A Prettier Website

GOOD EVENING!! Or, good morning. Or good afternoon. It's actually afternoon for me right now. I don't know why I started with good evening. This is kind of awkward. Can we move on and pretend this never happened, please?

This month, I only have two things - but they're both pretty big! I released a new project, and I've refurbished this website!

Babe Wake Up New Olie Project Just Dropped

In my last post I mentioned a new project related to the concept of dreaming. Well, that thing has now released! It's called Link Dreams and you can play it RIGHT NOW by clicking that big ol' button down there. Give it a whack, why don't you?

Open Itch.io

As always, it's best experienced blind - and I'm about to spoil a bunch of cool stuff, so please check it out first before proceeding!

...

We're good, right? You've played it? Cool. Okay.

Adaptive Music

I've wanted to create something with adaptive music for AGES, honestly. Like, when I was first getting into Baba, I remember briefly wondering whether there would be a way for the music in a custom level to change based on active rules (for instance, in my pack Everypence, the instruments could be swapped to something more ambient whenever an object becomes LOST). As with most things, it's probably beyond the capabilities of Baba, and I'm better off building stuff in other engines.

I was super pleased with the music I made for this! Every track was created in the same less-than-two-hour session, which is honestly really impressive given how memorable these themes are to me now! (Technically, "Senses" was added later... a "Senses" track did exist in the original session, but I ended up scrapping it because it felt a bit too happy. But don't worry! It was reused in the final project and renamed to "End".)

Worries

While I was pretty confident with the music, I was still ULTRA nervous about releasing this project. With Digital Penthouse, I felt relatively confident that the mystery / hunting-down-pages aspect would keep people engaged...

But this project has a lot less of that! All the readable content is pretty easy to find, and I was worried people wouldn't care enough to keep going after the novelty wore off. I don't know. Luckily people's feedback about it seems to be very positive, so I'm probably just overthinking it.

This Website Looks Good Now

I finally did it! I revamped the whole website!

Aside from the (hopefully obvious) CSS facelift, you might notice a lot of stuff has been moved around! The old layout buried all of my past projects in hard-to-reach places, so they've all been moved to the much-easier-to-find Projects tab in the navbar.

(I've also cleaned up the folder structure behind-the-scenes, which unfortunately means most old URLs will just lead to "Page Not Found"! Feel free to reach out if you want me to update an old link anywhere, or you're looking for a page that's changed locations.)

Sketchbook Gallery

Previously, all of my sketchbook drawings were spread out between random blog updates and Hazel Hotel character pages. Not only was this super annoying navigation-wise, it was also annoying for me! Every time I wanted to upload a picture of a new drawing, or make a new character page, I had to redo the same process over and over again - filling out the same description, date, and other information that already existed on other pages.

So... I accumulated all of the pages and descriptions into one big bad JSON file! For those that don't know, it's essentially a text file that stores information in a specific way - which means JavaScript can read it and automatically create the image gallery for me! Combined with the library Isotope (which I don't recommend... lol), I can then filter and sort these images based on whatever parameters I want, no manual sorting necessary!