22 Jun 2026 - digitalily

Tomoe is a character whose design I saw and went 'you are going to be the favorite character,' and things sort of went from there. With her 2nd ascension in particular, I appreciated that in terms of design, while it was definitely embellished as all things in Fate especially are, it felt much more restrained. It invokes 'samurai' very well, without leaning too far into (or really at all) fanservice, and is also visually striking in terms of the colors. It wasn't until some friends were discussing a group Fate cosplay that wheels started turning about potentially cosplaying her (and woops I missed it for the year we actually 'did' that), but once I started thinking about it things started flowing.

15 Jun 2026 - digitalily

I would like to begin by stating that I am not a UX designer. I did technically take a very phoned in UI design course in college, but it was only dubiously useful and mostly boiled down to 'talk with the client.' Which, all things considered is a really good piece of advice, but also is something that clearly a lot of large tech companies seem to stomp all over in favor of their own ideas of streamlined, or worse, maximizing dark patterns. Fortunately on this website, the stakes are a lot lower, and it mostly comes down to my own preference in combination with the degree to which I want to go. Starting from a fairly basic starting layout and being a static website with limited javascript at the moment means larger changes are simpler (except when confusing css is involved), but how exactly I achieve my goals can be a bit constrained. Here, we'll be talking a bit about what I call the horizontal navigation bar.

12 Jun 2026 - digitalily

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08 Jun 2026 - digitalily

Blue Prince is a game that I had heard small rumblings about for quite a while, with several people online speaking very highly of it, but I never knew too much about what exactly it was. What I did know was that it was in a decently long early access, and was being made by someone who at the time was very much a non-developer, but that was about it. It wasn't until a friend had started playing & loving it, even going so far as setting his desktop background to a stylized blueprint sketch of the manor, and him having roped a couple others in that I finally sat down to give it a try. Around this time as well, a streamer who I'd known of since long ago had on several occasions spoken about how it was easily his favorite game of all time during his Silksong let's play, so hype and expectation was there. And so, while on a vacation flight around the holidays, knowing it was a good 'Steam Deck game,' I flew up to 30,000 ft. and launched it. Immediately after watching the opening cutscene and walking into the first randomly drawn room, taking in the sounds and atmosphere, I closed the game with a firm understanding that I absolutely had to play it full screen on my desktop, and so I waited.

01 Jun 2026 - digitalily

I remember seeing the original Hades featured prominently on Steam a few months after it left early access and found the art style fairly appealing, and after diving in and getting immediately hooked, and eventually sharing many a run over voice calls with others playing at the same time, I knew it was something special.

26 May 2026 - digitalily

Another May, another ACEN & now Combo Breaker wrapped up- a welcome pair of events after a slow start to the year, featuring a bunch of recurring colds/illness and a hefty serving of cabin fever.