Canvases, Radioactive v1.14, Cameron

A steady day. Created most of the Spotify Canvases, including photographing some net curtains for lace, and finding a few small bugs in Argus (which is rare, it's fairly small and simple software). The Chicago Institute of Fine Art allows free use of its historical paintings, which is wonderful. I love their style of art too, and I'd happily donate art there. Their policy means that I can use some of Cotán's vegetables for my video, and a portrait of Harmen Hals, Frans Hals son in the Frans Hals video.

All that's left are The Laughing Cavalier, and Tycho Brahe.

Tonight, Steam have got back to me over Radioactive, so have prepared the Demo and Update for release on March 10th.

I'm feeling weary and disappointed. Almost every game on Steam has lots of reviews and interest, yet my games none, yet my games are, I think, good quality, certainly not spammy, not clickbait, not gambling, porn, clones, idiotic or any of the other many ultra-popular rubbish that litter gaming platforms - even if Taskforce does include Zombies (though the whole plot is strictly tongue-in-cheek). I feel sad at the injustice in the world. I spent 30 years trying to make game, working on my passion. I made lots of games, and although some were more popular than others, like Hilt II on Amiga, like Flatspace on PC, none were successful, and now struggle to be seen by anyone.

Yet, what can I do? My games are part of my art and I'll keep caring for them and trying to make them available for an uncaring world. I often neglect then, but do care about them, and care a lot while I'm working on them. As such, I now think that Radioactive is brilliant, even if the world does not. My life would be changed hugely with just one hit.

In other news, I read about Cameron, the wife of John Parsons today, and looked at some of her art and watched the 'Wormwood' film. Those strange, magical, artistic people of the West Coast are my sort of people. Art is my life and purpose, and art is magic. I don't believe in magic any more than religion, art is my religion because it has something to show for itself, some active contribution to make. Magic, if it is anything, is the power to transform others, to change minds and therefore the world. I must strive to express more, stronger, better, and live art to the greatest degree.

Onwards I march.

The Golden Age Spotify Canvases

A full day. Made a few more changes to Radioactive, just in case, to stabilise the screen resolution iterations, then took a video of the game to test the screen recording options on this PC. Windows 10/11 ships with a 'game bar' which is actually a useful screenshot and screen recorder, so I took a few videos and uploaded those. The game is rather fun to simply watch.

Then work on the Spotify Canvases for The Golden Age, which I hope can be used for a few full-sized videos too. I had to create a new 'infinite' chessboard 3D object, using my Hector tool, which meant registering the ComDlg32.dll with a fancy command. Then creating the object in Lightwave, and texturing it in my editor (a 3D Editor and Texturer in Visual Basic 6, one of the many tools I've made and used myself due to necessity).

Then I cut up the main cover artwork painting, so I could use 'my' looming face and the painter. This worked quite well. Then work on the other videos. For The Girl with a Pearl Earring, I used the Mauritshuis image (a shame I can't credit them in these tiny looping animations, but I have on my website). This is the only gallery which permits free use of its artwork, so all of my images come from them. they lack The Laughing Cavalier, and Girl Reading a Letter at an Open Window, but I can use many others, including a good Rembrandt self portrait, and a few by Frans Hals. For 'The Girl', I made her blink with some clever (if painstaking) photoshop work on the Argus texture.

Then I started to make a model Tycho Brahe:

He's made from a folded sponge wrapped in sack-cloth, and hot-melt glued. The hair is string painted yellow, the eyes and nose polystyrene. He looks more like van Gogh than Tycho Brahe, yet, the metal nose is a giveaway. I could gold-leaf it! I may use him for a full music video.

I won't spend long on any of it, I can't afford the time/money, so I must do my best with extreme time and budget pressure. This rarely makes the best art, but it can, and, in the general wide world, much of creative life is done like this. Bless my genius and ability to do this! My speed and efficiency is thanks in part to my software. I'm aware that perhaps nobody on Earth could do what I do. How many musicians have designed and programmed all of their own music software, all of their DSP algorithms, and the 3D animation software for creating music videos? I'm also aware how worthless these skills are considered in this abominable world; but perhaps one day I can sell the software, or can at least try.

