A little bit more about myself!

hello! i'm Vivy-NX (she/they), and I figure this is as decent a place as any to write a little more about what my deal is. i spend a lot of time on the computer! and most of the reason is that ever since my youth i've wanted to make video games. i still do today- so far i've made a few little fan game projects and put them on Itch for free, but one day I hope to make some original, larger scale projects. i don't think i'd ever go into the industry for it though, it just seems like there's so many horror stories these days. i'd rather have decent consistent pay from something else and do it on the side independently. but in general I just love making things on the computer, and I've been at it for a while. sometimes i post art on my tumblr, sometimes i make music and put it on my bandcamp, and for a while I did monthly uploads on my youtube channel, though nowadays I only do videos when I really feel like it. those are linked at the bottom of the main page, if you're interested.

on my interest in using neocities v. other social media

i've kind of had my eye on neocities specifically as an idea of a fun hobby project for.. a while, now. a year ish, registered and made a rudimentary thing a couple months back. i think it feels a little easier to organize all my stuff based on whether someone actually wants to see it when i am able to control the whole structure of my website at all times? social media is a very 'catch people's attention' type economy, i think. and I mean, it's still sometimes useful, but I also feel kind of.. reclusive, about it. At least when it comes to a text-post / image-post type situation like twitter or tumblr. At the end of the day most of what I use these platforms for is looking at posts. (it's now literally the only thing I use twitter for, though only rarely.) I follow various artists and creators and interesting personalities because I want to see what they're up to conveniently, and if they use the social media I'm on, I can follow them conveniently that way. But as far as posting things myself goes, something about it just kind of feels.. off. I'm singling out these text/image posting sites because for whatever reason I have no problem uploading videos and music and things to the applicable kind of places when I make it- at this point Youtube is probably the website I most actively post my own things to anymore, and I don't even do monthly uploads at this point.

Maybe it's just that I'm used to how posting Youtube videos goes? I think it's maybe also that it's kind of the easiest platform to share my stuff elsewhere with. Like if I'm making a random nonsense text post that not many people will get on Tumblr, (a platform which only a fraction of my close friends actually use) I would feel silly posting the link to my post on tumblr in a discord chat or groupchat or whatever rather than just posting it in of itself. additionally if it's like. a really LONG textpost, I'm also kind of averse to sharing that in a chat mostly on account of I don't really know that anyone's going to read it before continuing the channel's conversational flow onto a different topic and forgetting that I posted it. Posting artwork is kind of funny because while I have posted a decent bit of art to tumblr and twitter in the past, it's also kind of the thing I'm most shy to post to like. a public facing site? Doubly so if it involves characters I've made, for whatever reason. Not that I haven't posted any art of them either, I pretty consistently have my profile picture on things set to an image of one of my OCs and I kind of have had it like that for the majority of my online life at this point, and there's a few other examples I can think of, but.. I dunno, I'm shy about it.

Anyhow I'm not sure what's up with that really. But I feel like a dedicated website is necessarily going to be a cozier, lower-key place, what with less things vying for your attention in that familiar social-media-dashboard kind of way. If someone wants to visit my site and take a look, I think that's cool. No pressure to like and subscribe or anything, (though I guess I could tell people to subscribe if I put together an RSS feed or something. But obviously that'd purely be for if they simply wanted to see when I update my site I suppose. I dunno) just a site with things I thought to share in case anyone ever wanted to give it a look sometime.

so with that being said, I suppose I can talk about specific things I'm thinking about doing with this site. i do already have a tumblr but I extremely don't use it to blog, as in like, actually use it as a web-log to write about whatever's on my mind or whatever projects i'm working on or maybe opinions about things i've been watching/reading/playing, so maybe I'll do that here. (incidentally i suppose this is a kind of proto-blog post, seeing as I haven't invented the blog yet on my site. if you like this stay tuned i guess!) also I definitely want to make a comprehensive art gallery page and also write little stylish descriptions for my OCs and other projects for people to look at for reference if they're interested. I've posted art on twitter and tumblr before as previously mentioned like twice but lately I've just kind of been in the habit of making art, sharing it with my friends, and then never posting it anywhere else. something to do with the thing i was talking about earlier with being shy about posting publically on the internet. i wanna share a little more about my ocs and projects and whatall because I care a lot about making these things and it's one of the things I spend my free time doing most, second to playing video games and whatnot, and while I might be a little shy about posting it in a more obvious place all at once, I don't really have any reason to be shy about doing that on my own site cause it's my site and I can do whatever with it. anyhow, that's all I can really think of for now to write on that matter. plenty of time for me to come up with other ideas and try to get those going too.

