Pleck's Mart

yet another game development blog

  • code distractions

    Pleck’s Mart is still in development.

    Oh, I know, I’ve been remiss in posting updates or, to be blunt, in actually writing code for the game, but that doesn’t mean I’ve completely shelved it.

    First, it was summer, and the project was always a kind of too-cold-to-be-outside winter project for me to poke away at.

    Second, I’ve had some contract work that involves a lot of development work so my coding brain has been fatigued in a way that is hard to articulate.

    Third, when I’ve been coding for fun I’ve been working on another little non-game project: a custom CMS.

    Oh, I can hear you groaning. Just what the internet needs—another custom CMS system.

    But the truth is that coding practice is coding practice, and writing a CMS is a great little intermediary coding project to practice all sorts of hard coding skills: database design, interface design, security, and conditional logic for a start. But it also is a way to curate some softer skills around code management, feature creep, usability, and quality assurance.

    I mean, it’s unlikely I’ll ever do much to release this besides perhaps making the repo public at some point, but this little CMS I built started out life as a tool for myself to post social media-like content on a self-hosted website without the pressures of “engagement” getting in the way. I started using the very early version as a kind of mobile-focused travel blog back in 2022 on a trip to New York, the posts resembling nothing more than an old school Instagram: a photo and some text and some metadata.

    In the intervening years I’ve added more features, but mostly as a way to enhance the original vision of the tool: incorporating code to detect and better display panoramic photos, the ability to attach an audio clip to a post (think photo of Disneyland with a minute of ambient sound recorded while walking through the Small World queue) or a robust hashtagging system that allows me to essentially categorize and create photo collections on the fly.

    I’ve learned a ton building it and maintaining it, even just for my own personal use.

    And having spent a dozen free hours this past week adding some geo-linked features to the administration panel, fine tuning my security, tweaking some display quirks, and generally doing some code maintenance, it continues to teach me new lessons about developing software and writing code that I am 100% certain will translate back into writing better game code when I finally settle into my winter game design routines.

    Hobby projects can be a route towards experience that many professionals overlook. Sure, you went to school to learn something or you got on the job training at something else, but until you do it for yourself and become the primary problem solver for a project—be that coding, woodworking, cooking, or any other profession-meets-hobby—you are always just part of the job, and are missing out on build some skill that you might not even realize was there waiting to be learned.

    It doesn’t need to be a CMS, obviously. Just what the internet needs, after all, another CMS. But making something for yourself is a great skill-building distraction for anyone.

  • game con-spiration

    game con-spiration

    I’ve been a lazy game developer lately. 

    A couple months ago I was proudly telling people how much progress I was making on Pleck’s Mart. Heck I was logging at least—at least—a couple hours every day adding to the code base and debugging the game and making art and then sitting at the cafe writing story for the damn thing.

    I also wrote a couple months back about how I made some silly choices around leaning into a dead-end part time job that was supposed to round the rough edges off my days but instead wrapped me up into grocery store drama and derailed a bunch of personal motivation in my off-hours, plentiful tho they were.

    In short tho, I haven’t been coding for about two months now.

    Sadly. Realistically. Frustratingly. 

    There is a mental wall in the way, if I’m being honest, because (a) I was just coming up on a challenging bit of code, (b) a new version of the engine came out in the intervening months, and (c) it’s kinda sorta summer and (d) I should be spit-polishing my resume and not making video games.

    But then I went to Game Con this weekend.

    A couple things happened, very passively to be honest, but they happened at Game Con nonetheless.

    First, I got to wander around and talk—actually chat with and talk to—other indie game developers. That’s big. There’s a hundred reasons to go to a convention linked to your hobby, but seriously on or close to the top of that list of reasons should be the simple fact that hanging out with likeminded individuals is inspiring for another long list of reasons. There is a community. There are organizations boosting these efforts… locally. People have trod this path before us and are coming up the path behind us, and that means something.

    Second, I got to finally have a chat with Chris. We’ve been friends for over twenty years now, hung out countless times, vacationed together, stood atop a mountain peak in the sun, and rung in the new years nearly every year of that twenty. He is a legit developer. I mean, he professionally codes for a living, has a business, does community building, and that list goes on. And I sheepishly gave him access to my github repo. We finally got to chat, hanging out in the halls of Game Con, playing some board games and poking at the demo booths, and he wants to help with Pleck’s Mart. What’s our next step, he asked.

    So, it’s monday morning after the gamer inspiration weekend and I’m looking down the day at a question of not if I go down into the basement today to write some code… but when.

    What is the next step?

    As ever, it’s one problem, one line, one version at a time. And if nothing else, looking for that lost momentum.

  • mountain views

    Almost always when you’re up in the wilderness climbing a mountain the terrain changes with each passing trail marker, sometimes step by step, definitely hour by hour. You may start off on a wide trail with a gentle grade surrounded by rich forest, and that may break out into a rocky traverse along the dog legged trail through a centuries old rockslide, which around the next bend becomes a narrow clamber up and down through some root-laden single track all of it leading to a steep cliff where you need all four limbs coordinated and strong to reach the top.

    If I ever needed an analogy to write about indie game design and development, I think one of  the obvious options would be to compare it to climbing a mountain. It changes with every step, and you need to be prepared for what’s around the next corner—and that could be anything.

    My life has been cluttered up with non-game work these past couple weeks so progress on development has been a bit of picnic stop at a scenic viewpoint.  I’ve been swatting bugs, changing my socks, and enjoying the view from my efforts so far, but I’m not getting much closer to the top. Yet, this moment of pause and assessment is, as any seasoned mountain hiker would tell you, might be as important as any forward step up the trail.

    All that said, as I write this I’m getting fueled up for the next few days of knuckling in and pushing on.

    Sadly (for my forward effort in my education) my weekend round of lectures was postponed and rescheduled. This sets me back by about a month in my professional training, but—lemons made lemonade—frees up three solid days for some game coding.

    What have I done since last checking in?

    A lot, actually, but only a lot if—again to the mountain climbing analogy—if you consider squashing bugs, play-testing, cleaning up code, and poking around in my supplies an important part of the journey.

