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Goals progress

At the beginning of this year, I posted a set of goals for the first half of the year. The idea was that a public commitment would help me stick to them. With that period behind us, it’s time to see how I did. Ranked on a scale of 0 to 1:

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Twistago AI, part 1: Easy

This is the first part of a three-part series in which I explain how the artificial intelligence works in my latest game, Twistago. The AI has three different levels: easy, normal and hard. This is also the order in which I developed them, each level building upon the lessons and code of the previous, so it’s only natural that I do this writeup in that order as well, starting with the Easy level.

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Twistago has launched!

As I alluded to in a previous post, Mystery Game No. 1 is no longer a mystery. It is called Twistago and it’s the best thing since… well… the second best thing! I actually pushed the button for global launch almost two weeks ago, but didn’t have time for a proper announcement until now.

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Terrain variations in Dragon Attack

Earlier this week, I added some variations to the procedural terrain in Dragon Attack.

Previously, the landscape was generated one segment at a time, forming a “chain” of rotated sprites. Each segment would have the same slope as the previous one, plus or minus a random number. To avoid going off the screen, the random number would be biased downwards near the top, and upwards near the bottom. This system worked great, but it made it pretty hard to implement variety in the terrain. For example, with just the previous height and slope as your “state”, how would you generate a mountain range?

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Building a multilingual website in Jekyll

Jekyll is a great tool for creating (mostly) static websites; in fact this very site is built upon it. But it doesn’t come with built-in support for using multiple languages. This is a feature I needed for the website of Mystery Game No. 1, which will be released in German and English. I had to invent how to do it, because existing approaches didn’t quite fit the bill.

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Making of Morphing Maria

Princesses, snakes, and bears, oh my! In the form of Princess Maria, or some other form, make your way through 10 levels to save your fiancé, Plumber Pete, from the claws of an evil monster! Taking inspiration from The Talos Principle, Portal, Sokoban and a certain classic platformer, Morphing Maria is a top-down puzzle game in which you change shape to accomplish your goals. Each shape brings unique abilities that help you reach the exit.

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