I made a decision a few years ago to change my weekday encoding from the first letter of each day, to a unique letter for each day.

I usually use this encoding next to dates to quickly tell which day of the week it fell on, ex: 2023-03-30 R - Wow, so clear it’s a Thursday! 👏

Let’s look at SMTWTFS vs UMTWRFS:

Only a few letters are unique to a day, like H or W, but it does a better job to tell the day of the week at a glance.

These are the core tenets that I keep in mind when working on a game or a game design:

• Respect the Player’s Time
• Let the Player Customize their Experience
• Tight Core Game Loop
• Support Colorblind Users
• Clear Control of the Game
• Silhouettes are Important
• Don’t Punish through Choices
• Respect Internet Bandwidth
• Respect Computer Resources
• Reward Exploration
• Reduce Loading Times

Respect the Player’s Time

Time is one of the most precious and valuable resources that we have. Any game that I make should give the same level of respect to a player regardless of wheter they have 60 min or 12 hours to play.

I don’t like participating in pull requests that automatically close when the first approval is received. I really prefer that the author of the pull request closes the pull request after approvals are received.

At its core, auto-complete on pull requests does something that irks me: Auto-complete passes the responsibility of the PR to whoever comes next, and that’s bad.

Auto-complete assumes that reviewers are fully aware of the codebase’s functions, the context of why these changes are being submitted, and the context of what the new changes to the code will be doing. In practice this is rarely true. If a reviewer isn’t familiar with the codebase, then they can check for syntax issues and some local structural issues, but they won’t be able to completely review what’s going into the codebase. I also do not think approval should be reserved exclusively for veteran programmers.

This year I made a huge change in my life - I gave up soda.

I’ve been a huge fan of soda for basically my whole life. I would drink it with dinner as a kid, and when I finally started getting my own money I spent a lot of it just on soda. Since 2012 or so when I moved out during college, I’ve really been in overdrive on drinking soda pretty much every day. It’s embarrassing but there were some periods that I really didn’t drink much other than diet cola. I really enjoyed it but it’s not a life that I want to repeat.

Join the 0 Noti Club today.

I don’t like notifications that break my focus. I don’t mind badges or little icons, but flashing lights and noises are really distracting. They tend to be easy enough to disable, but there’s one form of notification that I really dislike: desktop popup notifications.

These turn signals that are widely async or informational (ex: status on background tasks, meeting invites) into immediate popups for attention. I find that breaking focus on people reduces their overall productivity, much more than they would gain by the off-chance a notification was actually significant.

Its time to move past apostrophes. They dont provide any real context to written speech.

It won’t be confusing, since apostrophes aren’t voiced in speech. Understanding the lack of apostrophes in written speech will be easy, since the context can be reviewed without asking the speaker to repeat themself.

Apostrophe S

’s is tricky. It can mean 2 things at once:

• Possession, ex: Rob’s computer.
• Action
  • is, ex: Rob’s using the computer / Rob is using the computer
  • has, ex: Rob’s used the computer / Rob has used the computer.

However, removing it can imply plural of something, ex: Robs using the computer (How many Robs?).

You can play Maine Coon Cala in your browser here: https://postrobcore.net/games/maine-coon-cala

I’ve been playing a lot of Clubhouse Games: 51 Worldwide Classics Amazon -> Nintendo Switch recently. Especially Mancala, since my girlfriend really enjoys that game, and she wins all the time.

While we were playing, I kept calling it “Maine Coon Cala”, and it took root in my brain. How would that look? Can I make it happen?

So after styling on her (actually she styled on me 😰), I designed the game:

Way back in the mythic era of like 2006 I was really interested in making a new word. This is what I came up with:

sarcass (sar-cass) | sarcassing, sarcassed

Verb

To be sarcastic towards someone.

I told Cart that I was upset about the lack of pepsi. He said he was upset with his lack good soda choices. Cart sarcassed me! 😡

Synonyms: get smart with, get witty, nay-nay

It’s time to stop ignoring checksums.

Software developers will often publish checksums alongside download links on their websites. Using the checksum information is a way to check that the package you received on the other end of the download is what the developer offered.

Checking the checksum when a file is downloaded protects against a class of risk where a file was intercepted mid-transfer and modified in some way. This can be done by a sophisticated attacker to add malware or spyware to an otherwise normal download.

Game design can be intimidating and overwhelming. It feels like all the good ideas have been taken, and anything that can be created is just derivative. Sometimes inspiration strikes me, and I have an idea for a game mechanic that comes fluidly. An idea so good that I’m convinced that everyone will love to play it!

Other times I sit in front of my notes and wonder why all my creative desire disappeared. I start working on a half-formed idea, or even a half-programmed one, and it breaks my heart as it falls apart in front of me. Was it even fun, anyway?

Every job pays in more than just money, I find that every job has three buckets of compensation.

In human society we communicate every day. We communicate everything from our desires and success, to our fears and dreams, to our joys and angers.

Thinking of anger, I love when someone yells on the internet lIkE tHiS. It’s really satisfying to type like that too. 😸

wHo DrAnK mY pEpSi?

