2025's been a bit of a wild trip so far. Writing, game stuff, and streaming have all taken a somewhat smaller back seat to more outward facing impactful work. I haven't had much to show for it but now I do.
I've been working on a project for about 18 months now to create a solution to allow people to self-host a Discord screenshare like experience. Part of this was trying to provide a solution for people wanting to leave Discord, but leaving Discord brings with it losing their arguably pretty alright voice and screenshare options. You've got Mumble and Ventrilo and those old school options for voice, but streaming? Not much.
I initially started writing OvenEmprex for this purpose. OE sits in front of a video streaming server called OvenMediaEngine and turns it into a Discord-like experience, somewhat. It's a simple web page that watches the streaming server and pops up video players as people start and stop streams, just like Discord does. You still need a streaming software package to push to it, because actually capturing windows/games and pushing streams is really hecking hard, but it's an option.
Well here's the thing... turns out I wrote something much better suited for running events than copying Discord. So I pivoted. OE is still there and is more or less "done" for its purpose, but I moved on to something bigger: Restream Space.
Read More...2024 was pretty wild. I don't do these year in review things often. This is the third I've done despite this blog existing for eight years now. I mostly ramble about games, but I got a few things I'm comfortable putting out on the big ol' internet in addition.
First of all, I ended up a tech administrator for Kusogrande. As a result of that I set up for them a backend video pipeline so we no longer have to capture racer streams off Twitch. It's got some bumps and dings I'm still hammering out but a couple weeks ago I finally got it to the point that I'm comfortable sharing the middleware I wrote to make it all work. It's an undocumented pile of Magic Code at the moment but it represents the ability to take a standalone WebRTC and RTMP server and turn it into a Discord screenshare approximation and stream handler. I think that's important.
Big Bad Game-a-thon 2024 went off without many hitches. I'd call this the first one I actually "ran". Last year I was the chair but I came in in the 11th hour and mostly took on a policy of "Change as little as possible". This year we made a few changes, and I think for the better. Some more well-defined policies for reviews, more careful decision-making. I don't plan to turn the marathon into a formal "thing" but having someone organizing things so everyone else can be their goofy adorable selves is important. I guess I'm doing that now.
I also had four games in that marathon, despite also running it. That might have been a bit more than I could handle; hah.
I started some shit in preservation circles. Romhacking.net closed down and I ask myself how much trouble I caused with my Langrisser Stuff and if that was part of the conflicts high up that eventually caused its collapse. At the end of the day I don't think I have that much power. I also worked with a friend to produce a more complete archival solution for FurAffinity in the wake of its founder dying and leaving its continuance a matter of question. FA looks like it'll survive, but the option for more robust and complete account archival is never a bad thing.
Read More...I almost feel like this needs some kind of "Platforms hate this one trick" clickbait title. But anyway, I politely requested Twitch terminate my affiliate agreement yesterday.
This decision had been a long time coming. Several months ago Peebs did the same thing and found that, possibly obviously but not something I was aware of, de-affiliated streamers have no ads on their streams. I'd been an affiliate since day one of the program and had just assumed ads ran but the streamer had no control over them. Not the case.
So I'd been thinking about this for awhile, and really there's a lot of reasons for this decision:
I have a bit of a fixation on games like Vampire Survivor. I never fully gelled on what those are as a genre. I've heard the simplistic "VS clone", I've heard the tongue in cheek "Garlic-like", and the more scholarly "Survival roguelite", but you know the vibe. You run around beating up an infinite swarm of foes, gaining meta-progression currency to buy better starting state to be able to beat up even more foes next time. It's a good 20 minute brain-off thing for me; except I typically do about 10 runs in a row then it's time to go to bed, ugh!
There's like a thousand games like this out now, and yeah a lot of them are kind of just low effort clones to try to cash in on the trend. There's a couple I came to really enjoy though; enough that I'd put VS itself at a strong 3 out of 5. Some of them are a completely different take on the formula and some are pretty much just copy cats with a little more polish in places I wanted polish.
Rogue Genesia tried to create a more roguelite "run with goals and progression" approach than VS itself. It somewhat lifted the map and stage system from Slay the Spire, presenting a tree of nodes you traverse and get a short snippet of gameplay in each. Each node can have different objectives like a specific kill count, defeating a boss, or simple survival.
Leveling up provides you with cards. Individual cards can be weapons, but they can also be anything from a massive array of smaller upgrades. Think things like "+10% damage" rather than the big bombastic passives of VS. But you get hundreds of them in a run. In fact, if you do a full run with some of the "+Experience" meta-progression in place, you'll likely exhaust the deck and do the final couple of stages with literally everything either acquired or banished. This does create a feel of runs ending in the same way, but you have a limited number of weapon slots and your weapon choices dictate what you do or don't want to keep or banish, so there's variety.
Read More...It's been awhile. I've been keeping busy and posting a lot of stuff on Fediverse things I guess.
This month's been a thing. The theme seems to be the sunset of massive decades-old data stores and that data just slipping into the aether, or community wells suddenly disappearing. Or at least that's what it looks like from where I sit and the communities I exist in.
First you have RHDN which announced suddenly, out of nowhere for 99% of its users, that it would be deleting all the hacks, translations, and patches it had and becoming a news-only site. This change was more or less immediate but fortunately an archive of the patches was uploaded to the Internet Archive. In a terrible, disorganized, hard to discover and peruse format, but at least it's saved.
I'm not going to get into the politics here and now but it looks like the sudden direction change was precipitated by ego, an internal staff conflict, and one person holding all of the power over the site and deciding to fire the staff and change direction. 15 years of community around building and distributing hacks and translations gone in a blink. The forums are still unpreserved but it appears they'll remain up for now. I consider them a risk factor for data loss, and there's a lot there given RHDN has been the well for 15 years.
The big damage in my eyes though is all about timing. We're at a peak of people considering Discord to be an atom of community and information. More and more groups that produce something whether that be art, or romhacks, or games, or FAQs and information are opening Discord instances and just putting all their stuff there. I see "download" buttons that dump you unceremoniously at a Discord join screen now. It's anathema to preservation and ease of discovery; unfortunately the latter is sometimes considered a bonus point. Especially if what you're doing is grey-legal.
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