This is a series about Star Anise Chronicles: Cheezball Rising, an expansive adventure game about my cat for the Game Boy Color. Follow along as I struggle to make something with this bleeding-edge console!

GitHub has intermittent prebuilt ROMs, or you can get them a week early on Patreon if you pledge $4. More details in the README!

In this issue, I figure out how to draw a sprite. This part was hard.

Previously: figuring out how to put literally anything on the goddamn screen.
Next: the remaining bits necessary to have something game-like.

This is a series about Star Anise Chronicles: Cheezball Rising, an expansive adventure game about my cat for the Game Boy Color. Follow along as I struggle to make something with this bleeding-edge console!

GitHub has intermittent prebuilt ROMs, or you can get them a week early on Patreon if you pledge $4. More details in the README!

In this issue, I figure out how to put literally anything on the goddamn screen, then add a splash of color.

Next: drawing a sprite.

Hi. Yes. Sorry. I’ve been trying to write this post for ages, but I’ve also been working on a huge writing project, and apparently I have a very limited amount of writing mana at my disposal. I think this is supposed to be a Patreon reward from January. My bad. I hope it’s super great to make up for the wait!

I recently ported some math code from C++ to Rust in an attempt to do a cool thing with Doom. Here is my story.

Here’s a problem I’m having. Or, rather, a problem I’m solving, but so slowly that I wonder if I’m going about it very inefficiently.

I intended to just make a huge image out of this and tweet it, but it takes so much text to explain that I might as well put it on my internet website.

Anonymous asks, via money:

What would you like to see happen in tech in 2018?

(answer can be technical, social, political, combination, whatever)

Hmm.

Game night continues with a smorgasbord of games from my recent game jam, GAMES MADE QUICK??? 2.0!

The idea was to make a game in only a week while watching AGDQ, as an alternative to doing absolutely nothing for a week while watching AGDQ. (I didn’t submit a game myself; I was chugging along on my Anise game, which isn’t finished yet.)

I can’t very well run a game jam and not play any of the games, so here’s some of them in no particular order! Enjoy!

These are impressions, not reviews. I try to avoid major/ending spoilers, but big plot points do tend to leave impressions.

Game night continues with:

• Detention
• Viatoree
• Paletta

These are impressions, not reviews. I try to avoid major/ending spoilers, but big plot points do tend to leave impressions.

Eevee grew to level 31!

A year strongly defined by mixed success! Also, a lot of video games.

Anonymous asks:

something about how we tweak physics to “work” better in games?

Ho ho! Work. Get it? Like in physics…?

Hi! Here are a few loose thoughts about picking random numbers.

For the last few weeks, glip (my partner) and I have spent a couple hours most nights playing indie games together. We started out intending to play a short list of games that had been recommended to glip, but this turns out to be a nice way to wind down, so we’ve been keeping it up and clicking on whatever looks interesting in the itch app.

Most of the games are small and made by one or two people, so they tend to be pretty tightly scoped and focus on a few particular kinds of details. I’ve found myself having brain thoughts about all that, so I thought I’d write some of them down.

I also know that some people (cough) tend not to play games they’ve never heard of, even if they want something new to play. If that’s you, feel free to play some of these, now that you’ve heard of them!

Also, I’m still figuring the format out here, so let me know if this is interesting or if you hope I never do it again!

First up:

• Lisa: The Painful
• Lisa: The Joyful
• MOOP

These are impressions, not reviews. I try to avoid major/ending spoilers, but big plot points do tend to leave impressions.

Anonymous asks, with dollars:

More about programming languages!

Well then!

I’ve written before about what I think objects are: state and behavior, which in practice mostly means method calls.

I suspect that the popular impression of what objects are, and also how they should work, comes from whatever C++ and Java happen to do. From that point of view, the whole post above is probably nonsense. If the baseline notion of “object” is a rigid definition woven tightly into the design of two massively popular languages, then it doesn’t even make sense to talk about what “object” should mean — it does mean the features of those languages, and cannot possibly mean anything else.

I think that’s a shame! It piles a lot of baggage onto a fairly simple idea. Polymorphism, for example, has nothing to do with objects — it’s an escape hatch for static type systems. Inheritance isn’t the only way to reuse code between objects, but it’s the easiest and fastest one, so it’s what we get. Frankly, it’s much closer to a speed tradeoff than a fundamental part of the concept.

We could do with more experimentation around how objects work, but that’s impossible in the languages most commonly thought of as object-oriented.

Here, then, is a (very) brief run through the inner workings of objects in four very dynamic languages. I don’t think I really appreciated objects until I’d spent some time with Python, and I hope this can help someone else whet their own appetite.

An anonymous donor asked a question that I can’t even begin to figure out how to answer, but they also said anything else is fine, so here’s anything else.

I’ve been avoiding writing about game physics, since I want to save it for ✨ the book I’m writing ✨, but that book will almost certainly not touch on Unity. Here, then, is a brief run through some of the brick walls I ran into while trying to convince Unity to do 2D platforming.

This is fairly high-level — there are no blocks of code or helpful diagrams. I’m just getting this out of my head because it’s interesting. If you want more gritty details, I guess you’ll have to wait for ✨ the book ✨.

IndustrialRobot has generously donated in order to inquire:

In the last few years there seems to have been a lot of activity with adding emojis to Unicode. Has there been an equal effort to add ‘real’ languages/glyph systems/etc?

And as always, if you don’t have anything to say on that topic, feel free to choose your own. :p

Yes.

I mean, each release of Unicode lists major new additions right at the top — Unicode 10, Unicode 9, Unicode 8, etc. They also keep fastidious notes, so you can also dig into how and why these new scripts came from, by reading e.g. the proposal for the addition of Zanabazar Square. I don’t think I have much to add here; I’m not a real linguist, I only play one on TV.

So with that out of the way, here’s something completely different!

Anonymous asks:

Could you talk about something related to the management/moderation and growth of online communities? IOW your thoughts on online community management, if any.

I think you’ve tweeted about this stuff in the past so I suspect you have thoughts on this, but if not, again, feel free to just blog about … anything :)

Oh, I think I have some stuff to say about community management, in light of recent events. None of it hasn’t already been said elsewhere, and I wouldn’t say it’s really about “online” or has a strong “point”, but I have to get this out.

Hopefully the content warning is implicit in the title.

IndustrialRobot asks… or, uh, asked last month:

industrialrobot: How has your views on tech changed as you’ve got older?

This is so open-ended that it’s actually stumped me for a solid month. I’ve had a surprisingly hard time figuring out where to even start.

A kind anonymous patron offers this prompt, which I totally fucked up getting done in July:

Something to do with programming languages? Alternatively, interesting game mechanics!

It’s been a while since I’ve written a thing about programming languages, eh? But I feel like I’ve run low on interesting things to say about them. And I just did that level design article, which already touched on some interesting game mechanics… oh dear.

Okay, how about this. It’s something I’ve been neck-deep in for quite some time, and most of the knowledge is squirrelled away in obscure wikis and ancient forum threads: getting data out of Pokémon games. I think that preserves the spirit of your two options, since it’s sort of nestled in a dark corner between how programming languages work and how game mechanics are implemented.