February 2 Updates

It’s February! Just like that a month of 2026 is already over. Can you believe it?

The fact that it’s already February makes me feel the importance of working on my projects every day even more. Time flies, and someone has to make new games and speedrun old ones.

The speedrun streak is now at 18, and I had my first stream of the year last Friday. It was great to get back to being live. I finished my first stream at #96 of the 176 runs posted on the leaderboards. Not bad for our first time out. Traditionally I’ve only been uploading my best speedrun in each game on YouTube, but I’m interested in chronicling a little more of the journey this year, so I think I’m going to upload whatever the PB is at the end of each stream. Youtube is a lot more friendly than Twitch as far as storage space, so it’s a better repository for such things. Here’s the first PB if you missed it:

The current PB still has two deaths in it, which is a ‘good’ thing from our perspective today. Removing those from the run will save us ~40 seconds. 40 seconds would move us from #96 up to around #79 without any change to what we’re already doing. After that, we’ll start getting into the longer-tail of improvements.

I don’t have a time or leaderboard-ranking goal for Mega Man 4 just yet. The dust is still settling. I do plan to push as hard as I can though. For those not familiar with the timer program shown in the video above, the little number in the top right of the display is how many attempts I have done in the game. You can see that the personal best here came in just the fifth attempt, which makes sense, since it’s our first stream. You’ll see that number climb as the streaming days keep coming.

Switching gears to game dev, the streak sits at 28. Last week saw mostly supporting artwork. Tomorrow I’m planning to take a break from working on pixel art and head back into the game engine. Gotta keep things fresh.

Above we’ve got the main town square of Friendshp, the main town and home base of the game. The main character’s house is in the bottom-left. The top left is a library. The bottom middle green one with the sign is the grocery store, and the bottom right yellow/orange one with the sign is an equipment shop. Next to the library is a small stand where you can buy small restorative treats like popcorn and cotton candy. Top right is the Citrus Circus. The unmarked houses will all house NPCs who give quests to the main character.

Above is the interior of the circus tent. There’s an array of citrus displayed at the top, and there will eventually be a few living and talking citrus fruits inside, though they are not done yet.

Above is the interior of the red house. The person living in the red house is going to be really into plants, and will have a questline related to growing a mythical plant that requires finding a special seed and fertilizer and such. Also if you look back at the main Friendship town square, you’ll see that the red house has a hole in the top of it. After completing the questline, the plant will grow out of the ceiling and you’ll be able to climb it and get somewhere secret. Some gamers will recognize this questline as being inspired by Super Mario RPG.

Above is the interior of the purple house, which is the home of a book-worm (who might literally be a worm, TBD). Their questline will revolve around finding rare books, and their starter-quest will simply require you to return one of their overdue books to the library, which will be your first incentive to enter the library and see what’s up there.

Lastly for now, we’ve got the interior of the blue house, which is the home of a fish collector. This questline will revolve around finding rare fish and helping complete their aquarium but do not fear, there will not be a fishing mini game. I think we’ve all played enough fishing mini games to last a lifetime at this point.

Switching topic to my diet, I did lose the streak, and we are starting over at 1 today, but it was an overall good week. I’ve been walking ~3 miles a day on the walking pad I purchased, and I quite enjoy having that option available. Erika and I watch at least an hour of TV together daily, so all I’m doing is walking 3 miles per hour for the first hour we watch TV. This has been putting me right around 5 miles walked per day, since I cobble together 2 miles during the rest of my day.

If you’re wondering what we’ve been watching, I paid for a month of Amazon Prime to get free delivery during this crazy blizzard era we’re living through right now in Pittsburgh (shame on me), but it has enabled us to watch the Fallout show. I’ve been enjoying it; the season finale airs this week. We’re also watching two seasons of RuPaul: season 18 of the traditional show, and season whatever-we’re-on of UK vs. The World (The UK’s version of the “All Stars” concept). Movie night remains on hold during the blizzard because I don’t wanna.

Anyway, here’s the chart we’ll be updating this year, with data for our first week:

These are the big 3. Game dev, speedrunning, weight loss. If I can make progress in these three areas, I’ll be happy this year. We’ve gotta keep the ball rolling.

That’s it for me for now. I’ll be updating this post throughout the week with updates, so feel free to stop back in if you want to see what I’m up to mid-week. I’ll talk to you soon - have a great day! You can do it!

Imperfect Art

I was listening to Debaser while cleaning my apartment this Sunday morning. I’ve loved Debaser forever. I even get to have a little bit of Boston pride with it, since it came out in the brief window (1989) where Boston was actually kind of the place for cool new rock music before Seattle swooped in and became the capital of grunge.

One thing Debaser reminds me of is that amazing art doesn’t have to be perfect. The reason it brings this lesson to mind for me is that the song has just about the dumbest lyrics of any good song I can think of off the top of my head. And not dumb in a Spill the Wine oh that’s quirky and funny and stupid kind of way. It’s dumb in a these lyrics are legitimately dumb and the song is great in spite of the lyrics way.

It’s about some silent French short film (21 minutes) called Un Chien Andalou that came out in 1929 and has an ‘iconic’ scene where they slash some guys eyes open on camera (it’s not real but it looks real). It was co-written by Salvador Dali. Cool cool cool cool cool cool cool. But like, no one has seen, or is attempting to see this movie. Not now, and not in 1989 when this song initially came out. Yes, I was one year old in 1989, but I still am pretty sure these lyrics were never relatable. It reads to me as the Pixies trying to seem cool because they saw some now-obscure silent French film. This short film is more than a decade older than Citizen Kane, which in itself was one of those ‘it was so influential!!!’ movies that no one actually ever saw. The song is about how the Pixies are trying to be as completely different and influential in music as this movie apparently was when it came out in 1929.

Let’s be real, the lyrics are cringe. I apologize to the French silent short film super fans out there, all two of you who exist. These drum rolls though. You don’t have to be perfect in every way to be amazing. I feel like I need to embrace that idea more in my work. I’ll surely be listening to Debaser until I’m in the grave.

Wednesday Update

Yesterday was my second stream in the Mega Man 4 era. It was a fun stream with a good audience, though I did not set a new personal best time. In my projects previous to Mega Man 4, that was a pretty rare occurrence. Nowadays I’m trying to stream slightly more often, so I think streams with no new personal best time are going to be a bit more common.

I’ve also got the first draft of the background for the green grass and woods area done. When viewed here in a still frame it’s going to look overly busy, but in practice a lot of these things exist on separate layers, and will move at a unique speed. E.g, the clouds will move at one speed, the bush with the berries on it will move another, and the trees will move at another. I think once everything is actually in motion, it won’t look crowded and busy like the still frame does, but we’ll see.

Thursday Update

I’m planning on streaming today. I got a great day of practice in yesterday, so I’m fully expecting to PB today, but then again, I can’t remember ever having a stream where I didn’t go in thinking that.

I hope everyone is having a great week so far. It’s kind of flying by on my end. I’ve been enjoying working my projects and feeling good. Good luck out there today <3

Got some new fruit enemies intended for the woods level here. One step at a time y’all.

The third Mega Man 4 stream ended with a bang - I improved my personal best time to 40:16. That moves us from #96 at the start of the day to #70 on the leaderboards to end the day. BANG.

I PB’d twice in this stream. The first was by around 45 seconds, and then this run saved another 30 on top of that. Here’s the video if you want to check it out :)

Yes, I did just get The Situation’s book from the library. SO excited!