Weeknotes 02

What happened this week?

Today is a test on offline weeknoting, as I write this from a small cafe in the back of a vintage shop. The words oughtn't be affected, but my ability to excessively hyperlink might...

I finally used my Factorio Mod!

In the middle of last year I made a Factorio mod to add proximity voice chat.

https://github.com/alifeee/factorio-proximity-voice-chat/

I also wrote a blog post about it ^^

https://blog.alifeee.co.uk/factorio-proximity-chat/

This week I finally organised the game with my friends and we played for about three hours with the mod enabled. It went great!

There were a few people who's mod didn't work at first, who I took into a "technical support" mumble channel, but 3 of the 4 had not clicked "enable proximity chat", and the other's problem was not with my mod, but with how mumble deals with virtual audio devices and proximity chat. Neat! Off without a hitch!

It either went so well because of a lot of luck, or a lot of preparation. As always, I'd like to believe it was the latter.

In total we were about 15 players, and thanks to the mod, could have multiple conversations in different parts of the factory without overlapping voices!

The map is hosted on https://server.alifeee.co.uk/factorio (I hold no promises as to how long that link stays alive...), using a tool I found called FactorioMaps.

The server is only online for three hours a week, because I wanted everyone that wanted to play to be online at the same time (to make the most use of the proximity chat mod!). This does make it quite chaotic, but very fun.

Next week it will be session 2!

I went to the dentist

I haven't been in maybe four years. They said my teeth were fine.

They also took x-rays of my teeth. I want these, so I'm going to email and ask for them. Last time I went to the opticians I asked them for the pictures of the back of my eyes, so soon I could have a whole head of imagery.

Some lipu tenpo test prints arrived

A while ago I printed and posted some lipu tenpo zines around the world to people who asked for them.

I'm hoping to restart this, but this time as a part of lipu tenpo, as last time I did it as an individual.

Last week I ordered some test zine prints from an online print foundry I found, and they arrived this week.

Because lipu tenpo is an "eingetragener Verein" (registered association) (e.V.), I chose "lipu tenpo e.V." as the recipient. This confused the other people who live at my address.

The prints are good! Soon, we will try and collect money and addresses from Patreon to deliver more physical zines :)

I made magazine stands

I think the zines look very pretty, so last time I printed them I took some nice pictures, and made a lot of use of a miniature easel (that I'd found in a charity shop for a pound) to prop them up.

Since I've moved house, I've lost the easel somewhere (or maybe intentionally left it somewhere).

On Thursday I was playing around with cardboard and split pins, crafting whatever came into my head, so I made some quick magazine stands using them. They work incredibly for how flimsy they look. I remain the biggest fan of split pins.

I went to the peaks!

I couldn't live in Sheffield without going to the Peak District occasionally. I went yesterday and had a big walk. It was grand.

I've been making tiny games

One of my friends is a great game developer. He was showing me some websites where people explain their ideals of "the small game". I think it's a neat idea because small games (hopefully) don't become a massive time consuming thing, but are just neat little games! Here are some links about small games:

https://abagames.github.io/joys-of-small-game-development-en/fun_to_make_small_games.html

https://stuffedwomb.at/the_small_game

I also found out about LÖVE, which is an "awesome framework you can use to make 2D games in Lua.".

I'd dipped my toes in Lua making the Factorio mod, and the mindset of people I'd seen who liked Lua (vaguely "programs do not need to do everything") was one I liked.

So, I downloaded it and started playing around!

The games I've been making are in a github repository, and are a fun little thing to work on.

Now, it's time to have some good game ideas...

I made a big pie

it was tasty

Comments

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