december

01 tilled soil and planted seeds

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 2019.

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. 49 minutes.

02 eyes glazed over

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

• Programming in Lua
• nonmateria’s devlog 3

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. 40 minutes.

03 tall grass

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. 1 hour, 39 minutes.

04 ellipsis

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

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

05 I should just start over

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

1 hour, 15 minutes.

06 starting over

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 hour, 38 minutes.

07 of maths and moods

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 2020. 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 hour, 8 minutes.

08 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. 14 minutes.

09 out sick

No code today. I’ve been coughing like a certain banker at Mulctuary Money Management.

10 slow recovery

I was mostly napping throughout the day. I haven’t had this bad of a cough since 2020.

11–19 mission fail

Well I definitely failed December Adventure, what with a busy worklife and a returning bout of bronchitis.

20 bookmarklets

Today I created a little bookmarket, specifically one that replaces “th” to “þ” throughout the current page. It works quite well on simple sites like izzzzi but breaks on sites with tables or more complex markup. But such is the nature of HTML.

Try it out here: þ

javascript:(function () {
  document.body.innerHTML = document.body.innerHTML.replace(/th/gmi, "þ");
})()

Something for another time: Devine has a list of old words. I tried crawling through nodes and applying text replacements, but this resulted in breaking changes in the render. A more intricate DOM walk where you’d have to make sure you’re only modifying text nodes and not nodes that contain other nodes should do the trick.

48 minutes.

21–23 astronomy

I haven’t been coding. Instead, I’ve been going through astronomy sites, reading up on things like stellar luminosity and spheres of influence, and updating my worldbuilding notes. I want to revive Vide sometime next year.