It’s the year 2101. Corporations have taken over the world. The only way to be free is to join a pirate crew and start plundering the galaxy. The only means of survival is to play
basketball.
Now it’s your turn to go out there and make a name for yourself. Create your crew and start wandering the galaxy in search of worthy basketball opponents.
The game is under heavy development and breaking changes are often introduced. If you can’t continue an old game because the save file is invalid, you probably need to start a new
one or open an issue to check if the save file can be migrated.
…
Just try it out!
Connect via SSH to try the game.
ssh rebels.frittura.org -p 3788
Save files are deleted after 2 days of inactivity.
…
I feel like I’m reading a lot about SSH lately and how it can be used for exotic and unusual tasks. Tarpitting‘s fun, of course, but really what inspires me is all these dinky projects like ssh tiny.christmas that subvert the usual authentication-then-terminal flow that you expect when you connect to an SSH server.
These kinds of projects feel more like connecting to a BBS. And that’s pretty retro (and cool!).
Anyway: Rebels in the Sky is a networked multiplayer terminal-based game about exploring the galaxy with a team of basketball-loving space pirates. I met the main
developer on a forum and they seem cool; I’m interested to see where this quirky little project ends up going!
I’ve had my itch.io account for about six years; I think I first created it to buy a copy of We Are But Worms: A One Word RPG. I’ve since made several purchases, donations, reviews, and comments, but
never really used my account as a “creator”.
I changed that today when I realised that there was nothing to stop me re-publishing games like DNDle and Axe Feather 2021 via my itch.io profile as well as on their current homes (and on GitHub, I suppose). For some folks, itch.io’s
discovery features might be the best way for them to discover worthwhile content weird stuff like this.
I might republish some other “things” I’ve made on itch.io too. It’s not like there haven’t been lots of them over the years!
This is a blog post about things that make me nostalgic for other things that, objectively, aren’t very similar…
When I hear Dawnbreaker, I feel like I’m nine years old…
…and I’ve been allowed to play OutRun on the arcade cabinet at West View
Leisure Centre. My swimming lesson has finished, and normally I should go directly home.
On those rare occasions I could get away1
with a quick pause in the lobby for a game, I’d gravitate towards the Wonderboy machine. But there was something about the tactile
controls of OutRun‘s steering wheel and pedals that gave it a physicality that the “joystick and two buttons” systems couldn’t replicate.
The other thing about OutRun was that it always felt… fast. Like, eye-wateringly fast. This was part of what gave it such appeal2.
OutRun‘s main theme, Magical Sound Shower, doesn’t actually sound much like Dawnbreaker. But
both tracks somehow feel like… “driving music”?
But somehow when I’m driving or cycling and it this song comes on, I’m instantly transported back to those occasionally-permitted childhood games of OutRun4.
When I start a new Ruby project, I feel like I’m eleven years old…
It’s not quite a HELLO WORLD, but it’s pretty-similar.
At first I assumed that the tedious bits and the administrative overhead (linking, compiling, syntactical surprises, arcane naming conventions…) was just what “real”, “grown-up”
programming was supposed to feel like. But Ruby helped remind me that programming can be fun for its own sake. Not just because of the problems you’re solving or the product
you’re creating, but just for the love of programming.
The experience of starting a new Ruby project feels just like booting up my Amstrad CPC and being able to joyfully write code that will just work.
I still learn new programming languages because, well, I love doing so. But I’m yet to find one that makes me want
to write poetry in it in the way that Ruby does.
When I hear In Yer Face, I feel like I’m thirteen years old…
…and I’m painting Advanced HeroQuest miniatures6 in the attic at my dad’s house.
I’ve cobbled together a stereo system of my very own, mostly from other people’s castoffs, and set it up in “The Den”, our recently-converted attic7,
and my friends and I would make and trade mixtapes with one another. One tape began with 808 State’s In Yer Face8,
and it was often the tape that I would put on when I’d sit down to paint.
Advanced HeroQuest came with some fabulously ornate secondary components, like the doors that were hinged so their their open/closed state could be toggled, and I spent
way too long painting almost the entirety of my base set.
