2025 Review

As it is nearing the end of the year I thought it would be nice to write about what I've been up to this year. This is mostly a list of things I've done and reflections on how things have been going.

Egypt

One of the biggest events of this year has been going on a trip to Egypt in September. This is the first time I've gone on a trip abroad for years which was quite exciting.

The main thing I wanted to do in Egypt is visit the archaeological sites and museums. I got to see the actual pyramids and sphinx which was very cool. I even got to go inside the largest pyramid which really felt like dungeon delving with how small and narrow the access tunnel was.

I visited both the old museum of Cairo and the fancy new one. It was impressive just how many artifacts there were and I got to see the mask of Tutankhamun. The new museum was very nice and it was a shame that I didn't get more time to look around it.

Ludum Dare 

Now and again I've tried taking part in the programming competition Ludum Dare over the years. Now often I don't manage to finish but now and again I do. 

I did manage to complete something for the competition in October. It isn't anything special but I was happy that it gave me a chance to try writing a dialog system and work on how to have npcs say different things based on your progression through quests.

One of the nicest things about Ludum Dare is the reviewing period. During it you get the chance to play and rate the games that people have played and leave feedback on their entries. In turn people review your game and it is lovely to receive feedback from people who have played your game. The experience is very positive with people leaving nice comments.

There is a ranking of games afterward and whilst I would never expect to score that highly I was pleased to see my game doing better than the average. It actually scored its best rating in humour which was cool. I guess people liked the dialog I wrote for all the npcs.

Nanowrimo

Nanowrimo, the novel writing event might not be a thing anymore but I still wanted to take November to be a month where I write a lot. I've been getting into writing a journal every day this year and I wanted to see how far I could push myself to write in it.

Nanowrimo is meant to be a novel writing but I decided I would allow myself to write anything so whilst I did write some notes and prose of a fantasy story the main bulk of my writing was in my journal. 

It was lots of fun to just write as much as I could and it felt nice to express myself. There is a goal wordcount for Nanowrimo of 50,000 words and I managed to absolutely crush it by writing 100,000 words!

Reading Books

Over the last year I've made it a habit to spend time reading physical books everyday. It is a lot easier to get through a large text if I'm not at a computer and distracted by the internet. Although having said that it has given me an excuse to do some microblogging by writing about what book I've just read on twitter.

I read a wide variety of books this year, not only fiction but some non-fiction textbooks too. I essentially have been going through all my old university textbooks and reading them again. It has been nice to refresh my knowledge of what I studied all those years ago.

Playing Music

Just over the past few weeks I've been getting back into something I haven't done since I was learning back when I was a kid which is playing the piano. I used to find it so difficult to sit down and practice each day so it's been really nice to be able to do that now I'm older.

Playing the piano isn't a skill you really forget and I can still play some of the pieces I really practiced from way back. I have had to remember a lot of the old theory and have been approaching it with new eyes which means it has been very interesting to learn more.

Summary

So all in all I've had a pretty busy year as I've also been getting to the gym and exercising every day. The previous years I had been going through a spell of bad mental health so it is nice to see improvement over the last year.

Hopefully I'll be able to keep up these good habits and even add some new hobbies to my collection. I was learning a new language, Japanese, last year so perhaps I could get back to language learning with Chinese? I'd also like to get back into doing some art such as drawing.

We'll have to see what the future holds and I might write more here about what I get up to.

March 2023

making full fledged game projects on itch.io is tough. I'm going to try something easier by making little scripts that can be embedded on these blog pages :)

February 2023

This month's theme: the constructed language Toki Pona :D

2023 A New Year

 This is pretty much just a placeholder post.

I might add to it or I might just delete it later.

Depends if I can create a better post for January between now and the end of the month.

Contemplating going 'goblin mode' on this blog and just posting whatever to overcome trepidation over having a gap between posts. (assuming goblins have a poasters nature, they certainly like to create piles of trash I guess)

PocketCiv is now playable on itch

Low effort post today as I've not managed to finish any longer posts over the last few months. Having enough energy to create things is hard :/

Programming Projects, where are they?

 

I think it must be a common situation for any person who creates things that you start a whole lot more projects than you actually complete. I've been messing around with programming projects for a significant fraction of my life and have lost count of the number that have reached a certain amount of progress and just... stop.

Even among the projects that enjoy good progress and reach a point where I want to share them there can be issues in terms of what form to share them in. There can be quite a lot of work involved in uploading and presenting projects online. Often the impulse can be it throw them up on the likes of itch.io and be done with them.

I, uh, should probably have mentioned sometime in the last couple of years that I have an itch.io page with projects on it... https://alexmulkerrin.itch.io/

So many fine projects that have never gotten a dedicated blog post are there.

Having been posting about programming projects online for about a decade now the form of how I've uploaded them to be shared has changed over time:

•  Initially I would just put the JavaScript inline on the page to be rendered into an html element which was neat but it did run into issues when more than one projects code was on the page at once and there were variable name collisions. 

• I could alleviate that somewhat by making it so only the intro to a post appeared on the blog homepage and you had to click through to see the running program. The issue then became when I wanted to write bigger projects and the code became too big to have all in one html file.

• I could split my code into dedicated script files if I had someplace to host them. Initially there was such a hosting functionality built into Google Drive that let you not only host files publicly but also embed JavaScript projects directly in another webpage.

• Alas this was only provided for a short time, then discontinued leaving mysterious Google error messages on the pages that used it, such as my initial post here about Swarmlord. Looking for an alternative I came across rawgit that let you host projects from a repository on Github. I already had a GitHub account so it was an excuse to be a more dilligent developer and use git as part of my development process.