long ramble about video games and things

with that all out of the way, I guess can just list things that I like to illustrate more about myself. as previously stated i've been a lifelong fan of video games. i've been a long time enjoyer of the Kirby franchise, which I think started when I got Smash Bros. Brawl for christmas one year, and especially when I got Super Star Ultra on DS. I've also been a really long time enjoyer of Sonic- I have a lot of fond memories of playing Sonic Heroes and Sonic Mega Collection on the original Xbox basically as far as I can remember. one fun memory I have associated with those two series is that I made Kirby and Sonic fan characters, which I was inspired to do by various Flash sprite animations I saw as a kid which had video game characters and / or fan characters doing these sort of very shonen-anime inspired fight scenes and whatnot, overall I thought they were cool, and if they weren't cool they were generally funny to me, at least at the time. often they were both. and I wanted to do that for a while, and I did, but eventually I learned a) animation takes a long time and b) trying to do that without using Flash at the time I was trying to do that was. kind of a tall order, and I wanted to do other things more, so I haven't really considered it much in a while. ironically I did eventually get Adobe Animate but then I proceeded to only use it to make hand-drawn animations instead. i think it's mostly just because it was an easier workflow for starting out with. never did make much in the way of sprite animations using it. but I use Blender for basically all my animation purposes now anyway so if I did ever do sprite animations again some day I'd probably use that. I don't really feel like my old fan characters would be all that interesting to use nowadays, so if I did go back to sprite animation stuff I think I'd either make new ones or just stick to canon characters. (plus sticking to characters whose sprites already are pre-made saves a lot of pixel art work. making a whole new fan character with a full set of sprites is basically impossible if you don't take shortcuts in some way, i.e. editing pre-existing character sprites) anyway. back to videogames; I also was really into games that had level editors or building mechanics as a kid; there was this old flash game called Super Mario Flash and I played a ton of that, and had a lot of fun editing little Mario levels, until I saw someone talk about a more robust Mario fan-game suite called Super Mario Bros X, and I spent a RIDICULOUS amount of time as a kid messing with that on my old Windows XP computer. it got copyright striked and development halted after a while (their url was "supermariobrothers dot org" for a while, so. I can see why nintendo would not like that) but in spite of all that people have sort of taken development into their own hands with it and it's still got a decent number of folks who are dedicated enough to keep using it and making things with it, even now. which I think is lovely. another fan game with level editing that I spent a lot of time tinkering with is Sonic Robo Blast 2, which has been in development since the late 90s, and it's still going strong, coming out with new updates every few years- and it's very modding-friendly! it's kind of crazy because it's a 3D Sonic game that runs in what is essentially at its core the idtech DOOM engine from back in the day, though obviously with loads and loads of extra additions and alterations and changes. i think a lot of what was appealing with SRB2's level editor stuff in particular to me was how it was a very simple way of doing 3D without really being a very complex learning process- because DOOM maps are basically projected from a 2d shape, all you really had to do to make a simple map was just draw it out top down on the editor and you could open it up and run around in it. As it got more developed things got more complex, they added the ability to make floating platforms (FOFs, or 'floor over floors', in the community parlance) and more recently a few years ago they managed to implement slopes, which I remember for YEARS people said was just never going to be possible, and the kinds of things you could make became more impressive, but even with all of the complex 3d shapes you can make in it the baseline is still ultimately just creating the topdown 2D outline, so it was pretty easy for me to get used to and start making some cool things without getting too bogged down in having to place a lot of disparate vertexes and whatnot in 3D space. anyway on top of being something I really liked modding as a kid it's also just a really fun and good game, and I highly recommend it. anyway, one of the other games i've spent a ridiculous amount of time in is Terraria, which I happened to find really early in development, because it was made by the original developer of Super Mario Bros X, so I got in very early with that. I think initially I thought it was going to be a Mario level editor type thing also? It very much was not. But I still really liked it, so now whenever I talk about games I like I get to mention that I have 5000 hours on Terraria on my steam profile.

I'm normal. (also most of that I think was me leaving my PC on and just not closing the game because I didn't know better. lmao) anyway yeah. I'm very fond of terraria. I really don't go for a new playthrough on the game very often, and if I do, it's also common that I just don't finish it, because it's a long and arduous process to do that, even if I do enjoy it, but I will almost certainly do at least one more playthrough of this game at some point or other, especially if I end up finding someone who wants to do a co-op playthrough, those are always really fun in my experience. but anyway I could talk about various specific random video games for hours upon hours and I wanna get to other things. Indie games generally speaking are kind of my bread and butter, video-games wise nowadays, either that or old games I already happen to have lying around that I've been meaning to play for ages. I don't really play a lot of triple A titles these days because a) I'm scared of money and b) sometimes I just really do not get a worthwhile experience out of it. And indie games are really good, so I see no reason not to just keep on going in this manner for the forseeable future. Plus a lot of indie games get to be unabashedly queer in ways that I find is very rare for triple A, and as a simple lesbian who enjoys when lesbians are on my computer screen that is obviously gonna appeal to me. I'm willing to try a lot of things, in terms of games. I don't really know how to boil all that down. I do tend to review games a lot on Steam, but also a lot of the reviews I have on Steam are Really Old(tm), so. I dunno if I really want to direct people there, lmao. Here's a short list of games that I feel very strongly about them being really good and I wish more people knew about them. Petal Crash. Chicory: A Colorful Tale. Super Lesbian Animal RPG. Pseudoregalia. OneShot. Please look into these on your own time, that's my homework for you today. They're all available on Steam, most of them are also available on Itch.io, if you want to give the devs a bigger cut of the money you spend on buying their game. Anyway lastly I do just want to mention Cave Story. Not because it's obscure, it's pretty well known, but it's a free game, you can go to cavestory.org and download it and give it a shot, and it's one of my longtime favorites, and also I guess it is going to be 20 years old this year, which is a little crazy. Anyway it's very good. I almost certainly will devote more time to writing about games I like on this website in the future so I'll leave it at that for now. I hope you liked reading the giant wall of text about random video games I feel extremely normal about. I'm going to go to bed now. Good night :]

last updated: 01/13/24 03:17 AM