    It had been over three weeks since I loaded a snapshot on my SteamDeck, and doing so with my bug-tracker sitting open next to me gave me a full day of work tuning controls, stabilizing code, and catching other little UI quality of life  fixes.

    I also dug into the back end of how I’d built things at the beginning and did some refinement. My understanding of Rust and Bevy both have grown exponentially since December and I look at the ways I built some of those original functions and see significant improvements to be made. And maybe this is a little disheartening to rewrite stuff that was already working, but then at the same time I’m tweaking stuff so that it can be expanded to to ten more things in addition to the thing it was originally written to do.

    I’ve also made a lot of art. 

    Art is time consuming. Heck. I figure I need somewhere in the neighbourhood of 300-500 more art assets. I’m able to make about four or five an hour. So, mathy time, that is something like a hundred plus hours of work drawing little pixel sprite carrots and tomatoes and blue cheese. Fortunately I can multitask my art (unlike my code) by which I mean I can draw with the “distraction” of the TV on, so I’m simultaneously getting my fill of classic Simpsons episodes while I draw.

    After I write this I’m going to do a couple things.

    I’m going to record a video of the game-play and grab some more screenshots. If that goes well it should get dropped about here…

    And I’m going to go into GitHub and reassess my issues. I’ve pushed and nudged and swept all the fiddly jobs into a pile and that pile is sitting in the middle of me finishing this latest milestone. So I need to reassess some of the things I said I was going to do and either say frak it and just do them today, or figure out where to shuttle them off to a future state again.

    Either way, I’m closing out 0.4.8 today and moving onto 0.4.9–and bound and determined to move into 0.5 by the end of the weekend.

    Stay tuned.

  • little treasures

    I like food.  

    I mean, I like the culture and the feeling of food, the idea of it as a thing that links us and propels us and drives us to become more than eaters harvesting nurtients from organic objects, but instead seekers of taste and flavour and aroma and texture and everything that strikes the senses as we dine and indulge.

    It’s no wonder then that when a local international food market opened up near me, sitting here in my quasi-career change retirement and looking for something interesting to occupy me in the hours of the day when I wasn’t behind a keyboard or writing code or making art or studying for the next phase of my serious career, when that market opened that I found myself with a part time job amongst all that interesting sort of food culture.

    It was a fit. And then it wasn’t.

    I left that place and still had food culture on the brain.  And that analytical, data-processing brain of mine had already long been thinking about how I would automate many of our frustratingly manual processes with a good database and some customer model simulations, y’know, in code of course. It would be an interesting exercise, no? To walk through the aisles of a grocery store and map it into a complex digital economic simulation, figuring out all the maths of supply and demand clashing with the forces of microbiology and human pyschology.  Complex and challenging and—

    Politics. I forgot about politics.

    About the same time I was thinking about starting work on a simulation of that store I found myself weighing my future at the same, and internal politics played my hand for me and I gave notice.  I had been through one career burnout already. I wasn’t queued up quite yet for another—or a retriggering of the last one.

    You may know the next two months of that story if you’ve read this blog. 

    I started coding anyhow and my food market simulator idea became the foundations of a silly little cozy game roguelike pixel party coding project now known as Pleck’s Mart.

    But as politics are wont to do, the politics played out, calmed, resolved somewhat, and the vibe of the store reverted—and me, keeping my finger on the pulse of that place, a sudden found myself being offered a chance to go back and do that thing which I had originally thought would be my job: be a food culture guy working in a trendy local international food market. In other words, I am back at work at the place that lightly inspired me towards a video game idea.

    The coding may slow somewhat, but the fresh opportunity to observe a real food market with the eyes of a guy who has been trying to simulate one in said code—that is a priceless opportunity, no?

  • connective tissues of code

    I like to write about the interstitial tissues of this coding effort because I assume that you assume in turn that much of the guts of this thing is me sitting at a desk writing code into a collection of text files.   The interstitial connective tissue between that coding is what is often more interesting.

    Yet, sometimes, I make those layered efforts and the stringy bit in between writing that actual code feels like a lack of progress, when in fact I need to remind myself that is often some of the more important work.

    This weekend I went down a rabbit hole of interstitial work that felt a bit like progress when it worked and like so much more wasted time when I was struggling.

    Last week, after I wrote my last post about the milestone of achieving the foundational bare minimum of a game I got an idea into my head. See, to remind you, after nearly two months of writing code that amounted to a kind of half-baked collection of systems that did stuff, I wrote the last of the systems that led me to a point in the writing of this game wherein I could actually start calling it a “game” — as in, or that is to say, the systems reacted and progressed in a way that it was more than a cute demo of code and sprites and time clocks and other loops, but rather there was suddenly therein a point. It became a game, if a utterly simple and mostly pointless cozy toy of doing stuff with no broader implications. It kept a score, it had conditions to progress, it played. It was a bare minimum game by my own biased approximation. 

    I got it into my head to do a thing with it. I got it into my head to put this game on my Steamdeck.

    For those reading this who may be less techie than I, a Steamdeck is a portable gaming computer very much resembling a Nintendo Switch but whose guts are more much more powerful than that and encompassing a gaming ecosystem designed, built and sold by a company called Valve who owns the Steam game store which in 2025 is The Foremost Place to buy and sell PC games. A couple years back they released this portable gaming system that was built on the ideologies of open design, right to repair, and extensibility. Simply, it’s a computer that is packed into a little portable form factor, running an open source operating system and linked to a downloadable ecosystem of countless games, from triple-A titles to little indie games like mine.

    Mine. But not yet, mine. 

    See the end goal of an indie game guy like me is to get their game into the hands of gamers and the aforementioned Steam game store is the modern go to for gaming self-publishing.  For a small fee I can put my game on there and anyone (and there are literally hundreds of millions) of their customers can buy and download it. 

    A lot of those people would, of course, want to play it on their very popular  Steamdeck. 

    I have a Steamdeck. And so logically, developing this I should figure out how to at the very least test it on there.

    This was where my brain was last week as I was playing around with the code and the compiled version of my game there on my Windows PC where I write my code each day.

    So. Off I set, down into the rabbit hole. 

    Down, down, down I went. Down deep into learning about the Steam developer tools, about cross-compilation, and about the lack of important code libraries that would make all that seamless and easy.

