Hello to the .001 micron of a person who has some interest in this site still after I've failed to update it for... very long

Of course, I do have an excuse being its the holidays and there's a lot of stress going around. I can also say I've been less motivated to both work on the sort of things I like putting here and also work on things at all. Shell shock is a bitch, huh? Regardless a lot of what I'm working on right now isn't ready to show or isn't the type of thing that I should share.

The community I've been working on has (soft)launched! There's about 15 people in the community right now. My goal is to get it to 30 before I begin doing large-scale events and stuff like that.

This is usually the music paragraph.... I haven't done anything with music between now and when I last posted a blog. Man. I'm planning on that being my 'main thing' when the whole events at home start. I should? be able to push something out somewhat quickly as it's really far along the pipeline, I just got unmotivated when I couldn't do exactly the thing that I wanted to (ADHD, am I right). More updates to come. I'm also considering putting the demos I've written for it up here, if I do they'll go in a hidden demos page under music that you'll find in this blog post. It doesn't exist right now though.

I've been working on an update to my modpack in Minecraft. I originally made it for 1.16 and have been rebuilding it. It's supposed to be a Vanilla+/Vanilla Extended style modpack. Might post it here at some point with proper attribution to the authors of the mods. It has however made me realize that I'd like to make a minecraft style voxelized sandbox game. I think Minecraft has really gone down in terms of quality since the Microsoft aquisition and I want to make something that replicates the sort of feeling I feel from Beta and Better Than Adventure.

Silicon has been the other main thing I've been working on I finally have Unreal Engine's Team-Based perception system working (you would not believe how much work it was to get it working. Months! Literal months! Absurdity!!). With that the game has a huge leg up as now I just have to build the actual behavior trees for the enemies, then I can start on polishing up the player character for a prototype release. I'll eventually post new content on its page, as well as maybe doing a stream or something about development? I'll link that if I ever end up doing that

I guess thats it. I'm not sure where I'll be in like, 3 months from now but it's at least been fun updating this page. I hope I keep doing it, but if this is the last post I ever make, I'm sorry.

Take care of yourselves.

Hexate

CW: Mention of Suicide

Welcome back to my amazing, lovely audience! (0.5 people)

Sorry it's been a while half-a-person who i will now name... Alex... You know how it is with this part of the year. I'll try to keep this updated, but unfortunately finding the time to do the stuff people (I hope) care about will likely prove to be difficult.

Something I've been focusing on a lot recently is putting together a tool to build local community within my area. I would suggest all of you do this, especially if you're a social minority. Maintaining a tight community in your area you can turn to in case things go sour will likely be important in these next few years. Keep yourselves safe. That has been eating up a lot of my time, and I'm not sure how much I want to share here, since it is local, but I'll definitely at least mention how it's been going and give tips if you yourself are trying to build one. My big one right now is find an artist. A visual artist. Having someone there to be able to make art assets is paramount to get people interested and looking at your server.

It's been a while since I've worked on that track I wanted to get out. I left the computer I produce on at home to visit family, and now we are snowed in here until it's safe enough to go back home. So I haven't worked on music even close to as much as I'd like. I'll also likely have to rebuild my workflow as I will probably give the Macbook I currently produce on (a mistake, I know) to a friend in need of a computer, and re-build my workflow on a windows partition of either my desktop or laptop (both of which currently run Debian). It'll be a process but I'll update here as it goes.

I found an old Akai LPK 25 at my girlfriend's house that belonged to her, and she told me I can take it. I was looking for something like an LPK to compliment the form factor of the SEQTRAK, so I'm quite happy, even though the keys are pretty weird.

I've also been trying to write something I started about a year ago. It started as a 'friend-fic', putting ex-friends of mine into a story that kind of fictionalized and metaphored the situation in which we were at that point in time. I still care about the story I was planning on writing there, so I'm reformatting it as simply a fiction story. It's hard to write though, because thinking about it makes me think about them, and when I think about them, well it makes me want cigarettes and a pistol. I'll eventually post a prototype of it over on the writing page. If I can make it through.

I've also been devoting a lot more time to building Silicon. The level is coming together really well and with it I've started building out AI subsystems and the like. I would really like to have a prototype of the gameplay on the table before the year ends, but I doubt that will be possible because the aforementioned community is the thing of the most urgency right now.

I'm also thinking about taking part in a Game Jam again, I miss doing those and I'd really like to just spend some time building a game and just having that be that after, say, 7 days or maybe 2 weeks? Gives me an excuse to focus on one thing, but I can't do that really before I've got the community rolling.

Well, what else? That it? I'm watching snow fall and listening to the Snowman Theme from Earthbound, a little tradition of mine when the first snow comes (though, the past few years there's been so little snow that I haven't been able to do it). It's nice. I suggest it. Especially with a cup of something warm, be it cocoa, coffee, tea, or hot Dr. Pepper.

Hope you're all staying warm, or cool for those in the southern hemisphere. Thanks for reading!

Hexate

Hello to the (I assume) 1 person reading this! How are you?

I decided today that I would write this blog post... But now that I'm actually doing it I'm not sure I have enough to write about. lol. Might as well do it anyway, more blog posts are better than less (maybe)

On the music I've been writing. The track mentioned previously is still progressing. I have what I believe to be one big change to go on it. It requires my voice however, So I haven't found the chance to set up a microphone and really meaningfully record what I need to do. I'm not sure right now if I should borrow my partner's MV7, or should buy myself an SM58 or pre-owned SM7B. That's been the sticking point, and I'll update when I resolve that.

