Here's a bunch of the stuff I did this month:

TTRPG stuff

The Flyloft

An anthology of backdrops for Dialect, the game of language and how it dies! That includes one I already wrote (The Founding) and four new ones.

Dialect backdrops are kind weird compared to e.g. Trophy incursions because so much of the heavy lifting's taken care of by the base game—the word and role cards—that a backdrop almost really is just a backdrop, a situation, some colour (I think it's all that plus a lens to view things through). Still, I like what I've done with them, and I finally got something good out of the “nuclear family robots trapped in a House-of-the-Future exhibit” idea I've had rolling around for about a decade. Then there's the other three scenarios, all new(-ish): medical trial participants in a language-altering dreamworld, angelic kids doing black magic, and an obvious adaptation of Moby Dick.

Tech-wise the file was a bit of an experiment with my normal HTML framework, in that it uses different styles in each backdrop; it's also the first time I used raster images in one of these game files. I don't really wanna try using different styles in the same file again—it's kinda fiddly and adds a bunch of data for different fonts—but it was good to figure out one way of doing raster images re-usably.

the Death of Numismus

An upgrade to my fantasy journalling game about the death of the eponymous god of coin! The big change is that the main digital game file's now HTML instead of PDF; I even got three-quarters of the way through making a simple javascript app that'd let you play the game in the file, but scrapped it when it got clunky.

One more thing: When I published version 1.0, I called this a Wretched & Alone game, but for this re-release I decided not to, since it always lacked some of the main features of Wretched & Alone (the block tower and the unlikely-but-possible good ending).

Fonts

LilMrkr v1.4, Zenimini v1.2, and Minitic v1.3

Finally got round to releasing this! I added a bunch of new glyphs and massively simplified all its glyphs, cutting a lot of data without changing how the font looks.

Finally got round to releasing this as well—just a few small changes, though.

And I finally got round to releasing this, which I forgot about for almost a year.

Simplifying timeTo and timeToPlay

These've always been a little bit confusing.

So there's overlap, and the original's kinda inferior compared to later project cause most people only care about the game clocks (which they should, timeTo is a bad idea taken to its logical conclusion).

Very few people pay for timeTo, so it's not a huge problem, but this month I decided to split the two clock types: now timeTo's just for analog clocks and timeToPlay's just for game clocks. The latter also got a few new clock styles in the upgrade!

Websites

New site

I'm making a new site! It's gonna be a combined portfolio and blog, starting with sections for TTRPGs, fonts, and code projects, plus a space for services I can be requested or commissioned for. I've got the structure, style, index pages, and a bunch of images roughly done, and imported a bunch of posts from here, but there's a lotta writing left to do for the actual project pages.

Weird Waves

My radio horror web app thing reached the end of beta! The main task left's to get to 520 shows by the start of October, and I've already reached 300.

There's one last technical fix I really wanna make, but it relies on Mozilla adding full support for the :has() CSS selector (it's still stuck behind a tech demo flag).

Upcoming anniversaries for the site: 24th of May (wrote the first notes for it), 25th of June (first public broadcasts), and 1st of October (moved to Neocities and started posting schedules on social media).

Daily creative stuff

Archipelago23

Another few weeks of daily islands! I reached a good stopping point in designing Stone Words Walk, the game I'm using to make the islands, so I took a week off to write up the current state of that game and the rules for the next game I'll be developing. That game's tentatively called Sunbright Dynamo, and it's about mapping journeys instead of mapping islands. It's starting off way rougher than Stone Words Walk, so I'm looking forward to reshaping it.

Daily sound recordings

I carried on with my daily sound recording thread(s) inspired by Emily Meo's 1000+ posts of daily sound recordings. You can find my thread on twitter and mastodon (starts on day 11 cause I migrated from my original account then, plus my posts get cleared after 1–2 months so the link might be dead by the time you read this).

At the end of last month I talked about slowly getting back into editing and soundscapes and maybe getting into music (super-simple to start with). I didn't get round to any of that in February, but I did keep up with the daily recordings. Still, I am feeling a bit of tension with this—at some point I've gotta change what I'm doing or just stop.

I think part of the problem's that I don't have a proper recording area (my desk's super-cluttered), so I gotta unpack and re-pack the recorder every day. Clearing some space to make it way easier to record might help ease that tension a bit.

Daily art

I kept up with daily drawings again—last month I was thinking about moving into still-life sketches in February, and I did do a few, but a lotta the time I was doing the same kinda pen drawings I did in January. Still, I did some I really like, and I've learnt the incredible power of repetitive fiddly details.

Next month (March) I'm gonna start with still-life sketches, partly motivated by finding a bunch of creased and slightly-ragged printer paper I wanna use up.

Plans for March

I did most of what I planned to do at the end of the January review. Here're my plans for March:

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