Updates
The news about me! (Not a blog)
February 27th, 2025 - Viscera Eyes
The site is up again. Yesterday, I happened to visit a neocities page, and realised that getting a simple website like mine hosted does not have to be hard at all. A long time ago I had some irrelevent dumb reason for not using neocities that I don't remember. Anyways, this is free, and easy to use. My site's URL went from "seemoore.xyz" to "seemoore.neocities.org"
I would like to improve the sites visuals, previously it was just a lame attempt at a generic 'old website' look, I would like an aethetic that is more personalized. I have started by replacing the generic sky picture background with a sky image I made for my game.
I've been working on a new game, a classic top-down Run N Gun type game mixed with Resident Evil 4, except faster. It is not my main focus, but I enjoy working on it a little bit at a time. Unlike the pleasant melodic and harmonically rich soundtrack of Freestlye, this game has a much more noisy, dissonant, loud soundtrack, with a higher focus on rhythm. It's main influenced by the band: Dillinger Escape Plan, particularly their first album: Calculating Infinity; an absolutely insane burst of crazy rhythms and energy that most people are not even going to be able to follow along with mentally. My initial idea for the aethetic was "Pixel Art Brown and Bloom + Contra" but that may not end up being quite how it looks.
Music I've been into recently is the previously mentioned band, and The Mars Volta, among other things. I've listened to The Mars Volta plenty previously, but it is only quite recently that I finally started to "get it", I now consider them possibly the best band of the 21st century. They are both prog and punk, having an aggressiveness that you don't normally hear from the 70s bands. The Mars Volta are not a band you can really appreciate on your first listen, you have to grow accostomed to their strange vocals and instrumentation. A big focus I have had on music for the last year is on what I call "Richness of arrangement", a mindset that I beleive is super important for making music that stands above the croud. Richness of Arrangement is what seperates AC/DC and the Steve Miller Band from Led Zeppelin and Rush, it's like Pizza with a dozen extra toppings (none of which are vegetables). I want to elaberate on the specifics of what makes a song have rich arrangement sometime, but anyways, The Mars Volta's arrangements are extremely rich.
I've played video games lately. Baba is You is a puzzle game that two years ago made me quit in rage, but this year I am back, and with me I brought a bit more patience. I think it's pretty safe to say it's the best puzzle game of all time, the base concept of the game is just too powerfull for crazy interactions for anything else to really compete. I also played Resident Evil 1 through 4, all great games, the most famous game series I had yet to play until now. I "played" the visual novel Steins;Gate, good weeb story. Last night I finished playing the most recently translated Towelket series game, Dekapari; The left turns the story takes are absolutely insane even by towelket standards and has several genuinely shocking moments. Yakuza 3 is also a game that I am playing, I have no other comments about it.
July 13th, 2024 - The Aimless Arrow
My website hosting services had to be renewed, but the price was shamelessly inflated to an absurd degree from fifty dollars for a year of hosting, to two hundred. They also pondered into existence a bullshit security fee costing an additional sixty dollars. I will never pay any of this, and will instead delete my account from this scam service. For that reason my website has gone offline once again, It will return eventually.
My game is an endless timesink, I cannot work on it every day, and am at this point quite far behind where I had hoped to reach by the halfway point of this year. I am further discouraged by the fact that my game isn't all that good: the gameplay is a turn-based slog, and the beginning areas are not of the quality to leave any good initial impressions to players; My newer additions are much more clever, entertaining and aethetically passable, but still suffer from built upon a poor foundation. Since finishing Freestyle my work on Dastardly Dudes Duty has been slower and done with less enthusiasm, I have not even touched in at all in the last several weeks. I miss enjoying my hobby as much as I did a few months ago. With the way it's going I think I will have to cut back on the scale of the unfinished areas heavely (In many possible cases, removing them entirely) I want to move on from DDD as it is holding me back heavily.
March 15th, 2024 - Glacial Pace
My knock-off touhou game is almost done, i've finished all six stages, but haven't made the final boss fight. I also will have to add several miscellanious features, including easy and hard difficulty modes, plus attempt to write some witty pre-battle dialogue. I also have to finish all the music, I've written the idea of all 14 tracks already, but have yet to extend half of them into full pieces. My goal is to finish the game before the end of the month, I've been working quite diligintly to achieve this and have what I will do every day from now on planned out.
