Andrey Listopadov

Gamedev marathon

Sun, 29 Oct 2023 15:45:00 +0300

In the last post on the subject I mentioned:

…And yeah, I felt burned up a lot, and considered skipping a month maybe…

So, yeah. I left the jam. And I’m stopping my gamedev marathon as well.

Realizing that it was a struggle rather than a self-motivation attempt helped to make the decision. Well, yes, I wanted to try this kind of extreme-paced five-month project - it is an interesting experiment. Not to mention that I kinda accomplished what I wanted, although not really.

The first month was weird. First two weeks I wasn’t doing anything, because I felt the after-vacation fatigue when you just back from the beach and you have to start working hard immediately. Then suddenly I felt encouraged and motivated, especially once I had some playable results. I thought that I was back on track, as I can, in fact, go on a few-month programming frenzy, and do nothing but code in my after-work hours. And it felt like that, except after I stopped working on Game1, starting to work on Game2 was as hard as with the first one. So hard, in fact, that I wanted to stop there.

Game3 was no different, except I made something that can technically be called playable. I worked for a week on it at most. It was much simpler than the Game2 on paper, so there were not that many roadblocks to make it work. After all, no camera movement, no complex coordinate translations, and no procedural generation. If you’ve played Game3 for a minute - you’ve seen it all.

Now, the Game4 was supposed to be a puzzle platformer. I spent the first week of this month thinking about what kind of puzzles I could make - and I got nothing original. I’m not into puzzle platformers myself, the only one I really enjoyed in the past years was Snakebirds, although it’s hard to call it a platformer. Well, it has gravity and platforms… Anyway.

I decided, that since there’s an upcoming Fennel game jam, I’ll just participate in it, and make another clone of an old game, like I did in my first ever jam. Same as before, I wanted to put a twist on it again, but, well, no game this time. I left the jam, and I gotta say, for some reason, this button makes it extremely demotivating:

Perhaps I’m just too tired.

Not that I didn’t work on the game though. In the first half of the jam, I tried to make my Game1 bump-based engine work for a Lode Runner-type game. However, in Lode Runner, you can’t jump, and your movement is tied to a grid - after all, your character creates holes on a grid of tiles. Modern incarnations of Lode Runner still follow this, so I decided to do the same, as it makes everything just a bit easier. So I dropped the idea of using work done for Game1 and started from scratch.

Second half of the jam I spent reworking animations, doing collision detection without Bump and I got a basic skeleton for the game. But the ladders didn’t work properly, the character was somehow clipping through the terrain still, and I was clearly running out of time, so I decided not to torture myself anymore. I deleted everything and left the jam. Nothing to show this time.

My idea for the twist was to make a series of rooms that you can roam free, after you’ve collected all gold on the level, and create a grid of levels, similar to rooms in a Metroid-like game. The goal would be to reach the bottom-right corner of the map, pick up a giant gold piece, and leave through a new set of rooms, as previous ones would be blocked. Kinda ambitious, and well beyond my skill to be able to do it in a 10-day game jam.

There’s another side to this whole marathon. Most of the time I simply had no spare time to consistently work on games. I’ve mentioned a few times that life had its own plans for me, and if you know me personally, you know what I mean. A lot of spontaneous events happened haphazardly during the past three months, and they were both exhausting and demotivating. Let’s just say that I hope I won’t have to go through this in another ~10 years. Perhaps, if not for this, I would have had more time and managed to get Game2 to a playable state and put more effort into Game3.

On the bright side, now I have some experience in doing animations, implementing a basic player controller, and interactions. I have future plans for game development, although I don’t know if I will go with TIC for that. TIC is quite limiting, and while I think it’s a good thing a times, I felt it tiring most of the time. The color palette is too small for my liking, screen space is also not the highest. If there were a 16-bit-like fantasy console, I would probably look at it, but I doubt there are other projects like TIC-80, which are free and open-source, and polished to the same degree.

Don’t get me wrong though, TIC is great for what it offers. I just want double the resolution, double or quadruple the color palette, double sprite and tile amount, and better sound. Kind of like we went from NES to SNES - it was so a major step upward that it was hard to look back. TIC feels like NES to me, and although it is more than NES, I want more than what it gives. So perhaps I’ll stick with LOVE2D in the future. Or maybe with an entirely different engine, who knows?

I’ll take a few months off from game dev, and then we’ll see. Maybe I’ll start working on the game I wanted to make for a long time.

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Spam Rant

Tue, 26 Jul 2022 20:21:00 +0300

Who doesn’t dislike spam? Well, apparently this guy loves it, but in a kind of special way. I definitively don’t like spam, even a clever one, but unfortunately, we all have to deal with it to some extent. This is a rant on spam because I was just fed up with it once again.

There are several categories of spam in my life:

E-Mail spam.
Spam calls.
SMS spam.
Promoted spam.

I think you all are familiar with the first three categories, and as much as I dislike these, there’s not much to say about them.

