Discussion

After some technical hitches, and can now find all the VisualInk courses coming up in the future at thinkersmeetup.com/scholars/...

With a couple of bonus extra #GameDev courses that aren't VisualInk specific. #VisualNovel #InteractiveFiction

On a rather closely related note, you can now see all of my upcoming courses for the summer and the Autumn term on my ThinkersMeetup page: thinkersmeetup.com/scholars/...

So, Wix (website building app) allows you to have courses, and courses can have members of staff assigned to scheduled sessions, and then the query API will return you course details including a staffMemberIds field so you can show who's involved in teaching a course on your webpage.

...except that said field is populated with all the staff members assigned to repeating scheduled sessions, and only to them. Obviously, if you only teach one session of a course, or the course only has one session you're not really teaching anything.

Hopefully this public service announcement will allow me to pay forward some of the three-ish hours I just spent tearing my hair out before I found this nugget in the docs, where it is just stated as if it is a completely sane and normal piece of behaviour for an API. The workaround? Make the single session a repeating session that finishes repeating before it's second scheduled date. That makes you a real teacher on the course.

I'm going to be running a week long, online, introduction to #GameDev at the beginning of August using #Godot for 12-16 year olds. Details below!

The Arcade Games of the Future

Games don't need to be complicated to be fun to play, and back when computers had less resources to work with game designers had to lean hard into that truth by creating games that focused on just one thing: good game play.

Learn from the old masters of game design as we use basic techniques to create replicas of the old classics, using the modern game engine Godot to build games in the style of space invaders, breakout, and classic side scrolling platformers. But we won't stop there: unlike the original creators of those games, we aren't limited to the capabilities of the earliest computers, so we can start adding our own unique twists and visual wow factor to the games once the basics are working.

You will need a computer that can run Godot to take part in the course, but don't worry - you don't need a super powerful gaming computer to run it. You don't need previous experience of coding to take part, but we will be writing actual code for a full game engine, so you will need to be comfortable doing some typing. It would also be helpful to have a good understanding of how 2D coordinates work (i. e. using x, y pairs to position things). If you have taken my 2D art assets course or otherwise know how to make sprites, there will also be the opportunity to customise the look of your own versions of each game - but starter art will be provided to let us get going quickly.

How many games can you make in a five day course? Why not join us for a week and find out.

The Arcade Games of the Future will run 3rd-7th August at 16:00 UK time, and each session will last for one hour. You'll get the most out of the course if you carry on pushing the games forward in between sessions and come to the next session with any questions or stumbling blocks you hit, but there's no 'homework' as such.

And we're live! This year, ThinkersMeetup and VisualInk are teaming up to mentor one (or more!) team(s) of under 18s through the week long InkJAM 2026.

Find out all the details in the course description, and spread the world if you know anyone who'd be interested in taking part a narrative game jam. #InteractiveFiction #GameDev #VisualNovel #InkLang

@[email protected] I would, genuinely, consider paying for a service that semi-accurately pointed me to places where I could buy things I want to buy without having to trawl all the options. I just can't imagine a pitch for such a service that I could actually trust at the moment.

@[email protected] The shear amount of engineering cleverness that has gone into underhand ways of tracking what you buy/download would be less annoying if they then used it to target ads with better logic than "they bought thing x, they must what 27 more copies with different names" ...

@[email protected] @[email protected] The cat bus from Totoro has friction too, you know

@[email protected] Ah, watching teacher spouses blossom during the summer having hatched from the armoured shell of school time...

@[email protected] That's just mean. Nearly as mean as offering to help someone learn Diplomacy.

Been a while since I've needed to look, so does anyone have suggestions for good DB deployment management tools? I want to say migration, but apparently these days that mostly gets results for switching DB tech, while I'm talking about the migrations you check with your source code during normal dev.

I've started with Sqitch ( github.com/sqitchers/sqitch ) for now just to avoid a research rabbit hole, but I'm curious what people like. #Database #CI

"The project" being Typst, not ox-typst which is obviously just a personal daily driver someone is being kind enough to share, as opposed to an organization with funding etc.

I know I'm a heathen who should have learned latex properly years ago, but it always felt it was just a bit too awkward to put the time into properly.

After my son started playing with it as a potential way of taking uni notes I've started having a look at Typst as an alternative (via github.com/jmpunkt/ox-typst obviously - I'm not going to give up org syntax for the basics like some kind of barbarian) and finding it pleasingly more straight forward.

I suppose this is my slightly reluctant post to check if I'm missing any big issues with the project given that checking that kind of thing is a depressing part of life these days.

@[email protected] Do you sell merchandise with your (non commissioned) artwork on it by any chance?

I needed my root domain address to have a website on it for reasons so now I have the world's most boring website as a placeholder.

Loads fast, though!

mavnn.eu/

@[email protected] Yeah, and the experience of using Bun matches his comments about pre-slop quality and attitude: it had a bunch of rapidly expanding, genuinely useful features that ran really fast... when they worked at all. And a bunch of table stakes things you'd expect to work but didn't, and occasional really weird bugs.

Not a bad tradeoff for rapidly exploring a new problem space, but I'd not recommend starting a production project with Bun - which is a bummer, because features like 'compile JS to a native binary across multiple platforms out of the box' are genuinely great.

@[email protected] Having some contacts in the Zig community and having used Bun on a couple of projects, it all rings extremely true to what I would have guessed from the outside. Andrew's tone (for me at least) manages to be both classy and honest about the frustrations which is an impressive line to walk.

Final session of my "Making 2D Game Assets" course today where we talked about recording sound for your game which is always great fun.

The final wrap up had some fun resources so I thought I might as well share it here as well!

Remember: the secret sauce of audio is always the same! Get as quiet a space as you can, and start by normalizing and reducing noise. Save that version before you do anything else, you'll thank me for it later.

How to create 100 distinct voices

This is a video from a voice coach on how to get started creating distinct character voices, starting with the easiest aspects to vary. youtube.com/watch?v=FVmAEezr...

Wing - Dopamine

We spoke about how flexible the human voice can be at creating sound effects just on its own. Wing takes this to world class levels, creating effects like this using only his voice, microphone positioning, and some reverb (the only effect allowed in the competitions he enters) youtube.com/watch?v=qlrpeYdm...

The Magic of Making Sound

This video gives a whole bunch of examples of Foley work. It does assume a certain amount of equipment you won't have available, but the basics are always the same: make sure you can see the video you want to match the sounds to, record the sounds, normalize and remove noise from your recording before setting the final volume you want. youtube.com/watch?v=UO3N_PRI... #GameDev #SoundDesign

Had a couple of days without #ADHD meds as I reset my sleep medication and times (summer holidays mean I can sleep with my actual circadian rhythm rather than taking a boat load of melatonin to try and shift it to match 'society').

And boy oh boy does it make a difference restarting them again. I suppose that even having taken them for years being unmedicated still feels my 'default' state from the decades I was undiagnosed - so stopping feels a drag but normal. Restarting after a break is kind of magical.