In a world before CD audio took off, “shuffle” wasn’t a thing, and we’d often listen to all of the tracks on a medium in sequence9.
That was doubly true for tapes, where rewinding and fast-forwarding took time and seeking for a particular track was challenging compared to e.g. vinyl. Any given song would loop around
a lot if I couldn’t be bothered to change tapes, instead just flipping again and again10.
But somehow it’s whenever I hear In Yer Face11
that I’m transported right back to that time, in a reverie so corporeal that I can almost smell the paint thinner.
When I see a personal Web page, I (still) feel like I’m fifteen years old…
…and the Web is on the cusp of becoming the hot “killer application” for the Internet. I’ve been lucky enough to be “online” for a few years by now12,
and basic ISP-provided hosting would very soon be competing with cheap, free, and ad-supported services like Geocities to be “the
place” to keep your homepage.
Nowadays, even with a hugely-expanded toolbox, virtually every corporate homepage fundamentally looks the same:
Logo in the top left
Search and login in the top right, if applicable
A cookie/privacy notice covering everything until you work out the right incantation to make it go away without surrendering your firstborn child
A “hero banner“
Some “below the fold” content that most people skip over
A fat footer with several columns of links, to ensure that all the keywords are there so that people never have to see this page and the search engine will drop
them off at relevant child page and not one of their competitors
Finally, a line of icons representing various centralised social networks: at least one is out-of-date, either because (a) it’s been renamed, (b) it’s changed its
branding, or (c) nobody with any moral fortitude uses that network any more14
But before the corporate Web became the default, personal home pages brought a level of personality that for a while I worried was forever dead.
2 Have you played Sonic Racing: CrossWorlds? The first time I played it I was overwhelmed by the speed and colours of the
game: it’s such a high-octane visual feast. Well that’s what OutRun felt like to those of us who, in the 1980s, were used to much-simpler and slower arcade games.
3 Also, how cool is it that Metrik has a blog, in this day and age? Max props.
4 Did you hear, by the way, that there’s talk of a movie adaptation of OutRun, which could turn out to be the worst
videogame-to-movie concept that I’ll ever definitely-watch.
5 In very-approximate order: C, Assembly, Pascal, HTML, Perl, Visual Basic (does that even
count as a “grown-up” language?), Java, Delphi, JavaScript, PHP, SQL, ASP (classic, pre-.NET), CSS, Lisp, C#, Ruby, Python (though I didn’t get on with it so well), Go, Elixir… plus
many others I’m sure!
6 Or possibly they were Warhammer Quest miniatures by this point; probably this memory spans one, and also the other, blended together.
7 Eventually my dad and I gave up on using the partially-boarded loft to intermittently
build a model railway layout, mostly using second-hand/trade-in parts from “Trains & Transport”, which was exactly the nerdy kind of model shop you’re imagining right now: underlit
and occupied by a parade of shuffling neckbeards, between whom young-me would squeeze to see if the mix-and-match bin had any good condition HO-gauge flexitrack. We converted the
attic and it became “The Den”, a secondary space principally for my use. This was, in the most part, a concession for my vacating of a large bedroom and instead switching to the
smallest-imaginable bedroom in the house (barely big enough to hold a single bed!), which in turn enabled my baby sister to have a bedroom of her own.
8 My copy of In Yer Face was possibly recorded from the radio by my friend ScGary, who always had a tape deck set up with his finger primed close to the record key when the singles chart came on.
9 I soon learned to recognise “my” copy of tracks by their particular cut-in and -out
points, static and noise – some of which, amazingly, survived into the MP3 era – and of course the tracks that came before or after them, and
there are still pieces of music where, when I hear them, I “expect” them to be followed by something that they used to some mixtape I listened to a lot 30+ years
ago!
10 How amazing a user interface affordance was it that playing one side of an audio
cassette was mechanically-equivalent to (slowly) rewinding the other side? Contrast other tape formats, like VHS, which were one-sided and so while rewinding there was
literally nothing else your player could be doing. A “full” audio cassette was a marvellous thing, and I especially loved the serendipity where a recognisable “gap” on one
side of the tape might approximately line-up with one on the other side, meaning that you could, say, flip the tape after the opening intro to one song and know that you’d be
pretty-much at the start of a different one, on the other side. Does any other medium have anything quite analogous to that?
11 Which is pretty rare, unless I choose to put it on… although I did overhear it
“organically” last summer: it was coming out of a Bluetooth speaker in a narrowboat moored in the Oxford Canal near Cropredy, where I was using the towpath to return from a long walk to nearby Northamptonshire where I’d been searching for a geocache. This was a particularly surprising
place to overhear such a song, given that many of the boats moored here probably belonged to attendees of Fairport’s Cropredy Convention, at which – being a folk music festival – one
might not expect to see significant overlap of musical taste with “Madchester”-era acid house music!
12 My first online experiences were on BBS systems, of which my very first was on a
mid-80s PC1512 using a 2800-baud acoustic coupler! I got onto the Internet at a point in the early 90s at which the Web
existed… but hadn’t yet demonstrated that it would eventually come to usurp the services that existed before it: so I got to use Usenet, Gopher, Telnet and IRC before I saw
my first Web browser (it was Cello, but I switched to Netscape Navigator soon after it was released).
13 On the rare occasion I close my browser, these days, it re-opens with whatever
hundred or so tabs I was last using right back where I left them. Gosh, I’m a slob for tabs.
14 Or, if it’s a Twitter icon: all three of these.
15 Of course, they’re harder to find. SEO-manipulating behemoths dominate the search
results while social networks push their “apps” and walled gardens to try to keep us off the bigger, wider Web… and the more you cut both our of your online life, the calmer and
happier you’ll be.
I’ve been enjoying playing Chain Words, from eclectech, intermittently, since it came out in November (when I complained
that the word ‘TOSSPOT’ was rejected; I don’t know if this obvious omission has yet been corrected). If you’ve not given it a go yet, and you like a word game that’s “a bit
different”, you should try it!
Over the Christmas break I dug out my old HTC Vive VR gear, which I got way back in the Spring of 2016. Graphics card technology having come a long
way1,
it was now relatively simple to set up a fully-working “holodeck” in our living room with only a slight risk to the baubles on the Christmas tree.
For our younger child, this was his first experience of “roomscale VR”, which I maintain is the most magical thing about this specific kind of augmented
reality. Six degrees of freedom for your head and each of your hands provides the critical level of immersion, for me.
And you know what: this ten-year-old hardware of mine still holds up and is still awesome!2
The kids and I have spent a few days dipping in and out of classics like theBlu, Beat Saber, Job Simulator, Vacation Simulator, Raw Data,
and (in my case3)
Half-Life: Alyx.
It doesn’t feel too heavy, but this first edition Vive sure is a big beast, isn’t it?
I’m moderately excited by the upcoming Steam Frame with its skinny headset, balanced weight, high-bandwidth
wireless connectivity, foveated streaming, and built-in PC for basic gaming… but what’s with those controllers? Using AA batteries instead of a built-in rechargeable one feels like a
step backwards, and the lack of a thumb “trackpad” seems a little limiting too. I’ll be waiting to see the reviews, thanks.
When I looked back at my blog to double-check that my Vive really is a decade old, I was reminded that I got it in the same month at Three
Rings‘ 2016 hackathon, then called “DevCamp”, near Tintern4.
This amused me, because I’m returning to Tintern this year, too, although on family holiday rather than Three Rings business. Maybe I’ll visit on a third occasion in
another decade’s time, following another round of VR gaming?
Footnotes
1 The then-high-end graphics card I used to use to drive this rig got replaced
many years ago… and then that replacement card in turn got replaced recently, at which point it became a hand-me-down for our media centre PC in the living room.
2 I’ve had the Vive hooked-up in the office since our house move in 2020, but there’s rarely been space for roomscale play there: just an occasional bit of Elite: Dangerous at my desk…
which is still a good application of VR, but not remotely the same thing as being able to stand up and move around!
3 I figure Alyx be a little scary/intense for the kids, but I could be
wrong. I think the biggest demonstration of how immersive the game can be in VR is the moment when you see how somebody can watch it played on the big screen and be fine but as soon
as they’re in the headset and a combine zombie has you pinned-down in a railway carriage and it’s suddenly way too much!
