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The Wonderful World of TTRPGs

Fri, 19 Dec 2025 14:10:41 -0700

One thing I get a lot from D&D 5e players is the statement “What’s all this about non-5e systems? 5e is all I need!” Or at least something along those lines. This is a bummer of a statement from just one person, let alone an entire population, so I’ve dedicated this blog post to all of these 5e players out there.

Please, just hear your friendly neighborhood game designer out on this one: There’s a world of fun out there that you’re very likely missing out on, and my goal in this piece is to show you the possibilities!

What you do from there is up to you.

D&D 5e is not for everyone

Have you ever thoght about what TTRPG system would best suit you and your group?

If you’re here, the answer is either “Definitely, yes. It’s actually the second thought my brain goes to whenever I start a TTRPG” (The first being “who’s bringing snacks?”) or “No, never. You specifically sent this to me and told me to read it, and I’m now doing so begrudgingly due to some polite society, social contract bullshit (thank you!)”

Well, either way welcome! I’ve split this one up into two sections. One of ’em (this one) breaks apart what 5e is, and who it’s actually for, and the second goes ahead and starts bringing back the curtain on the possibilities out there.

But before we begin, I wanna state clearly: I’ll talk about TTRPGs for years to come on this blog, but this is probably the only time I’ll ever make a focus of 5e or D&D in general. So, I’m putting everything 5e-related in my brain down here, and going forward, I’ll only look in earnest at various indie systems instead. Little designers deserve the world.

Let’s get into it.

What even is a TTRPG?

This sounds like a relatively simple question, especially for someone already familiar with the medium, but bear with me for a second. (Especially you, random GM that says “Oh i’ll just modify 5e for this,” every time you want to tell a different kind of story.)

A TTRPG is a collection of rules and mechanics that when put together create a system for often collaborative storytelling.

There are many others, but this definition is mine. The key point of which that I want to point out is that the end goal is telling a story. This end goal is super important, as your system’s collection of rules and mechanics is, essentially, a well-oiled machine tailor built and tested to make a specific kind of story. (Yes, patrick. Combat is a story)

See, in game design, (specifically TTRPG design, but many concepts apply more broadly), well-built systems are intentionally made up of mechanics that build towards a central thesis. This thesis can include critically important things, such as genre, setting, mood, tone, and even themes for the stories made within that system.

We designers just simply don’t have the same level of narrative control that other artistic mediums do, however, what we have, that they don’t, is a direct line of communication with the player (or players). So instead, we put a living shit ton of work into making arrays of mechanics that work together to build towards our thesis, as that’s how we convey artistic vision in place of raw narrative.

My main point here is thus: in modifying rules and mechanics, you are fundimentally sacrificing the designer’s thesis.

Or put simply, when you change shit, our designs no longer do what we designed them to do.

At the same time, it’s your game, and you are 100% within your rights to modify, tweak, and break things to your heart’s content. I encourage such behavior actually! It’s probably one of the best ways to learn game design! However, in doing so you should at least acknowledge that, at least to some degree, you are killing the designer’s child, and with it, their intentions, design, thesis, and all of the elements therein.

Specificity and vagueness by design, a sidenote

Some systems are intentionally vague or broad to expand the number of stories that can be told with them. Genesys and FATE (which, in turn, is based on “fudge,” The more you know!) are good examples of such systems. And they definitely have their uses; Edge of the Empire was built on Genesys, and that system uses the genesys dice system quite well.

However, broader systems fundimentally sacrifice their capacity to carry out their mechanical vision when they choose flexibility over specialization. In short, when you try to do everything, you do nothing well. Would you rather have one multitool that kinda handles everything kinda ok, or an array of specialized tools, each designed specifically and lovingly with their own hyperspecific application in mind?

D&D specifically is designed primarily as a system for combat, and has been slowly adapted into an everything system by its community over the years. 5e is designed vaguely, and if anything, continues to specialize in combat, as that’s the core identity of D&D. But heck, it doesn’t even do that extraordinarily well, due to its lack of focus!

In a world where people are lovingly crafting games about high school drama and gossip, games about sailing on trees on a chainsaw boat, games about living dungeons that gaze directly into the characters’ very souls, games about kids hoverboarding between dimensions, and infinitely many more, each with its own new ideas, mechanics, vibes, artistic visions, and themes… GASPS FOR AIR

Why would you want to play with a multitool?

RP enthusiasts, I’m looking at you.

Hey. I’m talking to you, roleplay enjoyers that just default to 5e because you don’t want to learn a new system. And I’m especially talking to you RP-focused 5e groups out there that simply just don’t run combat. Or do so very infrequently.

Because like it or not, 5e is a medival fantasy-based system designed primarily for combat.

So, if you’re looking to do anything else, you’re genuinely missing out on a system that was specifically designed to mechanically create the story that you and your party actually want to play.

The medival fantasy focus is self explanatory (A standard modern setting, for example, wouldn’t have pack horses as items and “arcana” as a skill), however, on the combat front, I expect I’ll get a good amount of pushback. Nontheless I stand by that; 5e is built for combat first and roleplay second. Allow me to elaborate:

The entire system centers around combat

In 5e, what percentage of class features, conservatively, center around combat mechanics? How about Feats? Items? How much session time does combat take up? It certainly depends on the group, but I’ve certainly run 7 hour combat sessions before.

Further, the sheer moment-to-moment detail of the system is nothing short of a second game mode. One must keep track of player & enemy positions, initiative order, player & enemy action economy, hit points, and everything must be done within ~6 second actions within the fiction. I’ll have more to say about the combat later on, but if you’re using this for RP it’s like hammering a nail with a wood saw: it’s overbuilt in all the wrong ways, and you’d be much better off investing the budget in a nail gun if all you wanted to do was nail nails.

The balance of the combat system is built for numerous combat sessions between long rests. And from personal experience running low-combat 5e campaigns, I don’t think my party ever went more than two bouts of combat between long rests, rendering the built-in combat balance way off (casters rarely ran out of spell slots, making them far more powerful than martials, etc…).

If you want to add something or have a player come up with an item or a trait for their character, as a GM, you either

have to be concerned with how it will be balanced/ abused in combat, or
don’t run combat anyway, and end up ignoring the many many 5e mechanics that center around it.

Its roots are literally in war gaming.

The creators of D&D were members of the international federation for war gaming (one of which co-founded the thing), which then branched off into a subgroup called the castle & crusade society, which then set the foundation for the chainmail system, which was a foundation for the original D&D ruleset. Go figure. (source)

The very basis for the 5e system is anchored in war games. It has indeed evolved to encompass much more, but it has almost certainly kept its roots. As a baseline, all the non-combat is a design addendum compared to combat, which is what the system was made for in the first place!

In short, D&D will never be a roleplay-focused TTRPG system and still be D&D.

A small capitulation.

This isn’t to say that you can’t use 5e or any other D&D based system for incredible RP-based storytelling. You totally can! I’ve done so myself, and I absolutely adore what GMs like Brennan Lee Mulligan do with the system.

However, just because a system is popular, doesn’t mean that it will give the most enjoyment to you and your party or be the best mechanical compliment to the stories your table wants to tell.

Since my fascination with tabletop RPGs hit, I’ve had so many incredible experiences and told so many beautiful stories that never could have ever happened in 5e, raw or modded to the teeth. And, as I stated above, my goal with this piece is to hopefully share that with you.

You don’t gotta take my advice, or heck, do anything with it. By all means, play what makes you happy, even if it is 5e. I clown on it a lot, but if it does make you happy, I don’t want to get in the way of that.

Combat enjoyers aren’t off the hook either

Remember all that stuff about multitools? Your favorite mechanic may be 5e’s design focus, but that focus has become a lot more fuzzy in recent times (especially with the recent influx of all you RP enjoyers).

Wouldn’t you like to just play a game that was made specifically for combat and nothing else? Look at something like Lancer and tell me that fucking mech combat wouldn’t be incredibly badass. Or perhaps if you like 5e’s medival setting, mythic bastionland might serve as a splendid alternative! And both place combat at center stage, so their systems are hyper-focused on providing a clean, well-oiled combat experience.

Even if you do genuinely enjoy 5e’s combat, it’s only one style of combat, designed to tell stories of combat in one way. The options out there for handling combat could create completely alien situations and encounters the likes of which you could have never done in 5e. Aren’t you curious what else you could experience?

Perhaps newbies?

Nope! I’d honestly recommend pretty much anything over 5e for sheer noob friendliness. 5e has a bunch of unecessary verbosity and specifics, and, again, gets bogged down in its combat far too easliy. So many other systems flow infinitely better than 5e and can communicate the awesomeness of the hobby much more fluidly, and directly.

Now, in terms of actually recommending an individual person a game, that depends entirely on what gets them excited. I’ll pitch them a bunch of stuff and see what they perk up at, regardless of difficulty. People are so much happier to sit through rules if it gets them to a place they’re genuinely excited about.

If that system is 5e, then so be it, but a lot of the time, that’s only the case because it’s the only thing they’ve heard of!

Who is 5e for then, bucko?

In summary, 5e is for you if you

already use the system & don’t like learning new things,
enjoy mideval fantasy settings, with a 60-70% combat tilt,
like vague, unopinionated sytems,
don’t mind overly corporate media,
just kinda like it (which is totally fair)

And if you do fit the bill here, I truly do wish you all the best in your 5e adventures…

But just because one system is for you, doesn’t mean others aren’t! pulls away curtain, exaggerated

Other systems and why you should play them

Every time I hear someone who likes TTRPGs say they’re not interested in learning other systems, I die a little bit inside.

In my brain, that sounds like someone who enjoys art saying “Nah the mona lisa is my favorite, I’m not going to go look at anything else.” Or someone who likes movies saying “I really like the avengers im not going to watch another movie ever.” Like what????

Come on, lil guy! We’ve got so much to explore, and we’ve only just begun! Off we go into the wild pale yonder!

The wild pale yonder

Hey. (I’m dressed in a trench coat beckoning you from a nearby alley) Hey, c’mere. Yeah, that’s right, I’m talking to you. You wanna roleplay as a fucking mouse?

I produce the box set of mausritter from the folds of my trench coat

Or perhaps you’re more of a “journal on my own from the point of view of a vampire losing their memories over the course of a thousand years” kinda person?

I manifest Thousand Year Old Vampire from a brick wall

No? Then may I interest you in modern detective horror?

Your bag of groceries transmogrifies into Delta Green and Triangle Agency

Hmm, scifi horror perhaps?

The Mothership box set, having grown spiderlike legs, scuttles up your leg

Or maybe, just a bunch of kids on skateboards. *Hoverboards. In portals. (Slugblaster)

a portal opens up to your right and at least four teenage kids on hoverboards pile into you, sending both you and them sprawling into another portal.

Ah, well I guess not then. Try not to peel out. Nasty business.

Other systems

The variety and creativity of the game design community is simply too vast for words. If it’s in your brain, there’s a system for it, and sometimes if you’re lucky, the designer has cooked up at least one mechanic that’ll change the way you see tabletop RPGs, and thus the way you play them.

However, a lot of the time, the true beauty is in games that would never have even entered your brain. Features, settings, mechanics, and themes that never would have even pinged on your radar, pulled full-focus by a designer who cares about them more than garlic bread.

That shit, my friends, is the good stuff.

So what should I play?

In short, whatever gets you excited! The options are so numerous and diverse, that it simply comes down to personal preference.

What kind of story do you and your party want to tell? How do you want it to be told? Do you have your heart set on a specific setting? A specific vibe?

If so, look for that! If not, go picking around and see what you can find! Read descriptions and check out options! See what gets your brain gets jazzed up about! What makes it buzz with interesting characters, plotlines, and ideas! And as discouraged as judging books by their covers is, TTRPGs feature some of the most beautiful art out there. And very often, a game’s overall vibe is encapsulated incredibly well by the art it puts on display, so if all else fails find some cool art and go from there!

My silly recommendations

As a quick disclaimer, this hobby, like many others, is a matter of taste. I, like everyone else, am biased towards a certain kind of game. Specifically, I absolutely adore games that place roleplay at center stage. Games that deal with the complexities of identity. Games with innovative mechanics. Games that present deep ethical quandries. Games that make everyone at the table ponder something menaingful. If you like similar games, you’ll probably love my recommendations. If you don’t, then don’t worry! There are so many more games out there that will be for you and not for me, (5e included!), and I absolutely love that about this hobby.

I listed a good few options above, but also, I’d encourage you to take a gander at a few of the following games, most if not all of which I will write full reviews for eventually:

Spire: Rise against the opressive high elves in a revolution destined for ruin, in an attempt to make a difference. Check out the fallout system in this one, it’s genuinely a game changer.
Blades in the Dark: Gang warfare: the game. Run a gang in a dark, steampunk, ghost-ridden world, and execute sick heists. Prep is for losers when in-scene you can just flashback to that time you prepared for this exact eventuality.
Slugblaster: TEENS ON HOVERBOARDS! DOIN’ SICK TRICKS! GOIN’ THROUGH PORTALS! GETTIN’ THAT SWEET SWEET INTERNET CLOUT! RUNNIN’ FROM INTERDIMENSIONAL POLICE! YEAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!
Lichcraft: You’re trans and the wait for gender affirming healthcare is 300 years. Welp time to turn to the dark arts and become a lich!

Conclusion

Well that’s that. I hope I’ve made a compelling point here, and I hope you get out there and find games that make you happy! If you find anything cool, please let me know!

I alluded to this earlier, but I intend to do more TTRPG-related blog posts going forward. Thanks once again for reading, and I’ll see you next time.

Nixos Is for Crazy People- A beginner's experience

Fri, 19 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Alright, you (nobody) asked for it, and here it is. I’ve swapped to NixOS as my main operating system from arch, and I have concluded that Nix is for crazy people. I also happen to still be happily running it ~6 months later. Let’s get into it.

Setup

Imagine, if you will, me waking up, configuring nixos, going about my day, configuring nixos, and going to sleep… For two weeks. (Now, this did include a full port of every single significant arch dotfile into nix’s homemanager, which was no easy task.) BUT STILL, THAT’S CRAZY.

The learning curve

Believe me when I say the nixos learning curve hits you like a goddamn brick.

The official docs seem written for experienced users, unlike arch, so you end up totally confused. You just want a simple config that works, but everyone keeps saying things about flakes, but flakes are marked as unstable??? Everyone also keeps talking about homemanager, what the fuck is that? Do you need it?

