I now have three partial games using my 2D pixel art but is actually 3D polygons setup in Godot. I say partial games, because even though all of them run and you can move around and do things in each of them, not one of them is really a game.
About a week ago I rearranged my whole desk. It’s sort of funny how set you can get, working in a certain way, with things in a certain place. It’s sometimes difficult to imagine that there might be a better way until you move a few things around.
After writing a few new stories, I have to edit them. This is easily the hardest part of writing. Coming up with ideas is easy. There are nearly infinite ideas that other people haven’t worked on, nearly infinite ways to remix the ones that they have, and nearly infinite ways to tell a story based on these ideas. So, yeah, ideas are easy.
It’s no secret that I am into a lot of old games. I’m also into a lot of new games, so it’s not like I think old games a somehow inherently better. Some of my favorite experiences playing games were relatively recent. Nostalgia is a trap that can make you believe the things you once loved are better than anything new. Taken to an extreme, it can make you think that the best times are in the past and we would all be better off rolling back the clock. But that’s more of a political conversation than one about games.
It’s a holiday for us here today. That just means I’m going to work on some writing and maybe a bit of game dev, but I won’t do a bunch of writing here.
Going through the process of constructively critiquing a lot of work, I think I have boiled my approach down to one simple rule.
Now, there are as many ways to critique as there are people, but if you actually want to be helpful to someone’s creative process I think the ways to do that are shockingly few. Pointing out mistakes or flaws isn’t it. Being whatever you think of as brutally honest isn’t it. Stroking their ego isn’t it.
Over the next few weeks I will be writing some more short stories for a contest. I will likely have some things to jot down here about writing.
So right now I am going to do something a little different. I’m going to tell you about the best joke I have ever seen.
There is a few pieces of text in Street Fighter III : Third Strike that I find fascinating.
They aren’t important to the game. They are mostly semi-nonsensical pump up quotes. One bit of text might have a typo in it. None of that is why I find it fascinating. It’s the technique that I love.
https://itch.io/jam/arcade-jam-2026-cgda/entries
Yesterday I got the chance to participate in a game jam. This time I wasn’t jamming, I was judging. I played all the games and talked with all the teams. It was sort of fun to see a game jam from this angle.
For a while I had most of the control issues with my game worked out. You could run around and the screen would scroll at least as smoothly as a 1990s era arcade machine or console. I had introduced most of the same constraints, so I was met with the same results. The simulation of the game could move with sub-pixel precision but the graphics could only move in full pixel increments. That meant that some movements would look smooth, but moving in some directions, particularly diagonals would sometimes lead to a stepping or jitter.
For my birthday I decided to gift myself not having to post something this week.
Shit. I just did, didn’t I.
You know that thing where people ask ‘what’s something that you could talk for an hour about without any preparation?’ I think I have two of those.
One is old video games.
We are over halfway through the Winter Olympics and, yep, I’ve been watching a lot of them. Just like the summer games, It’s not so much that I want to watch my favorite sports, it’s that I like the variety. Just today I watched some hockey, some speed skating, some figure skating, mogul skiing, and the highlights of a curling match. I’ll only ever watch the highlights of a curling match. Curling is like baseball. I’ve played it, and I can appreciate what people love about it, but it ain’t my thing. It’s just a firehose of sports. I’m starting to hit the point where it’s wearing me out, but I still really love it. By the closing ceremonies I will have worked it out of my system and I can spend several months after virtually sports free. A hockey game and figure skating tomorrow though. Lets Go!
This weekend was the Global Game Jam, and once again, I didn’t participate. I would like to, but I have been doing a writing jam instead.
As much as I enjoy getting together with people to bang out a goofy game, I also enjoy spending a bunch of time with myself arguing over what word to put where. The arguments are, again, with myself.