    A few hours into my efforts I realized that I would not be able to just press a button on my Windows PC and have a working copy of my game that would run on the Steamdeck. The Steamdeck, see, runs on an operating system called Linux. You may know enough about computers (not mobile devices, that’s a whole other ballgame) to know that there is Windows and there is MacOS, but then also that there is a third equivalent called Linux. Linux is technically free in as much as there is no Licence to buy to use it. There is a steep learning curve to making it work well, a curve that has smoothed considerably since I started playing around with Linux in the 90s but a curve none-the-less. Likely you interact with Linux on a daily basis and don’t even realize it. It lives on a huge percentage of the worlds web servers, for example, or on many little gadgets and toys (the Steamdeck for one) that haven’t switched over to something like Android. I have a few little Raspberry Pi computers in my house, the famous little fifty-dollar computer which runs a flavour of Linux called Raspberry Pi OS which is, again, just Linux. 

    I haven’t been writing my code in Linux. I’ve been writing it in Windows. And while normally in 2025 that isn’t the main problem because things like cross-compiling exist, I ran into one of those cases where I was making something complex enough that it didn’t “just work” like I had been expecting. 

    So there I was, a few hours in of mucking around in Windows trying to make a game that would run in Linux, and it wasn’t working. 

    Side note: Steamdeck does have a little emulator called Proton that lets you run Windows games, but that wasn’t working either. 

    So, deeper into the rabbit hole I went.

    First, I thought to myself that it since my Steamdeck is technically just a Linux computer in a pretty box I could just move the code over there and compile it there. I spent a good two hours installing software and building drivers and connecting all the dots and—well, I’ll be honest. I seemed to be running into roadblocks that seemed like they were inherent to the Steamdeck itself and as thing were grinding away I was already looking to other machines in my house for help. 

    At some point I moved onto one of those aforementioned Raspberry Pi machines. They are slow but persistent. They are meant to do simple word processing or manage file systems. I put all the pieces on a little Raspberry Pi 400 I have set up as a mini desktop computer in our bedroom and started compiling— and quickly ran into the same problems I had encountered on the Steamdeck. 

    Ok. So it wasn’t a Steamdeck issue. But I pushed on and solved those issues, dug deep and found the right commands to download the right libraries and then—slowly, like eighty minutes slowly—it churned through the code and finally spit out a working game. 

    The Raspberry Pi doesn’t have a graphics card, mind you, so when I booted Pleck’s Mart to life it chugged away at about 2 FPS struggling to keep up.  I had a game running on Linux.

    I copied all the files over and, though it was approaching midnight and I had a wife giving me dirty looks from where she was planning on going to sleep fifteen feet from where I was compiling code late into the night, I ported it all over and loaded it into the Steamdeck. 

    Memory stick transfer. Upload to deck. Press play. Bonk!

    Again. It did not work.

    I went to bed, having failed to complete my goal.

    I was up around 5am with a new idea. 

    A couple years ago I had loaded a copy of Ubuntu, a popular version of Linux, onto a twenty-year-old laptop computer.  It had few advantages over the  Raspberry Pi in speed but it did have the bonus that it was not in the bedroom where my wife was sleeping at 5am on a Saturday morning. 

    I dug it out, booted it up, went through all the same steps to get that compiler up and running as I’d done on my Pi the night before and—wham, by 7am I had yet another compiled copy of my game. 

    Memory stick transfer. Upload to deck. Press play. Crash.

    That didn’t work either. 

    After breakfast I spent another couple hours doing online resesarch and, sparing you the thought processes and digging through the cryptic Steamdeck logs, I will tell you that I learned that by default my game engine of choice, Bevy, uses something called Dynamic Linking. That is to say, when I put the game on my Steamdeck it was looking for files that were linked (to save space, or something I assume) to the the computer where I compiled it.  Turns out, if you want to “ship” your game, you need to use Static Linking and bundle all those important things up with the code.

    Another couple hours and adding even more plugins to my laptop I tried one more time to compile the whole damn thing. 

    Memory stick transfter. Upload to deck. Press play. Game!

    Almost twenty-four hours of frustrated tweaking and nudging and the game actually booted on my Steamdeck. Success, rigt?

    Yeah. And I could have ended the story there. 

    But by mid-afternoon on Saturday, after enjoying an hour of gleeful playing around with my new portable game on the couch, I had come to the conclusion that my biggest mistake was that I was using the wrong operating system at the foundations of this effort: that is to say, I should be using Linux as my development computer, not Windows. 

    Either work. There are arguements in favour of either. But Linux has advantages that were weighing in its favour for my work going forward.

    So. No time like the present to make the switch, huh?

    Here I endured another twenty-four hours of sporadic effort of trying to build my computer into a dual-boot system split between Windows and Ubuntu Linux, first by trying to run it (very unsuccessfully) off a USB memory stick (toooooooo slow) and then off a hard drive partition. By late Sunday night I had duplicated all the functions of my slow twenty-year-old laptop into a fresh development environment on a cleaved off chunk of hard drive on my newer, faster desktop PC—and had not only managed to compile the code, but to do a couple of code commits to my git repository. 

    And now, as of writing this, I have been happily writing and digging back into the day-to-day coding and working on “tickets” fully in Linux, having added little more than a couple behind the scenes tweaks and enhancements to the game. But coding. 

    Having changed nothing, but simultaneously almost everything.

    This is all interstitial stuff. Connective tissue of the actual code writing work that is so much more satisfying.

    I had spent nearly forty-eight hours of effort and frustrations doing little more than nudging my code into a different part of the hard drive on my computer.  

    Yet, confirming that I could do exactly that. 

    When my wife was more awake I noted to her that if I could not have made the game run on the Steamdeck there was a notion in my head that my whole plan might need adjustment. What would have been the point? You know? 

    And as I wrote above, it feels like simultaneously so much progress and virtually none at all. Very important yet invisibly trivial. Everything and nothing.

    Connective tissues. 

  • them carrots

    I don’t ever want to get ahead of myself here, posting half-baked successes as if they were all star performances. Yet, back nearly two months ago now when I sat down at the computer and worked myself up from a “Hello World!” introduction to Rust Language programming to a rudimentary game loop, it was a long road ahead of me to a day like today.

