Nov 19, 2025

Keepin' busy!

Neocities is fun

I've really been having a lot of fun doing my best impression of a webmaster for a little over a month now. A couple days ago, I decided that the site was looking a bit dull, so I gave it a little bit of a makeover. Mostly, this was adding a gradient background, and some fancier button styling, but I like how it turned out. Still fairly low-tech, but I like the kind of sky blue vibes I'm putting out now. I also did a bit of site rearrangement, with moving links to their own area and setting up a proper Magic main area. As we go on, I'll probably add a few more main site pages. Maybe one for general gaming, one for board games, one for music I like, etc. Buuuut, that's a lot of content to write, so it'll be slow goings I think, since I'm also occupied with game dev and other irl stuff too. Also, maybe I should set up some kinda guestbook? Might be fun.

Dirty Rectangles

Last week I hit up Dirty Rectangles - a monthly gamedev meetup - to see what other nearby folks have been up to in the gamedev world. I always like seeing the range of projects people present there. Lots of pretty early-stage prototypes and a few pretty polished small games to add to my ever-growing steam wishlist. I've been attending these for a little over a year now, and it's always a good time. The vibes are very chill/creator-y if that makes any sense. Usually you can find some like-minded folks to chat with between presentations, and you'll see some re-occurring presenters too, so it's a good spot to make some acquaintances if that's what you're looking for. Also, the bar it's at is very cool (I draft Magic there most weeks), so it's fun to support the bar this way. This time, my favourite presentation was from Lintilion who came with a bunch of fun little roll n' write games to play. My partner Jenbarb got super nerd-sniped by one of them, so she went into a fugue state and coded it up for fun if you want to go play it. Check out "Number Pyle"!

Hades II

(light content spoilers ahead, be warned!) Outside of that stuff, I've mostly been mainlining Hades 2 whenever I get a spare 30-45 minutes. I'm probably at the middle part of the game, story-wise so far, but I'm really enjoying it so far. It's mostly just Hades 1 but bigger with more refined combat, but that's a-ok with me. I had a great time with Hades 1, so I'm happy to see a new cast of characters and a bunch of new weapons to mess with. I like the arcana system as a way to have different builds and meta-progress without just being able to have everything unlocked like the mirror of night from Hades 1. I've mostly had success with the dagger weapon so far, but I'm getting a handle on the other ones. The jetpack(!) is weapon is sweet too. I like the switchup to the cast system where now you've got a mana bar and the cast is an AoE slow you can make even nastier. As far as characters go, I think my front-runners for faves so far are Dora, Scylla, and Narcissus. All very very funny with voice acting that really works for me. (Also, Scylla's songs are actually earworms, send help.)