Introducing the Kate-reon!

Hi everyone!

I didn't make an update post for March, because I didn't have too much news to share. I do now, though!

You can now give me money

Okay, you already could give me money by buying my games on itch. Or I guess you could have just asked. (Believe it or not, some people actually have! For some reason they all have bad spelling and go straight to my Gmail spam folder, though.)

But now! There's an official way for you to give me your money. Most of the paid projects I've worked on this year have been small in scope, and the ones that would have paid me a lot collapsed or simply fell to the wayside. Bad luck - and with the state of the world at the moment, I don't think many more opportunities will present themselves so easily...

I'm looking to supplement what I earn by explicitly soliciting some support. Don't worry, I'll still be OK, and there are definitely people who more urgently need help - this is solely if you have spare coins lying around and find the stuff I do meaningful. If so, you can convert those mushy sentimental feelings at the altar of Mammon into physical form (your money). I'm talking about cold hard cash!! My goodness!! I'm so flustered. You'll have to excuse me, I've never done this kind of thing before.

Joking aside I feel sort of conflicted about this, because I never really meant to try and solicit cash from my work. I was even reluctant to set up payments on itch.io when I was first publishing things there; until a wise friend reminded me that technically the default is already to ask for money - if you've got a payment account linked already, it's actually more work to disable payments than to enable them. It would be really nice if my day-to-day work was stable enough to where I wouldn't have to bother people about this, but I guess we don't live in an ideal world.

You can find info on where to support me here, if you're so generous!

DOMINO Jam 9

The jig is up! DOMINO: Declassified jam came and went, and we got some cool games out of it!!
For my own personal bilingual language diary, I received the prestigious Jessica Morebugs award for "an alien making life in an unfamiliar land"!

Wonderful award art by Mariken!

This game was made in windowpane, my as-of-yet unreleased collage-multimedia-madness engine. I hope to publicly release it soon - I want to make a few more things in it to sort of feel around, see what's missing.

I've thought about making a custom engine for a while, but never really found a niche that I wanted to improve on. If you want to make visual novels, something like Ren'Py or RenJS or Videotome is pretty much already perfect. That's not even to mention the countless other engines I've played or used.

Windowpane isn't so much a VN engine so much as it is a weird mixture-of comics-and-collage-engine. You can interlay pictures, videos, and HTML together, while changing up the style and music on demand. It's not a far cry from a regular webpage, but at the same time, it's something more.

These days, I'm finding tools really satisfying to make. I released Strawberry Starter not too long ago, and it was a really fun experience. It will be cool to see if anyone creates anything in windowpane!

Footnotes

So, what else is going on in the Bagenzoverse?

Toxic Yuri Jam is this June! I'm not sure if I'll participate, to be honest... Something is pulling me towards it, and something else is pulling me away. Paper-Girl-Chain was already a winner of the 2024 Menhera Jam, so I feel like maybe it's time to rest on my laurels a bit.

I think every artist is at risk of becoming Douglas Adams. (No, I don't mean they'll become British, although that is a pretty horrifying thought.) I mean they have their own personal Douglas Adams sitting on their shoulder in place of the devil.
The guy was rich, famous, and instead of using that to pursue weirder, niche things, he just kept doing Hitchhiker's Guide crap forever. It's funny, if you read some accounts of his life he kind of detested writing, and yet... he persisted for no understandable reason. At some point you have to just stop shooting for the top!! Enjoy life!! What else have you got to prove??

That being said, the jam organizers are really cool, so YOU (yes - YOU) should definitely check it out! Who knows, maybe when the theme is announced I'll have the inklings of an idea and join in too. Jolly Good! (oh god NO i'm becoming british it's real HELP)

Can Vivi's hunger ever be satiated?

I've also been learning Godot with Foto! Our hope is to release a little game together. More small studios are using Godot, so I think it's good to take a look at the current biggest alternative to the Unity ecosystem.

That's all for now... see you next time!