Recurse Center: Week 4

31 Jul 2024

In my fourth week I focused on the Recurse Game Jam, which ran from Monday to Thursday. I teamed up with Robin on her game puzdug-x86, a roguelike puzzle dungeon in x86 assembly. The game includes fog of war, player movement, mostly-static enemies, a win and loss condition, and color ASCII graphics. Robin had set out to make a game that fit in the boot sector, and we did briefly have a build that worked on a DOS-less Qemu instance! Unfortunately there is a 512 byte limit for the boot sector which we quickly shot past[1]; the final product for the game jam was a whopping 1KB (how excessive 😄).

I loved working in such an unfamiliar and challenging environment as assembly. There’s a serenity to making a game with such an uphill climb, because it took pressure off my mind to make the game impressive. Shipping anything written in assembly is impressive enough, I think!

I also…


  1. Since the jam, Robin has further improved the game by adding a custom bootloader, so you can boot directly into puzdug. ↩︎