JHax

Hell yeah

Spinny Wizard Game very much an exercise in whether I can make a game almost deliberately making the wrong decision at every turn (don't get me wrong, I am very much having fun with it again)

Love to use pixel art, the art form made out of squares, to make a game super heavily reliant on orbits, curves, circles, that sort of thing

Learning a lot by trying to get Spinny Wizard Game in a releasable state

In addition to the age old wisdom of "software takes at least twice as long as you think, even if you account for that in your estimate" I think I'm going to have to factor in "ennui time" to future projects

Speaking entirely selfishly, I really hope the new Fable makes it out of the door before all the XBox games studios either collapse or all get repurpose to churning out slop

In possibly the most being late to the party statement I have ever or will ever make: reading books is phenomenal stuff

Slay the Spire 2 really making me think I should get around to playing Slay the Spire 1 instead of just installing it on my Steamdeck and doing nothing with it

Yes, of course I celebrate Valentine's Day in the normal way, running 15k with my partner to get a cake at a café then making our own pizzas for dinner

Real uphill struggle on Game Dev today, took me until mid afternoon to get to the point where I remembered I actually like doing it!

An AMD Radeon 9700XT graphics card sitting in a box

An AMD Radeon 9700XT graphics card sitting in an opened up PC, plugged into the motherboard, but not the power supply

More PC upgrades! I've been running for a week on this now and seems stable enough (touch wood!) having swapped from my old NVidia GeForce 1060

I feel a piece of my soul would be healed if I owned this mug.

Github commit message saying "Reset Mana to Max at the start of versus rounds"

Bashing together a few bits on Spinny Wizard Game ahead of the Playtest Party table at Impact in #Bristol

Every time I see people playing it, this not happening comes up and I'm always like "ahh I need to sort that!"

A naked coffee grinder. Black plastic tower with a yellow circuit board at the front

The "oh god what have I done" stage ofnthe process. A coffee grinder broken into 4 parts, haphazardly strewn across a table along with a couple of screwdrivers. At the top of the image is the outer casing, followed by the top section where the beans go, the middle containing the lower butt and circuit board and finally, the base.

The inside of a coffee grinder, comparing an old worn burr, tarnished with old coffee grounds and the shiny new clean one.

Comparison of the old grind with the new one, the old on the left is much coarser and less consistent. On the right, I'd a finer and more consistent grind of coffee

Took a break from opening up my PC and tinkering with its innards yesterday to open up my coffee grinder and tinker with its innards! Looks like a much more consistent grind - hopefully it'll stop jamming so much as well!

Lamenting Steam's lack of a "sort wishlist by system requirements" so I can put my upgrades through their paces

A Raspberry Pi micro computer on a table with a red memory stick inserted. Saved the day when I realised I hadn't properly got the BIOS upgrade prepared for my new Motherboard

The finished upgrade. Windows 11 desktop on a monitor on the left with an open PC case on rather right

Open PC case, with some marginally better cable management

PC upgrade part 2, phase 3- everything was turning on at least! Couldn't find the BIOS upgrade I'd got for my motherboard. Hadn't realised I needed to unzip the download (rookie move!) Raspberry Pi came to the rescue - finally got booted into Windows 11! Almost done, graphics card on the way!

The ideal state of a computer, simple, streamlined, just a power supply in a case and a whole mess of wires. No motherboard or CPU or graphics card or any of that nonsense. One side open for optimal airflow

New motherboard, cpu, cooler and ssd sitting happily in the PC case. Before the nightmare of plugging everything back in, getting the old graphics card back in and getting nothing on a monitor.

It lives! Back end of a PC case and a monitor thankfully showing some signs of life

PC upgrade part 2, phase 2 - got the new bits into the case and plugged in. Disaster struck - didn't get any video signal on my monitor! Took a step back, slept on it, nicked the system speaker off my old motherboard the morning after to troubleshoot and found I'd just seated the RAM badly (phew!)

A PC motherboard with a shiny new CPU installed!

Thermal paste haphazardly added to a cpu in the classic 5 dot pattern

New motherboard with the CPU, SSD and dual tower cooler installed. Plus my be-socked foot for some reason

Phase 2 of my PC upgrade complete (somewhat pending seeing how it goes under normal use)
New motherboard, CPU and SSD are in, now on Windows 11 as well (less sure about it but don't have a huge amount of choice on that!) Was very nervous about the MoBo / CPU / cooler setup!