At this point I can say with certainty that you should use both. Also here’s a competent guide to actually getting everything working in a sane way, written in (mostly) plain english: https://nixos-and-flakes.thiscute.world/

*kisses your forhead* Everything’s gonna be alright, buddy. It gets so much better from here.

What’s a flake?

Flakes are experimental features of nix that allow users to define the nix equivalent of a function. These are widely used in the nix community to provide additional support for programs that don’t exist in nixpkgs yet, add native homemanager configuration for certain programs, provide out of the box configuration for certain programs (for example, nix-citizen provided me a fully optimized SC/wine installation without any config on my end. Neato!), and much more.

The best way to manage your system config on nixos these days is by defining a flake to act as an entrypoint. This allows you to define other flakes as “inputs” (read:parameters), that you can feed into your “outputs” (read: other function calls).

What’s homemanager

This is what you use to manage userspace, including dotfiles! Many programs are included by default, many more have a supporting flake, and worst comes to worst, homemanager lets you just place raw files wherever you want in your user’s ~ directory. Quite splendid.

This is super neat, as it allows you to make almost everything about your system, down to the user-specific configuration and customization, completely reproducable. chef’s kiss

Initial impressions

I was a bit cooked early on, as you can tell from my original ranting back in august. However, now that I’ve got the bulk of the learning curve behind me, even the downsides I saw back then have faded with time and I continue to reap the incredible benefits of this beautiful operating system. Here’s how things currently stand:

FHS environments? One shell command away.
Never having a broken system? Incredible.
Being able to have certain programs on stable branches and others on unstable? Immaculate.
Full state control? YES PLEASE
System rollback? Hell yeah.
System duplication? god yes.
Development? Crazy easy once I figured out how nix develop worked. And now, no more “It works on my machine” state garbage to worry about.
Packaging? Nixpkgs+Flakes pretty evenly rival the Arch repos+AUR. I think the AUR does edge out flakes in quality due to the size of the community, and the extra features that flakes must maintain in addition to simple packaging, but that’s balanced out by the sheer dedication that nix developers have to nixpkgs, which definitely tops the native arch repos in my opinion.

So should I use it?

Depends! How much do you value the benefits of nixOS? If you really like the way that arch gets out of your way and lets you just do stuff, you might not love nix. Nix has opinions, and not following those is totally possible, but does make your life a little harder. System config does take a little bit longer, but none of it is “OH GOD I FUCKED SOMETHING AND I NEED TO FIX IT NOW.” There are ups and downs.

Nix is still a tradeoff. If you think you’ll get real value out of the benefits, I’d say do it. But if you’re happy where you are and don’t feel like subjecting yourself to a silly amount of head-banging, you really don’t need to!

If you’re an operating system nerd (derogatory) like me, i’d definitely recommend it though, it’s such a wonderful little thing.

Conclusion

Thanks for reading! Sorry this one took me awhile, but I’m glad it’s out now!

I’ll chuck some tips & tricks below if you’re follwing in my footsteps. Nix is beautiful and definitely my end-game linux distro, that I’ll almost certainly be using for years to come. And I still have so much to learn! (Time to start making my own derivations ehehe)

Have a good one, and I’ll see you next time!

Tips & tricks

Here’s some nix specific stuff i figured out that I’d find super useful if I were learning from scratch again.

My Big notes

Set up git in your /etc/nixos folder. very very handy.
In userspace I’ll use a quick sudo -i to get root access to /etc/nixos for painless editing
This website is god https://search.nixos.org/packages?channel=unstable&
This website is also god for homemanager https://mynixos.com/ (Omg god yuri :3)
Like running raw binary files like a goddamned maniac, but can’t figure out how? Looks like you didn’t read this page on the guide I posted above, silly!
nix-shell -p package-name lets you test out a package in a temporary shell without actually enabling it system-wide! Super neat!
nix develop is also god for all you devs out there dealing with dependency hell (God polycule; shit is getting real, y’all)
And finally, nix-collect-garbage actually frees storage space of unused packages (but also clears out old versions of stuff so you can’t roll back to them anymore without another download)

Shell Shortcuts

I have ninit mapped to cd /etc/nixos;nvim .
gupdate to git add --all; git commit -m "rev"; git push; sudo nixos-rebuild switch (still haven’t gotten the time to make a bash script with dynamic commit names, whoops)
nixupdate to git branch -d update; git checkout -B update; git add --all; git commit -m "update"; git push; sudo nix flake update; sudo nixos-rebuild switch

Monthly Update 2025 November

Mon, 01 Dec 2025 23:26:07 -0700

Heya! Welcome back to another month of crippling burnout. This discreet math class, as stated earlier, will end me.

Cabin work

I did some work on that open source cabin game, then had to refactor as I had built everything on the grid3d node in godot, which does not support nodes, but only meshes. Oops. Luckily I have feature parity with the original design using a world grid snapping system instead. Yippee!

I’ve got some simple construction in, but not yet at the fidelity that I want for this vertical slice. I still have to figure out how to apply an incomplete shader to placed objects and also allow materials to be added to them, which is probably as simple as just toggling the render style on certain nodes in the object as items are placed. Still, on the todo list. Also resource gathering and processing are still on the todo list but that’s still a long way off.

Niri v25.11

She’s out and she’s a beauty! My little change is in here somewhere, but it’s just incredible to see what the open source community can put together. Patchnotes here!

Twee Narrative

This is technically for school, but it gets a pass to be in here because it’s so cool.

Essentially, I’m to make a little 10 minute narrative experience in twee. (Technically the class wants twine but GUIs are for losers & I have the power of CI/CD on my side). I have hopelessly overscoped this bitch and am now gazing down the barrel of having to write content for the thing.

Basically, it’s trying to tell a story through random events. And I added a weather system because immersion (someone kill me before I scope creep myself onto olympus). Purely text based, but I hope to make something genuinely cool here (and if you’re any good at github scraping you’ll probably be able to see what I’m cooking up). Looking forward to sharing more details when I get the thing out by finals!

Them

Fresh new cyberpunk hot off the press! I love me a little creative short story here and there, and I hope you enjoy this latest entry into whatever the fuck I’m making these days. Here it is!

November Nodeletter

Back at it again, the godot nodeletter for november is out! Thar she blows!

Retrospective

Ok guys, I know. Nike’s.

How about this: I’ll make you a deal, if any single person, one (1) person, including people that know me IRL, I’m not picky, sends me an email at kai@fireye.coffee saying that they care about Nike’s and want to see it finished, I’ll work on it in any little spare time I have, and aim to finish it by the end of the year.

As for that nixOS post, I got no excuse on that one either. I just didn’t get the spare time to chill and do some blogging. At some point I’m going to have to cut out the time though, sorry about that, if anyone happens to care. ADHD is tough shit for consistency.

Plans

I’ve been feeling the TTRPG itch a bit in recent days, so I might look at picking up an old TTRPG project soonish. Probably going to have to wait until after finals though.

Also apparently “Wild West TTRPG system” puts one of these blog posts on the first page of search results, holy SEO batman! I think that contractually means I have to work on it again, so maybe expect more of that soon.

Conclusion

And that’s the game! It’s about midnight at time of writing so I’m off to get some sleep. Thanks for reading once again, and have a great day.

Git for the Layperson

Sun, 09 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Updated October 20th and November 9th with some new stuff! Also I would be remiss to not include a link to oh shit git, which you should definitely refer to if you ever run into trouble.

Preamble

Hi! First off, welcome to git! Git is huge, and there are any number of guides out there, but this is mine.

If you’re using a UI to interface with git, there will be buttons and other input methods to execute the commands that I’ll be listing. Rest assured, this information is still incredibly pertinent for you as well, and can be translated with the simple internet search: “do git ‘command’ in ‘UI here’”. (eg: github desktop, gitkraken, sourcetree, vscode plugin, etc…).

Why do I need to use git in the first place?

A previous version of this guide assumed you already knew the value of git and generally VCS, but seeing as the target demographic is the layperson, I’ll assume you are walking into this blind. If not, feel free to skip this section! Perhaps you don’t know what git is, or assume it’s a programmer thing for programmers, or perhaps are generally skeptical of adding additional steps to your workflow, and see git (or VCS) as optional. I assure you, it is not. Trust me, regardless of your vocation, level of experience, or general computer knowledge, I am confient you can benefit from using git. It’s an integral tool in working with others in teams, and as an added bonus, once you learn it, you’ll never worry about losing work ever again. Allow me to elaborate.

First, show of hands who’s lost work on something before? Proficiency in git makes this occurence a relic of the past.

Not only that, you also gain the power to time travel back to every single iteration of your project, without losing any work, no ctrl+z required.

Further, you get the ability to simultaneously have multiple “versions” of your project that you can swap between. That way, you can have one version that always works, and others that you use to add features and fixes, merging them together when desired.

If you’re using a git server (like github) to upload your git repositories, you also gain an invaluable backup project that allows you to retain your full project state even if your hard drive gets lit on fire (no doubt from your nvidia 12 volt high power connector), you’ll still be able to get your project back just fine.

It also allows you to work on the same project seamlessly from multiple computers!

Sounds great right? Well those are only the benefits for solo developers. If you’re on a team (2 or more people), or working at any moderately sane software job (games or otherwise), git goes from “incredibly useful” to simply “mandatory”.

Why?

Well, let’s imagine what collaboration requires, without git. The project needs to live somewhere, and more often than not, it ends up finding a home on a flash drive or portable drive of some sort that gets handed around based on who needs to work on it. But if you don’t have the flash drive, what happens? If you have a copy on your computer and make changes how do you know that something you’re working on hasn’t been updated by someone else? Who has to throw away their work or spend hours of their day getting the two versions working together? Whose edits are the “real” version? And worse, if the thing breaks does anyone have a working, up to date version anywhere? And you’re still dealing with all of the problems above in the midst of this chaos!

Proficiency in git almost fully trivializes these problems. Where does the project live? Github. How do different people get the most recent version? Pull from github. How do you reconcile changes? Merge branches and resolve conflicts. What’s the “real”, working version? The main branch.

The nuances of all of this are of course a bit more complicated, but I hope this generally gave you an impression of the value of git and why you’d want to put the work into learning it. Now, let’s get into exactly that.

What is git?

Diffs

Git is a tool that keeps track of the changes made to files, and lets you manage these changes. A change in git is called a diff.

If you have a text file containing the text “hello world”, and you change it to say “goodbye world”, git says “ah it looks like ‘hello’ was deleted and ‘goodbye’ was added on line 1 of file.txt”. This is a diff. Git automatically takes this diff and holds onto it. You can look at these diffs by using git status.

Staging

Git also features a stage where you can put these diffs. Diffs are collected off the stage by default, but you can add them to the stage by using git add (thing). Regularly you’ll want to stage all of your changes so usually you’ll run git add --all or git add . Once you take a diff and put it on the stage, git stores that diff. This means that even if you wanted to make more changes to the staged file, It just creates a new diff off the stage with these new changes. You can combine the two by unstaging the staged diff (git restore --staged), or staging the other diff.

Be careful running git restore on unstaged diffs though, as in certain circumstances you can lose work if you do this flippantly.

Committing

Once you’ve finished work on something, you’ll want to save a snapshot of your work. Go ahead and add everything you want to save to the stage, and now you can commit. This is done by git commit. Committing yoinks every diff that you’ve staged, and gathers them together in a little box, and asks you to give it a name. This box is known as a commit.

Naming conventions for commits are a hotly contested subject matter, but however you do it, make sure to aptly describe what changes are contained therein. This is the first thing everyone sees when looking at your changes, and allows you to know what was in that commit later on, when you might need to revert to it, or diagnose a problem.

Stashing

Additionally, you can stash staged diffs to ignore them right now and save them for later. This sounds mostly banal, however becomes very very useful on occasion so it’s good to know. git stash creates a stash containing the currently staged diffs, git stash pop kills the stash and restores those diffs, and git stash drop deletes the stash without restoring changes.

Log

Ever need to see a history of your commits real quick? git log happens to be the default option, however I’ve got a little treat for you. If you run the following alias command on your terminal you unlock access to git lg which is a super trimmed down git log with a pretty looking graph!

git config –global alias.lg “log –color –graph –pretty=format:’%Cred%h%Creset -%C(yellow)%d%Creset %s %Cgreen(%cr) %C(bold blue)<%an>%Creset’ –abbrev-commit”

I had a mentor at work give me this one, but I found the alias command again after redoing my system config here. Beautiful little alias that’ll save you so much annoyance.

The main things to look at in git log, are the commit name, so you know what’s in there, and the commit hash, so you know how git referrs to it. All you need to know is a hash is a bunch of (not so) random characters that represent a commit in git’s brain, like an id of sorts.

Why is it useful to view your repo’s commit history and have access to commit hashes though? Stay tuned.

Reflog

Listen.

Pay attention.

Reflog. Will. Save. Your. Ass.

Reflog is similar to log, however instead of viewing your commit history, it looks at everything. See, every time you take a major action in git, reflog saves your state. Which means, if you did anything in git, reflog has it. Reflog is your homie, reflog wouldn’t do you like that. Reflog has hashes. So many hashes.

But what does one do with a list of hashes that represent the history of a repo?

Reset

git reset <commit hash here> is very powerful, but newbies can pretty easily mess it up and cause fixable, yet very distressing problems, so make sure you’re pretty confident in what you’re doing before doing it.

Notably, RESET is not RESTORE. Restore is for staging and unstaging. Reset allows you to restore your repository to a previous state. That state could be a commit, or it could be a hash you found in the reflog.

This means, if you fucked up real bad, you can fix it. Just reset the repo!

Reset comes in two main flavors (with some more minor ones you can look for yourself if you’re curous): --soft and --hard.

git reset <commit hash here> --soft resets the repo, however keeps all of the changes between your current state and the other one as diffs. tldr: it keeps your work.

git reset <commit hash here> --hard resets the repo. git reset –hard does not care. git reset –hard will kill your children (commits).

If you do end up accidentally calling in a git reset –hard, remember your pal git reflog, and be not afraid. Git reflog will help you, git reflog is there for you.

Branches

Alright now we have a bunch of these commit boxes in a line, tracking the history of the project in little chunks. What now? Well let’s say that we want to keep this line of commits as the “source of truth” in our repository. That’s to say, with few exceptions, this is the version of the code that everyone is sharing. This means that it needs to be kept in pristine condition. Absolutely no bugs, no half implemented features, no failing tests, no shenanigans, etc… This means, if all else fails, we still have this version of code to fall back on. We will call this the main branch. “Main” because it’s central to everything, and I’ll get to the “branch” part of that in a second.

