Recent content on James' Blog
I made Pac-Man, for reasons. There is also a Post Deadline Update below.
Play it on Itch.io Source available on GitLab I’ve been inspired by a few indie game developers on the internet. In no particular order:
Anthony Salter, a fellow Ultima Dragon breathing new life into a fantastic classic with Ultima 7: Revisited. Ben at Dev Duck makes balancing all aspects of life look simple.…
Play Here
Adventure Communist is a game by Hyper Hippo, and by all accounts I shouldn’t know what it is. However, a few years ago, after testing positive for Covid (probable false positive) and stuck in a hotel room for 10 days with nothing but a phone, bad cable television, and no symptoms I started downloading any and every game that looks interesting.
After being released, I…
Long story short, I was feeling defeated. I wanted to build something, anything, to prove to myself I can.
The Project I call it Orter for two reasons:
It’s retro in reverse It’s short for “ought to”, and you ought to retro It’s missing some quality of life features; but, hey, this is an MVP! My hope is, those familiar with a retrospective can just start using…
DevContainers are great! SSH, also great! Together they’re magic… until they’re not. 
 How to use git inside a container with ssh authentication and ssh commit signing . 

The previous post is a fun and non-rigorous dive into automating the deployment of a Godot project to Itch.io from GitHub and GitLab. The obvious follow up question is: What about Gitea?
But I have a homelab Everyone does… stop bragging. You can also deploy to Itch.io from a homelab.
GitLab can be fired up in a container, and it’s great! I took some time to check out Gitea as…
I’d like to acknowledging a preference for GitLab over GitHub. Obviously GitHub is the popular choice, but I have a soft spot for the underdog… especially the open source optionally self-hosted underdog.
My evidence is anecdotal, but Github Actions is a gentle learning curve compared to GitLab’s CI. It could be because I learned GitLab first and had new concepts to wrap the…
Why? No one Reads Blogs I don’t know, I don’t even average 1 post a year. Let me have my fun.
What changed? I switched to Hugo on GitLab. Wordpress feels like overkill and it mysteriously stopped working.
The hard part was ensuring redirects to old projects worked. Okay “projects” is ambitious, “project” is correct. The only one that matters is the link…
I use GNUCash for my personal finances because I don’t trust services that require me to give up my financial institution’s username and password. Not only does this feel wrong, it might be a terms of service violation. Either way, it seems like a security kerfuffle waiting to happen, so keep track of my finances locally. Yes it’s a lot more work, but I really feel like I have more control over…
Long ago, back in my bachelor days, I had built some 8-bit NES sprites out of Lego and hung them on the wall. Recently, my wife asked me, “What happened to those?” and “Why did you never hang them up here?” She doesn’t realize it, but she just gave me permission to nerd out for the next few weekends.
This weekend I pulled out the old Legos and learned more than I expected.
I decided to dive into Phaser 3 and Tiled with my next game project. I was looking to make a room change similar to Link to the Past (the SNES Zelda). The implementation is simple and the result was pleasing so I wanted to share.
Playable demo!
I’ve used Tiled a little in the past but this is the first excuse I’ve really had to dive in to it. If you’re not familiar with…
A short post about a game I made about a year ago for a class at the University of North Texas, CSCE 4210: Game Programming 1. I took the class because I heard the professor, Dr. Ian Parberry, was good at teaching game design and was an interesting fellow (I heard right on both counts).
I cannot claim all credit for this game because I worked with a partner. He was awesome and the only reason…
I was reading all the tax law news so I updated my tax slider from 2015.
2018 Tax Slider
I used this Forbes article to get the new tax bracket info. I’m not a fan of Forbes, they have too many advertisements.
I used this article because it had what the 2018 tax brackets would have been if there was no law passed.
It was fun, and gave me something to do.
You know what really grinds my gears?
When I’m signing up for a service that requires an email account and they don’t know how to properly validate email addresses. The + is valid in an email address.
It’s not only legit, it’s really useful.
What do you do about it?
I use the dots if it’s something I really need to sign up for. Also, any message I get from a website that doesn’t…
I do love Sudoku, and I play it too much. Not long ago (before this semester started kicking my butt) there were two things I wanted to play with: Local Storage and a Sudoku library.
This is what I came up with: http://geekwagon.net/projects/sudoku/
I also play in pen because I’m a glutton for punishment.
I didn’t use a library for local storage, for some reason I wanted to do it the…
Despite WildStar’s critical hit on my free time this past month, I’ve managed to code a little. Let me introduce both of my blog readers to the buggiest and most poorly coded version of Tetris they’ve ever seen.
http://geekwagon.net/projects/flipsy/
Someone sucks at Tetris
Don’t ask why it’s called Flipsy. That was just the name of the folder when I started and I didn’t bother to…
In an effort to learn more about backbone.js I made a web application that is easily considered beautifully useless (beauty in the eye of the beholder, useless in the eye of everyone else). Really, this is probably one of the finest work of code writing I’ve accomplished to date and there are maybe ten people in the world who will use it.
There is plenty of room for improvements, but I’d like…