Been busy... 😅

Kinda realizing nowadays that even if I'm not directly posting things directly relevant to my game, it might help to give some context on what I've been up to nowadays!

So, for those few who probably already know (since most folks over here likely are from the stream) I've been working on bot dev for the past few weeks, after a brief hiatus from Death For Growth while working on a game jam entry for the Jern Jam 2! In which I proudly made the worst rated game, and was awarded the Peer Pressured Award!! After failing to complete that jam entry on stream, I pivoted to working on my son, SetolyxBot!

I've been working on him quite a lot the past few weeks and have made a lot of progress. For those less initiated, I've been working on a sort of twitch-gamification chatbot by the aforementioned name of SetolyxBot for over a year. I've taken him from a completely limited system of pre-determined responses and limited chat commands to an expansive and adaptive system leveraging multiple APIs, one of the most significant being OpenAI, which allows him to conversate and be sassy as all hell!

Upon these changes, and many other attempts at expanding my son, I've taken him from a system that originated within the .net framework, to a system which now uses .Net 7, and now utilizes dependency injection to make the overall structure of functionality more scalable and more easily compatible with other frameworks like Blazor/Maui, etc. As the plan is to integrate an entire website of functionality into my twitch stream. Nowadays he's got conversational capacity (though memory is still in the works) and does all sorts of things like help run my stream, timeout people for bullshit reasons like "rice sins", "low effort jokes" and "being a dumbass", and more!

I'm currently working on setting up a proper local database instead of relying on .json files like I have since early on in the project, and I'm super stoked for the future of SetolyxBot! I'm just now dipping toes into databasing, but once I'm a couple steps further I'll be able to start cracking back into the development of Death For Growth at full speed, and I'll likely be committing a similar energy toward refactoring its systems as I have to refactoring my bot. There are many things I would like to improve, and honestly a lot of Death For Growth might just be getting rewritten to make sure things satisfy my newly existing standards.

So to those of you who are reading, know the dev is going beyond well, it's just been a bit muddied up with mixed priorities. I refuse to leave my current projects unfinished, so the game dev will continue SOON, and not just Soon™!! Streaming has just become the most likely source of stability for me nowadays financially and creativly, so I gotta lean into adding features to that which in turn allows me to continue working on dev of any variety in the long term, since this is what I do for any money I make whatsoever! Hopefully things work out as well as they have so far, because I'm incredibly excited for the future of the stream, bot, and game, as well as future projects!

All that said, if you wish to check in on my work, swing by my Twitch Stream where you can find me 5 days a week, Saturday through Wednesday, from 11am till about 4pm Pacific! And if you already know what I'm up to, and/or like the sound of what I'm working on, please do consider swinging by the stream sometime and saying hi! Beyond the stream, there's also the avenue of supporting me over on Patreon, which is an absolutely above-and-beyond way to support me in all endeavors beyond just streaming, so consider checking it out! Every little bit counts, but nothing is expected! ♥

In general, if you've read this, thank you very much. I just wanted to give a sort of general update on things, without directly tying it to my Death For Growth dev, because I know some folks see posts related to it and expect updates, which are still absolutely one million percent in the works!!

To Close...

I'd like to state a clear intention that once my game is reaching a public release level of ANY sort, be that open beta, early access, or full release, there will be frequent updates on a test branch at all times; even if those updates may be game breaking. It's only due to fear of breaking the game thus-far that I don't immediately upload each change that I make, as it's already broken enough as is. So I hope that is understood alongside my passion toward dev and determination to make something remotely decent. I don't want to ever be one of those devs that releases something vaguely enjoyable and doesn't continue frequent work on it, so I assure you as the game reaches later stages, the frequency of updates will become more stable and often!! 💪🤩

Again, if you've read this, thank you very much! Time for me to recede back into the shadows until I emerge again tomorrow as of writing this, with more incoherent rambles to share live on twitch!! 🤓