Pixel art in the PICO-8 palette for #PixelDailies
Work’s been pretty stressful lately and one of the way’s I’ve been coping with that is to take some time out of my day to do some PICO-8 game development. I’ve had a number of game ideas lately, one of which I have written about on this blog. But I’ve now actually had a new game idea that came to me over the holidays while staying offline in a cabin in Sweden. It’s a mashup of the Half Sword demo and Dark Souls, mixed with a healthy dose of roguelike ideas, rendered within PICO-8’s tiny 8-bit dimensions.
The idea is to make an endless roguelike game where you fight enemies with a sword and collect their embers (a kind of soul-like essence). When you die, you lose all embers you’ve collected since your last rest at a campfire. So it doesn’t have permadeath, since you always load in at the last campfire, but the enemies get spawned in prodecurally, based on your ember score. It doesn’t have a world per se. It’s just a dark, mysterious place — much like the Half Sword demo — which enables me to concentrate most of the limited PICO-8 resources on having interesting enemies. One big goal of the game is to make the combat very smooth and pixel-perfect, taking inspirations from early shmups. As fas as I know, nobody has done something like this, which is kind of exciting to me.
It’s also pretty interesting that I’ve been able to re-use a lot of code from Tinyhold and an earlier unfinished prototype. I guess that’s a factor of PICO-8 forcing its restrictions on the developer, so you tend to have to solve similar problems again and again, even in games that look very different from each other. As it turns out, I have quite a nice library of (probably shoddily written) tools now.
Yeah, my week is kind of continuing apace. I’ve had even more stuff come up and won’t be able to record and stream the podcast today either. Currently, I don’t know when I can even try to get this done. I will let you know as soon as I have a plan. It’s all gone to hell in the first week already. 
Well, that figures… The first day of my new work scheduling spectacularly failed. I won’t be able to stream a Private Citizen recording today. I will try to reschedule the recording for Wednesday and drop the planned gaming stream instead. I will keep you posted if this works out.
Please excuse the inconvenience, but I guess you live and learn. Hopefully, I’ll be able to refine my planning going forward, to prevent this kind of thing from happening.
I’ve been playing around with Rebelle 7. Still trying to get the hang of the oils after all these years.
In the coming week, I will be trying out my new weekly work schedule. This is one of the things I wanted to change in 2024 and I’m doing a first test run to see if what I’ve planned out is actually doable. For the coming week, this means I’ll be trying out the following streaming schedule:
- Monday, 18:00 CET: Private Citizen live recording
- Wednesday, 17:00 CET: Gaming stream — Escape from Tarkov
If this works out, I’ll be trying to stick to this schedule most weeks. There will always be unforeseen assignments and other things that force changes, but I’ll endeavour to be as consistent as possible.
Well, let’s first see how this works out next week…
It’s a Good Time to Play Mono-Red
I have returned to Magic the Gathering: Arena because aggro decks are back with a vengeance. Here’s the list I am playing right now.
The current internet drama in the Magic The Gathering community is about a judge who asked a tournament organiser to unlock a laptop with a fingerprint. The judge apparently said to the organiser “I need your finger.” The organiser replied: “Where do you need my finger?” This got interpreted by the judge as sexual harassment. I shit you not. I have no idea if it is relevant that the judge was born with one set of genitals but decided they’d be happier as part of the other sex. More power to them. But if this kind of nonsense is counted as sexual harassment now, we’re in for a very unsocial century. I mean, it could be a completely innocent answer. It could be a bad joke, maybe even a tasteless one. But it ain’t harassment. That you’re offended by something doesn’t automatically make it harassment.
You know what offends me? As someone versed in IT security, it offends me that this judge asked someone else to unlock a device with the other person’s fingerprint. If a device is locked with biometric information and you don’t have the biometrics in question, you’re not supposed to use it. That’s what biometrics are all about, for fuck’s sake!
Welcome to 2024, everyone! I hope you had a good slide into the new year — “Guten Rutsch!” as we say in Germany. One of the reasons you didn’t hear from me in a while is that I spent a wonderful week in the frozen wastes of the Dales, in Sweden, surrounded by paper books, paper notebooks and with my phone and laptop turned off.
After stopping by some friends in the north of Germany on the way back, I have now returned to my computer refreshed and with much energy and many new ideas for the coming year.
One of these ideas entails that I will, with renewed conviction, endeavour to spend less time on social media and more time writing on this blog. I’ve been trying, for quite a while, to have notes likes these replace the things I usually post on social media. So please, if you are interested in my projects and the things I write, follow this blog – for example by plugging its RSS feed into your feed reader instead of relying on my social profiles on other sites. And if you got any comments or ideas for improvements, please use the comment function under each post — for notes like this one and other smaller snippets, you will have to visit the post’s permalink to do so. You can also comment directly on the forum, of course.
Other plans for the coming year include finally finishing my novel and more regular streams, including a fixed day for the recording and live streaming of episodes of my podcast The Private Citizen. More on this in another post soon.
I wish all readers of my blog a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year 2024! I hope you have a relaxing time during the holidays and enjoy yourselves as much as you can.
I just released a final episode of The Private Citizen for this year:
→ Episode 164: The Year 2023 in Review
In my annual recap episode, I am looking back at the topics that I’ve covered this year and forward to the changes that 2024 will bring for the podcast.
That is genius! I might start using that. 
Zelda Treasure Chest Sound Generator
Building a device that plays the Zelda treasure sound effect when it is triggered by the movement of a magnet nearby; for example when an actual chest lid is opened.
Elden Ring is an amazing game. I am currently on my second attempt at actually beating it and the more I play it, the more I admire the sheer attention to detail that went into it. Here’s one example:
Early on in the game, you meet a woman named Melina, who offers to become your “maiden” and guide you through the game. She gives you a spectral horse you can summon as a mount, but more importantly, she becomes your mechanism to actually level up in the game. With her help, you can turn the runes you collect from dead enemies into stats increases at the sites of Grace that you rest at (which are basically save points).
Now, this turns out to be completely optional. In the dialogue with Melina, you can actually turn down her offer and continue your journey without her. Which means you then won’t be able to level up at all throughout the game. What is amazing is that you can still complete most of the game that way, including beating all of the seven major bosses. At level 1. Why do we know this? Because FromSoftware players are crazy and one of them actually tried this crazy approach. Took him 30 hours and in the end, he didn’t regret a second of it. He’s just mad that FromSoftware didn’t allow him to actually finish the game in this insane way. The crazy bastard.
For a scientist, that was a serious, almost an unforgivable lapse and Tom Lawson felt very angry with himself. He had let his preconceived ideas affect his powers of observation.
— Arthur C. Clarke, A Fall of Moondust (1961)
Clarke, obviously, understood the scientific method. This is getting rarer and rarer nowadays, where science is increasingly becoming ersatz-religious dogma instead of the search for the truth.
Nighthawks by Edward Hopper is probably my favourite painting of all time. Since I’ve been playing around with PICO-8 a lot lately, I decided to try to convert it to a pixel art look in the PICO-8 palette. I like the different look this has, but feel it should be a lot greener. And the details need work. I might try my hand at a manual take on this some time…
I wrote another piece on Eye on The Press about something that has been on my mind lately. Linux Outlaws listeners from way back will remember my stance on Musk back then, when everyone was hyping him…
→ Eye on The Press: On Elon Musk
The US presidential election is less than a year out. High time to call it, I think. Unless a lot of things change in the next year, you don’t have to be a genius to predict this one, I feel:
→ Eye on The Press: Trump is Going to Win Again
