paralogue.org

maybe this can be the general creative catch-all, because a place like this needs something like this.

but yeah! post art that you're working on, music, fiction snippets, game screenshots, videos – or code projects, stuff you've cooked recently, interior design… all of that would fit too. as long as it's WIP or fresh out of WIP, it's fair game.

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<span style='font-size:12pt;line-height:100%'><a href='https://moon-ii.net/infanity/audio/tensaishoujo_a1_20240501.mp3' rel='nofollow noopener' target='_blank'>tensaishoujo_a1_20240501.mp3</a></span>

i've been taken with the pc-98's soundchip¹ for a couple years now, maybe for the glass marble texture of its sound, maybe because fm synthesis had always felt a bit like a dark art and i wanted to actually learn it, maybe because the technical limitations force me out of my existing aesthetic crutches, maybe because linux kinda alienated me from my normal music production tools and i'm just trying to make do.

after picking at this for far too long, halfway through last month i set a deadline of may 1st to finish this so i could wash my hands of it and move on, though in order to "finish" it in time i had to chop out entire sections i was planning to have and polish the rest as best i could in that time. though even now that i've done that… i'm still not quite satisfied with it.

<span style='font-size:7pt;line-height:100%'>¹ technically the opna chip, most popularly used on the pc-9801-86 soundcard but i'll spare you the infodumping</span>

watermoon wrote:

<span style='font-size:12pt;line-height:100%'><a href='https://moon-ii.net/infanity/audio/tensaishoujo_a1_20240501.mp3' rel='nofollow noopener' target='_blank'>tensaishoujo_a1_20240501.mp3</a></span>

<span style='font-size:7pt;line-height:100%'>¹ technically the opna chip, most popularly used on the pc-9801-86 soundcard but i'll spare you the infodumping</span>

Oh this is insanely pretty! The soundfont is really pleasurable and I have to confess FM synthesis feels like a dark art to me, though @sarah and @sinku I think both know more on that than I do?

I like this a lot, watermoon. It reminds me a bit of this song from Rockman and Forte, I find that sort of two chord (is it IV-V? I don't know) repetition really soothing.

I've talked to a lot of people about my own work lately, but I don't mind showing it here on Paralogue.

So I've been working on a visual novel for a while. I think ideation started last May; I found collaborators in June and July, got character sketches through the summer, tinkered at it getting the UI right somehow spending Sep/Oct on it, wrote on it passively Nov/Dec, wrote on it nonstop in January, wrapped the first act sometime in Feb/Mar?, and now it's sort of in stasis until I can pick it up again to write act 2. That said I'm also waiting on assets from both artist and composer who are infrequently around, so it could just end up being a project I'm picking away at for ages, though I want it out this year honestly.

This is where the general look and feel pinned itself down to:



I showed the entire route to @meri recently and got a little bit of feedback, mostly on how the look and feel plays together?

As for what it's actually about ... well, I was inspired a lot by Subarashiki Hibi's structure; it's a bunch of short stories overlapping a few time periods, and I wanted to tell some stories that ended with questions that found answers from the next story, which itself posited more questions, and each one would gradually unfold a bit about the metaphysics of the world. It's in a composite Quebec town -- somewhere where the church still haunts us as a lost father -- and it focuses on the relationships between people where ghosts, spirits, gods, the loops of reincarnation, our astral fragments across time, all intercede and interrupt them. In each one something is a bit off about what's going on, but it's not really apparent to our characters. Their lives are just normal to them. I find that the most fun thing to write: when you're just stuck in someone's head and they aren't doing so hot.

