@NovaSquirrel@chitter.xyz
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NovaSquirrel

@NovaSquirrel@chitter.xyz

I'm a hobbyist game developer who mostly focuses on old Nintendo consoles, but I've done projects on PC too.

I'm a furry and I like to make cute characters and also make games about them! Check out my Toyhouse to see my characters: https://toyhou.se/NovaSquirrel

I'd like to meet other people who like to do lighthearted, story-driven roleplay.

I post NSFW sometimes but I tag it, so please be 18+ if you follow.

Feel free to reach out if you have common interests and wanna be friends! [she/her]

This profile is from a federated server and may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance.

NovaSquirrel, to random
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Someone on Second Life sent me a message asking if I could move some of my object that are intruding into their space, and I think they confused me for my neighbor somehow. If they're complaining about the tree I think they're complaining about I'd enjoy if it got moved too because it's poking through my house.

NovaSquirrel, to random
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I got all the Pokémon cards I individually ordered in my mailbox all together at the same time today, and it was funny having seven different envelopes all addressed to me. I thought it was going to be a situation where I'd just gradually get little surprises in my mailbox but apparently not, though one big surprise is fun too.

NovaSquirrel,
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I also got a package from my gf that I'd been looking forward to. Sometimes she visits game stores and tells me about a game I'd like so I send her money to get it for me, and I got all of those at once, plus a few goodies like a homemade Pokémon card of her ponysona, which I promptly put in my card binder alongside my other new cards.

I got Jumping Flash! 2, DDR for PlayStation 1, The Legendary Starfy, and Pipe Dreams 3D. Pipe Dreams was actually sealed and only like $12, for some reason.

NovaSquirrel, to random
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I'll probably stream more Chrono Trigger later tonight. Later than I wanted to tonight but I got held up.

NovaSquirrel, to random
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Sometimes when I stream games I have to sit in kind of an awkward position because the cord situation means my laptop and the TV have to be pretty close.

I guess I could solve this with extension cables, but for NES and SNES and Genesis I have this really cool workaround where I have the RF output go to my TV and composite (NES, Genesis) or S-Video (SNES) gets captured. This way it's two separate cables (or sets of cables) going in two different directions.

NovaSquirrel,
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Another advantage to this setup: my TV doesn't have stereo, but it will combine both audio channels of an RF signal.

That means I can set the game to stereo so it sounds better on the stream, but I won't have a channel missing for my own experience. Without me having to add another thing to combine channels.

NovaSquirrel, to random
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I think the local movie theater is doing a strategy where they're avoiding the need to have people check tickets by hiding what movie is playing in each room and having the ticket say where the movie you want is.

I kinda like that? You can leave and come back and don't have to prove you bought the ticket, and an employee is not put in a position where they have to confront guests, which I expect can get stressful.

NovaSquirrel, to random
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I just saw the Mario movie today and I genuinely liked it a lot. I guess I really liked seeing all the game mechanics treated sincerely and used for the plot.

NovaSquirrel, to random
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I've actually been using https://novasquirrel.github.io/SnesInstructionCycleTool/ quite a bit as I work on SNES dev, because I don't remember exactly how fast an instruction is and I'm trying to compare two different options for how I could do something. I'm glad I put it together.

https://novasquirrel.github.io/SnesVRAMPlanner/ is also surprisingly helpful, though less often; it's just nice to have a quick visualizer when I'm setting things up, that also gives me numbers to use.

NovaSquirrel, to random
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I like how I've ended up in a situation where I've got four different disc image programs because they do different (but overlapping) things. Though I could probably get rid of ImgBurn.

NovaSquirrel,
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@Blass_Rose Pretty much all of my remaining disc image usage is PlayStation 1 related nowadays, whether it's burning games onto discs to use with tonyhax, or making disc images of music CDs for emulated Vib-Ribbon purposes.

NovaSquirrel, to random
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Opening day for my local zoo! Looks like construction on the red panda exhibit I wanted to see won't be ready until May or so anyway, but it might be worth it to go back and check it out in more than one trip.

KitCatalina, to gamedev

Anyone do here?, I do indie and pixel games as of now.

NovaSquirrel,
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@KitCatalina Lots of people do!

NovaSquirrel, to random
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I'm using a custom audio loader protocol in my SNES game because you can do a lot better than the default one. One aspect of this faster loader is that the sound side will just assume the main side is always ready.

