2022-07-12
Long time! So what’s happened in the last six months?
- I’m slowly looking for work. Not good medicine for the ego.
- Got MegaHAL back online again at megahal.kranzky.com
- Working on Lazybones (formerly Hacktile) and it’s going well
- Released Sesame with Jack
I also released Gravitas at the end of last year. So feeling pretty productive,
even though I’m not earning a lot of $ at the moment.
Keeping fit and doing heaps of reading; 24 books so far this year. Have just
joined a few different libraries as it’s getting to be an expensive hobby.
New bike has been ordered and will be delivered in September. Looking forward to
it. Managed to dodge COVID; both the kids had it recently but they isolated in
their bedrooms and we kept the windows open even though it was freezing cold.
I’ll try to write more regularly again as I enjoy reading mundane daily entries
from a few years ago. It’s the usual thing; I feel I’ve got nothing to write,
and I always hate what I’ve written until enough time passes. Then it seems OK.
Plan is to release Lazybones soon, build some landing pages to try to get a new
startup idea off the ground, start earning money again in a new job, and
generally avoid COVID and have fun with the family. A simple life.
2022-01-20
Last post before I turn 0x32 on Saturday.
Had a great 2021, releasing 5 projects. Finished and launched “Gravitas” on
Christmas Eve.
This year I’m having a bit of a break in January, spending time with the kids
and so forth, but in the background Beetlefeet and I have been working on coming
up with 100 startup ideas. I did the “Aspiring Founders” startup school as part
of this effort.
I also wrote a Twitter bot to solve the daily Wordle.
I plan to divide by week between 6 activities this year:
- GroupFire
- The Punk Collective
- Untitled Startup
- Fun Hacks
- Exercise
- Reading
We’ll see how it goes!
2021-08-05
BLaTTiX is released! After two weeks of crunch, the game finally came together.
Fifteen levels spread across five planets, with eight enemy types. Not too
shabby! Reckon I spent around 350 hours on this, spread across 129 calendar
days. And now I’m learning to market something I’ve made. Sales are trickling
in, and I’m planning to write and post about the project in the hope of
capturing an audience. But, soon, it will be on to something else.
2021-07-19
Well, here we are in mid-July; kids about to return to school after two weeks
off. We spent some time down in Bunbury, which was nice.
I can see the finish line for Blattix; I have a small list of work to complete
over the next ten days, and expect to entirely wrap it up by the end of the
month. I also released a starter kit
for using Raylib+Flecs, and I plan to use this as the framework for my Deminer
and Noid experiments.
Been somewhat distracted by the NSW lockdown, but deliberately weaning myself
off the doomscrolling and the live press conferences. Must focus on
productivity.
Will dust off Punk / Gumshoe / Hacktile later this week. Also plan to do some
MegaHAL work so I can get a monkey off my back; a MegaHAL fan has asked that the
new implementation be able to load brainfiles generated by the old 1990s
version, and I reckon I can bust that out too.
Wish me luck!
2021-06-29
Well, we’re in lockdown yet again and BLaTTiX is getting close to beta release.
As we go into July I expect the following will happen:
- I’ll work less on BLaTTiX, switching more to a mode of responding to bug reports and generally polishing it up for release (probably on September 1).
- Prototyping work will start on a couple of smaller-scope projects, “Noid” and “Deminer”.
- Gumshoe, HackTile and Punk! will be dusted off, and basically upgraded to use the latest versions of libraries &c.
- I may start exploring DownTown, Sesame and Onesie, my other 2021 projects.
All in all that’s a lot! Together with RnDB, which has already been completed,
that makes 10 projects for the year. And we’re only just halfway through. Wow!
2021-06-08
Long time! You should probably note that all BLaTTiX talk has moved over to the
Itch Page. With only a month of
development left, the game is really coming together. Looking forward to
starting a new project soon!
2021-05-12
The lockdown gamejam went swimmingly; I finished all of the gameplay work that I
intended to do, and I shipped the game to alpha testers on
Itch, adding both Windows and Mac builds.
Feedback has been positive so far.
More recently, I’ve refactored the code to integrate
Flecs, an entity-component system,
which has helped to clean up the codebase enormously, and which will make it
easier to build more complicated game systems.
I also lost a day to Linux in an attempt to get a build out; I’ve installed
Debian 7 on two VMs (32-bit and 64-bit) and have a binary built, but the VMs
won’t run the game due to a lack of support for the GL calls I’m making, so I’ll
need to test that by installing a more modern Linux on my PC. But with
installing Linux, programming in vanilla C and re-watching
Serial Experiments Lain, it’s
like I’ve been transported back to the year 2000.
Speaking of, I’ve been learning a bit about “Modern C”, and the differences
between C11, C99 and ANSI C, which is what I learned back in the nineties. Most
notable are three features that I’ve come to rely on:
- Variable-length arrays.
- Designated initializers.
- Compound literals.
I’ll also make sure to use inline functions where it makes sense to do so. And
the other C99 features, such as single-line comments and a proper boolean type,
are hardly worth mentioning.
Another change to how I used to write C is a preference for pass-by-value and
return-by-value instead of by reference. Which means fewer pointers and less
manual memory allocation. These days it can be faster to use immediate values
than references for small structures, and compilers will copy the data into
registers. Nice!