    What’s special about today?

    Well, besides the fact that it is the day of St. Valentine and I am yet again sitting in a cafe writing about code, there is the simple success that as of a few more minor tweaks this morning I am about to hit an interesting sort of milestone.

    When I wrote that rudimentary code two months ago the thing that I wrote in a game loop was quite simple: a time-based cycle, looping through and counting off seconds passed, and at specific increments of time applying changes to data in a table.  That is an abstraction, tho. What I was actually trying to model and represent in code was the aging of a bundle of carrots.

    Yes, carrots. 

    You can put two and two together I assume. I’m building a game about a Science Fictional Supermarket and as such my game would obviously have something resembling a bundle of carrots and given that time passes in even most science fictional universes, said carrots must age. 

     Thus is the foundational premise of my game after all. You sell things in a store and the those things sell based on their quality and their quality is affected by what’s going on in the universe.  So, things like aging are one of those obvious things.

    Could I model an aging carrot? A carrot, getting stale and decreasing in quality and value is little more than a set of numbers representing those things, but the short answer was yes. Yes, I could. My little proof of concept code counted off the seconds and minutes and even an hour when I let it run, and after increments of time changes applied to those numbers representing my carrots changed to other numbers. Math. Imagination. Code.

    Then I dug in.

    If you’ve read any of these writings you already know that I’ve been plugging away and building rooms and doors and game clocks and npcs and art and sound checks and code efficiency debugging tools and piecing it all together.

    I’ve built a store and a warehouse on my screen, I’ve given controls to the little character to run around that space as time passes around him. I’ve given him virtual money and a place to spend it. I’ve enabled him to pick things up and carry them around, and then to set them down again somewhere else. I’ve put little virtual customers in the store walking around and getting in the way. I’ve layered a story over top of that with discoverable beats and unlockable help tips and a world stuffed with books that detail interesting backstories.  And then this week I added a sales loop that checks when the store is open and takes stuff that exists on the shelves and slowly sells it turning it all into profit. 

    And then today arrived. 

    I have one open ticket left in this milestone phase of my project tracking tool wherein I manage my efforts to make this silly game. I’ve worded it a bit different than this, but basically the ticket is: make the carrots age.

    Yeah, yeah. My proof of concept two months ago started with that first. But then I went back and built it all right building up to this point and… 

    I need to make my carrots get old. And everything else, too, obviously.  Age, go stale, decay, rot, et cetera. That is the one last underlying pretext of the game to complete the great big circle of my alpha-minimum-viable product game loop.  

    After today I don’t just have a part game. I have a game. 

    I mean, it may not be very good and it needs a lot of content and polish and tuning and tweaking, but the core of it will be there.

    Everything that follows will be enhancing that loop. Everything that follows will be making the loop more challenging and interesting as a game, adding obstacles to slow progress or challenges to keep it interesting or story to give it context or art, art, art so much art to give it depth.  Yes, there will be bugs. Yes, there will be inefficiencies that need to be tweaked. Yes, it will grow and shift and improve, but at the very core of my code there will be a game by the end of the day.

    That’s what’s special about today.

  • Game Boy, Denied

    A while back I had been writing little reflective essays, and this one in particular mashed up some of my personal backstory with some gaming-adjacent moralizing, and some lessons on pursuing your dreams. I came across that essay this morning and thought some of my readers might enjoy it.

    This is decidedly not the story of how I eventually bought myself a Game Boy video game system. 

    This is not the story of me finally getting the game system of my literal dreams a decade after it was released, how in my twenties I broke down and spent my travel money on a toy and then wallowed in a span of glorious delayed childhood. 

    No. 

    That is a tale for another chapter of this collection. 

    Instead, this is the story of why I never got a Game Boy video game system when it mattered the most. 

    It is the story of how and why I was denied and how being denied has almost certainly shaped the story of my life.

    This is the story of the Game Boy I never got.

    It’s early in 2024 as I write this, nearly thirty five years after the Game Boy was released to the public. And as the holiday season rolled through this past year—as we plunked ourselves down on our couch to watch though our list of holiday films both classic and new, movies like A Christmas Story and Eight-bit Christmas (to cherry pick a couple titles that precisely match the point I am about to make) I couldn’t help but notice a theme. 

    That theme? The lessons of unrequited commercialism, and the apparently-universal desire of little kids around the world to procure some MacGuffin-like seasonal toy that would make all their childhood dreams come true thus unlocking the real life trophy that is something-something, stuff doesn’t actually matter as much as you think it does, memories, love, Christmas, the end. 

    I also couldn’t help but relate. 

    I couldn’t help but feel a few pangs of tugging heartstrings, even just a little because when I was that age living throught the unrecognized glamour of the mid-eighties in quasi-rural middle of nowhere Canada, what I wanted most in my mundane little life was simply, unequivocally, unrelentingly a Game Boy.

    Clearly I’ve already spoiled the ending to this story. 

    I’ve already spoiled it because, I repeat: it took me many more years, leaving the country, getting lost in Europe, and tangling myself up in a mediocre self-justification of an excuse before I would actually, somewhat apologetically, pull out my wallet with my own pittance of a savings account and unapologetically buy a Game Boy for myself. 

    I did not, repeat DID NOT, get a Game Boy when I was actually a little boy, I did not get a Game Boy when it mattered. I did not get it when it would have calmed that roiling emotional beast of unrequited commercialism and sent me down a decidedly different life-path with a bit less checked emotional baggage. 

    At least, this is what I presume would have happened had I acquired a Game Boy at the age of twelve, thirteen, even fourteen, fifteen, sixteen or even older, which again: I did not.

    Junior High Schooled

    I assume that most people remember the Game Boy, but for the sake of the many future scholars who are reading this and puzzling over the concatenation of words that form the name of the famous Nintendo brand gaming console, a Game Boy is—was—kinda still might be the definitive handheld gaming device,  a device whose name, like Kleenex or Coke, has become synonymous with the entirety of a product class. 

    Until the Game Boy arrived on the scene portable video based electronics essentially did not exist. 

    Mostly. 

