+
+ Company Update July 2024
+2024-07-29
+written by Niko Chow-Stuart (Founder)
+ +
+ good day everyone! i'm writing this at like 11pm so it might not be day for me, but maybe it might be day
+ for you!
+
+
+ so, unless you've been one of the people emailing us for yiffOS support, you may have noticed that we've
+ basically been 100% radio silent since late 2023
+
+
+ now, i can't exactly say this was planned; in our last public social media post we hinted at having a
+ project very close to release, and while that project is 99% finished and currently just sitting in the
+ private area of our git repos, i'm unsure as to when or if that project will ever be released.
+
+
+ the main thing i ended up getting stuck on was documentation, it was a project that definitely required a
+ lot of good documentation before release, and because of that i ended up getting quite burnt out on writing
+ the documentation and that project ended up taking way longer than i would've liked.
+
+
+ just in case anyone was wondering, that project was in no way related to vap or the vorestation, and those
+ two projects are still things we plan on doing; which i'll get to in this next section
+
vap / vorestation
+
+ as these two projects are very much the foundation of our company, these are things we are unlikely to ever
+ cancel due to scope or burnout, and as such we are still working on these in the background.
+
+
+ throughout the last half year or so, i've gradually been working on the vap kernel as well as doing a ton
+ of research and planning on the design of the operating system. unfortunately i've done nowhere near the
+ amount of work i would've liked to on the project, but at the end of the day i'm only one person, that also
+ being one person with very bad adhd who likes to start new projects every other day.
+
+
+ i cannot exactly say when we'll next be talking about the progress of these projects, but i promise
+ that they are both being worked on and are both things that we still hold with high value
+
other projects
+
+ naturally, the absence of work on our main projects has lead to a lot of work towards some side projects.
+ i cannot exactly say that these projects are in anyway related to our position as a "hardware company", or
+ even necessarily a "software company"; but they're all things we're passionate about, and i feel that it
+ helps to just group all of our team projects under this one roof, whether that be for marketing or for
+ making the IRS happy.
+
+
+ assuming that everything goes to plan - which is a big assumption but i do have a good amount of hope, you
+ should be seeing the results of these things we've been working on sometime quite soon.
+
+
+ of course, i cannot easily clarify how soon "soon" is, but at the very least i can say that my project
+ management skills have gotten quite better over the time i've been working, and that i have been steadily
+ making progress on things, even if slow.
+
that mascot horror game we released
+
+ so uh, without proper context, us just coming out of nowhere after like over half a year of silence with
+ nothing but a tweet announcing what looks like some random mascot horror game probably seems quite weird.
+
+
+ to be honest, even with context it could seem a bit unexpected, but hopefully i'll be able to explain at
+ least a bit of our motives here.
+
+
+ first off i should clarify that this is not actually a mascot horror game. i'm not entirely sure what
+ genre i'd put it in, but the best thing i've been able to describe it as is a "quake-style strategy game".
+
+
+ i should note that i've always been a game developer. i'm still an osdev, but i have a ton of different
+ hobbies and as such i like to bring most of them under the roof of this company.
+
+
+ the main context for this game is that, years ago, one of my friends gave me $20USD to make him a
+ "FNAF clone". over the course of the next weekend, i made him a game called
+ "-13 Nights at Lil Guy's Pizza Pies". the game was very much just a fnaf clone, albeit with a humorous tone
+ and very much in my own style of game development, including using photos of some of our friends as the
+ enemies. nevertheless, it was never released outside our friend group.
+
+
+ fast forward to last saturday, i was browsing itch.io and saw that the PolyMars x ScoreSpace game jam had
+ started. i was somewhat intrigued by the main idea of the jam, which was to make a "speedrunnable game"
+ (i.e. a game that is built around speedrunning).
+
+
+ one of my first thoughts was "what is the most unique idea
+ i could do with this topic?", which eventually lead me to thinking about game genres that aren't
+ conventionally speedrunnable. the main thought i had was Five Night's at Freddy's, which if you've somehow
+ never heard of, consists of waiting in a security guard's office for animatronic robots to attack you, and
+ then defending their attacks by closing doors. the win condition is just surviving until the clock hits 6am.
+
+
+ this isn't really something you can speedrun whatsoever, since every gameplay session by design will take
+ the exact same amount of time. which is why i wanted to see if i could turn it into something you could
+ actually speedrun.
+
+
+ after some pondering of both the idea, and the other theme of the game jam (that being "Overheat"), i came
+ up with the idea that is now the tagline of the game: "fnaf but played in reverse".
+
+
+ you play as the animatronics and race against the clock to kill the security guard.
+
+
+ i have literally no idea how original this idea is, i've never looked into it and i can't say i'm much of
+ a mascot horror game player myself, although i knew i wanted to incorporate one other thing in most
+ conventional speedrunnable games that i love: fun movement.
+
+
+ because of this, i ended up building a movement system which took a lot of inspiration from quake and its
+ derivative engines. the game itself is made in godot, however as i have quite a bit of knowledge in
+ designing my own game engines, i used a lot of that to my advantage in designing the structure of this game
+
+
+ this is all without saying, however, that due to the 3 day time constraint, the game can be quite janky at
+ times. overall, it was a fun experiment; but at the end of the day, that's all it really feels like to me.
+
+
+ i couldn't imagine getting more than 10 minutes of gameplay out of this game if i hadn't made it myself,
+ maybe i would find it more fun if i had really spent a ton of time to tweak everything to feel perfect,
+ or maybe designing a more interesting stage to use all of this in would have improved things;
+ but overall, it's really just a game you can entirely experience in about 3 minutes.
+
+
+ still, if you're interested whatsoever in the idea, i'd encourage you to try it as me and my wife put a ton
+ of work into getting it ready for release within the short development window.
+
+
+ there are some parts, such as the leaderboard system, which we overengineered the hell out of, and as such
+ those parts are what i feel i'm most proud of.
+
+
+ if i someday feel like it, maybe i'll go back and polish this up more, but for now, i'm just going to leave
+ it as what it is, and focus on other things that i want to do more.
+
+
+
future plans
+
+ working on game design is something that i do still have a large passion for, and as such i can almost
+ certainly say that this is not the only game we will ever release, especially as i'd love for us to have
+ some released i'd consider of higher quality in the future.
+
+
+ other than that, i cannot say for certain what we'll release next. i'll try to post more frequent blog
+ posts in the future, although due to my tendency to prefer making big announcements of projects we've been
+ working on in secret over just posting a blog post everytime i have a new idea, and then having to cancel
+ 90% of the projects i bring up; i prefer to keep things sparse but with actual promise.
+
+
+ besides that, i want to hopefully by the next blog post implement an rss feed for our blog, as i think
+ that's something that we've gotten quite a few requests for, especially with the large split of social
+ media platforms at the moment.
+
conclusions
+
+ thank you to those of you who've made it through this huge blog post, i would've made it shorter but i
+ wanted to try to get out as much information about what's going on as possible
+
+
+ i'm incredibly tired after spending so much energy to hit the deadline of the gamejam, so i am probably
+ going to spend some time resting
+
+
+ otherwise, i hope to have more announcements soon!
+
+
+ happy voring (:
+
+ +
+ image made by @cathodegaytube!
+