Publishing Pico8 Games to itch.io with GitLab CI I’ve been developing with Pico8, a game development engine for pixelart games with constraints. Pico 8 can export games as HTML/JS that are runnable on itch.io. Itch provides an API tool called butler for automating project releases. I’ve put together a repository with the necessary components and instructions for setting up GitLab CI to automatically build and publish Pico8 projects to itch.io via butler....
2021: A Year in Fortunes
Fortune is a terminal program. I run it every time I source a new shell. Here are the fortunes from 2021 that grabbed me. January 11th You are scrupulously honest, frank, and straightforward. Therefore you have few friends. January 17th You will be a winner today. Pick a fight with a four-year-old. February 10th Q: Why do ducks have big flat feet? A: To stamp out forest fires. Q: Why do elephants have big flat feet?...
Rectangle Area Comparison Algorithm
Pico 8 Conveyor Belt Project I’ve been working on a game for Pico-8. It’s a sort of demake of Factorio, combined with, apparently, Zelda elements. (These things seems to evolve themselves with my own interest/motivation/limitations.) In the spring of 2021, I started the project just wanting to learn more about Pico-8, and it evolved into a reasonably-sized project. I’ve recently revisited it, and am making enhancements to publish it on itch....
Terraria Sky Block Challenge
Terraria has long been one of my favorite games. Last year’s Journey’s End expansion, with its inclusion of Journey Mode, saw its popularity grow even more. It came at just the right time when we were all stuck at home and looking for ways to fill our time. I managed to get a few older computers networked together to enable myself and my children to play together. We consistently played for quite a while, but then interest fell off and they refocused on Minecraft....
2020: A Year in Fortunes
Fortune is a terminal program. I run it every time I source a new shell. Here are the fortunes from 2020 that grabbed me. January 22nd “Do you believe in intuition?” “No, but I have a strange feeling that someday I will.” January 24th It is easier to resist at the beginning than at the end. -- Leonardo da Vinci January 26th Being schizophrenic is better than living alone....
Colony Sims for Miles: Round 6 of That Colony Sim I Keep Starting Over On
Yep This is the 6th iteration of this idea. I finally realized the term for type of game I’ve been failing to finish over and over is ‘Colony Sim’. I have loved these games since I was a kid, but didn’t really experience many until the last few years. I spent hours and hours playing SimAnt, but that was about it. Later, I played Age of Empires and Empire Earth, but really only enjoyed them for their colony management features, which are limited because the core of the gameplay was RTS combat, which I was not very keen on....
August 2020 Status Update
What I’ve been working on: (project management) compiling a list of past projects and their statuses (currently 31 projects, some very rough POC, some actually useful) (site) converting landing page to hugo-generated site (site) playing with asciinema for use in site demos (previous approach was screen recordings uploaded to youtube, then embedded youtube videos in the content page) (site) enhancing my digitalocean droplet management tooling (terraform/ansible) (dev) hacking a markov chain generator in python (dev) exploring python’s argparse and developing API-wrapper CLI tools (game dev) developing a text-based tactics RPG using python, with libraries such as blessings, pyinquirer, etc....
Fixing That Weird Positioning Problem in my Unity Game
I’ve been struggling with this one for months. It has made me stop working on this game altogether (as have other things). First off, the problem doesn’t make much sense. I’m using equivalent logic to handle the positioning of some elements in one view as I am in another. The game is the latest iteration of my resource management sim idea. Villagers get assigned to work stations that produce resources the villagers need to survive....
Amazon Game Lift: Day One
I’m working on getting back into using AWS tools, and ran across their game hosting tool: Game Lift. It has support for Unity 2019. We’re hosting a game, yo. Bullets from main tutorial: Each version of your game server is called a build Game servers are deployed into fleets of one or more Amazon EC2 instances (this takes a while) There also seems to be a hard limit of one instance for free (?...
Beyond: Two Souls - Reactions
Game feel Beyond: Two Souls is like a Bond game action scene in slow motion. It has vehicles, a cool underwater base infiltration scene, and you get to save the world from the bad guys. But rather than a playboy with an ever-ready quip, you play an emotionally damaged woman with a unique ability who simply yearns for a normal life. There’s also no penalty for idling (usually) mid-action scene, and seemingly no penalty for doing a terrible job....