Makealotl Stickers Part Two

Last year I made tons and tons of Delia stickers at the library. This year, fair's fair, I had to make some Wendys.

You can pick some up at Game Harvest this year, whenever it is. I have plenty ... I doubt I'll run out in my lifetime.

New Game at Makealotl Music: In Tune Lagoon!

New game at Makealotl Music: In Tune Lagoon! Kick a lilypad, hear a pitch. Help Delia sort the pitches from lowest to highest.

My friend gave me this idea at last year's Game Harvest when they asked if Makealotl did ear training. I was like, oh, not yet, but it can!

Click here to play!

Warp Zine Issue 5 Out Now!

Click here to access Warp Zine issue 5!

You'll probably see a familiar pink axolotl through the issue. Good. Behold her.

I don't know what to write for the next one. I'd like it to be an activism something or other, but I gotta decide.

Makealotl Music Updates

I updated Note Nab at Makealotl Music! I had a teacher request that the treble clef questions stick to one octave, she wanted to play Note Nab with young children who had just started reading music. So, now Note Nab has the Simple Treble mode, where all the questions stay inbetween middle and high C. Also, if Delia goes a minute without answering a question, a pop up now appears to tell the user to talk to a note. I got that idea by watching Note Nab played at Game Harvest -- I was surprised how many people were content to wander around the opera house lawn and never touch anything.

New Makealotl Trailer!

I cut a trailer for the Makealotl Music site! I hope you love it, it was tons of work.

And of course, you should probably visit Makealotl Music for all your music education needs

New Game at Makealotl Music!

Come play the new game at Makealotl Music! The Lilypiano is a music toy where you can play tunes on the lilypads. ... really what happens is Delia will summon her shrimp friends to bounce on the lilypad for you.

If you'd rather, Delia and Wendy will play songs for you in Play For Me Mode. Or, Delia will teach you a tune in Teach Me Mode.

Click here to play today!

I Don't Get It Either!

I had an issue, I solved it, and I have no idea why my solution works. I also don't know why my old solution didn't work. This sort of thing makes me cranky, so I'm hoping someone else understands it and explains it to me!

Makealotl Music is getting a new game with a lilipad piano. I wanted to include a mode where you play Simon Says with Delia to learn some of the songs in the program. You can see the final version working here:

An oversimplification of what's going on under the hood is that the game stores the song in several different arrays, and then as you progress through the song, it glues the arrays together to build what Delia "listens" for to check if you're wrong or right. Originally I had the arrays stashed on the button itself that you click to pick a song. So, for example, the Mary Had A Little Lamb would store C D E D in an array, and then the game would load C D E D and see if that's what you were playing. You can read the code here in this Pastebin if you want the technical-atude of it all.

This worked great until I added a second button to add a second song. (Brother John, if you were curious.) Once I did that, Godot would not read any array at all, and would crash with a null reference error. (Are those called null reference errors in GDScript? That's what they're called in C#, I've never heard them called anything in GDScript.) I cannot explain why the code would work fine with one object and go south with two objects.

I got to a point where whatever the explanation was wasn't important, I needed the code to work. I got the idea to:

• Have ONE object, just a regular ol node, run the code that lets Delia check what notes the user plays
• Store all these arrays in a resource
• Have the button send the resource up to the regular ol node and force it to read the arrays out that way. Tell me it's null now, you sonofabitch.

Godot 4.5 have a feature that I have been vibrating for. See that fancy "append node" checkbox? A signaling node can now send itself up with a signal! So we can store the resource on the button, have the button signal up, send the button on that signal, then read the resource!

Wow! Except it doesn't work!

If that song_data variable is null then I'm in Unity Engine. No. For whatever reason Godot simply would not read the resource off the button. Notice that the button itself isn't null? I guess it did manage to send itself, but none of its own data?????

Google suggested that sometimes you had to read the resource, duplicate it, then send it up. This doesn't work either.

So, like, don't do that, I guess, or suggest it.

Godot really loves the load() and preload() functions, those are pretty secure, so I tried this on the button:

Which doesn't work, but it lead me to the working solution. I don't love this solution, it's not slick and clean, but it's the only thing that actually works and allows the game to run multiple songs so let's goooo:

Using the connect dialog, send the resource's path as a string.

Then force the Teach Me object to load the path.

So I got this far, I got this working, party party, and then I remembered that I totally forgot that .bind() exists. Oh well, I can't promise that it would work, given that append node wasn't working.

Again, this makes me cranky, I'd rather just merrily be putting .tres files in the inspector by drag and drop. I'd love to know why the other solutions didn't work, and I'm curious to know if any of these will actually work in the upcoming 4.6. If you can explain it, let me know!

Game Harvest 2025

Just making sure you wish you developed games in Kentucky: all us Kentucky Developers got together and showed off our games to the public during the fancy fancy event Game Harvest, put on by Louisville Makes Games. We held it in an art musem, because we're art ~

So that's us, and all our little booths, before we turn the lights off. You can see Makealotl Music over on the far left!

You can see Makealotl even better here:

And on the left of that picture, you can see Vaporwave Battler running too.

I gave out stickers! That was fun, I love giving stickers to people.

