TBC Log 2/5/2025

   (Abby) Okay. So this month has been a little cray-zee for me. Haha.
    Things in my personal life I think have taken a turn, for the best, maybe. And accordingly, the great “it” of life has become both overwhelming and more rewarding. My mind is in a frenzy, and is as such to process what I’ve described briefly as “level 2” of reality to a few of my close friends. I don’t think level 2 is unrelated to the current political “fun” and “games” that are happening in my country. And I’ll only ever describe the happenings of America as such, because I am a compliant, normal citizen. So the mix of the personal and political (hi Kathie, thanks for the slogan (some day I’ll make a Kathie Sarachild ARG)) rocking of my extremities have really jazzed up my neurons a bit.
    But how is this related to The Back Country? How is what’s happening in my brain relevant to the creation of my dumb dumb animal cross-breeding warrior-cats sneaking virtual-villagers grieving little bundle of binary? Well, its because we’re on level 2 now, and everything is related to everything else.
    I’m getting very bored of “plucking away” at code and just want to fucking write again.
So “blah, blah” ,,, “blah blah blah”, is how I gestured with my mouth about writing dev logs to some fellow developers in The Fainting Room, when they mentioned a maybe trend towards enjoyment of a journalistic approach (towards writing dev logs) I didn’t hold back in telling them about me and TBC and how I really put my tiny syncopated heart into the words and errors that smatter through the screen every month. I mean these past months I’ve been keeping it in a bit. Because plucking away requires focus. And caffeine, and maybe a good cat to sit in your lap. But Lulav’s been sleeping in, and my stomach’s been souring, and my brain’s chasing dopamine, so the strength in my fingers to pluck has maybe been fading a good byte.
    Okay you want to know what I’ve been working on in The Back Country? Childbirth.
    If you can’t tell, it’s creeping me out a bit.     I mean, parts of it are really very funny. Like in this screenshot below

    If you’re struggling to figure out what exactly you’re looking at, you are definitely not alone. People would ask me the question, “can animal species breed with one another?”, and at the beginning of the TBC dev cycle the answer was always, “excuse me, what?”.
    So I thought and thought about this question and how I’d represent whatever’s happening in the reality of TBC. This, while keeping in mind the tools I have at my disposal to represent it. I love video games because it feels like that with their format, and with my brain, and with enough time… I can make anything. But I only know how to code so well, and we’re only given so much time here past level 1, and my brain’s energy can only be focused and channeled for some many hours a day… sometimes we need to make abstractions and compromises. In my opinion, and therefore the law of the land, my favorite parts of video-games, and any kind of art or infrastructure, are where wacky and fun solutions blossom from such abstractions and compromises. So yeah I’m not going to code in a slowly morphing hyper realistic bodily phenotype that is equally halfway between a pig and a wolf because I don’t have the energy to imagine that, the resources to request it of another person, or the time to give a shit. So, then, what is the answer to my players’ inter-species reproduction question? It is simple: I grab the model from the mom, the material from the dad, and plug em’ together. So what you’re looking at above is a pig mother and wolf father. The body of a pig, the skin of a wolf. The wolf mother and pig father looks significantly creepier. Like a wolf with skin is sort of nauseating. And if you play this game you’re gonna have to look at that shit. Get ready to give me your money and vomit.
    The physical, representational part of childbirth is done, functional, and in the game. Roy said he’d make me some nicer materials for the pigs with the wolf dads (and the crocs with the pigs, etc) so that they don’t have multiple sets of nostrils.

