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goeshard.org

  • in gamedev
  • 8 min read

A Summer of Gamedev Burn Out

It's become the Summer of falling out of love with gamedev for me or maybe it's just another temporary round of significant burn out.

Something about web projects that's very different from working on games is how rapidly a new feature on the web either lives or dies. You can knock out something cool in a weekend or less and get it online and see what people are going to do with it. But a game requires a plan of adding up many private victories that don't amount to anything on their own and which players can't appreciate properly until you spend months at minimum -- often years -- lining it all up.

In this post, I'll show you thoroughly with lots of clips what unfinished thing I built this Summer.

  • in meta
  • 4 min read

Updates Coming to the Board

It's been over a year since I touched the board.goeshard.org codebase. When I got into game development, it didn't leave a lot of time for webdev projects. Something that made it easy to move away from was, literally no one used the board back then. Now people sometimes use it.

Who knows how long that will last but I have some new ideas.

  • in music
  • 2 min read

Let's Listen to Fuckboy Rap

This is the only Nettspend song I fw. In this post I will expose you to cloud rap, teenage hyperpop, drillnb, and the most hilarious fuckboy fail in all of modern underground rap.

Adapting the Futhorc

The Futhorc was the original writing system for English. Theorized to have derived from the Etruscan alphabet, it was widespread across northern Europe until finally being supplanted by the Latin alphabet sometime around the 13th century. It was typically written on wood, to the frustration of modern archaeologists as only the rare stone or metal inscriptions have survived.

  • in meta
  • 1 min read

What's Next For the Site?

Recently I've been experimenting with a lot of different types of posting from different authors and aliases. The direction of the blog kind of jumped from just being a place to throw my sporadic gamedev and technology articles that would come out every month or so while I was more focused on making software into: "I will publish anything that someone wants to write for the site."

After asking people to consider contributing, it occurred to me that the best way I could make this look appealing was to write about other people on the Internet everyday. After all, what better way to make the site seem open to different kinds of articles than to feature different kinds of sites and people. I think that went really well. I'm not ashamed to admit that A True Story of Dead Internet is one of the best articles on the site and I didn't write it. I would love it if more people wanted to write as many quality posts here as that.

However, writing everyday to upkeep the appearance of a site that covers a wide range of topics and has many different writers where anything could happen is taking a lot out of me! Don't get me wrong, I've enjoyed it, but I have software that's waiting for me to get back to writing it.

This isn't the end but we might be slowing down for a while. Submissions are always open of course.

  • in links
  • 4 min read

Digging Up Y2K Era Cam Girl Blogs

In the early 2000s, there was a race to be the next Stileproject (the wikipedia article should catch you up) and every noname E/N site was adding cam portals, writing about cam girls, and hoping to strike Internet gold in the process.

Notice: She has a roms section, she has a phpbb section. She has all kinds of content.

A "camgirl site" wasn't really what you imagine today. It was closer to a girl with an Instagram and a Snapchat in terms of content -- the main difference being that she was generally interested in web design, was willing to teach herself to get a site up, and would then affiliate with portals for traffic and accept gifts from Amazon wishlists. She was almost always a college student studying the same kinds of subjects other people with websites were studying. Image quality was very low back then. Having full videos was the dream of a few years later. So these girls were also writers.

Let's look at some of these camgirl sites.

  • in opinion
  • 10 min read

A True Story of Dead Internet

Unmistakable Midjourney version 3 style

The term Dead Internet Theory has been floating around lately. The main gist is that as bots have become more prevalent, they’ve started to replace human interaction online. One might think that computer-generated content would be easy to spot, and in many cases you would be right. However much like how ChatGPT became very adept at creating banal HR dribble, it proved less that AI is capable of human speech, but more so that HR isn’t able to generate content that advances beyond basic predictive text.

  • in gamedev
  • 3 min read

Snow Deformation (with Godot)

Snow deformation is a cool effect where as you walk in snow, it deforms it in a trail along where you walk. There's a handful of different ways this can be done. Here I cover a way using particle effects, an orthogonal camera and a Shader on the deformed surface.

Intercepting Requests to Unlock Hidden Functionality

When you fill out a form on a website and hit submit, your browser constructs a POST request and sends it to the website so that it can decide what to do with that information. It would contain not only the data you entered into the form but information about your login session and a cross-site request forgery token (hopefully).

If you're interested in understanding a website's functionality, capturing requests as they exit your browser lets you examine how to effectively interact with the site, as these requests are crafted by developers to elicit successful responses. You can use this insight to create custom requests, which can sometimes yield intriguing results.

Let's look at how to do that with a simple example.

  • in meta
  • 4 min read

Do You Want to Guest Post an Article for Goeshard.Org?

It's been a while since I've done a meta post. Most of the time when I write, it's to nerd out over whatever programming project I'm working on. For the past year that's been just a lot of gamedev posts. But when I first imagined goeshard.org, this place was intended to be a hub of art, music, programming, and other DIY web projects.

I know when a lot of people set out to make an independent website their mentality is very much, "Welcome to my personal space!" That wasn't really the goal for this site. I wanted goeshard.org to be a celebration of various things across the web in general, but as working on games is very time consuming work, it's what I spend the majority of my free time thinking about. It's naturally what ends up being the primary content of the site.

Having more guest writers could be the element that elevates goeshard.org to coming closer to what I imagined and covering more topics.

