About

> Who are you and why are you shoving all this crap in my way? <

Hi, my name is Santino and this website is here to collect everything I've ever created on the internet.

I'm something of a "content creator", meaning I like to jump around from project to project, working in a variety of mediums to convey some weird thought I had. Usually it's a dumb joke. Sometimes it's a song or a drawing. Most of the time it's a story. I don't know if qualifying as a story teller here would fully count but if there were one thing you absolutley had to label me as, then it would be that.

> What kind of software do you use? <

Jumping right into the technical questions, are we? Alright. I hope you're prepared for a long read because I have a lot of software to list.

> Music <

For music, I use FL Studio. For a short while I've used LMMS Studio which is kind of like a free version of FL Studio except not as good. I really don't recommend that one. Stick with FL Studio or Ableton.

For VST's, I have a lot. Many of which are free. To name a few that I use regularly, I use Aberrant DSP's Shapeshifter for guitar and vocal compression. I've used Decent Sampler for more interesting and unique sounds. I use Spitfire Audio's LAB's for more realistic sounding instruments.

For synths, I've used plenty. I've used MeowSynth, Vital, tb_peach, DCO-106, iZotope Iris 6, Triple Cheese, Ultra Analogue Session, Lounge Lizard, Pendulate, Helm and much, much more. I also use copious amounts of Soundfonts and load them into sforzando to get that nice video game Super Nintendo sound.

I also use a lot of stock plugins that come with FL Studio. I highly recommend that you always take a look at the stock plugins because at the end of the day, it doesn't matter what you use but how you use it. As long as it sounds good.

For mashups, I visit a few sites for stems (vocals, bass, guitar, drums, etc.). Sometimes I have to make my own stems out of a completed song by using Spleeter. I used to use Audacity for mashups until I got ahold of FL Studio. Now I use Audacity for tricky audio formats that won't work with FL. I use to listen to music with the defualt Windows 10 audio player until I switched over to Winamp. I made the switch purely because I could customize Winamp with skins.

> Art <

I use Clip Studio Paint. I've downloaded some brushes here and there and while they're all great, I mostly use the standard default brushes. I use to use a Wacom Intuos but now I've upgraded to a Wacom Cintiq 16.

I use to GIMP to make art but that changed when I got Clip Studio. Now I use GIMP for image manipulations and edits.

For pixel art, I just stick with Aseprite, although GIMP has helped a few times when dealing with particularly large sprite sheets.

> Game Engines <

I use the main three game engines out there. It really depends what type of game I feel like making.

Gamemaker Studio 2 is my goto for 2D game design. Yeah, other engines have a 2D feature but I feel that Gamemaker does it better. Despite that, I think that its language, GML, is a bit wonky and that fact that literally everything is in its own window (Step events, create events, draw events, etc.) does make it very easy for me to get lost on where what line of code is where. I do recommend it regardless if you want a 2D engine that's easy to learn and has a fair amount of resources.

I use Unity for 3D design and testing out common video game practices like object culling. Sometimes I like using this better than Gamemaker simply because it uses C# as its main programming language. I do think some of the choices in how they handle creating (i.e., making scenes, layers, objects that are not player objects, etc.) are a bit all over the place for me. This is mostly because I've used Gamemaker for so long. Also, I don't think its 2D creation is the best thing because ultimately it's still running in 3D just with a few perameters turned off.

And lastly, and most breifly, I've used Unreal Engine 4 and 5. I really haven't made anything playable because I got lost in all the ways of making textures in the editor. I still have a lot to learn about Blueprints in conjunction with C++ code (of which I'm still a novice at). I do think that it's the easiest game engine to make your game look beautiful without trying. It is also, ahem, Unreal how it handles rendering, lighting, and highly complex structures at long distances. I can see myself learning more about this engine to try and make something actually playable one day, but for now, it'll just sit on my computer collecting virtual dust.

> Miscellaneous Software <

I use to use Notepad++ before I switched over to Visual Studio Code. For writing, I use Google Docs and I also have a normal Notepad open for random thoughts that bounce around my head. My Google Chrome has around 200+ tabs open at one time and I use those tab organizers religiously (I actually cut back on how many tabs I open in half if you can believe it).

I use Davinci Resolve for video editing and I post my questionable videos onto Youtube. I do have a Twitter but it's mostly for following artist, indie devs, and memes. I also use Soundcloud for clowning around.