August 2nd 2026

On August 2nd, 1990, at 11:20am, Water Weasel's brain was fully activated and wirelessly connected to her first body.  Fire Fox had asked permission to be the one to wind up her "new sister", so Dr. Sound gave her a wind-up key to put in Water Weasel's back, and after turning it three times, Water Weasel took her first breath and vocalized her first words: "Thank you Fiona!  Oh, does my voice sound okay?"

Fire Fox (Fiona) reassured her that her voice sounded fine, gave her a loving hug, and then, to put it in Dr. Sound's own words: "For over ten minutes they spoke with one another, not as machines sharing data, but as sisters sharing thoughts and emotions."  Eventually they hugged Dr. Sound, who reassured them that she didn't feel "left out" and knew that they hadn't forgotten about her in all the excitement.

Then Dr. Sound called for Helper Hyena (Henry) to "meet his new sister" because, similar to when Fire Fox had been activated, Henry wanted to wait until she was "decent", which for him meant that her brain had been put somewhere out of sight and her body was fully assembled.  Clothing isn't a factor since neither he nor "his sisters" have any issues with seeing each other naked, but for some reason Henry is very uncomfortable with seeing their brains or seeing their bodies in certain states of disassemblement.

Water Weasel, with the "personal name" of Wanda, is the third Clockwork Companion created by Dr. Sound.  As stated in the previous entry, Dr. Sound wanted each of her creations to have their own "birthday", but she also wanted the extra time to give them individual care and attention, partially to prevent any feelings of neglect or sibling rivalry.

Wanda could be considered a "science nerd", so of course xkcd is canonically one of her favorite comics, though occasionally she needs help from Lit Lizard or Wind Wolf to get some of the punchlines.  Unsurprisingly she's also really good at swimming, which translates into "multi-jump in water" in the game.  Actually, they're all decent swimmers, but for the sake of "game imbalance" I want to have Wanda be the only one of the six "sisters" that can "swim" while designing all the water areas around not being able to do that.

I feel this "imbalance" will make the game more fun because, for example, if the player encounters a difficult water section or they're just not good at them, they have the choice of either completing Water Weasel's stage first so they can come back and use her to completely trivialize that section, or "git gud" and complete it now for their own reasons ("because I said so" is always a good one) or because it might make completing Water Weasel's stage easier for some reason, because I absolutely love it when games allow me the freedom to do something difficult "before I'm supposed to" in order to make something later on be easier than it should be.

Wait a minute, when I put it that way, wouldn't it make more sense to have it be that Water Weasel's secondary weapon is the reason that "swimming" is able occur?  Wait even more of a minute, if I apply this line of thinking to all of the secondary weapons, that actually solves a lot of potential lore-and-gameplay-segregation issues... and instead of rewriting things back there to reflect this new planning, I'll just keep this in as a showing of real-time development work or, something.

I actually hate the term "game balance" because all I can think of are the ways making a game "more balanced" makes for a very bland, predictable, and not very fun experience.  I don't want to see a clear and straight-forward line on a graph showing a game's difficulty gradually increasing in a "fair and expected" fashion, I want that line stupidly waving all over the place, especially if it's due to how I'm choosing to play the game.  To continue this ramble, one of my favorite things about the first three Mega Man games is how the bosses are "not balanced".  Some of them might require 7 hits from their weapon weakness, while others might only require 2 or 3 hits, and some usually have multiple weaknesses of varying degrees of damage caused, allowing for more personal strategies.  Then starting with Mega Man 4 they made things "more balanced" by making every single robot master require exactly 7 hits from their one and only weapon weakness and taking just 1 damage or no damage from everything else, meaning every single robot master from that game forward is just Hard Man from Mega Man 3 (minus the awesome "weak to his own weapon" thing every robot master had in my favorite Mega Man game).  I like the concept of Hard Man, but I DON'T like the concept of ONLY Hard Man.

