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rose ▪ bud ▪ thorn - august 2026

Published 30 Aug, 2026 I met Suliman ! I'm having a good time playing FFXIV; made it to Heavensward now, excited to play more. My wife gifted me the new Hello Kitty Island Adventure DLC (Tea Garden) and it's been very sweet and calming :) We had a great date day on which we tried out a vegan kebab we had never eaten before, went to a few manga shops, Build-a-Bear, a cinnamonroll shop, and more. My matcha order surprisingly arrived without notice, just in time, when I had used up my last bit of the old an hour or so prior. We went to Gamescom and I found merch of a Sanrio character I like that barely gets any or is never included anywhere; a Mocha plush, and I even pulled Mocha (or rather, Cinnamoroll dressed as Mocha) out of a blindbox too! Plus I paid less than the price tag said for something. The way my wife looked at me when I pulled the small plushie out of the blindbox brings tears to my eyes. It was just so overtly, shockingly full of genuine love and joy for me. I can't even describe how it feels to see someone look at you like that when finally something good happens to you. I think remembering that look will sustain me for the rest of my life. Saw a full rainbow in a pink sky while looking out the window. I got back into journaling for joy, and using up some of the stickers I had accumulated in the months of not doing so. I felt really grateful for a friend reaching out that I hadn't talked to in months and how supportive he was when I told him about my struggles. He independently remembered specific upcoming days I was worried about, and then checked in with me on them to see how I was doing. I am still so surprised that anyone would do that for me, unasked. Generally received kind messages and emails of support, which I am thankful for. Started feeling more like myself again towards the very end of the month. Getting back into my gym routine that I had to pause for health reasons. Regaining my sense of purpose, re-establishing parts of my life that give me a sense of security, a plan to follow, something to work towards. Studying for my degree. I've really fallen off this semester. Finishing up my blog post drafts. There's so much I wanna put out there, but time just keeps running through my hands like fine sand. This has been the worst month of the year for me... yet. What happened this month cannot ever happen to me again. I've had 20+ high heart rate notifications via my smartwatch this month because of anxiety, stress, panic attacks and rumination, mentally spiraling while sitting there doing nothing. I don't usually mention it when I talk about my illnesses because for the past few years, it genuinely did not affect me at all after treatment with EMDR, but I was diagnosed with (C-)PTSD years ago. Something in my life recently triggered it again pretty badly, so this is the fallout. I've spent most of this month trying to exit this hypervigilant state, this feeling of always being in danger or hunted, even when I know I am safe, and trying to implement the coping mechanisms I had learned. It has also made some some other mental health issues reemerge that were never officially diagnosed, and I might need to get on that. Unfortunately, Germany is currently completely gutting psychotherapy... All of that is the reason it's been quiet and I have been very behind on answering emails. I've endured some really weird and off-putting behavior from multiple different people this month; some friends, some acquaintances, but also strangers.

Gaming Culture

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The Jolly Teapot Yesterday

August 2026 blend of links

As I am near the end of my summer holiday and paternal leave (for a total of five weeks nonetheless), I find it very difficult to take the time to… well… to do anything really. Having a soon-to-be four-month-old in the house feels like a full-time job, with long hours and short nights, pure bliss, laughs, and impromptus naps; nothing really blog-friendly I’m afraid. But still, between two heatwaves and two batches of homemade pizza, I’ve managed to save some interesting links. A digital museum of video game levels – So many memories, and the fact that the levels available in this museum are empty makes the site even more precious; isn’t it strange that we mostly remember some video games as places we’ve visited rather than games we’ve played? The Banjo-Kazooie and Half-Life 2 levels made me travel back in time, while it’s always nice to get a nice, serene view of Anor Lando . (via Kottke ) Another week on Linux – Saving this link for the next time — roughly every two or three months — I’m even considering installing a Linux partition on my computer. Jurassic Park computers in excruciating detail – Attention to spammers, scammers, and other email impersonators: if you want me to click on a fake link you send me, just make it somehow related to Jurassic Park. (via Daniel Benneworth-Gray ) WalletWallet – I will never understand why the Wallet app on iPhone is so little permissive: this website shouldn’t exist as its features should already exist within the app. (via Dense Discovery ) Nomos Club – In August, I have spent far too much time looking at watches (no pun intended), and I’ve grown quite fond of what Nomos is doing: in-house movements, Bauhaus-inspired design, beautiful craft. I like my Seiko SPB251 very much, but I want this watch. Apple Music weirdness – While reading this, I nodded in approval so hard that I almost hurt my neck. BitCam – Delightful. Absolutely delightful. (via John Gruber ) The TEMU-fication of Software, Digital Goods & Services – “ Just like with physical goods, we will probably end up with a two-tier market, in which we have a large and massively profitable lower tier of generated slop, and a smaller, more expensive upper tier of work that is still recognizably human. ” Eylenburg's Tech Website – Nerd paradise. (via 82Mhz )

Gaming

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Unsung 2 days ago

“An absolute bare minimum of interactivity”

