GameLab · October 23
Carve Night
A pumpkin carving simulator. Cut the lid, scoop out the goop, carve a face, and light a candle. Then line your pumpkins up on a porch and turn the lights out.
Now
What I’m working on now.
This morning’s post was about a pumpkin. You carve it. Seven, the little robot from my other projects, sits at the end of the table and tries to copy your cuts. He never quite gets there.
Updated
The day job
Principal engineer at Helix by Q2.
By day, I’m a principal engineer at Helix by Q2. The road there runs from SmartyPig to CorePro to Helix, and I was the original engineer behind CorePro.
On the bench this month
Seven keeps getting new jobs.
FlyLab · October 23
The Connectome League Almanac
The fly brain soccer game now has a club guide. Four robot clubs, four founding stories, six named rivalries, and forty years of history in a night orchard. All of the lore is made up. The game uses real fruit-fly wiring data in browser simulations.
GameLab · October 21 and 22
Starlight Menagerie
A zoo inside a space station, laid out like Omaha’s Henry Doorly Zoo. An asteroid hits, every animal gets out, and Seven has to find the last escape pod. It now has its own encyclopedia of 53 species.
CityLab · In progress
Shoreline Limited
Browser cities you reach by train. In the first ride, Seven boards at Granite Pass and rides down through the forest and along the coast into the city of Calder.
The question I keep coming back to
The worlds keep getting bigger.
“When you build a game world and fill it with this much lore, what do you do with it all?”
From the Starlight Menagerie encyclopedia post, October 22
A game gets built. Then it gets a trailer. Then a whole encyclopedia starts growing around it. I don’t have the answer yet. For now, I made a book you can poke around in.
Follow along
A new post most mornings.
I write about each build in Advisory Hour, my Substack. In October, a new post has gone out nearly every morning. The site keeps a copy of each one.
Advisory Hour on SubstackBrowse the archive
This is a “now page,” an idea from Derek Sivers. It changes as the work moves. About now pages