January’s theme is web dev, and the major project is spline, the thing that runs Floraverse.

I had a lot of stuff to do that I sort of left to the very last minute, as I am wont to do, so I’ve been rushing to actually do some of it.

• art: The usual. Bit lazier with them this week, since I’ve been busy with not-art, but now I miss it!

• spline: Got image embedding working in the blog editor. Cleaned up a few places I was writing values into JavaScript in templates. Vendored archetype into a submodule, rather than hardcoding (!) a relative path to it. Migrated the clumsy generated Pyramid script to a CLI you can just run with -m, and added a command for creating a new user manually. Added front-page support to the blog.

• SLADE: Submitted a pull request full of some old papercuts. Finished a branch that fixes and extends the Boom generalized labels for most specials’ speed args. Fixed one or two new papercuts.

• doom: Sifted through a bunch of Realm 667 resources looking for some neat gems. Toyed with weapons and powerups and monsters, with a few interesting results. Eventually I’d like to sit down and actually make a map, but this is the kind of thing I can do for an hour or two, and it’s interesting to try balancing extensions to the vanilla gameplay.

• quixe: I read about Lectrote, Andrew Plotkin’s IF interpreter that just bundles Quixe with a Chrome renderer, the same way Atom works. I’m not a huge fan of this approach usually, but IF requires support for a few layout tricks that are most easily accomplished with an HTML renderer anyway, so it makes some sense. Anyway, the post mentions that one of the concerns is speed, so I was inspired to go optimization-hunting, and I found an improvement of about 10% across the board. My benchmark story (Counterfeit Monkey by Emily Short, which is absolutely massive and does a ton of work at startup) still takes more than ten seconds just to load, but this is a vast improvement over the thirty seconds it took when I first started hacking on Quixe.

• twitter: I improved my bot @flareon_favbots a little — it now reports offenders for spam, and makes an effort to tweet more than just when it’s first run. It’s blocked another hundred or so fav-spammers in the last few days!

• veekun: Ported the CLI to argparse; previously it was optparse plus a lot of manual mucking about. Also started on a stub of a search interface built right into the pokedex library.

• book: Started taking serious notes on a book about computer stuff.

• blog: Started writing a post about, ah, writing.

• flora: Created a stub of a repo for Mel’s personal site.

Hey, that’s not a bad haul. Still more to do, as always, but I’m making a dent and finally have some momentum back.

January’s theme is web dev, and the major project is spline, the thing that runs Floraverse.

I’m rapidly discovering that I’m just tired of web dev.

• art: The usual. Also drew a new avatar, which I will probably be redrawing after some feedback.

• Mario Maker: Finished and published The Works.

• spline: Made some tiny inroads on getting CKEditor to work with reStructuredText instead of HTML, then realized what a mountain of work it was going to be to make anything non-trivial work, and totally gave up. Settled on storing HTML for now, and got the basic stub of a blog working for Mel.

• meatspace: Spent a whole day rearranging furniture — Mel’s desk is now in the spare room, and my desk has a lot more breathing room.

• blog: Wrote a birthday post.

• tech support: Helped a friend with some tech stuff and inadvertently discovered the most infamously ornery project owner I have ever seen.

• Runed Awakening: Updated to work with the latest Inform 7 release, including hacking around a segfault with some bundled extensions (!). Drew another experimental item illustration, but this time with pixels. Not sure what I prefer yet.

January’s theme is web dev, and the major project is spline, the thing that runs Floraverse.

Getting momentum back after completely blowing it all on AGDQ was surprisingly difficult. I felt like I’d forgotten that I’d ever done anything and would never be able to do anything again. After just a week! Brains are weird.

• art: The daily comics continue.

• Runed Awakening: Web dev seemed particularly imposing with no momentum, so I turned back to my game to get going again. I actually made some really solid progress! Implemented three or four new puzzles, added a way to see which alternative solutions you’ve found even across playthroughs, and fixed a bunch of obscure bugs. Still a long way to go, but it’ll get there if I can keep it moving along.

• flora: Yet another cutscene.

• blog: I dug up and finished an old heteroglot post about Pascal, and threw in an Inform 7 problem I’d done in the meantime. It was also 🎂 my birthday 🎂 this week, which called for the age-old tradition of putting confetti all over veekun. I’d always used some ancient snowflake “DHTML” script because I’m lazy, but this year I rewrote it from scratch to use CSS animations and only the slightest iavascript to generate the markup. Now it animates much more smoothly and is much less of a resource hog. For a joke that appears one day a year. Oh well.

