i think it’s impossible for me to not make A Game.
- 🌙, 24th of May 2025
On April 13, 2009, the web series Homestuck launched, altering the brain chemistry of a huge number of people forever.
On September 12, 2012, the web platform roll20 launched. Doesn’t really have anything much to do with this right now, but I felt like including it.
On May 13, 2015, the first version of Discord went live, and would slowly replace forums as the dominant form of support and information storage for independent projects.
On July 5, 2017, 17776 (or, What Football Will Look Like in the Future) was published. Just one more year until we all stop dying, right?
Linux is like a stimboard, to me. Obviously, that isn’t how everyone sees it, and to a certain extent, I’d expect that most people don’t see it like that.
A lot of people see Linux as a terminal.
It’s sort of inescapable, really; a lot of people who develop utilities and scripts are already really familiar with using the terminal, and prefer it, and the people who want more UI things are more likely to not be willing or free enough to make the switch and make things for a userbase that isn’t already open to more graphical user interfaces.
On the other side of the pond, there’s been a longstanding set of gripes we have with notetaking systems and word editors. Obsidian, which is actually what we use to write all these posts, is pretty good for blogging into a vertical format! (it helps that the Quartz framework also converts things into a decent bland visual and lets us keep the callout features, otherwise this would just be raw markdown files lmfao) It’s terrible for notetaking, even when you can have things split into 3 panes and 2 sidebars with varying granular information, but it’s fairly good for writing.
And therein lies the rub.
See, over the past half a year or so, we’ve gotten back into using physical paper for sketching, writing ideas down, and general notetaking. The biggest takeaway from this is: digital notetaking is in such a bad state. I could blame mobile-first design, but really, it’s kinda societal. Or at the very least, social. Why are notes for coursework and personal endeavours both expected to be done in neat, orderly, top-to-bottom linear fashions? Margin notation seems to only be left for marking up books and papers, papers themselves can only exist in the same set of columns (even when interspersed by relevant graphics).
It works for some people. Does not work for us.
Emacs is a very useful piece of software for writing and drafting.
For similar reasons to the above, it misses specific things when trying to approximate notetaking, but it’s been very helpful in looking at things for this. Currently, dovecote doesn’t have markdown formatting present (or more importantly, ruby text, because that’s clamplicated through Godot’s systems), but the blunt styling that retains the actual markdown elements is quite nice! And Org Mode offering quick alt-based reordering of chunks in particular was a very big inspiration for how the notes currently work.
On this note, PureRef! An imageboard reference tool. Lets you place images and scale them and move around within an infinite board.
This was originally meant to be a JavaScript application, believe it or not. (it’s probably believable, tbh.) The NWJS project was going quite well, but it kept hitting walls and roadblocks for ostensibly really simple things, and it did eventually wear us down to the point we took a couple months break.
To be perfectly honest, there’s still the nagging influence of academia and norms that posits: “Godot is not ever going to be the best option for Making Tools.”
This is largely bullshit, though it took sitting down and staring at it for a few minutes finally to dissect that.
Godot is not the best option, however, Godot is also the best option. If something is not going to get made using frameworks and environments that demand we hand-code UI elements, those are in fact quite terrible options! A game engine that makes the UI processes far easier, and lets it exist at all, is immensely preferable on basically any comparison.
I cannot make anything that is not, on some level, A Game. I am only interested in making technology that exists outside the common denominator of users—which, sadly, does put us in the unfortunate position of “nobody really ever seems to have documented wanting to do this thing you’re looking for” concerningly often!—and while that’s partly due to formative media…
I mean, that’s just how this brain works, at the end of the day.
Are you really fine with social media character limits and only ever doing things vertically? That brick in your hand, the box near your desk, both are capable of wondrous things, but they need to be told how to do them. It feels like a lot of professional projects get so caught up in the artifice of the thing that they forget they can just change the baseline rules for free.
Linear notetaking that is difficult to reorder is uninteresting, nonintuitive, awkward, and not even close to a proper analogue for what paper notetaking is. “Second Brain”-type note vaults are far too poisoned by Productivity Culture to mean anything.
I am here to have fun with my notes, and I am going to make them able to be fun. I can reorder pages in my binder to make space, I can stack slices of sticky notes over top for corrections, and I can write sideways or at any angle where things need to fit or be.
It doesn’t have to be boring.
It does, for me at least, have to be a game.
Because what else is the point?
During the course of getting a degree, and into a few years after, there was the ever-present dread and stressed spawned by being stuck on the very idea of making anything software-wise for resume reasons, because everything we needed to use already existed. Looking back on it now, that’s not true, but it does still feel like that can easily be the case when so many learning paths and methods of teaching seem to emphasize how you do need to do the same thing other people do.
And that’s how we end up at the major operating systems slowly homogenizing, I suppose…
It’s a little odd saying all this when the rest of the current Arch setup is fairly barebones, but it’s really still true! ranger as a file manager makes jumping back and forth between directories and shell commands fairly straightforward, but all function and no flash makes a Unix-based system not much more interesting than the other extreme (an Unreal Engine Tech Demo remake remaster sludge release).
Lots of things suck, especially in recent years, but I do think we’ll keep making Games*.
Because really, there’s nothing else worth doing.