Deep Space Delivery Office by jhax Play in your browser

Followed through on some of my post jam plans for Deep Space Delivery Office!

v1.1.0 is live here:
jhax.itch.io/deep-space-d...

With:
-Better controls for transferring cargo
-A more relaxed mode
-More info on high scores
-A couple of bug fixes for Tankers & Shuttles
-Downloadable Windows version

My slow picking back up of the guitar is going great, slowly destroying my fingers relearning a solo that ends with a bunch of double stops

A guitar pick featuring the Italian flag and the text "Lacuna Coil"

Found a relic in my parents' loft, from the first gig I ever went to

Photo of a PC tower on a table along with a new power supply unit box and some other PC parts that have been parked for the time being

The inside of a PC tower, with the old power supply unit, horribly dusty, removed

Insides of a PC tower with some very slapdash cable management hooked up to a new power supply. Booting as far as BIOS, as shown on a monitor nearby

Insides of a PC with some slightly better cable management (and a power supply that isn't concerningly drooping down towards the motherboard and graphics card ant more). A nearby monitor shows a Windows login screen

The big "oh wow my PC's too old for Windows 11, maybe this is the push I need to upgrade" process has begun in earnest today! Was going to upgrade to an SSD but I didn't check exactly how adaptable the M.2 to PCI adapter I got was

Deep Space Delivery Office by jhax Play in your browser

Astonishingly, this isn't the game I made when the theme was Delivery, especially as I've been wanting to make a "run a post office" game for a while - here's my #LD57 entry, Deep Space Delivery Office
jhax.itch.io/deep-space-d...

Notepad that reads: LD 57 TODO Station shuttles DONE Pausing DONE Ensure uniqueness of symbols DONE Add base symbol to used codes list DONE End game handling DONE Consume upgrade on use DONE Penalties for maxing out planet cargos DONE Add fuel mechanics DONE Menus etc. DONE Space Station Spawning DONE Dynamic tutorialing DONE Code for Music (rip from plan bee?) DONE Code for sound effects DONE Sort out upgrade UI hot resizing DONE Adjust when upgrades are available (shuttles particularly) DONE Set some maximums for upgrade lists DONE Move Icons above UI DONE Cycling planet textures DONE Base rewards on distance / whether they have to be sorted SORT OF Space Station Sprite DONE Make probes act on a delay / give them an animation DONE Get ships to rotate SORT OF Music DONE LD image 640x512 DONE Itch Image 630x500 DONE Sound effects DONE Test Year Tick DONE Penalty SFX DONE Itch.io page DONE Ludum dare submission DONE Sorting Tutorial DONE Sorting Tooltip DONE More upgrades HOW MUCH IS MORE? More fun name generation ABANDONED :( Background startfield? ABANDONED Overload Tutorial ABANDONED BUGS Navigating to a planet you're already at DONE Browser saving seems to be falling over at the first hurdle? DONE

#LD57 complete - here is my final To Do list (I'll post the game tomorrow when I'm less knackered!)

Screenshot of a block of code that says "Get Best Spacecraft" then "return this"

The kind of self confidence we all deserve #LD57

Image shows a screenshot of a game window, proudly sporting a small green square in the top left corner of a larger black square

Aaaand we're off to the races
#LD57

A screenshot of a block of code. Crucially a variable, LOAD_COMPLETE is in a pair of brackets, missing an essential "if" before it

Off to a strong start with #LD57

Big "I'm setting LOAD_COMPLETE to true...why does SETUP keep getting called" hours

Finally started actually getting things rolling on upgrading my PC before Windows 10 support drops! First new bits have arrived and I've just gotten back into Mini Metro, so that'll be a nice way to put the graphics card through its paces when I get to that stage

A very tired man with a Bath Half finisher's medal

Finished my first half marathon at the Bath Half yesterday! Prepared to feel worn out all week XD

Blip Shepherd: Director's Cut by jhax Play in your browser

I've added another one of my early attempts at GameDev to itch - jhax.itch.io/blip-shepherd-directors-cut

It's an attempt at playing around with a herding mechanic based on Conway's Game of Life, I'm pretty happy with how it's held up! #IndieGame

Rotoshift by jhax Play in your browser

Spending my GameDev day this week on a bit of preservation work! Not much in the grand scheme of things, but even my clumsier early attempts at games are important to me - so in that light I've just added Rotoshift (my first non text based game) to itch!
jhax.itch.io/rotoshift