    I sort of like the nostrils.
    The part that’s been hard for me to code, though, has been the relationships that spawn when a new child is born. Its been a little complicated to do this while also having pre-generated relationship data that connects to a pre-made campaign progression. Like its not the end of the world, but for child relationships to be functional outside the tutorial and in the sandbox version of the game, i’m going to have to re-organize my code (with each re-organization, the plucks morph deeper into echos) so that relationships that are both generative and pre-determined can live in harmony with one another.
    The next Big Game with lots of fancy mechanics that I make is going to have significantly more pre-production, so that whoever codes it knows what needs to exist before they make it, so that hopefully we can cut down on wasted time and energy. I’ve discussed this multiple times with my lovely friend Katie a few times. She highly recommends such a pre-production. She is a person who has released many a successful game on a professional and commercial level.
    My next Big Game won’t come for a few years after the release of TBC, though. Between the two, and although I am not a lesbian (here in America, it is fun and games, only.), I’m going to be writing a butt-ton of lesbian visual novels (partially to teach myself Godot… sadly it is time).
    I’ve been staying sane, though, here on level 2. One of the reasons for this sanity is the lovely Royalty.
    Along with working on childbirth, and a bunch of other things I don’t remember as clearly this month (tree FPS, night and day represented as stage-play billboards, whatever THIS commit was,

getting the movement system to work better, pre-generated stats and relationships, honestly getting like a good chunk of the tutorial functional), Roy and I have managed to release the TBC steam page! This is really good, in relation to like, not wasting posts we make or mentions in passings to interested strangers. Roy single-handedly amassed the images required to get ‘er up and running via his ability to interact with 2D images on the computer (which I only have when using aseprite because of some weirdo broken pathway in my brain). And in this process he made this insanely funny image that, every time I look at it, causes me to verbally squawk. I almost become trapped in the laughter (I would like to emphasize the “almost”… Roy would never trap me).

    If you don’t get it, don’t worry. This image is for me. But if you do get it… god isn’t it so fucking funny???? If you want to get it, check out this devlog.
    The other person who has really been getting me through this dev process is the lovely Carrie Padula. She’s TBC’s QA tester, and the other person on the TBC development discord server that laughs at my jokes. Carrie keeps coming up with merch ideas for the game and I am completely gung-ho with pretty much all of them. You should be excited for Carrie’s TBC merch.
    What else has been happening… oh LA’s been on fire! Like in a pretty bad way! This is another level 2 thing! As far as I know, Isaac is okay physically. I imagine they’re maybe not okay otherwise. It has been a bit since we’ve had a chance to catch up.
    My fingers are getting tired, and my brain has calmed a bit. So its time to pass the mic over to Roy.

(Roy) so, Abby has leveled up.
    dare I even judge my own power levels at this point? I wouldn't even know what measure to quantify it with, and if I'm at level 1 I'm happy to be here, the higher level/plane of existence is scary!
    mostly have been "on the grind" keeping up with tasks thrown my way and stuff that has been 'on the wall' so to speak, been moving over to the third and final tribe's assets and progress has been nice, it's been steady work. I really enjoy working on TBC as it feels like something I can enjoy up close and from afar, that afar being inside the game haha.
speaking of which, last rounds of optimization was making billboarded fakes for the trees, don't tell anyone but the trees aren't real, they can't hurt you!

    it works so well that you wouldn't even notice honestly, the forests here are so dense, might as well take advantage of that with textures doing the heavy lifting, where your eyes are unable to notice the individual details, it all becomes a blur where your imagination fills in the details! some other art I've been working on has been painting! can you believe it? well I couldn't, but Abby has really been encouraging me to give it a go and when I did I realized that I had the Joy of painting within me all along (thanks Bob!) here's some paintings I made for TBC, which the keen eye'd among you may find.

   aside from content creation, figuring out game stuff with Abby is a fun puzzle for us humans, whether it's implementations and how they're implemented (lol) and stuff adjacent to that, trying to come up with happy solutions and sometimes weighted compromises. I guess you could say "I LOVE to do puzzles!", I joke of course, but it's a fun brain exercise and figuring stuff out is my part of my drive for life on top of other things, just happy to be doing what feels meaningful and also actively engages my brain cells -- of which there's just two, I need all the almond activation I can get.