There's a bunch of stuff I want to do this year if I can just get the space to do it. I want to make music, though I think it may best be done just ... tinkering at a track to warm myself up into the creative spirit before writing proper, over and over again.

watermoon wrote:

<a href='https://moon-ii.net/infanity/audio/tensaishoujo_a1_20240501.mp3' rel='nofollow noopener' target='_blank'>tensaishoujo_a1_20240501.mp3</a>

what are you using for composing? deflemask or something else? this is a very pretty piece.

maru wrote:

I have to confess FM synthesis feels like a dark art to me

it is a dark art. there are complexities you dont get with normal synths. though, some stuff is simpler. Its easy to overcomplicate a tower and make a cheap or unusable patch. and thats just with sine waves, once you introduce other waveforms it becomes way weirder. :blink:

awwwww thank you both~

maru wrote:

I like this a lot, watermoon. It reminds me a bit of <a href='https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qeJmHodEB00' rel='nofollow noopener' target='_blank'>this song from Rockman and Forte</a>, I find that sort of two chord (is it IV-V? I don't know) repetition really soothing.

i'd describe what's going on in my ending loop as like I - iim7?, or just G - Am7/C for normaler people. so, basically a variant of I - IV, which is pretty common and always cozy when it shows up.

the rockman and forte song, i'd describe that loop as I - VIIb, but V - IV also describes those exact same chords yeah. and VIIb is really the IV of IV, so it all ends up related in the end.

sinku wrote:

what are you using for composing? deflemask or something else? this is a very pretty piece.

i've been using furnace, which is like deflemask but without the moral baggage. though in the past i've also used bambootracker for pc-98 stuff, but…

ok so bambootracker emulates just a bare ym2608, which is used in either later pc-88 models or a specific pc-98 soundcard that nobody really bought. that's fine, i think. but the later pc-98 soundcard that everyone remembers used a 2608 minus its adpcm capabilities, because the ram that the 2608 used as an adpcm buffer was instead rerouted to a separate pcm chain instead (lol). sites report the soundcard as having two pcm channels, which furnace interprets as meaning two monaural channels of "Generic PCM" that can be softpanned, but i'm thinking it might be more realistic to consider it as a single stereo channel. i had to look through multiple datasheets to come to this conclusion.

but i dunno, stuff like this is fun for me! i find it really really cool that an fm instrument here is just a set of 40ish numbers, and you can create so many different sounds from how you configure these numbers. and even though i haven't played many pc-98 games, i do adore this soundchip. it's essentially a mega drive with the world's cheapest-sounding drumkit bolted on and that's cool.
in my mind it fights with the pc engine's soundchip as being the one i love the most…

(i really don't know why i haven't done much with chipmusic when i could gush about this for hours)

watermoon wrote:

awwwww thank you both~

maru wrote:

I like this a lot, watermoon. It reminds me a bit of <a href='https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qeJmHodEB00' rel='nofollow noopener' target='_blank'>this song from Rockman and Forte</a>, I find that sort of two chord (is it IV-V? I don't know) repetition really soothing.

i'd describe what's going on in my ending loop as like I - iim7?, or just G - Am7/C for normaler people. so, basically a variant of I - IV, which is pretty common and always cozy when it shows up.

the rockman and forte song, i'd describe that loop as I - VIIb, but V - IV also describes those exact same chords yeah. and VIIb is really the IV of IV, so it all ends up related in the end.

[...]

(i really don't know why i haven't done much with chipmusic when i could gush about this for hours)

Wait. How much music theory do you know? I figured we were all fumbling around in the dark.

I think for making anything it's just a matter of when it calls our attention. It's more a matter of lifestyle than of motivation. Suddenly we remember we love it, but we have to be reminded, we have to make it a part of ourselves, our life ... I envy those who have. I feel like maybe I will one day.

i took piano lessons for eight years while growing up and have been writing music since maybe 14–15, so i've learned a few things… though i also go back and forth on how much that actually matters. after all, this is a medium where a band can keep going and gaining more experience and critics will say that they're going downhill!…

though i think i also understand that feeling, that envy… there are just some people who seem naturally prolific – who treat picking up the brush as a joy – and i wish i had what they have. i wish it wasn't always such a struggle.

it's also been hard to drum up motivation when i don't really have anybody to show my work to these days. i have no following, no creative community… i think this is also why i wanted to make this thread: to have a low-pressure environment where i and others could dump stuff off, and hopefully have that be encouragement enough to want to make more stuff to dump off.