Today I went and double checked the timing again and yeah, after the sound side asks for a new set of four bytes, it's slow enough that by the time it actually reads the first byte, the main side is actually about to write the last byte. So waiting for it to be ready is unnecessary.

NovaSquirrel,
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The audio side of the SNES uses a separate timing source that's less accurate (a PZT ceramic resonator, as opposed to the rest of the hardware using a crystal?) and it drifts a bit with temperature, so you can't rely on exact timing and have to have some leeway. But it definitely looks like there's a whole lot of leeway already.

NovaSquirrel, to random
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Still genuinely at a loss for what I'm supposed to do to find other people who do non-edgy, non-erotic, non-sci-fi roleplay online in 2023, or what sorts of communities I'm supposed to look at. I've felt really stuck for a long time and tried lots of things that didn't work out. I don't know if I need to just push Tilemap Town harder (I've been logging in every day and no one else does anymore) or if that wouldn't work anyway. It makes me sad I can't do a hobby I'm passionate about.

NovaSquirrel,
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I've gotten to do little bits of it but it's not very frequent and I haven't gotten to do anything with most of my characters. It would be nice to have a space where I can hang out in-character and bring in whoever I like, but I don't know how to make that happen.

NovaSquirrel, to random
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I've been thinking about how it'd be cool to play with fxpak/sd2snes firmware to add new coprocessors, like my earlier experiments with doing it on NES: https://github.com/NovaSquirrel/Chipmunk

But the thing about SNES is that the novelty is kinda gone because there's several cool official options that emulators and flashcarts already support, and it's a lot less enticing to put in that work when it's so easy to avoid.

That said... imagine a SNES game with access to a really fast RISC-V or SH-2 core.

NovaSquirrel, to random
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I got a random pack of 50 Pokémon cards and actually got really lucky because it included Mareep, Flaaffy, Hoppip, Skiploom, and Eevee, and those are some of my favorites. I thought it was just going to result in a lot of cards of Pokémon I don't care a whole lot about.

scout, to random
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thinking about "cute game" as a style of genre game, like "horror game" is. what are some tropes that "cute games" have?

NovaSquirrel,
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@scout Playing as an animal is pretty common across most of the games I find enticing for cuteness reasons

NovaSquirrel, to random
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When something I buy takes several more months to get to me than the original prediction, the excitement from when I bought it just ends up going away.

NovaSquirrel, to random
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Here's a Rosy Sky picture I commissioned from a friend, https://cupoftealeaf.carrd.co/

NovaSquirrel, to random
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I'm working on improving the graphics for my game's mode 7 levels, starting with Maffi herself. I'm still figuring out animation but I think this looks better than just standing there. I tried animating the plug as having some weight to it, since it would be heavier than the rest of the tail.

It's kind of funny to put most of the animation emphasis on the tail specifically, because that brings out certain hobby animation vibes, but that's fine (and welcome!) for Nova the Squirrel 2.

Animation of a pixel art mouse bobbing and swaying her tail back and forth

NovaSquirrel,
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I added a bunch of decoration and mode 7 levels look really fancy now! It's surprising just how much decoration matters.

I was trying to go for a vibe of some sort of flat level plane with some void underneath it, but I ended up making it look ocean-y so maybe I will lean more into that. It was tricky to figure out what sort of thing to draw above the horizon because it had to look ok when the camera was lifted up. Drawing stuff very far in the distance helped a lot with that.

An anthropomorphic mouse standing in a mode 7 world next to some void space, with some fans and some toggleable walls.
An anthropomorphic mouse in mid-air above a fan in a mode 7 world

Video of the player in a mode 7 perspective game move forward, jump over a fan, and get boosted into the air.

NovaSquirrel,
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@slembcke When I saw https://lospec.com/palette-list/aap-splendor128 I was really inspired to use it a whole lot because I really liked the color choices

NovaSquirrel, to random
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I played around with setting up my game to reuse memory between platformer levels and mode 7 levels, and I found a solution that works ok (making use of unions), but it throws off the debugger I use, so I just put that in a branch in case I want to play with that later. I have so few mode 7 variables that having them combined doesn't really save very much, definitely not enough to justify making debugging a lot more annoying.

NovaSquirrel,
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Oh right I could approach this in a way that confuses debuggers a little less, but still doesn't require me to manually adjust anything.

I already have step in my build process where I intercept everything the assembler did before it goes to the linker, and create a linker config from that, so I can just expand the scope of that to include also setting up definitions in a way where things overlap if I want them to. Of course debuggers still won't know which is which, but it'll say something.

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