Andrew Hussie

Rad dogg WTG.

Andrew Hussie - 4:50 AM

I got a pretty big music/gameplay freakout when I went into the secret room.

Also I just noticed you can see the red border on the cut scenes. This I’m sure is from my “matte” layer, which you can delete from each clip.

PATCHEZ YO

Aria Desires - 2:40 PM

Tried to kick the shit outta this’un and it seemed to run fine:

http://timelesschaos.com/mspa.php?curswf=Triterniabound

At very least some of the more concrete bugs have been nixed.

Andrew Hussie

Ok got the patch up.

<end of emails>

So yeah a pretty intense experience.

Although Andrew was a fairly experienced programmer (in fact, he did all the simpler interactive Flash games himself), he would often defer to me on technical and implementation details. So that’s where I was often the most “creative”. Any physics or dynamic effects I would have the first crack at, and he’d give feedback on it if it bothered him. Sometimes this would leak into the actual content: his proposal wouldn’t be worth the effort, or just wouldn’t make sense and we’d figure out what to do.

Trickster mode, as far as I can recall, was entirely my idea and doing. Often I would be the “lead” on what to do with a game’s easter egg, but since Andrew is just a living mixing board, he quickly got in on it and made it part of the process.

I think I also originally made the pogo ride game as a lark on the forums, and Andrew was just like “fuck it slap some paint on it and let’s make it part of the story”? Could be making that one up though. :)

Question: How do you feel about your contributions to the comic? Are they satisfactory to you, or are there things you’d go back and fix if given the opportunity?

It’s weird. I think mostly I’m pretty happy with what I did because I know the context under which it was created. There was no time to do things right. I barely had a chance to test it. I was a kid who had school and a job and was teaching myself how to program. Very occasionally someone comes out of nowhere and complains to me that something I made is broken or bad, and I feel bad for an instant, but than I remember what it was like back then and I just don’t care.

In theory I should probably go back in time and prevent us from using Flash since it’s now an effectively defunct format, and that fact is actually starting to bitrot the games. But honestly Flash was the Right Thing to use at the time. It was certainly radically easier to develop our Flash projects than the later HTML5 ones (where we had to build animation and asset management systems from scratch, on top of then-still-buggy browser implementations, and instead of a nice GUI I had to design everything with hand-crafted XML files – oh actually can I go back in time and stop that one? Making everything XML I wrote by hand..?).

If we’re just cleaning things up, there’s plenty of nitty-gritty things that I would fix having learned everything I did over the years. John Wander feels really unpleasant to me now because the camera’s too zoomed in, the canvas is too small, and everything is a bit too slow and floaty for my tastes. Not to mention it’s kinda glitchy on my current system (flash and hidpi are not friends).

Codewise I also know there’s some real nightmares floating in the older stuff. Like the original scene description format I designed was just like, this amazing giant quintuply-nested array literal all on one line at the top of the main code file (AS2(?) didn’t seem to like me line-breaking it?). It was like I invented JSON but only with arrays and strings. Just had to know how the code would interpret things at different positions (and based on things at the other positions).

I wasted a lot of time debugging syntax errors from missing braces or commas on that nightmare.

Question: How do you feel about the fan response to them? Do you feel your work was received well enough or did any criticism strike you, so to speak?

If I can trust my memory right, the stuff I worked on was incredibly well received. The only criticism of it that I consider particularly serious is that it comes along with inherent accessibility issues. In order to follow along with this epic story you had to be able to play these little adventure games which were stuffed with hundreds of pages of words, only some of which would be important. And these games don’t run the best because there were tons of things I did that were awful for performance but made it possible to implement things quickly.

(e.g. instead of efficiently describing the walkable areas in the HTML5 games with points/polygons, I just had a black and white image of each room’s walkable area and did pixel lookups for hit-testing; a huge waste of memory and actually quite slow for the existing browsers… but much easier to make with only photoshop and a text editor in a few days)

At one point Andrew tried to alleviate this a bit by including static summaries of the content. I think that was a great idea, and helped a lot. I also think the community took it upon themselves to transcribe (and sometimes translate!) all the content. Good community :)

Question: Are there any major or interesting secrets like Trickster Mode that, to your knowledge, have yet to be discovered even after all this time?

I’m pretty sure if anything went unfound for a significant period of time, I would just post it on the forums. I made stuff to be enjoyed by others! :)

Question: Given that your work played a considerable part in it, how do you feel in general about how Homestuck and its fandom has turned out?