Six-pack for Summer

longer term aspirations for doing a split, handstands, fancy calisthenics & acro-yoga

Need to stretch more

I am still working on this game, and for most of 2024 not a lot happened with it because my job was so draining. That is to say, at first it just took a lot of time, then it took a lot of emotional stress. So for 2025 this has been proceeding; the look and feel is a bit more polished. We've done the backgrounds for scenes over again; characters have shadows, the menus are configured for each act, and I wrote another act (~30k words each).
One act left, more assets to put in place, polish it together, maybe make each act have a stronger identity and we can publish it.

The sad thing is that I've also already gotten an idea for a side story and maybe I can start it later in the year ... I think we'll end up releasing start of 2026 for financial reasons, so there would be time to plan and jump into another one.

But that has also meant that I'm not doing anything else creative. Sort of wanna make a book again, sort of wanna do some music, sorta wanna make a gametoy, none of this is on the immediate docket. But I think the universe of this game is well-complimented by another story in it, at smaller scale.

so i'm being kinda sorta pressured kindly encouraged to share the things i've been working on since i started this dang thread… and i've decided that i want to spend this month finishing up the scraps of things that i've written 90% of the way and then just abandoned, for whatever reason. plus, now that i have a web sight to post things onto, it means i automatically have an outlet for them too!

and i think one of the things i want to finish this year is a fic that i started years ago as sort of a "lol what if i wrote a fanfic about milo from project natal" before it morphed into a fic about falling in love with this ai shota and the ripple effects that this'd cause within a small online community. i was inspired by a discord group my friend told me about where the majority of the members were paras yet there were a few outspoken antis keeping the rest silent – i like the idea of there being an underlying social deduction dynamic of people trying to figure out where each person's allegiances lie, either to find solidarity or to condemn.

but i'm still not sure where to go with it, or to what conclusion it's building toward.

further context because it's likely important: the fic is predicated on the what-if that project milo was never scrapped for parts in the early 2010s but remained under development into the 2020s as an internal testbed for player-character interaction dynamics, with its current incarnation of milo being powered by a local LLM. that is, until a transfem with a penchant for snooping around managed to stumble upon the repo that housed everything needed to make a complete build of the game, and she announced her finding to the tiny media preservation group where she had made her online home. drama ensues as, while the group begins to plan the logistics of announcing this finding to the wider world, the protagonist and one responsible for packaging the release chooses instead to dive further into the depths of what can be done with milo…

off topic but it's funny how, as some side effect of the way it renders, your text selection persists on the same nth paragraph as you navigate across pages

oh lol… though what's especially funny to me is that both my site and maru's encyclopedia eidolica are coincidentally built off the same framework (quartz), but she did a lot more to customize her site's layout while mine is mostly stock. in this case, hers doesn't have that issue because she turned off the single-page app feature to make it load pages like a traditional web site, while i left it on.

i swear i'm gonna get around to customizing my site more… one day…

i think it's really nice anyhow

8sumint wrote:

i think it's really nice anyhow

aww, thank you~ 💘🪽 i made it worse! :)

or, i guess the plan was to build off its base design and preset sans-serif fonts (because choosing fonts is always a bit scary) and iteratively work my way closer to the sort of shibuya-kei design you see on e.g. some of the Sucre. album covers. but dear god i wasn't expecting it to be such a mess inside – i now understand why maru ripped out a lot of its code. so it ended up taking more work than i was expecting to make the changes i wanted and not have the layout randomly break in weird ways… i still worry that some browser config i didn't test will break it anyway.

my eventual goal is to add more colors and images – a proper background image, have the header image change depending on where you are in the site, vary the colors on the sidebar more – but this is a good enough start to put online.