Spindley Q Frog @SpindleyQ@gamemaking.social

#introductions
I'm Jeremy! I am interested in weird videogames and retrocomputing.

I founded glorioustrainwrecks.com, a community focussed on creating a positive and accessible place for anyone who wants to make games.

I host the Fringe Game History Podcast, where I interview folks about the early days of weird, personal game dev communities and creators.

I wrote Neut Tower, a puzzle game created entirely on an actual-hardware 286 MS-DOS PC, which I am currently porting to the Apple II.

Fun side-effect of this project is that my son has now discovered Bitsy and has proceeded to spend his evening filling up a world with little pixel creatures doing jumping jacks

My kid is having fun making 14x16 pixel Apple II tile art. Lots of neat little objects.

I think the next step is probably to fiddle with the tooling to make it a possible to build a full Bitsy-like game without code. There's not _much_ game-specific code right now, but the tools are cumbersome to work with at the moment, since they were not really built for this purpose.

I mean, I could just whip up a little game-thing with the tools as-is, but that wouldn't be as interesting to me imo.

Trying to make a Bitsy-ish thing for the Apple ][ using Honeylisp for the Spring Lisp Game Jam (https://itch.io/jam/spring-lisp-game-jam-2021). It was... more painful than I expected to clear the Neut Tower-specific stuff out of the project, but I think everything is working now.

King's Quest (2015) Chapter 4 is excruciating. Literally just endless sliding tile puzzles, with a handful of riddles in the middle to make things slightly less monotonous. Multiple characters complain about how boring it is. I wish I was kidding.

The part of Pac-Man movement that doesn’t quite work right yet is diagonal - you can get him stuck into a weird oscillating loop at a crossroads trying to move two directions at once. Despite only having a four directional joystick, Pac-Man appears to actually handle diagonal movement smoothly somehow. Further study is needed to nail it down.

Pac-Man movement took like a week of thinking and a couple evenings implementation, but it basically works the way I want now!

King's Quest (2015) Chapter 3 pretty much retcons the entirety of KQ2 for the sake of making a King Graham dating sim. I'm OK with this. Valanice is basically an inanimate object in KQ2, your true-love-at-first-sight prize for winning the game who is then completely ignored for the next 4 games, so any attempt to flesh out her character and give her some agency is welcome.

People in this game keep saying “Zards!” and I choose to believe this is short for “God’s Nards”

I think maybe at the very end they’re not actually dead somehow?? It’s very unclear

There are some cute goofy fairy-tale puzzles in it so it’s a shame I’ve been spending the whole time anxious that I’m going to screw up arbitrarily and fucking kill people

King’s Quest 2015 Chapter 2 is an optimization puzzle where if you solve the puzzles out of order, innocent people starve to death. There is no sensible way to determine the correct order beforehand. I’m finding it kind of unpleasant!

I write Java at work and most of the time it's fine, but today I learned that there is no sensible built-in way to lazily iterate over a stream in a for loop and I'm not sure I can deal

Now that Bomberman is basically working right, time to implement Pac-man! Luckily Pac-man's movement logic is fairly extensively documented, so I don't have to do a lot of reverse engineering myself.

Turns out TG-16 Bomberman absolutely cheats and simply does not let you attempt to move diagonally. If you move the joystick up and right, Bomberman just acts like you told him to move right. As a player, you don't notice, because there are no open spaces where you can freely move diagonally, and the game has very aggressive auto-cornering behaviour.

I have been writing computer programs professionally for over 20 years now. I have built my own compilers and virtual machines and made complete games with them.

Moving a little guy around the screen and making it feel good is a harder computer science problem than cache invalidation or naming things imo.

Tidied up what I thought was the last messy bit of my Bomberman movement code. Moving in any single direction works exactly the way I want it to. Perfect. Beautiful. Except moving diagonally is pretty much just broken. The player regularly gets stuck at crossroads (Bomberman has LOTS of crossroads), and in certain situations can walk through walls.

Time to fire up the TG-16 and try to figure out what it's doing...

Finally managed to figure out why my movement function was behaving so strangely - I had somehow managed to swap the "before" and "after" position variables.

Now it's more or less behaving the way I wrote it to behave, though it's not quite _good_ yet. End is in sight though, I think.

Anyway, I have started King's Quest (2015). It's fine. A modern design trend I find annoying is beautiful, intricately rendered areas that you as a player are made to run past, because there is literally no other possible interaction. It feels so wasteful! I want to chill out in this beautiful forest and wander around and talk to weird forest gnomes or something, but the game just needs me to go from point A to point B and they've decided there should be a forest in the way.

I have given up on Mask of Eternity; it is just not my thing. Though every time I read some new fact about its development it seems more deeply cursed. Like, what the fuck is this shit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King%27s_Quest#Davidson_version_of_King's_Quest_VIII