I mentioned Atari’s Pong recently , a game often considered to be the first videogame ever. It wasn’t, and as a matter of fact, it was a clone of one of the games from the first home console Magnavox Odyssey , released earlier in 1972: = 2x) and (width >= 700px)" srcset="https://unsung.aresluna.org/_media/an-absolute-bare-minimum-of-interactivity/1.2096w.avif" type="image/avif"> = 3x) or (width >= 700px)" srcset="https://unsung.aresluna.org/_media/an-absolute-bare-minimum-of-interactivity/1.1600w.avif" type="image/avif"> This is a 34-minute video by FrameRater walking through the console and all of its strange games: = 2x) and (width >= 700px)" srcset="https://unsung.aresluna.org/_media/an-absolute-bare-minimum-of-interactivity/yt1-play.2096w.avif" type="image/avif"> = 3x) or (width >= 700px)" srcset="https://unsung.aresluna.org/_media/an-absolute-bare-minimum-of-interactivity/yt1-play.1600w.avif" type="image/avif"> I found it a very interesting case study. The Odyssey had a version of Pong before Pong – but it also had many other games that could be charitably described as “Pongs in disguise.” It all feels very, very convoluted for such a simple concept. You have to insert the right cart, tape an overlay to your TV of a certain size (the roll of tape is included), and understand the complex and poorly written instructions in the manual . Then, during the play time, you’d have to master the very strange controllers (left dial – horizontal movement, right dial – vertical movement), often do a lot of work that the console didn’t do (keeping track of collisions, or even scoring!), and deal will all sorts of accessories in the real world, like included cards, dice, stickers, and so on. You can admire the scope of this all – when life gives you Pong, you make a pongolade – but it all feels so clunky and convoluted, which the video catalogs in detail. But, in hindsight, it doesn’t matter if the included Pong (here, called Table Tennis) is good, right? Reader, Table Tennis wasn’t good at all. It wasn’t just the strange controllers, but also the really weird logic where you could twist the ball already in flight: Only looking at this made me realize, some 50+ years too late, the true power of Pong. = 2x) and (width >= 700px)" srcset="https://unsung.aresluna.org/_media/an-absolute-bare-minimum-of-interactivity/3.2096w.avif" type="image/avif"> = 3x) or (width >= 700px)" srcset="https://unsung.aresluna.org/_media/an-absolute-bare-minimum-of-interactivity/3.1600w.avif" type="image/avif"> Pong didn’t bother with many games, with complicated rules, with the breadth of it all. It just did one thing really, really well. For the Odyssey, it seemed like a lot of games were about mastering the controller. For Pong, it was only ever about mastering the game . The interface was simple: you have one dial, so rotate it. The game was fun to play, with its logic both challenging and predictable. The instructions were sparse and barely needed anyway. There was automatic scoring, which Odyssey didn’t have. There were also sounds – turns out, people really liked sounds. The Odyssey was clearly an in-betweener, a complicated hybrid device weighed down by its well-intentioned maximalism. Pong was simple, attractive, optimized to the bone. I feel that it offers universal lessons, feeling eerily similar to iPod’s release in 2001 – focusing on just the few things that mattered, and doing them really, really well. #complexity #craft #games #history #youtube

Gaming

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Unsung 3 days ago

“This time, there had to be a different ending.”

It is a testament to how much things have changed in competitive NES Tetris – a game released the same month the Berlin Wall fell – that this 1hr documentary by Summoning Salt that talks about the 2018 Tetris Championship covers the previous revolution in a play technique: = 2x) and (width >= 700px)" srcset="https://unsung.aresluna.org/_media/this-time-there-had-to-be-a-different-ending/yt1-play.2096w.avif" type="image/avif"> = 3x) or (width >= 700px)" srcset="https://unsung.aresluna.org/_media/this-time-there-had-to-be-a-different-ending/yt1-play.1600w.avif" type="image/avif"> I don’t watch a lot of sports, but I think this is a sports movie: a battle between the classic DAS players – DAS stands for Delayed Auto Shift and means that the player just holds the left or right pad and have the piece slide on its own – and the new-at-the-time technique of hypertapping, which allowed to move the piece to the side faster, but was really demanding on the player’s hands. It’s gripping at times – wait until the moment when a DAS player runs with a dangerous move called “quick tap” – but also surprisingly touching at the very end. (If you are interested, the newer playing technique that was invented in the 2020s, and even more effective than hypertapping, was rolling .) #ergonomics #games #youtube

Culture Gaming Entertainment

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Unsung 1 weeks ago

“This would result in some serious street cred and respect.”

