We're living in a world where LLMs and diffusion models are being used to constantly cheapen the stuff we see online for a quick buck at intentional best or to spread misinformation or replace workers with its output at the intentional worst

Generative AI is not magic, it takes a heck of an effort to get people to understand that it is just matrix algebra behind the scenes, especially those in power and with money

That much we should know and we should absolutely inform those who believe it is magic and denounce those who use it for nefarious purposes (and encourage ethically sourced material for creations), absolutely call them out, fully encouraged, and I respect NG leadership for not budging to the wave, deciding to block AI slop entirely

But one thing you should not do is act like a bull and charge forward with hostility the moment you see "AI" uttered by some person when referring to actual useful technologies backed by machine learning (ML)

For some people the mere mention of "AI" (which by now has become a buzzword) has now them raising flares and setting everything on fire due to misinfomation and that's concerning

Machine learning has its proper uses and is beneficial to most people if not everyone, and it makes me sad to think about how people were flaming the Spider-Verse artists using machine learning to reduce tedium from their work to, for example, make expression lines, or other software used to assist with coloring animation frames. I remember Clip Studio getting lambasted after adding image-GenAI to the main program (rightfully so). It was removed, and then they explored adding other useful features that make use of ML such as autocoloration or shadows, while trying to be useful to artists, and they still got the fallout after apologizing and being more conscious about it (thankfully that's waning nowadays)

Manual moderation in an ever growing online media lanscape is excruciatingly hard to do by hand, especially on big sites. I find that one of machine learning's biggest strengths is classification, which automatic moderation requires in order to be helpful to actual moderators

Hell, even in games for dynamic behavior; not even ML backed--AI is what developers called NPC behavior before the buzzword came in :P

Just something I wanted to put out there. Figured it'd be something cool to add to my NG blog, given i recently stated my opinion about it in a forum post (but didn't want to hijack it with this wall'o text lol)

Oh mother of mercy I did Not expect that I am so honored thank you very much

i'll keep trying and i'll keep grinding at it! someday i'll get more eyes on my stuff

it's going to be slow because of this job, but it's definitely going to happen

BBNANO+ 1.4.2 - BUGFIX & PERFORMA

This update is mostly a bugfix update and internal refactor of some things to make them like your machine better and your machine do likewise.

• Fixed memory leak caused by replaying stages over and over without restarting the game
• Altered ball’s collision box to have ONE less corner (potentially reducing mis-hits)
• Altered ball’s persistent collision check (Bricks should be skipped less now)
• Do note that edge and corner cases may still happen. It is a sad reality of this genre that corners always cause issues. I’m trying my best to make it consistent though!

• Grabbing a Multiball in nano-0:finite no longer produces a 200-ball solar flare

I left that last one in by accident. Forgot to remove the change before pushing v1.4.1. I’m sorry

But at the same time,

LMAO

Thank you for playing!

This one's a small update. I just tweaked some GUI stuff and added a tutorial guide.

BBNANO+ 1.4.0 - BALANCE & ACESSIBILITY UPDATE

This update changes how some difficulties start as, as well as adding indicators that tell you how powerups are doing without having to look at the side of the screen, toggleable.

The first update is the actual balancing, which changes the starting speed of some of the difficulties to have their descriptions match them better, as well as giving Euphoric 2 more lives.

The second update are the Powerup Hints.

These hints show how much a powerup has left when it’s important. There’s 3 setting levels:

• None, classic behavior, except Unstoppable’s last 2 seconds have its trail’s width recede down to the ball’s size
• Important hints, selected by default, Falsewall’s last hit will have a ⚠ when it has one hit left, and Magnet/Railgun have a tooltip below the paddle when they are refilled or are down to their last use.
• Most hints, has the previous except the paddle powerups show the tooltip on every use.

And a few bugfixes:

• Potentially fixed some edge cases where the ball collision will freak out at high speeds and skip an entire brick
• Potentially fixed WebGL not saving settings between updates

I've updated my game.

I ADDED A STAGE PORTAL AND STAGE EDITOR

go play it !!!!!!!!!

So I have recently finished Artfight 2023's drawings, and one of them was a game

I'm gonna upload Artfight's drawings in here, because I never did starting from 2021, and then I'll polish up the game I made for AF 2023 and upload it here

Lemme get a screenshot Ahhhhh

Play the game by clicking here

itch.io website

BBNANO v1.2 - THE (first) BALANCE UPDATE

This update has been published to address concerns with the gameplay escalation and loop, as well as some bugfixes to improve stability and user experience-

sorry, i meant the good-feel of the game and have difficulties feel like they’re their actual difficulties.

The first update within this update is an overhaul to how Paddle Transmission (paddle speed maximum) works. I think a video speaks more for itself, so here’s it:

Link

The paddle may feel a little off as a result of this change, so if the precision is severely affected, let me know and I will take it into consideration. 

The second update is to Multiball.

Multiball has a slim chance of spawning balls at angles that are extremely upright or extremely horizontal, and that may cause you to get softlocked. As such, a check has been added to prevent hard-right-angles from being used, and instead knock them to the closest non-infringing angle. In this diagram the angles that are avoided are highlighted in red.While we’re at it, the ball’s collider has changed slightly to address an issue with corner-hits and possible mis-collisions. Hopefully this change addresses that. If not, I’ll be looking more into it.

The third update is in regards to the Ball Respawn Punishment (or BRP as I’ll call it now).

The BRP is a small timer that runs starting from when the ball is lost (life lost) until it’s available to be used (launched). In this time period, the only ball-related powerups that will work are Speed-changing powerups (since those don’t affect the ball “directly”, but rather an element of play).

To address any confusion, such as Multiball or Unstoppable sometimes not working, the paddle will now be slightly less opaque when this period is on.

Speaking of the ball, speed specifically, the speed adjustment is now more dynamic and adjusts to how fast your ball is. Previously in all difficulties, the ball would change by static numbers. Now, each difficulty can change it in a particular way, and to illustrate an example here’s the values you’d get from the Mellow (basic) difficulty:

Notice how the speed-up powerup value does not change. This is intentional, and some difficulties may opt to become “bilateral” so the speed-up is affected in a similar way to the speed-down the lower the speed is.

Speaking of difficulties, there is now a slow-speed capped difficulty called Sleepy. You can see it in the main play menu.

Speaking of sleepy things, here’s some more miscellaneous, boring changes:

• Pico-0’s ADV color has been changed to blue to celebrate nick666101’s 1.7m point record in that stage
• Speed margins for every difficulty were adjusted a bit after feedback
• Fixed some highscoring bugs and settled on scoring points.
• Counters should be more reliable when values are changing often (Score is still the same).
• Pico-0’s brick sets have been rearranged a bit to prevent collisions.
• The difficulty you play is now visible in both the results screen and the Pause menu.

GAME !?

A reason I've been so absent is that I've been working in a GAME

do you want to see some of the GAME !?

you get to see some of the GAME, because it has reached a maturity level where I can stop showing it privately and expand its range to some

so, this GAME will also be uploaded to NEWGROUNDS

it's like a demo because development is slow, but I will keep working on it, and if I get enough funding from itch.io and people like it the GAME! will be STRONGER !?

here's a screenshot