  • in gamedev
  • 6 min read

Untitled Adventure in Cute Fantasy Farm?

In my brief gamedev career, I've become known for short, brutally difficult arcade games. When you're developing a game like that, it adds a certain amount of high stress once you're ready to release. You want the player to like it. You want the game to be difficult. Both of these things align very narrowly on stars when someone is really good at game design. So with the new game, that pressure is something I wanted to take out.

I'm officially in my cozy gamedev era with this new prototype.

It's been called a surrealist masterpiece by a real person.

A playable feedback request version is AVAILABLE TODAY.

  • in gamedev
  • 7 min read

Super Shirtless Guy World Postmortem

Back in December I started a platformer prototype. In February I entered it into a marathon game jam, which is an exercise where participants enter an existing project that they'd like to push themselves to finish and everyone presents their work a month later.

What became of this project is Super Shirtless Guy World, which I consider to be a massive failure despite the game working and being relatively bug free. Basically no one understands it or likes it. In this post I'm going to try to cope but also figure out how I might avoid several pitfalls in the future.

From Firefox to Ungoogled Chromium

Classic Firefox Icon

This past Wednesday Mozilla dropped a bombshell.

When you upload or input information through Firefox, you hereby grant us a nonexclusive, royalty-free, worldwide license to use that information.

Ungoogled Chromium Red Icon

For many years I was very proud to be a Mozilla user. Over time I came to think of them as the lesser of two evils. And now, I just don't want anything to do with them.

I switched to Ungoogled Chromium and inside are some details.

  • in music
  • 4 min read

Grandmother's Country Music, Honky Tonk

Hank Williams Sr

I couldn't begin to tell you what a modern country song sounds like or who the artists would be. I scarcely remember the names of 90s country artists I heard as a child from my mother's radio, which I regularly listened to with my cousins and family.

By age 13, I had completely discarded county music. I moved from punk rock, to hardcore, to emo, to ska, to dancehall, to vaporwave, to witch house, to cloud rap, to hyperpop. You name it, but the point is, I left country music in the dust as soon as I was old enough to do that.

Recently I've been experiencing a return to my familial roots. Except it's not my mother's country that I'm here to tell you about. I want to talk about my grandmother's country music.

  • in hax0ring
  • 11 min read

Fun with Retroarch on Linux

RetroArch Game Library with Thumbnails and Screenshots

Retroarch is a frontend for emulators. It basically merges multiple systems into a customizable interface with unified settings. I'm going to show you how I build and configure my classic game box and we'll look at the scripts I use to get roms onto it. By the end we will have a complete collection of games, thumbnails, screenshots, and database info about every game ever released for multiple classic gaming consoles. Then we'll do some other fun things like organizing a random game picker.

  • in ad
  • 1 min read

period blood scooped out of a public toilet used by taylor swift

period blood scooped out of a public toilet used by taylor swift

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Availability is as scarce as the authenticity of this once-in-a-lifetime offer.

Are you ready to uncork the truth?

  • in gamedev
  • 7 min read

Using Tiled Object Layers with Defold Tilemaps

Defold is great, but when it comes to designing levels, integrating an external tool like Tiled can significantly enhance your workflow. Tiled is a free, open-source map editor that supports a wide range of formats and allows you to create tile-based game worlds with ease. It's snappy, fast, highly extendable, and its been around for as long as I can remember.

Tiled Layers

What's even better is that out of the box, it supports exporting Defold tilemaps and collections. What's slightly disappointing is that after getting Tiled-pilled, you realize there's a lot of things it would be nice to specify in the level editor that you can't because Defold tilemaps do not support those features.

I'm going to show you how I set object spawn positions in Tiled, export them as JSON, and load them with Defold.

  • in gamedev
  • 4 min read

Started A New Platformer Prototype

It's been over a half month since I released Fester's Torment and went dark on this blog. But I haven't been idle. I already have a new prototype.

It's a fast paced, momentum based platformer that is a cross between Super Mario World and something like Megaman.

The influence is pretty apparent from the gameplay. Something similar to P-speed affects the height of your jumps. You fall fast when you let go of the button and you're floaty when you hold it down. You can get consecutively higher jumps by chaining jumps together without dropping momentum. It's a lot of stuff like that, where knowing the physics allows you to get that really crazy jump.

  • in gamedev
  • 3 min read

Fester's Torment Version 2.0 Beta Release

Fester's Torment Version 2.0 Beta Release

This game started as a clone of Halls of Torment but transmogrified into a Shoot 'Em Up style hybrid. It features a day and night cycle, in which waves of enemies are more aggressive during the day, and at night you have time to prepare for the next wave. The goal is to survive for 5 minutes.

Play the Game on itch.io

Or try it here if your screen is big enough. I'll talk more about the release below.

  • in gamedev
  • 7 min read

My Complete Defold Render Script

If you're planning to modify the render script yourself, expect to find only partial examples online. You’ll need to combine techniques from various scripts and spend time with the render pipeline manual and the render API. This process involves a lot of trial and error, so be prepared to dig into the code and make sense of it.

Here’s my consolidated Defold render script—a mix between the example script from this light map tutorial by UnfoldingGamedev and the default render script.

While I didn’t write most of this code, I’ll indicate the parts that I did, and otherwise how I got here.

  • in meta
  • 1 min read

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