DI MONTHLY #8: Better Late Than Never

Good news, everyone!

Hello. It's me, John Mors. I know I'm late. I both have a cold, AND am in the middle of yet another constant burnout and “holy hell I'm cracked” cycle. But it's okay, because I do have some exciting stuff to share from last month.

WHAT???

Yup, I've indeed been nominated for the GameMaker Awards 2025 in the Community Legend category!

This nomination means...a lot to me. I've spent years making stuff with this engine, and being recognized by both the community and the team behind GameMaker is genuinely a huge honor.

But truthfully, I wouldn't be able to do any of this without you all playing my games and supporting my weird endeavors over the years. So...thank you. Thank you so much for sticking around and keeping up with my bullshit. Means a lot to me.

If you want to help me bring this award home (and why wouldn't you?), please consider dropping a vote!

VOTE FOR ME HERE!!! IT CLOSES IN A DAY!!! (maybe I really should've just dropped this newsletter earlier)

Pro-Crustination

Do you hate cropping and resizing images into 50 different sizes for 10 different storefronts? No? You don't actually release video games on 10 different storefronts in the first place?

See, I had this issue earlier in the year with Operius DX. Every store has a dozen different requirements, and I didn't want to spend hours doing all this tedious work manually. Not to mention that making promotional assets for social media is a bit of a pain in the ass too.

So I built a tool that does it for me!

Meet Procrustes, a free tool for promotional asset creation. It works in your browser and as a desktop app.

I went completely overkill and built a full visual editor in TypeScript and Rust, but I think the result ended up being well worth it!

If that sounds interesting, give it a try! If you wanna read more about it, check the announcement post, where I go into a LOT more detail. Tell us what you think too!

She Cadence On My Block Till I Cascade

As I mentioned in the previous newsletter, we're working on a beefier version of Cascadence. It's still in the early stages, but…

WE GOT IT RUNNING ON THE SWITCH BABYYY!!!

Okay, the performance is still very rough (we've done no optimizations, oughhh), but seeing it run on this lil thing is still nice. I'm hoping that we can get it to a playable state soon, but we'll see.

As for what the game is going to be like, imagine the base Cascadence, but better. You know, with more polish, additional game modes, and more themes. It's going to be sold for the same price as Operius DX too, which is $5. The soundtrack will probably be a bit more expensive though, we have BIG plans for that one.

Don't consider this an official announcement though. More like a secret insider look. ;)

Operius DX Everywhere

Speaking of handhelds, a while ago I was contacted by the folks at PortMaster, an open source community project for porting games to retro emulation handhelds. They wanted to port Operius DX and include it with their collection of games, and I thought, "Why not?".

So now you can try Operius DX out on a large variety of handheld devices, for free! Yep, it's one of those “Ready to Run” games, meaning you get to try out a demo version of the game directly on your device. If you go get the full game on itch.io, though, you can copy over the files to play the full game on your little scrungly device. No, the Steam version won't work.

Get Operius DX on PortMaster!

Get the full game on itch.io!

I should probably mention that this is NOT an official release of the game. I'm simply highlighting a cool community project that is doing some sick stuff. So special thanks to the folks at PortMaster, specifically Fraxinus88 for getting this all set up!

Jeoff Keighley and Hideo Kojima Yaoi

Just a heads up: Steam's winter sale starts on December 18, and Operius DX will be on sale for 20% off! So if you're looking for a cheap game to pick up for your friends and family for the Christmas, oh boy, you sure are in luck!

I'm assuming you already bought it for yourself though, of course. You did, right?

Fin de una breve publicación del boletín informativo

It feels kind of weird, now that we're nearing the end of the year. This has always been a strange time of year for me, since I cannot help but look back and feel like we could've done a lot more than we did.

Well, there's still time for us to do cook up some more stuff, and we'll be back with an end of year recap post at the end of the month too, so I guess we'll see how well we did by then.

Keep your eyes peeled for the forum and all the other shit we've been cooking up! And don't forget to vote for me in the GameMaker Awards! HERE!!!111!!1!!1!!!

I kiss you. Bye!

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