Posts in "Devlog"

Here’s the coding projects I’ve been working on in my spare time.

Playing around with some possible UI design choices for that Android RSS Feed Reader. I think I will go with Flutter for this, seeing that I generally like the framework and it has decent (although not perfect) support for native Material styling.

Started looking at the feed item view. This is what I have so far:

Auto-generated description: A smartphone screen displays a Flutter demo app with a list of text items including an example domain, a note about using 'T' RDS instance types, and a comment about a blog post.

Note that this is little more than a static list view. The items comes from nowhere and tapping an item doesn’t actually do anything yet. I wanted to get the appearance right first, as how it feels is downstream from how it works.

The current plan is to show most of the body for items without titles, similar to what other social media apps would show. It occurred to me that in doing so, people wouldn’t see links or formatting in the original post, since they’ll be less likely to click through. So it might be necessary to bring this formatting to the front. Not all possible formatting, mind you: probably just strong, emphasis, and links. Everything else should result with an ellipsis, encouraging the user to open the actual item.

Anyway, still playing at the moment.

It’s done! Cyber Burger, the Pico-8 arcade game I’ve been working on for the last few months, is finished and can now be played online in a (desktop) browser. Check it out here.

I also decided to put the documentation “on-board”, as opposed to putting it on the web. Yes, it breaks from what was typical during the 8-bit gaming period, but I’ve got the space, and it makes adding illustrations easier.

Auto-generated description: Instructions for a retro-style video game involving making burgers by shooting ingredients and catching them in a basket.

Also forces me to keep it brief, which is no bad thing.

Building out the meta elements of Cyber Burger, including the “menu du jour” a.k.a. the main menu. I’ve used food-service terms for the menu items to maintain the theme, but there is a button to switch them over to more conventional names should it be too unclear.

Auto-generated description: A retro-style game menu displays options like Start Shift and Employee Handbook under the title CYBER BURGER.

Weekly Update - 3 Nov 2024

I probably should stop calling these “weekly updates,” seeing that they come up a lot less frequently than once a week. Maybe I should switch to something like “Sunday updates,” or maybe something closer to what this is, which is an excuse to procrastinate by writing about what I’ve been working on, rather than just working on it. But I’m sure you’re not interested in my willowing about the frequency of these updates, so let’s just get straight to the meat of it.

Try-Catch In UCL - Some Notes

Stared working on a try command to UCL, which can be used to trap errors that occur within a block. This is very much inspired by try-blocks in Java and Python, where the main block will run, and if any error occurs, it will fall through to the catch block: try { echo "Something bad can happen here" } catch { echo "It's all right. I'll run next" } This is all I’ve got working at the moment, but I want to quickly write some notes on how I’d like this to work, lest I forget it later.

Weekly Update - 20 Oct 2024

Yeah, I know, it’s been a while… again. A lot has been happening in life and there’ve been many days that I haven’t done any work on anything. Things are starting to settle down now, although I am expecting a few more bumpy days ahead, so we’ll see how we go with project work. Cyber Burger Yeah, I’m getting pretty tired of this one. I’m right in the trough of despair here, where the initial excitement has worn off and I just want to finish it.

I’ve spent the last week working on a small puzzle game called Coasters, where you presented with two images and a clue, and you need to guess the word or phrase. One puzzle a day, sort of like Wordle. I’ve got 10 puzzles ready to go and I may add more but no promises. Check it out if you like.

Auto-generated description: Two coasters are shown, one with the text 'happiness is attractive' and the other displaying the logo 'crust bakery', with a prompt to guess a species of bird.

Weekly Update - 22 Sept 2024

No preface today. Let’s move on to the update. Cyber Burger Cyber Burger now has sound! I started added some basic sound effects to the laser and the items flying across the screen. They may change, depending on how I find them after a while, but it’s a start. I do like how Pico-8 makes these easy to make: select a waveform, then just draw out the pitch and volume graphically: