As an attempt to write more this year I'm gonna start doing these monthly recaps. These are generally just what I've been doing for the month, low-downs on the current state of Team Max Hog projects, and serious stuff that I feel like I want to talk about.

The idea for these writeups are inspired by @LeviRamirez's "The Levi Post" and @StuffedWombat's blogs and writeups. I recommend them both if you're into game development related writings.

January As A Whole

I made very little art this year, and I kind of gave up on it. I put more of that energy into getting better at CompSci/coding, and while I think it was a good investment I am remiss to all the time I spent making art I liked, particularly my textmode stuff.

*From my 2022 Recap

Overall I'd say I combatted this problem, I've made a few textmode pieces and gotten back in the groove. It was truly an experience redownloading playscii and fumbling my way around until muscle memory restored my memorization of keyboard shortcuts (as well as experiencing its most annoying of bugs and trying erroneously to get the project's source code off of a weird site that wasn't GitHub). Looking back at it now, I remember the main reason I stopped textmode art was because I had to reset my computer after foolishly installing windows 11 and trying to go back to 10. It ended up deleting all of my charsets, color palettes, and unpublished art and it broke me a little.

I am glad I'm doing textmode again and art in general, but it's really a sideshow. Art is my least favorite part of game-making so I'll usually try and get others to do it for me. I'm also not going to try and draw on a consistent basis, internet art for the most part is full of weird self-centered weirdos that I don't want to get tangled with.

A Video Game

I'm spent the majority of my time making a hebrew learning game for school that I'm not going to post here, but it has been my main project and the main focus for the past two months.

*Prototype footage

The process of making something like this was a surprisingly stressful experience that was due entirely to poor time management, and I'm making due on learning from the mistakes of this project. Mainly it makes me appreciate two things: Source control with GitHub, and FOR THE LOVE OF GOD THANK GOODNESS WE ARE GETTING RTL SUPPORT IN GODOT 4.0. The game by itself is nothing spectacular, but I'm glad to get it out of the way and back to more fun things next month.

Me and Tiny were considering making something for pixel day but it really just didn't work out, but we had some fun concept doodling and such.

*by yours truly :-)

*by @Tiny

This month was barren, but it was a lot of brushing up stuff from last year so I can get prepared for this one. Overall I have a lot to look forward to, which I'll try to share best I can.

A Big Fat February

Everything I'm doing in February is stuff I can't disclose yet but I'm pretty excited for, which I want to list below:

• A very special event that we're excited to bring back to newgrounds, which is cooking with @Default, @Nokoi, and @Tiny
• Another Max Hog Game
• Stinky art for the stinky Feb 14th.
• Work on something for @TappyWara's Cartoon Network Collab
• Collabs galore!
• An animation jam celebrating a certain special freak of me and Tiny's

We have our work cut out for us but I'm optimistic, will time-manage the heck out of all of these. It'll be one hell of a ride!

Brain-Thinks

This section mainly entails stuff I perused on the internet, media I enjoyed, but mainly thoughts I feel the need to share. That last one gets a bit ranty so best be careful dear reader.

Media I Slurped Up

I played a lot of video games, and a few stood out to me. First I bought Voidigo by semiwork studio, and I have been playing it like a maniac since (my friends can attest to that as they've poked fun at me for how much I play it). The story of it is quite interesting, as semiwork was originally the youtube cartoon duo ThunderHumor. When I was a tween these guys were my FAVORITE animators. From time to time I rewatch at their videos and still feed me heaps of laughs. Surprise-surprise they made a video game in their years away from cartoons and GOODNESS GRACIOUS IT IS GOOD. It is a very fine-tuned experience that fixes my problems with most roguelikes, and it integrates a lot of story from their videos, particularly their "Rupert Grimsby Series". Please please please watch these videos, they are funny and have a cool little narrative in them, and the connection to the game is stellar.

I also got back into Monster Hunter (MHW is fifteen bucks for the remainder of the month, get it while you can) and it's been pretty good. Playing MH is like eating a steak, you gotta have it in little chewable bites. It's been fun and I still love all the creatures they make, and I'll be back onto Generations Ultimate when I finish world again. I recommend it if you enjoy video games where you smack dinosaurs with sticks until they fall over. It's a hoot

As for stuff on the portal I have one game from this pixel day I highly recommend, Game by @Default. It's eerie, it's difficult, and it's pretty. Please play it, and any other thing Default makes.

Final Spiel

Thanks for reading, these will get more content and thoughts in them in the future, but I want to get into the habit of writing more. Alongside these I'll try my hand at other writeups, perhaps tutorials, compsci stuff, or art things. Either way I go it's more talking, and if you are willing to read I thank you very much :-)