A fascinating 11-minute video by Modern Vintage Gamer about the PC videogame piracy in the 1990s: = 2x) and (width >= 700px)" srcset="https://unsung.aresluna.org/_media/this-would-result-in-some-serious-street-cred-and-respect/yt1-play.2096w.avif" type="image/avif"> = 3x) or (width >= 700px)" srcset="https://unsung.aresluna.org/_media/this-would-result-in-some-serious-street-cred-and-respect/yt1-play.1600w.avif" type="image/avif"> This is a “no honor among thieves” story about a few groups racing to pirate and release one of the most important videogames in history: 1996’s Quake . There is a lot of interesting vernacular here: leetspeak , nfo files , cracktros , ASCII art, BBSes, IRC, a bunch of slang, and even specific font styles. At the same time there is also some unexpected bureaucracy – apparently videogame pirates had sort of a governing body, which perhaps was also somewhat corrupt? #games #piracy #youtube

Culture Gaming

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Unsung 1 weeks ago

“The ghosts are fast and they don’t turn blue.”

Some time ago, I shared a video talking about games that leaned into their bugs and made them part of their lore . One not listed there, perhaps because it’s the most obvious example, is Pac-Man’s kill screen . A few weekends ago at an arcade game convention , I spotted something really interesting. It was an arcade cabinet of Pac-Man, but with a twist: The game was modified and set up to start immediately at level 255, with all its challenges: fast timing, very angry ghosts, ineffective energizers. = 2x) and (width >= 700px)" srcset="https://unsung.aresluna.org/_media/the-ghosts-are-fast-and-they-dont-turn-blue/1.2096w.avif" type="image/avif"> = 3x) or (width >= 700px)" srcset="https://unsung.aresluna.org/_media/the-ghosts-are-fast-and-they-dont-turn-blue/1.1600w.avif" type="image/avif"> = 2x) and (width >= 700px)" srcset="https://unsung.aresluna.org/_media/the-ghosts-are-fast-and-they-dont-turn-blue/2.2096w.avif" type="image/avif"> = 3x) or (width >= 700px)" srcset="https://unsung.aresluna.org/_media/the-ghosts-are-fast-and-they-dont-turn-blue/2.1600w.avif" type="image/avif"> And once you beat that, you immediately face level 256: the infamous kill screen. I don’t think I have ever seen anything like this before. It reminded me of this joke someone made once about the olympics: that each competition should begin with the organizers grabbing regular people from the street to participate, just so the viewers can truly realize how impossibly hard those competitions are. I know a lot of software onboarding starts gently, walking you through basic scenarios to make you comfortable and to have you understand basic concepts. But sometimes I wonder: for professional apps, would it also be cool to start with a really advanced use that would get you excited? A really well-made, complex spreadsheet? A really sophisticated graphic? Instead of gently propping you up, what if the onboarding was about breaking something really complex down? I played the game a few times. I didn’t finish the level 255, and I never saw the kill screen. But it was a great challenge; if I had more time, I’d definitely spend it trying to make it happen. #bugs #games #onboarding

Culture Gaming

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Brain Baking 2 weeks ago

Why I Play Board Games (And So Should You)

