Brain Rampage
I’ve been coding a lot and didn’t realize how much. I kinda accidentally came up with two new projects in the past week or so.
General Store
This was some sort of attempt to make an el cheapo 2D adventure game engine, which more or less became an interactive fiction engine. My friend Laura decided to try out my crazy experimental fiction maker during its 0.0.1 pre-alpha state.
This was last Friday - then I was asked to speak about it at Mozilla web dev’s monthly Beer and Tell. But the clock said 10 a.m. and we needed to have this ready by 5 p.m. By ready, I mean something to demo. So I decided to make a demo game too.
Fast forward to 5 p.m.-ish. Laura and I came up with the following demos:
If you’re a bit concerned, you should be. These demo “games” make absolutely no sense and we were basically slapping Photoshops of layers together. And this - boys and girls - is what dreams (read: nightmares) are made of.
I’ve made some major updates to General Store so that you too can easily make interactive gonzo fiction. Note the instructions on the README - you’ll need to clone the production branch to make a game, not master.
I actually have another game being developed with this - basically Twin Peaks in cat form - I swear it’s more coherent. I’ll give you updates in a few days hopefully.
General Notes
Of course, this project involves Laura again. I think she brings out the lysergic acid in my pineal gland. Or something. Anyway she wanted a simple note app and I said I’d make one in two hours. It ended up taking 2.5 hours because CSS can be annoying.
Then I worked on it some more and now it handles local and remote syncing of notes - IndexedDB on the client and Redis on the server. All JavaScript, all the time.
You can try out this fun little note app if you need yet-another-note-app - but made by my pineal gland. The source code is also available.
I’ll be writing up another blog post next week about this particular project.
I will leave you with a picture of a hiking road trip from yesterday
