Weekly Update - 15 Sept 2024

Two projects to discuss this week.

Cyber Burger

I've decided to ditch game mode A, where the player is given a series of stages they need to clear. Instead, I'm changing this to be closer to an old-school arcade experience. In this mode, you start the game with a 45 second timer, and you need get as high a score as you can before the timer runs out. Your score depends roughly on how large and "interesting" your burger is. Every burger you make also adds 10 seconds to the clock, so the ultimate aim is to balance making interesting burgers for a higher score, vs. trying to avoid letting the clock run down to zero. Or at least that's the idea. I need to do some rebalancing, as I think the game is a little easy.

I am wondering whether to award points based on how fast you make the burger. It was originally my intention, but I'm now wondering if that would be considered unfair, as you don't get to choose the items flying across the screen. I still do need to fix the random number generator too, so as to avoid keeping the player from waiting around too long for a bun base to start building their burger. Resolving these two things will be my goal for the next week.

This working version has been pushed to the web for anyone to try out. If you do, please let me know if you have any feedback.

Nano Journal

The next project I spent some time on was Nano Journal, the web-based journalling app stolen from inspired by Kev Quirk's journalling app.

I wasn't intending to work on it this week, but I did have a motive to do so as I was expecting to do something that I wanted to document (I ended up not doing that thing).

The biggest changes I made were adding paging and post titles, plus making some improvements on the backend on how posts are stored and retrieved.

Setting the title is done using a slash-commands:

/title This is my post title
This is my post body

I also added an /append slash-command to add to the latest post, rather than create a new one. This also works for attachments too, allowing a somewhat clunky way of adding multiple attachments to a single post.

I am still considering this a prototype, but I have found myself writing here more often than Day One. I definitely need to start thinking about the long-term storage of posts if I want to "productionise" this. Ultimately I want to get them saved in a private Git repository. Each post is just a markdown file stored on the file-system, which will make this easy to do, but I’m somewhat procrastinating on relearning how to use the various Go Git clients that are available.

One other thing that I'd like to do is improve instances where a post couldn't be saved due to network issues. The way I'm thinking of doing this is to store the current draft in browser local storage, at least until it's saved on the server. I'm also wondering if it's worth adding the concept of draft posts. Not sure at this stage whether that juice is worth the squeeze, at least not yet. This was meant to be a relatively simple side-track. But I guess that's the danger (beauty?) of starting something and finding it useful. 🤷

Anyway, that's all for this week.