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ArjinFerman  Tinfoil Gigachad  1d ago (text post)   215 thread views

Tinker Tuesday for November 10th, 2026

This thread is for anyone working on personal projects to share their progress, and hold themselves somewhat accountable to a group of peers.

Post your project, your progress from last week, and what you hope to accomplish this week.

If you want to be pinged with a reminder asking about your project, let me know, and I'll harass you each week until you cancel the service.

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Changes this week:

  • New alien sprites
  • A smaller map
  • Scaling spawn rate with time

I spent most of the time generating new sprites and animations. For all my prompt-fu, it still feels like there's a significant element of pulling a leaver on the slot machine to this. Still, I'm pretty happy with the result. I tried out a few versions, and googled a whole bunch of creepy animals, but it seems I grew attached to a vaguely spider-y form. However, they do seem to stand out from the background a lot better, and I've pulled a lot more frames for the sprite animations this time, so they look a lot smoother now. The only issue is that they're also longer, so sometimes the monsters are still in the process of dying by the time the grenade smoke clears, so I'll have to tweak that.

How have you been doing @Southkraut?

I'm not arguing with your choice, but why is it always spiders that are the swarmy bad guys in games?

How have you been doing @Southkraut?

Did exactly what I set out to and pushed my plan states into the UI. Which was, to be honest, a pretty minimal change, done in about an hour, of which half was spent AFK.

I really didn't get around too much this week. I hope the coming week offers more free time.

I'm not arguing with your choice, but why is it always spiders that are the swarmy bad guys in games?

I actually wanted to go with something else (the only reason it was a spider originally is I had an open source sprite sheet of one with me, which I later upscaled with AI), but every alternative I tried out felt "meh". Spiders do have those creepy legs going for them, which looks even creepier in a swarm.

Do you have any other ideas? I'd be more than happy to try some things out.

asymmetrical legged robots with buzzsaws
energy ghosts of light and shadow.
crabs (hey, not spiders!)
mini shoggoths that merge into larger shoggoths
trilobites/pillbugs
large hornet/locust analogs with dangling tentacles
writhing masses of worms

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