141–150 of 1001 posts
The final stretch of getting my game ready for release next week: https://store.steampowered.com/app/2764460/Sandustry/ It's an automation game and factory builder with "falling sand" physics. Think Noita meets Factorio.
I’ve always enjoyed solving observability and reliability problems, so eventually I decided to build my own take on the boring-but-important "is it actually working?" part of the stack.
It does uptime checks, cron/heartbeat monitoring, incidents, status pages and notifications. Nothing revolutionary — the goal is to make the familiar stuff simple, reliable, and pleasant to use.
It’s built with Rails and hosted in the EU.
I got laid off at the end of April and have been building my own personal dream tool since, it's a skeuomorphic carpentry simulator with an agent MCP. You start with real wood specs and a shop full of miter saws, router tables, table saws and the like. Think of it like Sketchup but no extruding rectangles. It's been really fun to build with. Agents can create parametric procedures so e.g. stick framing becomes a simp…
I got laid off at the end of April and have been building my own personal dream tool since, it's a skeuomorphic carpentry simulator with an agent MCP. You start with real wood specs and a shop full of miter saws, router tables, table saws and the like. Think of it like Sketchup but no extruding rectangles. It's been really fun to build with. Agents can create parametric procedures so e.g. stick framing becomes a simp…
Every day, players answer 5 questions that require estimating some quantity, such as distance, year, cost etc. Then you can compare against answers of other players and the real answer.
Working on finding the right balance of questions that are both fun and also help understand facts about the world.
I'd hoped for a more meaningful update from when I first mentioned Vestiges last month (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48884984). But I've often felt discouraged and haven't worked as much as I'd intended.
As was recommended by guiambros last month, I started the process of setting up Vestiges on Steam, but that's still in progress (currently, my identity is being verified). I also set-up at micro.blog (https://ksaun.micro.blog/) and (https://mastodon.social/@ksaun), but haven't posted anything yet.
I bought a Linux laptop for this project (I was working on a 2020 Surface Book 3). (I had used Unix in the 1990s, but not much since then. The video game industry being so Windows-centric, I'd stuck with that OS throughout my career.) So recently I spent a few days enjoying (not sarcastically!) setting up my new computer and work environment. In doing so, I also took improved some aspects of my development process.
Limited meaningful work on the game itself. From a technical perspective, I could release the demo now, but I'm dissatisfied with the content (specifically the writing). Not that it needs to be amazing just yet, but I want it at least less embarrassing. As I've worked with some of the best game writers in the industry (in my opinion; people like Chris Avellone, George Ziets, Neal Hallford, Brian Mitsoda), I'm accustomed to quality that exceeds my personal ability. And this writing work requires greater focus than I can usually muster, so I've been procrastinating, polishing other things that were already sufficient to ship.
Since last time, I've finished most work on tutorial features and content as well as the other implementations I wanted for the demo. For the modes that are ready, I added full support for keyboard-only play (which was a more substantial effort than I'd anticipated, taking close to two days (very part-time for me, but Claude was fairly busy)). I also now have an MCP server implemented so that Claude can playtest as a player would, but I've only just started to make use of it. (And some progress on the aforementioned writing, just not much.)
Current goal, which I've been working on for a bit more than a week now, is to add support for controlling the RDP (the part of the N64's GPU that actually does all the rasterization), such that programs can actually draw triangles. I'd already implemented the control registers, so the current work is defining all the RDP commands, along with documenting what they do and how to use them — which means that I need to fully understand what they do and how to use them, and that's been a fun rabbit hole to explore.
I'm currently about halfway to two-thirds of the way through defining packed structs for all the RDP commands, then the plan is to build a CommandList struct with methods to build RDP command lists and validate that they make sense (make sure all the triangle/rectangle rendering commands have all their subcommands in the right order, make sure you ain't calling them without there being a framebuffer defined as the rendering target, make sure the needed synchronization commands are in place where needed, etc.). Then that should hopefully be enough for Zig64 to draw its first triangle :)
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And taking a second crack at a feature flags with https://quonfig.com because I seem to be unable to put this problem down and finally feel like I have the right git native and agent first approach.