Glad to have you with us!
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thanks! i don’t know if i’ll be very active but i’ll endeavor to make my contributions at the very least interesting
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good choice of avatar imo
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i too find myself mind-boggled by the psx on a regular basis
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did you know gaming: one of these unassuming skellers is a young gravelord nito
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Hello everyone! I’m Zoë, a.k.a spinnylights. Despite being a working artist I’ve tended to keep kind of a low profile, but some of you may know me as a game maker or musician, maybe especially for my work with Lily Zone/cicadamarionette/townmap/etc. who’s my long-time partner (these days we live in a small apartment on the south side of Pittsburgh, although we met in Central Texas where I’m from originally). We talk about this forum kind of often but for a long time I waffled over whether or not to actually make an account, but I’ve ultimately decided I should try to get out more and talk to game people in the wider world whatever my reservations. I have a lot of ideas and strong feelings about games but up to this time they’ve been rather greenhouse-grown—Lily’s the only one who’s heard about most of them explicitly—and I feel like it’s a bit sad to keep them cooped up like that when some other people might also get something out of them and have interesting responses and so on. Naturally they appear in our games, but that’s not quite them same as actually talking with people about them.
As far as playing games goes, these days I mostly play games that I can run in the emulators Mednafen and OpenMSX, for the rather prosaic reason that they both support a heavy “temporal blur” visual effect that can rule out the possibility of rapid high-contrast flashing or blinking patterns. Visual patterns like that can give me migraine attacks that usually last a few days, and during which I become too averse to light and sound to play most games, so I kinda have to work around that. Things weren’t always this way—I didn’t have migraines at all until my late teens and I didn’t get them from flashing light patterns before several years ago—so I’ve played a wider variety of games over the course of my life and miss many of them I used to play in the past.
I have dreams of writing an X11 compositor that can use the GPU to detect regions of the screen that are starting to blink and adaptively blur them, and although I’ve designed an algorithm that should do the trick, I feel like I still have a long way to go with the X11 API before I understand it well enough to make that happen in full. I chip away at it now and again so maybe eventually I’ll be able to use it and return to the wider gaming sphere. Thankfully in the meantime there’s a lot of interesting stuff you can play in Mednafen and OpenMSX, although it’s ended up meaning that I know a lot more about games from the mid-'90s and prior than anything later on, particularly games that don’t require super-quick reactions since that’s difficult with all the the heavy blur.*
Over the years I’ve learned Japanese well enough to play adventure games and RPGs and things, so at the point that I’m stuck in mostly-non-action retro-land that’s been a fun thing to occupy myself with when I am playing games. Recently I’ve been enjoying Yuji Horii’s Okhotsk ni Kiyu, which maybe I should do a running thread on here about or something since it has a great droll wit and cool art and music. I want to make my own Famicom-style adventure game at some point—I have one sketched out, I just have to make space for it with all the other stuff I have to work on, but if I get enough stuff cleared out of the way that I can make it my primary focus, I might serialize it so I don’t have to spend years working on it in a lonely private way or whatever. 
When talking about games, I like to try to really get up close to them and figure out how they get their fun effects and such, and also to think about them in terms of affect and how the game is trying to relate to the player and the like, and to find bridges between these modes of analysis. I was a music theory major, and I like the half quantitative/half qualitative, half empirical/half interpretive approach that music theory takes to music, so I try to kind of go at games the same way. I feel like that yields insights that are particularly useful to people actually working in the medium, although it can also really enhance your appreciation of existing work by revealing facets of it you might not have noticed otherwise. I also just like to banter around about games and be silly and things though…I’m not always super-serious or whatever.
Anyway, it’s nice to make the acquaintance of all y’all! I have a long-running tendency to get too anxious and embarassed on forums and run away eventually, but hopefully I can overcome that tendency and manage to stick around here and have fun with y’all and things. 
*[I actually love action games honestly but there’s not many I can feasibly play these days. I do sometimes play Arkanoid (which looks kind of cool with motion blur) and Centipede (which is made a bit more awkward but it’s too much of an old favorite of mine not to play now and again). Also Metal Gear and Metal Gear 2 for the MSX are fine to play that way and are some of my all-time fave games. 
