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Changelog: Citadel 1.0.1
Two fixes, both found by pointing the engine at something it was never built for. Creatures were dissolving into any hot surface behind them — not just fire, but an amber door lamp would do it. And more than sixteen fireballs at once killed the game outright, which a room full of exploding drums can absolutely arrange.
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Announcing Citadel: My Latest Native Mac Game
My second native game is out. Six weeks, forty-eight floors, one flamethrower, and a rule that quietly reorganises everything else: killing the thing that holds a floor is only half the job. Here's what Citadel is, what makes it strange, and every promise I broke to finish it.
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The Furniture Was a Lie
I filled my next game's rooms with bunks, lockers, oil drums and dead terminals to make the place feel lived-in. It looked wonderful. There was just one problem: you could walk straight through all of it. Here's how I made the set-dressing solid — without costing a single frame.
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Every Level Is Winnable, and I Can Prove It
My next game builds its levels fresh every time you play — rooms, corridors, locked doors, hidden keys. Which raises a terrifying question: what if it builds one you physically can't finish? Here's how I stopped blindly trusting the generator and started proving it wrong.
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I Tore Out the Renderer. Again.
When I built my first game I ripped out a renderer I loved and rebuilt the world from scratch. For the second one I did it again — only this time there are no models, no meshes, no geometry in the usual sense at all. Every wall and every enemy is an equation. Here's why I keep doing this to myself.
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The Sound I Could Not Fake
I wrote a whole post bragging that my games ship no asset files — every pixel and every note generated in code, the lot small enough to fit on a floppy. Then I started the second one, and a monster in the dark made me break my own rule. Here's why sound was the one thing I couldn't synthesise, and how I broke the rule without betraying it.
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Strataris: The Screensaver That Became a Game
Five months, a lot of swearing, the occasional actual tear, and a stubborn rule that the whole thing had to fit on a floppy disk. My first native game is finished. Here's the messy story of how it got here.
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Why I Keep Rebuilding Arcade Games
Three tributes and counting. Not because the world needs another Centipede clone, but because some things are worth remembering with your hands, not just your head.
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Building a Star Raiders Tribute in a Single HTML File
How I rebuilt my favourite 8-bit space sim using Canvas, Web Audio and 2,288 lines of JavaScript — informed by an extraordinary reverse-engineered source code that made the impossible feel achievable.
Games
Making native Mac games. 9 notes.