• spline: Less than I would have hoped for halfway through the month, but I did clean up the (minimal) docs a little bit and replace a bunch of code with a third-party module.

• Mario Maker: Made Purgatory.

January’s theme is web dev, and the major project is spline, the thing that runs Floraverse.

I spent an embarrassingly large chunk of the week watching AGDQ instead of actually doing anything. Oh well.

• flora: I slopped together another three “cutscene” updates, all pretty short but a little time-consuming nonetheless. I also put some work into refactoring the guts of the player, with modest success. The eventual goal is to build an editor, so people who aren’t me can make little web VNs without having to cobble together a bunch of undocumented JSON and pray it works.

• art: Keeping up the daily comics. They’re definitely larger in scope than what I was scrawling in pencil a year ago. Sort of like speedpaints, but the time limit is loosely defined as “I don’t want to spend all day on this”. Trying to vary how I do them, too, though it ultimately comes down to whim.

• blog: With some reservations, I wrote a thing scoffing at how condescending Paul Graham’s latest masterpiece was.

• SLADE: Bit of very minor work, fixing a few papercuts and trying to diagnose a couple others.

• Runed Awakening: Didn’t get very far, but I did manage to spend a couple distracted hours stubbing out a puzzle I really like.

And that’s it! Mostly drawing and dabbling. I (accidentally) woke up early today, so I’m going to try to get a good chunk of something done to get my momentum going again.

This month’s theme was game dev, and the major project was my text adventure, Runed Awakening.

• art: More than half the week went, pretty solidly, towards my magnum opus, which was a gigantic Christmas card I wanted to finish by the end of the year so I could stick it in this art improvement grid which I should probably put here on my own gosh-darn website. I spent the last two days of the week just doodling, to kind of de-stress from finishing this and the blog posts. Also started doing daily comics again, which is how I got started drawing one year ago. Now they’re a little more ambitious though.

• blog: I finished both part 2 and part 3 of the Doom series, the last with only minutes to spare!

• SLADE: Fixed a couple issues I ran across while writing the posts: some drawing errors I caused, a very obscure drawing error I didn’t cause, and some helpful configuration of arg specials. I also spruced up some less-than-helpful stuff on the ZDoom wiki.

Thus ends my first attempt at a theme month. I sort of sabotaged myself twice here by biting off a bit too much: a huge 4096×4096 painting that took a solid week to finish, and a series of articles that ended up preposterously long and also took a solid week.

So the major project, Runed Awakening, did not get quite as far as I would’ve liked. It did get much further than it would’ve if I hadn’t decided to prioritize it, and I’m still jazzed to keep working on it, so I’ll still call this a success. This month will have a different theme and major project, but I’ll keep chugging away on my game as well. Wish me luck!

This month’s theme is game dev, and the major project is my text adventure, Runed Awakening.

I may have ended up drawing for like half the week, by accident.

• SLADE: After having used it intensely for a while to write my Doom post, I spent most of a day fixing a bunch of little papercuts, plus (I hope) a crash someone experienced on OS X. I also cobbled together some preliminary support for 3D floors, which will be awesome.

• Flora: Threw together a quick cutscene. I should really make an editor for these things so I don’t have to keep doing it. Maybe next month.

• art: Oh wow. I spent the last three days of the week, pretty solidly, working on a single picture. I have a collage of the best thing I drew every two weeks for the whole year, and it only has one final slot left, and I wanted it to be the best I could possibly muster, and I may have been a little ambitious. It’s still not done. Almost.

• Runed Awakening: Made a couple breakthroughs, implemented some more Main Plot stuff, hurrah. I don’t think I’ll have time this week to do any serious work on it, so it seems I didn’t get mostly-done this month as I’d hoped. I’ve cleared a lot of hurdles and laid a lot of groundwork, though, so I hope I can keep up the progress and have something worth showing by the end of January?

• blog: Workin’ on parts 2 and 3 simultaneously. Fixing SLADE stuff kind of got in the way. I’m also having some kind of irritating driver problem that crashes SLADE at inopportune times, argh.

This month’s theme is game dev, and the major project is my text adventure, Runed Awakening.

Much better this week, though most of the effort went into blogging and fixing SLADE, and not so much went into my own game. I’ll try to remedy that this week.