One day I was trying to do one of the cool spacing things:

w h e n i s l u n c h

--> read more <--

Colemak Website -> https://colemak.com/

ARST Life

Background

Me? Well, I work on the computer. I play on the computer. Dude I basically live on the computer.

My body is not made to live at the computer. Sitting in a chair all day and only moving my hands is going to eventually have a bad effect on me. I started using a standing desk so I can stand for at least an hour or two during the day, but what about my hands?

If you’re like me and you want Steam to stop downloading stuff automatically, there’s a way to prevent it!

In the Steam app:

• Go to Steam > Settings
• Go to the Downloads section of the settings popup
• Under Download Restrictions, check ‘Only auto-update games between:’ and then pick a time that you’re unlikely to be on Steam

After this, you will see your downloads queueing and waiting until your selected time. You can pick which updates you want and install games without any problems.

Way back in the mythic era of 2016, I published a mod called Feed the Colonists for RimWorld. It added a meal recipe that allowed players to cook 4 meals at once.

Here is the wild of how it was incorporated into the main game.

What was the “Feed the Colonists” mod

Cooking is really inefficient in RimWorld. Here are the steps to make a meal:

• Colonist brings enough food to the stove to make a meal, which can take more than 1 trip.
• Colonist cooks the meal.
• Colonist brings the meal to a stockpile.
• Repeat until you have the desired number of meals.

For reference: Colonists eat 2 meals per day.

The future of everyday transportation is autonomous vehicles. I can’t wait. There will be a day where I get in the car, I input where I want to go, and then I just pull out my phone and play minesweeper until I get wherever I want to be.

In the meantime, I sit with the experience that I got to ride in a robot car, a Tesla with autopilot, a few times.

I joined the protests again today. My heart hurts to think that #BlackLivesMatter still has to be said.

I have never forgotten about Philando Castile, John Crawford III, and Tamir Rice. I’ll never get the videos of their murders out of my head.

There was no reason for any of them to die

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shooting_of_Philando_Castile - murdered for following the law
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shooting_of_John_Crawford_III - murdered for playing with toys, only given seconds to ‘surrender’ while he was on the phone
  • A second person, Angela Williams, died after suffering a heart attack while fleeing from the shooting.
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shooting_of_Tamir_Rice - murdered for playing with toys in a park, only given seconds to understand why a cop was screaming at a 12-year-old boy

So many more lives than just these three been lost to police brutality and racially-motivated discrimination.

Ffff-uck Orcs

Originally posted to the internet on 2014-JAN-11 01:06:16

This year is a year of crossing stuff off the list for me, and one of those things was to “try Phaser”.

I figured this would be easy enough, it’s been around for a while and it’s popular so it should be possible to find tutorials for it. And even more: find tutorials for what I wanted to tinker with: a tower defense game!

I slapped down an index.html in a new directory and found the cdn link to download phaser from the nets, when I realized:

Play Ardent here: https://postrobcore.net/games/ardent

I started this project in 2016 not long after working on aMAZEment. My love for minesweeper and my love for procedural generation inspired me to create Ardent.

Ardent is a pastel RPG board-based game, with items and monsters placed on the game board. The power of monsters and the stats of items increase based on the number of monsters adjacent to them in the 8 directions. Players can only pick up items that are not surrounded by monsters, defeating monsters removes them from the board.

🧚‍♀️⛲🧚‍♀️

I keep thinking about what it must be like to be in a fairy fountain from Zelda. In my thoughts, I’m allowed to stay there for as long as I want.

I think about the little fairies flying around the fountain. I think about how there’s no furniture designed for humans, only a few pots and marble columns. I think about the vines growing up the columns and up the walls. I think about large windows with simple metalwork holding them up and adorning them. I think about the great fairy surfacing from time to time to be around the fairies. I think about the harp playing an enchanting tune in the background.

Play aMAZEment here: https://postrobcore.net/games/amazement

Back in the mythical era of 2015 I started a game called aMAZEment. I was just starting to get into web development more and wanted to try making something using HTML5 <Canvas>.

aMAZEment was designed to be a roguelike game, except the monsters weren’t supposed to move. This would have given the player time to explore and think about how they want to approach the level. I didn’t plan to have hunger or any mechanics that would force players to progress through the level, so it would be fine for players to take hundreds of turns to figure something out.

This site is using an open-source font called Fira Code. https://github.com/tonsky/FiraCode

I’m using it because I really 💗 ligatures.

It gives this site some nice charm and lets me do cool stuff like this: www *** != >= -> =>

When programming with ligatures it takes some time to train your brain to look for >= and != instead of >= and != but I think it’s pretty fun and worth it so far. 😸

You can play my quick and not super polished Minesweeper right here: https://postrobcore.net/games/minesweeper

So here’s a fun fact: I really love the game Minesweeper. It’s unironically one of my most favorite games.

I’ve written my own version of the game many times across a lot of platforms (win32 tkinter python, android + unity, web) and now I am bringing it to my blog. 😸

I spent a couple hours over the last few days making a Minesweeper clone!

Hello world from the new blog generated using Hugo! 😸🌎