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I tried this first, but found it really hard to recognize/remember [random-glyph] as "hello". Better if it's readable, even if unrelated, to make looking it up in the blab-o-dex easier. I may add a letter to separate conversations, so "H2" instead of "31". Still figuring it out.

Thanks! Just played FCD, love it <3

Love this so far. Great work! Two suggestions:

1. I have a really hard time using the crank for rewinding. Would much prefer that to be on the B button, with the current popup menu options just stuck in the system menu.

2. Paging through all the dialog notes when retrying is a bit of a drag. It'd be nice if the B button could immediately dismiss without paging through like A. Or maybe put the notes above Elena's head so you'd need to jump to read them in the first place.

Thanks! I intended to make the VIEW process slightly annoying to disincentivize it but probably went a little too far.

Yeah, sound on/off should be a physical switch but I (1) added sound way late, and (2) had already designed the case.

Cool idea. The generator is a means to an end though - to create a diverse martian population for the game's mechanics and settings. I'd do things differently if the focus was on build-a-face. Not that it couldn't work but it'd be a different game.

For the mouths, you're on point. I haven't shown it yet but each mouth has 3 versions: em/oh/eh, which is just barely enough for animating speech.

If it was fast enough to generate them all at once then it'd be fast enough to generate as-needed, so there's no real advantage to doing everything up front. My plan is to include a few thousand faces, so hopefully it still feels random enough without having to port everything to the runtime.

I had another game idea specifically targeting the Playdate's 1-bit screen and the crank but not really the physical screen size. Mars was a followup idea trying to hit all 3.

Thanks! There's a fairly simple "collision" system that I use to snug the parts together and I think that helps with making the fit feel natural. Also because everything is low resolution 1-bit, it's easier to forgive some mismatching.

I try to work in drawing on paper/ipad and plinking around on a synth/piano to get some productive time away from the desk. Recommended.

Thanks Stephan! Any runtime synth would just be generating a sample buffer in the end so I'd be surprised if straight .wav playback wasn't faster.

My god it's full of stars. Thank you! I'd run across this before but it never comes up in searches so it just slipped right on out of my brain.

I worked on things for a long time knowing it wasn't enough but having no idea what to add. Some of the best ideas come while spinning my wheels, so even procrastinating can be productive.

Probably just from "dune buggy" :)

Thanks! I spent way too long on a custom animation scripting system and the two credit machine sequences are so far the most complex scenes using it.

I didn't know about that and it's almost exactly what I want. When did that get added? Clever hiding it under a single-option "Generate" submenu.

It even supports svg shapes and exporting sub-layers alongside containing groups. Definitely the best way to do multi layer exporting.

I still need the positions and structural hierarchy so it's not quite enough for the Mars case but I'll put it in the toolbox for other projects. Thanks for pointing it out :)

I recently started testing ArtStudio Pro out (maybe from one of your earlier recommendations) and you're right, it's excellent. For patterns I prefer using layer effects, which it supports just like Photoshop so all happy here.

Those screens look beyond great btw.

Cool to see you here, and thanks for Pixaki! For layering, #1 request from me is groups, #2 is masks.

The system itself does support species like that but I haven't loaded it up with much yet. It's more-or-less based on some ideas from Papers Please, where what you really want is to define some criteria, then generate papers (or a face) that explicitly matches or does not match in interesting, non-confusing ways.

Interesting. For Obra Dinn I felt the outlines were key to legibility and wanted them to be as clean as possible. Which meant the relatively art-heavy burden of marking each object with a special color to define how it should generate edges. You wouldn't get that with realtime video of a live scene, so you'd need to tease it out of depth&color. That's how most 3D edge detection works anyways so it's not really a problem, just a little less precise than what I wanted.

Well those look incredible. Great style that works perfectly in 1-bit. Checking your itch page, all of your design work is amazing so I'm now a fan.

I like to be surprised by what an algorithm can generate from the pieces I feed it. Designing all the martians by hand would probably look better but be a lot less fun to work on. Also I don't know how many I'll need yet. Probably in the hundreds/thousands.