The music came out great, I've been feeling that I have really got it at this point. Not only are the melodies more consistently good, and the instrumentation/production more rich, but I also think that I've developed a style that no but me can replicate, being built off of all the techniques I learned to use just from experience. If this game is to be successfull it will be from it's soundtrack.
I hope you enjoy when it comes out within a week or two!
Other words.
Jan 5th, 2024 - Man-Erg
A new year arrives. I've been doing a lot over the last months, and it feels like it's been a long time.
Although a lot the days of the year were too occupied to be spent in game develepment, a lot were also spent with nothing better to do; I think the amount of time I spend working on games -when I work on them- is at the highest it's ever been. espeically during December. As already documented in former entries to this page, I mostly worked on the city area of Dastardly Dudes Duty for the first third of the year. After that, specifically on what I recall to be easter day, I was struck with a speical inspiration for a big sidequest to be in the game, essentially a self-contained story with clever plot development that was much better than anything else the game had to offer. I spent the next months making the sidequest instead of the main game. It came out quite nice and gave me a better idea of how to make an entertaining plot for the rest of the City. For the last two months of the year, I found myself wanting to make a game with actual gameplay as the focus, and decided to take a break from Dastardly Dudes Duty for some time to do so. It is a shoot 'em up game of similair style to Touhou. I had only just became skilled enough to actually beat Touhou games not long ago after several years of playing them on-and-off, so it was on my mind a lot at the time. I am still working on the game currently, it is the absolute best gameplay i've ever managed to code myself. It is coming along nicely, all of the hardest things I need to do are behind me and I mainly just need to make more levels, graphics and music at this point. My shmup is programmed with the OHRRPGCE engine I use to make Dastardly Dudes Duty, it is absolutely unfit for the task, and has many limitations that required clever tricks to get around. The only reason I am working with this engine is because I do not feel like getting used to the workflow of anything else.
I've officialy been learning japanese for a year, my ANKI program says I've learned 3000 words now, half of the words it has. I finished going through the Genki 1&2 text books a while ago and started Tobira, a textbook that consists mainly of just reading full paragraphs, I can conprehend sentances without transating them into english in my head like I used to have to, and I'm quite good at memorising Kanji, I can read a lot faster than when I started, but it depends on what they're saying, a lot of the time I still struggle to get exactly what is intended to be communicated.
Being a prog rock fan for a while at this point, I've already heard most of the biggest classics already years ago, but for some reason I neglected to ever check out until recently the band Van Der Graaf Generator. They have become one of my absolute favorites, Van Der Graaf has a unique "theatrical" approach to prog rock with a dramatic, expressive singer and emotional songs about things like being hopelessly lonely and lost in space, I usually don't think about lyrics, but Van Der Graaf Generator's stand out to me as particularly well written. Their grand sound makes me enthusiastic enough that they get their own paragraph on this update. If you want to check them out, I would reccomend any of the three albums "H to the He", "Pawn Hearts", and "Godbluff".
Games I played recently include the first Devil May Cry, my first forray into the series, I love the PS2 generation of graphics and game design, so it was a very nice short adventure. I've also been playing Stalker, a slow paced classic fps, the biggest game to come out of Russia I believe, It's nice in that it's not just a linear campaign you beat in a few hours, but a crafted world to get immersed in, a strength of videogames. I've also been playing Touhou and other Shmups as mentioned previously, once you are good enough to actually play them properly they become very fun. I've known what Touhou was since I was ten because I liked the music, it's stlye has had some influence on my composition since then.
Update since I wrote the prior words of this paragraph: I gave the much-hated Devil May Cry 2 a chance, a game that seems disliked by almost everyone, I sometimes really enjoy sequels generally considered bad, such as Dark Souls 2; however, in this case, I was disspointed to find out that it is indeed awful. I shall try to perservere so that I can play the much-acclaimed third entry in the series.
With the use of the internet my attention span had been geen shorter and shorter, last year I had given myself new habits to counter this, and this year I went further with it. Mainly, I spend my entire morning offline usually, I try to make the amount of my computer time spent on social media sites much lower than actual computer hobbies. I avoid videogames that are advertised as hyper fast-paced, and i never listen to music while I do anything except during designated 'music time' which is while programming. I've regained the ability to read books thanks to this. Ubik was a good read, and I've been considering giving The Lord of the Rings another chance, it bored me as a child but I always liked the movies.
Sometimes I think about making youtube videos explaining in-depth a lot of the things I think about when writing music, I have some subtle tricks that I do not believe are much talked about by internet people at all. I continue to put off the idea because my time is already occupied with enough things to do, and because of the fact that music not being visual at all would make it hard to explain things clearly.