• Sadly last time I checked a rawgit link it wasn't working either. At that point itch.io had become a thing so I eventually moved to hosting projects on that including old and recent Ludum Dare entries, another thing I have been neglecting to blog about!

Long story short, from now only any programming projects I share will be hosted on my itch.io page where, hopefully, they will remain accessible and continue to work.

I would also like to get back into the habit of posting on here about projects I am currently working on. Even going so far as to provide links to in development projects not 'officially' visible on itch.io. For example this:

It's a world map generator which lets you zoom in super close just like Google Maps :D

Super secret link here

There's a whole lot of work to do on this but the essential algorithm to allow you to zoom in and out focused on the mouse cursor's position is solid. For now I simply adapted the Civilization terrain generation algorithm and tile types. It's crazy to think that on a properly scaled planet each tile is 500km across :o

Dropfleet Commander Kickstarter Fleets

 I'd like to share some photos of a slightly different hobby project that I've completed recently. Miniature spaceships for a tabletop wargame called Dropfleet Commander. Firstly, here's a shot of all the different faction's fleets together:

That's 28 ships in total over 4 different factions, including light frigate sized ships and bigger cruiser hulls. I'm pleased with how the colour schemes I chose for the different factions came together and make it clear which ship belongs to each faction as well as make it apparent what the different armaments are.

As an aside the kickstarter that launched Dropfleet Commander as a game (page viewable here) in my opinion is the most successful kickstarter with the most benefits from additional milestones ever seen. They blew past their initial goal of £40,000 in less than a day and reached a staggering £629,000 raised from 3900 backers in total. Their success was such that they were able to bundle in additional ships for each an every backer. I only backed at the lowest level to receive one fleets worth of ships; the PHR (the ships in orange above) giving me 4 frigates and 3 cruisers. But because of the addons I received an extra frigate sprue as well as a cruiser sprue for each of the four factions, meaning I have a small force for each! :D

The kickstarter funding period ran for a month over November 2015. I actually received the package containing the rules, extra backer rewards and unassembled miniatures still on the spruces around November 2016. While it didn't take me too long to assemble the models and play a few games with them I didn't get them painted until last month. They have spent rather a long time being packed away in a box under my bed but that is a not too uncommon fate for such miniatures I find :P

Anyway, here are some photos of the individual faction fleets:

 First the UCM (United Colonies of Mankind), the main human faction. After the Scourge invaded and occupied the core worlds, including earth, the UCM was formed to take back the worlds lost. I gave the ships a very utilitarian colour scheme based on a plain white undercoat with a black inkwash over the model to pick out the seams of the armour plating. I took the time to pick out some of the plating on the tops of the models in grey and white to denote different ship types. Other details to note are the railguns with a light blue inkwash over a metallic colour, missile pods picked out in red and engine pods metal with a yellow inkwash and bright yellow thrust.

One part I was particularly pleased with how it came out were the hangar bays on the cruiser. Painted in white and then given a light blue inkwash to give the impression of light streaming out of the opening. Here's another closer view:

Next are the Scourge themselves:

Very organic looking ships that reflect the fact that Scourge pilot their vessels by merging with their machines. Their playstyle revolves round being sneaky with stealth systems or hiding in atmosphere to get close to their targets before unleashing devastating weaponry at close range. I'm really happy with how the combination of a light blue basecoat combined with a purple inkwash looks. The models have all this cool, organic detail that an inkwash works really well on. The Scourge main armaments are oculus beam weapons which I've done as reflective red eyes by using a transparent red paint over a metallic base colour.

Another alien fleet are the Shaltari:

Aloof and mysterious their ships look and act very differently to the other factions. They get lots of special rules such as shields and most importantly utilize teleportation technology for the gameplay of getting their troops to the planet's surface. This is done through Void Gates, the little circular ship in the top left. Being such an advanced race their ships have a really alien look to them and it's difficult to work out what parts are ornamental or functional. I experimented with different base hull colours on the small frigates at the front but if I were to paint more of this faction I would probably use the colours on the large cruiser at the back; a earthy yellow with a brown inkwash. I went for a wooden look to these ships with browns and greens. The little lights were fun to do being just white dots with a wash of a ghostly green contrast paint.

Lastly but by no means least are the PHR:

The PHR (Post Human Republic) are a different set of humans who got involved with a mysterious alien artifact and are big on robotics and self-modification. Their ships look absolutely great, highly advanced, sleek hulls with manoeuvring fins and loads of guns in a broadside configuration. The official colour scheme is quite subdued with a bleached bone look to the hulls so I decided to go for something a little more exciting; bright orange with stripes. They already look quite fishlike so why not go the whole way and have a fleet of tropical fish in space? :D

Like the UCM I gave the launch bays an inkwash to depict light sources, green in the case of the PHR which can be seen on the ships in the top right. The PHR ships have lots of detail along the sides and the rear which were easy to pick out with a bright metallic base layer with a black inkwash. I love inkwashes, they work so well on highly detailed miniatures like these :) For the orange hulls I used masking tape to block off where the stripes would be and then painted the rest in the brightest orange I could find. As a finishing touch I put a layer of varnish over the hull to give it a reflective quality which I'm rather pleased with.

Well that's what's being keeping me occupied over the last month or so :) I've also been playing a few games of Dropfleet with family and being enjoying that too. Perhaps in future I'll find some people locally who are interested, fortunately I already have painted fleets which we can play with. There are loads of new models which have been released since the success of the kickstarter, including a whole new fifth faction so I'm likely to pick some of them up to paint sometime. Thanks for reading!