Joel Auterson
Hello! My name's Joel and I'm a software developer. No, not that one.
I run a tiny indie game studio called Bearwaves. I'm also a published poet.
I'm part of the Rare Mammals collective, and am an alumnus of Southbank New Poets and Barbican Young Poets. I work in the games industry.
Everything tagged with 'dev'
Playing Metaphor: ReFantazio which has some of the most stunning UI work I’ve ever seen. Meanwhile I can’t get the text boxes to reflow properly in my own game engine.
Got my layout being actually flexible now with preferred dimensions, expand, and fill. Alignment next. Loosely basing it on GTK because I like using GTK!
Starting to get the flexible layout stuff implemented in Growl, my pet game engine. Very early days yet!
Chuckling at this from the new Steam update.
I’ve been running this website on IndieWeb principles and tech for over a year now, so I thought it was time for an updated edition.
Finally got around to reconfiguring the debug UI in Growl, rendering the game scene into an Imgui window - starting to look like a real engine now.
Just got myself unstuck from a tricky Lua-C interop thing that I’d been going round in circles on for weeks now. Pleased!
Can anyone recommend a Google Analytics alternative that isn’t a privacy nightmare for a personal website?
Been playing with shader support in Growl - shaders can now be edited in realtime, and have built in uniforms like resolution and time. Goal is to be able to paste in whatever from Shadertoy and have it work!
A thoroughly wasted evening trying to make Wi-Fi work on a Raspberry Pi Zero. I’ve been using Linux for nearly two decades and Wi-Fi still baffles me.
Very pleased to discover several games recently ported to the Epic store are using eos4j!
breathe in, breathe out, new Krazam
Might ship a game tomorrow
Just submitted the final build of Feud 2.0 for review to the stores. It’s real, it’s happening, we’re doing it
A bit buggy but I now have Lua scripting inside Growl’s debug UI!
Some lunchtime shader learning
Not sure yet if we’ll get any kind of boost from visibility on Steam when we leave Early Access but here’s hoping.
I just realised that Feud has crossed the 70,000 players mark! Very pleased
Just spent ages messing around with diagram software trying to get my network diagram to look right, only to give up and just do it on a whiteboard and take a picture of it. My handwriting aside, it’s far more readable
Working out who to contact for press stuff in games now seems so much harder than it did five years ago. How does this work? Who do I talk to? Aaaahhh
brid.gy’s Bluesky integration now supports publishing! This post was published by Bridgy! Wow! There’s some code of mine in there, do have a go.
Any games press types On Here who would like to try out a prerelease build of Feud 2.0? Get in touch if so!
Quite a nice day of Feud polishing and bug fixing. Still got a couple of localisations to review and import but other than that I’m feeling good about the release on the 23rd!
Me when I start reading Perl documentation
brid.gy I would obviously keep, because brid.gy is incredible
What I think I’d like is some sort of simple web server that sits next to Hugo and provides the Micropub/Webmention endpoints and serves the site. I think having the content live in Git rather than a DB is definitely something I’d want to keep.
So at this point I’ve got:
- Hugo website hosted on GitHub Pages, deployed by GitHub Actions
- Micropub and media endpoints running on AWS Lambda, with API Gateway stuff
- Brid.gy to syndicate things and backfeed interactions
- Webmention.io to collect webmentions
Does it work? Yes! Is it better than if I’d just written a fucking server? hahahaha no
I ended up moving my Micropub endpoint from DigitalOcean to Lambda - I usually prefer working on DO (the AWS console/config is just painful) but the lack of support for custom domains, plus the 1MB limit on POST requests, kind of made the choice obvious.
If you’re reading this post on Mastodon, it’s gone through a fairly baroque sequence of steps:
- A Micropub endpoint running as a serverless function
- Hugo to build for my website
- A hacky GHA script to run the publishing
- brid.gy to do the actual publishing.