    I mean, of course they existed. The Game Boy did not spring whole cloth from nowhere. Yet, from my twelve-year-old’s perspective this was new technology—and borderline magic. In the nineteen eighties, most any electronic device that you could hold in your hand and interact with (in the same way that what one hundred and eight percent of the population of Earth does with their phones today) was at best a niche product from the back pages of a Radio Shack catalogue and probably required six D-batteries or an extension cord. We had portable electronic games, sure, but they were one-off toys. Electronic football was an array of LED lightbulbs with some creaking plastic control pads. Our Game-and-Watch style LCD games were the size of a stack of credit cards and never ran out of batteries, but were the gaming equivalent of programming a VCR while someone was throwing balls at your head.

    So, clearly, the Game Boy was special. 

    It stormed into the video game world with its little green-hued screen complete with a boxed-in Tetris game cartridge and thus ushered in an era of video games that were truly portable.

    And I remember the very first time I saw one.

    School was back in after a too-short summer vacation.

    My friend, the same friend who got everything his tiny little heart desired because his parents had diposable income, all of it, whatever he wished for—you know that kid—had, of course, acquired a brand new Game Boy video game system for his birthday. And because it must have been important for him to rub that fact in our faces, he had brought it to school.

    I remember with liquid-crystal-display clarity that my friend was playing Mario.

    On a school bus.

    Mario!

    Specifically, he was playing Super Mario Land. Super. Mario. Land! On a bus.

    Holy cow! He was actually playing a Mario game on a school bus, leaping and running and eating power-ups and stomping little monochrome Goombos and it was the most glorious thing I’d ever witnessed in my not-yet-a-teenager life.

    I was adequately familiar with the likes of the the other Super Mario Bros. titles, having spent hours on borrowed hardware burning through the orignals on NES. 

    And here it was on a school bus. In the nineteen-eighties. 

    I don’t know how to articulate how much that blew my mind back then.

    I went home that night with visions of Mario so vivid in my mind that I actually put them to paper, sketching out the scenes of the level I’d witnessed him playing, drawing them out in elaborate detail because I could not begin to articulate to my brother, three years my junior, what I had witnessed earlier that day and how it had changed my perception of the universe forever. There was no internet from which to pull more information. There was no simple way to explain to anyone else in my family what I had experienced, the emotions of wonder and thrill and envy that coursed through my veins. There was only a few short minutes of raw, looking over-the-shoulder of my friend and patiently hoping he would share his good fortune with others elation.

    I wanted one of my own.

    I needed one of my own.

    I would do anything to be that kid on the school bus hunched over his very own Game Boy and living the dream of any nerdy game-loving junior high student. Somehow.

    Rise of the Resistance

    “How much?!” Is probably what my parents barked at me. I don’t recall this particular interaction so clearly or postively as I can recall my few moments of Game Boy joy on that big yellow school bus. I don’t recall precisely because the volume of conversations that followed in the proceeding months, particularly as my birthday came and went, then Christmas came and went, none of it resulting in that little rectangular box wrapped up for me as a gift, the volume and tone of those conversations was on a trajectory of disappointment and frustration.

    In Canada the launch price of a brand new Game Boy was about eighty-nine bucks. In 2024 money, that works out to the inflated equivalent of a little over two hundred dollars. Roughly speaking, a Game Boy in 1989 dollars was about the same price, maybe a bit cheaper, than the “lite” version Nintendo‘s current generation console the Switch. I need to caveat that here because in modern bucks eighty-nine Canadian dollars isn’t a lot of cash. That’s a tank of gas. That’s a modest family dinner out at an average restaurant. That’s a digital download of just one game title on a Playstation 5 console. 

    Eighty-nine bucks doesn’t buy what it used to, but back then eighty-nine bucks would have changed the course of my life.

    At least—

    Well—

    Life changing is how it felt every time I argued the case for somehow, anyhow, I will do anything, acquiring my own glorious, amazing, you-just-don’t-understand how this would make me feel mom-and-dad Game Boy video game system.

    A-Button B-Button Testing

    Look, I’m not a psychologist or a professional mind doctor nor even just a guy who can really write with anything resembling confidence or certainty about the long term effects of child-rearing by parents upon kids as they grow up. I might a bit of a philosopher, sure.  And I have been a kid—and a parent, and I definitely have lived a good chunk of this single life of mine spanning the transition from one to the other.  What I’m trying to explain here is that when I tell you that “parents aren’t always right” and that mine probably, maybe, could have, would have, didn’t but really should have caved and bought me the darn Game Boy, or preferably, let me buy my own Game Boy or just somehow in some mysterious way found a way to let me have this thing I really, really, really wanted, I merely write this as a single data point of my own personal experience.

    You can’t A-B Test your own life. You can’t go back and try the other way.  All you can do is look at the facts and dig into your memories and tug on the threads that weave it all together. You can mash the buttons of your mind in peeling back the onion-layers of your own psychology hope some bit of truth is revealed.

    When I mash those mental buttons I realize that I get a lot of personal therapy lessons and a smattering of insight and sunlight shined into the tangled code that makes up my adult ideas about the universe. These were neither traumatic events, nor were they particularly taxing on me at a corporeal level. To even call it a struggle or a burden would be an extreme exaggeration. Yet, there was almost certainly something formative about these events that were my inability to clear the immeasurable invisible threshold set by my parents that would have allowed me to become the teenage owner of a Game Boy handheld video game system. I cannot re-live the life I had with that switch toggled over to B where a rectangular box showed up under the Christmas tree or better, that life where they one day the parents just finally relented, shrugged and drove me down to Toys R Us to plonk my very own cash on the counter and return home to play my own copy of Super Mario Land. I’ll never really know for sure, but I can see it there like a signpost on the path of my life reading “Please Select Your Character” and I’m pretty sure I should have been allowed to pick an alternate option.

    But wait.

    Hold up, you’re thinking to yourself right now. There are a lot of big claims here about consumer mentality and formative child psychology and absolutist parenting ideas.  State your evidence, you’re telling me.

    To be honest, as I have been writing this I have been thinking about that exact point. I mean, what was my thesis here other than that of feeling sorry for myself and contending that there was something formatively deficient in my life as a result of me not getting this darned Game Boy toy when I was a kid?  Did it really truly have an impact, or am I merely mapping some other disastifaction with my adult life back onto my childhood history?

    Then I saw it. I saw the connection on television.

    One recent evening my wife happened to load up one of our streaming services and she clicked on a documentary about kids and music. It was a heartwarming story about the small team of people who keep the literal thousands of musical instruments in working order on behalf of the Los Angeles school system and consequently ensure that kids around the that city have access to musical education. Through a handful of interviews we the audience are introduced to kids who by fault of poverty or other misfortunes would not be able to play the violin or the sousaphone or any of a hundred other instruments in their school band. And the moral lesson of the story, the point of that documentary, was that good people help kids aspire to their dreams.

    Before you dismiss me for equating a video game toy with a functioning French horn or a well-tuned piano, follow me here for a few moments longer.

    See, my hypothetical unpurchased Game Boy is not really about the Game Boy is it? 

    Not really.

    If I were to go back through this essay and replace every reference to the words Game Boy with, say, a baseball glove, a carpentry set, a watercolour box, or yeah, a musical instrument, this story would easily become a heartwarming tale about a kid who’s folks denied him an opportunity. I would instantly become the protagonist in a relatably sad tale of a kid who “coulda been a star”—or an artist or at least kinda, sorta reached for his dreams.

    Because here’s the truth. I’ll admit it. The Game Boy in this story is something of my own MacGuffin, a false lead, my object of desire that is mostly just a story mechanism to provide a reason for me, the author, to tell a different tale, a story adjacent to the red herring. 

    Sure, I wanted a Game Boy—but what I really needed, what I was denied in those months following the school bus Game Boy episode, was agency.

    Would buying a Game Boy have made me happy?

    Sure, for a few weeks I would have been gloriously overjoyed, showing off my new toy to my friends and wearing out the buttons on Tetris or Mario or some other portable game..

    Would owning a Game Boy have changed the course of my life?

    I’ve implied as much but—well—okay—probably not, despite all those earlier contentions. But then I’ll never really know.

    But! But. But? Would having the agency to make that decision on my own have taught me something about who I was, what I valued, and in that very specific and narrow band of time, given me formative insight into my relationship with how I felt about my own personal worth and the pursuit of the things I needed or wanted in life over the whims and detractions of other people?

    Almost certainly, yes.

    The Game Boy was never the point.

    The point was that the Game Boy entered into my peripheral vision at a time when I had the means and the desire to aspire to something that was in my heart, in me, no matter how silly or trivial or commercial. I’m pretty sure we all have one of those things. Yours might have been a new bike or an electronics hobby set or an Easy Bake Oven. Mine was a Game Boy. I’m pretty sure we can all look back on our lives and pick out the moment when A versus B we were set down a course of understanding that yes, certain people do actually get the thing they want, be that a the baseball glove, the violin, the art set, or even just the Game Boy—and on the other side of that choice, certain people don’t.

    Certain people get told no. 

    This is who you are. This is what you get.

    Certain people are told that their dreams are foolish or not worth pursuing.

    Certain people are made to save their money for so-called important things and to set their hopes aside in favour of practical considerations.

    This isn’t a parenting lesson. 

    This isn’t a commentary on the nature of need fulfilment. 

    This isn’t a sweeping generalization about the effects of privilege or consumerism or entitlement or even words regarding crushed dreams as stern lessons for growing minds. 

    This is merely a personal assessment of my own experience. My parents were wrong back then, even if was just about this one thing, and I’m pretty sure a lot of my own weird adult beliefs about my experience as someone with big ideas, broad hopes and silly dreams—and then my ultimate story of failing to pursue a lot of those, all of that can trace a lineage straight as an arrow back to those days of trying to spend my own eighty-nine bucks to get myself a Game Boy. 

    Lately, I find myself trying to pursue the things that I want as an adult. These are not material possessions or even extraordinary aspirations.  After a long pursuit in a dead-end profession I took a plunge and aligned both my resources and resolve to seek out something more soulful and spiritual. I went looking for a career change, and from that a more creative participation in the universe, the pursuit of joy and happiness and simplicity in my day-to-day. My lifelong dream of becoming a writer was dangled out in front of me, and a single amazing opportunity to pursue it. And all of these things have come at a cost, both financially and emotionally. Yet the emotional cost, the struggle against my core sense of self worth, the very idea that I even deserve to try to aspire to this crazy dream-like stuff has been the hardest to mortgage, because the credit score traces all the way back to the 1980s and a little kid who could have, should have, but didn’t get a damn video game system.

    I know this in my core, I have evidence for it because I listen to myself. I hear the language I use, the very words I use to describe these adult pursuits. I frequently apologize. I couch my need for better mental health, and otherwise logical decisions, and of course that dream of a job that gives me purpose and meaning, I couch my explanation in words like privilege and personal crisis.

    I am forever waiting, looking over my shoulder and around every corner for someone to butt their nose in and point out that I don’t deserve this and I should not be doing it.

    Like that twelve year old who wanted a Game Boy, I am the kid who just heard no. This thing is not for you. This thing you desire is silly, it is an extravagance and even if you’ve easily got eighty nine bucks in your bank account to spend on it, it’s not something you deserve to have.

    Like I said this is not the story of how I eventually bought myself a Game Boy video game system. Rather this is the story of a simple denial of agency, choice and worth—and sure, had this been a shinier story of my childhood denial of a pair of hockey skates or piano lessons or going to summer camp I might come across as far more sympathetic than a wannabe gamer kid. But the heart wants what it wants, be you twelve years old or four times that age. Be that thing a Game Boy or the fulfilment of a dream bigger than what the world has offered you on its own.

    And though we as parents, friends, family, or simply well-wishers can never really know if someone is yearning for just a Game Boy or if someone is learning a deeper lesson from that heartfelt pursuit, it’s worth noting that everyone deserves to pick option B, to play the character they want to play, and to have that tiny bit of agency that informs them that they can, should, and will chase that dream—if that’s what they want to do. Go for it.

  • shortcuts & bottlenecks

    It has been literally a full week since I’ve posted an update and tho I wouldn’t say that I owe an explanation for that, there certainly is one. See, a lot of people juggle time management, balancing work and play and code and life. I am no different, obviously, but this past week has been one of those weeks when a lot of other things have sidelined the code-writing and the pixel-art-making and the usual hunkering down in the basement turning my sweat and tears into a silly little video game.

    I won’t go into details, but school and such account for most of it, and while as of yesterday I pushed through and submitted the last of a short list of assignments, to say I’ve dived headlong back into code would be slightly inaccurate, too.

    But then the whole thing seems strange at this stage because even though I haven’t been able to spend nearly as much time as I may like on actually writing code, I also seem to have come to the part of this development project where two things are true:

    1) what’s really slogging my progress is my ability to generate art, and

    2) most of the progress I am making is expanding and duplicating features.

    The first of those two statements seems pretty self-explanatory, right? I write some code for a player inventory and then I need to make art for the two hundred things that go in that inventory. I add a toolbelt, and now I need to draw all the tools. I added the ability to add decorative and interactive objects into playing field and now I need to draw dozens and dozens of interesting objects that might realistically populate the floor of a grocery store. My bottleneck there is art output, and I’m not an artist who has ever really been about volume production, so it all takes some mental shifting.

    The second statement is a little more vague, perhaps? I mean, the whole effort here has always been expanding features, incrementally adding functionality to the game world. 

    And yet, for a very long time that incremental enhancement was either entirely new code or entirely new functionality. Draw a room, add animations, add collisions, create database queries, respond to input. New. New. New.

    But lately I find that I now have kind of two tiers of code: (a) stuff I wrote way back that is foundational and important and has been tested and refined and tweaked and expanded, and (b) stuff that I am squeezing into the gaps anew. And to make it more interesting, a lot of those gaps are emerging through copying stuff I already wrote and using it in a slightly different way.  This is a good thing, I think. If you build a system and it works and it is something that can be stretched a bit and nudged a bit and reused so that you have two very similar systems leveraging some of the same resources and working in pretty much the same way but resulting in slightly different outcomes, then that’s a good design practice.

    An example might help here. Take my path grid code for example. 

    I got ambitious one weekend and diverted myself by working on something I should have left for a later phase: I built a path tracking algorithm for npcs. It’s not complex. To be fair, the whole thing could be expanded easily, but as it stands it is literally an invisible grid matrix that corresponds to each tile of a room map. The two are independent, but they are tethered together digitally in that when one moves the other moves, when one changes the other changes, that kinda thing.  The grid consists of  and X x Y size, and each “cell” contains a bit of data: planar coordinates that correspond to the map, a “type” and most importantly for my npcs, and “occupier” code. An NPC exists as a varible inside the grid “occupying” a cell when it is standing still, then checks a path to see if the next cell is occupied or not. If so it changes direction. If not, it occupies two cells for a moment as it moves from one to the next, then releases the one it left back to a cleared state. It sounds complex, but it took less lines of code to make it work that than to explain it here. I tested it. I pushed it. I have tweaked and solidified it. It works pretty well.

    And so rather than rewrite something entirely new for how objects exist in a room—sitting on shelves or on the floor as obstacles—I just duplicated some of my npc code and now, as far as the software is concerned, objects are just a kind of npc that lives on that same invisible grid occupying a cell.

    The original npc code took me over a week to write. 

    Building off of that code in the same amount of time I was able to add a store system, a player inventory and toolbelt, and an entire scheme of putting obstacles and objects in the room—all while I was deep in some school courses where I had rightly diverted eighty percent of my attentions.  I had once figured this second part would take me a month of coding. Instead, it just sort of was an oh-copy-paste-this-code-and it mostly worked.

    I like to think that was all good planning, but it was mostly just a bit of fortuitous flukey foresight.

    The short version of all this is that my code is sprinting because of these lucky shortcuts but now running into the bottleneck of my ability to art fast enough.

    I guess I need to spend more time drawing and less time writing long winded posts about it, huh?

  • keys to gamer success

    My carefree days of hours-long coding sessions are on hiatus, it seems.

    Well, at least are coming in more sproadic than in the throes of mid-winter.

    I still am managing to find good blocks of free time to work through tickets, adding small enhancements, squashing bugs, and tweaking algorithms. The game creeps towards some kind of state of playability.

    And that’s the first key here, I think. 

    I spent two months working and committing code almost every single day, and all of that culminated in a thing that looked and played like an alpha-state game. Which is a big deal.

    Getting that same game to beta? That’s going to be the work of a few more months of work, lots of art, lots of writing, lots of hunting bugs. I mean, I now have an entire category of tickets that is called “playtesting” by which I sort things that I’m pretty sure I have fixed but until they crop up naturally in the middle of play—or I play long enough to feel confident that I fixed them—there isn’t much to do (besides maybe writing some tests) to ensure that they are working.

    And that’s the second key here, I think.

    This game thing I made is big and complex and—hell—its a simulation and it rolls along simulating and doing stuff behind the scenes that are the result of compound effects of algorithms that I wrote. Calculate this, math that, compute these. And it is deeply fascinating to see that at work—but it is anything but simple to untangle in my own head to know if it is actually working.

    I did the most dad-gamer thing the other day.  I ordered a copy of Civilization VII (which recently released) for my PS5, but I ordered it using airline points. Yeah, I had enough spare points to buy a ninety-dollar new release game and yet I still have bank.  But I have been watching the reviews of the new game (and I have played all six previous versions when they were new plus the spin offs) and people are pickyAF about the mechanics.  This game that is so complex it is almost an organic lifeform in an of itself, doesn’t behave exactly how people expect and they rant and scream online about how terrible it is. 

    And that’s the third key here, I think.

    Players can be particular. They want complex things but they also seem to hate complexity. Pleck’s Mart is no Civ 7 on the complexity scale, but I wrote about complexity previously when I compared this creation to Dwarf Fortress and the complexity of Pleck’s Mart has definiely increased since that post.  Yet, with complexity comes unpredictability, and simultaneously the inability to game out ever combination of that complexity. 

    How do you trust it other than to play it and have many other people play it and then be ready to nudge it back into balance if the balance is not as tuned as one might think? 

