Launched a new game: Freefall

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On 27 February I released a new Nokia 3310-style game: Freefall. In this game you control a parachute for humanitarian airdops in hostile territory. It’s my entry to Nokia 3310 Jam 5 and the theme was Fast & Slow so the main game action revolves around controlling the speed of the airdop between parachuting and freefall to dodge bullets coming from both sides.

The aim of the Nokia 3310 Jam is to have fun making a game using the restrictions of a Nokia 3310, so green, low-res, 1-bit screen, monophonic and only 12 keypad buttons. My entry placed 28th out of a 147 submissions and I’m especially proud of this because I did the music, animations, programming and game design all by myself. The game is open source and you can read it in the GitHub repository.

Always prefer accessing GitHub over SSH than HTTPS

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This is to avoid accidentally cloning a repo as read-only when GitHub defaults to HTTPS links, and then having to edit the gitconfig later to get an SSH URL you can push to. Add these 2 lines to your global .gitconfig file in your home folder to override all github.com URLs from HTTPS to SSH:

[url "ssh://git@github.com/"]
     insteadOf = https://github.com/

Why though?

Note, this is not for all git remotes, only GitHub. I have a similar setting for the GitHub Enterprise instance we use at work. Generally though, for most remote servers I’m fine with whatever it gives me, which is usually HTTPS.

The difference becomes important if I ever want to contribute (i.e. push) to the cloned repo, as is mostly the case when cloning my own repos or work code. Continue reading →

Ebiten vs PyGame

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The following is a copy of a response I wrote to a university student asking in the Ebiten Discord server whether they should use Ebiten or PyGame for their first time making a game:

Having used both I can say that PyGame provides much more out of the box but that this is not just a pro but also a con. For example in pygame there is a concept of “sprite” that has movement and you can tell it move left, move right etc. In Ebiten it surprised me to find that there is no such thing but it’s nice for two reasons: Continue reading →

Launched a new game: Cr1ckt

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Direct link to game: https://sinisterstuf.itch.io/cr1ckt

On the 1st of December Tristan, Rowan and I released the first version of Cr1ckt, a tricky platformer where you need to jump to avoid water and get to the fruit. It’s our submission for the GitHub Game Off 2021 game jam, an annual challenge to make a game based on a secret theme within the month of November. The theme this year is “BUG” so apart from playing as a cricket it also has some fun, intentional bugs.

It’s got downloads for major desktop platforms Windows, Linux & Mac, as well as Android. They’re quite small so you should be able to download and play quite fast. You can get the downloads or play online in your browser on the game page at sinisterstuf.itch.io/cr1ckt.

As hobbyist game developers in our free time this is one of the Continue reading →

3D-printed caps for protruding bolts

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When I attached our children’s swing to the ground there was still a significant piece of sharp-ish threaded metal sticking out above the bolt head and I was worried about them falling on it. Grinding the end off might still leave some sharp parts, so I thought it safer to print plastic covers for them.

Sharp bolt end protruding from the ground
Screenshot of bolt cap design in OpenSCAD
Screenshot of gcode printing plan
Photo of 3D printed bolt cap

I designed the caps with OpenSCAD, using the ScrewsMetric library for the bolt-shaped inset.

You can see the source code for Continue reading →

3D modelling replacement knobs for back massager

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small wooden knob

small wooden knob

There’s this fantastic device we have at home that I’m fairly sure is for giving back rubs, or maybe massages in general, like on your legs or something. I’ve tried it a few times but mostly the kids play with it. However it bothers me that there’s holes in it where the little knobs are supposed to be, so it doesn’t roll properly. I think the kids pulled them out, but maybe Continue reading →