It's been a bumpy ride, but my migration from Gamejolt to Itch is finally complete. Before May in 2021, I had seven released games, and all of them were free and available on Gamejolt. Well, from now on, I'm not using Gamejolt anymore. From now on it will only have my first 7 published games on it with no new feature updates added to them anymore, Startup Tophat, Quik Game, Bunny Horrors, Type Crawl, Terrifying Rocket Zest, Auckland Scumbag University, and Green Dude. It's abandoned now.

Here's the thing about Gamejolt. It was somewhat broken, and definitely flawed. I don't want to go into too much description, but it's enough for you to be told two things: I had heaps of difficulty trying to get online paid products to work - in the end I didn't - and Gamejolt's AI outright denied that one of my Bridge of Fate builds was a working application for the actual operating system and wouldn't let me choose that option. I also realized eventually that Gamejolt looked ugly to me and had webpages that made me feel claustrophobic, pointedly once I started to see what my games would look like once they were formatted on Itch pages. I just like Itch Io a lot more now, and this is where I want to be for my present and future. I think the design elements of posting a game on here are great, and so much better.

This is why updates were fast over the last month, and will be slow for a while starting now. I was uploading "old" games that I had already finished months ago. Seven games, the first five being from 2018, the next being from 2019, and the last being from late 2020. Now when I want to post another game on Itch, I'll have to actually make a new one.

That's the plan. I don't want to stop developing games, because naturally I just love doing it. In the very near future of working on games, I want to only go back to older unfinished projects of mine to clean up the mess of unfinished simulations I started over the years, sitting in my explorer directories - like Ferst and Castle Prot - by turning them into complete games, and not start a game that hadn't existed at all before. That being said, there might be one... There's a sequel to one of my existing Hindbodes games I have been highly considering creating, and that is to be a single-month or two-month project that I take up not long after the successful migration that I just did, and I'm going to have which game it is be a surprise. After that, I think I'm going to work more on tools and base code, and at some point try to finish one of the ancient games of mine that "failed" but simply needs more work to get a release and existed before even Startup Tophat.

This is an old screenshot of one of those proto-historic Hindbodes games that I couldn't finish after an unprepared start was made. Its beginning predates the first days of development of both Startup Tophat and Bunny Horrors.

I also might join a game jam soon, other than the insane ten year one that I've been slowly working in, but nothing about that is certain.

The thing I should make clear about my game library, however, is this. I migrated seven games, but as a human developer I have published complete projects of an amount of eight. The way I have it structured on Itch is that Hindbodes is where I post free games, and Rodent Predator is a place where I only put games that I charge money for people to play - with Rodent Predator being my company. This makes sense to me, as the games have variably different personalities, and the logos mean different things as such with vastly different appearances. Unless you can't tell the difference between a savage mouse holding a dead mealworm and a pretty gemstone. Bridge of Fate was released practically immediately after it was ready, and only ever in one place: Itch. The rest of the eight first games already existed on Gamejolt, and only existed on Itch after Bridge of Fate got there - even though as of right now Bridge of Fate was the last game to get my finishing stroke as a new release.

I think all is fairly well with the library, and as long as it's not compared to Rodent Predator, the first seven games have the right order and almost everything is well off chronologically. From now on, it should all make sense.

[Open July Post Update]

As for Green Dude, there is some trivia and information I can share now, though I was supposed to do it sooner.

As far as my optimistic guess goes, Green Dude will need no further updating from me. There are some things I might change if I were to "finish Green Dude tomorrow" - which would actually suck because Green Dude absolutely needed to be finished and available somewhere before the last second of 2020 - but whether I go back to Green Dude to bother with any more work on improvements is totally dependent on what Green Dude players think of how satisfactory the 1.0.0 game is. I can go back, but I'm not going back unless more than one person asks me to go back.

I must admit, during development in 2020, I did think about future updates being a possibility and what I might do in them, but it's pretty clear to me right now that right now I don't see what I was thinking. There's a pretty big "why?" on that one because of how it was meant to be a two-month-only year-locked project to ensure that 2020 didn't go by gamelessly for me.

If they happened, updates would probably include some new features - ones that don't mess with the level design of the main gameplay in its seven levels you are used to - but definitely deal in bug fixes and imperfection removals. That means new levels in out-of-the-way places, probably.

I don't want to say what the bugs and imperfections are, because if I do it this way then the feedback I get is more accurate and natural to what people could actually notice on their own. I'll give some numbers, though. There's 2 unintended bugs that make the game slightly worse in my opinion, 1 imperfection that I don't think I want to bother with beautifying, 1 accidental gameplay mechanic imperfection that it might improve the game to fix, and something small about the music. I think that's all of them.

There's also a secret you can find in the game, and right now it doesn't do much. One of the things I absolutely considered changing in an update even back when the game was still far from finished was the size of this secret: making it bigger. The secret is still there, and you can find it without doing actual game hacking, but... well, you'll know how small it is when you discover the entrance, if you ever do that in 1.0.  It's likely that 1.1 would completely change it.

This secret had something to do with an older plan of mine to have a second route on the right side of the map - other side to the left side which has the curving route containing the gameplay you've probably seen already - that involved something to do with random generation. I've forgotten exactly how that was envisioned by now, sadly. But I can easily think of some good ideas to fill the role of Second Pathway Design. Many concepts involving how I could potentially advance these things are running through my head right now.

Secrets in primitive video games are cool...

[Close July Post Update]

Look at this screenshot: these are the eight games in their natural order sitting in my taskbar.

If you want a polished, objective-oriented and challenging-but-small platformer for a cheap price, I can recommend Bridge of Fate greatly. It exists on the Rodent Predator "store" on this page.

LAST EDITED ON JULY 6th, 2021. YOU PROBABLY NEED NOT EXPECT MEANINGFUL UPDATES TO THIS POST PAST THIS POINT.