Leon ._.

"Monkey patching" is honestly the best name for that thing you do in Javascript. It is just ape-like coding practice. I actually think the whole language would be truer to life if it was fully monkey-themed. Firefox's engine being called SpiderMonkey is already a good start.

All videogames have the implicit premise "what if the world worked like a videogame" and there's nothing they can do about it. But then, even paintings have the premise "what if the world worked like a painting (everyone reacts simultaneously to a nearby event while naked)".

I have only a few strong opinions on the Metroid series but I cannot condone recommending Zero Mission first because you will encounter all the music and setpieces it copied from Super Metroid and thus think it's more creative than it actually is.

22 Sept

https://modarchive.org/index.php?request=view_player&query=193485 - Favourite parts of The Ur-Quan Masters (fka Star Control II) are when you're majestically exploring a galaxy at war, getting messaged by a new undiscovered faction, and finding out that their theme music sounds like this

17 Sept

Today in CSS: We all know you can change the highlight colour of selected text, but it's impossible to animate that colour. Unless… the colour was just a variable inherited from the parent element, using @property to make it animatable… Hahahahaha…

14 Sept

"Don't ask me how I know. You should ask me *who* I know." –the talking boulder from Void Stranger on LinkedIn

Recently I've been brushing up on web technology, and not just the new stuff like position-anchor, but old stuff that could have been the future but wasn't. Just now I taught myself XPath and document.evaluate() for basically no reason.

Did you know that browsers in 2026 still have strict XHTML parsers and error messages for application/xhtml+xml content? (I went and confirmed this with iframes and Blob URLs without needing to make an actual local HTTP server.)

To me Ocarina Of Time 2026 feels less like a remake and more like merch of the original game, but in videogame form

They call me the Shadow-Shrouded Prince of Not Posting

25 Aug

Epic new idea for protecting your blog posts from LLM training: write them entirely in really-small-font-size ASCII art

11 Aug

Little Known Song Continuity Crossover: The song "Danny Boy" is about a boy who went down to the woods on the day of the Teddy Bears' Picnic

I've been thinking about how card games and card-game-adjacent roguelikes tend to have two kinds of counterintuitively opposing systems - "diversifying systems" that force the player to diversity their moves, and "specialising systems" that force the player to restrict them.

Most roguelikes already have a built-in specialising system in the form of limited item and weapon drops. 868-BACK and its predecessors accompany this (in this case, limited prog drops) with a diversifying system of 2 currencies that you must balance.

Interestingly, because you have easy access to both currencies in equal measure, the seemingly-similar 2-colour system actually serves the opposite purpose as it does in MTG.

The big example is Magic The Gathering - its specialising system is the 5 colour system that restricts your access to card currency, and its diversifying system is the 4-of-a-kind rule that forces you to have a diversity of card names.

Basically, each of these work to restrict your deck choices from different directions - to force decks out of a narrow category (card names) but to stay within a broad category (card colours) - to pen them into a middle ground of overall diversity.

I think it's funny that when a citizen is forced to do something by the government, it's called an order, but when a constitutional monarch is forced to do something by the government, it's called "advice".

17 July

New Deltarune characters are certainly not going to be coming back in later chapters, so while I'm happy they had their time in the sun, I'm sad that an incredible Aqua-Lancer pesterlog will never happen.

16 July

Thinking about what makes me like 868-HACK and 868-BACK so much, and while the core mechanics of alerts and encounters are really fresh and satisfying to grasp, the one huge reason is simply the cyberpunk setting. That by itself holds everything together and gives it beauty.

16 July

Not just in terms of audiovisually being not just another fantasy game, but also cyber elegantly framing the basic mechanics. The endless hordes of identical mindless spawning enemies are effortlessly explained, to the point of feeling unquestionable, by a cyber world setting.

28 June

*finds out there's an Isle of Life painting that's the opposite of Isle of the Dead* Folks, Böcklin has jumped the shark

22 June

Yeah, you BET I'm hurriedly replaying Deltarune. My new favourite underappreciated character is the secret shopping UI white tiger face.