That’s all well and good, but now how do you develop on it? Development is messy! Not perfect and beautiful like this main branch! True! This is where Branches, plural, come in.

A branch is essentially a copy of the codebase at a certain point in time, that can be used independently of other branches. So if I went ahead and created a branch off the main branch, I could do whatever I wanted on it, without having any effect on main. And the reverse is true as well: If one of my friends comes in and puts code on main, it doesn’t affect my branch.

Checking out

This one is super simple, but it deserved a pointer here. When you checkout a branch, you move from looking at your other branch to the new one. This actually changes the files around to be what they are in the other branch, but it keeps any local changes you’ve made. As a beginner, you’ll want to stay on a single non-main branch as much as possible, till you’re more comfortable with git.

Merging

In standard development environments, you want your working branch to always be up to date with main. If there’s code on main I want it on my branch! How, You ask? There are a few ways of doing this, but the simplest, is just a merge. A merge grabs the state of one branch and plops it onto another. In this case, you want to merge main into your branch so if you’re currently using your branch you can run git merge main. This will usually work, but in some cases you may have edited the exact same location in a file as someone else! Git has no idea what to do with this so it stops and asks you. This is known as the feared merge conflict. To resolve it, you can check which files conflict with a git status, and open any offenders in your text editor of choice. You’ll notice some weird symbols in this file:

<<<<<<< branch1
# branch1 code here
=======
# branch 2 code here
>>>>>>> branch2

If you want to keep both, just delete all three lines with the weird symbols (<, =, and >), save the file and you’re good to continue merging! If you want just just branch1’s code, you can delete the line that says branch1, along with everything between the equals signs and the branch2 line. If you want brach2’s code, just do the opposite. Bottom line, as long as the arrows and equals signs are gone, git doesn’t care. Just make sure the file is syntactically correct once you’re done! After that, just go ahead and readd everything to the stage, and run a git merge --continue. You just killed a merge conflict! Yippee!

If you want to avoid these entirely you can specify a merge strategy in your command taking either yours or theirs in the event of a conflict, but this will override someone’s work! I’d recommend you try to resolve it manually if you can.

Rebase

I would be remiss for not bringing up the humble git rebase. Strictly speaking, Rebase is Merge but cooler. Merges are rough and ugly, Rebases are clean and beautiful. In terms of sheer good practice, always prefer rebases over merges. Your coworkers/ team/ fellow open source contributors/ future self will thank you for it.

However, early on, rebases can introduce many many problems if not used in a repository that has general good practice and as such I don’t reccommend them to newbies. If you’re already feeling overwhelmed, skip this section, and come back when you’ve got some git under your belt.

For the rest of you, here’s a simple summary of a rebase: Where a merge simply grabs all of your changes and shoves them into another branch, a rebase takes the point where a branch was created and moves it around. This essentially rewrites the commit history, so make sure you’re not on a branch used by someone else or that makes problems.

This is especially useful for getting your branch updated off main, if main has been updated. Generally it’s good practice to rebase off main every time you sit down to do some work, to make sure you’re working off the most up to date stuff as possible, as well as to update your branch before merging to main.

Both of these actions are also doable by merges, but merges create really ugly merge commits that end up both:

causing a shit ton of merge conflicts at the same time (ESPECIALLY if you don’t regularly update off main) and
obfuscating commit history so it becomes super difficult to parse later on.

A well rebased commit history is literally just a line of commits and their names, each adding an incrememntal change to the project. Very simple, and very readable, so when the day comes that you need to regression test a stupid ass bug that won’t go away, you can rest easy knowing that you won’t need to crack open any commits to see what’s actually inside.

Moving on, another beautiful use of the rebase is the…

Interactive rebase

git rebase -i allows you to interactively rebase your branch step by step. What the hell does that mean? Well, it means you can do something like this: git rebase -i HEAD~3.

Let’s go through what this does step by step. First, What is HEAD~3? HEAD referrs to your current position on the commit history. Usually, this is the most recent commit on your branch. The “~3” means “including 3 commits back”. This is the total number of commits that will be displayed to you, including the one you’re currently on.

Now what are you doing to these 3 commits? You’re rewriting history, silly! You’re the time lord! Reality bends to your will! Wanna rename a commit? Done. Wanna combine two commits into one? Easy. Delete a commit? No worries.

Once you’re done, if you have a remote, you’ll have to force push. Again, make sure nobody else uses this branch, and if not, then go ahead and force push your rebase. You can make both your and someone else’s day really bad if you mess this up and push to remote so be very careful! You almost certaintly won’t lose work, but you will lose time and sanity, so it pays to think before acting.

Lingering Questions…

What if I want to put my code on main? Is it the same as a merge? You ask. Well yes but actually no. If you’re running locally, all alone, sure (though I’d recommend against it). But, if you’ve got friends, you need something that allows you to share code and work together. You need…

Github

(Or another git hosting service. I’m not picky, but I’ll be referring to this type of service as github, despite there being other options out there in the interest of beginner friendliness. If you understand that, check out my essay on why we need git federation!)

Regardless, Git and Github are often misconstrued to be the same thing. They are not! Git is the thing running on your computer tracking files and doing merges. Github is where you can send your git repository when you want to back it up on the cloud and/ or share it with others. How does this work? Good question!

Pushing

Is your commit on your computer, but your friends don’t have access to it on github? push it! Push is the third command in the classic git three-hit-combo:

git add
git commit
git push

This is the quickest way to get your code from your pc to the remote where other people want it! Notably, push only works on commits! It won’t do shit on diffs, even staged ones. Pushing will push your local branch to the linked branch on remote, usually of the same name. Generally, it’s impolite to push directly to a branch that someone is using without asking permission. Instead, consider a pull request, or sending them a message.

Wow! Can I push to any branch, you definitely didn’t ask? No! Never ever ever ever, ever ever ever push directly to main. Unless you know exactly what you’re doing, avoid this like the plague. Local code has cooties, and we can’t have that on our precious main. Set up branch protections on github to make sure this never happens. Now. I’ll wait.

How do you get code on main if you can’t push to it?

Pull requests

A pull request is just a merge happening on github, rather than your computer. What makes it special is that it allows other people to review your code before it’s approved and sent off to main properly. They’re generally abbreviated to just “PR”. Generally, on larger projects, it’s good practice to keep these open for the duration of a feature or fix’s development so that other people can track your progress, rather than just opening one up once the code is ready for main.

Pull/ fetch

These last couple commands are how you get code from github onto your computer. Fetch is a glance at what’s out there without actually doing anything, while pull actually grabs changes from github and gets you them locally. Generally you want to be pulling code whenever there’s updates, especially to main, and if there are, merging main into your current working branch to keep yourself up to date with the project.

Best practices (Especially for teams)

Here’s a little addendum here, as there are a lot of little things that contribute to a better experience using git, especially with teams, that I didn’t fully comment on above.

1. Little changes over big ones.

This applies to both commits and pull requests. Split up diffs into discrete commits. If you made some big map changes and also fixed a UI element, those two should probably be on seperate commits at least. Ideally, you’d open individual branches and pull requests for both, seperately.

That way they can reach main faster, for your teammates to access more quickly. This also really really helps the readability of your project’s history.

2. Feature branches over monolithic branches

I alluded to this earlier, but it’s worth repeating: make different branches for different things. Individual branches do work for jams and the like, but hardcore break down when working on any long term projects with a team.

The convention here is to prepend feature/ to branches adding a feature of some sort, and patch/ or fix/ to branches fixing bugs and the like. (eg: feature/add-shops) Feel free to come up with your own conventions for your own projects though! Many more professional workplaces will have a task management or ticket system (github projects is a great free option!), with branch names mirroring ticket numbers. (eg: tickets/DM-38901)

This also allows teammates to base off your feature branch if they desperately need to build off an in-progress feature, without getting inundated by 83 other changes you happen to have made.

3. Update off main frequently.

Always, always, always work off the most recent version of the project. Whenever you sit down, checkout main, pull, checkout your branch, and either merge main into your branch, or rebase your branch on top of main.

Seriously, do this. People will complain that git has so many merge conflicts; If your team is constantly updating main, and always updating your local versions to track main, I guarantee merge conflicts will become unfathomably easier and vastly more infrequent.

This also resolves the problem of whose job is it to resolve merge conflicts, as main is the source of truth, so once it’s on main, everyone else has to deal with it on their own branches. (Which conincidentally really incentivizes smaller branches; if you’re keeping up a big branch, whoop de do every time someone makes a change to something you’ve edited you’ve gotta update your branch. Split it up buddy!)

4. Git is built for text.

This one is good to know, as git isn’t the only VCS (Version Control Software).

Git handles everything through text, including big binary globs. This makes certain software significantly more annoying to work with, especially proprietary software. I’ll call out Unreal engine specifically here. Things like actors, map files, etc… gets serialized into an unreadable jumble of characters. This makes them totally unmergeable (if conflicts exist anyway), which is bad. I personally don’t recommend using such software, as merging is incredibly powerful, (and open source software is simply better), however if the choice of software is set in stone, here’s the deal.

Git is not great at handling these files, however, other VCS solutions don’t really do much more than git in this realm, other than baindaid the problem a bit better. Essentially, other VCS solutions will allow users to “lock” files so that other people can’t edit them, which you can emulate in git by just communicating with your team. If the files are not locked, and two people do work on one such file, one person will simply have to abandon their work on that specific file, and start over. If you do have to work with these, I recommend looking into other VCS software and doing some research. Git is still a great option, but the playing ground does get a bit more competitive in this realm.

If files are openly serialized to readable text, such as in godot, this is not a problem and merging can be performed as normal in git.

5. Git is open source!

Just a quick reminder that git is free software developed largely by volunteers! It’s licensed under GPLv2, which means that you can use it as a tool to develop whatever you want with no strings attatched, though i’d definitely reccommend reading through the details of the GPL becuase it’s fascinating! (that sentence is the nerdiest shit I’ve written in a while dear god)

Conclusion

I’m finishing this thing up super late and I’m incredibly cooked, so if there are errors, or any points of confusion please let me know.

They/them out; ~ Peace! ~

Monthly Update 2025 October

Mon, 03 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Hey I did almost nothing interesting in october I think. I’m literally only writing this out of moral obligation to keep up the streak.

Cabin GDD

I put together a GDD for a new project that I’ve been contemplating for a while. I’m not sure if I’ll actually be doing this anytime soon but I do want to do it at some point. You can check it out here.

Optimization shenannegans

Do y’all run your entire operating system while gaming? Lame! You’re wasting frames! I’ve run up a series of custom gamescope sessions on my greeter that literally just spin up a gamescope instance running my game of choice, and nothing else. I have the current iteration in my nix config at the moment, but it’s still very incomplete. Currently systemd still runs up the same stuff as my main config, so I’m considering making a new user account to limit what systemd ends up running. I really don’t need a full pipewire instance here, for example, pulseaudio or even ALSA would work just fine.

Drumset

I got some digital drums so I don’t have to emulate drums on a keyboard. Nice! Unfortunately the MIDI integration that this drumset uses isn’t interpreted correctly in Ardour, so I’ll have to do the signal processing for the MIDI signals into raw XML so that my hi-hat pedal works correctly. That’s a project for later, because that’s a goddamn pain in the ass. Luckily the thing still works for simple drums, and I don’t fully need a hi-hat pedal to play better than on keyboard so I’m content with how it works at the moment. Mostly.

The only way I can get Ardour to recognize it in the first place is to swap the IO from pipewire into ALSA which is so inconvenient. I’m not sure why pipewire can’t handle MIDI input via USB, but who the hell knows. I’ll have to look into that as well.

October Nodeletter

I helped out on the october nodeletter, check it out here

Retrospective

The schoolwork this semester has been crazy, so I’ve been unfathomably busy with that, work, climbing, etc…

Definitely going to reduce my credits next semester though, as I really need to do more stuff.

Plans

I’m literally just trying to survive at the moment so I’ll just put stuff on pause at the moment. Sucks to do, but I really need to pass this discreet math class lmao.

Conclusion

Thanks for reading, hope you have more free time than I do haha. Imma go take a hike, have a great day.

Monthly Update 2025 September

Mon, 29 Sep 2025 20:42:43 -0700

It’s september time, and I’m unfathomably cooked. This is gonna be a short one, and I think I need sleep.

Why so short, batman?

Well, I got really really really sick for about a week, then was buried under the resulting schoolwork for the next two, and here I am. I’ve done what I could in that time, but have been largely cooked.

Niri WM Hot corners

WE’RE MERGED BABY!!! Compile the WM from its main branch to grace your eyes with fully configurable per-monitor hot corners courtesy of yours truly. Doccumented here!

Eventually I’m looking at potentially adding spawn and spawn-sh functionality to hot corners as well, but that’s closer to a thought marinating in the back of my head than an actual thing that’s happening. If it catches my fancy on a cool autumn day, perhaps I might pick it up. Until then, enjoy!

Motherboard update

Well, the mobo might be cooked. After ordering and consulting an annoyingly silent POST beeper, I’ve come to the conclusion that somehow the POST circut is simply just not triggering in the first place, which SUCKS, as that’s the thing that’s supposed to start everything and/ or tell me what’s gone wrong. Might try to do some contact tracing if I can find a half decent schematic somewhere but who the hell knows. If anyone knows the Strix Z-690-F Gaming Wifi moderately well, or knows how a POST circut works, please feel free to reach out!

Music

I played music! I recorded stuff! I haven’t recorded stuff since I was on arch, so I had to reconfigure my audio setup on nix, but ardour works great now, and I’m getting to work!

Did you finish anything?

Next topic!

Games!

Hades 2

I’ve been selfishly saving myself for the full release of Hades 2 through the open early access, as I loved the original hades and wanted to experience the second completely fresh. And seeing that it released last week I’ve been doing so! It’s been genuinely one of the best games I’ve ever played and I don’t think I’m even halfway through. I’ll almost certaintly do a post on it once I finish the thing, but suffice it to say I’ve been having an incredible time with it and the chaos redesign was literally life changing.

Hollow Knight

While I was sick I was able to 104% the original hollow knight. I haven’t done the true ending yet, but I thouroughly enjoyed it, with a few annoyances here and there. I might do another post on it as well, but I’ll wait till I get that true ending to do so. The writing is unfathomably powerful and it’s fucking bonkers how much they’re able to do with so little. I ended up crying twice through my playthrough and each such encounter had a number of dialogue lines that you could count on one hand. Truly impressive work, and I’m looking forward to picking up silksong when I get the time.

