First week, second game!
This time I opted to go with plain Lua. Don’t get me wrong, I like Fennel, but I wanted to get a bit more authentic experience. Apart from having a nicer standard library, Fennel doesn’t add anything to the table in the case of the TIC-80 environment.
Lately, I’ve been working on async.fnl in my spare time and realized that the previous code that I used to schedule timers was terrible. Well, realized isn’t an appropriate word here, because I knew it back when I first implemented it, I just didn’t bother to make it better until I had a fully working library.
Well, this was fun! A bit exhausting, actually. The first of five months of the challenge has ended and here are the results:
Play Game1 on itch.io The game isn’t really complete, but I did my best to make it feel as complete as possible in the time constraints I had.
This post is midway through the last week I have to work on the game in a platforming genre. And it’s a bit of a shame because currently, I’m having a blast - now that the physics and camera are in place the game already feels like a playable thing.
Who knew that writing a post about how I’ve procrastinated for two whole weeks instead of following my own challenge would be so motivating? Immediately after I posted the previous post on Monday, I regained interest and started working on physics integration. Well, making a platformer without experience turned out to be harder than I thought, though I got stuck on things that are not platformer specific.
Long story short, no progress so far. I’m starting to think that the way I’ve set this challenge up actually mostly demotivates me to continue rather than encourages me to press forward. To say that I’ve been working on Game1 will be both a lie to myself and to you.
Lately, my Magit buffer broke once again because of something weird going on with major mode, and I couldn’t stash or commit hunks unless the point was at the beginning of the line. That once again reminded me that Emacs UI is not really a UI, all of it is mere text with a bunch of properties slapped on top.
As I stated a month ago, I’m going to force myself into game development with a personal game dev marathon1 that will span over the next five months. Technically, nothing prevents me from jumping off at any point, so I do want this to go as smoothly as possible, so I won’t burn out until I get out at least two games.
Lately, I’ve been reflecting on why I’ve settled with Emacs of all other text editors. You may remember my old post where I go into lots of different code editors, and I list Emacs among them too. That post itself was written in Emacs, like everything else in this blog, but I can’t say that I understood the main point of Emacs back then.
Recently I had a discussion on the topic of trust and it got me thinking about large language models. I will come back to LLMs shortly, but imagine the situation:
You ask a real person for some bit of information, and the information they’ve provided to you is false but you don’t know it yet.