This is a crosspost from my Substack newsletter.

Welcome back to The Hydromecha Monthly! Here’s all the stuff I was working on in February. As always, you can check out the video edition (now featuring a fancy new filter) below:

A Most Musical Month

I was bitten by the music bug in February. I ended up completing three songs, which is three more than I usually make a month. These songs are all on Newgrounds and will be linked below.

Intertidal Zone

This is a prog-rock-ish song I made to use as a background track on the website. It might be a little too exciting for that so I’m thinking of making some changes for the web version.

North Atlantic Current

Here’s another song I made for the website. It’s what I like to call deep sea industrial jazz. It’s probably also a bit much for a background track but I’m still happy with how it turned out.

TIRE IRON TANGO IN THE WASTELANDS OF DESERTIFICATION

Late one October night after working out at nearly 3 AM I threw together a list of 50 metal song names. The Waltz of False Life (a song I finished that same October) uses one of those titles.

TIRE IRON TANGO is another member of COOL_METAL_SONG_NAMES.txt and it’s a heavy metal tango fusion (in case that wasn’t obvious). I’m pretty happy with how the dueling guitars part turned out. I really want to try making a heavy metal klezmer song so stay tuned for that and the rest of the COOL METAL SONG NAMES.

These songs were all made using MIDI instruments with LMMS. At some point I’d like to take a deeper dive into music theory since I only sorta know what I’m doing.

The Beginnings of a Webular Revolution

Full resolution images on Substack

I want to make some changes to the Hydrosite, and one of those changes involves a landing page that shows off the entire monitor I had built for it.

The process for making this new landing page involved cropping out the monitor from a photo, rendering it in Blender on a backdrop, adding a dither filter to it in Krita, and then getting things set up in HTML.

There are some other elements I want to make to complete the new look of the website, so keep an eye out of that in the future.

Bugalo Takes to the Skies

In the newest page of Wonderful and Fancy High School Bait Club, Bugalo’s ghost rockets through the skies of Gerbil Detroit, straight towards a zeppelin housing the Gerbil Dictator.

This page continues the use of the screentones I talked about last time. The page on the Hydrosite is compressed down in a way that they all turn into different shades of gray without any of the screentone patterns showing. Click on the image above to check out the new page. If it isn’t loading, try clearing your browser’s cache.

HazMat One-Shot: P.I. Periscope

I'm gonna try making something for the Newgrounds Jump! Contest in the same setting as Hazardous Materials. You can see a rough sketch of the main characters below. If you’re a returning reader you might recognize Periscope and Amber from the HazMat chapter 2 lineup I showed off back in July of last year.

In this one-shot, Periscope must figure out why the city-state of Plantor hasn’t burned itself to the ground yet. Hopefully I'll have something published by the contest deadline. This is gonna be my main focus for the month. If I don’t end up doing much else in March I can do some behind-the-scenes stuff for this comic for the next Hydromonthly.

As always, I’ll see you again next month with another update.

Have a good one,

-Hydro