I made mulled wine sorbet & there’s nothing on the calendar for the next week. Merry christmas

starting to feel much more comfortable programming complex systems. Had an idea yesterday for a kind of Dishonored-style character controller based on parallel state machines #screenshotsaturday #gamedev

I spent over a year designing this font license (& almost 5 years refining it), with gamedev as a primary use case. Just about every indie foundry I know is actively trying to improve this stuff, despite Monotype repeatedly setting the font industry’s collective goodwill on fire ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

things I have caught myself saying in the last ~24 hours: “I’m gonna play about an hour of dwarf fortress and then I’ll go to the club” “please can you remove the zombie blood from the coat rack” “we’re out of mandarin campari sorbet. It’s the end of an era”

you can just claim any font is better for dyslexia. no one checks. I think we should all agree the best one is Zapfino and be done with it

drowning in paperwork this week but I made a muscovado & dalgona ice cream, which has been a huge morale boost

Monotype once again giving our whole industry a bad name

In high school I wanted to know how fonts get made and no one knew. At university I wanted to know how fonts get made and they told me to go to The Hague and speak to a man named Erik. In The Hague they told me the basics, and I realised ‘how fonts get made’ is gonna take a lifetime to figure out

Everything is wrong. This is not straight. This is too high. This is in my way. We must put them right.

Available now: MD Thermochrome v0.4 adds over 100 new icons to the typeface, all of which respond to weight and italic angle just like every other glyph. Legibility not guaranteed www.futurefonts.com/mass-driver/...

The moving finger writes; and, having writ, Moves on — the AI only helps a bit. Just let me know if you have any Q’s, Or if I can adjust the vibe of it.

found some astonishingly cheap pineapple quinces this morning, so today I have been making quince cheese. Remarkable how much this has lifted my mood

mushroom sprites #pixelart

thinking about UI. I don’t love the big sidebars & high information density of a lot of roguelikes — trying to come up with something that’s minimal but still shows everything you’d regularly need #gamedev #screenshotsaturday #godot

I know it’s been 14 years but I still can’t believe they set the Skyrim user interface in Futura Condensed

this game won a Hugo Award and frankly it deserves another

local craft supply store’s incredible new loyalty scheme: every €5 you spend earns you a sticker, and when you collect 64 (!) stickers, you give them your full name, address, email and phone number, and they give you a one-time €10 discount

smashed up a cabbage. played with knives. new combat sounds. (I don’t know what I’m doing) #gamedev #sounddesign

Made some sound effects for footsteps & potions. my first serious attempt at sound design, feedback is very welcome (Combat sounds are not mine, included so bsky compression doesn’t crush the volume) #gamedev #godot #screenshotsaturday

it’s pretty subtle, but I tried recording some of my own sound effects for the UI. (combat audio is placeholder/not mine) #gamedev #godot

Added some (extremely placeholder) sound effects to the melee combat and it’s starting to feel very satisfying. Might go ahead and add sounds to everything #gamedev

a heist with a hoist. looters on scooters. this is 10/10 stuff

the isopods don’t like it when you get too close #gamedev #screenshotsaturday #godot

map editor now shows tile variants (corner/side pieces, etc) & loads/unloads chunks dynamically around the cursor. Still very barebones (no undo!), but I could probably build most of a game in this #screenshotsaturday #gamedev #roguelike

added damage numbers & some hit fx — trying to make combat feel both snappy and juicy. (no audio yet) #gamedev

Thinking about coins. having only a single “gold” currency in a game is easy and intuitive, but I think some complexity here is good: many overlapping currencies from different times and places; different regions and social classes having their own understandings of value #gamedev

the font I’m working on atm is readable at 3pt, which is both very satisfying and also not something I expect anyone to ever take advantage of

- Rewrote the lighting engine to fix performance issues - Performance issues were actually caused by Vsync so it didn’t make any visible difference - Still got lighting time down from ~4.7ms per light to ~0.3 - Added columns & sarcophagi (as a treat) #gamedev #screenshotsaturday

improvements to the lighting system: walls are only lit if you’re on the same side as the light source. (map editor is already hugely useful for creating specific test levels) #gamedev #screenshotsaturday

built a (pretty rudimentary) map editor this evening. Adding actors is done by typing their ID and clicking on the map — I’m wondering about some kind of visual interface, but honestly this setup feels good. (maybe just needs autocomplete based on the actor ID database?)

René Magritte painting titles that sound like procedurally generated Dwarf Fortress tavern names

Added a basic lighting system (& made the isopods react to it). #gamedev

heard you like containers. so I put containers in your containers (implemented chests, randomised loot & openable items) #screenshotsaturday #gamedev #roguelike

→ Actors have a ‘request_verbs’ method → it sends a signal that components can listen for → components respond w actions they theoretically support → request_verbs checks which are valid in the current context & returns a list → UI panel shows the list (I am v satisfied with how this is working)

living next to a tram line has taught me that: 1. a single driver parking badly can make 500 people late 2. this happens about once per week just on my block

with apologies/gratitude to @lorenschmidt.bsky.social, I had to try this idea for tiling patches of trees (each tile is 2 colours + background) #gamedev #roguelike

I think I’m getting a feel for what this UI could be. Minimal, trying to avoid most common tropes (geo sans-serifs, little bits of art-deco filigree)

O grungy dungeon (grungeon), all filled with lice #roguelike #screenshotsaturday

I can’t remember how Qud does the “select nearby interaction” interface but I feel like it was something like this? either way I like this idea of highlighting tiles where something is available to interact with (pick up item, open door, etc), if there are multiple options

it looks the same as it did ~6mo ago, but now the former spaghetti mess codebase is at least vaguely neat

didn’t think I was tired but I have tried to execute the command `gut pish` twice this morning

great that we can save posts now but I would like to go back to ~3 weeks ago when the Discover feed was actually good

had one of those moments today where I discovered a new programming technique and it felt like stepping out of Plato’s cave. which is also funny because if anything it means I’ll be seeing less daylight in the near future

thinking about the time I abandoned a novel halfway through because the protagonist chose to eat dry toast without butter and shattered my belief that they could possibly be a real person

posting this to help any graphic design nerds using blender who happen to follow me: you gotta get this "ST2" addon. It add so many BASIC typesetting features that are just absent from vanilla blender. Case in point: opentype stylistic sets seen here. Saved me a major headache, coldtype.xyz/st2/

spaceship

Somehow a single flower from our Hydnophytum moseleyanum (epiphytic ant plant) was pollinated, so today we have a single tiny berry

it’s so funny to me how fully 50% of people finding my studio website through ChatGPT end up on 404 pages. It generates URL schemes which don’t exist, it attributes competitors’ products to us. A joke

I'm cool. No problems.