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I've been thinking a lot lately about the state of the internet and web tech. It's highly likely that you, dear reader, have heard of Dead Internet Theory. If not: the gist is that the vast majority of traffic on the internetcomes from bots and that most of the actual content (what a vile word) is algorithmically-generated, increasingly by generative AI. I want to believe thatthis theory is false, but as far as social networking goes it seems increasingly plausible. However, it's worth trying for a different future — onethat brings power back into the hands of the people and not the megacorps. Ream is a small contribution toward this goal.

I've been meaning to start actually writing about graphics programming (my day job) for a long time. This post isn't anything groundbreaking, but it's a really simple and quick technique that can be used to fake something akin to subsurface-scattering for toon and illustrative materials. I have meatier topics that I'm interested in covering, so consider this an amuse-bouche (though who knows when I'll get around to writing up that other stuff...)

After much handwringing, laziness, and generally just not working on it, the first issue of the zine is complete. I'm not going to promise any particular schedule or cadence to issues or updates, but it's my intent to produce more of these and hopefully convince other people to contribute their own works or at least contribute to future issues.

This post will mostly be a retread/revisiting of a talk I gave to the Albany IGDA chapter earlier in the year. There's some new stuff, and I've chosen to leave out some other stuff.

Pico-8 is what's referred to as a fantasy console: that is, it evokes the feelings of working with an old, 8-bit console (specifically something between an NES and Gameboy) without all of the pain of actually working with that hardware. I ended up with a copy of it because I bought the Voxatron Humble Bundle way back and at the time, buying Voxatron got you Pico-8 for free (this is still true at the time of writing this blog post).

Pico-8 is an interesting piece of software for a couple reasons: it has a lot of functionality in a very small package, it supports a very tight iteration loop, and it has limitations that encourage the user to think creatively and only about the problem at hand rather than getting hung up on abstractions and frameworks. In a lot of ways, Pico-8 is a modern day equivalent to BASIC. The surprisingly rich set of features it has, combined with ease of learning and use make it a very attractive tool to prototype and game jam in.

Today marks the day that hardc0ded launches. I have bigger things in mind for what I'd like this to become, but for now this is going to be a blog about the craft of game development.