Since Christmas or so, I have been messing around with some old games. I say ‘messing around’ because I haven’t really been playing most of them. These are games from the dos and early windows 95 days. The days of the first 3D accelerators. Games where you had to manually configure IRQ assignments. If you know what an IRQ is, you know what era of games I’m talking about. Part of this is research. I like to mine old games for ideas and designs that might have been tried once or twice, but seem to have been abandoned in more recent games. Gameplay strategies, visual development, etc. etc. Part of it is fun. I mean games are fun, and sometimes games that haven’t been played in years are still fun. Another part is gauging nostalgia. Nostalgia is an awful thing. It can bring back good feelings, but it can also trick us into believing that the past was better than the present. I like to test that feeling. I can tell you, most of the time, you can’t go back. There are some amazing games from that era. True stand-outs that are still as fun as ever. They are good because they are good, not because they are of a certain vintage. Most of the time though, these games do not hold up. Things you may have tolerated in the past because there just weren’t that many fast paced dos game, or games rendered in full 3D, just are not tolerable anymore. We have moved past them. Part of me hoped that I would find a whole stack of new Best Games contenders among the early win95 games, but they are fairly thin on the ground in that era. That’s not to say that there are none. There are, and I will likely be writing about them in the future, but the past isn’t a treasure trove, it’s a painstaking excavation. I will still keep playing old, weird games, because that’s the sort of guy I am, but it does make me appreciate the golden era of games we currently find ourselves in.
I’ve been working on a very short story all day and I’m mostly out of words.
I have been playing some weird old games though, so I might have some things to say about that next week, or soonish.
I finished writing a new flash story a few hours ago. I will probably have to go back over it and do some editing work before it’s ready to send anywhere, but this is one of the rare occasions that I don’t think I will be adding many words.
This is the first post for 2026. So what am I doing.
Our oldest is back at university after the holidays, our youngest has been studying and getting ready for wrestling, and we have been wondering what we will do with ourselves when they are both out in the world doing things and we are at home alone.
This will be my last post for 2025. Does that mean I need to make some sort of resolution of the new year? A semi-hollow promise to myself? Nah. I’m more than happy to make plans. Here are some things I plan to do. I will write a few more stories, finish editing a few that I have on the go, and have at least a half dozen out for submission at any given time. I will finish up the gameplay loop of my game and try to get it out to a few people for playtesting. I will work on another game and hopefully that one will be ready to go by fall. I will do some work on yet another game, and attempt to get some very experimental visuals up and running in an engine I don’t have that much experience using. Mostly, I plan to enjoy my work, enjoy my family, and enjoy my life. And I plan to do all of that for as long as I possibly can. Check in with me around 2075 and I’ll let you know how that plan is going.
The saga of the nas is ongoing, but I think I have it pretty well in hand.
It’s a bunch of drives that sits and chugs along in my basement, and once in a while I write some files to it. Pretty standard stuff, but it’s one more thing that I don’t have to worry about… until I eventually do have to worry about it. That’s future me’s problem.
A few weeks ago I had a hard drive fail on me. It was a backup drive and thankfully it didn’t have anything important on it. Still, I did lose some non-essential files. I have lost drives before, but I tend to keep most important things backed up in a couple of places and very important stuff gets the local and cloud backup treatment. That doesn’t mean I was happy about it.
For a very long time I used Photoshop, Illustrator, Premier, and After Effects. Probably the better part of two decades. I did more designs for signs, brochures, stickers, and vehicle wraps in illustrator than I care to count. I have used a lot of other art and illustration software over the years, but those are probably the ones I used the most.
For the last few weeks I have been plunking away on a Discord Bot. The plan was for this to be a simple little thing. A sort of management agent for a group game critique. It keeps track of games that people want to suggest for critique, creates polls to gage interest, schedules critique events, and, with any luck, does all of this with very little effort. Of course, all of that might sound simple, but this involves python coding; something I’m familiar with but not to any sort of proficiency. It also involves hosting the thing and administrating a Linux server; something that I have a little more experience with. I did what anyone trying to set up something like this would do. I went out and found examples on GitHub and stole that code. If you have never written any code, I can’t begin to tell you how far you can get just by stealing some code. First, you see how someone else did the thing you are trying to do. Or a similar sort of thing at the very least. Second, you can break it without worrying too much that you won’t be able to fix it. You already have a working copy to refer back to. So I took my stolen code, mashed that more into the shape I was looking for, and then I set the AI on it. I have said before about using ML agents to work on code. I think it works really well if you already have a working thing that you want to clean up, optimize, or add features to. In this particular case, it worked extremely well. Since Discord bots are a pretty well understood topic, and I wasn’t attempting to do anything really wild, I was usually able to tell Copilot to look at a feature I already had working and extend it or create a new feature based on it. I went from having a little poll creating bot that read out of a database I hosted, to having a fairly full featured, not terribly ugly, critique management system, while only really working on it a few hours over a handful of weekends. Now I have to let some actual people mess with it and break it.
