Variations on Pac-Man

I made Pac-Man, for reasons. There is also a Post Deadline Update below.

• Play it on Itch.io
• Source available on GitLab

I’ve been inspired by a few indie game developers on the internet. In no particular order:

• Anthony Salter, a fellow Ultima Dragon breathing new life into a fantastic classic with Ultima 7: Revisited.
• Ben at Dev Duck makes balancing all aspects of life look simple.
• Game Endeavor who I thought fell off the planet, but I’m glad is back–with a demo!
• Keone, a crazy nutter solo-developing an MMO called Elegon, and making progress!

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 Clonunist / Bureaucrats

Play Here

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)/¯

Orter, a Retrospective Tool

Long story short, I was feeling defeated. I wanted to build something, anything, to prove to myself I can.

The Project

I call it Orter for two reasons:

• It’s retro in reverse
• It’s short for “ought to”, and you ought to retro

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.

Multiple GNUCash Reports

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.

Lego 8-Bit NES Sprites

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.

Room Changing With Phaser 3 and Tiled

I decided to dive into Phaser 3 and Tiled with my next game project. I was looking to make a room change similar to Link to the Past (the SNES Zelda). The implementation is simple and the result was pleasing so I wanted to share.

Playable demo!

I’ve used Tiled a little in the past but this is the first excuse I’ve really had to dive in to it. If you’re not familiar with Tiled, there are a million ways to learn more.

Viking Dungeon - Some Sort of Game

A short post about a game I made about a year ago for a class at the University of North Texas, CSCE 4210: Game Programming 1. I took the class because I heard the professor, Dr. Ian Parberry, was good at teaching game design and was an interesting fellow (I heard right on both counts).

I cannot claim all credit for this game because I worked with a partner. He was awesome and the only reason I don’t mention him by name is because I didn’t tell him I uploaded this and no longer have his contact info. To my Viking Dungeon game programming 1 partner: if you want me to add your name to this post let me know.

More Tax Sliding

I was reading all the tax law news so I updated my tax slider from 2015.

2018 Tax Slider

I used this Forbes article to get the new tax bracket info. I’m not a fan of Forbes, they have too many advertisements.

I used this article because it had what the 2018 tax brackets would have been if there was no law passed.

It was fun, and gave me something to do. Over all it was kind of a waste of time.

Sudoku From the Other Side

I do love Sudoku, and I play it too much. Not long ago (before this semester started kicking my butt) there were two things I wanted to play with: Local Storage and a Sudoku library.

This is what I came up with: http://geekwagon.net/projects/sudoku/

I also play in pen because I’m a glutton for punishment.

I didn’t use a library for local storage, for some reason I wanted to do it the hard way. This project has only been tested in Chrome, so if you want to see the mess I put in local storage the developer tools (F12) has a tab named Resources.

Just Another Tetris Clone

Despite WildStar’s critical hit on my free time this past month, I’ve managed to code a little. Let me introduce both of my blog readers to the buggiest and most poorly coded version of Tetris they’ve ever seen.

http://geekwagon.net/projects/flipsy/

Someone sucks at Tetris

Don’t ask why it’s called Flipsy. That was just the name of the folder when I started and I didn’t bother to change it.

I did follow the Tetris guidelines to the best of my coding ability. The obvious things, like piece colors are there. With the exception of the square. One cube on the square red so I could see it was rotate. Less obvious Tetris familiarity is the piece randomness. There are a ton of guidelines I haven’t implemented yet.