Where’s the NixOS post, Jon?

It’s being worked on, I promise! I’m still learning things about nix (yes even a whole ass month and a half after switching, NixOS is one hell of a rabbit hole, let me tell you), and I’d like to make it as good as it can be. I have an open PR to nixpkgs and I’d love to have that merged before I do the full post so I can fully write about what I’ve learned from it (though nixpkgs is huge and might very well take a while).

What I can say is this far in, I don’t regret the switch. NixOS makes so much sense and I’m delighted to say the bad stuff get so much better with time. I did half regret switching at first but I think the brain worm finally ended up taking hold, so I’m grateful for that at least :P.

Retrospective

I think I did well considering the circumstances. Mostly just annoyed that I didn’t work on nike’s. I think the scope is intimidating me a little bit, but that’s just a matter of making myself sit down and chip away at it little by little.

Plans

Alright here’s the deal. I’m going to put some stuff on the back burner as little as I’d like to do that, so I can focus on what actually needs to get done.

Main list:

Nike’s
Open VPN Config
Music Recording

Backlog:

Treehouse RPG
NixOS Blog post
Motherboard Repair
Niri Hot corner updates
Hollow knight blog post

Conclusion

Thanks for reading again! If you made it this far, go look up a picture of chaos from hades 2 as a reward. You’re welcome, and I’ll see you next month! Vaya con queso!

FEDERATE GIT!!!

Wed, 03 Sep 2025 12:26:12 -0700

Background

In the modern day, git servers are a must. Even on the smallest of solo projects, one can greatly benefit by using a git server to host it, collaborative projects are nigh impossible without git servers, and more importantly, git servers are the backbone of the vast majority of open source development. And among git servers, github is by far the most prominent, which is moderately saddening given that the main location in which most open source development occurs is not open source itself. This isn’t without reason, though. Free hosting, baked in support for issues, forks, pull requests, and anything else one might need to work in a git repository, and even free and easy access to github actions which are unfathomably powerful CI-CD tools. And at the same time, willingly or not, all the code hosted on it is also almost certaintly being used as free real estate for the microsoft AI teams to train off. It’s been pushing copilot nonstop, and will likely only get worse from here.

Self hosted git repos like sourcehut, gitlab, gittea, and many others serve as a great alternative, given you have the skills, know how, and/or resources to run one up. However they do have their downsides, as I’ll get into later on.

The Problem!

So what does one do when they want to switch off github to an alternative? Well you find and host a new git server! It’s just that easy! Jokes aside, if you’ve used github at all, setting up a new git server and migrating is nontrivial on its own. However, that’s not all. Like it or not, everything else will still be on github. So now you’ll still have to use github to contribute to most other projects, but now your own projects will suffer from the reduced traffic of not being on github due to its sheer size. Some choose to mirror their repos, which tries to reach a best of both worlds approach, but suffers from the partitioning of the community, and more often than not the mirror becomes higher traffic than the actual repo!

All this to say, you have been for all practical purposes cut off from the vast majority of the open source community. This, needless to say, sucks. Self hosing should certaintly provide more freedom, but also MORE connection to the community, not less. Open source is made and broken by its community, and this problem desperately needs some sort of solution, as looking at, well… microsoft, github will continue to enshittify, and if we don’t solve this problem, we risk either being trapped on github or losing a whole bunch of traffic to open source communities.

The Solution

We need global git federation.

I’m proposing Mastodon’s ActivityPub but for git development. On Mastodon you can live on server A but still get information from server B. We need this for git servers. I like to joke that git is my social media, but in this sense it really needs to be copying off social media’s homework. I’ve said this already but open source development lives off its community. Thus, we need to be pushing to expand these communities, making it easier to get involved in open source and reducing barriers to entry. As one does more open source work over git, one naturally gravitates towards wanting their own git server, as it’s freer and it gives the user back more control of their software. I completely agree that more people should be self hosting, which is why this means so much to me. We NEED to make this a no-brainer decision, but as it stands, all it really serves to do is separate an individual from the very communities that would otherwise help them. We need to FEDERATE GIT!

I found a few tidbits on gittea potentially implementing something along these lines, but everything I found dried up around 2022, and even if gittea, or any other git server provider for the matter, had implemented a perfect federation model, the issue of cross-provider federation persists until a critical mass of other providers also subscribe to the same federation protocol. As nice as it would be, one provider having federation does not fundimentally solve this problem.

The onus, instead, should fall directly on git. Git itself needs to define a server federation protocol, to clear up all confusion among the server providers and push all of them to adopt it so that they can claim to support the full git protocol, federation and all. The added benefit of course is that there’s no toiling over which protocol to use or how to implement it, there’s only whether or not they can implement the official one, which makes actual implementation much more straightforward.

What should it look like?

Actual implementation should certaintly be left up to the designers, but from a user perspective here’s what I would like to see:

I run up a git server. I can define the visibility of all my repos, ranging from private to local to global. My global projects show up on github and other git servers, and I can search others’ global projects in this way as well. I can create issues, comments, and pull requests on others’ servers and vice versa. Forking a repo on another server creates a fork on my server. Critically, If I have a gittea server (host) and someone on github (remote) leaves an issue, the issue should be created on my server! There should be no duplication, and the host server should have full authority. The remote server’s job is to display my repo to users and make API calls to my server when an action is performed on the remote. Rather personally, I’d also want a global subscriptions/watch/star list, so that I can watch or star repos across servers and get updates on new releases, comments, issues, PRs, and the like, regardless of server. Heck, built in RSS functionality could handle that last one just fine. (I know that a lot, if not all, git servers support RSS, however I’d like to see a first party reader as well so that you don’t need to be an RSS nerd to use it. Eg: Click the star button, and your account on your home server is automatically subscribed to that repo’s update feed.)

In summary

We should be splitting off github more but the communal nature of open source is harmed by this fracturing of the community, as beneficial as self hosting may be. We need a way to preserve that community in the process and we need to work to make that happen.

Thank you for reading and go forth and spread the good word of git federation!

Monthly Update 2025 August

Tue, 02 Sep 2025 11:29:35 -0700

Welcome to the august monthly update! We’re a bit late on this one, but not without reason.

Eldritch Wager

I Made a game! The brackeys game jam came around and I ended up decideing to make something simple because I could. Check it out here!

This is generally why I missed the monthly update deadline I’ve set for myself, as I was neck deep in this game jam. (Now I’m neck deep in homework catchup, as uni started last week, but que sera sera).

NixOS

I did it. My arch partition is gone, I’m running NixOS on my laptop, and it’s for the totally insane. I’m in the process of writing up a blog post on it at the moment, but suffice it to say, if you are not totally insane, stick with arch. Arch just works. Trust me. If you are not regular insane enough for arch, stick with mint or some fedora spin. Thank me later.

As for me? I might be clinically insane, because I’m getting things working slowly but surely. NixOS sounds like a straight upgrade from the outside (Namely Arch), but I would caution against this perspective. Rather, there are tradeoffs.

Determinism in system state? Upgrade.
Effortless rollback? Upgrade.
Packaging? Oddly enough, despite the size gap between nixpkgs and the AUR (Nixpkgs unstable is significantly larger by sheer number of packages!), I’ve actually had a more seamless experience on the AUR! Flakes are nice but they’re still experimental and purely community driven, and you can’t yet fully rely on them existing for your project that happens to be absent from nixpkgs. (3dslicer, zen browser, nirius, etc…)
Learning curve? Literal hell. This took me weeks of work, and I don’t think I’m even halfway competent at this operating system.
Literally just running software? Whoa there buddy. You want to run a piece of software? I hope you’re ready to dig through wiki pages for hours to get a working fhs environment. Dependencies? I hardly even know her! (Cooked)
Development? Harder. It’s just harder. Dev containers are definitely a thing, but I’ve had problems testing Niri, as on arch I’d just replace the system version with mine, but on nix you need to figure out a way to package your version somehow… I think.

More ranting to come though.

Federate Git

FEDERATE GIT DO IT DO IT DO IT RAAAAHHHHHHH :3

Website update

I got a huge website update out in which I was able to knock out a whole bunch of quality of life improvements for the website that you can view here. I’m super happy with this though!

Clear Thoughts

I also did a bit of writing, as I felt inspired to do something short to dip my toes back in. Cyberpunk is good, cyberpunk is friend. Check it out here!

Motherboard repair

Tried to fix a motherboard! Unfortunately the debug lights are concerningly not doing light things (completely dark) but I do get board power (pretty RGB) and power on works in at least some capacity (we get fanspin, but no video out). Looking to get a motherboard speaker to see if we’re getting beep codes in any respect. If anyone has any idea what could be happening please please please let me know!

Open source contribs

Godot engine

I’m now working on the official Godot nodeletter! Check out the latst entry here!

If anyone reading has anything they want potentially featured in there, please reach out to kai@fireye.coffee!

Niri WM

Multiple monitor hot corners are functonal! If I have time I’ll see if I can add custom actions on hot corner but As it stands I really just want that PR merged (Yalter notice meeeeee). PR can be found here.

Retrospective

So. You may have noticed a couple things are absent. Oops. First and foremost, Nike’s. I still want to work on it, I just didn’t have the time. Don’t worry it will happen, I will fight god (adhd) to make it happen. Further, I didn’t do enough music this month. Expect more of that going forward. OpenVPN is still T Posing over my sobbing corpse as per usual, and the treehouse did not progress at all. Cooked.

On the other hand, I did get that website update out, I started working on that motherboard fix, and I embarked on the long painful NixOS journey, so not a total loss!

Plans

Here’s the list:

Nike’s
Treehouse
OpenVPN setup
Motherboard fixing
Music
NixOS Blog post.

Let’s see how I do.

Conclusion

Thanks again for reading, see ya soon!

Monthly Update 2025 July

Mon, 28 Jul 2025 15:51:47 -0700

Hello and welcome back to my monthly update series! It actually has a publishing cadence so I actually released a sequel! Wow! I’m getting good at this “doing things” stuff!

Alright, let’s go ahead and kick things off.

Game Developers Together

I finally got the juice to go ahead and finish my webring! I started this months ago and rediscovered the repo a couple weeks back, so I decided to get it working! It took me about a weekend or so, but it’s up and running at gdt.fireye.coffee, and you can read my announcement blog post on it here. We’re open for applications, baby!

Nike’s House

Work is progressing steadily, but slowly on nike’s. I wrote a couple solid paths, but I’m not fully happy with the character voices that I put down so I may have to do some significant editing later on. Further, there’s some personality in this game that’s starting to shine through, especially in flynn’s dialogue options that I’m presenting to the player that I’m starting to like quite a bit. Unfortunately, leaning into this further than I already have would require some nontrivial rewrites in act 1 that I don’t necessarily want to commit to, however the disco elysium vibes of these new options is really calling to me like the green goblin mask. Still, I think I want to keep the scope creep to a minimum and keep focusing on the writing. I hope to start up some local writing groups in which I can share what I have with other writers to get feedback on what I have and points of improvement.

However speaking of nike’s let’s move on to:

Open source contribs

Godot dialogue manager

I think i’ve well and truly got the bug; I was writing for nike’s the other day and ended up finding a bug in godot dialogue manager, which I found a workaround for… then promptly ignored, opting to dive straight into the plugin’s source code fixing the bug itself. I made a few other contributions to godot dialogue manager as well, most of them C# oriented.

Godot engine

I continued testing godot PRs for regressions and reproductions. I don’t have any experience with C++, so as a way of getting familiar with the engine source code I figured I’d do some simple testing labour. I poked around in there a bit and tried to fix a bug in custom resource resolution, but C++ just isn’t my cup of tea. I do want to keep contributing to godot though, so I reckon I’ll go ahead and learn it anyway, It’ll just take a bit longer than I’d like.

Niri WM

Niri has been amazing, and I’ve loved using it so much that I’ve started to actively contribute to the project. Yalter, the maintainer, looks a bit cooked in terms of their spare time, which is a shame, however I can only see the project going good places, given they have the capacity to review people’s PRs in a reasonable amount of time. I’ve already submitted one adding a much needed update to hot corners and have fixed another PR’s failing testcases, and I’m hoping to expand the hot corners to per-monitor hot corners, when I have time.

Rust

Further, Niri is written in rust. Oh boy do I looooove rust. I hadn’t written rust before this but the level of control it provides at the level of simplicity that it sits at is simply unprecedented. Cargo is immaculate, and the tracebacks it gives me are better than even those of python, which is absolutely bonkers. I will be writing more rust in the future. Rust is good, rust is friend.

NixOS

It is getting more and more appealing to switch to nixOS as the days go by. It makes the hassle of sysadmin so much more streamlined, and especially when I have two systems to manage, I do NOT want to have to manage two different systems with different environments. And I won’t have to ever worry about debugging on a half functional system anymore! Nix just solves everything! The work involved in switching is large though, and I’m not totally convinced that home-manager is a good idea. This is probably because I don’t know how it works, however as far as I can tell, it needs all of its options to be manually programmed into it, which is already iffy, and only gets worse the closer someone is to the bleeding edge. If a program I use has an option that I want to toggle, but it isn’t in home manager, do I need a dotfile again? If so, now the entire benefit of home manager is busted! More research is forthcoming, but I’ll keep y’all updated :3

Pirate TTRPG

I’ve started casually working on a little pirate themed TTRPG with a friend. It’s still in early stages, so I haven’t even made a project for it yet on here, but stay tuned!

Music

I started doing actual music recording in july! You can find some of the little things I’ve put out here, but I’m hoping to do longer and longer releases as I go on. I’ve been playing around with synths, guitar effects, and I even bought myself an actual pedal the other day. Stay tuned here as well, as I have some stuff in the works that I like quite a bit.

Spire

I started a campaign of Spire this month! I’m hoping to use it to get a better grip on the system and take that forward into my other designs, but also to tell a good story. I also just want to take this second to reiterate the sheer importance of safety tools and of good communication at your tables. As I wrote in my treehouse game:

Your priority is to your friendship with these people, not to the text of this document!

Remember that y’all are doing this, as friends, for fun. If your friends are not having fun, you have failed at games. People say you can’t win or lose TTRPGs; I disagree.

You win TTRPGs by successfully scheduling sessions.

You lose TTRPGs by disregarding the enjoyment, safety, and wellbeing of your actual friends in favor of literally anything else.

Climbing

I’m weak! I can barely climb a 5.11c without getting gassed! This must be remedied. I will be hitting the gym much more frequently next month and maybe socialize with people for once.