• art: I drew stuff nearly every day all week, which is a great turnaround from my rut. This is pretty cute. So is this! I had a flip through some of my drawings from earlier in the year and I can’t believe how terrible they are and how not-terrible they sometimes are now.

• irl: I went through a huge pile of mail and whatnot that had accumulated under my keyboard. Started dealing with taxes, oh boy. I also did another round of going through an old hard drive I accidentally broke a couple years ago — the filesystem shattered a bit, so figuring out what’s there and what’s worth recovering has required some archaeology. Found IRC logs from 2003, though.

• SLADE: I fixed some behavior related to working with a directory (vs working with a single-file archive), most notably teaching it not to delete files it doesn’t know about. I also implemented about 60% of LOCKDEFS support, i.e., having the UI actually tell you what numbers correspond to what keycards.

• flora: More planning for the card game. Also a lot of work fixing the goddamn Rails nightmare that runs the Flora store.

• anachrony: That’s, uh, the Doom map set I’m working on. I have no idea what I’m doing and it’s really tough to figure out how to design spaces I really like, but that’s the whole point of the exercise, so I go back to it every now and then. I basically just tried out some ideas for connecting areas together and kinda like how it came out, so, that’s good.

• Runed Awakening: I got a good bit of planning done! No actual code written, oops; my time got eaten up by other stuff. I also drew a test illustration for an innocuous object, which was well-received, so I might end up illustrating every object. Maybe.

• blog: It took several days but I finally finished part 1 about how you should make a Doom level. Still awaiting the avalanche of incredible three-room maps.

This month’s theme is game dev, and the major project is my text adventure, Runed Awakening.

I got knocked a bit off course by accidentally watching some Discworld specials and sleeping through all of Saturday because my cat is a jerk. I’m hoping that writing this now will help nudge me back into a more productive mindset.

• Runed Awakening: Made some huge improvements to AI, which is surprisingly tricky, so I’m always happy when it works out. Fleshed out more stuff in the start area, started adding some tester amenities, and fixed bunches of bugs. There’s some more to do with what I have, but I’m currently a bit blocked on planning out the middle of the game, which I want to have some intertwining side stories. So I did a lot of thinking without necessarily making much progress, which is annoying. Hoping to get closer in the next few days.

  The game is pretty story-driven, being a text-based game, but it’s also a pretty shallow story — neither the player nor the universe are in imminent danger or anything nearly so dramatic. I considered trying to make it a little heavier at the end, but I think that would feel pretty tacked-on. I’d rather try to get this out sooner and do something bigger for a second game. I just hope people enjoy this one? I realize I’ve never actually published a creative work, so I’ve been anxious on and off.

• art: I drew a Delibird and it’s okay though I’m still not happy with the way I do outlines. Also this Friskeon. And a lot of doodling. I think I’ve managed to draw for at least an hour every day this week, which I’d like to keep up. Still frustrated, though; I’m painfully aware that I only know how to draw a few body shapes in a few general poses, and I’m trying to branch out from that, and it’s all stuff I’ve never tried before so it comes out awful. So it goes.

• music: Something I want to learn how to do. I toyed around with LMMS a bit and made a few notes that aren’t entirely terrible. A huge problem here is that even if I think of something I like, I can’t transcribe it correctly, and after hearing the wrong thing a few times I’ve forgotten what the original thought was. Next time I give this a shot I might just practice transcribing tunes I already know very well, like Zelda melodies.

• spline: Fixed some fallout from CSRF protection, whoops.

• flora: Mel wants to design a card game, and I’ve been helping plan that.

• blog: Worked on this month’s posts some, but I hate everything I wrote and will probably delete most of it. We’re halfway through the month already so I really need to get these done, ugh.

Here we go — the first weekly status post, Sunday to Saturday.

This month’s theme is game dev, and the major project is my text adventure, Runed Awakening.

Also I’m going to try picking a major project to focus on each month, along with a general theme that will direct minor projects I work on when I get bored or stuck on the major project.

• blog: Wrote a new post about, I guess, boobs. Added this ‘dev log’ category, and seeded it with posts about all my Mario Maker levels — big high-quality screenshots and a few paragraphs of what I was thinking. Started taking notes for blog posts for this month, which I think might end up being a three-part series on getting into Doom mapping.

• Mario Maker: Made and released Pipe Dream. Went through and played through all the levels several of my friends have made, leaving doodle comments on all of them. (The Miiverse drawing interface is super primitive — only one level of undo — so this was surprisingly difficult!) Made a level called The Works, but I’m not super happy with it and think it has a lot of filler, so I’m sitting on it and will revisit it next time I play.

