Updated CAT & ONION's Steam page with new descriptions that are more "me" and less dry.

Understanding the Odin Programming Language 1.8 is out! The biggest change is an overhauled strings chapter. It explains UTF-8 and runes in a much clearer way. Release notes are here: odinbook.com#release_notes Also, see this thread for some free goodies related to the update.

@zylinski.se Hey, thanks for a fantastic video series on Odin + Raylib! I'm learning Raylib with C, but your videos were very helpful regardless of programming language (also, "we have cat at home" ↓)

store.steampowered.com/app/1757300/... Played this for 3.5 hours with 4 friends. So much fun! FTL, Freelancer and a shooter, all at once! One friend flies the ship, and you run around in the ship at the same time, repairing stuff etc. Amazing coop 💖

Do I know anyone who's good at Unity/Android stuff? I've got a game that's hitting a bunch of ANRs and I don't have the bandwidth to deal with it right now, would be happy to pay someone to tell me what to do!

Need help improving your in-house game engine or your game engine tools? I'm available for contract work. I'm an expert game engine and tools programmer proficient in C / C++ / C# / Odin. More information and contact e-mail here: zylinski.se/portfolio

Newsletter time! Today I'm talking about "karl2d", which I hope might become something similar to raylib, but written in Odin: news.zylinski.se/p/a-raylib-a...

It’s a cat silently judging you in the nighttime

A lot of people hate on Object-Oriented Programming. But some junior programmers seem to mostly echo what they've heard experienced programmers say. In this blog post I try make people be less extreme about these things, and think for themselves: zylinski.se/posts/know-w...

I'm currently looking for contract work. I can help with game/engine/tools programming in Odin/C/C++. Drop me a line on [email protected] if it sounds interesting. See zylinski.se/portfolio/ for examples of my work.

New blog post: Mentally connecting the concept of a temporary allocator to the concept of an arena allocator: zylinski.se/posts/tempor...

This main problem with the Steam Deck is that it is too heavy. The marketing images look like this. But believe me, even a fairly fit person will not be able to comfortably hold it up like that for long. I often sit in sofa with 2 pillows in a pile under it. Then it rests at a perfect height.

we used to build household shrines to Going On The Computer and it's no coincidence that as we abandoned these we started straying further from god's light

Ron Gilbert's new game. Fun to see him do a top-down action game! www.youtube.com/watch?v=fXIG...

David Bull, a woodblock printmaker in the traditional Japanese style, just posted part 3 of his "Adventures in Washi" series. In it he explores the traditional paper making that supplies his craft, trying to rescue it from going extinct at the same time. Go watch! www.youtube.com/watch?v=nrIF...

Trying Jai (the programming language) for the first time in a few minutes, on stream! www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qx2-...

Bought a new toy

GAMES MADE IN SWEDEN SALE: My game is 67% off! store.steampowered.com/app/2781210/...

Philosophizing a bit about an approach to making a general purpose game engine in Odin. news.zylinski.se/p/vacation-t...

gf bought camping chairs turns out one of them was kids size good thing I have kids size bbq too

I wish D3D12 didn't use all those D3D12X etc helpers in C++. It just makes the code harder to understand and harder to port to any other language.

Game design is my 𝔭𝔞𝔰𝔰𝔦𝔬𝔫

My friends have good taste

My main workstation can't have windows 11 (hardware requirement not met). It's a 10 core i7! But it's lacking the required TPM module. So unless Microsoft changes their mind about win10 end-of-life (sometime in fall), then I might actually go Linux after summer.

They are bad!!!!

Snacko's Mines & Magicks update is now live✨ Celebrate the launch of 1.0 with a 25% discount on Steam this week! store.steampowered.com/app/1125510/... #indiegame 📌 Over 200 quests to enjoy 🪴 Flexible build system & tons of furniture 🌨️ Explore the new mines utilizing spells and your hovering Kart

I like videos and blogs that show positive things about technology and programming. I don't need to hear about everything that's bad. Show me the good stuff! Be positive and excite me.

Being independent (gamedev & author) is hard! I've made some money, but not enough for me to be able to properly shift focus to new projects. I must work on marketing past stuff, and updating it. That eats away some of my creative juices. I feel a bit stuck and pulled in many directions at once.

TIL: When the Original Star Wars Trilogy finally aired on Chilean TV in 2003, the network spliced custom beer commercials into the films themselves to avoid cutting to commercial breaks. these additional scenes turn Obi-Wan & Luke into raging space alcoholics who are constantly shotgunning booze.

Wrote a blog post that explains why it felt like Odin was "made for me". zylinski.se/posts/a-prog...

odin-c-bindgen can now create constants from C macros Pictured: Generated raylib bindings that bring along constants based on `#define`s in the C header. Also included: Code alignment and comments. Thanks to xandaron for helping me implement this. Check it out: github.com/karl-zylinsk...

Everybody stand back! I'm gonna try "act on press". Meaning that UIs respond on mouse button going down, not up. It makes UIs more snappy. You can't "abort" by moving outside while holding down the button. But like John Carmack said in the past: Is that feature worth making the whole UI laggy?

Other than more control, a big win of manual memory management is that you see how many allocations some code requires. It'll be more annoying to implement some things in the same way as in auto mem mgmt. So you're inclined to try a simpler data layout, making your code a lot faster!

Played through the demo in 1 sitting and am now buying me Snacko. WOOOOOO meow.

Ported the dialogue editor from CAT & ONION into this new project I'm toying around with (graphics by @mandelbaumski.bsky.social!) Since both projects use Raylib and the editor code is simple, I could copy-paste most of the code. Just needed to disable some very CAT & ONION-specific things in it.

Doing a refactor of serialization code. It's oddly soothing to see the resulting files come out exactly the same, but knowing that it was created using different code.

My April newsletter is out: news.zylinski.se/p/april-aren... Contents: Blog summary. Open-source project updates. Reflections on how I like to make games.

Wrote a blog post about "no-engine gamedev" -- About creating video games without a big game engine, while also being productive and having fun! zylinski.se/posts/no-eng...

My painting TROUT WATER

When I wrote my book, I sometimes wrote in silence. But a big chunk of the book was spent listening to... THE TRANSPORT TYCOON DELUXE OST It's amazing: music.youtube.com/watch?v=JTi6... (This is the Adlib version, which is my favorite)

A video on handle-based maps. Focuses on implementations that maximize pointer stability. Similar to the blog post I posted earlier today. www.youtube.com/watch?v=MzR1...

Another follow-up post on handle-based maps. In it, I explain three different variants of handle-based maps, what their pros and cons are, with links to source code. zylinski.se/posts/handle...

Today I wrote about how putting a dynamic array into an arena might not be a good idea. zylinski.se/posts/dynami...

Tried to switch to Proton Mail. When everything was done I realized they don't support properly syncing contacts with phone and have been promising the feature since 2022. 😶 Instead, when I want to call people, they want me to open the mail app and use a Contacts side panel. Asking for a refund.

Wrote an article about my Odin -> C binding generator. It looks into how one can configure it in order to generate pleasant bindings. zylinski.se/posts/genera...

My March 2025 newsletter is out: Updates on my book, the game jam, libraries and templates! ... And the future! karlzylinski.substack.com/p/march-2025

My game 'Chunk Miner' is now on GitHub: github.com/alektron/Chu... A simple but complete game, written almost from scratch in just ~3200 lines of Odin code. Care was taken to make the code simple, readable, extensively commented. No cruft, no engine, just a game. #gamedev #indiedev #odinlang