This blog continues at blog.steveasleep.com . New blog RSS feed Old blog Posts so far Usernames Big and little conferences The web development decision firehose A series on things I found on a web site I made when I was 12. These are good! Autoarchaeology Part 1: Web Sites Autoarchaeology Part 2: Early Games Autoarchaeology Part 3: Mac Software Autoarchaeology Part 4: Media
Hello, Hacker News. You found a post I wrote in 2018 that in hindsight has some issues. Please don’t judge me too harshly. Instead, check out my free online whiteboard Browserboard or read some of my newer posts , such as Let’s generate some imaginary guitar pedals . Roguelikes are games that, among other things, have a lot of procedurally generated content. To generate content, we need random…
This year I did a bunch of things, but one thing I didn’t do was blog about every single thing. Here’s a roundup of everything I missed. I made some games I made three games this year for Ludum Dare 38, 39, and 40: Rogue Basement , Power-Q , and Please, Come In . Their collective soundtracks contain five original songs. The only one I really dedicated myself to during Ludum Dare was Rogue Basement…
Power-Q is the polished, productized version of my Ludum Dare game PoweRL . They have exactly the same mechanics, but Power-Q has about 30 extra hours of effort invested into it. Before I send it out into the world, I want to reflect upon where those 30 hours went. Power-Q is in beta on Mac and iOS. You can get the Mac beta on itch.io , but to get the iOS beta you’ll have to email me. Before:…
Ludum Dare 39 fell on a weekend when I wasn’t busy, and I wanted an excuse to learn a bit about Apple’s game libraries, so I made another roguelike , PoweRL :
I spent the day making some basic playthrough videos of some of my old games. Check ‘em out! You can find more info about them here . Most of these videos have some kind of disruptive sound. Bibble Biter (2005) Walaga (2005) Canvas Wars 2 (2005?, unfinished) There was a Canvas Wars 1, but the code is long gone. Whizbang (2005, unfinished) Artack (2006) You can actually download this one! Guy who…
This year I participated in Ludum Dare 38 , a 48-hour game programming “competition.” I’ve been thinking about trying my hand at a roguelike for a while now, and it seemed like the perfect opportunity to give it a shot. I made Rogue Basement , a bare-bones, single-level game with ASCII graphics. In this article, I’ll cover the game design decisions I made, how they affect the player’s experience,…
I wrote about the work I’ve been doing at Hipmunk over the past year over on over at the Hipmunk engineering blog .
TL ; DR Computer Words I write a lot of documentation. I do it for two reasons: I like writing, and I like to be understood. Documentation is what takes software from “something @irskep put on GitHub” to something you can actually use. But I’m not happy with the available tools. Open source documentation for young projects tends to fall into one of three modes if they have it at all: A GitHub wiki…
Graffiti Labs is shutting down next month. I’ll be spending June looking for a new job (edit: found one!) and honing my audio engineering skills. As my first act of freedom, I’m releasing Slam Jamsen’s Salvage Operation EP ! This is a collection of “bedroom tapes” made between 2005 and 2009. The popular vision of a budding high school rock musician is a guitarist sitting on a bed writing bad love…
My band The Nest just put out its first EP . Listen to it here!
I just returned from recording an album with SF local artist Anthony Presti. Check it out on Bandcamp!
I did the best writing of my life in 1997 when I was eight years old, sitting at an old PC with my friend Eric Drury to write the New Dork Times. Although it ran for only nine issues published between 1997 and 1999, its biting social commentary remains as relevant as ever. Earlier this year I came across my personal archives of all nine issues of the New Dork Times and decided they were worth two…
We Dreamers is an abstract online sandbox that placed sixth in the Innovation category of Ludum Dare 26.
I recently started my new job at Graffiti Labs after working at Yelp for almost a year and a half. During that time, I did a lot of work on mrjob and tron . Now I work on Buildy , a collaborative sandbox web game. I have a few technical blog posts over at the Buildy Blog . I also work on Literally Canvas , an open source HTML5 drawing widget.
A world in Buildy can be hundreds of square miles. I wrote about the combination of technologies we use to render and display enormous zoomed out world views on the Buildy Blog .
We posted Buildy on Hacker News and it was on the front page for 17 hours. I shared some observations and experiences on the Buildy Blog .
For a while I thought I was going to rewrite these 150 pages of filler interspersed with content, but my willpower wanes with each passing month. Therefore, these links are only for the brave: 150 pages of insanity Defense slides
With the end of a semester just past, my course projects are all bubbling up in various states of completion. One of these is a point-and-click adventure game called Space Train: Terror on the Mustachio Express , developed by a team of students from the Cleveland Institute of Art and Case Western Reserve University . Its technical components include an event-driven level scripting system,…