• he/him

Occasionally I start making roguelikes and then mostly don't finish them



I never really posted much here, but I enjoyed lurking here while it lasted. I'm over on mastodon now but probably won't post much over there either. Possibly just occasional updates for games I'm working on, but who knows (if you just care about game updates, following me on itch.io works too).

I'm not really working on anything right now, but my plans for whenever I get around to it are:

  • Finish my 7DRL from this year, Byte Thief. I originally wanted to include limited use special abilities but didn't have time during the actual challenge, so I'd like to go back and add them at some point so the game feels more complete to me.
  • Make a full version of my 7DRL from 2023, Loose Spirits. The released version is pretty bare bones, but I'm really happy with how the core mechanics of the game worked out and I have an unreasonable number of ideas for additional stuff I could add. I'd abandoned the project since I wasn't happy with any of my ideas for how to structure a larger version of the game, but after letting it sit for a while I was randomly reminded of it last week and now have a good idea of how to proceed.

There's also a non-zero chance I'll be at the Seattle Cohost Wake. I haven't really decided if I'm going, but it's a convenient location for me, so on some level I feel like I might as well go.



I've submitted my 7DRL for this year to the 7 Day Roguelike Challenge 2024 game jam. It's called Byte Thief and it's a hacking themed stealth Broughlike. You can play it in your browser here: https://sportzer.itch.io/byte-thief.

The basic idea is that enemies by default don't really care about you, but each type has a unique behavior and detection ability. If you trigger an enemy's detection ability it will become alerted, which will make your life more difficult, and if it detects you again while already alerted it will generate trace. If you get too much trace you lose the game. The goal is to sneak your way through 8 levels worth of random maps and steal some data from the final level.

Comparing this to the previous 2 7DRLs I made, I'm definitely noticing some trends. That's probably to be expected, there's only so much you can do in 7 days and even less that I personally find interesting. My general 7DRL design philosophy seems to be:

  • Pick an interesting but relatively simple core idea. For me this tends to be a core mechanic involving some degree of enemy manipulation.
  • Design a bunch of stuff that fits with that idea that you can jettison from the game if you run out of time. Scoping is hard and 7 days is not a lot of time to make a game. The last 2 years this took the form of planning way more unique enemy types than I could reasonable manage, but that worked out well since I could focus on only implementing the least complicated ones. This year I ended up dropping an entire major game mechanic. You'll still need to implement enough variety to keep things interesting, but it's nice to have a surplus of ideas to pull from.

The biggest issue I ran into this year was that I was using a relatively new to me UI framework. My past 2 7DRLs were based on a wrapper around a terminal UI library (specifically cursive) that let me use it in a web browser. I was starting to run into the limitations inherent in using a UI library that thinks it's running in a terminal, and as much as I enjoy a good ASCII graphics interface, the ideas I had for this year made that a non-starter. It's still just text and very low resolution pixel graphics, but making the jump to "actual" graphics afforded me such luxuries as:

  • Proportional fonts
  • Rendering maps at two different sizes
  • Enemies with directional facing
  • Enemies with chirality
  • Having multiple enemy types whose name starts with the letter "S" without having to do something weird with how I choose to visually represent them

I'm pretty sure I spent well over half of the 7 days just wrestling with UI, whereas the actual gameplay implementation felt pretty straightforward. I could probably spend another 7 days worth of time just cleaning up the UI mess I made (and probably should, albeit spread over a much longer duration of time). On the plus side, if I'm still using the same framework next year I'll have a much better starting point for next year's 7DRL.

Anyways, I'm pretty happy with how it turned out in spite of everything. The different combinations of enemy types make for fun tactical puzzles and I think it's a fairly novel take on puzzley stealth gameplay.



mtrc
@mtrc

This is a post I've been trying to write for a while - like, years - and I've finally gotten it down. I want to stress that I'm not a sociologist, or a historian, this is not an academic treatise or anything like that. It's just a bunch of memories and thoughts, and I don't have a complete picture of all the political and social changes of the last few decades. (Update: thank you for the lovely responses! I will reply to every one, it just might take a little while.)

A few days ago someone sent me a clip of Elon Musk talking to Joe Rogan. In a wild act of self-hatred, I decided to play the clip. Here's a transcript of what he says:

Musk: If you start thinking that humans are bad, then the natural conclusion is that humans should die out. Now, I'm heading to an international AI safety conference later tonight, leaving in about three hours, and I'm gonna meet with the British Prime Minister and a number of other people. So you have to say, like, how could AI go wrong? Well, if the AI gets programmed by the extinctionists it will... its utility function will be the extinction of humanity.
Rogan: -pause- Well yeah... clearly.
Musk: They won't even think it's bad, like that guy. It's messed up.
Rogan: There's a lot of decisions that AI would make that would be similar to eugenics.

This is a blog post about the TV show QI, how the belligerent arrogance of a few people set an example for a whole generation, and why loving science is not enough.



everest
@everest

Finally- a finished, practiced, streamlined version of Sungrazer. First performed live as a part of Screenwalks in February, I've been stealing little bits of time out of my other work to record this, the final version.

Stemming from the concept of Wikipedia racing (and a childhood spent playing invented hyperlink games), Sungrazer is a walk through the connective tissue of Wikipedia.

Focusing on memorial, the networked image as marker, and the function of memory and remembrance on a collectively edited internet, this work context-drifts through Wikipedia articles, forming a web of lateral connectivity between topics.

Following links from one article to another as backing slides for the lecture itself, Sungrazer is beholden to every 3 am rabbit hole that leaves you, blinking, the next morning at a window full of tabs and a browser history dense with searching.

35 minutes / burned subtitles / auto-translated closed captioning.