💾 Archived View for rawtext.club › ~winter › gemlog › 2022 › 12-19.gmi captured on 2023-07-22 at 17:04:02. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
⬅️ Previous capture (2023-01-29)
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Gemspace is interesting. I like doing stuff in the tildeverse. This also seems to have peripheral side-effects: I'm writing more words, but coding more, too.
I've started working on a terminal-based game. Something simple, with a reasonable scope such that I can finish and announce it at the end of the year, and ideally before then.
I come from the generation that grew up on BASIC - whether Atari, BBC, GW/QBasic, another variety. And when I was younger, like many kids, I wanted to make games. I checked some books out of the library. I looked at the code on the pages. I didn't understand how to put it in the computer. I put my interest on hold.
I was 14 when I finally learned to code, learning a few QBasic commands from a kid in my typing class. This was a eureka moment: oh, the rush I felt when I'd run my program and it would do what I wanted. I made weird little games. Mostly text adventures. No real parser or anything complicated. But it was fun, that process of imagination and realization.
I went to university and my degree took over, and then I graduated and my career took over, though finally I started working on games again. Well, _a_ game. A roguelike. I'd been obsessed with nethack and angband in my late teens. I wanted to make a game of my own. I've managed to do this. It's somewhat successful. I keep hacking on it! It's not Qud, but what is?
In the past I've always resisted working on other games because I didn't want a huge drain on my time. But playing around on RTC got me thinking: what if I just gave myself a small block of time? A couple of weeks? What could I make? curses is easy enough, I know how to use that. I could make something small and fun and put it on my github and maybe it'd be small and fun for someone else.
So that's what I'm doing. It's in progress; it should be done by the end of the year; I won't announce it here because I don't want to create an edge between my gemspace presence and that on the identifiable web. This is just to say: I'm having fun, it feels like the dumb games I made when I was young, and explorations in gemspace have sympathetic resonance.