The Quixotic Engineer

My daughter (age 6) is aware that her daddy makes video games, though with somewhat abstract notions of what that actually entails. She has often asked if we could make a game together, which led me to research various child-friendly gamedev tools. On a whim I picked up Game Builder Garage, a game-making toolkit released for the Switch in 2021. I hadn’t heard much about it since its release, but generally trusted Nintendo’s ability to appeal to young children.

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Austin’s independent games collective Juegos Rancheros hosted another game jam this summer, and this year the theme was “mystic western”.

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To start off 2016, I thought I’d take a moment to write about some of the new Twitter bots I assembled last year. In my last post on the subject, I indicated that I was reluctant to continue making bots because it was distracting me from larger projects. However, since lately I’ve been focusing hard on a big exciting endeavour, I’ve found that making bots has continued to be a relaxing creative outlet in my downtime.

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Last year I made a little game for Space Cowboy Jam with my good friend Matthew Breit. Inspired by one particular scene from Cowboy Bebop, we decided to make a silly cooking simulator. He modeled some vegetables, I coded some menus, we wrote some goofy dialogue, and slapped together Stir Fry Blues in a couple of weeks.

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Since making @HoroscopeBot and @EveryBookBot, I’ve been on what you might call a bot-making rampage. I’ve really enjoyed tinkering with tiny scope coding projects that can be finished over a weekend, as opposed to my game-making side projects that often take months. Here, briefly, are five new bots I’ve assembled over the last few weeks:

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