Howdy!

Hey folks, rae here. It's December! (my godddddd!)

So, if you've been in the Playdate-verse for a while, you know that last year TYM hosted a community awards ceremony, handing badges and bragging rights to some of the primo games released throughout 2022 in Playdate history. This year, they're doing it again! And unlike last year...i'm here. :3

I've got a...few things in the pipeline lately, but my big project is clearly RowBot. So, I'm officially putting the call out there for folks that are hyped about the game: make your voice heard, and nominate RowBot Rally for Most Anticipated Game at this year's awards show!

It'd mean a lot to me if you did. This year has been amazing for me, thanks in absolutely no small part to Playdate, this community, and everything people have put out and been working on through this year and beyond. It's been so fun seeing both others working on insane games and apps, and people being excited for the stuff I'm making as well (like, what???). Whether you wanna nominate my game or not, get in there and vote for your favorites! (trust me, there's a bunch of categories.)

Anything else?

Well, on the RowBot side of things, at least...not much LOL! This whole fall has been very hectic, with classes and lots of pet projects taking up a hefty chunk of time that would have been otherwise available to me. I've got this whole of December off, and I wanna focus that time into finishing up and releasing a smaller game of mine, and then cracking back down on RowBot after that's squared away.

There has been one big breakthrough recently...and that's Procreate Dreams. As you may or may not know, the current cutscenes in the DEMO version of the game were animated using Procreate. Procreate is an amazing drawing and painting tool for iPads! Procreate is also a really not-great animation tool. It's serviceable, it works, but there's no support for motion tweens, in-depth editing or audio of any kind, and it's kinda grafted onto the existing layer system which makes handling a longer-form project like this really...messy. But!! Dreams seems like it has INCREDIBLE potential for the future of these animated cutscenes, to the point where I may try my hand at redoing the existing ones as well. (Cue the eye roll from the people who've already seen like three different versions of that first cutscene :woozy_face:)

There's definitely a...steep learning curve to the app. Even as a self-considered Procreate expert (not a euphemism), there's a lot of...weird stuff? Like, why is the onion skin hiding in the timecode bar. Why. BUT I hope to have some more RowBot updates coming around Soon™™™™™ enough!! I definitely can't really promise anything in the near-term, which SUCKS because I hate leaving projects on the back-burner, but life's just been really swiping my attention away from most-any gamedev lately. You know how it is.

Anyway! That's the gist of it! Why not get out there and gimme a nommy if you're feeling so inclined, but otherwise... Sea ya later!