May 31, 2023 - Plugged In
The website is online!
My site is a simple html+css combo. But I didn't want it to be a static website like one hosted on geocities (those sites are not good for something you frequently update, and are not capable of having social features like a comment box). At first I used the guide on LandChad.net, It's made by some libertarian guy who I knew would give good instuctions on making a site I have full control over, but I ultimately failed to get past his Linux mumbo-jumbo. After a while I figured I could host it here with Bluehost. (Landchad would probably frown upon me for this decision) Bluehost uses a website creator for dummies that could only make a bland corporate looking business site, I just deleted all the website data and redirected the link to my own "index.html" file. 2 hours of frustrating tinkering later, and here we are!
My language learning has been going very well, I've been actually reading (skimming) some manga in japanese lately, I can understand up to 1/3 of what is being said depending mostly on what the manga is about. Slice-of-life manga with a school setting are the easiest. Anki says that I have a vocabulary of 1000 words now, I've learned more words from other sources as well.
What video games have I been playing lately? I am so glad you asked! I've finished the hardest puzzle game I have ever played, DROD: King Dugans Dungeun. "Deadly Rooms of Death" is an obscure but amazing puzzle series that started in 1997, King Dugans Dungeon is the first one. I played the third one, "Gunthro and the Epic Blunder" before the first because it is easier and designed specifically for newcomers. I now move onto the second DROD game "Journey to the Rooted Hold". I love these games' style.
Speaking of Second games, I have also been playing Half Life 2. I overlooked it for a long while because it seemed like just a halo-campaign type game, it is exactly that actually, but I had not realized just how much better it was than Halo until now, the story and gameplay are leagues better. I love it's characters like the g-man, or the russian guy who shotguns zombies while preaching to them.
I've been working on Dastardly Dudes Duty more lately since I am now once again unemployed (I was not fired).
March 10, 2023 - Okay And?
Not being at home 5 days a week really sucks, I dislike my job.
I am still working on the 5th section of Dastardly Dudes Duty, I added some good jokes to it, and am mostly finished making an awesome secret feature that most players will miss.
Wizardry is a cool game, it is the first ever RPG video game (Dungeons & Dragons is the first non-video RPG of course) , and the first turn-based combat game. I've been playing it lately. I bought the original physical version for the Apple II because the cover art is cool and I have a hole in my pocket.
February 24, 2023 - Poo Perserverence
I should start writing more words. This website is currently just an html file sitting on my hard drive that I havent looked at in a while, so I don't know when it will be visible to the public.
I have recently begun the fifth year of Dastardly Dudes Duty's development, I started working on a very big area of the game recently, and hope it will be finished by the end of the year. If so, the game will be half finished at the start of 2024. I spend several hours a day working on it, I don't work on it too hard since it's just a hobby. This month I started a job that takes me away from home 3-4 days a week, I dont work on DDD at all during that time. The pay is really good and I don't want to worry about taking an eternity to release the game.
Last month I started learning Japanese, for real this time. A little over a year ago I was learning on Duolingo but had stopped out lack of progress; Duolingo is a garbage language-learning website that doesnt properly explain grammer, and is nothing but flash cards. This time around, after finally building up the enthusiasm to start learning again by seeing the cheap prices of original japanese manga which can be baught in bulk, I am learning with the textbook, Genki. Genki teaches things way faster that duolingo, I learned the entirety of Hiragana and Katakana in less than two weeks (the former I rememberd a lot of from Duolingo). After the first couple chapters of Genki I needed to slow down a bit, so I started using a combination of the computer flashcards application Anki (its way better than Duolingo), and an app on phone called "Kanji" that teaches exactly what is in the name. The Kanji app helps a TON actually, because it makes you actually draw the symbols with the power of touchscreen, making memorization a lot easier. Currently I know over a hundred Kanji, I think my progress may be faster than average.
Lately i've been playing visual novels, I got into them with Higurashi about 6 months ago, and since then I've "played" Umineko, Higanbana and am going through Kanon. I want to go through all of the VNs by Key, Ciconia, and several other popular classics in the future. I've been quite a weaboo lately despite the fact that I dislike anime, I only ever read manga or VNs, which are somethimes actually good.
I am struggling to not start every sentance with "I".
April 9, 2022 - Madcats Gamecube Controller
I worked on my website more.
March 5, 2022 - Beginnings
I started making my website, It is not yet online.
Seemoore
“Test test test.”