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Three nuisance calls today so now call screening is being turned on. I think this feature deserves a “finally.”

November 24, 2025 5:03pm

Leon Mika

Screenshots

Discovered that turning off “Convert pasted HTML to Markdown” in Obsidian has eliminated the need to select Edit → Paste and Match Style when pasting things from the terminal to a note. So glad this setting exists. One more of those things I wished Obsidian had, and sure enough… 🫲 🫱

October 27, 2025 12:56pm

Leon Mika

Screenshots

Anyone remember jQuery Mobile? Looks to be live and well on Tram Tracker. First time I actually noticed it, as I usually don’t have a need to visit the website.

October 25, 2025 9:11am

Leon Mika

Screenshots

My eye has been wandering towards the Cards Theme of late. It was enough of a pull that I decided, after a couple of schooners this evening, to switch this blog over to it. The Mythos theme is good, and the changes I made to the index page to display posts in a similar way to Scripting News was an interesting experiment, but I don’t think it fit the type of site I wanted. I’ll give the card theme a try and see if it’s a better fit for me.

October 24, 2025 9:14pm

Leon Mika

Screenshots

Whew! Made it home. A bit of a delay but given the strong winds, it’s fortunate that the commute wasn’t longer than it was. Could’ve been much worse. Good thing that large tree branch didn’t fall on the train line (it was close enough to brush against the side of the train).

October 22, 2025 5:45pm

Leon Mika

Screenshots

Finally added some checkpoints to level 1-3. Also added some animated water as a new type of hazard. The asset pack I’m using came with a single “wave” tile. I used Aseprite to shift that across 4 cells and configured it as an animation in the tile set. I was planning to add some background waves too, but that made it a little too busy and hard to discern. Less is more here.

October 14, 2025 9:51pm

Leon Mika

Devlog

Screenshots

A small devlog entry today. Just painting the level, adding background tiles and kill-zones. I also added a frame around the lift door, just to define it a little. Discovered that it’s probably best not to have sprites with non-even dimensions. It makes positioning them a little awkward, resulting in fractional offsets. I elected to include a transparent row at the top of the frame sprite, just to avoid this.

October 13, 2025 10:02pm

Leon Mika

Devlog

Screenshots

Some advice for the TLDraw Obsidian plugin maintainer: drop everything after the words “and” and “then” in these menu items, then remove duplicates. This should bring the menu items down to a number that’s easy to scan. I can manipulate tabs myself, but finding what I want here is a lot.

October 10, 2025 9:17am

Leon Mika

Screenshots

Small change to the thirst mechanic for my Godot project. Switched from discrete thirst levels to a single timer that will tick down if the player is thirsty. This allowed for a change to how I indicate this to the player, replacing text messages that’ll be displayed at each thirst level with a gauge that shows up on the HUD.

I thought that the messages would be enough, but after playing through with them, they turned out to be more of a hindrance. They didn’t communicate the player’s thirst level well enough: they show up for a few seconds, then disappear, leaving the player to wonder how much time they have. This information is now always present with the gauge. Plus, I think it gives more of a sense of urgency, in that a gauge that’s constantly ticking down will encourage the player to play a little faster in order to reach the next water bottle before they perish from thirst.

September 28, 2025 12:09pm

Leon Mika

Devlog

Screenshots

More on that Godot project today. Finally bit the bullet and started working on proper backdrops. I’ve leaving the artwork until later (i.e. I’m procrastinating), today was all about the mechanics, trying to get parallax scrolling working. Fortunately Godot has built-in nodes to make this easy, although I did have to upgrade Godot to 4.5.

This is my first cut, some simple colour banding to represent sky and sand in one of the desert levels:

These two layers were added to the scene as Parallax2D nodes, each with a single Sprite child. Positioning the sprites was a little tricky. Godot suggests placing them at the origin, but what I didn’t understand was that the actual position of the sprite depends a lot on the scroll scale of the Parallax2D node. I added the sky layer without changing the scroll position and it took me a while before I discovered that it was appearing below the camera. Only after reducing the scroll scale to about 0.1 did it start showing up in the viewport (one nice thing about Godot 4.5 is that the “play scene” window includes debug options, allowing you to hijack the camera and move it around the scene).

I will need to introduce some detail in the backdrop layers soon. The bands are too simple and may induce some vertigo when the player is ascending to high platforms. Plus, it just looks boring. Not that they’re meant to be eye-catching but something a little more interesting would be nice.

September 27, 2025 12:02pm

Reading Time: 2 minutes

Leon Mika

Devlog

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Just a reminder that MacOS comes with a grapher, and a pretty decent one at that. Came in handy when I wanted to visualise a few functions.

September 27, 2025 10:41am

Leon Mika

Screenshots

Finally indeed.

September 9, 2025 8:41am

Leon Mika

Screenshots