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…
- Used Siri Shortcuts to parse a web endpoint for my local train times, and blogged about it.
- Finished up my first LSP blog post.
- Made Hindsight, my “20 second break after 20 minutes of screen” app, a little smarter. Previously it checked if the Zoom app was running to avoid interrupting me in a call; now it checks to see if my camera is on instead.
- Went down a rabbit hole with wasm and dynamic linking. I didn’t end up achieving what I wanted to, but I learned some things that will hopefully make for an interesting blog post soon.
Since the jam, Robin has further improved the game by adding a custom bootloader, so you can boot directly into puzdug. ↩︎