At least, the first two are kind of easy to deal with. I don’t read 99% of e-mails that end up in my spam folder, conveniently managed for me by GMail. While I don’t really like GMail, and rather move to a self-hosted mail, Google does a pretty decent job at tracking spam, even with all smart features being “disabled”. I never answer calls that aren’t on my contact list, unless I’m waiting for some kind of delivery. This is an easy fix because you can make your phone only make a sound when someone from your contact list is calling you, or even writing a message.

But the last two categories are hard to deal with.

SMS spam

SMS is still widely used for delivering various kinds of information to people. And for some reason, it is considered an official communication channel by a lot of people. For example, when you need to secure an operation in your bank, it will likely send you an SMS with a confirmation code. At least this was the case until some years ago when most banks I use switched to using their respecting application on Android/iOS, which is used to show the code now.

But still, some companies may send you such codes from time to time, and that’s basically the only useful case for SMS today. Well, emergency notifications are also distributed via SMS in my country, which may give SMS a kind of official status, but these are also broadcasted via other channels. However, mainly due to the confirmation codes it’s really hard to ignore SMS, and most of the SMS messaging apps (on Android, at least) use a modern conversation view, as opposed to how older phones worked with SMS as per separate messages. And this leads to a problem.

The first one is that you can’t block SMS from non-contacts, because these security codes are likely to be sent from some corporate number. While you could add such numbers to your contact lists, and be done with it, the problem arises when you want an SMS from a new service, so you basically have to disable filtering. Which defeats the purpose.

And the second problem is worse because the spam comes from the same phone numbers that are used to send you security codes. My bank, for example, not only shows me ads when I use their official app but also occasionally sends me ads via SMS from the same number they use to confirm operations. And they use the same number for spam calls too! You basically have to accept this. I call it promoted spam because it uses the same communication channel it uses for important stuff, just so you couldn’t block it easily.

Other companies, like clothing companies, for instance, have these club cards, that you register in order to have a discount from time to time or some other benefits. Guess what, in order to register such a card you have to supply both your phone number and your e-mail. And while e-mail is easy enough to ignore, they just keep spamming you with new ads even though the last time you’ve bought anything from them was 3 years ago. For that matter, you can’t give them a fake phone number because of the confirmation code they sent you before applying for a discount.

The most fun part is that my phone operator has a paid feature that blocks such SMS spam! And they remind me of it every single time I get a spam message that they have an anti-spam feature I can subscribe to. It’s like, they know it’s a spam SMS, they let it through, and immediately after it reaches you, they send another spam SMS that advertises you an anti-spam feature! I’d rather change my operator than subscribe to something like that.

Just unsubscribe

This is what I often hear when I brag about spam or read about it online.

Well, first of all, not all spam is something I’ve willingly subscribed to. Some of it is automated when you register a club card or some other account of sorts, and usually, there’s no way to disable these messages upon registration.

Some services don’t even have a way to cancel subscriptions! I once participated in a micro-controller-related conference, and in order to sign up, I used my personal e-mail, instead of the work one. It was a giant mistake, motivated by the fact, that due to security reasons it was impossible to use work e-mail outside the office, and I thought that I may need my e-mail for confirmation or some paperwork when I’ll arrive. Not only I didn’t need it, but I still receive yearly emails about upcoming conferences, highlights, and other stuff. And there’s no way to unsubscribe. I don’t have an account, their e-mail is random every time, they don’t respect GMail’s “unsubscribe me” feature, and there’s no e-mail to write back to a real human to take me off the mailing list. I’ve made a custom rule that deletes messages from them automatically, but it still manages to come through somehow sometimes.

And I’m not even talking about malicious spam, which is a different kind of beast at all. You can’t unsubscribe from it, obviously. Otherwise, it wouldn’t be as effective as it is.

But as I’ve said - e-mail is easy enough to automate and ignore, but SMS isn’t.

Much like the situation with the conference, you can’t unsubscribe from most promoted SMS spam. Companies just don’t even admit they’re sending anything to you like these messages don’t exist. I’ve tried coming to a customer’s office and speaking with a manager about the issue, but they basically told me to give up, and accept the situation as is. I’ve changed operator since then, but the story repeated.

So, no. You can’t unsubscribe from the majority of annoying spam. It’s not a solution. Forget it.

Just ignore it

I’ve used e-mail for a long time, and in the early days, I spent a lot of time marking stuff as spam, because filters weren’t that good enough yet, and spammers were creative. But not all people spent time, analyzing what is a spam message and what isn’t. And, more importantly, spammers are creative, and when we’re talking about malicious spam, which wants not only to advertise something you don’t want but also to steal your money or personal information, scammers today are as creative as they have ever been.

I’ve linked a TED talk at the beginning of this rant, and there’s one example of spam, that I’m not getting too often, but still see in the spam folder from time to time. But I know some people, who were victims of such emails, sending money to scammers.

And that’s the problem. Spam works, and spammers get what they want more often than you think.

There are a lot of similarities between spam messages/calls and TV advertisements. They steal your time and focus and promote you something you likely don’t even need. And unfortunately, nothing can be done about it really.