Still, it’s nice to be able to write on my static site and have it syndicated without touching Git.
eos4j v1.2.0 has been released! This new version adds support for the Ecom
interface in Epic Online Services. It also fixes a bug with conversion from
timestamps to Java Date objects.
Quite liking where I’ve got my Vim setup to now. I don’t really miss an IDE, which is a first.
I replaced the debug cat image in Growl with a picture of our actual cat. So long debug cat, you served us well.
Well, there’s still a fair amount of work to do - bugs to fix, translations to review - but as of today Feud is feature-complete for graduating from Early Access. It’s nearly eight years since we started working on it - longer than my professional game development career lasted!
🦦 test note pls ignore 🦦
Just played a tiny prototype of what might well become the next Bearwaves game and I am very energised.
I’ve lost two entire days of work to Terraform lockfile nonsense
My “weekend project” of implementing Bluesky support into Bridgy is finally, several months later, complete! Ish.
I do most of my daily work in Vim, and by this point I find it quite hard to use anything else, but for writing that isn’t code (or, let’s be real, mostly YAML these days) it could be a lot better.
eos4j v1.1.0 has been released! This new version features support for the Leaderboards interface in Epic Online Services.
Had my first report on eos4j this weekend from someone actually using it in their game! Very exciting.
I worked at Improbable in 2019, when Unity tried to change their TOS to screw us over. They ended up backtracking and put their TOS on GitHub, saying they would not change TOS retroactively.
It appears to be gone.
https://www.reddit.com/r/gamedev/comments/16hnibp/unity_silently_removed_their_github_repo_to_track/
lol, lmao
Since launching on the Epic store a couple of months ago, Feud has had something like 28,000 new players. That feels significant!
I always get a kick out of explaining to people how #golang’s magical, mildly terrifying timestamp formatting works.
Thinking of writing a GitHub bot to replace me at work that just comments “could you please split this up” on every PR.
Been attempting to integrate a native C library into a Java project and it’s proving to be a total nightmare, even with jnigen. Once again cursing myself for choosing to write a game in Java.
I’ve gone down into the depths these last couple of weeks with IndieWeb, POSSE and a whole bunch of other arcane terminology. Now that I’ve come up for air, let’s chat about it.
I struggled recently to work out how to build an APK out of a native Android app without using Gradle.
I use an app called Daylio as a diary and a mood tracker. It’s really good! I recommend it.
I also use an app called Habit to track things I want to do every day, like “stay off social media” or “work on a project”.
Notarization is required as of macOS 10.15 (Catalina), and it’s a bit of a minefield - doubly so for a Java application, or anything built outside Xcode.
The newest version of macOS (well, that’s out) has caused a lot of issues for a lot of people, game developers especially. I’ll write about my notarization woes in a separate post, but this should help address quite a specific issue.
I’ve been reading a lot about PICO-8 recently, and found it really interesting. For the uninitiated, PICO-8 is a ‘fantasy console’ - a games console which exists purely as a program and set of development tools, rather than a real piece of hardware. Developers can create games for PICO-8 which are small enough to be embedded directly into a .png image, which is really cool.
I had great fun last month writing a Reddit bot that pretended to be DJ Khaled. It’s been running ever since, but I thought it was about time to extend Khaled’s internet empire into another social media service. The obvious candidate: Tinder.
I’d wanted to make a Reddit bot for a little while, really just as a toy project, and finding the excellent PRAW library for Python (as well as finally having some time off) gave me the kick I needed to get it done. It’s also April Fool’s Day, so I thought I’d make something a bit stupid.
The game development landscape has changed significantly over the last few years (understatement of the century, but whatever). One of the most significant of these changes , especially for game developers - though it’s one that often goes unnoticed - is the rise of screen resolution and aspect ratio fragmentation.
Before I begin, I should point out: Uplift isn’t dead. The Kickstarter for Uplift is dead. Sensationalist title, I know. Let’s pretend I’ve been learning how to be a journalist. Because having a blog definitely makes me a journalist, right? Ahem.