Daniel Bucci's Blog Thing

87

There Go the Month Streak

Man, forget writing something once a week, I can't even write something once a month! Venting was pretty fun last time though, so maybe I should give it another shot. But then again, if it's not the start of a new year, what's the point, you know?

I wish I had something coming soon, besides the endless streak of cruddy comics. I want to animate something, but my tools aren't there just yet, and I got tired of working on them. I want to make a game, but I can't think of anything good. Maybe I just need to release something small to get the mojo flowing.

So yeah, the news is that there's no news. Nice talking to you...

86

This F***ing Guy: Or How to Write A Go-F***-Yourself Review

I try to keep a level head when it comes to reviews of my games and comics and such. If I get a negative review on Newgrounds, I almost always respond with a joke, a passive-aggressive retort, or in very rare cases, genuine concern for genuine feedback. And in the 7+ years I've been making games, I've only gotten better at this. After all, no one likes an angry internet poster, so I almost always brush off ill will and move on.

But then there was this review for my Voat.co submission of Jet Pack Jesus that really pissed me off yesterday:

A Bunch of Bullshit!

"first game you've made" Fuck you. I say that because I guessing it might be too late to tell you to go suck your first dick.

You know, it's not that he didn't like the game. Some people don't like my games and I'm fine with that. It's the gross condescension that gets me. He "wants to congratulate" me. He says "don't give it up", because I've "made it further than most ever will". I need to take my time and make a better game with "the right talent in the right places". He's on my side, you see, just doing Jet Pack God's work by telling me like it is.

Sure, he didn't actually clarify why the music sucks, or the art sucks, or the game concept sucks, or spend any time backing up any of his (baseless) assertions, but hey, it's charity or something, so who gives a shit or whatever, I should just be happy he even commented on my game.

Motherfucker, I spent 2 Jet-Pack-God-Damn Years on this fucking game. I spent plenty of time thinking about every moving part, and believe me, this is the game I wanted to make. If you didn't like it, fine, I won't bitch about your shitty taste.

But drop the shitty "coming from a place of love" act, because it's really only pissing me off,

85

January Post

Holy shit, it's been exactly 6 months since I last posted. A lot of stuff's happened since then, but I can't remember any of it. Oh yeah, I did finally release JET PACK JESUS yesterday! Go play it and then come complain to me when it's broken, because it probably will be...

Also of note, there's a new font that's actually somewhat readable now! Because of that, I've made it my 2016 resolution to post to my blog at least once a week, like I've been doing with my comics for OVER A YEAR HOLY SHIT I DIDN'T THINK IT WOULD LAST THAT LONG! I almost missed it yesterday, what with the spending 11 straight hours finishing up JET PACK JESUS so that it could release on Pixel Day over at Newgrounds.com, but what do you know, I made it!

That one started with the idea of just advertising my game, since it's funnier and better than any half-hour comic will ever be, but I managed to cram some slapstick humor AND a King of the Hill reference! I miss that show...

So I've been rambling for long enough. Just had to make sure that I didn't go 6 months and 1 day without a blog post. That would have been embarrassing. See you all next week*!

*Maybe.

84

July Post

I need to write these posts more often... Anyway, July's been going well. I went on vacation. I'm gearing up to move across the country in just over a week. I guess my summer break is finally coming to an end. Yay working for the rest of my life!

Uh, got a new game in the works which is probably gonna suck, but what can you do. People still don't care about my comics, but what can you do. That's about all the news I got. No wonder I never write these.

83

How ya like me now?

Stuff looks different again (unless you're on mobile, and then it's pretty much the same). It's amazing how you can making sweeping changes to a site's code and still see fairly unsubstantial changes for the user. I basically rewrote a lot of the CSS for the site, which was old and not great. The plus side is that only 1 style sheet needs to be loaded now, so the site might be a little faster. If only those god damn social media buttons didn't take years to load.

There will be a new game soon, either this week or next. It should be done by Wednesday, and then I just have to do the administrivia, and I might submit to Newgrounds for Robot Day, because it's that kind of game. I think it'll be good. I hope.

Anyway, I should write these posts more often... Till later!

82

Comicus 3

Notice anything different about the latest comic? It was made with Comicus 3! Which might actually be Comicus 2, because the first iteration of Comicus was called Comic Maker, and the last iteration was Comicus. Eh, we'll skip Comicus 2 like it's Windows 9.

I hit a point where I couldn't/didn't feel like going any further with Comicus, so I started reworking it in what turned out to be a 4 week project, that's still sort of on going. But it's complete enough to make a comic!

So what's the difference. The biggest is the text rendering. It turns out that browsers suck anus at perfectly rendering pixel text, like the fonts I use, so text rendering in this version of Comicus is done in Javascript using canvas elements to render each character perfectly. This actually makes a lot of text code a lot cleaner, and I'll probably port this text renderer over to other projects (what could those be?!).

This comic is actually the first comic I made on my Mac because it finally fixed the aliasing issues that occurred before. So now I have no reason to keep my old HP. Except for Haxe development...

81

PUSH STATE EVERYWHERE

I just pushed an update to the site to add PUSH STATE to every link on the site. What does that mean? It means if you have JAVASCRIPT enabled, THIS SITE GONE BE FAST.

The site actually had this before, but it was only for the main navigation links. So if you went from the blog to the comics page, it loaded quickly, but going from one comic to another was still slow. BUT NO MORE! YOU HAVE NO EXCUSE FOR NOT READING EVERY COMIC NOW. BESIDES THE FACT THAT NO ONE WOULD ACTUALLY WANT TO DO THAT.

I also fixed a PUSH STATE BUG, so now you won't have to press back twice on the first page you visit. YOU CAN LEAVE MY SITE EVEN FASTER NOW. YOU'RE WELCOME!

New game this week? I hope!

80

Buncha Junk

Today's been a good day. Which is good, because I felt like shit at this time last week. So why's today been a good day?

1) I put the final touches on Electric War and shipped it off to Newgrounds and reddit.com/r/WebGames, the latter of which promptly banned it because it came from this site. But either way, Tom Fulp liked it, which is good enough for me.

2) Apparently my latest comic, Offbeat, got put up on a site called memebase. I think this is a first for my comics, which makes it feel like an achievement. Even better, it has 29 thumbs up and 833 thumbs down, which I think is just fantastic for reasons that I can't quite quantify.

Check out the page here.

So yeah, it was a good start to the day. Too bad the next few days will probably stink.

79

Does this site smell like SPEED?!

I just pushed a big update to the site that should make browsing seem much faster. Now, if you have JavaScript enabled and you click a navigation link (Blog, Games, etc.), the site will only load the content of the page, without reloading the sidebar or header, which, from my testing, makes it a hell of a lot faster. Yay!

And thanks to pushState, you'll still be able to use your browser's back and forward history buttons. Historically, the loss of history has been a big issue for using JS to speed up sites like this, but not for this site! Double Yay!

Eventually, I'll start putting up new stuff on the site. I honestly might get 3 games on here this winter (2 Unity project's I've made for a class, and of course, Jet Pack Jesus!), so I think the next few months are gonna pretty fun (save for finals). See ya then!

78

I'm So Full of Shit

The doctor says its above my belly button. What the hell? How does that happen? What the hell have I been eating and not pooping? Anyway, this is advice for those who haven't confused constipation with appendicitis today: eat some fiber every now and then.