This post is being published on my personal blog and the Geekwagon blog.
I’ve made many games for my own amusement, but now I want to build games you enjoy.
Video games are what got me into computers back in the 386/486 days. It’s the dream to make games for others. I’m not greedy, it doesn’t have to be Undertale or Stardew Valley. Just something that brings a little joy to a few people and–hopefully–puts food in my fridge.
I made Pac-Man, for reasons. There is also a Post Deadline Update below.
I’ve been inspired by a few indie game developers on the internet. In no particular order:
I’d like to give game development a serious go. I’ve made a lot of silly games no one should play. This one will be the same, but not without a goal. Which was to make something simple, complete, and on a deadline to learn more about what I’m getting myself into.
Adventure Communist is a game by Hyper Hippo, and by all accounts I shouldn’t know what it is. However, a few years ago, after testing positive for Covid (probable false positive) and stuck in a hotel room for 10 days with nothing but a phone, bad cable television, and no symptoms I started downloading any and every game that looks interesting.
After being released, I stopped playing them all… except Adventure Communist. What is it about making numbers bigger? Even after making a clone of the game, ¯\(ツ)/¯
Long story short, I was feeling defeated. I wanted to build something, anything, to prove to myself I can.
I call it Orter for two reasons:
It’s missing some quality of life features; but, hey, this is an MVP! My hope is, those familiar with a retrospective can just start using it, but there is a getting started guide to explain most features. I also created a “marketing” page, mostly for the jokes, but it highlights the features that I thought were missing from similar tools.
DevContainers are great! SSH, also great! Together they’re magic… until they’re not.
How to use git inside a container with ssh authentication and ssh commit signing.
The previous post is a fun and non-rigorous dive into automating the deployment of a Godot project to Itch.io from GitHub and GitLab. The obvious follow up question is: What about Gitea?
Everyone does… stop bragging. You can also deploy to Itch.io from a homelab.
GitLab can be fired up in a container, and it’s great! I took some time to check out Gitea as a light weight alternative, and I have to admit it has started to win me over. Why is a different blog post (don’t hold your breath).
I’d like to acknowledging a preference for GitLab over GitHub. Obviously GitHub is the popular choice, but I have a soft spot for the underdog… especially the open source optionally self-hosted underdog.
My evidence is anecdotal, but Github Actions is a gentle learning curve compared to GitLab’s CI. It could be because I learned GitLab first and had new concepts to wrap the ol brain round. The option to use other people’s reusable elements in GitHub is sweet.
I don’t know, I don’t even average 1 post a year. Let me have my fun.
I switched to Hugo on GitLab. Wordpress feels like overkill and it mysteriously stopped working.
The hard part was ensuring redirects to old projects worked. Okay “projects” is ambitious, “project” is correct. The only one that matters is the link from xkcd 1190 to geekwagon.net/projects/xkcd1190.
I made some minor changes to the original project so it can be served from GitHub pages.
I use GNUCash for my personal finances because I don’t trust services that require me to give up my financial institution’s username and password. Not only does this feel wrong, it might be a terms of service violation. Either way, it seems like a security kerfuffle waiting to happen, so keep track of my finances locally. Yes it’s a lot more work, but I really feel like I have more control over what I want to see and a better understanding of what it means.
Long ago, back in my bachelor days, I had built some 8-bit NES sprites out of Lego and hung them on the wall. Recently, my wife asked me, “What happened to those?” and “Why did you never hang them up here?” She doesn’t realize it, but she just gave me permission to nerd out for the next few weekends.
This weekend I pulled out the old Legos and learned more than I expected. The Megaman model used in this post is shared on Bricklink’s Studio.