The project wizard

Here’s something I find software increasingly doing that irritates me a little bit: the startup project wizard. For an example, look at just modern programming IDEs like PyCharm, RAD gamedev tools like Unity and GameMaker Studio and even newer versions of the pentesting-focused HTTP proxy tool Burpsuite. Open any of these programs and you’ll be greeted by a project wizard. Before you can actually use the program to do any programming/gamedev/traffic interception/etc, you have to go through a bunch of menus to create a new project with...

Review: Getting Over It with Bennett Foddy

A game I made for a certain kind of person. To hurt them. Getting Over It with Bennett Foddy Steam store description There’s a scene in Philip K Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? in which protagonist Rick Deckard uses a VR device to experience the feeling of climbing up a mountain. Through this device, he and thousands of others see and hear what the climber sees and hears and more importantly, feel what the climber feels as he is hit by falling stones. This practice is a core ritual in...

Review: Finding Paradise

Finding Paradise is the long-awaited sequel to 2011’s To The Moon, a game I reviewed previously and greatly enjoyed. Like its predecessor, Finding Paradise is a story about memory, love and regret, told through a sci-fi lens and presented as a low-res JRPG without any RPG elements. In both games, you play agents of Sigmund Corp, a company that offers a memory alteration service to elderly clients. People with regrets or unfulfilled dreams and aspirations tell Sigmund how they wish their life had gone, and Sigmund sends a couple of...

Announcing Trollcave

I’ve added something new to the Games page, but – like a couple of other things on that page – whether it qualifies as a game depends on what you mean by “game”. It has a clearly defined objective, multiple stages of progression and requires you to expend effort towards no useful end, so I’m going to call it a game. Also I don’t want to make a “Vulnerable VMs” page on this website – at least not until I make a second one. Trollcave is a...

How I publish this blog

At the request of a couple of readers, here’s a post all about how the sausage is made. Some of this content can be found in the Hugo documentation and various online tutorials, but here it’s all linked together and contextualised. I still recommend reading other tutorials if you really want to set something like this up though, as I’m not going into exhaustive detail about everything here. A table of contents is provided below for the convenience of those interested only in one or two sections of the...