I want to complete all 13 videos by the end of tomorrow.

I'm still waiting on Steam for information on how to add a shared depot to Radioactive, and, amazingly, after a full week and about 12 messages, Soundmouse still haven't fixed the problem preventing me from uploading my music there. All they need to do is delete some of my uploads, which I'm not permitted to. The fix should take 2 minutes.

Stoic Marches

I woke late after a night of strange nightmares. A creature with red spiral eyes kept pursuing me, hiding under the curtains. I woke tired.

I started work by looking again at Fictive, examining possible changes and how to put together a separate authors' and players set for it. It would be nice if I could do something with this system and am thinking of ways to update and use it, share it, but often I feel that my efforts in anything are futile. I've spent my life creating trying to share things, but constantly feel like I've got nowhere and am getting nowhere. Of course, some things are more popular than others.

There was a strange bug in Radioactive which, when 4 computer players battle, caused the first player to instantly play. This was, I think, due to leftover data in the unit structures after the initial title-screen battle. I spent some time tracking that down and fixed it. I'm ready to update it, but need Steam to get back to me regarding a few technical problems.

I had my first painting ideas of the year last night, but painting seems as futile as any aspect of my life. My mood today is full of doom, yet, at the same time eternal action, constant work. Each day, each hour, I do my best, roll my rock, strive for what is better. What is best to do in life? I would ideally devote myself to art, painting and music. Though both are ignored by the world, I can see improvement, gradual but certain with each act, and this feel satisfying but anything else; the pursuit of wealth though games or books is soul-destroying as well as futile.

I feel weak and my resources are waning. Life feels pointless, but I will keep fighting until the last hammer.

I have a plan for March, and seem to have, already in February, ticked off a lot of it. My small goals for the week are creating Spotify Canvas videos for The Golden Age. I have old games to remaster. I know that these will be ignored too, but nobody else can or will do this, and they are part of my life. It would be sad if they were to remain unseen forever, even if only sad to me.

Curiously, the Kindle version of my Songs of Innocence book is 'selling' on Amazon for the first time. I say selling, but it's free and being given away by Amazon. Before this month, it had 'sold' only two copies to Japan, but there's a renaissance in the e-book now. No physical copies have ever been sold. If only they knew that the Songs of Life is the rarity, with about 10 copies remaining from the 100-copy print run.

Flatspace IIk 1.07 and Radioactive

A programming day. There was a bug in yesterday's Flatspace IIk update which stopped the ingame music playing at the correct volume (loading a new tune resets the volume to 100% - didn't notice this, and this is not needed in Flatspace, as all music was loaded upon startup, with the volume set later). This annoying bug took a few hours to fix and update.

Then, a day of work on Radioactive.

I love this game. I decided to update the audio again, adding a little ambience, then worked on the store page, and created a shared depot for the files, to make it easier to add the demo. This work is rather tedious, and I've encountered a few problems with the system, but I've completed the programming on my side. Now awaiting for Steam to approve the store and fix a problem with the share depot.

Radioactive v1.14

A slower day than yesterday, starting with filing all of yesterday's work. I've updated Radioactive a version today, the only important change is making the Desktop resolution the default for the game, but lots of small bugs have been addressed (bugs that are only a problem if things go wrong, such as start-up files not being found, no keyboard or mouse detected etc.)

I've remade the speech audio using SayIt for a classic 1980s/1990s style of spoken audio and created a demo version where one can watch the computer play, as a technical test for those worried about compatibility. I've also explored increasing my prices. Future Snooker/Pool/Radioactive were all $11.99 at launch, later reduced to $8.99, but my cut at $8.99 can be under $1, and the cost of living has increased since. Around the world, some prices are 50% higher in USD than before. I'll wait until after the next major sale and increase prices.