Four years ago, I wrote a short apology for playing games , targeted specifically towards digital video games. Today, I would like to reiterate my statement and expand the idea to analogue board games. Even though many arguments are interchangeable, the analogue and innate social nature of these forces us to approach the idea in a slightly different way. The reason why this thought bubbled into my head is Blaise Pascal’s criticism of games and leisure time in general. According to Pascal, we’re all squandering our valuable time and should instead be looking for God by living the ascetic way devoted to prayer and spiritual growth. After his (second) intense spiritual experience, he began to ponder the way in which we invent all kinds of means to distract us from the more pressing and urgent questions of life and death (Graham Tomlin’s words): Take away their diversion and you will see them bored to extinction. Then they feel their nullity without disguising it, for nothing could be more wretched than to be intolerably depressed as soon as one is reduced to introspection with no means of diversion (Pascal’s words). Pascal isn’t the first nor the last philosopher to issue such a statement. This post isn’t meant to serve as a firm reply but rather as a way to form my own opinion regarding playing. I have yet to read Johan Huizinga’s Homo Ludens which states that we as humans are primarily playful/playing beings. Pascal seems to deny this entirely 1 , but at one point does put emphasis on the importance of social intimacy. Anyone who ever played, as a kid outside with a ball or as a grown up inside with cardboard and meeples, will know that playing does exactly that: it strengthens human bonds. Of course games can serve us very well as a distraction to our life’s problems. I will be the first to admit that turning away from a problem to boot up the Nintendo Switch—digital games are better at this than analogue ones—works as a magnificent escape hatch for the currently present misery. Best enjoyed with noise cancelling headphones. Yet that misery will still be there when you decide to save and quit. I think Pascal’s focus on spiritual enlightenment made him reject certain facts of human life: to live is to cope with misery. Playing can be coping. There is nothing wrong with that: without games as a coping mechanism, I wouldn’t have made it this far. So there’s the first argument for instead of against games: coping . But since that has little to do with board games specifically, let’s shove that philosophical debate aside for a minute and instead focus on why board gaming can be very enjoyable. In the following sections, the term “game” will refer to board game, not video game. Most games require another player to fully enjoy its mechanics and story. Pulling a box from your shelf and unloading its contents onto the table usually means you have company. The social aspect of gaming has already been touched on but bears repeating often. It’s a perfect excuse to meet up with friends, call regular gaming sessions, ask how everyone’s doing and share a piece of the aforementioned life misery to help shave off the rough edges. I do enjoy the odd solo play session but often prefer to play digitally when I’m on my own. Board gaming is a profound social experience. Taking this argument a bit further, you can even forgo individually owning games and set up a shared game pool: good board games don’t need to be owned . Two enjoyable board game sessions: The Castles of Burgundy Special Edition (left) and The White Castle with the Matcha expansion (right). To me, the social aspect of these games its single biggest appeal. It allows for families to bond (or argue), it allows me to wind down together with a friend. You can pick a fight by playing a competitive game with a lot of direct interaction, or you can decide to save the world together by cooperating. I do recognise that this argument also stands for many video games: I love playing point & click adventure games together with my wife precisely because of it. But I am more of a single player video gamer than I am a single player board gamer. It’s also a good way to reduce your screen time—unless you buy too many games that require hybrid play sessions with for instance a tablet. It certainly is easier to grab a handheld gaming device of your choice, press that power button, and start playing. There’s the hassle of calling friends, trying to pin down a moment everyone’s free, plowing through the manual, … But it might be better for the eyes. Speaking of manual, the learning component involved in board gaming is an exciting way to keep your brain active. I recognise that this might be personal but I really like figuring out how something works. I have a few friends who just shove the box and manual over and say “here, you read how this stuff works”. They’d rather get on with playing. Some games can be very daunting to try and get into, but that in itself can be a part of the game—or a challenging game on its own! The problem then becomes trying to remember how it worked as not very game is played each month and the more difficult ones rarely hit the table here. Everyone who knows me will know what’s coming next: the physical component of board gaming is so much more satisfying than its digital counterpart. I love analogue card games because I can hold something in my hand, scan my opponent, or just fool around and secretly trade cards even if it’s not allowed, just for the heck of it. Fooling around is a fundamental part of play. I love fooling around (which is why I love the original Bohnanza ). In a board game, you can make or break the rules. Some rules might not make a lot of sense for your play group: just throw out that rule or invent your own house rules! No need to try and hack the binary by opening up a hex editor or scouring the internet in search for a trainer or cheat codes. The “bendability” of these types of games is a core mechanic of the recent legacy game subgenre where the rules are constantly permanent changed by tearing up cards, placing stickers, and so forth. A card or board game is an enjoyable way of spending your evening. Creating such an experience surely is also an enjoyable way of spending your working day—most games are made by just one or two designers. Remember the mass layoffs in the video game industry? Giant AAA studios hiring hundreds of highly specialised folks, taking care of one specific part of the engine, script, or story? Thankfully, analogue games have none of that. As an amateur game designer, create your own roll & write or print & play games to enjoy with friends, inspired by your favourite mechanics. No programming language, expensive RAM, or graphics card needed. I could also make a case for the attractive financial aspect of a card game versus an AAA console game that nowadays costs but that argument will only hold if you keep your collection modest and stay away from the huge limited edition boxes that easily go above . I trade and buy/sell board games much more often than I do video games, because I can , and with digital games I simply cannot. Also, the average medium-sized board game costing , played ten times over a session of one to two hours means money well spent in good company compared to a one-time movie ticket—or even a single player video game. As always, your mileage will vary: some finished legacy games cannot be sold since you tore up cards. Board games are designed to be replayable. Most contemporary video games are not. I still love playing Agricola , a game that will become 20 years old next year. The simplicity of the rules, the variety by for instance a variable board setup, the gradual complexity and feeling of “beating” the game thanks to skill instead of luck, … Of course I also still love (re)playing The Legend of Zelda: A Link To The Past which is 35 years old so perhaps most of the above arguments can also be applied to video games. None of these statements are meant as an argument against playing video games—I just tried to focus on the more unique aspects of board gaming. When I’m too tired to pull a game box off the shelf, I’ll still boot up the Switch instead. Or read a book. Such as Blaise Pascal’s Pensées . Which makes you ponder… Why do I really play games? Before his second spiritual experience, he did enjoy solving the problem of probability in games of betting, so does that argument really stand?  ↩︎ Related topics: / boardgames / games / By Wouter Groeneveld on 12 August 2026.  Reply via email . Before his second spiritual experience, he did enjoy solving the problem of probability in games of betting, so does that argument really stand?  ↩︎

Culture Programming Gaming

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Unsung 2 weeks ago

A bug becoming a feature (1972 edition)

