I hit a point where I just didn’t like this website any more. It was too… stuffy. Posts kept getting longer, more elaborate, more time-consuming to write. I didn’t recognize the tone any more, and when I look back at older posts, those are way snarkier than they need to be. I think I was trying to be taken seriously-but-not-too-seriously, and the voice that developed as a result was just really weird.

I kept looking at this blog and thinking… who is this? Who wrote this? And who is supposed to write more of this?

So I’ve changed everything.

Welcome to Monday Night Itch, a harebrained scheme to encourage folks to play more non-AAA games by adding a touch of social gamification. I thought I would be tweeting my adventures here, but I just had an experience so profound it can only be captured within a blog post.

A Chronicling of the Lyfe and Times of one Miss Pearl Twig Woods, who has Passed at a Young Age from Troubles of the Heart. She is survived by Anise, her Arch Nemesis; Cheeseball, her Adoptive Ruffian; and Napoleon, her Star-Crossed Suitor for Whom she Longed from Afar.

GZDoom is the fanciest way to play Doom. Unfortunately, it has also historically been difficult to recommend to newcomers, because its default settings are… questionable.

Conspicuously, for over a decade, it defaulted to traditional Doom movement keys (no WASD) and no mouselook. I am overjoyed to discover that this is no longer the case, and it plays like a god damn FPS out of the box, but there are still a few twiddles that need twiddling. Mostly the texture filtering. Christ, the texture filtering.

Anyway GZDoom has a lot of options, so here is a handy list of the important ones. There are fewer than I expected, which is good.

Welcome to part 1 of this narrative series about writing a complete video game from scratch, using the PICO-8. This is actually the second part, because in this house (unlike Lua) we index from 0, so if you’re new here you may want to consult the introductory stuff and table of contents in part zero.

If you’ve been following along, welcome back, and let’s dive right in!

Eevee grew to level 34!

I super almost forgot to write one of these!

What a very, very long year. I went back through my dev journal to see what I’d done and could not believe most of this happened in the past year. Even stuff from August feels like it must have been at least a year ago.

🔗 Steam release
🔗 itch release

Whoops! I meant to write about this when it originally came out, in April, but never quite got around to collecting my thoughts. Here is a very rushed subset of them.

The game is extremely NSFW, but the commentary below is not.

You may recall that I once had the ambitious idea to write a book on game development, walking the reader through making simple games from scratch in a variety of different environments, starting from simple level editors and culminating in some “real” engine.

That never quite materialized. As it turns out, writing a book is a huge slog, publishers want almost all of the proceeds, and LaTeX is an endless rabbit hole of distractions that probably consumed more time than actually writing. Also, a book about programming with no copy/paste or animations or hyperlinks kind of sucks.

I thus present to you Plan B: a series of blog posts. This is a narrative reconstruction of a small game I made recently, Star Anise Chronicles: Oh No Wheres Twig??. It took me less than two weeks and I kept quite a few snapshots of the game’s progress, so you’ll get to see a somewhat realistic jaunt through the process of creating a small game from very nearly nothing.

And unlike your typical programming tutorial, I can guarantee that this won’t get you as far as a half-assed Mario clone and then abruptly end. The game has original art and sound, a title screen, an ending, cutscenes, dialogue, UI, and more — so this series will necessarily cover how all of that came about. I will tell you why I made particular decisions, mention planned features I cut, show you the tradeoffs I made, and confess when I made life harder for myself. You know, all the stuff you actually go through when doing game development (or, frankly, any kind of software development).

The target audience is (ideally) anyone who knows what a computer is, so hopefully you can follow along no matter what your experience level. Enjoy!

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This is part zero, and it’s mostly introductory stuff. Please don’t skip it! I promise there’s some meat in the latter half.

🔗 Lexy’s Labyrinth
🔗 Source code on GitHub
🔗 itch.io later

Here is Lexy’s Labyrinth, a web-based Chip’s Challenge emulator.

It’s easy to get into and mostly speaks for itself, so here is a story.

I’m working on a video game! Like, a serious one.

I read J.K. Rowling’s essay.

I regret doing so.

Here are some thoughts. Trans readers, brace yourselves, especially if you didn’t read the original.

Some help came from Andrew James Carter’s response thread, which has many more citations but feels less compelling to a general audience to me.

🔗 Play it on itch.io
🔗 Play it on the PICO-8 BBS (where you can also download the cart and view the source code)

(I originally drafted this just after publishing the game, but then decided to start a whole series about its development and wasn’t sure what to do with this! But it’s solid and serves a different purpose, so here it is.)

It’s been a while, but I made another PICO-8 game! It’s a little platformer with light puzzling, where you help Star Anise find his best friend Branch Commander Twig. It’s only half an hour long at worst, and it’s even playable on a phone!

This is the one-and-a-halfth entry in the Star Anise Chronicles series, which after several false starts, finally kicked off over Christmas with a… uh… interactive fiction game. Expect the series to continue with even more whiplash-inducing theme shifts.

More technical considerations will go in the “gamedev from scratch” series, but read on for some overall thoughts on the design. Both contain spoilers, of course, so I do urge you to play the game first.

I first got into web design/development in the late 90s, and only as I type this sentence do I realize how long ago that was.

And boy, it was horrendous. I mean, being able to make stuff and put it online where other people could see it was pretty slick, but we did not have very much to work with.

I’ve been taking for granted that most folks doing web stuff still remember those days, or at least the decade that followed, but I think that assumption might be a wee bit out of date. Some time ago I encountered a tweet marvelling at what we had to do without border-radius. I still remember waiting with bated breath for it to be unprefixed!

But then, I suspect I also know a number of folks who only tried web design in the old days, and assume nothing about it has changed since.

I’m here to tell all of you to get off my lawn. Here’s a history of CSS and web design, as I remember it.

Eevee grew to level 33!

🔗 Advent calendar, with links to individual projects

Happy new year!

For December, I had the absolutely ludicrous idea to do an advent calendar, whereupon I would make and release a thing every day until Christmas.

It didn’t go quite as planned! But some pretty good stuff still came out of it.

🔗 Doom text generator, locally hosted

I’ve been mad my entire life that one of these didn’t seem to exist. ZDoom can print arbitrary text, of course, but only if you fuck around writing and compiling an ACS script or whatever! There’s no console command for it! Outrageous!!!

So I finally made this. It took like ten hours, which I have to say, is fucking incredible.

I did not expect my return to writing to be like this.

Twigs, our nine-year-old sphynx cat, has died.

He is survived by Pearl, his lovely niece; Anise, his best friend and sparring partner; Cheeseball, his wrestling protégé; and Napoleon, his oldest and dearest friend.