Art & Literature

Burning Chrome, William Gibson

I read through more of William Gibson’s burning chrome and it was quite good. I might want to expand the website to allow me to share my favorite media with visitors, but for now, I definitely reccommend giving gibson a read if you are a fan of cyberpunk themes (hypercapitalism, baby). One of the stories I read this month had a beautiful ending that really landed quite well. It said a lot about how we as humans perceive ourselves and expect ourselves to operate on a social stage. Beautifully thought provoking stuff!

Mythic Bastionland, Chris McDowall

This is a beautifully crafted, short and to the point, TTRPG system about knights. It has 21 pages of precise rules, including one page on aging that makes the system truly unique as far as I’ve seen, and then proceeds to list a series of knights, seers, and quests for over 200 pages thereafter. Despite being short, this system looks unfathomably robust, and I can’t wait to play it.

Plans

Alright. I didn’t do great on last month’s plans, only getting around to 1 of the 3 goals I set: That openVPN server is mean, and I completely forgot to update the website, past supporting music publishing.

Nonetheless, I’d still like to get around to both of those things (self-hosted OpenVPN setup, and website updates), as well as continuing work on nike’s. I’d also like to do a bit on the treehouse, as that system still needs love, and I can feel it getting close to completion.

Further I might start getting more into electronics repair; I have my LGA1700 test bench and I’ve already ordered a broken motherboard that I hope to try and fix back up.

Conclusion

Thanks for reading! I hope to continue doing these, as they serve as great reminders for how I spend my spare time, and what I choose to use it on. The class is definitely eating a lot of the time that I’d be using for stuff like this but I’m still managing to get stuff in. Regardless, I hope you have a great day, and I hope to see you next time. Vaya con queso!

Game Devs Together

Mon, 21 Jul 2025 19:37:19 -0700

TLDR

Hi! I made a webring! An OPEN SOURCE webring! If you’re a gamedev with a personal website, you can join it here!

What is it?

The quick one-liner is that GDT is an open source indie web style webring for game developers who run personal websites.

Like a normal webring it serves to connect indie websites to each other without reliance on a conventional search engines. It focuses its scope in a bit more than many conventional webrings (specifically to just game developers) in order to hopefully provide a more curated experience for the indie web surfer who might be interested in finding more indie games and game developers to follow.

More importantly though, this also allows the community to focus itself and become a lot more useful to its members. Right now, I’ve set up a forum where people can talk, and I’ve intentionally kept it open as a resource for all game developers and aspiring game developers to come in and chat, not just the ones with websites.

Ideally, once GDT grows a bit, I’m hoping to see if the community can tackle a community project or two, taking advantage of the group’s open source nature, but till then I’ll be hanging out.

I’m hoping to go advertise it in a few other indie web forums and areas to hopefully gain some kind of critical mass or initial userbase, but who knows haha.

Monthly Update June 2025

Sat, 28 Jun 2025 17:31:29 -0700

Hello! Welcome to my monthly update for June (happy pride :3)! This being the first of its kind, allow me to explain what exactly I plan to do with this series.

See, I’m always working on things. However, these things very rarely see the light of day, complete or otherwise, so to the outside observer, it appears that I am doing nothing, which is a shame! Further, publicly summarizing my activities and setting goals for the next month allows me to hold myself to some sort of standard and thus do more things. Planning and visualizing the future is also really good for me in terms of ADHD, and being accountable to the internet to do so is a great way to make sure it happens.

TLDR: It’s a summary of what I did this month and what I plan to do next month, tied up into a neat retrospective.

So, without further ado, let’s kick it off.

Star citizen survival post

I’m dropping this with a post I’ve had laying around for a bit on survival in star citizen. The reason I didn’t initially release it was that around the time I wrote it the whole blades debacle came up and I just got super depressed about the direction of the project and didn’t want to engage in it as much. These days things have generally improved ever so slightly so I figured what the fuck I might as well just release it. All it was really doing was collecting dust anyway.

Treehouse TTRPG

I spent a lot of June working on “The Treehouse” (learn more here), which is a new TTRPG that I was working on for the “Jam In Silence” Game Jam by possum creek games. I was not able to finish it on time and as such it’s sitting incomplete on my hard drive, but damn is it gonna be good when it’s done! Imagine a modern setting but focused on the PCs in a treehouse where each characters’ troubles, flaws and vices are represented as “classes”. Feature-wise it’s mostly there, with a few additions and tweaks here and there, but content-wise, it’s a barren wasteland, which is somewhat terrifying. Definitely gonna return to this soon though, as I’d love to playtest this one with friends.

Vacation

My first half of june was claimed by a trip to spain, which was a breath of fresh air compared to the ins and outs of life over here. Functional public transport was really nice and the spanish siesta was truly iconic. The sun also goes down around 10 in the afternoon, which does wonders for my sleep schedule, and surprisingly everything is open past 7:15. Wild.

Open source contributions

I also started going down the open source rabbit hole. I did some work on the godot project (nothing major, just regression testing), and generally went out of my way to open tickets, do testing, and work with smarter developers to contribute to any number of random FOSS projects. The highlight reel consists of the embedded game window over wayland in godot, a bug in the xwayland-satellite project, and some work on the niri WM.

Niri

Welp it took me this long to realize that the hyprland maintainer is a bigot. Neat. Time to find a new WM. Enter niri! Niri is awesome! It’s still a bit rough around the edges (It doesn’t support release keybinds yet and scratchpads are sorely missing), however I love it. It took me about a week of literally nothing else, but it’s all set up, and now I can do any single productive thing (please). I’m tracking a lot of issues on its github, and I can’t wait for it to get better.

Nike’s house

It’s still happening! I promise! Treehouse really put a wrench in my progress here, as I wanted to make a TTRPG, and that jam seemed like a great opportunity, however I’ve since sidelined treehouse and I’m back working on nike’s. I’m hoping to get it done by august time, but no promises. There’s a lot more to it than I had hoped but I’ve made some steady progress.

I added an event tracker so the game can keep track of what you’ve said and which paths you’ve gone down, as well as a few api tweaks so that when I sit back down to do more writing I can make more tweaks to the gameplay from within the dialogue. I also cooked on a bit of dialogue and plot structure stuff but I’m not locked into anything specifically so I won’t drop anything specific here in case I happen to change my mind haha.

Disco elysium

In less productive news, I have played disco elysium to completion! My goodness that was good. I will be referencing it on a regular basis going forward. Long live tequila sunset.

In all seriousness it really gave me a deeper appreciation for the writing that goes into games, especially branching ones where people cannot ever be expected to experience every line of dialogue that the designers sweat over. It’s really a beautiful thing to bash your head in weaving a web of narrative that leads to a conclusion that can be experienced from all angles. Some things may be done out of order, others might not be done at all, and as a designer you have to account for all of it and still make sure the story remains coherent. You also have to provide multiple ways of going from point A to point B and make it all flow which is a mind boggling amount of work to do. It’s genuinely awe inspiring. The game is beautiful, and I’d urge you to give it a play (though maybe obtain it though alternative means as the game and related IP has been regrettably stolen from its original creators). Also, ironically, some of the most nuanced political discussion I’ve ever seen online (which isn’t saying a lot) has come from the disco elysium community, which is hilarious to me.

I killed all my social media too. I’ve kept youtube around in a limited capacity (30 minute daily cap, and I’ve limited it to just the subscriptions page), but everything else is dead, discord included. RSS feeds are so goated. Here’s a neat rule you can use to determine if you’re in too deep though: If you’re checking your phone like it’s a skinner box that dispenses dopamine at irregular intervals, it’s time to stop and re-evaluate your relationship with the thing.

It’s horrifying to think that I got in too deep despite knowing and working against a lot of the psychological tricks that social media companies use to cultivate addictive patterns. If I got sucked in that far, what about joe schmoe who just uses instagram or tik tok, or any alternative on a daily basis. How many hours are lost to just watching noise that will be forgotten in a matter of minutes. Staring into the static just to emerge on the other end no better than when you started, just more exhausted. It’s a depressing image.

I don’t want people reading this and thinking I hate all social media. I don’t. I think it has the capacity to do a lot of good. It’s just run by evil people and also mark zuckerberg (who is also evil but definitely not a person), and is handcrafted to turn your time and attention into profit through manufactured addiction.

I personally don’t have the capacity to make sure I’m using everything mindfully so I’ve cut it all off. Youtube is on thin ice, but youtube revanced (which i heavily recommend), an application timer, and the unhook browser plugin have made it manageable. I’d also urge everyone reading to look at your own use and make sure it’s done with your own consent. In other words, would you benefit from this time more if you sat down and watched a video, scrolled a feed, etc…, or rather got up and called a friend, climbed a tree, did some creative work, played some music, or anything else. It’s a really good practice to ask yourself that every time you whip out your phone to scroll and if you can’t then maybe consider deleting some apps.

Anyway I’m not your parent; I’ll get down off this soap box and get back to the meat and potatoes.

Plans

Alright, what are we doing in july?

Well, I’m planning a few updates on the website, as well as some extra content here, as it’s been awhile since I gave fireye.coffee some love. That integrated todo list looks really good, as I keep my todolist on github issues constantly up to date, so I’d love to figure out some sort of backend that translates that into raw HTML, and can natively display it for people here.

Further, I’m of course going to be working more on nike’s house. I should probably stop with the tools work and just get to writing, as I could work on tools forever (I love tool (the band too)). Expect an update on that sometime this month. If you don’t see one, email me yelling about it.

I’m also messing around with self hosting stuff and fucking christ I’ve tried to set up this openvpn server at least 5 times now and it still doesn’t work. It’s a distinct skill issue and even if I do set it up I reckon I’ll be hacked almost immediately due to further skill issues, but we’ll take those battles as they come. I just love the idea of homelabbing so much, so I’ll bang my head on this as much as I need to to get it working.

I also have a summer class starting up soonish so I might be a bit more cooked on time than I have been recently which sucks, but eh que sera sera. I’ll live.

Conclusion

Alright that’s all I got for y’all. This was already a couple days late, so sorry about that. I’ll try to keep these up though as they keep me accountable and help me track my actual goals, and if anyone happens to care then hooray! Regardless, I hope you have a great day, and thanks for reading. vaya con queso!

Star Citizen- On Survival

Mon, 05 May 2025 17:24:31 -0700

I know what you’re probably thinking: Oh great, another star citizen rant! When will this idiot shut up about their silly space game? Well the answer is almost certainly not now!

I saw a neat video the other day, discussing the concept of survival in star citizen, and while I am about as excited as the creator of said video about the prospect of survival in star citizen, I do think a lot of that video got caught up in the excitement of the “what ifs.” It failed to consider any of the factors of actually making a video game that would go into making this eventuality occur, nor did it take any real stance on the design/ implementation of these factors. Instead it settled for a vague starry eyed vision of survival, which while fun to envision, communicates nothing of substance, and is firmly unrealistic.

So here’s my response in an attempt to remedy that. This is not a dig at the creator nor the video; I actually quite enjoyed the thing and it spurred a lot of thought, which i’m very grateful for. The goal of this is rather to maintain a certain amount of suspense of disbelief, but to use it more productively, at least in my perspective. On with it then.

Survival is mandatory

Star citizen is a game that feeds its immersion above all else, likely as a core design intention. I can tell many people in the community dislike this part of the game, as many disliked Arthur’s sluggish movement and lengthy animations in RDR2. In immersive games, this friction is a feature, not a bug. I will concede that there is a “sweet spot” where this friction is substantive enough to fully immerse a player but isn’t too much to cause them to waste vast amounts of time, but that friction can and should exist in games whose goal it is to immerse players, such as in SC.

A core aspect of that kind of immersion is survival. Nobody wants to take time to feed themselves or drink water, but needing to do so creates so much interesting gameplay if used correctly (which I’ll get into later). That’s why I think star citizen is only going to lean more into this survival gameplay; they’ve already implemented the foundation, they just need to play off it. That said there are a few various aspects of survival each with various levels of feasibility:

Aspects of survival

Let’s take a look at what comprises survival, at least in my eyes, and see where it can neatly slot into star citizen.

Food and drink

We already have this! Yay! However, it provides so little depth that my game developer soul weeps when looking at it. Right now, all it does is mandates you grab some food when you leave a station or city and that you need to return to stations and cities regularly enough to restock. All that you’d need to do to make it overwhelmingly better is add edible meat to fauna and add edible flora if you don’t want to deal with the whole “meat needs to be cooked” thing, and allow people to refill water bottles at rivers, or just to directly drink out of rivers.

This is generally not the most complicated thing to add, though I’m not certain how high fidelity these functions need to be to be pushed to live, so I won’t make any strong assumptions regarding the planet tech that governs the utility of the rivers, nor the animal/plant loot systems which could provide that food. From what I can tell from what we’re seeing released at the moment, it looks like the animal loot systems are being used the most, so that would likely be the easiest avenue for this, as depending on their backend it could be as simple as adding a new loot item (which does involve adding assets and modifying fauna models) and toggling on a theoretical boolean “edible” flag. Admittedly it could be a lot more complicated depending on their implementation though so, again, the term “easy” is very easy to fling around when you don’t know the systems.

Regardless, what this addition would provide is an avenue to actually explore and engage with the beautiful planets that CIG have designed, as at the moment, why would you ever land on any non-POI part of a planet? Adding interactable rivers and edible flora/ fauna that feed into the extant survival systems, would draw players running low on hunger/ thirst to the surface, searching for sustenance. Low flying over microtech, looking around for a good river when you’re close to death, then hopping back into a mission as opposed to jumping all the way back to a station would prove much more time friendly, immersive, and enjoyable.

Crafting

We can’t talk about survival without mentioning the elephant in the room: crafting. Pretty much every survival game includes some form of the thing, as the basis of survival is the capacity to take natural resources and use them to create more advanced tools and resources, which then loops ad-nauseum. Star citizen’s current plans for crafting are more industrial and grand scale than many other survival games, but I do think there’s still both demand and capacity for smaller scale crafting, as would feature in an early game survival loop. If we look at how satisfactory navigates the small -> large scale crafting, we see the usage of a crafting bench that allows simple crafting mechanics, which enable further development, then the game directs you to automate this lengthy manual crafting, by pushing you to larger scale crafting.