While that track will be released here when it's done, I'm considering pairing it with another that I've had the idea for for years now, and pairing them as an A side / B side on a single. The A side would be called "Audition". I have a lot of ideas for Audition, so we'll see what comes from it

I've also been working on some tracks for "Friends" recently. Right now it is slated to be a 5 track EP, consisting of the tracks with the working titles of "Friends (Intro)", "Drift Station", "Tell me Your Stories", "THANK YOU", and an as-of-yet unnamed track following a panic attack. The sonic gimmick of the album will be a tour through the decades of electronic instruments. With one track utilizing instruments like the ARP Odyssey and Moog Model D, another using the Yamaha DX7, Juno, and D-50, the next utilizing instruments like Virus TI, and a "modern" track utilizing sounds from things like the Minifreak and Wavetable synthesis. Not sure how strong this theme will be in the end because I want the tracks to sound cohesive at the end of the day, but that's what I'm operating on right now. Excited to start posting demos eventually!!

I've also really been wanting an Arturia Keystep, something with a built-in sequencer and arpeggiator would really help my workflow, even though most of my workflow is currently software. My next two purchases for music hardware will likely be a microphone of some sort and a Keystep.

Speaking of Arturia's Step line, I was at my local library today, and they have a Moog Theramini and a Eurorack setup in the makerspace there? I was shocked, it's very cool!! I will definitely be spending a lot of time there.

I posted about the above on my Bluesky. You should follow me there if you like my stuff! We can chat! Please!!! I need friends on it!!!!!

I'm also really wanting to start a band. Of course I'll work on my solo stuff for the time being but I would love to start a band with 1-3 more people, and I'm gonna start looking into someone I could potentially do that with. I'll keep this blog updated, and add my band to the music page if it comes to fruition. Could be very fun!!!

On another note, finally, Silicon Starship is going well, I finally have some fun ideas for the first prototype world, so I'm working on the level for that right now. I'm not sure what the pace is going to be like, but a prototype will be linked here whenever it's ready to be tried! Silicon is shaping up to hopefully be a really fun game and I'm excited for the aforementioned one person reading this to try it out and give us some feedback. :3

On a personal note, I applied for my new Social Security card under my new name. It was quite a process, multiple hours of waiting for 10 minutes of documents. I managed to write an entire little track on the SEQTRAK that I'll probably post a live jam of at some point. Probably gonna title it "Waiting for SSA Jam" lol!

Anyway, that's about it for me this time. Call to action bluesky again, please follow me please? please????????

ahahaha. Up to you of course.

Thanks for reading!

Hexate

#2! Well. A lot happened huh.

Have been doing this instead of anything more productive because of The Thing that happened. So yeah lol I'll write this blog to do anything but think for any amount of time.

I've been spending a loooot of time recently working on a track to put on the Music page. It's 50 hours in and I think I'm nearing completion. It won't be incredibly perfect and polished the way (ideally) my full release tracks will be, but I wanna drop things here just for fun so Y'all can come back and hopefully always find something new to be excited about. Moreover, I also bought a new piece of hardware, A Yamaha SEQTRAK. I am getting used to it, but the ideal is some tracks I produce on it will turn into full releases, and the others will be put here to sate anyone who's really craving more of my stuff! :3

I might also make some YouTube videos about using the device. That would be really fun!!!!!! In a case of absolute queer providence, the person who was selling the SEQTRAK was a transfemme like me! So of course we were just chatting for hours and hours even after we traded goods lol. New friend!!!!! that in of itself would have been worth the money I spent!

I just added all four sub-pages of the Games page. It does not at all have all the games I've ever worked on, but its a good start and might stay like that for a while. I wanna move on to the other pages and get those working nicely. Though there's some really fun games there, please check it out if you have nothing better to do!!!!

Also, I made a Bluesky that you can follow me on! I'm gonna add it to the index after I write this post, but I'll link it here too in case :)

Besides that... uhhhhh.... Hmmm. can't think of anything really. IDK what else to write. I guess my feelings? Scared, Determined, a little bit Tired. That should be good!

Thanks for reading!

Hexate

Well, where to begin...

I was never good at maintaining Any sort of journal about my life. The Abomination-purple diary that I started 2 years ago still sits on my nightstand, not updated for the better part of a year (and a crazy year, at that). Maybe this being open to the public will motivate me to update it more (or, more likely, less due to fear).

My point is - sorry if this section rots while other sections continue to get updated. I'm not good at this. Honestly I'm not good at any of this - but journalkeeping more than most.

Well I suppose I should just start at what I was doing - and what my plans are until my next entry:

Most of my day today was spent participating in the Splatoween event. (Wizard FTW, but I knew Ninja was always gonna win). I did some setting up for some VSTs. Did you know that you can emulate the Virus, Virus TI, and MicroQ now using a VST wrapper? It's awesome, but it just makes me want a Virus TI more! T-T
My plan is to go hard into trying to write and release a track this week. I've got a lot of (what I hope are) good ideas that I want to extrapolate on, and I've got the time to do it. Besides that, I recently introduced myself to a community led by one of my friends. It feels nice to be a part of a community like that again, and I'm looking forward to make myself a usual there. They are getting into Pro-Wrestling, which... I always knew I was destined to be autistic about. I should take this with the grace of a dying warrior.

Besides that, I've continued to consider updating this site. I really want it all in a viewable state before like- the first week of November. Gives me enough time and lets me start focusing on things other than the site (though of course it will still be a focus!). I hope to release some music (probably a single) before the end of the year. I told myself I will not purchase any more music hardware until I release a track. And I want a bunch of things. So I have to release a track. Lol. Back on this site- After this is written, I plan to write the Games page, then the Soft/hardware page, then I'll be "happy" with it, until I focus on a shrine.

I hope this isn't too long - I think this is the end of this blog post. Well! I hope everyone who reads this has a good day/night/whatever else it might be. Hope you're doing well - at least better than I am

Thanks for reading!

Hexate