DI MONTHLY #6: ALWAYS BUSY!!!

Me? Focusing on one project? Oh, don't be silly...

It's kinda crazy that this is our 6th newsletter already. That's like, half a year of monthly newsletters that probably nobody reads. Except you, apparently! And you know what? I appreciate you. You're a real one.

Anyways, this was (sort of) a busy month. So let's get into it!

MORS FOR MAYOR!!!

Nominations for this year's GameMaker Awards are now open, and I'm going to shamelessly ask you to nominate me!!!

See, they have a new category this year called “Community Legend”, and it'd be really funny if I won that one. Plus, apparently the finalists get 12 months of enterprise license. That shit is very expensive, and we need it for console self-publishing.

So, uh, please vote for “Mors”! That's genuinely one of the best ways to support what we do.

Nominations are open until October 16th! I guess you can put the link to my Bluesky there when they ask for socials.

And, I mean, if you REALLY want you can nominate Operius DX for the best game too. :D

A Puzzle Game?

So, remember how we teased a puzzle game a few months ago? The idea with that one was to make it a small game for the newsletter subscribers, something special for our most dedicated fans. But I was busy with the Gamescom game, and Cato wasn't even fully convinced by the idea, so we had to drop it for the time being.

Anyways, while we were getting close to finishing the Gamescom game, we were told about this “Falling Block Jam” happening. AHA! We've got the perfect excuse to make a puzzle game now!

Well, we decided not to start over from scratch, but to take the same idea, most of the codebase, and build on top of it. So, you know, at least 30% of the game was made before the jam even began. Is this cheating? No idea, but nobody has complained about it yet, so I guess it's fine!

And yeah, here's the game… Cascadence!

The idea is simple, just form 4x4 squares of the same color with the falling blocks. In the Marathon mode, you have 10 levels to complete, each with a different theme. In the versus mode, meanwhile, you can play against a friend or the CPU. Yes, we even added CPU opponents. I'd call it AI, but that word has different connotations these days.

I'm really happy with how the game turned out, and I'm very grateful for all the positive feedback too. Everyone who got to play it was SHOCKED that we made this game in only a week. Like, all that juice? All those game modes? And that music? In a week???

And the best part is that out of the 239 games in the jam, ours has managed to become the most popular one, at least for a while. Even surpassing games made by my own game dev idols! I even got to talk to some of them and watch them play my game and AHHHHHH I'm flailing my legs and squealing like a little girl right now >.<' EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEKKK!!!!!!!!!

But yeah, you can get the game on itch.io here. There's a web version but I wouldn't recommend it, just download it for Windows. If you're not on Windows...well, that's rough, buddy.

That said, you should also play all the other games in the jam! You can do so from the jam page here. They're all great! Okay, maybe not all great, but there are many awesome games in there. Some that might even be better than ours?

One thing you might have noticed is that we didn't call it a “Distant Illusions” game. That's because it isn't one. I just released it as a “Mors and Catonator” game. I guess it was my own way of separating the “serious” games from the ones we make in a week while crunching ourselves to death.

In hindsight, it probably would've been a much better idea to put it under the DI banner to get more eyes on Distant Illusions, but oh well.

A… PICO-8 Game?

This one has even less to do with Distant Illusions since Cato isn't even involved. See, I was looking for some inspirations for our forum, and I decided to take a look at PICO-8's BBS. There I saw that there was a game jam happening, and, to Cato's dismay, I couldn't control myself.

It's called “drift1k” because the whole theme of the jam is to have a game under 1024 bytes. I thought it'd be an easy way to start with PICO-8 development, so I jumped in.

No.

80% of the development process here consisted of me doing a shitton of micro-optimizations to make the code as simple as possible, which was NOT easy. It was kinda fun though. And, people seemed to really enjoy the game too...somehow. Like, this game also ended up at the top of the jam popularity list, even though it's my very first PICO-8 game! Damn!

Give it a try!

Mors, Do You Have Any Actual Distant Illusions News?

Okay okay, I get it. You're not here for my shitty game jam games, you're here for the big Distant Illusions news. Well, my friends, my bros, my fellas...we've got one thing for you!

Remember when I said I was looking for forum inspirations? Well, that's because we're making a lot of progress on that front too, and we're hell-bent on getting it out this month. In fact, in the upcoming weeks we'll be launching it in public beta, so keep an eye on your inbox! We're bringing SOUL back to the internet!

You might be wondering what will happen to the Discord server as a result. Well, not much. It will still be around, but we want to turn the forums into the main hub for the community instead. We'll see how that goes, but I'm optimistic.

The BIG Sale

Oh, lastly… Operius DX is currently on sale on Steam, as a part of the Autumn Sale! It's 10% off, meaning you can now get it for $4.49, instead of the usual $4.99. That might not sound like a lot, because it isn't. But it's still something!

What's that? The sale is over? Well, fine, I guess we're putting it on discount for ANOTHER week. Now you have, no excuses left.

GO GET IT NOW!!! GO GO GO!!! YOU HAVE UNTIL 13 OCTOBER!!!!!!

Le Finale

This month wasn't the biggest for Distant Illusions itself, but for me, it was packed with side projects, jams, and other such fun experiments. I have a suspicion that it wasn't exactly the most exciting month for Cato, though…

Either way, things are going to be a bit different next month, because by then we will have the forums up and running, and we might even have some big news on our big upcoming project! We will see.

NEVER STOP THE GRIND!!! DISTANT ILLUSIONS OUT!!!

(and pls don't forget to nominate me :D)

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