Finished reading: Against Worldbuilding, and Other Provocations by Alexis Kennedy 📚

Good stuff, I’ll probably go back to the more practical chapters (mostly in part 2) again.

Current view:

Finished reading: Level Up! The Guide to Great Video Game Design by Scott Rogers 📚

I skimmed some chapters, but will definitely keep it around for reference.

GameDev.tv jam results for The Last Stan: I’m happy to have gotten #59 (out of over 1000) in the mechanics category, and a decent showing otherwise(except for “theme”).

My favorite comments call the game “weirdly relaxing” and “quite therapeutic”.

I don’t like this new world where swiping your credit card at a business automatically signs you up to receive their marketing emails.

“The Last Stan” is live on itch.io and submitted to the gamedev.tv jam. It’s a platformer, with typing.

It’s not my favorite thing I’ve made, but I will say that it’s got some charm (a good deal of which comes from the Kenney art and background music by Seth Makes Sounds).

Hey, an actual #screenshotsaturday :

For the gamedev.tv jam, I’m working on a platformer where you escape alien ships and defeat ground-based enemies by typing. All art by Kenney.

I spent the first part of my life in the Hazleton, PA area. Here’s a really cool 10 minute video about the “city under the city”, a legacy of the coal industry.

I never thought I’d say this, but…

I get too many emails from Run the Jewels.

Whole Earth 📚

Currently listening: Whole Earth by John Markoff 📚

A year or two back, I listened to Tom Wolfe’s “The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test”, and soon after, for unrelated reasons, started reading some stuff about the early years of personal computing (including Markoff’s “What the Dormouse Said”).

Stewart Brand was the common thread running through all of it.

Finished Listening: The Ultimate History of Video Games, Volume 2 by Steven L. Kent 📚

I think I’ll try to make something for this year’s gamedev.tv jam(which kicks off tonight), if the theme is interesting.

Ten days to work, and every entry gets a free course.

I’ve made a few minor fixes to Zummoning recently:

  • Cards get dealt in a smoother, less jerky manner
  • Help text now stays on screen for as long as your mouse is over card
  • Fixed an issue where the drop target would turn purple, indicating a you could put your card there, even though you could not

Currently reading: Against Worldbuilding, and Other Provocations by Alexis Kennedy 📚

Star Trek: Deep Space 9, or The Continuing Adventures of Miles O’Brien.

Orchestrator

I spent some time last night and this morning learning about Orchestrator, a visual scripting plugin for Godot. I was mostly taking a look to see if my son might want to try it out, as an alternative to “regular” coding. He knows Scratch pretty well, but hasn’t taken to written coding yet. I thought Orchestrator might offer him a way to make stuff happen in Godot, using a style of programming he’s used to.

At first, I was amused and appalled that in an example, this short line of gdscript:

rotation += angular_speed * delta

… equated to a six-node graph. After completing the step by step tutorial, I appreciated it more.

I’m missing the words for describing this coherently, but, to me, it encourages a different way of thinking about the functions you write. Instead of the step-wise, imperative march from input (or not) to return value (or not), you kind of need to start at the end, with the impact you want to cause, and then work out the information and logic needed to inform that action.

I haven’t spent much time studying (let alone doing) functional programming, but… is that what functional programming is like?

I’m not sure I’ll reach for Orchestrator in my own projects, and I’m not sure the kiddo will either. I did show him the results I was able to get it, and if he wants to learn more I’ll certainly work with him. I was wrong to assume that it’s anything like Scratch, and I don’t think it really improves on gdscript in terms of reducing the cognitive work involved in programming. Orchestrator doesn’t simplify Godot.

GameOps

I used the Pong Wars deployment as an excuse to try out GitHub actions. It’s nice! Almost too nice, like the fact that it’s free makes me suspicious.

I ended up struggling with what I thought would be the easy part– GitHub pages. Back when I was a young man, all you needed to do was push your site files to the gh-pages branch. That still works, after you do some extra configuration. It was only the next day that I figured out what the problem is.

Godot-CI worked pretty well, though I needed to build my own version of the container image, because I’m not using a supported Godot version. I’m using a pre-release build of Godot 4.3, because I wanted to take advantage of the improvements to web exports.

Pong Wars

I’ve published my Godot re-creation of Pong Wars by Koen van Gilst on GitHub (and embedded it below!) It’s not exactly a game– more of a “visual toy”. I did add some fun extras:

  • left click a block to instantly flip it’s color
  • right click anywhere to flip ALL of the blocks.

People who think the web is dead or dying haven’t used the Domino’s Pizza Tracker.

I recently updated my /games page so that each game has video.