New year
The last weeks of 2023 have been very enjoyable. Other than having to deal with a cascade of car issues, there’s been a lot of time to hang out with the partner and kids, wander around outside, and poke at fun personal projects…and I mean, work, too, but…you know.
The other evening I pulled together a fun Markov chain toy. It isn’t anything fancy, but I wanted the ability to feed a madlib style script to the program and have it use that as a template to fill in. The resulting program is beak and you can take a look at it if that sort of thing interests you. I want to figure out how to build a game around it about history and discovering the past’s fragmented stories.
Then, last night, I made what is probably the most minimal, worst version of Alto’s Odyssey (one of my favorite games) imaginable. My version is called hill, and you can play it online. I haven’t put the code into a repository, yet, but it is just plain-old, boring-old, no-dependencies-on-anything-but-the-browser, JavaScript, so, view source will reveal all that it contains. I made this as a fidget-toy to play with during meetings.
I’ve struggled for a long time to pick up personal projects like this, but someone recently gave me the advice to focus on smaller points of curiosity — e.g., rather than dive right into trying to make an entire game that needs to generate vast histories, make the generator and then figure out how to layer more game bits on around it. That advice has proven wicked powerful, and I’ve enjoyed building more stuff more quickly lately. I think my attention span is also less impacted by brain stuff these days, which is helping me feel more confident when taking on any kind of project — I was even able to do some car repairs (shout out to Isaac for the encouragement)!
…I don’t enjoy doing car repairs.
Supposedly it’ll snow soon. The winter has been mild and exceedingly damp.
I’m about one third of the way into Arkady Martine’s A memory called empire and loving it.