• spline: Did that stuff for Sketch. Later I went back and improved the YouTube embed support a little, finally fixed thumbnails being shown using full-size images rather than actual thumbnails (oops…), and updated forbiddenflora to take some recent CSS changes into account.

• art: Drew a Psyduck petting a cat for @sarahjeong. Did a lot of doodling, but none of it came out very well; been having this problem a lot lately, ugh. Also I realize I haven’t actually been posting any art on here since it’s much more of a pain in the ass than just dragging something to the Twitter web interface, but I’ll make an effort to do art roundups every so often.

• Runed Awakening: I recently rearranged the entire world and have been dealing with a lot of fallout from that. The intro sequence saw a lot of improvement, as did some AI. (I’m being intentionally vague since it’s a story/puzzle game and I don’t want to spoil it. This is driving me up the wall.)

Back to doodling!

I love tinkering with things, but in the absence of external stimuli (like, “it’s my job”), I’m pretty bad at finishing things. Instead I gradually accrete a ball of projects, todo lists, XXX comments, half-written blog posts, and mental notes-to-self. Eventually the mental load becomes overwhelming and I freak out at how many recreational things I “have” to do.

So I spent much of last weekend trying to alleviate this, by dumping various todo files and the contents of my head and tabs that have been open for months and half of my Workflowy into issue trackers. I know, duh, but I always get out of the habit of using them, and then it seems like more effort to get back into the habit than to just jot down or remember one more thing. Maybe this time it’ll stick. I have far more brain to be dumped, but what’s left is generally more detailed planning that won’t come into focus until I sit down to seriously work on the corresponding project. The real test will be whether I keep filing tickets as they come to mind. And actually, like, assign them to myself. And do them! Whoa.

I’m also making an effort to make my code more accessible to anyone who wants to contribute to it; I’ve been using git and GitHub for ages and attracted a couple pull requests, but I’m pretty lax about even build documentation. I wrote a few READMEs to alleviate this, and will be writing some more as I touch repositories that lack them.

Oh, if you give half a crap about what I hack, I’ve thrown together a projects page listing some of the things I’ve started attempting to build. Or you could just look at my GitHub, really. Feel free to contribute, or tell me how I’m making it hard to contribute.

And I totally cut down on the number of distinct categories I was using for this blog, so when I start posting more than once a month, categories will be useful for sifting through posts!

Hello here is what’s going on.

Just as I sit down to actually blog something, I see the first gigantic spider of the summer on my wall, and have to run away screaming like a little girl. The universe doesn’t want me to write! (Let’s pretend every other week for the past six was stalled by way more spiders.)

Mel lives here now, and I want to spend time with her whenever I can, naturally. This is something I’ve never had in my life before, and it presents something of a complication.

Weeknights consist of an eight-hour solid block of free time. I’d usually spend half of that doing absolutely nothing, another hour or two trying to pick up my last-known-state for whatever I wanted to work on, and then finally get a couple hours of actual “work” done. It was hardly efficient, but it kinda worked. And this was all a single workflow, to me; the hours of time-passing made for some irrational mental preparation for sitting down and doing something.

Now, though, I don’t have solid eight-hour blocks; I’m instead affected by a regular human being’s schedule, which includes going out or talking or eating or what-have-you in the middle of the evening. That free time is now carved into multiple smaller chunks of a few hours each. For most people, that wouldn’t make any difference, but for me those chunks are almost entirely consumed by the time-wasting that would lead up to a context switch.

So, I’m having to learn very quickly to knock this crap off, or I just won’t get any work done on anything. Frustrating in the short term, but certainly beats the… system I had going before.

It’s been a while since I’ve really sat down and thought about where my pet projects are and where they’re going, either publicly or privately. Part of this is just because I haven’t really done a lot in the past month and a half or so; between Christmas interruptions, having Mel move in, a brief and disasterous switch of medications, and restless nights due to cats wandering around on my bed, I’ve been varyingly exhausted or distracted or some other excuse.

Lately magical has ever-so-subtly hinted that roadmaps are a good thing, so in the interest of project management, here’s a rough outline of what I’m up to. With any luck, this will make it into a bug tracker and actually get done!

I’d still like to do these weekly, and I think being able to dump a splat-delimited list into a text file will help considerably. Here’s hoping.