I really didn’t like how the Homestuck fandom developed over the years, but I don’t think that’s as much a value judgement on the fandom as it is a mismatch of interests mixed with a lot of my own personal issues.

In terms of personal issues, Homestuck basically coincides with my absolute worst years growing up. I was just the absolutely shittiest and angriest god damn teenager, dealing with a lot of depression and stress. At times I genuinely perceived mundane expressions of joy as phony bullshit and got mad about it. This didn’t mix well with a huge rush of other people coming to talk about things I don’t care about. (Aside: holy shit am I embarrassed by some of the shit I said and did back then. I feel like there’s more people I should be apologizing to than I can possibly remember…)

In terms of mismatched interests, what I really loved about Problem Sleuth and early Homestuck was the world and mechanics and how Andrew made all this complete bullshit slot together like a giant rube-goldberg machine. Insofar as I cared about characters, I cared about them as individuals. I loved the bullshit stats, mechanics, and enemies that Andrew would make up in Problem Sleuth. I remember spending hours discussing how totems and punchcards are supposed to work in Homestuck. I friggin’ loved the ~ath programming language. I cared about the original kids in the ways they expressed themselves individually.

The story and relationships? Those were always just a vehicle for the things I actually cared about. A purely utilitarian thing.

But as Homestuck blew up, more and more people poured in who wanted to talk about their fan theories about the story or relationships. That wasn’t for me, and it made me mad because, as I noted previously, I was a piece of shit. Eventually I found myself pushed out of a major part of a community that I was literally one of the most active members of (I spent basically all of my free time as a teenager on the MSPA forums).

And because MSPA is fundamentally a giant jam session lead by Andrew, this shift in the community’s focus ultimately became reflected in Homestuck. It became more about the story and relationships. Originally (around the time troll relationship mechanics started being detailed) I perceived this as Andrew mocking the parts of the community that I didn’t like, but as time went on it pretty clearly became some kind of Serious.

For a long time I just hung out on the General subforums (non-homestuck discussion), but eventually I completely drifted away from the forums. I never was able to bring myself to finish reading/watching Homestuck. It was just this thing that I hurt myself over and that stopped being for me. (Writing this email brought up enough Feels that I found myself ready to finish it, which I just did.)

I got pushed out of the core community fast enough that I never interacted with the Apparently Crazy Shit that I hear vague whispers of occurring. So no comment on whatever that is :)

Question: Do you feel that working on it was a valuable or useful experience? Has it played into any other aspect of your life or opened any opportunities that wouldn’t have been available otherwise?

Yeah! Working on Homestuck had a huge impact on me, and is probably the basis for my entire life trajectory. Like I fucked myself up over it, but working on Homestuck and the community around it gave me a reason to care about life at all. So, pretty net positive.

By the time I got to university I was way ahead of most of my peers because I had shipped like 7 games for a million people to enjoy, while the curriculum couldn’t even assume you’d programmed before. This made me stand out in my class of like ~300 people, which got me a spot working in my university’s Computational Geometry Lab over the summer. This put me on a path for academia studying algorithms and data structures. That study led me to mess around with data structures in the Rust programming language, where I quickly became a member of the Rust standard library team. That work in turn got me a job at Mozilla working on integrating Rust into Firefox, where I happily am now.

Of course this is all on the back of massive amounts of privilege which gave me the time and resources to teach myself programming and work on Homestuck, but without Homestuck I would have just pissed that advantage away and done nothing. There’s a reasonable chance I would have dropped out of highschool overcome by depression with no one to turn to (even with Homestuck I got pretty close).

Question: Finally, do you have any other comments or insight you’d like to add? Could be anything you like or have on your mind.

I would strongly advise against trying to use Andrew Hussie as a job reference. Background check people get really upset when one of your references is impossible to contact because they’re basically a drifter.

Also I couldn’t find a place to fit this in so I would just like to put it on the record that I totally named Rose Lalonde and that rules.

Also here’s a dump of random dev screenshots/artifacts which I couldn’t work in:

The reason LoWaS runs like dogshit (Andrew just dumped this FLA in my lap):

Using images as hit-detection (Flash made this easy and fast because you could just paintbrush vectors and do hittests on them from ActionScript) + a peak into how rooms were implemented as keyframes:

Explaining to Andrew how origins were used to define depth (also trees suck)

GOOD WIZARD BEST FRIEND

GOOD FARMER BEST FRIEND

A history of how my modern visual identity was a collaborative effort by the MSPA community

unused assets from The Midnight Crew Game, which was definitely not secretly a thing we worked on