I think star citizen could definitely benefit from this model of splitting the crafting system by size and scale, the smallest subsection of which could simply be a multitool attachment. That way when your ship has soft death-ed on a planet you have the capacity to gather natural resources and craft them into usable tools, or hacky replacement parts to ideally get your ship to limp back to civilization without having to phone support or off yourself and come back later. Ideally both of these options, (the latter especially), are properly de-incentivised in later, more stable versions of the game, though I don’t think phoning help is ever going to not exist. Like you can cut off in game comms to global chat and any other local systems, but at a base level, you can’t stop people from whipping out their phone and texting a friend or an org to bail them out, as immersion breaking as that might be.

I don’t, however, see the workarounds as a reason to just give up on any of these systems. The natural storytelling that these systems will afford are just too rich to pass up, in my opinion. Having a little multitool crafter, and allowing you to just build your way up to a building, or getting a broken ship back up and running despite nature’s attempts to the contrary are the stuff of stories you tell even after you set the game down. The zero to hero’s with this system in place would also be vastly cooler too lmao.

The loop here is pretty crazy as far as scope goes though. Giving crafting capacity to a multitool is an incredibly tall order though, and integrating all the collectables for this loop in planet gen isn’t gonna be easy. Luckily it looks like they’re already on the FPS scanning feature, which would be really helpful when searching for requisite resources, but overall this is a big endeavor, and I really doubt it’ll be in anytime before 2030 (which is why we suspended some disbelief above). The only reason I bring it up is that CIG seems to already be making a crafting system and thus could build micro-scale crafting into the spec from the beginning, which usually bodes better than tacking things on post-implementation. I do hope they’ve taken survival into account in their plans though.

Hygiene

This one’s a bit wonky as I don’t think a tier 0 implementation of it is a good idea at all. It’s similar to the issue with food right now: if you just add it without full engagement in the mechanic, you get all the downsides, without any of the upsides. No; It needs to enter the game in a fully fleshed out state. I know many people would be critical of hygiene playing any part in SC whatsoever at any point in time though, and I do want to push back on this. Things like having to use the restroom, sleeping, or regularly showering sound tedious and useless, and in a tier 0 implementation, I completely agree. In such a state they’d only really serve the immersion, and provide more friction to gameplay which is something a lot of SC players grumble about quite a bit.

But looking past that, I could see restroom features becoming useful as a part of farming when that’s added, and sleeping/ cleanliness can contribute to a demand for amenities in ships, cities, bases, and stations, requiring your ship or base supports the above or you face penalties for not properly caring for your character. This pushes demand for ships with these functions, such as the intrepid, which is a pretty bad deal at the moment but could become a much better one, allowing players to sustain themselves for much longer stretches of time than other ships of its class. Bases would also need to accommodate these new demands, which creates further demand for resources to construct the proper facilities, which stimulates the economy.

Conclusion

I look forward to seeing how CIG end up implementing these systems, especially with their being referenced in the recent star citizen live, be John Crewe himself. I just hope they’re done sensibly and at the correct time, as CIG is unfortunately not well known for their capacity to release things smoothly.

Thanks for indulging my long overdue Star Citizen rant post. I have a few ideas for future blog posts cooking, and as I have more time this summer I’ll likely be able to get to at least a few, not to mention a project or two (stay tuned Nike’s House fans, I’ll get that full version out sometime this summer even if it kills me!) As always, thanks for reading, and I hope you have a great day.

Make Bad Art

Tue, 18 Mar 2025 12:56:49 -0700

“Make bad art! Make bad art, make bad art, make bad art!” This is my artist’s mantra. A motto that drives my creative process. And it kinda sucks! Why the hell would I want to make bad art when I could make good art? And what happens in the unlikely event that one of the three AI webscrapers reading this (that probably ignored my site’s robots.txt) thinks the bad art I made is actually good art? Well let’s kick things off with the beret-wearing elephant in the room:

What is art?

My hot take of the day is that art is, at a base level, human expression. This definition is incredibly broad, and it is so intentionally. I’ve heard numerous arguments on the futility of broad definitions, claiming that they rob the word of any utility. I believe that is a mostly factual assessment, but not a helpful one. I’ll come at this from two perspectives: that of the viewer/ player engaging with the piece, and that of the artist, the creator of the piece.

The viewer

From a viewer’s eyes, art is something that evokes feeling, spurs thought, and/or creates meaning for them. However, individuals are an incredibly diverse bunch, both in life experience and in perspective/ personality. I don’t see a reason why any single piece of human expression could not evoke at least one of the above, if not more. Even if the work was not intentionally created as art, if a viewer engages with it as described above, who are we to reject their experience as “not artistic”? In my eyes, that’s needlessly exclusionary. Art should be for everyone, not just those who do it “right.”

The artist

I think it’s worth starting out with another definition. An artist is, pretty simply, one who makes art. On the surface, this is, as stated earlier, pretty useless with the above definition of art in mind. A person who exppresses themselves in some way? Doesn’t this just make basically everyone an artist?

Yes it does! In my eyes, art is something that is almost inherent to one’s humanity. The uno to their xbox, if you will. I think including everyone who wishes to be an artist in the term does something much more profound than be “specific in definition,” or whatever that means. It grants the everyday person the societal permission to create. To express. I’ve heard any number of bunk perfectionist arguments from everyday people that discount their own abilities and capacities, afraid of judgement. “I’m not an artist, I can’t create cool things” they say, almost circularly preculding themselves from exactly that. That’s a damn shame, as every single person who enjoys art is now missing out on another voice contributing to the shared dialogue that permeates the artistic world. In my eyes, we as artists have a direct responsibility to make art more accessible, not less. More open and accomodating, and less pretentious and gatekeepy. Because every single artist benefits from more ideas, opinions and perspectives. Art is derivative and the more we have to draw from, the better.

The birth of an artist

I also want to address how one becomes an artist. Simply speaking, when they fist start out, artists make bad art. A lot of it. And over time, as they make bad art, they hone their skills, and at some point their bad art becomes good art.

This is also vague as shit, but let’s start by clarifying the idea of what “good” art and “bad” art are. A lot of semantics around good and bad art are generally also meaningless as the “quality” of art is inherently subjective, however, humor me here. When people say “I don’t think this is art,” I think it would be more accurate to state “I think this is bad art.” Anyone can have any opinion they wish on any article of creation, so your subjective nullification of what another person may see as an artistic piece, can go both ways, resulting in a generally worthless argument consisting of “Nuh uh!” and “Yuh huh!” being flung back and forth. Simply allowing it to be classified as art avoids the nullification of others’ experiences while also opening up the possibility of a productive dialogue as to the quality of the piece. Enter bad art. I think we can all agree that bad art exists, all i’m arguing is that we dissolve the frankly useless line between bad art and not art.

This is all to say, I believe anyone expressing themselves and creating art, even (and especially) bad art, is an artist. You are likely an artist if you so wish. Now what to do? Bad art.

Go make bad art

I touched on this earlier, but in the creation of bad art, one is able to learn their craft. The benefit of making bad art over good art is that when making bad art, one is able to shed their expectations and standards for what a complete piece of art “should be,” and is freed up to simply create. Those concerned with good art get tied up in standards and polish (which to be clear do have their own merits!), and aren’t able to create as much as those making bad art. In learning, sheer quantity of repetition and practice on broad strokes will teach one far more than a fixation on perfection or quality. And in the long run, with the sheer amount of learning in mind, the bad art you make down the line will be of higher caliber than the good art you might have set out to make in the beginning! In short, go make shit! It’s better to make a finished bad thing than nothing at all.

This mentality is a much more subjective one than the ideas on art I presented earlier in this piece, in that I think it’s perfecftly fine to disagree herein. I’ve found a lot of benefit in this “make bad art” mentality personally with my ADHD ridden executive functioning issues, but one could have an entirely different experience than mine, which is entirely valid.

Caveats

This mentality is shaped with self driven projects and artworks in mind. If you have a job, or a school assignment, you’ll of course be subject to external expectations and standards, and it’s not necessarily bad to learn polishing skills. I’d just give a friendly reminder to do so mindfully, rather than hyperfixate on perfection over creation.

Conclusion

Thanks for reading! I hope this article got you to think about art and the creative process, and hopefully just try to make something! Art makes the world better for everyone.

To get notified about future articles, I recently added a newsletter that you can sign up for here, and you can support my creation of future articles like this one via my kofi here. Have an awesome day.

Bloob Devlog

Tue, 04 Feb 2025 15:00:37 -0700

After finishing The Memories of bloob and sending it to friends for playtesting, I got a lot of interesting feedback while watching people play through the thing and talk about it afterwards. One of the most interesting pieces of feedback, however, was the general distaste for the Quicktime feature. Let’s talk about it.

On Quicktime

First off, quicktime is old. Not like old old, just regular old. It has a spot in a lot of antequated games as a lazy attempt to engage players during cutscenes, throwing a fail state on failure, then forcing players to restart the whole scene. On the whole, this use of quicktime is generally awful for player experience, and especially so for acessibility.

To be completely clear, this was not the way quicktime was designed in Bloob. The execution was not perfect, the game being made in under a week and all, however, I still think that many players didn’t look past the veneer of a cheap quicktime event and actually engage with bloob’s core message, which I want to try and remedy.

How did Bloob do it?

First off, Bloob is inherently a narrative game. Not reading dialogue is not a good way to enjoy your time with the piece. Bloob was primarily written as something closer to a short story than a jam game, though it does fall under the latter definition and as such is written off as a piece with throwaway dialogue (as many jam games are) by most players, which is a damn shame.

Bloob’s implementation of quicktime was designed with the idea of “pain in the ass, but still more than doable” as the core design intention. The user is prompted to prepare to spam by the system, then is let loose, and spams buttons for 15 seconds or until they lose. Notably, the term “Suppress the memory!” is displayed right below the bar.

Taking advantage of the gamer brain

For some odd reason, the combination of a shrinking green bar getting replaced with bright red and a timer ticking down makes the gamer brain short circut and just spam the prompted buttons. “Winning is good right? I can’t let the bar reach 0, I’ll lose!”

And knowingly or not, the player has just made a decision. Simply doing nothing, and thus not suppressing the memory is within the option sphere, yet players simply don’t even consider it, which is frankly fascinating! But this whole minigame boils down to a simple success/ fail. Did you suppress the memory or not? This naturally leads into the following question:

Why disguise the decision?

The exact same outcome could’ve been reached with a simple dialogue branch. “Do you want to suppress the memory? Yes | No”. Why disguise it behind a weird antequated minigame?

Bloob tells a story of suppression, escapism and refusal to live life, choosing to live in memories instead. When you’re in that headspace you don’t simply decide to stop, to click that “No”. The player shouldn’t have that luxury either. Offering a Yes/ No decision to the player is, in my eyes, antethetical to the entire premise of the game.

Quicktime instead?

On the other hand, the way that a quicktime event hacks the player’s brain works almost too well. On earlier builds of the game, players would just rush through the game without realizing that you could fail a quicktime event! It wasn’t even an option that occurred to them, which is a beautiful paralell to the game’s themes, however I did want the player to realize that something was wrong, so I added dialogue that better flags the idea of something being off, and tried to be more overt in my communication of these themes. Even so, i’m aware that some players just play through it and assume the discrepancies in dialogue and go “huh that was weird” then go on with their day, and I think I’m ok with that.

Final notes

Thanks for reading! I appreciate your time, reading my ramblings on a little thing I made. Have a great day.

Wild West TTRPG System Devlog 1

Fri, 31 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Hi! Welcome to my wild west TTPRG’s first devlog! I figured I’d use this blog as a tool to get me thinking about this project again, and if I can share my thought process and inspire others to be creative and make things as well, that’s an added bonus! Please feel free to use the table of contents above to jump around to stuff that you find interesting, as I’m gonna be yapping quite a bit. So, without further ado, let’s get started!

Where did we start?

This wild west TTRPG project extravaganza started back when I was playing 5e very regularly (over four years ago, holy hell i’m old). I’ve since curtailed my use of the 5e system to take up playing more independent work to draw from in terms of system structure and approach to design, however the wild west system’s old doccuments that i’ll be picking up are still very rooted in that old 5e-style. It leaned heavily into that moment to moment combat that D&D is well known for and it dealt in minute stat values and to-hit bonuses to weapons and heavy resource management. In other words, I think my digital game design practices crossed with my overwhelming 5e experience to that point resulted in a rather creative, yet bewildering network of systems and ideas that aren’t well suited to the TTRPG medium, or at least to the experiences I want to create with this system. Let’s take a look at what remnants remain and what I want to do with them.

Old docs

Here are the old doccuments if anyone’s interested in looking them over.

Combat

As much as I love the detail and ideas behind my combat mechanics, they were incredibly overcomplicated, and, in fact, the system as a whole actually looked to de-incentivese combat as a core design decisison, so introdicing interesting complexity would draw players to combat (ooo, interesting system! Let’s do more of that!) rather than than the other way around. That’s a direction I intend to maintain from the original doccuments, so (in retrospect) this complexity was completely unwarranted. My goal is to make combat bad. Bad as in “incredibly costly”, not “unfun”. Something that pushes players to look for a nonviolent solution, but still remains a last ditch option in a dire crisis.

I assume many tilt their heads at this decision. The wild west ficiton, after all, is rife with gunslinging, cannons, gatling guns, and shootouts. The heroes running into the fray, firing pistols left and right, and emerging with a couple bruises, ready to do it all again a few more times before sundown. And no doubt there are systems out there that fulfill this fantasy, however, I want mine to be a slight departure from the “shoot first ask questions later” mentality. Or at least make an effort to push players away from such behavior, which in turn, makes it more impactful and meaningful when it does occur. The goal is a harsher combat ruleset, but also a simpler one, to help the game keep its focus on the roleplay and immersion in the setting.

Roleplay

This was actually the least developed part of my old docs, as I intended to finish the combat before moving on but uhhhh… ADHD. However I still have a few ideas for where I want to take it.

First off, I dislike stats, at least as a tool for longer term campaigns. In terms of shorter ones, Mothership, for instance, uses them to great effect. You can run up a character in a matter of minutes and have a great idea of what that character is generally capable of with a quick glance at a few simple numbers. However, in my many years running long campaigns of D&D, stats become stale with time and lock fundamental experiences and mechanics behind walls of numbers. ASI’s really don’t do much to help the problem as a) min-maxing is essentally the default approach to character creation and b) in my experience, people just take feats instead.

Abstracting the player character’s development over the course of the narrative to a basic +2 wherever the player wishes to put it (You killed 32 goblins without saying a word in character to get to level 4 and you’ve suddenly gained two charisma?) is frankly strange in my opinion. It’s an intuitive enough abstraction, but I’d argue in a longer campaign where your character’s current actions need to make a difference down the line, any number of sessions in the future, I refuse to accept that inherent stats and arbitrary bonuses are the best way to do that.

