Diary 2018-12-29

By Max Woerner Chase

I finally read some more of the manual for the PICO-8, and was therefore able to cut down considerably on the size of the spritesheet, so that's good. The next thing to do is to start working on the various update and draw functions, but those should be easy once I kick myself into actually working on them.

I also played games today.

The Minecraft I've been playing has been a skyblock pack focused around crops. Since I've gotten most of the crops done (the obvious stuff missing is a lot of HarvestCraft stuff, and emerald, which relies on HarvestCraft stuff), I've started actually exploring the mods I went and got the resources for. I've progressed a little way in Astral Sorcery and Immersive Engineering. What I think would be a cool way forward with this would be to make independent "islands" associated with different mods, and connect them to the center island with steel cables so I can try out the skyhook for getting around. One obstacle to this is that I'm not super-great at elaborate builds in general, especially not aesthetic builds, especially not in a skyblock context. But I'd like to learn. Maybe find some pictures of factories and such for the Immersive Engineering island.

I got through whichever bit of 7 Billion Humans was bothering me, and suddenly it's showing off how weird the variance in objectives can get. Sometimes I'm leveraging pathfinding and general dynamism, and other times I'm basically writing one program per worker, and it kind of has no pattern I can discern so far? It's really peculiar. I feel like I'd somewhat prefer to have the ability to use later instructions on old puzzles.

I'm learning a bit more about Erlang, but I think I'd be served well to start looking into coding challenges to try to apply it to. Maybe take a look at Advent of Code stuff, since I've been remembering that it exists.

It's late, and I have to do stuff in the morning. Good night.