You can be extremely careful, and not put your e-mail and phone number anywhere, and while this cuts a lot, there are still systems that probe wide ranges of phone numbers automatically. I’ve actually tried it several times, and still somehow managed to get spam, even though nobody knows about this e-mail address, and phone number.

With SMS there’s also a point of trust because so much secure information comes through this communication channel, I’m a bit afraid to use anti-spam systems. As they will likely send my SMS to their server, and we all know that user personal data leaks every week these days.

So, yeah, unfortunately, spam is something I just had to accept, and I’m not sure if the situation will ever get better.

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New look

Tue, 22 Feb 2022 18:58:00 +0300

About a year ago I’ve started thinking about changing the theme of the blog and hopefully designing my own theme. This didn’t go so well, as I had very little free time to actually sit and do the thing. So at the end of the last year, I decided that I’ll prioritize this task at the start of 2022, as usually there’s not so much stuff to do at the year’s start, rather than mid-year.

Initially, I’ve decided to move away from Hugo to a pure Org Mode-based static site generation via Org Publish. Not that Hugo doesn’t work, or has problems, I just wanted to try out something new. So I’ve created a new blog, where I’ve started experimenting, using my old posts, and the new publishing system. It didn’t work out, unfortunately.

There were two main problems I encountered. The first one was that I was unsure how to properly organize pages. What I’m talking about specifically is that when you’re reading a post in my blog, you usually see the blogname.domain/posts/post_name/ in the address bar. However, pages generated with Org Publish were blogname.domain/posts/post_name/index.html, and I couldn’t figure out how to make an automatic redirection, or edit links to automatically omit the index.html part. I’ve tried patching the code of Org Publish, but couldn’t figure out where the link transformation happens. Of course, I could just use blogname.domain/posts/post_name.html format, but this would break all links referring to my posts in other blogs or social media. And for now, I’d like to avoid that.

Another problem was with generating RSS feeds. Hugo does a great job creating separate feeds for every category and tag, so readers can subscribe only to the topic they’re interested in. Same with blog aggregators - no need to filter posts via some regular expressions, just specify the correct feed URL. Org Publish can’t create RSS by itself, you need a separate package, called ox-rss for that. It was a bit hard to install, given that Org Mode removed the contrib packages to a separate repository, and unfortunately, ox-rss doesn’t seem capable of creating feeds similarly to how Hugo does it.

So ultimately I’ve decided to stay with Hugo for the time being, and, for now, simply change a theme. I’ve changed themes before, but that was mainly due to the fact that I came to dislike a certain theme, and wanted something different. Especially since (I believe) I’m the one who sees my blog the most, it’s important for me to have something I like looking at. Originally, I started this blog with the Ezhil theme, but a month after that I replaced it with a more cool-looking Hyde theme with its thick black bar on the left and bold fonts. But around April 5th of 2020, I moved to Hugo Primer, and tweaked it ever since, changing colors and templates.

It was a good theme, but it was still a bit too busy for my liking. It is designed to be visually similar to how GitHub looks, so it had a lot of small widgets, like circled numbers, tags were little rectangles that resemble badges found in most repositories, and so on. Overall the experience was solid, but one thing I disliked, in particular, was that there was an enormous CSS file, with 8k lines when un-minified. This made it harder to tweak the styling of the blog and obviously increased page load time a bit.

So I went to the Hugo themes page and searched for a nice and minimal theme that can work as a base. After quite a bit of searching, I’ve found several candidates: Anubis, Archie, Rocinante, and XMin.

Anubis was my first candidate, but I ended up dropping it. It does feature automatic change to the dark version, which happens synchronously with the change of system theme, which is a nice touch. But it also has some JavaScript, and I’d wanted to avoid it unless really necessary for a certain article to work. And with the dark mode came some problems, as the inline code snippets remained in their original color, thus being very bright. I could change that, but there were other variants to check before that.

The Archie theme didn’t work for me - it was too contrasting, and it also has JS. Overall, the Network page looked pretty busy for loading such a simple-looking theme.

XMin was very nice and minimal, I’ve considered it as a way to go for a while. However, after browsing different pages with it I’ve noticed some eye strain, perhaps due to the contrast, and relatively small fonts. Not that this can’t be tweaked, but I had one more theme to try.

Rocinante was a weird one. At first, I didn’t like it, but then I decided to try and tweak it. And after some very small tweaks here and there, I’ve got what you’re looking at right now. I’ve kept the custom color I’ve used in my previous theme variant, removed some of the visual noise introduced by additional colors and separators, moved some elements around, and that’s it! I really like the result, and it’s very light as well. And now, that it’s not a huge minified CSS I’m working with, I can finally tweak things as I need, so maybe some changes will pop from time to time. I’ve also added a dark variant that is automatically selected via CSS @media(prefers-color-scheme: light|dark) media query, but it may need some tweaking. So Feel free to tell me if you like the new look, or preferred the old variant!

I won’t be releasing these tweaks as a standalone theme, as with those my blog has more chances of being a bit more individual. But nothing prevents you from grabbing the CSS and tweaking the theme’s templates a bit to achieve a similar look if you want.

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