Thankful today for all the people who are, and have been, in my life.
I’ve done a lot of driving recently. Well for some of it I wasn’t driving. I was just a passenger. Either way, I have spent a lot of time out on stretches of the flattest, baldest prairie that you could imaging. Just endless miles of unpopulated farmland stretching out to the horizon. Here’s the thing though. That might seem terribly boring, but it really isn’t. I really do live in a very beautiful part of the planet. We watched the sun set multiple times over the last couple of weeks. Not just the twenty minutes or so that the sky turns red orange. The entire sunset, from wickedly bright afternoon to complete darkness. And out on the empty prairie, complete darkness can be pretty damned complete. We stopped to watch the northern lights dancing behind thin clouds. I looked up at the night sky and saw the sweeping arc of our galaxy. I watched dust clouds kicked up by combines finishing the harvest drift across the road in front of me. I drove past golden fields of barley that hadn’t yet been cut. All of that is incredibly beautiful. I used to think that where I grew up and lived was dull. Generic. But it was only generic to me, because that is where I live. I think a lot of people would think that the idea of driving for several hours without passing even a small town might sound boring. Like there is nothing worth looking at out there. That’s just not true. Where I live is amazing. It’s nice to remember that sometimes.
This hasn’t been the easiest week. I’ll likely write something longer next week.
A few years ago I wrote about riding my bike. At the time, I rode my bike most places. I still do, but maybe not quite as often. I might not ride as often, but I think I ride more than I ever did before.
we are flying back after dropping our oldest son off for his first year of university. I found myself thinking about this older post (423) that I wrote several years ago.
Many, many years ago, during my university sculpture class, I spent a few weeks welding a lot.
There were a lot of options, but quite a few people in my class decided that they wanted to sculpt with metal. I made a couple of metal sculptures too, but I spent a lot of those few weeks welding up other peoples projects.
I wrote that whole thing last week about the rise, and repeated fall, of authentic media. It was a sort of eulogy of Giant Bomb, a website, and collection of revolving personalities, that I have followed since before its inception. I was a fan of GameSpot’s On the Spot podcast and the people there who eventually left to form Giant Bomb.
Back before MTV or MuchMusic, there were music video shows. At first it was just segments of music or dance shows that would run a video or two. Eventually, there were hour long blocks of television reserved for music videos. The music video was a new and rising art form and at least a few people out there decided that there was an opportunity available for anyone who could present a platform for that art.
I sat down here, an hour or so ago, with the intention of playing a game. I have a couple of new games I have been trying out, but I didn’t end up playing any of those. I played old games.
I haven’t written about it here, because it didn’t seem relevant to what I write, or draw, or model, or whatever, but I do have some thoughts about generative AI. Some of them are even good.
Many months ago I started making the switch from using a lot of cloud services to backup and host files to a mostly self hosted setup. It hasn’t been entirely without issues, but I have been pleasantly surprised by how well a lot of these solutions work.
If you read these, you’re probably getting as tired of reading about writing as I am about writing about writing. I just finished editing and submitting a story, so I’m low on words at the moment. I think I’ll just leave it at that. Maybe next week I’ll write about a game!
The Global Game Jam was this past weekend. And I didn’t participate. Because I was doing this writing jam. A jam is a jam though. One of the major parts of a jam is that you are given a prompt, or a bunch of prompts and what you make from those prompts will be anyone’s guess. I have done a lot of jams by now and I have a few rules for dealing with prompts. It turns out, for me at least, the rules are the same if I am jamming on a game or jamming on some writing. I’ll drop some of them here.
