sugo14

Finished up my first complete blog! Should be about ready to ship for the first time.

I added a ton of stuff, basically finished the first draft of the site. I added a secondary color, the about and projects pages, and started on a bunch of features for the next version. Also did more funnies with the font including straight up modifying the font file lmao

I did a ton of stuff over the past couple days. Mainly, I did a couple reworks to the font, switched to JetBrains Mono, improved static generation, added a list of blogs, generalized ASCII font generation for use on the front page, started on my first blog, and got started on a text-based gif thing much like my project Terminal Velocity.

Did much more work to make the 11ty static generation work consistently on GitHub Pages. I also added a footer to all pages and got started on a home page.

Switched the blogs from using manually written html to statically generated html from markdown. The markdown is much simpler to write, and it automatically colors code, deals with text styling and all of that (using 11ty for anyone wondering). This is a much more maintainable way to create the website without nearly as much hassle.

I spent a lot of time collecting cute small ASCII art, which I planned to display on either side of my username header, but that plan ultimately didn't work out. It just didn't look purposeful or as clean as the rest of the page, even though it was theoretically a really good idea I think... hopefully I can find somewhere else to use all of the art I compiled, because it really was a lot. I also started working on page stubs and the organization of the rest of the website, as well as working more on modifications to the ASCII font for readability.

Got the site automatically resizing pretty well, with the main thing I implemented being word wrapping for the title text. Remember, the title text consists of multiple smaller box-drawing characters for each glyph, so automatic wrapping like with normal text wasn't an option. So, I had to manually code a word wrapping algorithm, which was actually not super bad once I got down to it (just took a bit of thinking). Also I don't think I made it clear before, but the horizontal bars above and below the navbar are also box-drawing characters that resize.

Spent so much time turning old C++ code into functional JS code for ASCII font generation. Thankfully it does finally work, and I made a few modifications to the original font to better suit the site's aesthetic. It's surprisingly tricky to handle Unicode multiple-byte characters and such, and more work is needed later to have it wrap properly and so on

Did a couple of notable things with the site. I added the horizontal bar below the SUGO14 logo and centered some things. I also added some placeholder text that is an example of a blog (taken from int0x80.ca) to test out fonts. I settled on this ASCII title font after some messing around as it was a stylistic match and not super big. I do definitely want to make some adjustments to how it looks though, and I need to actually implement dynamic generation of it.

Got started on the site after lots of planning. It was surprisingly easy to create a very close match to a terminal in vanilla HTML/CSS/JS, as shown in the image. I created some figma designs as well to see what the site could look like as it progresses as well. The font is chosen, the general aesthetic has started, and overall I'm excited to see where this goes.

Spent way too much time creating a release. I tried to make an online demo with Emscripten compiling to webassembly and using online terminal simulators, but that ended up being just way too complicated. Then, I decided to just add a precompiled binary to the GitHub release and call it a day, but I needed to compile with an old version of glibc to ensure compatibility on old OS's, so I needed to make a Docker script to simulate an old OS with an old glibc just to compile. Overall way too much hassle, but at least I know how to go about it now.

The project is finally in a first-shippable state! As for the changes I made, I just fixed a bad attempt at frame safety that caused the HUD to jitter, and did a few other adjustments to difficulty scaling. In the future, I'm looking to change the way the score text is displayed (unify it with the rest of the physical HUD), add more visuals to make the world feel alive (like stars), and implement multithreading to improve performance and add true frame safety.

Here's a cool GIF I put together that showcases the game:

Finally added this game over screen, it looks decent IMO and ends the game as expected

Started working on Game Over text. I'm implementing it a little differently than the start text, in part because it has a specific destination rather than just move to the side, but also because I wanted to try something a little different. I also improved organization a bit by moving all assets to a resources folder, and did some other minor adjustments to improve gameplay.

Optimal matching now works, and a simple version of the match score rating script is also done (rating all combinations of tutors and tutees based on interpersonal compatibility). This is the core of the suite so I'm happy its done and appears to work

Updated the title text and prepared to add game over text. Also other misc polish in preparation for shipping

Finally got some decent text working, just chose to make it in the image buffer rather than separately printing. This approach is ultimately way easier, keeps the screen modular, and allows usage of many different fonts

Added numeric text rendering thats highly sketchy at the moment. ASCII art is cool, and if I'm making a terminal engine, I need to have support for it, so I wrote code to make working with actual text (rather than my pseudo-screenbuffer) easier

Spent some time on maintenance, cleaning up terrible code, commenting it, and so on. One of the most notable things I did was fix an extremely major issue with the crystal collisions: when a crystal was hit, it would not necessarily delete the crystal that was hit, but rather the oldest (or newest? not 100% sure) crystal in the scene.

Added a cool little title screen, which took a while to make as I needed to improve my image support. Also, I made some much-needed clean-ups, with many more likely to come.

Added some variance to the crystals' color, rotation, and spawn rate.

Finally got a functional version of the game working! Harmful asteroids spawn in, and occasionally crystals spawn that the player must shoot and collect. I used a trick to make the asteroid spawn rate increase with the player's forward movement, as though there are asteroids evenly spaced throughout z-space. It also ended up being a more fun experience than I initially expected, which is a pleasant surprise.