I used to love playing shmups as well, but there I don’t really know of almost any that I find fun to play with blur and also can be blurred enough in the emulator to prevent migraine…Gradius 2 is fairly playable, and I rather like the MSX version where you can replace the ship with Penta and experience a penguin flying through the Gradius world of '70s science textbook covers, but my photosensitivity has gotten hair-trigger enough that the OpenMSX blur effect (glow) even at maximum isn’t strong enough to smooth out the “shimmeriness” caused from the motion-blurred Gradius sprites moving forward in a line with their trademark sudden periodic jerks and I still get a migraine from that…alas…maybe someday I will make a non-blinky shmup so I have a game like that to play again. It’s almost intrinsically hard because of the constraints of the form but I think there might be some approaches that could be guaranteed to work…]
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welcome! your avatar rocks
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Oh hell yeah come on in
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welcome! your avatar rocks
Awww thank you! ^^ It’s adapted from a scientific paper which suggests that cats rubbing their faces on silvervine leaves has an adaptive benefit because the chemicals in silvervine deter mosquitos, and also discusses a physiologic mechanism by which the chemical nepetalactol in silvervine encourages feline rolling and rubbing behavior by raising β-endorphin levels (their research also suggests that elevated plasma levels of the hormone β-endorphin in cats generally plays a role in them rolling around on the floor and rubbing their faces on things…in humans, β-endorphin tends to reduce pain sensation and give pleasant feelings,¹ in case you needed any scientific encouragement to trust that, if you pet a cat and they start rubbing their face on things and rolling around on the ground, they probably feel relaxed and happy). 
Oh hell yeah come on in
Howdy 
✧
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can confirm our cats go apeshit for silvervine sticks
lovely to meet you spinnylights! hope you stick around, with that kind of mindset and knowledge you’d be a credit to the forums
also i hadn’t heard hide nor hair of CM for years so i’m glad she’s alive and well!
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This sounds amazing btw, I played Total Distortion recently on stream and it had a lot of flashing effects that I was sometimes uncomfortable streaming just for like, safety reasons. Would be very cool to be able to mitigate that.
And welcome!!
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Welcome to SB. I would definitely be interested in hearing video game thoughts and recommendations from someone involved with Crypt Underworld. That’s such an impressive and inspiring game.
And we could use more discussion of MSX and PC-88 games around here.
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Nice, that’s good to know…our cat is a kind of mild responder to catnip, he kinda gets into it but not as much as some other cats I’ve known, but maybe that’s a sign that he would get really into silvervine. From a bit of glancing around I’m getting the impression that silvervine is stronger.
Thanks, lovely to meet you as well! ^^
Very much so! A few years ago she did delete her main Twitter account but she’s still been online in other places. We’re both working on redoing our websites right now so there is that, but also much of her solo game work and stuff we’ve done together is at https://lilithzone.itch.io/ which we both attend to regularly. She’s on this forum too, under the name @townmap…I’m not entirely sure if people here realized that was her or not but she said it was fine if I said it was her so um, yeah, you may have seen sign of her more recently and not realized perhaps. She manifests under a variety of guises…she could be anywhere, anyone… 
You know I hadn’t thought of the streaming aspect! I’ve only been working on it kind of minimally in part because I think of it as something with extremely niche use (I’m not sure how many people out there both have photosensitivity conditions and use X11…some, I’m sure, and of course I know of at least one , but I’ve never seen anyone online pining for that particular kind of software, as opposed to WIP games of ours people want to see finished or whatnot). In any case, I wasn’t really thinking about its use to streamers—that does expand the potential user group a lot! Still, do many streamers use X11…? You can use it in Windows under Cygwin but of course Windows games won’t necessarily run in that environment. I’m not sure if Windows natively provides a way to do arbitrary graphical operations on the “root window” (or whatever the Windows equivalent is)…it might, but I’ve never heard of it if so.