4 Where, while doing a little geocaching, I messed-up a bonus cache’s coordinate
calculation, realised my mistake, brute-forced the possible answers, narrowed it down to two… and then picked the wrong one and fell off a cliff.
I’ve found myself, unusually, with enough free time for videogaming this Christmas period. As a result I’ve played – and loved enough to play to completion – not one
but two games that I’d like to recommend to you!
Egg
Egg, released last month by Terry Cavanagh, is a frustrating but satisfying 3D puzzle platformer playable for free on the Web or downloadable for a variety of platforms.
If Getting Over It with Bennett Foddy was a story about eggs instead of a man whose legs are stuck in a cauldron…
then it’d still be much harder than Egg, which almost never made me want to throw my computer out of the window.
It’s not quite a “rage game”, because it’s got copious checkpoints, but it will cause at least a little frustration as you perform challenging timed jumps to deliver each
of your six eggs to suitable nests hidden throughout the map. But I enjoyed it: it was never too hard, and it always felt like my hard work was paid-off in satisfying
ways.
I probably spent a little over an hour lost in its retro aesthetic, and was delighted to do so: maybe you should give it a go too.
Dispatch
You probably don’t need me to introduce you to Dispatch, from AdHoc Studio, because the Internet
has gone wild over it and rightly. Available for PlayStation and Steam, it’s a narrative-driven multi-pathed game that straddles both storytelling and strategic resource management
mechanics.
And it does the best job I’ve seen at making it feel like your choices matter since Pentiment. Perhaps
longer.
For the bits in-between the strategy layer, the quicktime events, and the dialogue choices, the game seamlessly slips into pre-rendered video that provides a best-in-class
“interactive movie” experience.
The story is well-written and wonderfully voice-acted: I’d have absolutely been happy to watch this “superhero workplace comedy” as a TV show! But the way it has you second-guessing
your choices and your priorities every step of the way significantly adds to the experience.
The basic gameplay is intuitive, lightweight fun, with a couple of surprises along the way… but it’s the story that’ll keep you hooked to the end of the eighth episode. There’s a good
chance this one’s going to win a ton of awards.
It only took about 8-10 hours of my time, spread over two or three sessions, but it’s very “episodic” so if – like me – you need to be able to dip in and out of games (when life gets in
the way) it’s still a great choice. And there’s some replay-value too: I’m definitely going to run through it a second time.
So if you’ve got at-least-as-much space for videogaming in your life as I do (which isn’t a high bar), those are my two “hot picks” for the season.
Recent discussion about the perils of doors in gamedev reminded me of a bug caused by a door in a game you may have heard of called “Half Life 2”. Are you sitting comfortably? Then
I shall begin.
…
What is meant to happen is a guard (spoiler alert – it’s actually Barney in disguise) bangs on a door, the door opens, he says “get in”, and then the game waits for you to enter
the room before the script proceeds.
But in this case the door sort of rattled, but didn’t open, and then locked shut again. So you can’t get in the room, and the gate closed behind you, so you can’t go do anything
else. The guard waits forever, pointing at the locked door, and you’re stuck.
…
If you watch the video, when the door unlocks and then opens, there’s a second guard standing inside the room to the left of the opening door. That guard is actually standing very
slightly too close – the very corner of his bounding box intersects the door’s path as it opens. So what’s happening is the door starts to open, slightly nudges into the guard’s
toe, bounces back, closes, and then automatically locks. And because there’s no script to deal with this and re-open the door, you’re stuck.
…
So this kicked off an even longer bug-hunt. The answer was (as with so many of my stories) good old floating point. Half Life 2 was originally shipped in 2004, and although the SSE
instruction set existed, it wasn’t yet ubiquitous, so most of HL2 was compiled to use the older 8087 or x87 maths instruction set. That has a wacky grab-bag of precisions – some
things are 32-bit, some are 64-bit, some are 80-bit, and exactly which precision you get in which bits of code is somewhat arcane.