= 2x) and (width >= 700px)" srcset="https://unsung.aresluna.org/_media/a-bug-becoming-a-feature-1972-edition/1.2096w.avif" type="image/avif"> = 3x) or (width >= 700px)" srcset="https://unsung.aresluna.org/_media/a-bug-becoming-a-feature-1972-edition/1.1600w.avif" type="image/avif"> I just learned something fun this weekend. The seminal videogame Pong from 1972 looked like this: But there was a problem . Here’s Al Alcorn, the designer/​engineer of the machine: The paddles on the original Pong didn’t go all the way to the top. There was a defect in the [circuit] – I used a very simple circuit, I had to, to make the paddles, but they didn’t go to the top. This meant that there could be situation where the ball sneaks up past the paddle at the very top of the screen, and the player cannot do anything to stop it. You can see it in this video : But Alcorn decided not to change that: I could have fixed it, but it turned out to be important, because if you get two good players they could just volley and play the game forever. And the game has to end in about three or four minutes otherwise it’s a failure as a game. So that gap at the top, again – a feature. So that was sort of a happy accident. “Happy” primarily in the context of the industry – the goal of an arcade game was, after all, to bring in quarters, and this here was the unexpected equivalent of the zero in a casino roulette game. But I wonder if some of this bugginess/​randomness also helped the game feel challenging and surprising, even for skilled players. #bugs #games

Programming Gaming Business

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Unsung 3 weeks ago

Arno Beck’s art

I am generally not a fan of typewritten art, because at some point it all starts to feel a bit same’y, and the gimmick of using a typewriter as a paintbrush wears off pretty quickly. = 2x) and (width >= 700px)" srcset="https://unsung.aresluna.org/_media/arno-becks-art/1.2096w.avif" type="image/avif"> = 3x) or (width >= 700px)" srcset="https://unsung.aresluna.org/_media/arno-becks-art/1.1600w.avif" type="image/avif"> But these drawings by German artist Arno Beck caught my attention, because it feels like they playfully remix three eras: = 2x) and (width >= 700px)" srcset="https://unsung.aresluna.org/_media/arno-becks-art/2.2096w.avif" type="image/avif"> = 3x) or (width >= 700px)" srcset="https://unsung.aresluna.org/_media/arno-becks-art/2.1600w.avif" type="image/avif"> = 2x) and (width >= 700px)" srcset="https://unsung.aresluna.org/_media/arno-becks-art/3.2096w.avif" type="image/avif"> = 3x) or (width >= 700px)" srcset="https://unsung.aresluna.org/_media/arno-becks-art/3.1600w.avif" type="image/avif"> = 2x) and (width >= 700px)" srcset="https://unsung.aresluna.org/_media/arno-becks-art/4.2096w.avif" type="image/avif"> = 3x) or (width >= 700px)" srcset="https://unsung.aresluna.org/_media/arno-becks-art/4.1600w.avif" type="image/avif"> = 2x) and (width >= 700px)" srcset="https://unsung.aresluna.org/_media/arno-becks-art/5.2096w.avif" type="image/avif"> = 3x) or (width >= 700px)" srcset="https://unsung.aresluna.org/_media/arno-becks-art/5.1600w.avif" type="image/avif"> In case this interests you, in 2018 I gave a 46-minute talk called “The abridged history of having fun with keyboards” that’s a (hopefully fun) walkthrough of this whole space: = 2x) and (width >= 700px)" srcset="https://unsung.aresluna.org/_media/arno-becks-art/yt1-play.2096w.avif" type="image/avif"> = 3x) or (width >= 700px)" srcset="https://unsung.aresluna.org/_media/arno-becks-art/yt1-play.1600w.avif" type="image/avif"> #art #conference talk #games #marcin wichary #youtube overtyping keyboard art (early 1900s), the sort of photorealistic smooth shading I most associate with ASCII/​ANSI art (1990s), big pixels from early home videogames (1980s).

Culture Design Gaming

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underlap 3 weeks ago

Improving my Go

Three months ago I started playing Go again, both online and at Winchester Go Club. Most Wednesday evenings I enjoy sipping a Guiness 0.0% at The Black Boy pub and getting completely absorbed in games against stronger players. Some of my recent games are as follows: Since there’s supposed to be one handicap stone per difference in rank, that puts me at around 13 kyu, although I’m still trying to break the 19 kyu barrier online. My more recent games are as follows: I’ve already acquired far too many Go books. Although they are all supposed to be for beginners, some of them make me feel out of my depth. I’ve subscribed to “Go Magic” which has excellent videos combined with exercises and puzzles. I’ve enjoyed some of Nick Sibicky’s YouTube videos ( categorised list ). He recently admitted “Go is so hard and so complex that you never know what you’re doing.” which shows some humility for a strong player. I’ve also watched some of Dwyrin’s “Back to Basics” series on YouTube. I found lugging my beautiful 4.3 kg goban to the club rather hard, so I’ve purchased a thinner/lighter board. I’ve never been very good at reading in Go, which means working through sequences of moves in your head. Generally, I’ve tended not to try to keep much in my working memory and have found ways of working around this. But, especially when playing in person, there’s no alternative to reading out some positions to determine the best move. I wonder if it’s even possible for me to improve my working memory significantly. According to Handicap for smaller board sizes , a handicap of 4 on 13x13 corresponds to a rank difference of 8-10 kyu. If I’m 13 kyu, that might put Angus at 21-23 kyu. ↩︎ Nigel (10 kyu) gave me a 3 stone handicap. I won. Wayne (6 kyu) gave me a 7 stone handicap. I won. Marcus (12 kyu) gave me a 2 stone handicap. I won. Mike (4 kyu) gave me a 9 stone handicap. I lost, but it was close. Marcus (12 kyu), even game. I lost. Phil (4 kyu) gave me an 8 stone handicap. I lost. Angus (? kyu [1] ) on 13x13. I gave him 5 stones and lost and then gave him 4 stones and won. According to Handicap for smaller board sizes , a handicap of 4 on 13x13 corresponds to a rank difference of 8-10 kyu. If I’m 13 kyu, that might put Angus at 21-23 kyu. ↩︎

