Author: Jacob

I’ve been surviving for so long. This is the construct I’ve built to be okay. Doing things on the computer; setting goals and crushing them. Here’s a metaphorical story: I’m on a flight to the next stage of my life. The plane crashes. I survive. The people helping me are in turmoil. I survive. I…

I’m noticing that being able to play faster makes this more of a rage game, like playing Getting Over It on PC. It really has a similar flavor to Getting Over It. I hope there’s a way to cleanly fall back to the beginning, if not I’ll have to practice.

I just discovered that Punishment isn’t supposed to be agonizingly slow. I assumed it was part of the challenge. I’ve been playing on my Windows XP laptop (because it runs natively), but today I tried playing it on my main laptop and it runs at 60 fps! Time to get good!

Today I finished reading Blink by Malcolm Gladwell. I started to write about it, but then I realized I had more to say about reading on Kindle than about Blink. It’s an excellent book and I thoroughly enjoyed it. This post won’t do it justice, so you should read it yourself. Ok, about reading on…

Perhaps in mowing the lawn of words, I’ve missed the wildflowers. A few years ago, I read On Writing Well by William Zinsser and it overhauled how I think about writing. My main takeaway was to ruthlessly delete. To purge useless words, poor sentences, and unwieldy paragraphs; to trim the verge, evening, noon, and night.…

Typing on an unplugged keyboard. It’s oddly nice. I can type whatever I want. Watching letters go straight to the void. Typos don’t matter. I’m the only one who knew they existed. Or did they exist in the first place? What’s the point of function keys? I would at least want the enter key. Punctuation?…

Hey, I just watched this video by Savannah Brown. It’s the most real conversation I’ve seen in a long time, a level of realness I aspire to. Allow me to set the stage: (Excerpt from another essay:) I want to use tools of the past to create games of the future, games where you feel…

What kind of game could you guarantee finishing in 10 minutes? Seriously, I’d be thrilled to see. Here’s mine. I think this is an interesting question because it’s at the heart of what it means to finish games. The decision process involved in finishing a 10-minute game is a condensed version of the process to…

I’ve found a perfect tool for writing interactive text games! It’s called Ink and it’s free and open source. I normally use Windows Batch, but I’ve been looking for something cross-platform. I’ve briefly used Inform and Twine, and Ink is somewhere in the middle. I think of Inform as being on the far left of…

Hey! Today marks one year of daily posting! Who would’ve thought when I wrote, “I might also continue tomorrow if I’m having fun” that I’d end up here? I wanted to do something to celebrate, so I played my ukulele, blew bubbles outside, ate some gummy worms, and listened to my favorite music on repeat.…

Today I read The War of Art by Steven Pressfield. The central theme is the idea of resistance, a force which prevents people from making creative works and becoming their truest selves. I really liked the book, but the idea of resistance didn’t resonate with me. It was still a motivating read and I’d definitely…

Hey, just wanted to say that game development isn’t always difficult. I see most people online (including me) talking about problems and roadblocks, but sometimes there are moments when everything’s coming together. Earlier today I was working on a project and everything was going smoothly and my creative expression was flowing and it felt so…