As hinted at to be my plan in my post about my first proper gamedev experience back in April, I recently took part in my first ever gamejam, Go Godot Jam 4, and during that built a game called “Pew Pew Pew: Danger Zone!”. The jam required all submissions to be built in Godot Engine, which was one of the reasons I chose it - I just recently got my feet wet in game development with Godot 4 and wanted to get some more practice in....
In my last post I told you that I’ve been very much interested into video game development for a while now, and just never got around it until the personal Gamejam gift from my partner. Due to this interest I’ve also been subscribed to a bunch of game design and documentary specific YouTube channels for a few years now, and since I consider their content pretty interesting – even if you are not interested in game development and just games in general!...
For my 40th birthday a few weeks ago, I got a pretty amazing gift from my partner: a coupon for a personal 4-day Gamejam/Gamedev experience, just the two of us. I’ve been a gamer pretty much my whole life, I’ve been a coder pretty much my whole life, but I never so far managed to combine these things. Apart from copying some Star Trek game code in BASIC from a book in my teens, the probably quite common tinkering around with the parameters in gorilla....
When Valve announced the Steamdeck back in summer of 2021, I was immediately sold. At that point my primary gaming device - despite owning a quite capable PC with enough computing and graphics power to run even the latest AAA games at a decent enough quality - was my Nintendo Switch, simply because I was not particularly happy about spending my after hours in front of the same PC that I already spend my working hours on....
I originally published this in October 2020 as a Twitter thread. Even though it’s been a couple of years, the points still stand, so I decided to preserve it here as a short blog post. It’s easy to only see the success and also to only share the success in our journeys. But success is usually just the end of a long path of struggle, compromises, setbacks, failure. Over the years, I’ve talked about my journey a lot....
I’ve always been a bookworm. As a child, my favourite past time was reading. I usually dragged my current book with me everywhere and would read at any opportunity1. So, when e-readers became a thing, I was very excited to save on a ton of shelf space in the future and got myself an Amazon Kindle at the first chance I got. Back then in 2010 I actually had to import my Kindle 3 Keyboard from the US since it wasn’t available in Germany yet....
One thing that kept me from blogging more so far was the difficulty in working on posts on my phone. So after switching this blog over to Hugo I decided to see if I couldn’t improve on this situation. I needed a solution that would allow me to Checkout my page’s git repository from GitHub Quickly create a new post, consisting of a new folder inside content/blog matching my chosen <year>-<month>-<day>-<title slug>/index....
Two years ago I was into learning React, since that is what I’m planning to use for a future OctoPrint UI. And when I decided to reboot this webpage, I also figured I would use that as a reason for experimenting with new build tools and techstacks. So I built this site with next.js, Tailwind CSS and a bunch of other stuff, and spent a lot of time implementing basic content management tooling and rendering....
Update from 2023-02-02 To answer the most common question I’ve gotten after publishing this right away: No, I do not plan on selling these. This is something I did for fun and out of love, I’m not interested in making money off of it, and I frankly already have my hands full enough as is without adding a custom button business to the mix as well. I’ve provided this write-up to give you an idea of how to do it yourself, and I hope you’ll enjoy it....
I attended RC3 from December 27th until December 30th. While it was (once again) only a virtual edition of the Chaos Communication Congress, at least this time around I managed to have a similar experience to 36c3, as in, I spent the last two days mostly hanging out with a bunch of fellow geeks in a fun location (a jitsi conference that also included a camera pointing at an aquarium full of fish) and nerding out while tinkering around with electronics....