The majority of the development of this game is being done on stream. There are a few reasons for this. The primary one is that my ability to self-motivate across larger projects has always been a struggle for me. By streaming the development, even if it's only to a couple of people, gives me a reason to continue and push through.

Having said that, I'm not a streamer. I have no intention of being a streamer. By which I mean, I pretty much just hit go on OBS. The layout I had until recently was just a facecam, and a couple of window captures. I really don't want to try harder.

But then I had an idea.

Now, don't get me wrong, this is a stupid idea. But it did allow me to add some "polish" to my streaming.

I would create an overlay… which would run on the Jaguar (or, at least, in an emulator)

At this point, the tooling was already at a point where I thought I could do this relatively quickly. It just needed me to decide on a layout. So I threw ones together based roughly on the theme for this site, and set about creating a layout scene in the game.

This taught me a lot about how the game was working, how the tools were working, and the shortcomings. For one thing, all of the rooms, spritesheet etc to that point had been created based off a handwritten seed file. I had begun the spritesheet json file by hand, and it had grown manually before I wrote the tooling. Trying to make a new setup from scratch uncovered bugs that I wasn't aware of, and hardcoded assumptions that were just not valid.

The scene itself is pretty straightforward. Background tiles, then a border around each of the elements, and a green box that OBS can then use to colour key and display thing inside of. One thing I hadn't thought of, but was a nice addition, was that the player sprite spawns and just hangs around.

Of course, I could have created all of this very easily with a static image in GIMP, with a little animated gif. Right now there's no functionality. And any functionality I do add could also be done outside of a Jaguar. I am definitely not denying that. But this was a fun aside, and I am much more enthused about this overlay than I would be if it were made any other way.

As for the additional functionality, I have already added one-directional "UART" to VirtualJaguar - granted, it's not actual UART support, but it is enough for me to have implemented output to stdout in my game, which has helped debugging significantly. If I make this proper bidirectional UART, then I could then pass information back to the game, and I could make it react to things. The first thing would be to add chat support - I have already written an IRC bot which works on Twitch. I could fairly easily get it to forward all messages to VirtualJaguar's UART, and then have the chat be rendered by the game. I could also at that point also parse the chat messages and get the game to respond. At this point I don't have anything functional that the game could do, but I'm sure I can figure out some fun things.

I do also intend to stream to other services… I just haven't set that up yet.