Of course, I guess if the graphics-processing part of the program works as I imagine it would, maybe there would be at least some way to hook that part into the middle of your streaming pipeline in some sense—that would depend on your streaming software I think moreso than the OS. Stuff to think about I suppose…if/when I get more done on it I’ll take pains to keep the pure graphics stuff decoupled from X11 and written as portably as I can so it at least leaves the possibility open of adapting it to Windows environments in one way or another.
Although, maybe you in particular do use X11…? I looked at your site a bit and saw you apparently stream PS2 games which you could do that way. (Also since you say you like harpsichord, I want to mention the keyboardist Simone Stella, who in 2011 made recordings of Buxtehude’s entire harpsichord-friendly ouvre which make for hours of lovely harpsichord music if you like the North German Baroque style, and also the harpsichord specialist Elisabeth Chojnacka who recorded one of my favorite albums of contemporary harpsichord music Clavecin 2000. That one sadly doesn’t seem to be on Youtube but here a different recording of her doing Ligeti’s “Continuum” at least which is the first piece on the album—the one on the album has less reverb and is with a treblier, reedier harpsichord…which I feel like makes for a more transparent result and one which better exposes the acoustic characteristics Ligeti perhaps intended in the harpsichord’s upper partials for the piece…just like, IMO I guess …anyway PM me I guess if you’re interested in either the Stella or the Chojnacka. )
Aww well I’m glad you like it so much! I’ll pass that on to Lily…I have to admit though, I in the end didn’t end up having that much direct involvement with that game. It has ideas I came up with and stuff Lily and I thought of together and things, but there’s not much in the way of stuff I actually made or wrote directly in the game as it came out in the end. If you’ve played Song of Homunculus, The Last Car, or Elf Bowling RPG, those have a lot more of my concrete work in them (although not always in the same sense). Little bits of my stuff are in other game’s of Lily’s too here and there, like Room Map or Gilgamesh II or Day/Night Town etc.—single pieces of music, small code modules, a texture or animation, that kind of thing, usually just stuff that comes up organically during development. (We work next to each other so a lot of what we both do ends up being at least sort of collaborative in some sense just because we’re both there and talking, which sometimes leads to other things and so on.)
Glad you feel that way 
I actually don’t really play PC-88 games ever sadly because I don’t know of a PC-88 emulator with a strong temporal blur effect…I wish there was one because actually I think the PC-88 is extremely cool (I like its graphical look and I’m ever-enamored of FM synthesis). Lily does play PC-88 games a lot though so maybe she would be up to discuss them here more. Although, she has posted about them a bit already.
I like the MSX a lot too, and it does have some really great games, including some cute hobbyist stuff and things which I kind of pine for playing console games in Mednafen. I’ll try to post fun stuff about it.
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yeah apparently AU cats are way less catnip–responsive as a whole than US ones… this might be a continental or even hemispheric situation but i don’t wanna extrapolate unduly
oh!! we love a woman of mystery
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I have occasional photosensitivity–doesn’t sound as bad as yours; migraines occur but pretty rarely; mostly it’s manageable as long as I don’t go too hard on sleep deprivation–and spent a long time looking for non-blinky shmups. Found a few; from the sound of it they probably are still too intense for your situation but I’ll throw them out just in case.
This person’s shmups https://xxgameroom.itch.io are Cave-inspired but without the flashing effects, at least Blue Wish Resurrection Plus and Blue Wish Desire. The pulsing bullet FX in RP and multi-color bullets in D did start to get to me after a while though, I think.
Cave’s Mushihimesama on Steam isn’t TOO blinky, particularly by their usual standards. Lots of fast bullets though so probably still not the best.
The version of Gunbird 2 on Steam mutes the hit flash FX by 50% or something:
Nothing in the game’s documentation mentions this and there’s no option to enable/disable it. I wonder if maybe someone on the port team was photosensitive and they just slipped it in there.
But yeah shmups are a real tricky one visually.
We’re in the U.S. too—although we don’t know our cat’s true origins since he moved in with us when he was like maybe 1–2 years old. He could be secretly Australian…maybe as a kitten he found a cheesesteak in a trash can and decided he had to sneak onto a plane to Philly to taste the sandwich in its home environs. I wish he could tell us about that period of his life.
Cool, thank you and I appreciate you sharing the fruits of your efforts! Lily can probably check out video of those games and see since she knows pretty well what would “get me”—that’s what we often do. And yeah, I guess I’m probably kind of unusually susceptible; I can get 5–10 migraines in a month even blinkiness aside, often for no clear reason, and they typically come with surreal, rather fascinating auras that can be debilitating in their own ways (like I can get a limp or parts of my vision can get covered up with noise or whatnot). I take propranalol every day as a way to supress them; before I went on that I was getting more like 20 a month. So yeah, I guess like, it’s kind of easy to “knock my brain over” or whatever. 
I do know (sadly) that Mushihimesama is right out even though I love that game’s whole vibe and stuff. 
The major problem for me there I think is like, the bullets are very light in the middle, and very dark on the edges, so if you arrange a lot of them overlapping in a line and then move the line really fast across the screen, the screen itself will have a band of regions rapidly flashing even if the bullet sprites aren’t being animated in themselves. 
Like you say, Cave likes fast bullets so their games are basically all hazardous to me now because of that kinda stuff…which is sad to me because I find their games really fun and kind of adorably geeky and bonkers…I do hope I can return to them someday.
As a side note, on the topic of Mushihimesama, I think these quotes from two interviews on Shmupulations about how they came up with their ideas for it give interesting insight into the mysterious “Cave mentality,” in that era at the very least:
Ikeda: Actually, at first we were planning to make something ultra-realistic, a “tanks and helicopters only!” kind of world. But around that time we got news that a new Raiden game would be coming out. We eventually decided that would be a tough act to follow, so we decided on a completely opposite, fantastic world for the game. (laughs). When graphics leader Wakabayashi told me “since its not going to be military themed, think of something else”, I brought in some fantasy style storyboards and we went with that.
(from Mushihimesama HD – 2012 Developer Interview - shmuplations.com)
So I guess like, Raiden is an example of staid naturalism in shmups, apparently, and Mushihimesama is its “complete opposite.”
and
Wakabayashi: There were actually various versions of [Reco’s] design. shall I take you through the history of them, going up to the one we settled on?
- A hero, who fights and rides on some kind of living creature.
- How about riding a dragon?
- Maybe the hero transforms into a dragon? Hmm, sounds like Dragon Spirit.
- No, no, definitely she is riding another creature, not transforming.
- The hero should be a girl.
- Riding on a dragon has been done too many times before. How about a bug? (at this point I also conceived a world of bugs with bug enemies)
- How about she rides a butterfly?
- Oh, this is pretty cool! But the butterfly motive is too similar to ESPGaluda.
- Well then, maybe a beetle?
- The backstory became “A princess who secretly works as a bounty hunter, riding and fighting on a beetle.”
- The way she rode didn’t look good.
- She’s a princess, so she should sit on her side.
- Yeah, now we’re talking.
- Reco. A cheerful princess who is shouldering some heavy burden (she’s conscious of it within herself, but she doesn’t show it on the outside).
(from Mushihimesama – Music and Design Interview - shmuplations.com)
“now we’re talking” 
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Hello @spinnylights . I okay a lot of STGs and such, so I will try to keep an eye out for any with low flashing levels and such to suggest them, but as you have said, that’s a big issue in them.
yes this is absolutely the case
Thanks for the Mushi interview links. I dig that concept art. : )
Hello and thank you!
I will keep that in mind. He is a big-time meower and I suppose Aussies do have their wide vowels…
Sure, I’m glad! ^^ There’s more if you click through (and even sillier text ). There’s something really funny to me about the idea of that concept being like, totally the other way from Raiden. I guess maybe there is some sort of sense in which like, when you think of all the possible scenarios for a game where all you do is fly around and shoot at things, maybe somehow “bounty hunter princess rides a giant beetle side-saddle” is on the other end of a spectrum from “‘ultra-realistic…tanks and helicopters only!’” but I can’t help but think of them as fascinating specimens for those kinds of ideas. I guess like, maybe “sheds light on” wasn’t quite the right way to put it…those interviews kind of just add depth to the mystery in some ways. But it does give you more to think and giggle about amidst all the explosions and giant numbers flying around.
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