Ok. So I lied about blogs. They’re still dead. Also, did you hear about Flash? A shame that. Truly an end to an era.

Textmode, ASCII art, PETSCII art, etc., however, is having a bit of a moment in the sun and you know I’m into it. Let’s catch up on the last couple of years of blog silence.

Flash is Dead for Real This Time

I’m still salty about Flash being killed. It’s highly unlikely I’ll rework all of the projects on this site to JavaScript, though any new projects and demos will be HTML5. I’ll have to make some time to go through the process of deleting (what us in the biz call “sunsetting”) the games that now essentially deliver dead plug-in shells.

Blogs are Dead But You Can Still Read Them

Do you remember when the Internet felt like something everyone owned, and no one owned? This weird, both sprawling and intimate agglomeration of odd sites and fledgling platforms. And now those platforms have fledged and taken flight and we are cast in their shadow. Google decides Reader is no longer a fun project for them, they kill it. Adobe decides Flash is ash, they not only discontinue it, they outright retroactively block it. Who does that? Megalomaniacs, that’s who.

Textmode

It should come as no surprise that I’m a fan of this ancient art form. Only I didn’t know of its origins or of PETSCII–based art or what can more generally be described as Textmode art.

I tried to get into doing my own textmode stuff before, but it turns out alls I needed was an editor with the ability to rotate and flip tiles (don’t tell the purists). Enter Playscii, which also has great support for custom tile sets, palettes, animations, and even tile sets with more than 256 glyphs (also don’t tell the purists).

Here are Some Things I’m Working On

This is a thing:

This is another thing:

(more on these soon)

Guildmaster?

The short of it: paused.

The long of it: I spent quite a long time on world generation, UI design, and even name generation, but never quite got the core loop of the game to be something I was happy with. I started down the path of a large design restructure and simplification but it’s been hard to stay motivated on a long-form project this past year. I did pick up ukulele, electric guitar, and am gardening a lot more!

Nolithius in 2021

Could be an unofficial new year’s resolution or a result of Flash having finally been killed or a growing disillusion with social media or a re-broadening of interests partly brought upon by the pandemic but in any case I have resolved to accomplish the following in 2021:

• Blog more
• Release a new game
• Restructure Guildmaster
• Get good at music
• Garden more

Cheers!