  • some crazy game symphony

    I have recently been accused of writing things that no one understands.

    “I don’t even know what half those words mean.” A friend remarked. “All that stuff you post about your game.”

    The effort of trying to bring a glimpse of a guy trying to do some simple game design to the masses is as difficult as the coding, it seems.

    The problem is that coding and technical stuff is jargony. It is tough to describe complex things, after all, without falling into the easy rhythm of just using the complex words.

    And, it turns out, if that isn’t a metaphor to describe the challenges I encountered in my code this week, I don’t know what is.

    Falling back on the easy, I mean.

    It wasn’t so much that I shortcutted or made bad decisions, per se, but rather that in my effort to do something complex I described it to the compiler—I wrote code—in a way that, um, confused it a little bit.

    My code got just complex enough that I ran into one of those juicy jargony words that begrudge programmers all over the world: race conditions.

    Let’s back up a bit. What the hell is coding anyways?

    You probably know or have heard that computers speak binary. Zeros and ones. Right? And that is true. Virtually every computer program every built for every consumer product relies on binary computation.  (I could go on about quantum computers or analog computers or whatever, but let’s keep this simple, shall we?) Digital computers speak binary.

    I’d love to be able to spit out a string of zeros and ones long enough to fill a library and not make any mistakes and do so well enough that it results in the computer making a game called Pleck’s Mart that you all want to eventually play.  But I will never be able to do that. 

    I can, on the other hand, write down all those complex ideas in a text editor in a language called Rust (which I have been learning quite well) and then ask this little bit of software on my computer to turn it into that string of zeros and ones so that it becomes said game.

    That’s coding. Writing out complex instructions for a compiler to turn your plan into binary numbers.

    And knowing this, you should also know that this can fail in two basic ways: Either you can write code so bad and wrong that the compiler tells you it kinda sucks and you should fix this or fix that and go back and try again because it doesn’t understand—or, you can write code that makes enough sense to get translated but results in something unintended happening when the computer starts mathing and computing all those resulting zeros and ones. We call the first bad code and the second, usually, a bug.

    The first fail, bad code, happens to me a hundred times per day, and I go back and fix stuff. I mistyped a variable or forgot to make something mutable (flexable and changable in the system) or missed a semi-colon at the end of a statement or—the list goes on.

    The second fail happens alot too, but is occasionally more subtle in as much as you don’t notice that the results are wonky until you really do. Easy to spot bugs are incorrect coordinates on sprites or calling a valid but incorrect variable or switching the signs on a math calculation.  The hard ones are things like the thing that bit me in the butt this week: race conditions.

    To understand this you have to also understand something that is probably pretty basic but important to my point: computers are fast. Freaking fast, these days in particular, but they have always been way faster than we realize.

    You can look at this little video of my game that I recorded yesterday of things on the screen and realize that there are about five hundred individual images on the screen, each a file that needs to be loaded into memory, and simultaneously the computer is reading information from the screen, the mouse, the keyboard, my gampad controller, playing music, loading up individual click sounds for the little interactions, checking the math to see if anything I do causes any two of those little image files in the pretend space of the screen to crash into each other, and about a hundred other things I can’t even keep track of—and it is doing all of that on repeat over a hundred times per second.

    Per second!

    And I, the invisible conductor of this crazy digital symphony, need to to have staged all of that down to the millisecond.

    And when things are simple, nothing really deeply goes wrong. At least not wrong enough to matter.

    But then things get complex and—well, let’s go back to that symphony analogy: I play in an orchestra so believe me when I say it is easy for things to get out of sync. The timpani is pounding out a steady beat but then the clarinet comes in half a second late and the violas sitting next to the clarinets try to pace them, but the violins are watching the conductor and timing themselves to the baton, and then the trumpets who can’t hear anyone but themselves way at the back decide to wing it and jump in too. The result might be music, but it more likely will just become noise.

    One thing got ahead of the next thing and the thing that was supposed to be following in a planned order happened out of sync and—that’s kinda a race condition.

    In coding, as I understand it, a race condition is when the code is not exactly wrong, but you as the coder have not put in the right set of rules to stop things from getting out of sync. 

    On a small program you might not even notice.

    On a growing and complex program? Chaos ensues. If things don’t crash outright, then you suddenly have eighteen soundtracks playing because they are not properly being removed and replaced, or all the objects in your room spawn a mere half a second before the rest of the room making it look like ten cases of tomatoes just blipped and appeared in empty space for a moment, or else your player flashes brightly because the lighting effects took effect a beat too late to maintain the illusion of that shadow you had meticulously coded. But then, mostly, yeah, mostly it just crashes. Or bogs down to a crawl as eighty-seven thousand copies of your player sprite spawn into the program and the computer (as fast as it is) just throws in the towel because even it isn’t that fast.  And then it crashes anyways.

    These things are not laziness in coding, but they are me making assumptions about that long string of zeros and ones and assuming that the computer can make sense of them as much as I think it can without tripping over its digital shoelaces.

    They are adding a dozen more musicians to the orchestra and just hoping they will all keep perfect time.

    Thankfully Bevy, the game engine I am using, has mitigations for this. I have spent a few hours restructing my code to give it a little bit more of a compartmentalized order and some timing conditions. That, for people who thing I am being to jargony, just means that I can specifically tell the computer to wait for one thing to happen before starting something that is supposed to happen after it, and I can also tell something else to count to ten and hold its breath before doing something else. Like cues and an enforced script, mostly. Sheet music and each musician with their eyes glued to the conductor and noise cancelling headphones so that they can only hear themselves. No more winging it and hoping for the best.

    All of these challenges are themselves spawning out of something good, tho: progress. Real progress. The game is moving forward. As much as my code is occasionally tripping over itself, that can be managed and fixed, and the result still is that the game does something this week that it didn’t do last week. It’s progressing. 

    In this phase I have dug into objects: stuff on shelves, mostly. I built the core functionality that allows the little guy (who up until now was just walking around exploring) to order objects from the shop, carry them around in an inventory and put them onto shelves, pick them up again, and put them somewhere else. 

    And it is weirdly satisfying to organize cases of vegetables in the store or the warehouse. So long as the game isn’t racing and crashing that is.