From 224b8b4f496b3d574b2ac41a069aa7bf378387ab Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001
From: husky <nikocs@voremicrocomputers.com>
Date: Mon, 29 Jul 2024 23:45:21 -0700
Subject: [PATCH] add company update july 2024 blog post

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         </h3>
 
         <ul class="blog-listing">
+            <li><a href="posts/company_update_july_2024/index.html">Company Update July 2024 (2024-07-29)</a></li>
             <li><a href="posts/btrees_and_refactoring/index.html">B-Trees and Refactoring: Week 4 of VoreStation Development (2023-09-10)</a></li>
             <li><a href="posts/infinite_dbas/index.html">The Simple but Awful Result of Making a Miscalculation: Week 3 of VoreStation Development (2023-08-27)</a></li>
             <li><a href="posts/journaling_impl/index.html">VapUFS Implementation Hell: Week 2 of VoreStation Development (2023-08-13)</a></li>
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+<html lang="en">
+<head>
+    <title>vore microcomputers development blog - Company Update July 2024</title>
+    <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8"/>
+    <link rel="stylesheet" href="/microsoft.css"/>
+    <link rel="icon" type="image/x-icon" href="/favicon.ico">
+</head>
+<body>
+<div class="container">
+    <div class="container-item">
+        <a href="/"><img src="/assets/logo_typeset.svg" alt="vore microcomputers logo"/></a>
+
+        <h1>Company Update July 2024</h1>
+        <h5>2024-07-29</h5>
+        <h4>written by Niko Chow-Stuart (Founder)</h4>
+
+        <p>
+            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!
+            <br/>
+            <br/>
+            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
+            <br/>
+            <br/>
+            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.
+            <br/>
+            <br/>
+            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.
+            <br/>
+            <br/>
+            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
+        </p>
+        <h3>vap / vorestation</h3>
+        <p>
+            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.
+            <br/>
+            <br/>
+            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.
+            <br/>
+            <br/>
+            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
+        </p>
+        <h3>other projects</h3>
+        <p>
+            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.
+            <br/>
+            <br/>
+            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.
+            <br/>
+            <br/>
+            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.
+        </p>
+        <h3>that mascot horror game we released</h3>
+        <p>
+            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.
+            <br/>
+            <br/>
+            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.
+            <br/>
+            <br/>
+            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".
+            <br/>
+            <br/>
+            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.
+            <br/>
+            <br/>
+            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.
+            <br/>
+            <br/>
+            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).
+            <br/>
+            <br/>
+            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.
+            <br/>
+            <br/>
+            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.
+            <br/>
+            <br/>
+            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".
+            <br/>
+            <br/>
+            you play as the animatronics and race against the clock to kill the security guard.
+            <br/>
+            <br/>
+            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.
+            <br/>
+            <br/>
+            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
+            <br/>
+            <br/>
+            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.
+            <br/>
+            <br/>
+            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.
+            <br/>
+            <br/>
+            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.
+            <br/>
+            <br/>
+            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.
+            <br/>
+            <br/>
+            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.
+            <br/>
+            <br/>
+        </p>
+
+        <h3>future plans</h3>
+        <p>
+            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.
+            <br/>
+            <br/>
+            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.
+            <br/>
+            <br/>
+            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.
+        </p>
+        <h3>conclusions</h3>
+        <p>
+            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
+            <br/>
+            <br/>
+            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
+            <br/>
+            <br/>
+            otherwise, i hope to have more announcements soon!
+            <br/>
+            <br/>
+            happy voring (:
+        </p>
+
+        <hr/>
+        <p id="footer">
+            <br>contact us at <a href="mailto:nikocs@voremicrocomputers.com">nikocs@voremicrocomputers.com</a> <a
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