I got to talk to a tonnnnn of people, too, and watch them play both Note Nab and Vaporwave Battler. It was also excellent to talk to my fellow dev pals, get ideas, and play with their games as well. I walked off with so many ideas, you guys, I have so many ideas now.

My list of ideas for me for next year:

• Get little yard sale signs -- you know, the neon cut out ones? -- to give people a call to action about the game ("Buy on Itch.io!" or "Visit Delia on the web!"). Also use the signs to mark the stickers as free
• Reprint my buisness card holder, it busted right before
• Maybe Game Harvest specific builds that reset or give directions after a time so my booth needs less babysitting
• Headphones. I brought purple ones for Makealotl Music just because Delia has purple headphones and I think I'm funny, and I noticed they got used when the bands were playing really loud. They're just 5 Below headphones, I think another pair of cheapies would be a fine investment.

A Bad Word Filter

If you read this post, you're gonna agree that you're old enough to see some pretty bad words on the Internet!

One of the last tasks I had to program in for Delia's game was a bad word filter. I taught, I am 100% aware that kids cannot be trusted and have to have that filter. But: what bad words do we include?

I know that older games have bad word filters that have been cracked and are probably sitting around in the open on TCRF, but I didn't even know where to begin to find those. Soooooo I asked on the Kentucky Developer's website, and someone linked me to the Banned Word List. Did you know there's an official bad word list? Had no clue.

I'm gonna link it here, and it's obviously not safe for work, so you're clicking at your own risk: The Banned Word List

Just for good measure, some people put me up on these other two lists, which are also not safe for work, and you are also clicking these links at your own risk: Wikipedia's list of ethnic slurs and Wikipedia's list of common nouns derived from ethic group names. I went through and picked the ones I figured kids would be most likely to use.

Now, if you've read down this far, you're grown enough to know this, but I still need to say it: I'm not providing this information so you have a cool new list of awful things to call people. I'm providing this in case you're ever in the same situation and you need to block words. When I would let kids choose names on Kahoot, to put it politely, they would use something off these lists pretty much every time. Kahoot has a feature where it picks names for the kids. It made them complain, but it also meant that I wasn't displaying the Banned Word List on my projector.

I'm actually not sure how this factors into products for adults, but if you know I'd be interested to hear.

(You know, for whatever reason they'd pick nice names for Blooket. Can't explain that.)

Stickers!

My local library lets me print stickers!

Do you recognize that axolotl? That's Delia!

I have plans for promoting Delia's site, Makealotl Music, annnnnnnd I need stuff. My local library will let me print $8 worth of stuff a month, and apparently THIS many stickers is eight bucks. I get eight more bucks every month. It's my tax dollars, may as well go down to the library and use it. While I was down there, I printed a zine about Vaporwave Battler too. Free printing at the library.✌️

Give me some time, I'll give you your opportunity to get your own Delia sticker. Also, I wonder what I'm printing next week? 🤔

Progress on Delia's Game

All the testers had nice things to say about Delia's game! That's good to hear. (It still needs a name ...) But that also means I can start designing the second level, inside the Opera House.

I love when I can peek out from behind stuff in games.

You can also roll into the plants and watch em shake:

I should put the notes in this week, make it function like a real game. ... I should put more stuff to knock into, as well.

My Testing Process

This is a screenshot from my newest project! I don't have it named though. But the pink axolotl is Delia. It's an educational game. If you're old like me, this game is similar enough to Treasure Mountain, it just has a fresh coat of paint on it. It's through it's first testing phase, and everything has gone great so far! That's a lie, the first test was actually kinda rough -- that's what testers are for. I thought it might help if I outline my current testing process. If it helps, you can steal it.

• First, I test it. If I can't break it, we're doing great.
• Then, I make my husband test it. He's a software developer, and he ususally works okay after I remind him that if his testers don't come back with extremely detailed reports he gets mad, so yes, actually, he is expected to play my game longer than 30 seconds.
• At this point, I stop and fix things that he's found.
• I send it out to my local programming club's discord.
• I beg for testers on Bluesky. Seriously, don't sleep on this step, plenty of people are willing and ready to help you. Use the #indiedev and #gamedev hashtags.
• I take the comments, and if I like the suggestions, I integrate them into the next build. I don't always change everything. That's art, baybay. But I do pretty much 95% of what my testers say, because the program has to make sense to people who aren't me.
• My programming club, my husband, and Bluesky all get copies again to beta test
• HOPEFULLY that's the final boss of testing and I can go on to something else

That's where I'm at with Delia's game! I'm hoping this week to get her second level started, she's more than overdue for another level. The hardest thing to get rolling with her game was the touch controls. Everyone has a different opinion on how she should control. My programming club really encouraged me to not have controller buttons on the screen. The thing is, Delia rolls a lot. When I test on my iPad, she rolls if she thinks she detects a change in pressure. In the end, the control scheme I wound up with actually wasn't the most accurate -- Delia still rolls around the screen sometimes unintentionally. But my husband and I agreed it was the most fun, because she flips a lot and moves the fastest. Maybe like Sonic the Hedgehog I guess. Hey, if you want me to test your stuff, my contact info is always here.