@grumpygamer - found some old MacAddict magazines from 1998. Throwback to a time when interactive media, multimedia and educational games were a thing.

@grumpygamer - sometimes you periodically recall the glory days of 6502 coding in assembly. I’m curious what you enjoyed about it? How productive/fast were you with it? And if you ever see yourself writing assembly (new or old) again or is there largely no need to go back to it with modern languages? I’m teaching myself 6502 to learn the pain and respect of what people wrote back in the day but it’s soooo tedious so I don’t know how anyone could enjoy it but people do!

Prototyping a #bladerunner inspired match-3 #mobile game using the #defold engine and scripted in #lua. Featuring music, and sound bytes from the movie. https://deckarep.itch.io/match-runner

This is a fun “cooperatively scheduled” animation test using TypeScript and Love2D to process animation files from the DeloresEng repo by Terrible Toybox. Code handles animation .json files with layers, looping, offsets. #thimbleweedpark, #delores, #scummvm /cc @grumpygamer @DavidBFox …thought you might get a kick out of the music choice. So many ideas spinning through my head about this engine.

@grumpygamer - what is your opinion on unit-testing the games you build? I don’t see any unit-tests for game logic in Delores but what about in the engine itself? I know it can be useful and can make sense in certain places but not all.

@grumpygamer - in some of your talks you mentioned that the older games could take hours to compile. When I heard that I assumed it was just “older” tech for the time period but actually was a big part of it because of your walk-box compiler step to do “connectivity”? If you didn’t have to do this at comptime maybe it would have shaved off a lot of that time? Do the new games do this at runtime? Brilliant optimization to handle this at comptime for the older games! Read about in Scumm tutorial.

@grumpygamer - looking at 30 year old decompiled SCUMM code vs new Delores API code…if you squint your eyes it looks very much like the same pattern of engine design from long ago. If ain’t broke… My question is aside from languages/architecture evolving would you say my observation is accurate or have you employed any new innovations/paradigms in the newer games that you didn’t do back then? I continue to be fascinated with the technical aspects of your work so hope the question is welcome.

@grumpygamer - after I’ve been writing Lua code for a month I’m throwing in the towel and switching to TypeScript. Curious if you considered typescript or how you feel about type-safety and/or generics in the context of a scripting for games? With typescript, type-safety is opt-in and not enforced for the most part so then it looks practically like Dinky or Squirrel. Dial up type safety and compiler catches a lot more up front. I don’t need to tell you the benefits but curious on your opinion.

@grumpygamer - in a few interviews you’ve done you say you much prefer making games rather than playing them (paraphrasing). May I ask: do you prefer more the game engine development side or the game design logic/puzzle/scripting side of the game itself? If it’s both, how much time do you split between these areas?

@grumpygamer - very general question: in the realm of building parsers/compilers what books, tools, courses helped you get started in this domain? Also, do you use parser generators or perhaps hand-roll the typical recursive descent parsers? Curious what you did back in the Scumm days vs now. New to Mastadon, and it’s weird.