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NovaSquirrel's Gemini capsule

Hi, I'm Nova and I'm a furry who likes to make characters, worlds, art, and games. I set up this capsule because it was easy to do, because Gemini seems neat, and because I like talking about myself hehe. This covers fewer topics than my website but goes into more detail on the topics it does go into. I'm a big fan of people setting up their own spaces online and having communities that don't rely on a big centralized service run by a for-profit company. One of my own projects, Tilemap Town, tries to help with that in my own way.

I love old consoles (especially the SNES and Genesis) and I like making games for them in assembly language. I love the aesthetic of the games on them, and I like interacting with gaming history, but do actually prefer to play modern games usually because of improvements in game design over the past 30+ years. My game development projects try to bring modern game design to older hardware.

I also like how working with old game console hardware gives you a very different experience from making a game for PCs, and there's a really cool bonus where old consoles have effectively become standardized program formats that will work across most hardware and most operating systems. You will probably be able to play a game made for NES or Game Boy forever no matter what happens to computer hardware in the future, because someone will inevitably make an emulator for it.

I feel like the Game Boy Advance does a great job at playing this role, because assembly isn't required for good performance, the games don't feel tied to a specific form factor (as on the DS line) and the specs seem like they're in just the right sweet spot. It's powerful enough where you're not *too* limited, but it's not too hard for even cheap modern hardware to emulate. Did you know that sampled audio on the Game Boy Advance is played through a software mixer? We have mixers that sound a lot better than the one Nintendo supplied to licensed developers, so homebrew can have audio that's better than you might expect from a GBA.

Aside from game dev I do really like roleplaying online. It's really fun to bring my characters to life and have them make friends with my friends' characters while establishing some shared history together through their interactions. I enjoy cute characters, mascot aesthetics, magical girls, fantasy and magic, exploration, and cool adventures. I like doing very character-focused roleplays, where there isn't necessarily a single GM pushing a plot forward, and the characters have enough development that you can let their feelings, goals, fears, skills, passions, etc. guide the way things go. I'm not interested in TTRPGs, and wish more people would give freeform roleplay a chance.

Rabbits are my favorite animal. I like Care Bears and My Little Pony and the Kirby series. My favorite genres are platformers and action puzzle games.