A quick aside

If I can pull the discussion towards my sweet child, red dead redemption two, i’d like to point out the honor system in that game, as I believe that many game developers, digital or otherwise, can learn a thing or two therein. It’s a simple as hell system: Arthur does good things, he gets good points. Bad things get him bad points, which cancel out the good points. And depending on how many points you have, positive or negative, the story changes. This isn’t a new idea, but the important thing is how deeply it’s connected to every single thing in the game’s world. Most actions that Arthur can take when interacting with the world around him will tie into this system, good or bad. Again, and again, and again. Players can no longer act like complete maiacs and murderhobos with complete impunity because they clicked the “i’m a goodie goodie” button on some dialogue a couple times. Is it perfect? Definitely not, (1 human life equating to approximately 3 “hey there, pardner!“s is comedic at best), but we can almost certainly draw from it here.

Specifially, I’m looking at the idea of individual actions contributing to a larger longer term result. As opposed to abstracting these to numbers and having the player choose how those improvements come about, they’re forced to actually do the things that improve them. You get smarter by studying. Stronger by lifting and hitting things. Better at lock picking by lock picking. And there’s an opportunity cost to doing things (as I know very well with the sheer number of hobbies and interests i’ve decided to engage in). These should all contribute to their own skills, without the need for essential stats, which in turn allows the character to evolve over the course of the campaign directly based on how they’re played. The trick is how to implement this simply and thoughtfully. That’ll have to be the focus of another devlog, because honestly, I haven’t figured it out yet, myself! But I’m very excited to give it a crack.

Classes

I’m toying with the idea of removing classes outright. They’re a simple, helpful abstraction to help the player shape their character, but I’m opposed to the idea of fundimentally separating ideas or skills from others. If D&D’s classes are the windows operating system, its navigation bar, desktop environment, notification manager, etc… set up in one specific way for the user, I intend for this system to be akin to a version of Linux, giving the user a much wider breadth of fundimental choice at the cost of some user friendliness. Breaking apart classes into a more general pool of available skills, potentially with reccomendations to create common character archetypes, but affording the player the choice and flexibility to create a truly dynamic, unique character. Again, more on this to come.

Dice system

Here’s the kicker. I’m still up in the air about what kind of dice system I want to use! Woe is me! The original was d20 based and was calculus hell. That’s something to move away from. But towards what? PbtE is too crude for my purposes (As much as I adore it). Spire’s d10 pooling system is much closer to something that I like for this purpose but it doesn’t feel quite there just yet, at least for this system. (It kicks some major ass in both spire and heart, though.) The next article is likely going to be focused on my decision process here, as a good dice system will make or break this game, and I need to think for a good long while about what direction I should take with it.

Final Notes

And with that, our short time together is up. Assuming anyone is, in fact, reading this. If you are, and you aren’t a webscraper, thank you for reading. I really appreciate it. And with that, I receed back into my world of dice probability calculators and balatro. Have an amazing day, and I’ll see you next time!

My concerns with Life is Strange: Double Exposure

Tue, 25 Jun 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Life is Strange: Double Exposure is the first genuine sequel to 2015’s “Life is Strange”, in that others have been made, but this is the first to feature Max Caufield, the original’s beloved protagonist, once again. This is a bold choice, as max’s story was pretty clearly complete at the end of the first game, yet here she is once again taking up both the mantle of protagonist and, more concerningly, the use of her powers. I’m not overly impressed with how deck nine has handled the life is strange franchise after having taken it from don’t nod, and now we observe their attempt to alter the canon of the first story. While this isn’t necessarily a terrible thing, it does make me concerned for the direction of the game. Let me explain why.

Gameplay

The genius in don’t nod’s original “Life is Strange” was, at a base level, inherent to max’s use of her powers. It was quite frankly genius to take a genre notorious for save scumming and “rewinding” (pun intended) and turn it into a bespoke mechanic. This allowed don’t nod to balance short term consequenses with lasting ones and be more secure in their knowledge that players would be, for the most part, happy with their choices, at least in the short term. This deincentivised the 4th wall breaking save scums and allowed a much deeper, more coherent, immersive story to be told in the fiction, as players would be taken through the game facing the lasting consequenses of potentially bad decisions that they made and stuck to. This is usually not the case for similar games, as players tend to optimize and save scum the fun out of reactive storytelling, instead opting for perfection rather than the mistakes and imperfections that will inevitably make any story better in the long run. The original’s mechanic had, for the most part done away with this, which is what makes it that much better than its bretheren, at least in my opinion.

This is also what I was happy about when I heard about double exposure. I was hopeful that the original mechanic would return, allowing for more of that awesome gameplay. Of course, the first game’s plot does make even this a bad call, but from a gameply perspective, I was hopeful. Then they announced that the had changed the mechanic. This, for obvious reasons, is a bit of a red flag for me. Why bring back the original protagonist for any reason other than to bring back her signature power? Narratively, her using it again doesn’t make sense, which honestly is probably reason enough to keep the character retired, seeing as this is a narrative game, however now it doesn’t make mechanical sense either. The only option left is that they’re looking to make a cash grab off of nostalgia, which is a tragic end for the series. How do they intend to make this mechanical loss up? It’s a big question, but for the sake of the game, I sure hope they have a big answer.

Narrative continuity

The first game very notably ended with the resounding message that the use of max’s powers had dire consequenses, even when used to save those she loves. So why in hell is she doing the same damn thing again? She knows people die for a reason and if she wants them not to, then there’s gonna be hell to pay. I hate how they’ve just repeated a plot point from the first one, as if she’s learned nothing. Why the hell would she ever use that power again? She knows about it now. Regardless of ending, she’s not the type of person to open pandora’s box again, because she knows what that brings. it’s definitely one hell of a hole to write yourself out of, and I hope for the sake of these characters, this story, and this game that i’ve come to love, they write well. I’m not gonna say it’s impossible; I can think of a couple ways that they might start to go about it, but it’s going to be hard. And I really really hope that they have what it takes.

The Allure of Star Citizen: A Buyer's Guide

Sat, 27 Jan 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Star Citizen is one of the most incredible games to exist both in planned scope and what already exists for people to play. It’s also one of the most broken, infuriating games I’ve ever played. And yet I continue to play it. What even is Star citizen? What pros and cons are there to the game? How does the monetization system work? Why do I play it? And more importantly, should you subject yourself to Star Citizen as well?

What is Star Citizen?

Plainly put, Star Citizen is an open world MMORPG that takes place in space. It features 100 player lobbies (at the time of writing), and has a local gravity system that allows free movement inside moving spaceships, regardless of orientation or location. Star Citizen is also firmly a systematic game, prioritizing the freeform nature of its systems over a more straightforward ideology. This results in a lot of consequential gameplay that emerges from systems interacting with each other rather than pre-defined quests driving gameplay flow. This results in both a replayability factor that sparks joy and a level of flow in the gameplay that can turn a simple hauling mission into a cutthroat, vendetta-driven quest for revenge. This flow extends to other areas in the game, most notably, in loading screens! There aren’t any! Once you load in, it’s a seamless experience, start to end. And once you realize this game has fully scaled walkable/ drivable planets, and space stations scattered everywhere around the system, this lack of loading screens becomes something truly awesome.

Before I can talk about anything else though, let’s get into how the game works.

Gameplay

At a base level, gameplay consists of a few distinct “loops” that allow the player to gain in-game credits that can be spent on ships, which in turn allow the player to access different loops, or improve performance in other loops. For example:

Eddie likes bounty hunting. He has a Mustang Alpha, which is an entry level fighter ship. He plays a bunch of bounty hunting missions until he saves up a lot of credits. Now he can either purchase something like a Cutlass Blue to improve his performance at bounty hunting, or instead buy a Prospector to try his hand at the mining gameplay loop.

There are a plethora of defined gameplay loops. These include the following:

Hauling
Mining
Ship combat
FPS/ Ground combat
Bounty Hunting
Salvage
Medical
Pirating

Regarding the flow I mentioned earlier, the nature of the game’s systems and the way these loops are structured, many loops overlap each other. This is what drives the flow of gameplay. Here’s an example of this in action:

Dana is a hauler. She buys goods in bulk for cheap at one location, loads them onto her ship, and brings them to another location, selling them at a higher price there for a profit. Rex, having a ship with good firepower, decides that he wants dana’s goods without having to pay for them upfront. So, he intercepts her after she buys and shoots her ship down, stealing the goods.

This is the Pirating gameplay loop.

However, by doing this, he has now obtained a crimestat. This puts him up on the bounty hunting database. Emily has been doing bounties and finds Rex’s bounty. She accepts it, hunts him down and collects her reward.

This is the bounty hunting gameplay loop.

Quinn also has a ship with good firepower and is offering their services for a small fee. Dana doesn’t want to lose all her investment again, so she hires Quinn.

This is the ship combat gameplay loop.

This is only really one example of a pretty common systematic emergence in star citizen. It’s truly incredible how well systems are built to link with each other and even themselves.

These loops aren’t your only options, however. Star citizen, being a systematic game, defines systems and allows players to do what they wish with them. This allows you to do stupid things to an amazing degree. Want to sneak onto random peoples’ ships and mess with their shit? Go ahead! Want to see the biggest vehicle you can fit in the trunk of your Drake Corsair? Time to find out! (So far it’s a C8R Pisces). And the best part about this is:

Multiplayer

Guess what? There’s a reason this game is an MMO! And thank the gods it is, because this game is easily 10 times more fun with friends.

All of this stupidity that you get up to solo gets punched up to an 11 when you’re doing it with friends. You wanna put tanks on large ships and play battleship with your friends? Fire in the hole! You want to have a hover quad rally where you see who stays alive the longest? Rev the engines! Heck, let’s drive the hover quads off a moving ship and see if they can survive the fall.

Having backup also enhances loop gameplay, as now you can have someone in a cargo ship move the salvage from your vulture into their ship, allowing longer salvage runs and higher profits. You can haul cargo in groups to deter piracy, as a squad of hauling ships is significantly more intimidating than just one.

Bottom line, If you get into this game make sure you either cyberbully your friends into playing with you, or just straight up join an org. In terms of orgs, there are plenty of options out there (here are the listings) and here’s mine. Whatever you do, play this game with other people!

Ships

There are a lot of ships (you can check out a comprehensive and descriptive list here) But to summarize, ships are the bread and butter of star citizen. As of right now, we don’t have base building yet, so ships are essentially the sole late game toys that you can throw your hard earned in-game currency at. Predominantly, ships are seperated by two main distinctions: Size and Function. Size is primarily a function of number of crew members that the ship can accomodate (A stat that is usually lower than officially stated). Function is usually any specializations that the ship has that makes it better at or allows it to do a certain gameplay loop. More granular listings can be found at the site I provided above. In terms of bigger and more expensive ships, though, you don’t need to get something huge to have a good time. Most of the time, large expensive ships require a crew and are close to inoperable solo. Small ships like the Drake Cutter and the Aegis Avenger Titan are great solo; Ships like the Drake Cutlass and the Misc freelancer are the perfect balance between flyable solo but better with friends; and Huge ships like the RSI Constellation and the Anvil Carrack are borderline unplayable solo. I’d encourage those who are curious to look around at what the game offers because it’s truly beautiful what CIG have been able to make here.

All you really need to know about ships is that they’re the game’s backbone. You can’t do anything in Star citizen without a ship. Wanna mine? Need a ship. Wanna salvage? Need a ship. Wanna haul? Need a ship. You get the idea. To be clear, there are also non-ship related activities, but you’re gonna need a ship to get to them.

Scope

The game’s scope is jaw dropping. As you’ve seen throughout this section, there are so many damn systems and ideas. This game has something for almost everyone. It’s incredible how many different games Star Citizen has managed to combine. That’s why it’s taken 12 years and counting. Most of the time, sky high scope is a developer’s deathwish. In this case, I don’t believe it is, as they have taken the time and raised the money to do high scope correctly. There are, however, a lot more planned features and systems that are a part of this scope that I have left out above, as they don’t actually exist in game yet. And here’s where we get to:

The Drawbacks

You’re probably thinking: “Wow this sounds great! How did I not hear when this was released?” Well, the answer is twofold. First, the game hasn’t actually released yet, and second, it’s been in alpha (not beta) for 12 years now, with really no end in sight. There are a few issues with this being the case, the biggest being:

The bugs

Dear god there are so many bugs. Ask any star citizen player their favorite bug moment and they’ll prattle on for hours. One time a friend dropped me a shotgun on my ship while we were flying and the ship just straight up exploded. The game has semi-regular crashes called 30k’s that just thanos snap the world to smithereens, sending everyone in there back to the main menu, potentially losing them progress and/or money. Ladders are hell, and elevators should be avoided whilst in quantum. These are just a handful of the numerous bugs that exist.

Performance

The game needs a good PC to run. I’ve put together a list with the minimum specs that I’d recommend for running this thing enjoyably at 1080p resolution. I’ve taken some tips from the public facing telemetry site so feel free to check that out as well for more detailed data. At the time of writing, most of these reccomendations are above base spec, aiming for an ideal experience, so if you’re a bit below spec, you should be fine depending how below spec you are and in which areas.

Ryzen 5 5600X/ i5 12600KF
- SC is a very CPU hungry game. If you have a better GPU than CPU, as many gamers do, then you will likely be CPU bottlenecked.
3060 Ti / 6700 XT
- Quick tip: Make sure you’re not CPU bottlenecked before buying a new GPU for this game!
100GB of free SSD space
- This is probably the most essential part of this list; Star citizen will be essentially unplayable on an HDD.
32GB DDR4
- SC will pretty reliably use 20GB, which exceeds the 16GB that many computers have. This sucks, but usually won’t be the end of the world, unless your virtual RAM is using an HDD and not an SSD. This is to say, get the SSD first.

The subpar performance coupled with the fact that the game is only really supported on windows, also makes it harder than usual to get friends into it, which is a damn shame.

The balance issues

The game is also pretty bad off in terms of balancing. Patch to patch, you’ll be going back and forth between dropping 25 mil on an anvil carrack for the memes and barely scrounging up a few hundred k like a poor victorian orphan.