…
Amazing thread from Tom Forsyth, reflecting on his time working at Valve. The tl;dr is that after their compiler was upgraded (to support the SSE instruction sets that had now become
common in processors), subsequent builds of Half-Life 2 became unwinnable. The reason was knock-on effects from a series of precision roundings, which meant that a Combine
security guard’s toe was in a slightly wrong place and the physics engine would bounce a door off him.
A proper 500-mile-email grade story, in terms of unusual bugs.
This weekend, I received my copy of DOCTYPE, and man: it feels like a step back to yesteryear to type in a computer program from a
magazine: I can’t have done that in at least thirty years.
So yeah, DOCTYPE is a dead-tree (only) medium magazine containing the source code to 10 Web pages which, when typed-in to your computer, each provide you with some kind of fun and
interactive plaything. Each of the programs is contributed by a different author, including several I follow and one or two whom I’m corresponded with at some point or another, and each
brings their own personality and imagination to their contribution.
I opted to start with Stuart Langridge‘s The Nine Pyramids, a puzzle game about trying to connect all nodes in a 3×3 grid in a
continuous line bridging adjacent (orthogonal or diagonal) nodes without visiting the same node twice nor moving in the same direction twice in a row (that last provision is described
as “not visiting three in a straight line”, but I think my interpretation would have resulted in simpler code: I might demonstrate this, down the line!).
The puzzle actually made me stop to think about it for a bit, which was unexpected and pleasing!
Per tradition with this kind of programming, I made a couple of typos, the worst of which was missing an entire parameter in a CSS conic-gradient() which resulted in the
majority of the user interface being invisible: whoops! I found myself reminded of typing-in the code for Werewolves and
Wanderer from The Amazing Amstrad Omnibus, whose data section – the part most-liable to be affected by a typographic bug without introducing a syntax error – had
a helpful “checksum” to identify if a problem had occurred, and wishing that such a thing had been possible here!
But thankfully a tiny bit of poking in my browser’s inspector revealed the troublesome CSS and I was able to complete the code, and then the puzzle.
I’ve really been enjoying DOCTYPE, and you can still buy a copy if you’d like one of your own. It manages to simultaneously feel both fresh and nostalgic,
and that’s really cool.
Or: Sometimes You Don’t Need a Computer, Just a Brain
I was watching an episode of 8 Out Of 10 Cats Does Countdown the other night1
and I was wondering: what’s the hardest hand you can be dealt in a Countdown letters game?
Or maybe I was just looking for an excuse to open an image editor, I don’t know.
Sometimes it’s possible to get fixated on a particular way of solving a problem, without having yet fully thought-through it. That’s what happened to me, because the first thing I did
was start to write a computer program to solve this question. The program, I figured, would permute through all of the legitimate permutations of letters that could be drawn in a game
of Countdown, and determine how many words and of what length could be derived from them2.
It’d repeat in this fashion, at any given point retaining the worst possible hands (both in terms of number of words and best possible score).
When the program completed (or, if I got bored of waiting, when I stopped it) it’d be showing the worst-found deals both in terms of lowest-scoring-best-word and fewest-possible-words.
Easy.
Here’s how far I got with that program before I changed techniques. Maybe you’ll see why:
At this point in writing out some constants I’d need to define the rules, my brain was already racing ahead to find optimisations.
For example: given that you must choose at least four cards from the consonants deck, you’re allowed no more than five vowels… but no individual vowel appears in the vowel deck fewer
than five times, so my program actually had free-choice of the vowels.
Knowing that3, I figured that there must exist Countdown deals that contain no valid words, and
that finding one of those would be easier than writing a program to permute through all viable options. My head’s full of useful heuristics about English words, after all, which leads
to rules like:
None of the vowels can be I or A, because they’re words in their own right.
Five letter Us is a strong starting point, because it’s very rarely used in two-letter words (and this set of tiles is likely to be hard enough that three-letter words are already
an impossibility).
This eliminates the consonants M (mu, um: the Greek letter and the “I’m thinking” sound), N (nu, un-: the Greek letter and the inverting prefix), H (uh: another sound for when
you’re thinking or hesitating), P (up: the direction of ascension), R (ur-: the prefix for “original”), S (us: the first-person-plural pronoun), and X (xu: the unit of currency). So as
long as we can find four consonants within the allowable deck letter frequency that aren’t those five… we’re sorted.