Books Gaming Sports

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Unsung 3 weeks ago

“It’s unclear how Sopwith escaped to the general public.”

Sopwith is a 1984 videogame made by David L. Clark for the original, seminal IBM PC model 5150 . It sports the distinctive 4-color CGA palette and an equally distinctive PC speaker soundtrack. It’s also one of the oldest videogames still in active development, and I was surprised how enthralled I was learning about it. = 2x) and (width >= 700px)" srcset="https://unsung.aresluna.org/_media/its-unclear-how-sopwith-escaped-to-the-general-public/1.2096w.avif" type="image/avif"> = 3x) or (width >= 700px)" srcset="https://unsung.aresluna.org/_media/its-unclear-how-sopwith-escaped-to-the-general-public/1.1600w.avif" type="image/avif"> (First of all, you can play Sopwith in a browser . Choose “single player” and then “novice” first for the game to tell you about its unusual keyboard control scheme.) The current maintainer of the effort is Simon Howard. He wrote about Sopwith’s interesting history ; I love appreciate this kind of approachable and caring preservation of obscure titles. The history is worth a read. From that, I learned a fascinating factoid. The game was intended as a demo for networking hardware, and the original author didn’t realize the game was “in circulation” for many years: Intended as a trade-show demo, it’s unclear how Sopwith escaped to the general public. David L. Clark didn’t even discover until around 2000 that it had “gotten out”. Little did he know, Sopwith had been circulating for years in collections of early games for the IBM PC. Only a couple of years after the first version was released, ads were appearing in magazines like PC Magazine advertising Sopwith for sale as part of collections of games for the IBM PC The modern edition started by Howard is called SDL Sopwith (SDL being a cross-platform graphics library ): SDL Sopwith is directly derived from the source code to the original DOS versions, and still includes changelog comments that date all the way back to 1984. What I particularly liked about the contemporary Sopwith is its guiding document/​philosophy page , also worth checking out in full. Here are some choice principles: There is something in all this that I feel a lot of software could learn from – not just vintage games. I appreciated Howard being thoughtful about growing Sopwith without forgetting its roots, but also with understanding that some things have changed since 1984. You could imagine remixing “The goal is to be a great old game rather than a mediocre modern game” to something like: Better be a great focused app than a mediocre sprawling app. Lastly, how did I learn about Sopwith? Howard shared this charming installation visual with me: = 2x) and (width >= 700px)" srcset="https://unsung.aresluna.org/_media/its-unclear-how-sopwith-escaped-to-the-general-public/2.2096w.avif" type="image/avif"> = 3x) or (width >= 700px)" srcset="https://unsung.aresluna.org/_media/its-unclear-how-sopwith-escaped-to-the-general-public/2.1600w.avif" type="image/avif"> #change management #games #history #software evolution Sopwith has a long history that deserves to be honored and preserved. By default, the game should always play like the original DOS version. That means the gameplay in particular should be the same, without any significant differences. Someone who has just discovered the project should find it to be a delightfully accurate recreation of the game they may have played when they were younger. […] Some new features can be enabled by default, as long as they are subtle, unintrusive, carefully considered and can be turned off. An example is the medals feature. The game will never try to be “something it’s not”. This means that it will always have four color CGA graphics, PC speaker sound effects and a low resolution display. It will never add (for example) hi-res sprites or 3D models, digital sound effects or MP3 music. The goal is to be “a great old game” rather than “a mediocre modern game”. New features should be fun and recognize the comical aspects of the game. Features should be carefully considered before being incorporated, not just added arbitrarily and thoughtlessly.

