Posts

Intro I don’t know why this has been on my mind the last few weeks, but guess that means I need to write something down… I love Bruce Lee. I don’t generally think of myself of someone who has “heroes”, but if there is one person outside my father who has greatly inspired me and changed how I think about life, it would be Bruce Lee. At first, as a little kid with silly hopes and crazy dreams, it was just all the cool fighting scenes in his movies that made want to be like him. ...

Hey everyone. I’ve been wanting to do an update, but was hoping to do so once I had more to share. I’ve been working on the game occasionally over the last few weeks, but I’ve run into a ton of issues, mostly my own fault, but not all of them. I’ve started addressing some of the issues that people raised, and this was going well until I tried to make a new build. I mentioned in one the last posts just before I released that upgrading to URP in Unity meant my lighting was broken, and builds took longer because I had to manually bake lighting. ...

Hey everyone 👋 I just wanted to post a quick thank you to everyone who has tried out my game. I especially appreciated anyone who has given me feedback on it. Obviously being an alpha I know there is a lot of work left, and it really helps when I hear what people think need to be addressed first. I had some time off after releasing and had a chance to rest and recover, and would like to get back into things this week. I won’t be working at the same pace I was before, but I do have some clear goals that I would like to set. ...

It’s been a long few months, so I’ll keep this short. Windows, MacOS and Android builds are working, Linux still has issues, so I’ll work on that. But… LOL, not really, this is just the beginning! The game has most of the mechanics there; equippable skills, turn based combat, ultimate skills, skill unlocks, dice roll mechanics. But it needs more, and it needs balancing. More enemies, more skills, more bigger dice. ...

TL;DR That’s pretty much it. Entire post summed up right there 👆 Introduction Early in 2023 I took on a challenge. I’d been going on about making my own game for ages, and my wife finally called me out on it; stop talking, start doing. A buddy of mine had been doing the same thing about an app idea he had, and so our wives decided to lock us in a room for a day and force us to work on these ideas. ...

LOLWUT. Random. Yes. Kinda. So here’s the thing; I recently watched a reaction video by ThePrimeTime for a clip about the “Best Programming Setup” from the Lex Fridman interview with John Carmack, and for some reason it sparked an urge to write about something. The specific bit was here (from around 19:45 to 21:12), where John talked about making the move from 2 to 3 monitors, and Prime commented on being a 1 monitor person. ...

Clarity for the purpose of this post 😏 code monkey, n. a computer programmer who is not involved in any aspect of conceptual or design work, but simply writes code to specifications given programmer, n. an organism that can turn caffeine into code. Introduction Once upon a time, (many, many moons ago) at the very start of my career, I was just a “code monkey”; an individual contributor to the grand scheme of the digital jungle being fed instructions from primates higher on the food chain and was expected to simply do what I’m told. ...

Right, so it’s been a minute since I last posted something. Like many other companies this last year, we weren’t spared layoffs. While I still have my job, my team has been greatly reduced, both from people leaving when they saw the signs and from people being let go. So while fighting survivors guilt and an increased workload, posting hasn’t been my first priority. But while doing my day to day and trying to keep my head down and deliver as much as possible as quickly as possible, I noticed something. And I’m not sure how I feel about it, other than we need to talk about it. ...

Introduction So very many years back when I was but a fledgling coder, armed with BASIC skills and deep into a Turbo Pascal with Objects book, I remember a conversation with my dad. Frustrated by the level of specificity needed to communicate with a machine, I asked, “Why has no-one made a programming language where I can just tell it ‘build this game for me’?” My dad, in his infinite wisdom, mused that cracking that puzzle – creating a natural language programming language – was a feat yet to be achieved. “Whoever manages to do that,” he predicted, “will make a fortune.” ...

Ah, another “trend” I’ve seen online in the last year. I wonder which AI recommendation tool suggested this one to the thousands of small YT channels and influencers who needed a topic… Okay, saltiness aside, I actually found this one quite interesting. And not because I agree with most of the approaches I’ve seen people recommend (it is shocking how many just want to punt their own products or their sponsors), but mainly it was interesting because I was thinking that… ...