rezmason @rezmason@merveilles.town

Okay, I might be crying a tiny bit. That's the surprise announcement.

Thanks for reading! 😅 Go play Verreciel!

I'll take another swing at this later in the week. The glinting kinetic sculpture that is Verreciel's universe will be properly grokked by its resident ghost before too long, and it'll probably deserve a decent writeup.

And maybe the solution I come up with can help me, too. If I'm writing a program to prioritize things, so that they're done in the right order, then maybe I can, you know, feed it my life and goals and it can print me a tutorial.

I mean, probably not 😂 but we'll see!

And here's the personal crux of it: the awkward, error-prone, doesn't-handle-change-well, needs-a-robust-replacement progression system is a stand-in for me.

I'm brittle. I don't scale, or adapt gracefully to change. I'm not quite robust.

Which are all fine! I'm human, sure!

But I've got some really great friends, who I want to thrive, and I want to contribute support. I'm in a real good place. I just need to be more reliable.

Aside from the dormant refactoring branch, I feel like I've got only two things to show for my progress.

One, I better understand the problem I'm trying to solve. It's a hard problem, but solving it would be fantastic, and could lead to new games or tools in our community.

Two, I better understand my motivations behind working on it. Verreciel is Devine's pride and joy, it's an awesome thing, that I want to last. It's in a real good place, its progression system just needs to be more reliable.

I've tried to make my gameplay logging easier, by speeding up the game clock, but this apparently subtly messes up the sequence of in-game events (like timers) that I'm waiting for.

I have a ten thousand line JSON file of logged clicks, literally everything the player clicks in Verreciel, in the order they click it, and I'm throwing it away, because the auto-pilot goes catatonic 10% of the way through.

And here's the thing— while I can record my Verreciel gameplay, it's basically a log of every little button I press and in-game event I wait for, from start to end, and if I mess something up even once, I want to start over. It's Sisyphean! It's my pilgrimage.

The alternative is to rewrite large parts of the game's internals to be data-driven, and to program a "solver" that decides what needs to be done, and what to do first. I've done some of this, in a branch, but it's arguably a distraction.

Verreciel is a very interesting project to contribute to. In many ways, the game is a tutorial— one that slowly pulls away, so that the instructions you follow become more and more abstract, leaving it to you to handle the details of operating your spacecraft and bartering at spirographic ports of trade.

Like most tutorial systems I've encountered, Verreciel's is rather brittle. Recent changes to the game's progression have required me to re-record the optional "auto-pilot" in the game.

For those who aren't familiar with Verreciel (as in "verre de ciel", which is Montréalais for "sky glass"), it's a minimalist space exploration game, where you kind of sit in a wireframe cockpit, fly to wireframe worlds and accomplish wireframe missions. It contains a music album by Aliceffekt!

https://hundredrabbits.itch.io/verreciel

Ahem. Who here likes Verreciel? 🚀🎛🎶 I'm gonna talk for a while about Verreciel.

No, this isn't a surprise announcement. I'm doing work on Verreciel, and would like to talk about it, that's all. And this might be an interesting read, who knows?

Just spent my entire evening signing into two dozen programs on my Android phone. Denying most of them permission to things they have no business accessing.

The walled gardens are the only reason platform migration is this painful.

Perhaps I should have waited to drink until after all the cooking got done. Or at least until after I had something to eat. #Drunksgiving

Oh, jeez, the Google has a long long memory.

I haven't used Android since October 2011, but my Pixel 4 has pictures and video from that entire year.

Does anyone have a recommendation for an Android Mastodon client?

I've begun my gradual climb out of Apple's gravity well, and while I'll probably try other OSes, I'm getting up to speed on Android tonight.

Nothing warms my integrated circuits like a long, nerdy phone call with my programmer dad!

🤓🙏🤓

Hey @neauoire ! My dad wants to know: will your Berlin livecoding show be livestreamed or recorded at all? Your prospective viewership is larger than you know.

Also, if you get enough samples of string instruments, you could have an ORCAstra just sayin'