New games and tools
and a little more art too!
I’m noticing a pattern where I title these quarterly/bi-quarterly posts something like “Videogames and GameMaker work”, but I work on games and make tools/extensions for GameMaker all the time, really.
Videogame work
Not counting one-off extension work,
Nuclear Throne beta is moving along, with a public announcement now live.
Shovel Knight Pocket Dungeon’s Online VS mode had a public beta recently.
I made the underlying system and initial prototypes for the mode.
If you’d to try it out, it’s still available on Early Preview beta branch.I helped with netcode for Pulsar Crash, which is a competitive close-quarters twin-stick shooter kind of game.
I’m helping with netcode on Atlas Brave, a co-op ARPG.
I’m helping with netcode on a few more games that are early in development.
I’m helping with modding systems on a few games that you might have heard about, including Tinkerlands.
(work on the rest is currently unannounced)I’m helping with a prototype for a turn-based tactics game.
GameMaker-adjacent
I released a GMEdit update that adds pop-out code windows!
I wrote a post about making radial health/progress bars.
The fastest way to draw a circle is to not draw a circleI wrote a post (with a handful of reference implementations) about using different PRNGs in GameMaker, as well as testing PRNGs in general.
I wrote a post about a trick to use
screen_redrawin GameMaker: Studio, which is also how you can use semi-hidden GM functions in general.I released a GMLive update with some fixes for GM2024.11+ and otherwise.
I wrote a patcher that enables GM2024.11+ games to run on Windows 7… at least for now.
I re-created Misu’s scripts for quickly fetching pixels from buffers, with a few improvements.
I updated my localization extension to have more settings in the web version, and more options in general.
I made a script for reading and writing buffers with per-bit granularity.
This is nice to have if you need to pack data tighter, such as to fit into 64 bytes of Steam leaderboard metadata.I had to update several extensions because GM2024.13 introduced this one bug that hits a bunch of my extensions but wasn’t in their unit tests.
Other works
I released an update for my pixel font creator tool, which adds a handful of settings and a “rules editor” for configuring things like kerning easier.
I wrote a post about a grid-based spiral algorithm, good for occasions.
I wrote a macro that fixes a quirk with touch input on Windows.
I wrote a userscript that undoes a novel inconvenience with Home/End keys in Discord.
I wrote a userscript that re-creates the “mini inbox” on Reddit as it appeared before March 2025 changes.
Art
Been doing a little more art lately, as you can see!
Mainly owed to me figuring out how to do binary brushes in Procreate (notes), which I find to be a pleasant way to draw - you can draw a shape and then chisel away at it with an eraser/pencil until it looks good. And the magic wand/paint bucket always work correctly!
I also made a little app for sending images back and forth between a PC and a tablet more conveniently.
Now I just need to figure out why dust sticks so easily to my tablet’s screen protector…
Newsletter
If you’ve had the misfortune of reading this or other Substack newsletters on mobile, you might have noticed that Substack has been getting pushier with getting the readers to install their mobile app and showering them with notifications if they do.
This is kind of counter-productive to why I started a newsletter to begin with, so I guess in the near future I’ll be mirroring it somewhere else so that the readers don’t have to endure this unless they already use the Substack app.
And that’s about it!