2021-02-25

After a lot of focused work on Gumshoe, I reached a milestone that allowed me to put together a simple, complete game, which is currently playable online. It’s fun, and easy for others to pick up and try. But all this rushing meant that some refactoring and tidying up was in order, and, instead of doing that, I decided to descend the procedural generation rabbit-hole.

I’ve finally come up for air, releasing RnDB into the public domain as evidence that I was actually doing something. Over the coming weekend I’ll finish that off, perhaps recording an explanatory video.

It’s an itch I’ve been longing to scratch for a while, having first has the idea while working on LA Noire at Team Bondi in 2005. So great to get it done and shipped in just a week or so of intensive work.

Beetlefeet, Maxxor, Chr15m and I have established “The Punk Collective”, which is a support group of sorts for solo developers, and our first gathering at a coffee shop mid-week was super productive and inspiring. The aim between now at the next gathering will be to knock off all of the Gumshoe overhaul work, together with back-end integration. Beyond that, I’d love to get back to HackTile, but who knows really?

We also bumped into Shrydar during our meeting, who was grabbing a fluorescent green milkshake, and brought us the sad news that the coffee shop will soon be closing down, which will be the end of an era. We briefly discussed leasing some office space somewhere, as I’d enthused everyone about the Loonshots Nursery idea. We’ll see where that goes.

Shrydar is still coding c64 demos, which is totally awesome to see.