After much copying of old content, adding in newer works and commentary, and poring over MDN docs to get the CSS styling
just right, I'm pleased to announce that Signal Tower version 2.0 is now ready for public release!
To be sure, there's still a ton of other stuff I've yet to add—the current lack of any music or external links to my
friends' websites is especially glaring. I'd also love to have a page showcasing all of the fanart I've gotten for my
work over the years, just like the fanart page on my friend Nadia's website
(NSFW). There's enough here now, however, to where I'm comfortable launching it, heheheh~
Also, there's an RSS feed now—there's a link to it on the footer at the bottom of every page—so you can get updated in
real time as I publish more pages here! In the meantime, I hope you enjoy your stay here, and that you appreciate all
of the new content here that never ended up getting uploaded onto my old website~
One last thing: Huge shout out to my my talented friend Kate Bagenzo for making the
Strawberry Starter template I used to make this website! Using her template
to build this page has been a hundred times easier than my old approach of manually editing static HTML pages every time
I wanted to add or update anything, heheh.
I keep finding myself writing these blog posts in the dead of night, right before I go to bed. I've been so preoccupied
with working on the website during the day that I end up putting these off...!
Even though I'm tired, however, I want to say two things:
- Apparently, this website template supported adding comment sections to posts? I might experiment with it later on,
though I might also take a similar approach to deaddeaddeath's website and have
links to off-site comment boxes for my games or other pages of interest.
- As ever, my seasonal depression brings out the worst in me. As happy as I am when I see my friends and fellow
artists receiving tons of praise, attention, and glowing comments about their work, some insecure part of my mind,
inflamed by Winter's touch, sulks with envy: "Oh, so we get barely so much as a trickle of views on any of our stuff
even on release, while they all get thousands of downloads and dozens of comments about how these games changed the
commenter's whole personality, cleared up their acne, opened their third eye, and made them curl up on the floor
while crying and vomiting profusely for hours? Are all of our games just complete shit by comparison or something?"
Expanding on the second point there, obviously I recognize that comparing my games to those of my friends is like
comparing apples and oranges. We're clearly telling very different types of stories, and a great deal of my work is as
strange and inscrutable as anything else about me, while their games are vastly more grounded in reality (and thus
vastly more accessible, say, to the average Itch.io commenter). And in a community of predominantly queer and trans
folks, it's to be expected that the stories centered on widely shared queer and trans experiences will get far more
attention and acclaim than the Kyou System's opaque attempts to recreate the more lurid images of their nightmares.
I also have to consider that a huge proportion of the traffic going to their games, especially on Itch, comes from their
games both featuring and being tagged as containing adult content. This fact also helps to account for the difference
in the number of comments, since a significant fraction of them appear to come from people who stumbled across these
titles while looking to masturbate and ended up getting blindsided by the emotional depth of the storytelling and
characters. Meanwhile, I haven't released any sex games yet, so I don't see any of that traffic, which necessarily
means my work will systematically receive less attention on Itch.
Not that it really matters all that much at the end of the day. These intrusive flare-ups of insecurity aside, I love
the work I've been doing on my projects; and even if my games are never included alongside those of my peers in the
"Awesome Games / VNs You Gotta Play Right Now" recommendation posts, I'm going to keep making them anyway, heheheh~
And I truly am delighted that my friends' works are getting so much praise! In all honesty, they deserve every last bit
of it: They've all improved so much as artists even just in the time that I've known them, and they've been releasing
some truly excellent VNs lately! The gratification of my ego is infinitely less important than the fact that the
community is growing and everyone is supporting each other as we express ourselves together~
First things first:
When You're Happy Being Single
Even though I'm plural, the Kyou System is single, and despite Old Man Winter's best efforts to undermine my moods, I
really don't mind living by myself~ I'll take freedom tinged with isolation over the emotional anguish that
characterized too many of my past relationships, certainly, heh.
Indeed, I might not have gone out on any dates today, but I did finally finish assembling the new art gallery on here,
as well as finding some of those Bandcamp-style music stream embedding frameworks I was looking for~ I've also fixed
the broken favicon, and learned more about how this SSG template translates the directory structure of the input files
into an actual website!
Though, on the subject of romance-type things, a good friend of mine made a point of telling
me recently that at least one mutual friend of ours has (or previously had, perhaps) a secret crush on me—but my
tendency to vanish from the internet for long stretches of time, combined with my general inscrutability, has made me
very difficult to approach.
Perhaps so. Monoe is my favorite NPC from Yume Nikki for good reason, after all, heheheheh~
Sometimes the psychic damage from social media platforms is too much, and I need to mute everything for a while for the
sake of my own sanity. I don't anticipate that changing anytime soon, especially with the way things are going with
social media as of late.
At the same time, part of my hope with this new website is to have a much more consistently active and easily followed
online presence. It's more for my own sake than anything else, granted, since I've been in need of an outlet and a
non-cancerous platform for logging my gamedev updates for a while now.
If it also ends up helping me communicate to my cute friends, however, that I am, in fact, harmless—and by extension,
both available for and interested in cuddling and biting—then that's all the better~
(I've had this file sitting open for a while; let me actually write something here...)
If I have one goal in working on this new version of Signal Tower, it's finally to have a website that won't be a
gigantic pain in the ass to keep updated and blog on. I don't know if the way I'm setting up my website on this
template is exactly how Katey had intended it to be used, but hey, templates are made to be modified, yeah?
The new Hall of Images, complete with new commentary, is almost finished. I'll probably make the site public once
that's done, then steadily add updates with the writing, music, etc later on.
With the music in particular, I remember seeing a website styling template somewhere that lets you set up your website
like a Bandcamp page, which would be perfect. I'd love nothing more than to let people stream all of my music from
here~