It's been a second since I last posted anything, eh?

Truth be told, it's been a pretty hectic couple of months and a bunch of learning within that time. But as I'm running around and trying to get things done, I might as well make a little update post to just keep people in the loop.

Everything started shortly after my previous post, when my hard drive decided to do a little thing called "die". My computer was out of commission for a good month and a half, and unfortunately that means that every single thing I've worked on to this point? Gone. Lost in the drive or completely written over.

It sucks, and yeah I felt really horrible about everything that I lost and about going to the different projects I'm on to tell them "yeah, everything's lost". Okay, I don't feel bad about everything that was lost - the BNB and Eteled Reincarnate stuff is supposed to be lost media and I'd laugh knowing those are gone for good - but dang, most of that stuff was in progress and I will honestly miss a bunch of it. Thankfully getting all of my plugins back was easy to do, and my computer actually runs a bit quicker than it did before, so take that for what it's worth.

If I could give any lesson to you after going through that: seriously back up your stuff. Doesn't matter if it's to an external drive or the cloud - I started taking it seriously after what happened.

But in a weird way... that wipe felt needed, and I feel like I came back better than before the wipe happened.

It's no secret that I absolutely suck at production and sound design, so while I was out I did research on those - I mean I took legitimate notes on the process of mixing, mastering, EQ filtering/shelving - as much as I could. When I came back and started working on stuff again... no it didn't become a perfect fix but it just felt... better.

I also started adopting a "warmup" routine of sorts. I found a site that has a ton of stems in a ton of genres that are meant to be used specifically for mixing and mastering practice. So my startup project file in Ableton now goes to a file that I can pop one song's stems into and just practice mixing and mastering techniques as a warmup. I also created a little Swiss-army-knife audio effect rack that covers basically every base I'd need on the main bus, and I have it saved so that I can bring it around to whatever I'm working on.

I don't expect immediate results, but I think that kinda practice is what I really need on the production side of things, and then the EQ items can help on the sound design aspect. So I'm really curious about how it turns out to you all!

As for coding - in my last post I mentioned how I was the coder for FNF: NEO, and since then there was a small teaser clip posted of one element I got in - in-game text effects (movement, color, etc).

Before the drive died, it took me two weeks (and a BUNCH of talking on the Codename Discord server) to get the system working, and even then it wasn't really working fully - pressing ENTER to finish the dialogue pulled some weird things. When I came back, it took three days to not only get back to that point but even eclipse it. I fixed the aforementioned finish problem, I put in a system that I think has better performance than the previous system, and I even added more in that time.

Truth is the reason why that line was used for that clip wasn't just because "haha funny words" - it was also to test the toggleable voice acting system. People can go into the options for NEO and toggle on/off voice acting, so they can either let the cool VAs do their thing or possibly dub the dialogue themselves if they wish. The line actually does work with the system, I've tested it!

Literally in a week I got all of the code wishlist for the mod working save for one or two things that I can't do until more work's done. I can't wait to share what I've been cooking in the coding department because it's honestly been fun to make and even more fun to learn.

That's kinda why I've been silent on here recently, alongside prepping for the summer when competitions happen here on NG. But with me being back, there's also been a ton happening too.

I didn't say much about it back then but I ended up becoming User of the Month last month, which I was happy about hehe. I've been working on a larger indie project and that was one of the first things I restarted with on the new drive. I also have been getting a ton into Blender recently, and I might use it for visuals on that indie project, who knows? It's such an interesting program to learn, even confusing dare I say, but I'm interested in tackling that beast on my spare time.

As for the meantime, I think I wanna prepare two songs for release in an EP here on NG. These were done pre-death and originally they were three songs, but I was never satisfied with the middle song so I wanna just keep it to two.

Oh yeah - and another song dropped recently too. It's in-game currently and I'm super excited that I got to work with the folks that I made it for, but the release is waiting for an all clear to post. For those who don't know, just have a heads up that it's a collab track... hehe.

In the meantime there's two things I wanna experiment with.

One of them is here on NG - I decided to use the Playlist functionality to create a little directory of my works! It includes a Google doc listing that I'll try to keep up-to-date with everything I've done, as well as a portfolio for a simple collection of some of my things (also gonna try to keep that up-to-date), but I've also sorted it based on general categories and projects. You can absolutely use the Audio button to look for whatever, but if you're looking for pieces from someplace specific then you can view the directory on my bio!

The other thing I wanna experiment with is on Game Jolt. I've popped links to my GameBanana and Game Jolt accounts on my links section if you're curious, but while I love Newgrounds a ton I've found it a little weird to post previews or teasers n such on here instead of full-fledged works. I think I wanna use my Game Jolt for that reason - it's nearly five years old so why not give it more of a chance? Gotta be better than Twitter or YouTube at least.

I just gotta update both of them in some way though. My GameBanana signature is old and doesn't look that good, and both the GB and Game Jolt accounts use an older version of my profile picture, so why not spice them up a touch, yknow?

That's really all I got for now. It's been an interesting couple of months but I'm excited for what's coming up and I hope you are too 💙