I've had to create a Steam Demo product, and have lots of admin on that front. I won't actually update the game for users for a few weeks to avoid a pile of announcements all at the same time.

Flatspace Updates, Cabbage Licencing

A full day of updating Flatspace IIk, largely spent working on four new music tracks for the new Golden Age Music Pack. I knew I wanted to add the mysterious Nature Morte music, but wasn't sure about the rest. In the end I added edits of the songs (without words) to Welcome to My Gallery, Cotán, and Tych Brahe. The technical upgrades were fun. I almost feel like making Flatspace 3.

One problem is that the program is so complicated than balancing things is increasingly difficult. Originally I wanted a game that was as deep as a roguelike, but as easy to play as an arcade game. Over the course of development, more and more controls and options were added making it as complex as a roguelike, and as deep, with arcade elements. Well, there are many things I could do to improve the game, many ideas that fill me with joy and zeal, but I'm always crushed by the sadness that my years of working on games were wasted ones and that the money is just too poor to risk it. Taskforce took me 18 months or-so work at the time, plus about two months back in 2020, and yet it's still sold less than 15 copies. Flatspace is more popular, but not quite popular enough to gamble for financial reasons, so my motivations would be artistic. In some ways, my games were training in doing things for artistic reasons.

One thing I would love to do is update my older games and list those on Steam, but again, I need at least $100 per game. This, again, must remain an aspiration.

I've asked for permission to use images for the Cotán painting 'Still Life with Quince, Cabbage, Melon, and Cucumber', but the fees are a ridiculously unrealistic £195 for 5-years for use in a video. How many internet videos last 5-years? None. I expect that nobody licences under these terms. Every other museum with a 'Golden Age' painting has allowed the use of the work for free. Even The Mauritshuis, who own the Girl with the Pearl Earring, one of the most famous (and lucrative for the museum) paintings in the world, makes the image free to use in return for a credit; yet the practically unknown Cotán painting of cabbages costs an amount equivalent to about 20-years of streaming royalties.

The image is hardly vital, and I'm at least a good a painter as Cotán. I could probably paint a copy from life and do a better job, but a camera is even cheaper. I hardly need to use the actual image, or indeed any, but it would have been nice to create a video with Cotán's actual vegetables (a phrase few have ever typed!).

Programming is on my mind again. I'll start work on a Radioactive update next. A sale of three games starts tomorrow and I need some sales. Life is a struggle and a battle, as it is for so many.

Onwards!

Admin, Flatspace IIk v1.06

A few things done today. Made my paintings the main entry point and front page on my website, and looked into ways of using Fictive to create interactive books. It would be great if this could be a widely used tool for authors, but how to do this?

I spent most of the day updating Flatspace IIk and getting it working and compiled under Steam on this new PC; I'd not even installed Steam or run any of my games so far, so I was relieved that it worked first time. I've fixed lots of small errors with the help of Code Analysis, perhaps 20 or so small bugs, but mainly made the program load in-game music as needed rather than loading all of the tracks upon startup. This allows the addition of much more in-game music, up to 100 tracks, without any extra memory burden.

It would be good if I could add more DLC, and not necessarily music. It's easy enough. Part of me thinks that I could revive the project, this, my most successful game.

Music admin is being delayed. I was persuaded to submit a track to a dodgy looking website and apart from it barely working, and now being unable to either progress or delete my account, I'm now swamped with music promotion spam. I wonder if big pop stars get assailed by this sort of rubbish? Perhaps. 'All I can do is block' is a good title for a song.

Onwards I roll my rock. Onwards I charge. Onwards I stoicly crawl through the harsh winter of this world.

ArtSwarm Videos

A busy day, starting with more music admin and research into a future Flatspace IIk Music Pack, then completion of the ArtSwarm filing, the final tweaks to a new intro/extro sequence for the ArtSwarm Live videos, plus editing 6 together. I'm somewhat disappointed that my work doesn't feature, but this is an incentive for me to do better next time.