9 Jan, ’25

Progress, Despite EverythingBeing "Free Tech Support" isn't really any better when it's for yourself

by Cal

WELL. It's been a fun week! Somehow I've managed to have pretty much all my domain renewals/expirations coming up in the January/February time period, so I've been having to deal with some... unexpected systems admin stuff as a result of one of them. Nothing dramatic, just annoying. But I've managed to do some stuff, anyway!

Nameless Cozy Game progress

The fixed/updated wardrobe system is now fully back in action, which feels great - and it actually works better than before, because now it re-equips your whole outfit back on your character when you change your actual avatar, too! Basic but surprisingly fiddly, quality-of-life stuff, that. And the whole wings-and-tail bug turned out to just be because I had a logic check of <= instead of >=, so that was a relief.

The base action template, meanwhile, isn't much to look at, but it's coming along great as well.

Doing "Research"

I can't remember the full sequence of events that led to me wandering across Critter Cove on Steam, but I tried out the free demo last night for a few hours. I enjoyed it more than I thought it would? It feels like a blend of Stardew Valley and Animal Crossing in the mechanics and vibe. The game itself is in Early Access, and, well, I don't know if the demo is fully indicative of the current state of the EA game, but I would say that it is very... irregular, in its state of polish.

The rendering is flawless. The animations are fantastically smooth, but a bit lacking in design and variety. The game's writing is what I would call "fine", but in need of copy-editing. The modelling and texturing of the character models is excellent, but the particular style choice of facial features is jarring in contrast and the facial expressions feel like somebody forgot to finish them. The music is referential but pretty good. The general sound design is okay - decent attention to detail, nothing that makes me go "this is so good" OR "this is so bad".

Except the voice. The single shared "voice" for all the NPCs is obnoxious as F*** oh my god if everyone is going to sound the same please make it as neutral a sound as possible instead of going for the highest pitch of Fake Talking you can think of I'M BEGGING YOU.

The mechanics are exactly what you'd expect from Stardew Valley meets ACNH, nothing exciting there, but if that's a vibe and mechanic you want then it delivers. Crafting, home decoration, gathering, tools, building relationships with the various NPCs while learning their likes and dislikes, character customization, energy systems, day/night cycles... They make good use of the island setting as well to have a whole underwater POI/gathering/salvaging mechanic.

A lot of the reviews compare it to the My Time At X games, which I've never played any of because I am a shallow bastard and I can't stand the art style. Critter Cove's art style is... acceptable enough. Although it's not quite my preferred flavor of furry style... It's more Sonic, less Disney, you know? And while I am a fan of many things, the character design style of Sonic games is not one of them.

In less productive news...

I went down a bit of a rabbit hole making a prototype for my own LLM-driven¹ "AI Streamer Companion", just to see if I could. It's actually come out fantastically so far and I'm kind of motivated to make it work really well - with as minimal resources as possible. I'm actually really into AI in a hobby enthusiast sense - have been for a very long time - so this has been fun to dip my toes into. Ideally, I'll successfully put something together that doesn't require thousands of dollars of hardware but still can generate decent text and comes across like a thinking personality. And then I'll tell everyone how I did it and how they too can create and run their own virtual-companion vtuber, muahahahaha.