The point

Point being, this game is half broken, and anyone considering getting into it needs to understand this. It’s definitely not broken to the point of being unplayable, but it’s definitely broken. Why isn’t it being fixed? Well that leads us neatly into:

The development strategy

CIG, the developers of star citizen, have put a focus on making the game feature complete before polishing out the non-game-breaking bugs and balance issues. Now this isn’t inherently a “drawback”, per se. Polishing and keeping a game in pristine quality takes a lot of dev power and would make the already sky high scope of the game take far longer to complete than it already will. (Which is long. Very long.) This strategy lends itself very well to fast prototyping and development, which I believe will benefit the game in the long run. Additionally, It’s ideal for private builds of the game that aren’t made for the consumer side. However, star citizen is very much consumer facing, which brings a lot of the more ignorable issues in private development to the surface.

My point isn’t to discount the many bugs and grievances that players have; It’s to contextualize them. There are so many valid reasons why players can and should be unhappy with the game’s current state. I’m among them in many respects, however, I also see the long term vision and I would rather continue as things are and get to see more systems and actual progress being made than have something polished being perpetually worked on at a snail’s pace. Every prospective player should decide if this is a sacrifice they’re willing to make, though. If you’re not happy with this development style then you’re well within your rights to wait until the game is more complete and stable to invest your time and effort into it. I don’t fault that decision; Just know there is a decision to make here.

Devtime

The amount of time taken to develop this game, 12 years as of now, is vast. I personally don’t see a full beta release happening anytime before 2030. I’d be happy to be proven wrong, however, the speed at which development is going and the sheer scope of the project all point to years of devtime remaining, even with this expededited development strategy. There’s another force at work here as well: Squadron 42. Squadron is the singleplayer game designed by CIG alongside Star Citizen. They chose to direct their main focus onto it rather than Star citizen for a few years, slowing down SC development considerably, however, It was recently declared feature complete, and now developers are moving back to Star Citizen, porting over the many finished systems from there into Star Citizen. I’d predict a 2025-2026 release for Squadron, but I still don’t know how much this will speed up development. Regardless, 2024 is looking like a very promising year for the project, and I’m looking forward to seeing what progress is made.

Monetization

The monetization for star citizen is a subject of controversy, for good reason; The game has raised over 600 Million dollars of pure crowdfunding. There are rewards for spending over $25,000 in the game’s “pledge store” on mostly just ships. This is an immense amount of money, and just looking at that as well as the cost of just buying a ship from the pledge store would probably be enough to make most casual gamers weep. However, this is not the full picture. Allow me to explain.

In-game availability

Every ship that can be purchased with real money is currently, or will eventually be, completely available in game for in game currency, no credit card required. The usual timeline is that on release, a ship is exclusive to those who bought it with real money for about one patch cycle, which is usually a handful of months, then is made fully available to all players through a reasonable amount of in game cash. This means that you don’t need to buy anything more than a $45 game package to fully enjoy the game.

The Pledge store.

The pledge store is the digital retailer of star citizen, selling game packages, ships, in game items, and even physical merch for real life money. You can also purchase upgrades between ships and only pay the difference between the two. The main focus though, is ships. A small ship will run you ~60-80 dollars, an medium ship that can be well run solo can head up into the $120-130 range, and bigger ships just scale from there. A sizable multicrew ship can cost you upwards of $300, a huge ship can cost 500 or more, and capital class ships are comfortably over the ghastly $1000 mark.

What the F*@k?!

Is an understandable reaction. “If there is no real barrier to buying ships in game then why buy ships at all? And why are they so incredibly expensive!?” First off, good questions. The first answer to both of these is: to support the game’s development. These are primarily marketed as a way to support and fund the game, as the game is solely crowdfunded via these very sales. Even if you choose not to buy anything, (as I earlier outlined as 100% a possibility), you’re still benefitting from others’ use of the pledge store in their resources redirected towards the game’s development. Next, There are some creature comforts of owning a ship bought with real money, such as keeping it when a server reset comes around (where everything is wiped and everyone starts from scratch), or with certain ships, being able to customize and name them. But, I’ll say it again, you really don’t gotta spend shit! If you think this is garbage, splendid! Buy the game and never look back. If you want a slightly nicer ship, you can throw 20 bucks at the game and be totally happy playing the game from there. If you love the game and really want to support it while gaining a literal armada of ships, then that option is available to you as well.

The key point here is that this is not a vital part of the game, and can be ignored with little to no consequenses.

Who is this for?

Star citizen is a game by game developers for game developers. There also might happen to be other people who enjoy the game, but I am firmly convinced that game developers are the main body of players and fans of this game, especially in its current state. I know for sure that’s why I’m as into it as I am. I know that every second this game spends in development a developer at CIG out there is living their best life and I’m so happy for them. But other than the developers out there who will spend their first play session inspecting the glass materials and making conjecture about refraction equations, who is this game for? And more importantly, should you play it?

Audience

First of all, there isn’t exatly one main target audience, (barring game developers of course); You’ll get a lot of different people with many varied gaming backgrounds playing star citizen. Chill gamers opt for the relaxing gameplay loops such as salvage, mining, and hauling. More “hardcore” gamers will opt for FPS/ ship combat or just straight up piracy. And the options in between can be fun for almost any kind of gamer willing to put up with the downsides I described above. If you’re looking for a multiplayer experience to play with friends, however, I’d definitely encourage you to overlook the downsides more than you already would.

Should I buy it?

Here’s a handy dandy flowchart to help you decide if you should get into it or not.

Do you think there are cool things that you’d like to experience in Star citizen?

No

Don’t buy it.

Yes

Are you willing to live with the downsides?

Yes

Buy it.

No

Do you have friends that you’d like to play it with or are you planning on joining an org and playing with them?

Yes

Consider buying it

No

Wait until it’s in a better state.

Those of you have decided to wait or not buy it, I’m glad I was able to help you make a better informed deicision. Those who have decided to buy it, I have a few tips below on how to get the best out of the onboarding experience.

I decided to get it! What do I do now?

First off, Welcome to the verse! Here’s a quick intro to the game so you can have the best onboarding experience.

Steps

First off you’re either going to head to one of webpages, depending on what ship you want to start with.
1. Anyone who just wants the game go here. I fully reccommend this option over the other one, as you can always upgrade your ship if you wish.
2. If you insist on getting a better ship to boot, go here instead.
It also might be worth snooping around the 2nd link to see if there are any good sales going on. I got my first ship, the drake cutter, during a halloween sale where it sold me the ship & starter package for only $45 and threw in a green paint job as well. Since there have been a few sales, lowering starter packs to $40, so it’s always a good idea to be on the lookout!
Next, You’re going to choose which ship you want to start with.
1. If you went with option 1 in the step above, you’ll be choosing between the RSI Aurora MR and the CO Mustang Alpha. The Aurora is better equipped for general use with 3 SCU of storage, and has a small walkable interior with a bed, (which allows you to bed-log while in space). The Mustang can only really do ship combat and has no interior, bed, or storage. It is, however, significantly better at combat than the aurora is.
2. If you’ve opted for a better ship, the viable starters other than the Aurora and the Mustang would be, in order of ascending price: The Drake Cutter, The Aegis Avenger Titan, and the CO Nomad. If you’re a sucker for alien tech, check out the Syulen as well. I wouldn’t reccommend anything over the nomad unless you really want a solid multicrew vessel. If that is something you want, pick between the drake cutlass and the misc freelancer. I, again, don’t reccommend this, as you can buy ships in game with ingame credits or you can upgrade your starter to another ship later on.
Now it’s gonna ask you to sign in. Press “Enlist Now” to create an account.

Here is where you can put in referral codes as well, so make sure to find one and plug it in. These will give you additional starting credits (both in the alpha and on full release) and if there’s an event on, potentially some other goodies. The most recent couple I can recall are a full set of pretty armor and matching weapons, and a literal CO Hoverquad with a skin & LTI. I’d reccommend asking a friend who already plays (if you have one) for theirs, then looking elsewhere for one. Here’s mine if you feel so inclined: STAR-C6PX-673X. Regardless of whose it is, make sure put one in there!
Pay for the package and download the launcher. If for some reason you can’t find it, the link to download it is here. This will download the launcher and not the actual game, so make sure to allocate that 100GB of SSD space and buckle up.
While it’s downloading, find yourself an org! As per my advice above, here are a couple links!
1. The org Listings
2. My Org and our Discord
Alternatively, feel free to google relevant orgs and skip the listings. I actually found my first org through googling!
If at all possible, once the game is done downloading, get someone in your org to show you around, or find a youtube video to do so. Here’s the one I used but it is a much better experience if you’re doing it with other players so I encourage you to find an org and ask someone there to show you the ropes!

If you can’t find any that suit your interests, please join my org’s discord and ask for a quick intro! We welcome visitors and prospective org members alike, and would be more than happy to give you an intro to the game.

And that’s it for onboarding! There’s a lot more to this game that I plan to go over in future blog posts, however this is all you need to get started learning the ropes. To sign off, I’ll leave a bunch of other resources here at the bottom. Thank you so much for reading; I really appreciate it.

Closing Notes

Here are just a few more things i’m putting here at the end that might be helpful!

Resources

Game wiki: https://starcitizen.tools/
- Very helpful, especially with ship research. This is definitley one of my go to sites, that I wholeheartedly reccommend.
Ship loadout planner: https://www.erkul.games/live/calculator
- If you want to see how you can deck out a ship to maximize DPS or just see what quantum drives are the fastest and where you can get them, this site is a godsend. I have had issues with item locations being outdated, though, so keep that in mind.
Armory loadout planner: https://armory.thespacecoder.space/
- Allows you to look up armor and weapons’ stats and locations
Item Finder: https://finder.cstone.space/
- Need to know where you can get an item or a ship? This here is your place.
Commodity Prices: https://uexcorp.space/
- The most up to date statistics on commodity prices for hauling. Also has a bunch of other cool features.
Trading tools: https://sc-trade.tools/home
- More useful calculators than uexcorp, but not as updated.
More Trading tools: https://gallog.co/
- If the other 2 don’t spark joy, here’s another resource for similar functionality
SC tour guide: https://verseguide.com/
- Helpful tool to familiarize yourself with locations
Fleet builder: https://hangar.link/fleet/canvas
- Allows you to make cool graphics of ships. I love this thing.
Ship stats: https://www.spviewer.eu/
- Similar to erkul, but less for customizing and more for preformance analytics

Don’t concern yourself too much with these to start, but they do get very helpful later in game once you really get into it.

Disclaimers

I am not affiliated whatsoever with CIG or any related group that would lend additional bias to this article. This is an independent assessment of the Star Citizen project from an outsider perspective. Still, I would like to cite aspects of my situation that could contribute to any relevant biases that I may conciously or unconciously hold so that you may read this article with them in mind.

Using my referral code I provided above to purchase the game will grant me (and the referral’s user) certain in-game benefits.
I have also spent some of my own money on star citizen, and have overall positive views about the project’s direction going forward.
While it won’t directly benefit me in terms of money or rewards, I do link to my org and our discord in a couple places as well.

While these involvments help contextualize this article better, I try my utmost to keep my work as unbiased as it can be.

Support me

If you think this post was helpful and you want to support me doing more stuff like this, you can find a link to my ko-fi here. Every donation, regardless of amount, helps my work immensely and will likely go towards buying more coffee, which is essential in the creation of things like this. Thanks so much again for reading, have a great day, and I hope to see you in the verse.

~ Kai

Kai's Awesome Session 0 Checklist!

Sun, 21 Jan 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Favorite aspect of TTRPGs. What do they like about TTRPGs? What kind of things do they want to happen? Is there any “cool moment” that they really wanna have at some point? Usually you’ll get things like “world building” or “puzzles” or “social subterfuge”, but it really depends on the players. This really helps you set the tone for the campaign and how you plan it.
Campaign specifics. How long do you wanna run this for? (A good rule of thumb is when you estimate the amount of time for players to complete a certain amount of content, multiply it by ~2-4 to get the actual amount). How frequently are you meeting? Will it be the same day/time every week or not? Where are you meeting week to week? Will there be food? Snacks? If so, who brings the food/snacks?
Absences. Establish a quorum with everyone, and decide what they want to do with their characters when absent. (“give control to another player” and “has something else to do canonically” are the 2 most common options) If you don’t meet quorum do you still want to meet anyway and play board games instead? Also I like to implement a 3 strike rule. The way I usually run it is “if you no-show a session without at least 24 hours of advance warning that’s one strike, 3 strikes and you’re out.” This is also established on a case by case basis though so if someone has an emergency, I don’t rule that as a strike. You can be as loose or as rigid with it as you want, but it’s really good to have from the get-go.
Vibes. Ask everyone what kind of campaign they want and have them put percentages on the following scales: silly/ serious and RP/Combat (eg: 30% silly, 70% serious; 90% RP, 10% Combat). If there are any polar disagreements here (including on your part) talk it over. If you’re too split here, and nobody wants to budge, it might just not be a good group. If this the case, it’s good to note this early and potentially stop before you realize nobody is having any fun.
Safety tools. It’s better to have them and not need them than the other way around. The X-Card is a good option.
Lines and veils. Topics that people don’t want to come up at the table. Lines are red flag no-no topics that you should avoid writing into the story at all, and veils are more of a “it’s ok if you fade to black/glaze over it rather than going into detail but be careful”. I like to describe both then leave the table open for suggestions. This isn’t the only framework for this kind of discussion, so encourage your players to talk about sensitive topics in whatever way they feel comfotable with. For example, a player might be alright with going into a certain theme, but only if it’s being handled in a certain way. Also make sure that players know they can direct message you if they’re not comfortable saying in front of everyone else. The most important thing here is that everyone should be having fun, so if one person says something’s off limits, it goes, no questions asked.
Other stuff! Open the floor to any additional notes that players might want to add. Address any of these, and once you do that, you can move on to…
Character creation! I specifically ask players not to bring any character to session 0. Just potential ideas. Give them a brief intro to the world, ask for questions, then let them loose. I’d start with some basic character details (such as race and class), then jump right into backstories, as those influence pretty much everything else. Encourage them to link backstories with each other. I require my players to have at least 3 relevant NPCs that mean something to their character. This grounds them in the world and can serve for some really nice plot hooks later down the line. Here you also want to set the campaign’s starting parameters. Where are they meeting and how did they get there? Once backstories are done, have them finish character sheets. Bada bing Bada boom, session 0 complete.

Hello World!

Sat, 20 Jan 2024 00:00:00 +0000

This is an initial test of a blog system! I’m writing this in markdown and let’s see if it gets generated well through jekyll! This is the first paragraph.

Here’s the second paragraph, I’ll see if this one makes it into the excerpt. (it did not)

Thanks for reading this I guess!