I don't have anything scary to share today but I have a kinda spooky CSS demo I created a long time ago that I can share called Magic Sword.

Tomorrow I start my #sveltevember #devlog about diving deep into Svelte and getting STIM ported over to it as a first experiment. I will blog about my experiences and share my progress from this blog!

I've been wanting to get back into writing, coding for games, and learning about Svelte, so I've decided to combine all this into one effort where I do a #devlog about my experiences with #svelte and how I'm porting STIM over to it as a first pass.

It's been a busy few months here in Andrew Land. I've been working on a serial novel called The Clockwork Apprentice as well as an interactive fiction writing tool called STIM .

I'm trying to figure out how all these tools fit together, and where I should be posting articles.

I've not forgotten Godot Engine as it's rapidly moving towards another release. I'm particularly excited about the new text effects.

About to spend some time off on vacation. Need a break from the relentless code demands.

Chapter 10 of The Clockwork Apprentice is out

Part 8

I'm working on a new serial novel:

I'm working steadily on STIM and having a great time coding it up. It's been a long time since I've had “fun” building something on the web. And it's been because I have stopped feeling guilty about knowing some framework or doing it the “best way”. I'm using a collection of open source projects to build it and not reinvent the wheel.

Other than that, I'm looking forward to playing a game called Dragon Quest Builders 2 which is this really fun RPG/sandbox game.

The theme for the rest of this year is “output” and I aim to follow that.

Look for more posts soon on my progress on STIM

I was thinking about minimalist app making – where you just put together the most basic version of an app, and it struck me how I often try to over complicate things ( for example the HTML version of IttyBittyRPG ) so I set a goal for myself to create just a super minimalist Interactive Fiction tool I'm calling STIM. I'm using Repl.it to code it, Cash and Torus for the JS, and Bulma for the CSS ( and Font Awesome – which is ... Awesome!)

If you want to follow along you can check out this project:

Part of my vacation time was spent working on a new game making tool called #ittybittyrpg. I'm building it in Godot and I made a lot of great progress. Here's a recent screenshot with Save and Load working, as well as a logo from Logomakr

I have a really interesting idea for IttyBittyRPG where instead of doing things like Twine or Bitsy, as I was originally wanting to do, the idea will be more like you have a fantasy world sticker book, and you create dialog, battles, and levels like you might put stickers in a sticker book. The UI for the editor will be “playful” and then the game itself will be emergent from that.

So, since this is supposed to be about coding, I had to port over the Save / Load code from an older version of GDScript to 3.1.

Code example is here

At Campus Movie Fest ... Making a game

I'm in Atlanta for 🎬 #campusmoviefest while my daughter and her friend get to check out cool sessions on movie making and present their short films. But, I get to work on my side projects. For some reason I'm gravitating toward 🎮GDevelop. It seems like such a good fit for me – as it's close to my javascript heart for games, while also being easy to code for. The UI is still kinda ... rough in some ways, but it's still very usable. What gets me is that the games that I've seen made for this engine are so fast. I don't see any framerate drops and the controls seem to be pretty responsive. I don't know about the UI, but there must be some real good things going on under the hood.

If you've not tried it out, I encourage you to check it out and kick the tires. It's both been around for a long time (2008?) but seems new with this latest version 5. It's free and open source, so support it!