december

The December Adventure is low key. The goal is to write a little bit of code every day in December.

—Eli, Oatmeal

🌱 🎄 (7/31)

tilled soil and planted seeds

an untitled game, a blank grey canvas, and a little astronaut-like character sprite
an untitled game

This month I want to make a game with LÖVE. I still don’t have a clear idea on what it’ll be exactly, but I want it to have something to do with forests and plants. It could end up being a platformer, a roguelike, or maybe even just be an idle game.

Two things:

  1. I don’t have much game dev experience. Over the years, it has just involved a couple of Bitsy demos, a GB Studio project in cryostasis, and a handful of implementations of basic games.
  2. I don’t have much experience with Lua either, outside of tinkering with mpv scripts and porting a handful of my Project Euler solutions.

Anyway, I started small today: initated a repo and added a little bit of code for player movement—good old WASD. The sprite is a temporary placeholder and was ripped off of the aforementioned GB Studio project from .

handwritten ideas about the game on a notebook
brainstorming

I spent some time in the afternoon scribbling some ideas. I’m picturing a game where one could wander around the game world, collect different types of plants, and build either a farm or a garden (or both?).

4 sessions. . 0.75 efficiency.

eyes glazed over

a field of flowers, one highlighted in moderate red
flowers of the field

Yesterday, cblgh and nonmateria shared some resources for both LÖVE and Lua. I love this about Merveilles.

Although it’s not really quite there, I tried implementing two things today: a grid system where plant entities would be placed and the ability to spawn in multiple entities.

I’m wrestling with imaginary pressures to push commits, but maybe the first few days or so would really just have to be me getting more comfortable with the language, i.e. thinking in tables. It’s like when you know words but can’t string them together to fully express yourself. (nods to the rewriting folks) On top of that, I still don’t know what the game is. I just have a bunch of concepts I’m trying to thread together.

For now, I’ll stare at this measly garden with eyes glazed over, waiting for the representative neurons to form some cranial committee and make things *click*.

mood: Flowers Of The Field — Sky Sailing

2 sessions. . 0.5 efficiency.

tall grass

an astronaut in a monochrome field of grass and flowers
tile maps

I had a meeting-filled work day and went for a run in the evening so I didn’t feel like doing much today—played around a bit with tile maps and updated the UI, still trying to get a feel of what the game is.

I think I like tables now too.

local map = {
  {
    0, -- y2
    1,
  }, -- x2
}

for x1,x2 in ipairs(map) do
  for y1,y2 in ipairs(x2) do
    -- do stuff
  end
end

Also I spent some time designing proper sprites, especially for the astronaut character but the well of inspiration has gone dry today. There are a couple of holidays coming up this month. I’m aiming to do two sprint bursts and make significant progress on this project then.

mood: Wheat — WILDERADO

3 sessions. . 0.67 efficiency.

ellipsis

I’m too lazy tired today. Tomorrow it is.

mood: Terrarium (feat. the Album Leaf) — Color Therapy

I should just start over

two astronauts, one is being pushed around by the player. red square marks current player position and green square marks direction (for future direction-facing sprite logic)
I don’t even know what I want to do anymore
view GIF

I really have no idea what game I want to do. Maybe I should just put this in the backburner and do something else?

. 0 efficiency.

starting over

updated design of the laboratory microsite
updated the laboratory

I’ve decided to put aside the game project for now. I do still want to develop and release a game at some point but I need ideas first. So for the rest of December, I’ll just work on smaller, random, little things.*

This evening I decided to update the Laboratory and have it align with the recent Arachne redesign. It’s a subdomain of this site that houses experiments, drafts, and ideas.

3 sessions. . 1 efficiency.

of maths and moods

visualisation of mood logs since 2020
mood log

This morning I was doing some worldbuilding when I noticed that MathML was broken, at least on Vivaldi. So I spent time brushing up on MathML docs, eventually landing on MathJax, and then ultimately deciding to convert all worldbuilding formulas to plain code because the inconsistencies even with the renowned library was too annoying to bear.

In the evening, I rebuilt my mood visualisation, prompted by recent similar trackers like Rek Bell’s happynothappy. Under the Intra project, I’ve been tracking mood, among other things since . Perhaps it’s time, seeing as I have half a decade of data now, to think of ways to integrate all of these metrics and learned patterns into Arachen. Some ideas I have are colour palettes changing based on mood or updates to content if I’m asleep. In my bio page, a sentence is added in the last paragraph at a particular time when I should be asleep to let the reader know that if they ping me at that time, I may not respond right away. Currently the time range is set and does not take into account recent sleep patterns, e.g. if I’ve been staying up later than usual.

2 sessions. . 1 efficiency.

under the weather

I woke up feeling on the verge of a malady, possibly a flu as the weather here has been rather dry. All I did today was add a tiny typographical change to this site: indented paragraphs! Only paragraphs that come after another paragraph are indented. Old-fashioned or retro chic? Let me know.

:is(article, section:not(.gallery)) > p + p {
  text-indent: var(--f3);
  margin-top: 0;
}
blockquote p:not(:is(:last-of-type, :first-of-type)) {
  text-indent: var(--f3);
}

2 sessions. . 1 efficiency.