WEEK OF 2023/09/04: BELATED BLOG POSTS ABOUT TORONTO LOL

we wrote a small handful of blogs about the funkin gang out here in Toronto earlier this month, but me and Dave have been so damn busy, that I never got around to working on blogs and writing up anything else! So here's a few blogs from earlier this month we wrote that we are finally getting out heheh.

Phantom Says: Workin in Toronto!

by phantomarcade

Yup, what the title says. Hung out w Kawa n Sunni n Eric n Cam, shit was cash money. Busy animating rn, ttyl

-PA

Funkin' In Toronto continued...

by ninja_muffin99

allo everyone. Last blog I believe we mentioend that we had a handful of our crewmates here in Toronto!!!

I will seperate it out into two sections.... how the OFFICE work turned out, and how it's turning out now! Dave is still at my apartment workin with me!!! Wahoo!!!

HOW DID THE OFFICES GO???

About at the beginning of August, we had some of our crew here, as mentioned. It was a smidge of the ADMINISTRATIVE crew / help, and also Eric! Towards the end of the week we ended up getting Dave to come from Philly too!! We had two offices during the week. For the Mon-Thurs, we had a small little room that juuuuust barely fit 5 of us by the end of the week. There was a cute little TV in the room, which we used to project up and have Notion up as a bit of a "digital whiteboard" of sorts, to organize our tasks. Through the week we all aimed to be there at about 9-10AM, which was VERY different for me, but a welcome change. It's weird to say, but it felt like.... an actual job.... in a good way!!! I've had two jobs my whole life, grocery store, and Friday Night Funkin'. Working from home has it's benefits for sure, but it does take a certain discipline to have a normal schedule for yourself in your day, that I don't seem to have just yet! It felt very refreshing, and after the theatre meetup, I was really in the mood to get back into FNF work.

We got a LOT of our biz and administrative internals reorganized and whatnot, along with a decent handful of programming work outta the way and bug fixxins and whatnot.

It was fun showing the team around TORONTO and was nice broad.... TEAM BUILDING WAHOOOO!!!!! That may seem cringe to say... but it really does damn matter WHO you work with, and if you are happy to work with 'em.

ANYWAYS the funkin CREW toronto meet was all nice and lovely and at the end of the week we all got matching purple shirts from UNIQLO, the funkin crew uniform begins...

CLASSIC PHANTOMARCADE AND NINJAMUFFIN99 GRINDS

Once the smoke cleared, it ended up being just me and Dave working in my apartment now. We kept the 9-5 habit... except now we are on the 9PM-5AM schedule! HOWEVER we are getting a DAMN lot of work done. One of our major features of the update is almost wrapped, which was REALLY on our todo list for a long ass time. It truly feels like a large block of what we have left is closer and closer. monster energy, la croix, nicotine gum, and tim hortons double doubles keep this damn game afloat. During the day me and dave will hit the sunlight a bit, and do some chores, etc. etc. Life been upside down!!! There's a few DDR machines in Toronto that we've been hunting down, and those are our R&D missions.

FAN ART OF WEEK - Mimyko

by ninja_muffin99

this week I am picking da pic of the week... and I pick..... PICO MAID!! by Mimyko

idk where the origin of Pico maid comes from but everytime I see it, it just feels correct. Mimyko has made this particular Pico very cute and awesome and lovely! I was actually looking at Mimyko's stuff from another art piece on Newgrounds, and then saw Pico maid in sidebar and had to toss it some rep this week.

Pico maid...ah by Mimyko

Head to Mimyko's page on Newgrounds for more awesom art!

a few things about toronto

by procgenkawa

• I was too shy to say hi to anyone at the Newgrounds meetup but it was really cool to watch happen! everyone is so creative and cool as hell!
• i will never view pigeons the same way again though, thanks for nothing /j
• Streetcars are very cool and the service is pretty good! Support your local public transit!!
• I thrifted a very good shirt in Kensington Market, and in general I recommend hanging out in that neighborhood a whole lot! There was lots of good food and crafts and thrifting, exactly the kind of stuff I like!
• it was neat to run into big festivals about immigrant/diaspora communities, and that happened a lot!

tickets, please

by procgenkawa

The thing about a big project is that there's just...a lot to do! It's so easy to get lost in the sauce of what's in the air and who's waiting on you for what, or to spend too much time focusing on something that wasn't even that important! It's really easy for something to stall because you don't know what needs to happen next to make it real, etc.

Wise sage Sakurai [1] presents a quick overview of the solution most PROFESSIONAL GAME STUDIOS use: a ticket system!

Funkin has tried this a few times in the past, but if no one is tending to the ticket list, it's easy to forget to move them forward and track them as you go. There can also be random mental hurdles to using a tracking tool, because all our brains are funky like that. Luckily, they have me now, and since I'm usually not directly touching game content creation [2] I can be the one making sure this is all up to speed as one of my major responsibilities!

We're using Notion for this, as ninjamuffin mentioned - it works well for my brain, and I like that I can also make general pages-full-of-notes (for things like documenting how to test the game) and calendars (for holidays and time off) that are really trivial to link inside each individual ticket.

Sunni [3] and I jammed on making the Notion board for the team while the others cranked out content and programming improvements, making it easy to use and pulling together information that had been scattered to the winds and hard to find before, and I'm so hype to see how it'll help everything else go way smoother!

[1] If you're interested in the world of professional game design and development at all, we at Funkin can't recommend Masahiro Sakurai's channel of bite-sized gamedev wisdom enough!! We refer to it a lot around here! [2] Remember, I'm not musician extraordinaire kawaisprite! I'm Kawa, an employee who got here at the start of the year to iron out stuff like this! [3] Sunni is one of the wise sages at Windflower Games https://windflowergames.com - bizdev and production experts for hire!

outro text

by ninja_muffin99

here is the funkin blog about toronto! as im writing this, me and dave are likely nearing the end of the Toronto work hustle. We did a lotta crazy work and all shoutouts to hatsune miku shoutouts shoutouts we got da gooncave setup and shiiiiit we (I) am getting obsessed with lil miku toys and art prints, there was FanExpo here in toronto last week so I gooned out and got some nice lil miku art and figures heheh

SONG OF WEEK: