Daily Things

👽 So, is it back? I like the Alien franchise a lot and tend to talk about it more than I probably should. But if I narrow it down, my focus is mostly on Alien and Aliens — two of the best sci-fi movies ever made. Then we had the weirdness of Alien³ and Alien Resurrection, which had some cool action but also a ton of questionable decisions. Prometheus started as something separate but eventually merged into the Alien universe; and while I think it has its merits (especially the visuals and large-scale sci-fi world-building), there are plenty of head-scratching and plain dumb moments. And Covenant? Oh I don’t even want to talk about that one, it exists. ...

Yesterday, I shutdown the VPS that has been hosting all my websites for the last ~10 years. I’ve moved everything to static content, including this website. 📝 WordPress Since the very beginning (~2008) this blog has been powered by WordPress, it served me well, it worked, had a nice backend to make the posts, plugins and themes. After a couple years I moved from shared hosting to a VPS, I had other websites and services I needed running and all in same machine was better and cheaper. But WordPress needs a lot of things, PHP, MySQL, maintenance in all those moving parts. ...

After mostly a week of anxiety, for thousands and thousands of developers, Unity changed the rules again, and first glance, it’s better for the immediate problems it would cause for active and in-development games. They removed the retroactive aspect of the “pay-per-game-install”, so only for someone on Unity 2023 LTS+ (launching next year) will that apply, current projects will not be affected. Small relief, as long as we can keep using existing versions with current Terms of Service. This will be impossible on mobile and consoles in a short time frame due to SDKs, but for PC should be fine. ...

So this was an “eventful” week in the game dev community. Unity, one of the most well know, and used game engines out there, after years of doing mostly good for the community, pulled a reverse card and broke years of trust the community had on them. Unity announced that they are retroactively charging (for example $0.2) for each game install, after developers hit a certain yearly revenue threshold, which sounds insane. ...

> At the bottom of the article I added a couple links that help finding your Twitter following/followers on Mastodon and follow them With the recent Twitter purchase, change of ownership and rules, a lot of people are leaving the platform or just searching for alternatives. Among other platforms one that keeps showing up as an alternative is Mastodon, but change is always hard, some people have been on Twitter for years, so what exactly makes this any different? ...

I have no idea how many people, if any, are still subscribed to this blog RSS feeds, but if they are, they probably saw a couple of new posts in burst yesterday, apologies. This happened because I decided to merge all the posts from my studio into this one for “cleaning house”. I’ve been thinking about it for a while that I have these 2 blogs mostly abandoned and it’s a shame, I used to be very active, but IRL stuff and especially Twitter and QoD launch got me busy elsewhere and I mostly abandoned blogging, which I enjoyed a lot. It felt like the audiences were in other places so it made more sense. Upfall Studios blog was mostly created as I felt it needed to have a more professional look for the devlogs of all the ports I made, and it helped doing that, explaining the new features, it was a place for players to see the roadmap, and blogs are perfect for that. ...

> Hey everyone, wow ok so first of all it’s been a long time since my last post, I keep telling myself I need to return to do more regular posts, but twitter kinda replaced it in many ways for my daily-rambles. However I’ve been trying to work on something new and gotta get back to more regular blogging, but more on that later. Second, but not least important, Vizati is turning 10 years old today (11 June 2010), feels only yesterday we (me coding and Rita with the art) were doing the first puzzles and trying to figure out the best way for making this a fun game. Things changed a lot over the years and the original team is no longer working together, also because of OS updates, like the iOS versions etc or hardware not being around anymore the game has mostly vanished from all stores. The other day I was thinking about game preservation and thought it would be a shame to leave this only in our computers, combined with the 10th anniversary we decided to make it free to everyone, the original game can now be downloaded and played even on the newest Windows versions (thank you XNA). ...

As I’m starting to write this post I’m on my way to my home town for the holidays, so I may not post it in a couple days. It’s been a crazy year(s)(?) and I’m taking these near 4h of travel to write down some things. I’m sorry if it’s incoherent, this is mostly a dump of thoughts. For those who follow my work a bit more closely you probably know that for almost 4 years the project I dedicated more time was Quest of Dungeons, which started development in 2013. ...

Can’t believe it’s almost new year again. It became a habit of mine to to hit pause for a couple minutes, look back, write about it and think about what’s next, this helps me to sort things out. Thank you I have to start with something, a big Thank You for all the people who purchased QoD, everyone who helped spreading the word, the ones who wrote emails, tweeted and help my solo developer work became an even better thing to do. This wouldn’t be possible without everyone who supported me, in one way or another, so even if I do work a lot to make the best possible I can, if no one cared, it wouldn’t be possible, so thank you. ...

WOW, 2014 is already coming to an end. Can’t even believe the amount of things that happened to me this year, some bad, some good, I decided to make a wall of text. This was been a great year for my game dev objectives. In January I got Quest of Dungeons approved on Steam in only 6 days, which was mind blowing, on March 25th I finally got it released, and during the rest of the year several other platforms got a port, like Linux and Android, both platforms that I never had worked before, so I learned a lot. Finally on October I got QoD approved for Xbox One. ...