I started this post at the beginning of the year, and it has taken me another 6 months to sit down and finish it. Not because it actually took me that long, but simply because things have been busy!

During 2017 and through to today, I have been working on a number of projects:

• My superhero-themed roguelike “Justice”,
• a little bit of work on Hobgoblin,
• Started another RL with a friend set in the Monster Hunter International Universe
• A stand-alone procedural house generator, which is based on a module written for Justice.
• I built a naming language generator in Ruby that was based off of a fantasy-map generator which I also annotated
• I did JS30
• I built a cryptocurrency wallet visualizer
• I learned React
• I built a browser version of Rutherford Craze’s Processing script for procedural runes
• I created a front-end and back-end for a logging tool to aid in productivity
• I was introduced to the works of Devine Lu Linvega. This caused a paradigm shift for me, and resulted in a deep-dive on most of his projects including:
  • The beginnings of my own Twitter bot based on his Ruby framework Nataniev.
  • Several bug fixes for his blogging platform Oscean and text-sandbox game Paradise. He has moved both of these platforms to a purely front-end style now, but Nataniev is an incredibly interesting way to build out a platform.
  • My own notes/webpage written as a Nataniev Vessel (front-end, back-end) for the ancestor language of Lietal, a conlonag Devine created. This ancestor language used to be called “Traumae,” and the details have been lost to the dark places of the internet and the git history of Lietal.

Wow! Quite a bit now that I’ve got it all on paper. Most recently I’ve been learning about the P2P web over from the Beaker Browser folks.

And there is so much more I want to do!! Top on the priority list for me is releasing Justice. It is time to be done (I mean that in a good way). As has been predicted by so many roguelike developers, as my first “real” attempt at a game, I bit off more than I could chew, and the result has been a long slog. I regret nothing; the struggle has been an opportunity for me to practice diligence and persistence, even when it has been hard to continue. The result is something I am immensely proud of. A huge downside to picking at an enormous game in my spare time over the years is that technology has moved on. I want to build the next thing, and I’m ready to be back on the cutting edge.

After I do that, I want to move Hobgoblin JS into the future. It was created before ES6 was really a thing, and before the widespread standardization on tools like Babel. I want to create a library that you can import from in the modern way instead of using global variables etc. As I do that, another big goal for me is to write a tutorial series on this very blog for how to make your own roguelike using Hobgoblin!

We’ll see how much I can do with the rest of the year. While I am trying to do all of the above, I am also raising a family, writing a HERO System campaign, and am involved in a lot of other activities and organizations, and am working a full time job at a new company that I joined at the end of 2017!

It’s a lot, but I’m hoping to do even more, as I try to make productivity a habit.

Till next time, -Jake