microsoft Paint (you absolute madlads)

Other

I’m a traditional artist

Not an artist button / I’m bald / vanilla extract / etc.

Hi! I make tiny indie games, mostly jam games. You can find me on itch.io

A Closer Look: Vertebrates Chordates

First order of business, turns out coelacanths are not vertebrates, which are what I’ve been basing my hexapodal polypodes (Sniffers, Bees) off of. So, to cover this group we’re switching from vertibrata to chordata (at least for this post, vertebrates still exist)!

The Chordata clade can be split into 3 main groups: neomammalia (new mammals) and brachipteryxus (wing-armed) - the vertebrates; as well as polypodus (many-footed) - their distant six-legged cousins.

Examples of chordates: Dolichocerca leo, the ocelot (neomammalia); Lepidoscelus igneamantis, the strider (brachipteryxus); and Neopolypodus flavitta, the bee (polypodus).

Neomammalia and brachipteryxus are both notable survivors of Primordial Death, the mass-extinction event that eliminated the majority of life in the realms prior to the players’ entry. Neomammalia in particular had many surviving members, and has since continued to diversify.

A chicken (Myriapinna polynativas) and a sheep (Lanatumorphus myriachroma), both survivors of Primordial Death.

Polypodus is considered a lazarus taxon - a group of organisms that was considered extinct, but reappeared later. Bees were discovered first - long after the players’ emergence - and defined the previously unknown polypodus taxon. It was believed they were the only extant polypod, until ancient sniffer eggs were discovered - and miraculously hatched.

A snifflet (juvenile Anchipolypodus aeternovis).

Return to full tree.

A glade in a forest. The man below the tree has passed.

Attempted to animate a scene from Crazy Critters Attack in Gartic Phone.

Made a mod for the Outer Wilds New Horizons mod jam, The Machine. It tied for second place!