22 June

Ashamed to report I took 6 tries on Knight going in cold. Don't unfollow me I swear remembering strats is harder than it looks

22 June

I love games that make you wanna become the wiki for them

17 June

Reading the ImageMagick command line manual

7 June

Alright, the game's been out long enough, time to post insular nonsense and relatable made-uppery #868-BACK

fairysvoice.netHow to Play 868-BACK: Beginner Tipsby Leon

5 June

fairysvoice.net/blog/How_to_... - Hey! If you're playing 868-BACK and are still coming to grips with the game, here's a new blog post with some tips for beginner play. I'm hoping there's something here that might get you up and running on both feet.

A big design thought I've been having about 868-BACK is how it takes a game with stage-spanning power progression (on each 8-floor stage, you start with few progs and slowly gain more as you fight through) and adds a second, run-spanning power progression system (devices) to it.

So, there it is: a way to make run-based progression and stage-based progression, two different kinds of power curves, integrate with each other, without the former drowning out or trivialising the latter.

Honestly, even to me the game's dev connecting system had felt a little arbitrary on first blush, but on subsequent blushes it's clear that it does a lot of important work with very little!

This progression also matches your opponent's equivalent to devs– the bonus powerups. All powerups start enabled from floor 1 because normally the basic enemies don't meaningfully change or increase in power. Your opponent's stage power curve is always flat, with or without them.

The other thing is, unlike progs, you always get a full pick of your obtained devs to enable. The devs could have been scattered into the sector, needing to be siphoned like progs, but then they'd start competing with progs for resources and disrupting the base system.

(To analogise this with Balatro or something, imagine if at the start of each ante, your five Jokers were disabled, and then you picked one to re-enable for small blind, then two more each at big blind and the boss. That's what this system resembles.)

Thus, even if you have a ton of devices with super-strong passives, you still "start" each stage with 0 devices, *just like* how you start with 1 or 2 prog. Even as your run progression keeps increasing, the *stage* progression still has roughly the same curve!

To me, the huge thing that makes it work (which had already been locked in to the design before I'd started balance testing 2 years ago) is the system of connecting devices. You start floor 1 with all your obtained devices off, and have to pick one to enable (connect) each floor.

store.steampowered.comSave 10% on 868-BACK on Steam868-BACK is a computer-hacking strategy roguelike game where your mission is to dismantle capitalism one server at a time! Use hacking powers to fight enemies, steal the servers' data, and face increa...

Hey! For the past quite-awhile I've been playtesting 868-BACK store.steampowered.com/app/3304110/86 8BACK/ It's the sequel to 868-HACK, one of my lifetime favourite minimalist traditional roguelikes, and let me personally guarantee you, this one's absolutely even better. It has the stuff in spades.

Anyway, I'll probably say more, and maybe share a few beginner tips, a little later, but for now: I encourage you to try for high scores!! Rest assured, there are rewards to be had for pushing yourself, and strange new challenges to discover.

(Also, credit to @visager.bsky.social for stocking up the new stuff in the game with new sound effects! There's a couple of funny ones in there for a couple of funny events, but they're all great quality.)

Now, arcade-style scoring was a huge part of the previous game, and one of my favourite aspects. Everyone will talk about the emergent combos and systems, but my biggest focus throughout testing was making very sure that the scoring *made sense*.

Making sure that everything that gave big points was correspondingly difficult, and that every scoring build was relatively close together in terms of point yield. I'm really satisfied with where it's at - a LOT of design pinholes had to be threaded to make things just right.

9 May

Mario Maker 2 out of context

26 Apr

"How can you people live with yourselves" - Me remembering that North Americans call the room with the toilet the bathroom

23 Apr

Seems everyone's talking about Titanium Court now that it's released. …And, as it turns out, I /also/ have a release review of the game at the ready. Here's my *gameplay-only* review, its two "tides", and whether the most effective strategy is fun or not. fairysvoice.net/blog/A_gamep...

18 Apr

@foddy.net

17 Apr

If the web platform is standardised then explain THIS

30 Mar

I was just browsing Twitter, and right while I was reading, it started auto-translating Japanese tweets without my asking and I had to click the "Show original" button to turn it off.