Academics Anonymous
April 22, 2024
tags: life school projects
Freedom, sweet freedom. I finished my last exam for the semester today and I’m finally free from the pressure of classes for the next 4 months. Well, technically at least; I managed to get myself roped into a software project run as a joint venture between my department and a local music festival for some of their services (I won’t say what for privacy). I’ll be working on it over the summer doing some security and backend stuff for a 400 level compsci course credit, and I might even get paid too.
Never ending projects stuck in an eternal wait
Listening to: Manganas Garden - Solar Satisfaction (2015)
I’ve been thinking a hell of a lot about what I wanted to do once I had my free time back from the bottomless pit of assignments and studying, and about how I didn’t really do much last summer despite wanting to. Looking back, I think it was that I didn’t have any projects that I was excited for, but this year is almost the complete opposite. I have a lot of project ideas that I want to get on paper in digital markdown document.
Finishing this god damned website even if it kills me
This one couldn’t be any more obvious. For the LOVE OF GOD I need to finish this fucking website ASAP. This is taking top priority. I'm currently not just regular broke, but in debt levels of broke, so I am looking into possibly hosting locally on a raspi and praying that cloudflare can block a fair bit of traffic coming in until I can get it ported to some piss cheap cloud hosting.
As for the actual software side, I'd like to do a rewrite of how I handle posts to either just bite the bullet and use sqlite, or try and do some cheeky shit like generate a post index of metadata and files so every time someone looks at the post directory it doesn't have to load every file into memory.
On the topic of changing things, while I do love the Tokimeki memorial theme I originally built out for the site, I think my interest in the block white on puke grass green has outlived it's novelty to me. Being a person so utterly stuck to the past, I took a glance over at Yumi's old site (prettyboytellem.com) and realized how much nicer it was to read than my own site, and also that my idea for a timeline that followed along post entries was also not my own idea.
I think I just say fuck it and steal it for my own. Last I checked he hasn't been updating the old side since 2022, and it's not like he owns it.
Virtual pet handheld
Someone I know got really into hacking on hardware over the last few months, and I've come to learn that it's contagious.
After being handed an ESP32 with a small OLED display, my hardware hacker egg was fully cracked, and in that very moment a lightbulb went off in my head as I had just fused a very old, failed project idea in with my love of tamagochi devices.
The idea is really simple; I'd like to make my own tamagochi-like virtual pet device built on an ESP32. More concretely, I'd like to write a mainly C++ framework for rendering graphics, handling input, interfacing with serial devices, and anything else one may need to make a v-pet happen on such a device, and then bind this engine-like code to Lua via sol3.
Single player tabletop RPG
I love Etrian Odyssey a lot.
I think what I love most about the series though, is how weak they make you feel in comparison to the dungeon and the creatures in it. The mixture of constant moral peril, hard earned wins, and exploration as you map out a path through the dungeon and learn it's tricks, that's what I call crack game design.
I also love tabletop RPGs, but I also don't have a tabletop group to play with. I spend a lot of time reading the books and manuals for games whose story and setting that live rent free for months, which has come to torment me. While I hope to find my forever group one day, I don't think I'll be finding one any time soon.
I'm haunted by a spectre; the specture haunting me is game development. Nowadays I've taken to lovingly referring to my urge to make games as "the intrusive thoughts", and I call them that for a reason: making games is hard and takes time, which is something I do not have ever.
Recently the intrusive thoughts have struck again, and in full force. I've devised a concept for a 1-4 player, DM-less tabletop game that I really, really like the concept of.
The game takes after more traditional JRPG mechanics than D&D, and makes heavy use of dice rolls and tables to determine the ongoings of your party as you traverse and map out a merciless dungeon.
Traversal
The traversal itself on a higher level works by splitting up the dungeon into different 'zones', each one meant to represent an area where our theoretical player can look around unobstructed by major walls or blockages. Each zone itself will be on a movement grid similar to any old dungeon crawler, and the party is expected to move their position as a single unit around in each zone, transitioning into other zones on specified transition points.
Fog of War
The way zones work is meant to emulate a "fog of war", and to encourage players to manually map out each zone as they progress through the dungeon just like the party they play would be doing, which acts as a beautiful bit of ludonarrative harmony.
Combat
I haven't fully fleshed out combat yet, but I know for sure that whatever I end up with will be some variation of streamlined JRPG combat to avoid overly incessant dice rolls.
I've coined a name for this system, "All Dungeons No Masters". It's a tongue-in-cheek combination of the anarchist slogan "No Gods No Masters" and focus on dungeon traversal. It also encapsulates the mentality behind the system: there is nobody trying to steer the reigns for you, nobody putting on a performance for you, it's just you and the dungeon/game systems, and maybe a friend or two.
Mahjong Client
Now Listening: タイム―ラプスき - のこ帝国 (2018)
Pretty straight forward, this one. I promised a friend we'd work on something over the summer, and since I roped this friend into learning mahjong a few years back (and founding/running a mahjong club with me on campus) and so the idea of writing a mahjong client devoid of scantily clad anime women (or men (or enbies)) has been floated a few times. We've also both taken it was a chance to actually write something in Rust, which is always a good time.
Thats all for now,
Cya~