Company Update July 2024
2024-07-29
written by Niko Chow-Stuart (Founder)
good day everyone! i'm writing this at like 11pm so it might not be day for me, but maybe it might be day
for you!
so, unless you've been one of the people emailing us for yiffOS support, you may have noticed that we've
basically been 100% radio silent since late 2023
now, i can't exactly say this was planned; in our last public social media post we hinted at having a
project very close to release, and while that project is 99% finished and currently just sitting in the
private area of our git repos, i'm unsure as to when or if that project will ever be released.
the main thing i ended up getting stuck on was documentation, it was a project that definitely required a
lot of good documentation before release, and because of that i ended up getting quite burnt out on writing
the documentation and that project ended up taking way longer than i would've liked.
just in case anyone was wondering, that project was in no way related to vap or the vorestation, and those
two projects are still things we plan on doing; which i'll get to in this next section
vap / vorestation
as these two projects are very much the foundation of our company, these are things we are unlikely to ever
cancel due to scope or burnout, and as such we are still working on these in the background.
throughout the last half year or so, i've gradually been working on the vap kernel as well as doing a ton
of research and planning on the design of the operating system. unfortunately i've done nowhere near the
amount of work i would've liked to on the project, but at the end of the day i'm only one person, that also
being one person with very bad adhd who likes to start new projects every other day.
i cannot exactly say when we'll next be talking about the progress of these projects, but i promise
that they are both being worked on and are both things that we still hold with high value
other projects
naturally, the absence of work on our main projects has lead to a lot of work towards some side projects.
i cannot exactly say that these projects are in anyway related to our position as a "hardware company", or
even necessarily a "software company"; but they're all things we're passionate about, and i feel that it
helps to just group all of our team projects under this one roof, whether that be for marketing or for
making the IRS happy.
assuming that everything goes to plan - which is a big assumption but i do have a good amount of hope, you
should be seeing the results of these things we've been working on sometime quite soon.
of course, i cannot easily clarify how soon "soon" is, but at the very least i can say that my project
management skills have gotten quite better over the time i've been working, and that i have been steadily
making progress on things, even if slow.
that mascot horror game we released
so uh, without proper context, us just coming out of nowhere after like over half a year of silence with
nothing but a tweet announcing what looks like some random mascot horror game probably seems quite weird.
to be honest, even with context it could seem a bit unexpected, but hopefully i'll be able to explain at
least a bit of our motives here.
first off i should clarify that this is not actually a mascot horror game. i'm not entirely sure what
genre i'd put it in, but the best thing i've been able to describe it as is a "quake-style strategy game".
i should note that i've always been a game developer. i'm still an osdev, but i have a ton of different
hobbies and as such i like to bring most of them under the roof of this company.
the main context for this game is that, years ago, one of my friends gave me $20USD to make him a
"FNAF clone". over the course of the next weekend, i made him a game called
"-13 Nights at Lil Guy's Pizza Pies". the game was very much just a fnaf clone, albeit with a humorous tone
and very much in my own style of game development, including using photos of some of our friends as the
enemies. nevertheless, it was never released outside our friend group.
fast forward to last saturday, i was browsing itch.io and saw that the PolyMars x ScoreSpace game jam had
started. i was somewhat intrigued by the main idea of the jam, which was to make a "speedrunnable game"
(i.e. a game that is built around speedrunning).
one of my first thoughts was "what is the most unique idea
i could do with this topic?", which eventually lead me to thinking about game genres that aren't
conventionally speedrunnable. the main thought i had was Five Night's at Freddy's, which if you've somehow
never heard of, consists of waiting in a security guard's office for animatronic robots to attack you, and
then defending their attacks by closing doors. the win condition is just surviving until the clock hits 6am.
this isn't really something you can speedrun whatsoever, since every gameplay session by design will take
the exact same amount of time. which is why i wanted to see if i could turn it into something you could
actually speedrun.
after some pondering of both the idea, and the other theme of the game jam (that being "Overheat"), i came
up with the idea that is now the tagline of the game: "fnaf but played in reverse".
you play as the animatronics and race against the clock to kill the security guard.
i have literally no idea how original this idea is, i've never looked into it and i can't say i'm much of
a mascot horror game player myself, although i knew i wanted to incorporate one other thing in most
conventional speedrunnable games that i love: fun movement.
because of this, i ended up building a movement system which took a lot of inspiration from quake and its
derivative engines. the game itself is made in godot, however as i have quite a bit of knowledge in
designing my own game engines, i used a lot of that to my advantage in designing the structure of this game
this is all without saying, however, that due to the 3 day time constraint, the game can be quite janky at
times. overall, it was a fun experiment; but at the end of the day, that's all it really feels like to me.
i couldn't imagine getting more than 10 minutes of gameplay out of this game if i hadn't made it myself,
maybe i would find it more fun if i had really spent a ton of time to tweak everything to feel perfect,
or maybe designing a more interesting stage to use all of this in would have improved things;
but overall, it's really just a game you can entirely experience in about 3 minutes.
still, if you're interested whatsoever in the idea, i'd encourage you to try it as me and my wife put a ton
of work into getting it ready for release within the short development window.
there are some parts, such as the leaderboard system, which we overengineered the hell out of, and as such
those parts are what i feel i'm most proud of.
if i someday feel like it, maybe i'll go back and polish this up more, but for now, i'm just going to leave
it as what it is, and focus on other things that i want to do more.
future plans
working on game design is something that i do still have a large passion for, and as such i can almost
certainly say that this is not the only game we will ever release, especially as i'd love for us to have
some released i'd consider of higher quality in the future.
other than that, i cannot say for certain what we'll release next. i'll try to post more frequent blog
posts in the future, although due to my tendency to prefer making big announcements of projects we've been
working on in secret over just posting a blog post everytime i have a new idea, and then having to cancel
90% of the projects i bring up; i prefer to keep things sparse but with actual promise.
besides that, i want to hopefully by the next blog post implement an rss feed for our blog, as i think
that's something that we've gotten quite a few requests for, especially with the large split of social
media platforms at the moment.
conclusions
thank you to those of you who've made it through this huge blog post, i would've made it shorter but i
wanted to try to get out as much information about what's going on as possible
i'm incredibly tired after spending so much energy to hit the deadline of the gamejam, so i am probably
going to spend some time resting
otherwise, i hope to have more announcements soon!
happy voring (:
image made by @cathodegaytube!