Gaming Open Source

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Simon Willison 3 weeks ago

One-shotting a Raccoon Heist game using Claude Fable 5

Back in 2024 I tweeted screenshots of a game concept generated by GPT-3 and some concept "art" created using DALL-E. Today, on the fourth anniversary of that tweet, I decided to see if Claude Fable 5 (running in Claude Code for web ) could build the entire game from the content of that tweet. It did a pretty good job of it! You can play the game here . Here's the GitHub repo , and a short video demo: Your browser does not support HTML5 video. This is the August 5th, 2022 tweet : My GPT-3 prompt back then was: This was in the text completion days, where you asked GPT-3 to complete the rest of the text. It completed: In "Raccoon Heist", you and your team of thieving raccoons are tasked with pulling off a series of daring heists. From robbing banks to stealing priceless art, no job is too big or too small for your furry crew. You'll need to use your wits and your skills to avoid the police and make a clean getaway with the loot. With exciting gameplay and a charming cast of characters, "Raccoon Heist" is the perfect game for anyone looking for a light-hearted caper. My prompt to DALL-E was short: Today's experiment: can I dump those screenshots into Fable 5 with a prompt telling it to write a game, then leave it to its own devices and get a working game at the end? A frustrating thing about Claude Code for web is that it can be hard to test what it's working on while it's still working. I've been using GitHub Pages to work around that limitation, and found it to work really well. Here's my process: That's all it takes! Within about 30 seconds of each push the latest content will be visible at . If you do this with a private repo, anyone who can guess the name of the repo will be able to view the published content. I don't worry much about this myself. Here's the prompt I gave Fable 5 (written in the notes app on my phone - this entire project was conducted on mobile). I accompanied it with the two images from the original tweet. I didn't make any technology choices. I assumed (correctly) that it would probably use Three.js based on previous experiments. Giving Claude access to an OpenAI key turns out to work really well for filling in gaps in its capabilities - in this case we needed some way to generate images to use as textures. Fable is very good at prompting image generators! I said "Work independently - do not ask me to make any further design decisions" because I wanted to see if it could produce a full, working game without any further input from me. I also said "Commit and push as often as possible so I can preview your work". When you use Claude Code in the Claude iPhone app you give it a GitHub repository and it works in a branch. Telling it to "push as often as possible" means commits start landing in that branch straight away. I like asking for as a bit of added flavor - here's that finished file , and the entry it made when it added the dog: New escalation: from night 3 the yards get a patrolling guard dog — a low-poly brown hound with a spiked red collar and a wagging tail. It wanders between random spots, and within 12 units it catches your scent and tracks you by smell (line of sight is irrelevant — it's all nose, shown by a 👃 over its head and barking). It gives up if you open a 17-unit gap. Getting caught messages are now source-specific: guard / headlights / hound. Verified wander → track → caught with an automated test. You can access the Claude Code shared session , and I also used my claude-code-transcripts tool to export my own HTML version which you can find here . Fable started with an index page, vendored a copy of Three.js, then wrote its own gen_textures.py script ( copy here ). It generated the textures and spot-checked them to make sure they looked OK. The metal.jpg file it generated for the trash can looks like this, though I don't think it was applied exactly right in the game itself: The raccoon, dumpster hideout, and both crew raccoons are now perfectly visible on mobile. Committing this critical fix. It decided to generate a title screen, which it did using this gen_title.py script. Here's the prompt it used for that: And the resulting image (which Claude thought was "gorgeous" ) - though I note that when it's shown on desktop it gets cropped to just the top third without the raccoon! Then my favorite change: it added the dog : And did a round of testing on it using Playwright, including another screenshot . It made a few more tweaks, then declared itself done : Raccoon Heist is built, tested, and pushed — 7 commits on , all verified with automated Playwright playthroughs on desktop, portrait-phone, and landscape-phone viewports. The game: You're a masked raccoon sneaking out of your crew's dumpster hideout into a moonlit cul-de-sac. Grab coins, gems, rings, donuts, and fish (they visibly stack on your back and slow you down), then waddle home and bank them before dawn. Each night raises the goal and the heat: night 1 has one flashlight-sweeping guard, night 2 has two, night 3 adds a scent-tracking hound that ignores line-of-sight entirely. A police cruiser sweeps the street with headlights, homeowners randomly peek out of windows, a seagull periodically dive-bombs your unclaimed loot, pizza slices trigger a 6-second speed FRENZY, and a rare golden TV is worth 120 points if you can haul its weight home. Win ranks: TRASH PANDA ⭐ → CAT BURGLAR ⭐⭐ → MASTER OF DISGUISE ⭐⭐⭐, with your best run saved to localStorage. How it's built: Vendored Three.js (no CDN), procedural low-poly characters, and a procedural WebAudio soundtrack (sneaky walking-bass jazz plus all sound effects — zero audio files). All seven ground/wall textures and the title-screen hero art were generated with gpt-image-2 and committed as static assets, so the deployed game makes no API calls. Mobile gets a dynamic touch joystick (appears wherever you touch) plus a DASH button; desktop uses WASD/arrows and Space. Testing caught two real bugs worth mentioning: the canvas rendered at 2× size on any real phone (a assignment was wiping Three.js's inline sizing — desktop DPR-1 tests masked it completely), and the win screen's star-rating div inherited the title screen's full-screen CSS and silently swallowed every tap on the "next night" button. Both are fixed and regression-tested, along with pickup, banking, chase/caught, dawn, night progression, and lose/retry flows. has the full build log. The game is live on the branch — just serve the repo root and open . It's an impressive starting point, but it's not a good game. You move your raccoon around a yard collecting items - donuts, fish, gold coins, jewels - while avoiding guards with flashlights and, in later levels, a dog. You have a limited carrying capacity, and once that's full you need to drop stuff off at the dumpster. If you pick up a pizza slice you get a temporary speed boost. There are no team mechanics at all - there are two other static raccoons next to the dumpster but they're purely decoration. It gets slightly more challenging as the levels progress - the dog introduced in level 3 is the most interesting new mechanic - but it's very, very easy to beat. It's also pretty boring - each night has a fixed duration and you can collect all of the items and then have nothing else to do while waiting for the dawn. I was impressed by the implementation. It's fully 3D, there are trash cans, the flashlight illumination cones are fun, and it has a reasonably coherent visual style. It works on mobile. The music ("a procedural WebAudio soundtrack (sneaky walking-bass jazz plus all sound effects — zero audio files)" according to Claude) is simple but feels about right. As a finished game project, it's mediocre. As a starting point from a single prompt I think it's very impressive. I've vibe coded up quite a few games now. They've all been deeply disappointing from a gameplay perspective - it turns out designing games that are fun remains a uniquely human trait, and one which requires significantly more skill and experience than either Claude or I can bring to bear. That said, I thoroughly recommend tinkering with game development projects as a way to explore the capabilities of agents. It's a fun, low-risk way to try out new things. If you stick at it long enough you might even produce something that's worth playing! You are only seeing the long-form articles from my blog. Subscribe to /atom/everything/ to get all of my posts, or take a look at my other subscription options . Create a new repository for the project at https://github.com/new - this can be public or private, the trick works equally well for both. Start a Claude Code for web session, in the Claude iPhone or Desktop apps or in the browser at https://claude.ai/code Tell Claude what to work on, and encourage it to commit an page as quickly as possible. This will create a branch with a name like Navigate to the Settings -> Pages area for the repository ( in my case), select "Deploy from a branch", pick the branch name, and hit Save.

