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.
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 →
This morning we went hiking in the Pilis (pronounced pih-lish) mountains along a trail that started from just outside Pilisszentkereszt. The thick fog gave the forest a spooky feeling and we didn’t expect it to be so muddy but it’s … Continue reading →
I put googly eyes on the webcam so that I look at the right place during video calls and don’t appear to be looking off to the side when I’m trying to get an important point across.
The weekend after we cut down the trees in the forest, my brother-in-law went over to help stack them in a neat pile and sent me this photo. They’ll be left to dry there for the next 3 years.
Several cubic metres of chopped wood stacked to dry out over the next few years
I’m imagining how much more full of interesting content, like photos or stories or ideas, this blog could be. What if every time I had posted something to a closed system, like Facebook, I had published that here instead?
This week we went wood chopping in the forest not far from the village. My family in-law use a boiler powered by a wood furnace to heat their house. That’s why it’s important to collect enough wood in advance, so that it can dry out enough to be used for firewood in years to come. They own part of some land covered in trees and with the foresters permission they collect some every year.
A small group of us drove out in the morning and cut down trees in teams of two: One person saws down the tree and Continue reading →
The Hungarian coat of arms features an iconic cross with two horizontal beams. In Hungarian it’s called “Kettős Kereszt” which translates to “Double Cross”, usually called the Patriarchal cross in English. This cross is present on other emblems around the area of Central and Eastern Europe too and has been featured on the Hungarian coat of arms at least since the reign of King Saint Stephen of Hungary.
3D model of the patriarchal cross as shown on the Hungarian coat of arms
Seeing as it’s a Hungarian national holiday today, in memory of the heroes and martyrs of the Hungarian revolution of 1956, everyone has their Hungarian flags out. I decided to do something Hungarian too, while trying out some tools for preparing models for 3D printing. So far I’ve been using Blender, because I have some experience with it, but it’s for creating 3D scenes and although you can use it to design 3D models for printing, it’s not CAD software. This time I tried Autodesk’s web-based program Tinkercad, which although lacking many of the features you’d get in a full-blown CAD program, is plenty enough for me to design simple things like this. Not being a mechanical engineer, I probably wouldn’t even know what features I’m missing!
3D printed “Kettős Kereszt” painted in the colours of the Hungarian flag
The program is very intuitive to use. I put a few cubes on the workplane, stretched them out into intersecting rectangular boxes and exported an STL file for printing within minutes. You can see a screenshot of the result above. I also made a version with a hole cut out of the top so you could hang it on a key chain. That turned out to be as easy as putting a cylinder in one of the boxes, stretching it out of the top and bottom box faces and marking it as a “hole” in the model.
After scaling the model down to 30% so it fits on my print bed, the final print came out as shown in this photo. It took less than 10 minutes to print at 30% in-fill and seems pretty rigid. I’ve painted on the red, white and green of the Hungarian flag and will hang this up somewhere, who knows, maybe it’ll even be good for a Christmas decoration. If you’d like to print your own Hungarian cross you can download both of my STL files here:
