Hey guys sorry I haven't made new items for a little while there, they were kind of driving me crazy. I have the ability to make the coolest AI artwork now, but the animations are really hard to make perfectly looped and sometimes you do 20 animations in a row and the pixels haven't budged at all, and it costs money per animation attempt, it's maddening to say the least.
So I went to develop a ton of other software using AI, I found that I could write an entire program or game in the time it would normally take me to make 1 AI video animation and be happy with it, and I made so many programs that one day I had the idea to ask AI to make me a custom animation software suite for JAMs so we could get animations coming out which are nice transparent glittery little GIFs not the AI videos type. After a bit of iteration, the program can now spit out some half decent creations. These are going to look great.
And so, having only 20 different FX's in my pipeline and having a variance of 10 of them stacking creates some interesting effects, each time I hit refresh it seems like a waste not to save every render. I am going to try expand this to 1000s of different effects if I can, right now I have 20 basic categories of them and I am just spamming AI to draw up different rendering effects over and over. I've set it up in such a way that my computers can work as clusters, where some can use LLM's to generate new animation parameter / themed concepts and output the item code for Steam directly, and the other systems could be rendering the designs themselves, so I should literally just have to wake up in the morning and choose the best items and just tweak the names and upload them. We are going to have lots more items very, very soon.
I have already coded the game in such a way where if we have a ton of items, everyone gets a huge boost on the click counter rate, so I can't exactly just put a ton of new items out all at once, but I also saw people were yearning for some kind of rare drops.. but all of our drops become rare after 30 days anyway, and we have had at least one "rare drop" in every season at least, so I was not sure how to make more rare drops.. but with this new creation, I could have like 1000 new "rare drops" and then all of them would be hard to obtain, except for the mainline series. Like a huge exotics pool, all of which being very unique in their own way. I was also thinking about non-commodity items, if I can figure out a way for items to have uniqueness in some other way where the items are all truly unique, that may be something worth exploring here with this new system before implementing it. Currently just working out what might be possible to do.
Also I developed a bit of software that interfaces directly with the Google Gemini chat window and does all of the file updating for me, with a diff system, versioning, building, etc all automatically as Gemini talks to me, so I can now develop complicated programs like this without ever needing to touch a single text document, just literally chat it out and it's ready to ship. I might even redo the entire JAMs interface in Python if I can have it done in a programmatic way like this so we can expand the program to extreme degrees very quickly, but the Unity app can maybe serve as a way to provide us buttons which launch these Python apps alongside it. It would be insanely easy for me to just throw together some Python programs in here compared to how long it takes to fiddle with the knobs and inter-workings of Unity.
Reason for the news though is I just noticed it's Spring Sale and our DLCs are on sale and there's like 18 hours left if you wanted to pick them up. I just wanted to give you guys an update on what I had come up with this week for some new items, in case you were on the fence about getting the DLCs or if you were wondering about new items --- I think we should park the AI videos for a bit and make some glittery transparent masterpieces. It already works as really nice with layering and backgrounds but this is also audio reactive, I could like have the music in the game make the visuals reactive. My animator program here is smarter than the entire JAMs game and I made this in like a day. If I can figure out how to talk to Steam we are going to have a lot of fun with these these new apps! I am literally on cruise control with my auto-coding and building tool I put together here. Be a couple days before I can get them all in the game but just figured I'd give you all a head's up on what I'm up to over here!
