~/blog

For more background, see my previous post about GitHub Actions.

Now that it's possible to follow the blog and be notified by watching on GitHub, I wanted to incorporate a little more interactivity. As much as anyone enjoys shouting into the void, I do like the idea of getting feedback - so it's time to incorporate comments.

I follow a gamedev blog on github that uses issues for posts, which seems like a pretty elegant solution to me: you get comments, reactions, labels, and search "for free". Plus, issues are written in markdown, which is already the format this blog uses for posts (mostly - foreshadowing). I wanted to maintain the independence of the static site, so that means mirroring each post to a GitHub issue, and then displaying comments on the site by retrieving them from GitHub's API.

Obligatory "wow it's been so long since I've written here!"

In an effort to reduce the (admittedly already low) friction of writing blog posts, I'm now hosting this site on netlify, which makes it pretty effortless to generate site previews off of pull requests, as well as perform the usual tasks like updating DNS, provisioning a Let's Encrypt cert, etc. I'm still using my own static site generator which was easy to integrate with netlify's GitHub App: I set my site's "build command" to make build, which runs:

Hello there! With just over a day remaining in the voting period, it seemed like a great time to finally write up a post-mortem for my experience this time around. I've included my favorites/recommendations of the entries that I've played so far at the end of this post.

Of course, if you haven't played the game yet I would love to get your feedback! Visit the game page here.

Cultivate is an adventure/visual-novel-like game about a day of high school.

Recently I decided I wanted to integrate Google Play Services -- leaderboards, achievements, etc -- with a Haxe/OpenFL project targetting Android devices. I assumed this should be easy enough given the ability to hook into Android/Java frameworks via native extensions. Overall it was simple, but not necessarily straightforward, so I'm writing this post as a quick start guide for others.

Setting Up Project Extensions

I settled on using the linden-google-play extension, which sets up the JNI hooks to the Play Services library for you.

I was determined to participate in TextJam last weekend, and without much time to devote I thought it could be smart to give Twine a try. Starting with a solid framework meant that once I had learned the syntax (and installed a few essential macros,) I could devote my remaining time to content and styling.

Here is my entry, You Are Mistaken

I have a love-hate relationship with CSS, but I'm happy with the simple style I ended up with. Writing content with the Twine editor is pretty natural, and it wasn't hard to keep things mostly organized once I got the hang of it.

A common pattern I find myself following in game development is the message-subscription/callback model -- notifying a group of objects that a certain event has happened, at which point they all go about their business responding in the appropriate ways.

This can be really effective, especially for organization, but I rarely seem to fully implement the procedure, instead just hacking something together that works. Realizing that going the full distance wouldn't require much more (and could mean having something more portable to work with) I put together a simple manager for a messaging system:

class Signal
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