Jan 19 Updates

Welcome back everyone! It’s great to see you. Guess what? There’s another week upon us. That’s good right?

Two weeks ago was essentially the start of the new year, since the new year has to start on a Monday due to the human rules of the number 7 and well-supported procrastination. That means it’s been 14 days of trying to do things differently than last year.

(This tune didn’t quite get enough run-time at the end of last week’s post. TOGETHER.)

The discipline that has been doing the best is game dev. I have not missed a day yet in 2026. That’s 14 straight days of working at least two hours a day. I’ve tried to pay attention to how it has gone. The first week definitely involved a lot of REALLY not wanting to do the work, and then doing the work. Week two felt smoother. I still sat and had a coffee and goofed off for like an hour in the morning, but I’d eventually get myself going. Slowly but surely, the game dev is feeling less and less optional, which really is the idea. The more I feel like I have the option to not work, the more likely I won’t work. Humans, including myself, are lazy at their core.

Here’s a new character created during the past week if you missed it in the updates to last week’s post. This is based on my Twitch friend Cosmic Citrus who goes by the nickname “Circus”. Her character will be in charge of the Citrus Circus, alongside her real life dog Bo.

These were worked on during a little break from working on the textboxes and menus in the game. Here’s the update there if you missed it. You need audio to hear the text blabbity blah blah noises. We’ve got room for dialogue portraits (though they don’t exist yet), changing speaker names, changing babble noises, and an overall good start to the text system.

Another detail worked on last week was looking forward to the translation of the game into different languages. The game no longer has english dialogue interspersed throughout the code. Instead, there are keys that map to an external CSV where each column represents a different language. It’s quite a ways down the road, but if I ever want to have this game available in a language other than English, it is already setup for that.

Toward the end of the week, I started working on the main character’s house, which will exist in the town of Friendship. My previous mocks of Friendship were from a top-down perspective, so this is the same idea translated to a side-scrolling view.

The two blank rectangles will be posters on the wall that I haven’t gotten to yet. You can also see that I started working on visible clouds through the windows - that’s the first thing I want to pick back up with this week. I’d like the clouds to neatly pass by all four windows in a continuous fashion. So like, after you see a specific cloud leave the far left window, you’ll eventually see it show up in window #2.

The other notable thing about the main character’s room is that the view is zoomed in 2x relative to the rest of the game. That means the main character will be 64x64 on this screen instead of the default 32x32. Changing the perspective in this manner isn’t something I’ve actually done before in the code, so that will be an upcoming learning experience.

Now, let’s take a moment to properly celebrate the fact that I’ve done two weeks of daily game development. HELL. FUCKING. YES. This is exactly what I want out of my life. It’s up to us to make our lives happen. I don’t want to sound like a grind culture influencer, but speaking only for myself, I cannot take days off of game dev. There is absolutely no reason that I need to do that. Your goals and circumstances might differ a lot from mine, but I need to keep up with this no-days-off mentality.

Don’t look now, but speedrunning is starting to cook

I’m at four consecutive days of speedrunning for at least two hours a day. Much like game dev, the momentum is building.

Mega Man 4 has 16 levels, and by the end of last night I had learned 8 of them. By now everyone has heard the rumors floating around Twitch. The rumors that mclepke is done speedrunning. She’s washed up. She peaked with her 18:57 in Ninja Turtles 4.

We ain’t done folks. The comeback is on and mclepke will rise again. We just need to keep taking it one day at a time. One two hour session at a time. One room at a time. One button press at a time. That’s how great speedruns are made.

Don’t look now, but my diet is still up and down

Come along for the ride diet! It’s close to happening. Game dev is killing it. Speedrunning has officially jumped on board and now speedrunning is killing it. Diet is the last thing before we’re in Super Mclepke Mode.

This is the week. Seven days, two hours of game dev each day, two hours of speedrunning each day, no processed food all week, and we’re staying under 1600 calories all week.

Other Stuff

For those wondering, movie night will be resuming next week after a long holiday hiatus.

Also an important reminder to everyone to hit up the library. Video game prices have been a topic of conversation in the industry lately. New games are selling for $80, and there’s widespread speculation that Grand Theft Auto 6 will be charging $100 when it releases in November.

Metroid Prime 4 came out in December, and I was interested to see what Nintendo would do with the title. Metroid Prime 3 came out in 2007, so there was a really long layoff between games. If you read the reviews, a common sentiment you’ll read (at least right now, while the game is still new) is that the game is decent, but not worth anywhere near $80. The website How Long To Beat which tracks such things calculates the main story taking a slim 13 hours based on aggregating polled data from users.

And the thing is, it’s totally true. This game is not worth $80, and had I spent $80 on it, I probably would feel some underlying resentment toward the game for not being worth it. When you can play the game for free from the library though? Eh, it’s fun enough to be worth my time. The library helps you just enjoy what’s there to enjoy with a game and makes the whole experience lower pressure. Frequent your libraries everyone.

That’s all for now - updates will come in throughout the week. Have a great week everyone! I believe in you.