Two projects to discuss this week. Cyber Burger I’ve decided to ditch game mode A, where the player is given a series of stages they need to clear. Instead, I’m changing this to be closer to an old-school arcade experience. In this mode, you start the game with a 45 second timer, and you need get as high a score as you can before the timer runs out. Your score depends roughly on how large and “interesting” your burger is.

Well, it’s been three weeks since my last post here, and as hard as it was to write this update, not writing it would’ve been harder. So let’s just skip the preamble and go straight to the update. Cyber Burger (That Pico-8 Game) I’m terrible at being coy, I’ll just spill the beens. That game I’ve been working on is call Cyber Burger. It’s based on a DOS game I saw on YouTube, and it seemed like a fun project to try and work on, with some tweaks to the gameplay that I think would make it more forgiving.

Oof, another long stretch between updates. This has not been a productive winter. Much of the project I’ve been writing about here are, shall we say, “on ice”. UCL is still being used for the project it’s been built for, but there’s been no further work done on it recently. I think we can safely say Photo Bucket is dead, at least for now. Blogging Tool and that interactive fiction project is still ongoing, but both are running on a slow burn.

Hmm, another long gap between posts. A little unexpected, but there’s an explanation for this: between setting up Forgejo and making the occasional update to Blogging Tools, I haven’t been doing any project work. Well, at least nothing involving code. What I have been doing is trying my hand at interactive fiction, using Evergreen by Big River Games. Well, okay, it’s not completely without code: there is a bit of JavaScript involved for powering the “interactive” logic part.

Spent the last week working on Blogging Tool. I want to get as much done as a I can before motivation begins to wain, and it begins languishing like every other project I’ve worked on. Not sure I can stop that, but I think I can get the big ticket items in there so it’ll be useful to me while I start work on something else. I do have plans for some new tools for Blogging Tool: making it easier to make Lightbox Gallery was just the start.

Oof! It’s been a while, hasn’t it. Not sure why I expected my side-project work to continue while I’m here in Canberra. Feels like a waste of a trip to go somewhere — well, not “unique”, I’ve been here before; but different — and expect to spend all your time indoors writing code. Maybe a choice I would’ve made when I was younger, but now? Hmm, better to spend my time outdoors, “touching grass”.

Some light housekeeping first: this is the 15th post on this blog so I thought it was time for a proper domain name. Not that buying a domain automatically means I’ll keep at it, but it does feel like I’ve got some momentum writing here now, so I’ll take the $24.00 USD risk. I’d also like to organise a proper site favicon too. I’ve got some ideas but I’ve yet to crack open Affinity Design just yet.

I opened up Photo Bucket this morning and found a bunch of commits involving pages. I had no idea why I added them, until I launched it and started poking around the admin section. I tried a toggle on the Design page which controlled whether the landing page showed a list of photos or galleries, and after finding that it wasn’t connected to anything, it all came flooding back to me.

I’ve been thinking a little about how to support indexing in UCL, as in getting elements from a list or keyed values from a map. There already exists an index builtin that does this, but I’m wondering if this can be, or even should be, supported in the language itself. I’ve reserved . for this, and it’ll be relatively easy to make use of it to get map fields. But I do have some concerns with supporting list element dereferencing using square brackets.