To get away from that ramble, there's still a lot of lore-related things in this game's setting that I still haven't figure out yet.  For example, where is this game located?  Is it a country, or like, I don't know, some other term that's like a country but not as big?  Did the country have a different name before it merged with that other country that I also don't know the name of yet sometime in the very early 80s?  I don't know the exact date that happened yet because I don't know when the son of that Japanese man I also don't know the name of yet who helped Professor Alan in 1967 deal with his creations after they "went crazy" after studying ancient religion without any guidance and decided to become gods themselves was born, but I do know that this son was 18 at the time of that war that almost led to that second country completely destroying itself because the new leader (who was a fool but to his credit died bravely in that war) that overthrew the old leader (who was later vindicated by history and died peacefully in 1998) tried to create "war machines" similar to Professor Alan's creations, except they completely lacked the "human factor" and it was the kind of disaster that anyone who knows how those kinds of stories go could have predicted, but the son of that Japanese man had joined the army and mostly-single-handedly saved the day with the help of a female soldier that became his wife when the war was over, and they had a son that I also don't know the name of or exactly when he was born, but just like his father and grandfather, he's a mighty warrior like you'd see in one of those really awesome manly anime shows, though he often has the bad luck of showing up too late to help with any combat-related situation that's already been taken care of thanks to Dr. Sound's creations so all that's really left for him to do is help clean things up, which he gladly does because it still counts as helping and he's a really decent guy.

All of that has as much to do with the main story of this game as the history of your grandparents has to do with the main story of your life.  You aren't required to care, but you deserve to be rewarded if you do.

Anyway, I figured since this is the "birthday" of the "science nerd" of the group, maybe there should be a focus on the more technical aspects of the game in this post... or at least try to without mentally crashing over how little I was able to get done last month (I fail to accomplish this).

To start with, let's focus on the limited color palette of the game, which is meant to look like the entire EGA color palette, or rather, a variation that is due to deliberate decisions of technological limitations.

I'll start by addressing the most blatantly obvious issue that I'm certain comes across at first glance being due to sheer incompetence: the incorrect RGB values.  Yes, the 8s should be 0s, the 80s should be 85s, the 176s should be 170s, and the 248s should be 255s.

Oh wait, this IS due to sheer incompetence.  As I was putting this together, I realized, with utter horror, that it would make far more sense to use 8, 88, 168, and 248 as the values.  Now I'll need to go through all my game files and fix that...

I assume mistakes like these are why the people I love don't want me to be a part of their lives.

Oh wait, the reason I had it the other way was to match the color palette I made for, another project... oh forget it, this "8 88 168 248" layout is closer to the "0 85 170 255" layout than the "8 80 176 248" layout was.

Anyway, the reason why all the 0s are 8s is because Multimedia Fusion 2 Developer doesn't like using anything other than all 0s for the transparency color.  It's not that it can't, it's that it just doesn't want to for some things, like a custom mouse cursor, which is why I use all 8s for solid black, and it just makes sense to have things be consistent.

Another reason is Multimedia Fusion 2 Developer has four different color modes: 256 colors, 32768 colors, 65536 colors, and 16 million colors.  32768 is my favorite mode because every color is a multiple of 8, just like on the SNES.   I wanted to use the 256 color mode, but for some BIZARRE reason certain objects won't read the correct RGB values in that mode and return utterly nonsensical values, but I also realized that I could make my graphical tilesets freakin' HUGE by allowing more available RGB values to be read as data for the X and Y positions of the tiles on the tilesets.

I mean, check this craziness out:

4096 tiles is a lot of tiles for background graphics, especially when you consider that's not a representation of all tiles available for the entire game, but all the tiles for each individual level (or even more than that if we factor in being able to swap tilesets for, certain ideas).  The reason I'm using Red for X and Blue for Y and four ranges of Green (0-56, 64-120, 128-184, 192-248) for, uh, the quadrant stuff is because I want to use bright yellow pixels to represent ladders and bright green pixels to represent overhang climbing on the "Bones" maps (and a shade of orange for the top-of-ladder thing but I haven't put that in yet).  Right now, for testing purposes, I'm using the same image for both the "Bones" map and the "Graphics" map, which is why there's already weirdly-colored graphics put in place there.

Here's the current state of my testing map (those blue'ish and purple'ish pixels are just graphical notes that don't cause any code issues, which is awesome).

Right now it only takes, like, 2 or 3 seconds for the entire thing to load, and I could make the map even bigger if I wanted to, but other than Level 7 I think most levels will probably only make use of, like, maybe half of the available space.  That stuff on the right edge might be used for storing the sizes of each room (64 rooms is way more than I'll ever need), but it isn't being used for that yet (currently I'm using an invisible List Object with 8-digit values and I might instead just keep that method).  I do have the screen and room scrolling coded in and working perfectly, but right now the "brief pause followed by uncontrolled scrolling from one room to the next" effect hasn't been coded in yet and it just immediately jumps to the next room, which I am absolutely keeping in as a feature you can toggle, though maybe not until after beating the game so it'll be grouped in with, other things.

The reason why most of the ladders (yellow pixels) aren't solid lines is because they don't have to be (due to the height of the player's hitbox), and because they aren't actually placed on the map like every other tile.  I can't figure out how to read the Y coordinates of a tile the player collides with because I'm an idiot, so instead of placing ladder tiles, it places Active Objects that I can read the Y coordinates of, which is necessary for allowing the player to snap to the center of the ladder.  This also led to a bizarre situation where, after figuring out how to only load the "Bones" for the room the player is in (and thus only creating the ladder objects for that specific room instead of game-laggingly all of them), it turned out the jump controls were getting screwed up if I didn't have at least one ladder object existing somewhere (since it deletes all preexisting ones before loading the next room), so I had to include a line of code to always create a single ladder object far outside of the play area.  I'll probably have to do the same thing for when I create the "overhang climb object that you snap onto and can't move" for things like, I dunno, small floating hanging-type platforms where you don't have to worry about quickly letting go of the directional button as soon as you grab on.

To make things less confusing, here's part of the current state of the "Bones" code showing how the pixels are translated into tiles (I have to mouse over the check symbol thingy to make that stuff appear).

Anyway, like I said, this game is supposed to look like an old EGA game, except the twist that it's not regular EGA, it's Super EGA.  You know how there's VGA and SVGA?  Well, how about EGA and SEGA- oh, wait, that could be a problem.  I'm also using a 400x300 resolution, but I'm only using 384x288 because I needed my 4:3 resolution divisible by 16.

EGA is actually 64 colors, but normally it's only able to display 16 colors at a time.  Most games stick with the CGA 16 color palette because, I dunno, backwards compatibility or something.  CGA is actually 16 colors, but for some reason only text-based games can use the whole 16 colors, like ZZT.  Non-text-based games only have access to a few predetermined 4 color palettes, the two most common ones being one that is made up of the colors associated with traffic lights, and one that is made up of the colors associated with the flag of a dangerous group of people that claim they "act with love and sincerity" while doing terrible things like sending to people they take issue with dead rats (I honestly can't believe that anyone I know would actually do this), feces allegedly tainted with covid (I can't prove anything), or something they absolutely know will cause the most extreme psychological damage when sent to my mother's house to arrive close enough to my birthday last year, though I still believe that last one is entirely unrelated and could be just as much a silent cry for help as it could be a vile trap to trick me into doing something that could be used to ruin my life even further, I HAVE ABSOLUTELY NO IDEA.

I really don't know how much longer my body can physically handle dealing with this.

Anyway, now that I've ruined this write-up and probably made Water Weasel cry a little (Clockwork Companions do have a sort of "fluid-storage" setup enabling them to "shed tears", which isn't a physical necessity of their design, just an emotional one), the next update should be on September 3rd, the "birthday" of Lit Lizard, who I guess you could call the "culture nerd", meaning she likes anime, video games, y'know, that sorta stuff.  Hopefully I'll have her updated cape graphics finished by then, which was SUPPOSED to be finished by now, especially since I figured out how to make it work code-wise (along with realizing I only need 5 body part animation code groups, not 6, if I just add some redundant frames to group 5, and adding redundant frames to group 4 means I can give Helper Hyena a long unbuttoned coat), but every time I try to get any artwork done my C-PTSD flares up, and I don't even want to think about what could happen if I tried to create music right now...

As before, if anyone wants to say or ask anything, here's how to contact me.

Even if I don't get sent anything, I'll keep writing these blogs on the dates I've pre-scheduled (assuming the new medication my psychiatrist seems to think will help me get work done doesn't backfire), mainly because I said so, but also because I like to think there are people out there who want me to continue doing this even if they don't say anything, in the same way that I like to think there are girls and women out there who would be comfortable being topless/outfitless while snuggling with me, in that I feel like an idiot regardless of whether I believe that to be possible (I need help with this) or believe that to be impossible (I don't need help with this).

Whether you want me to succeed in gaining the strength to get this game done, want me to succeed in gaining the courage to commit suicide, or want me to succeed in first gaining that strength and then gaining that courage (I don't think the other way around is possible), hope and pray for whichever outcome you most desire.

-Andious Wandarier

DEEP WITHIN MY SOUL
THESE WOUNDS THEY WILL NOT HEAL
HATE CORRODES MY MIND
CONFUSING WHAT IS REAL