HTHRFLWRS #2 - Year of the Cockroach

My friend davemakes recently introduced me to the phrase “Year of the Cockroach”¹ when discussing the current status of indie games: that a bunch of the big institutions are collapsing or about to collapse or were simply never that good to begin with, and that the best way to survive the present moment is by being small and indestructible. The idea’s been stuck in my head: there’s no such thing as being too big to fail, but if you’re little and well-carapaced, maybe no amount of chaos can stop you. E3 is gone, long live a million smaller conferences. Twitter is gone, long live a million Twitter clones. Making a newsletter in response to a social media shutdown may itself be a bit of a Gregor Samsa move, but I promised myself that in according with the first rule of social media² I would never write another newsletter about writing a newsletter, so I’ll leave the topic for now. On to what I’ve been making with my prothoracic legs!

Last week, I posted a gif of a book animation I was working on. Now, let’s look at where that animation (and its twin) ended up!

Part of making a fully-fledged metaprogression roguelike is having lots of menus to store and display the player’s growth over time, and part of doing that properly is having cool animations and framing devices. Also I was in a pixel art mood — can you blame me? These turned out great.

The big trick to them is having a secret extra animation that’s just dedicated to the mask for the UI’s actual functionality. You can see in the upgrade screen that the book closes around the UI. Here’s the frame-by-frame with the UI mask overlaid in white: a little crude, but undeniably effective.

Not to let myself be outdone by myself, I also spruced up the main menu and level select…

Yeah, this is good. There’s a little framerate friction between these ultra-smooth tweens and the bespoke pixel animations of the previous gif, but once I get some sound in there, they’ll fit together like a charm.

This game is coming together incredibly fast, which is good, because the demo deadline is coming up even faster! I can’t share specific dates (because I don’t know them yet), but if all goes well, I’d say that the free demo of the game will likely be in y’all’s hands by this time next month. I’ll be working on the trailer soon, so keep your eyes peeled!

Last week, I asked how often people like their newsletters. It seems that the consensus hovers somewhere around weekly to monthly, which is good, because I was going to do weekly no matter what people said. It’s my newsletter, you’re just reading it. To highlight a specific response, though…

Remi AKA remeranAuthor: One thing I do recommend is highlighting and replying to specific replies you get for everyone to see so it can be kind of like a comment section except you'd only be showing off the ones you like so it would be a good comment section.  That might be a bad idea if you ever get very large and it encourages more people to reply than you could ever hope to read, or something, but that sounds like a good problem to have.

Wow, I agree! I’m going to do that. I’ll probably try out a couple different methods as we all get used to this. For now, just know there’s a chance I might ask to highlight your comment in next week’s post.

Questions of the week: How do you feel about the phrase “Year of the Cockroach?” Do you think that size inversely correlates with stability, or does it just mean you’re more likely to get crushed when small things go wrong? How do the platforms we rely on affect our notions of community and success? Is it even possible to be an “off-the-grid” online content creator in the era of platforms?

That’s all for this week! Next week: more Fish Fear Me news, more discussion questions, more of me doing whatever I want forever. Thanks for reading!

— Heather

P.S. So far I’m really digging this whole “think about a single topic for one week and then write something small about it” thing. I think I may have the Newsletterer’s Temperament, which is like the Poster’s Spirit but slower.

Want to respond to the discussion questions? Email me at heatherflowersbusiness@gmail.com!