Weekly Update - 3 Nov 2024

I probably should stop calling these "weekly updates," seeing that they come up a lot less frequently than once a week. Maybe I should switch to something like "Sunday updates," or maybe something closer to what this is, which is an excuse to procrastinate by writing about what I've been working on, rather than just working on it.

But I'm sure you're not interested in my willowing about the frequency of these updates, so let's just get straight to the meat of it.

Cyber Burger

All the logic, graphics, and sound-effects for power-up/power-downs are now finished. They now spawn in randomly, with a frequency and specific types dictated by the current stage. I also added the notion of a "milkshake bonus" which awards the player a bonus multiplier for a short amount of time.

I've also made a few balancing changes around demerits. Based on my own testing, I was pretty blasé about loosing demerits, as you could recover a demerit every time you finish a burger. I wanted to discourage that, so I changed things around a little. You still loose demerits if you screw up the burger your trying to build — such as making it too high or not catching the correct item — but you no longer recover demerits for every burger you complete. Instead, you recover one demerit for every $50 you're awarded. This is now every three to four burgers, depending on how sophisticated they are, which I hope would make loosing demerits something the player would want to avoid.

There's still the difficulty curve stuff left to do, but I think I'll start working on the meta elements, like the title screen, main menu and high score tables. I can probably leave out the addition of stages and a difficulty curve if I'm honest, but I would like to have a decent title and menu screen.

The other thing to do is write the manual. I made a start the other day, but there's much left to do on this front. Part of me wonders whether it make sense adding "on-board documentation."  But part of the fun of using Pico-8 on this project is to imagine a time where this game came out during the late 70's and early 80's and the 8-bit era of home consoles. And those games didn't have on-board documentation. That said, I might add a quick start guide for those that didn't RTFM.

UCL

I've been using that tool I've written for work quite often so there was a need to add some additional features to UCL. The biggest one was adding exceptions, but there've been a lot of little things like rounding out the standard library.

All the code written in a rush is starting to weigh this project down though, and I do think I'll need to do some refactoring to tidy things up a little. I may need to work on documentation too, just for my own sake more than anything else. I doubt this would be anything more than the toy language it currently is, but it does have it's uses, and whenever I need to reference a built-in, I'm always going to the source code. Which is fine, but I think I can do better on this front.

Other Projects

A few other things I worked on during the last fortnight:

• I spent some time last weekend playing with Htmgo by making a simple world clock that would update every second. I ended up remaking this as a static web page backed by some WASM code. Knowing the time in UTC and some American cities could come in handy for my job. At least, that's the theory: I haven't had a need for it yet.
• I also made some changes to Nano Journal to add support for uploading multiple attachments at once.

So that's the update for this past fortnight.