Turns out using the ladders isn't intuitive. This may be the third or fourth attempt to mitigate that.

One of the hardest parts of finishing my text adventure game has been getting enough people to play through it that I can feel confident it's ready for release

It seems like my arduino uno skips the bootloader waiting if I connect a capacitor in parallel to its power supply. I'm not complaining, it's exactly what I needed, but... why? It's weird but I'm glad it does. Its serial TX line is going to become a doorbell.

I will never get over how household induction stoves are part miracle of science (the induction stove part) and part crime against humanity (the touch "buttons" part).

More incredible technology should be forcefully strapped to the worst imaginable interface to bring rage to its users.

When I was at an offline LAN event in Uppsala I connected my text adventure to a local social media service (running fediverse software "Sharkey" if I'm not misremembering) for a collaborative play session. It kinda sorta worked for a while.

#gamedev

micro optimizing things that don't matter to procrastinate on finishing the damn game...

I have made a new blog article for the first time since Cohost closed. If I count all the time I spent procrastinating I can pretend it's been six months in the making.

I ported Cave Story to a Sun Ultra 1 workstation computer running Solaris 2.6. It took a little work.

quux.foo/articles/cav...

I'm too lazy so I put the new game mechanic's test object in the starting room, but I care too much, so I write fitting flavor text for it. My priorities may or may not be in order.

I ended up making that graphviz generator after all. It took about five minutes and is super useful when it comes to actually wiring up this dialogue tree since I ended up making it quite messy. #gamedev

For my text adventure I wrote the parser at the very start and then almost never touched it after that. Turns out that was a bad idea, as I spent almost all day yesterday refactoring it completely.

It can now probably support reasonable error messages as opposed to just "parse error". #gamedev

A positive thing about my favorite programming language: I can easily shape it to my needs.

A negative thing about that: being able to do so sometimes makes me do something in a worse way because it feels slightly cooler and has some minor benefit I may or may not actually use.

Would introducing an arrow key-driven menu system for just one section roughly half-way through my text-based adventure game be too jarring? I'm leaning towards "no, this is a great idea". #gamedev

This might be scope creep (it 100% is), but I'm feeling a strong desire to hack in automatic generation of graphviz for my dialogue trees. I made one by hand and it took a while but was very useful, so I imagine automatic ones would be very useful too. #gamedev

It took me way too long to realize that my drop command works on all objects that can be found, not just objects in the inventory. I have no idea how this slipped past me. #gamedev

Highlighting directions for movement with inverted colors. I don't like this very much, but playtesting seemed to indicate that directions needed to be more visible somehow.

I'm developing a text adventure that was supposed to be Infocom-esque but accidentally ended up with characters instead of obtuse puzzles. A friend called it "cool".