2020 in review

Wild year. Proud of everybody for keeping it together.

We had a baby! Extra stressful because of the pandemic but it's been a pure delight. Babies are extremely fun and cool. It's also weird how good of a year this has been on like a personal level.

Tried not to put any pressure on my creative output, but looking back I did quite a bit:

Music

Released brightly wrapped box for the tilde.town song compilation, vol 2: noise

I did another Looptober this year, completing one loop for every day in October! That page has notes on the songs I though were interesting, but my favorite three are:

New Games

ElfBalls

For the Merveilles Hypercard Jam I created a billardesque fantasy battle game (link). Players take turns shooting their special character at the other player or special powerups. A bit of an anachronism in that it runs exceptionally slow and is only really playable at overclocked emulation speeds, but I think the game concept fits right in to the System6 shareware era. It's also genuinely fun and I think the different character perks came out really well.

This is my second Hypercard game and I'm consistently impressed by how modern and useable the editor environment is.

gameplay

Orbomancy

Orbomancy (link) was an entry for the Autumn Lisp Game Jam and an exhibition game for the clojure in Godot lib I was finishing up at the time (see below). It's a mashup of breakout with a bullet hell vertical shooter. Difficulty is a little steep but it plays smoothly which is what I was after. The music for this was from last years looptober.

gameplay

Prototypes

SnakeVR

snakevr demo

I revisited the "3D snake in VR where the controller angle controlls the snake direction" idea from 2017, and to be honest I'm not seeing any fun here. This is a pretty smooth implementation though, with a very parametric snake.

snake_resize

OpenRoll

One of the nice things about being a software developer is you can have a goofy idea and just start making it.

Anyway this is meant to one day be a peer to peer open source katamari clone where you can make your own levels and share them or your 3D models & music. At the moment it's just a very nice proof of concept for the katamari ball mechanic. It's built with three.js and the emscripten version of bullet physics.

The in development version is up here, it plays very well on a touch screen device or with a usb game pad!

openroll01

Debugging this project was a lot of fun:

katamari2

untitled spaceship thing

One of these years I really, really want to make a space trader game set in our solar system. This was mainly me learning how to use the Godot engine but it's a good start.

engine_shader 3

local

Software

ArcadiaGodot

I put out a big usability release for the 'Clojure in the Godot game engine' library: ArcadiaGodot.

I'd gotten clojure and a REPL running in Godot a while back but this year I sat down and fleshed out out a full implementation (Arcadia style hooks & state with utilities for using Godot's signals). (ArcadiaGodot overview)

For a while I'd been feeling that Unity had moved into a weird space of being cumbersome to set up new projects, with confusing and half baked implementations of multiple rendering setups and ECS systems. Making a game with ArcadiaGodot feels very similar to how I was working with Arcadia and Unity, and I'm very excited to work with this setup going forward.

webAPL

Slowly chipping away at this project to get gnu-apl compiled into javascript with a editor environment. It's working! I came up with a very nice on screen keyboard for the APL character set. I'd love to see this become the go to APL introduction, as getting an environment with an input setup can be a pretty big hurdle.

I want to add file buffers and handle mobile formats before doing an official release, but you can play with the current version here.