I came up with U J Y U Q V U U Z, but there are definitely many other tile-sets that are completely valid within the rules of Counddown (albeit insanely unlikely to turn
up organically) but for which there are no valid words to be found.
I enjoyed getting “Q” into my proposed letter set. I like to image a competitor, having already drawn two “U”s, a “J”, and a Y”, being briefly happy to draw a “Q” and already thinking
about all those “QU-” words that they’re excited to be able to use… before discovering that there aren’t any of them and, indeed, aren’t actually any words at all.
Even up to the last letter they were probably hoping for some consonant that could make it work. A K (juku), maybe?
But the moral of the story is: you don’t always have to use a computer. Sometimes all you need is a brain and a few minutes while you eat your breakfast on a slow Sunday morning, and
that’s plenty sufficient.
Update: As soon as I published this, I spotted my mistake. A “yuzu” is a kind of East
Asian plum, but it didn’t show up in this countdown solver! So my impossible deal isn’t quite so impossible after
all. Perhaps U J Y U Q V U U C would be a better “impossible” set of tiles, where that “C” makes it briefly look like there might be a word in there, even if it’s just a three
or four-letter one… but there isn’t. Or is there…?
Footnotes
1 It boggles my mind to realise that show’s managed 28 seasons, now. Sure, I know that
Countdown has managed something approaching 9,000 episodes by now, but Cats Does Countdown was always supposed to be a silly one-off, not a show in it’s own
right. Anyway: it’s somehow better than both 8 Out Of 10 Cats and Countdown, and if you disagree then we can take this outside.
2 Herein lay my first challenge, because it turns out that the letter frequencies and even
the rules of Countdown have changed on several occasions, and short of starting a conversation on what might be the world’s nerdiest
surviving phpBB installation I couldn’t necessarily determine a completely up-to-date ruleset.
3 And having, y’know, a modest knowledge of the English language
A Castle Built From Random Rooms is a work in progress/early access/demo version of a full game that’ll probably never exist. But if it does exist, it will be
basically the same as this, but on a grander scale, and include the following features:
– over a hundred random rooms instead of about ten
– character jobs and descriptions that actually add individualised effects/skills/starting equipment and so on
– special pre-chosen characters with particulalrly challenging stats levels for extra difficult challenges
– more stats! more items! more use of the stats and items within different rooms to create different outcomes!
– high scores and loot rankings and possibly even achievements of some kind
– less bugs (aspiration)
– decent endings (stretch goal)
What the game almost certainly won’t ever have:
– any semblance of quality or coherence
– sound and/or music
– monetary success
It’s a Twine-like choose-your-own-adventure, but with the rooms randomly shuffled each time, in sort-of a semi-rougelite way. Some imaginative work in this. And the art style is
wonderful!
Blender Studio’s official game project is a short casual interactive story. Play a big, adorable dog traversing through winter woods and help out a little kid decorate a snowman
with colorful items hidden in the environment.
…
…
DOGWALK is a free, open-source Godot game for Windows, MacOS and Linux, produced and given to the world by Blender Studio as a way of
showcasing some of their video lessons. The beautiful, playful “papercraft” models were made by making actual hand-painted paper models of the assets, unfolding them,
scanning them, and then re-folding the maps back into in-game assets, which is an amazing and imaginative approach.
It was released a little over a week ago, and it’s a short but adorable little game.
Y’all seemed to enjoy the “overworld” map I shared the other day, so here’s another “feelie” from my kids’ ongoing D&D campaign.
The party has just arranged for passage aboard a pioneering (and experimental) Elvish airship. Here’s a deck plan (only needs a “you are here” dot!) to help them get their bearings.
In preparation for Family D&D Night (and with thanks to my earlier guide to splicing maps together!), I’ve finally completed an
expanded “overworld” map for our game world. So far, the kids have mostly hung around on the North coast of the Central Sea, but they’re picked up a hook that may take them all the way
across to the other side… and beyond?
Banana for scale.
(If your GMing for kids, you probably already know this, but “feelies” go a long way. All the maps. All the scrolls. Maybe even some props. Go all in. They love it.)
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