The writing competition I am in adheres to a very strict, very tight, word count. It’s pretty easy to blow past that limit and have to walk everything back, one word at a time. I managed to wrestle it down. This time. I have found this practice of hitting certain word counts really supercharges my editing. When you are looking for more concise ways to word things, you also find better ways to make an impact. Better ways to get to a certain feeling or vibe. You can’t count on long, flowery, descriptions. You need to get to the heart of what you are trying to say, quickly and efficiently. I have found that this practice had the effect of making me more aggressive when editing, even when I didn’t need to hit a specific limit. My current stories are more compact. I don’t know that this will work for everyone, but just like doing a lot of reps can strengthen your muscles, a lot of editing makes you better at editing. If you are looking to improve your writing, I fully recommend joining a similar competition or jam.
I’m doing another one of those writing contest things. Writing very short stories every weekend for at least a little while.
I’ve only just started, so I don’t really have much to say about it yet.
I hope everyone is having a happy holiday.
I don’t have much to write for this one.
I thought about writing some stuff about the games I’m working on, but none of that is in a place to talk about.
Making graphics for games is a bottomless task. No matter how deep you dig, you will always find more. More to learn. More tools, more tasks, more ways to build, and more ways to screw up.
I was going to write something about game dev and making graphics for games and how there are so many layers and intermeshing systems at work that it’s amazing anything ever gets made. I stashed that post for a later date.
I like working with fonts. That should probably come as no surprise. I was, after all, a designer of signs and posters and banners, etc. for years. Working with fonts is a big part of the job. Learning and relearning the rules of shape, and spacing, and balance. Learning them and then breaking them. Fonts are one of the actually fun parts of design work.
I have been using obsidian for notes and writing for a couple of months now. I’m surprised. Normally, when I’m using a tool like this, I would have found all sorts of limitations and problems by now. Something that would annoy me enough, or prove inconvenient enough that I would just stop using it. I haven’t, not so far anyway.
I have been following Formula 1 pretty casually for a decade or so. I’m a fan, but not really a super dedicated one. I usually watch the highlights, check the championship standings, follow some of the driver drama. I don’t really have any specific team or driver that I cheer for. I just like to see some good racing. It’s rare that I watch a whole race, but this weekend I did.
If you happen to be reading this where it lives on my website, you will probably notice that it all looks a little different. A little simpler. A few of the links and menus are missing. Welcome to the new home of whatever it is I’m doing here.
When I started writing this blog, it was a sort of dev diary. I didn’t post once a week and I titled, rather than numbered, each post. While I thought that no one would likely read what I wrote here, on the off chance that they might, I tried to make it a somewhat pleasant experience. Somewhere along the line, I decided to both switch to one post a week and stop worrying that people might read it. That’s why the posts are numbered rather than titled, and I sometimes repeat myself. Like right now. I have written a very similar thing in an earlier post, but I don’t think that anyone has read all of them, so I can probably slip it by without anyone catching on.
We are in the time of lists. At the transition point from year to year it’s customary to create lists. The best of, the worst of. The things that are memorable from the year gone by. A ranked index of towering works.
I don’t title any of these posts. I don’t title any of the stories I have written and posted here. I realize that can be a bit annoying if anyone was trying to find a particular post. You can search for strings in the search bar that sits just up and to the right on the desktop version of the site. The string “Best Games” will, for example, return every post in the “Best Games” series where I examine why a specific game is good or important.
Really short update today. I’ve just been doing some more work on creating and setting up models for import into the game. UV unwraps, zeroing out transforms, organizing materials, that sort of thing. I have a couple of longer post and Best Games in various states of construction, but none of them felt done enough to post today. I’ll polish one of them up for next week.
Quiet Moments.
The Walking Dead is the first game that has ever made me cry. Games, sports included, are typically full of gung ho bombast. There are moments of high energy, and deep strategy, but your motivation to attempt these tasks, is kept light. Games feed our power fantasy and escapist needs. Games are consequence free conflict. Precise management of time and space. The best games are usually honed to eliminate any extraneous elements, anything that could obstruct our fun. There is a very narrow emotional band being targeted by most games, somewhere between tension and adrenaline. Time and again they successfully hit that mark. When a game makes you feel something new, it’s worth thinking about why.