Open Source Gaming AI CSS HTML

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Unsung 1 months ago

“Next up? You know it. You hate it. It’s the invisible wall.”

Tangentially related to the previous post , this 8-minute video from CrowBranch is a fun tier list of various ways games try to keep you in bounds: = 2x) and (width >= 700px)" srcset="https://unsung.aresluna.org/_media/next-up-you-know-it-you-hate-it-its-the-invisible-wall/yt1-play.2096w.avif" type="image/avif"> = 3x) or (width >= 700px)" srcset="https://unsung.aresluna.org/_media/next-up-you-know-it-you-hate-it-its-the-invisible-wall/yt1-play.1600w.avif" type="image/avif"> The limits here are I believe unrelated to precision, and rather to wanting to keep the player within a controlled, designed environment. (We once covered a story of this backfiring horribly , and also talked about skyboxes and streaming .) The video also made me want to see people – especially designers with less experience slash less baggage than I have – doing a tier list of e.g. common interface elements. Or maybe I should make such a video… #errors #games #youtube

Design Gaming Entertainment

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Grumpy Gamer 1 months ago

Thimbleweed Park 2

I have good news and bad news. First the good news. The good news is that we just started production on Thimbleweed Park 2, due out in early 2028. We will self-publish with the help of a private investor. Mark Ferrari, Gary Winnick, David Fox, Octavi Navarro, Robert Megone, and others from the original team will be back! Wishlist on Steam! I’ll be starting up a Thimbleweed Park 2 dev blog like we did for Thimbleweed Park and posting regularly to keep everyone up to date. Now the bad news There is no bad news, it’s all good news. P.S. Thimbleweed Park 1 is on sale on Steam, Switch, iOS and Google. But I suspect all my readers already own it. P.P.S Steam doesn’t show it yet, but there will be Mac, Windows and Linux. P.P.P.S There will be a GOG version.

Programming Business Gaming

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Brain Baking 1 months ago

The 2026 Board Game Shelf Analysis

The yearly recurring thing called the Board Game Shelf Analysis didn’t recur in 2023 and didn’t in 2025. I guess I don’t really like odd-numbered years but I do like to write about this now deemed as a biennial event during the summer. In 2024 , I still had to make due with the smaller hallway closet. Since last year everything was moved to a bigger Kallax that’s still riddled with gaping holes: enough space left to welcome new boxes. But first we have to say our goodbyes to a few ones. Take a look at the photo of the above linked post to inspect the state of the board game shelf in 2022 and 2024. Below is the updated 2026 version, just before selling the culled ones. Please ignore all the baby toys that seem to find their way up, under, and inside every single piece of furniture in our house. The board game shelf, summer 2026 edition. The top right box contains games that should leave the collection. I’m trying to figure out a system starting from the left (in) and ending to the right (out). The idea was also to have a few spaces on eye level where I could place the games that deserve more plays/attention. So what’s gone and what’s new? As mentioned in the 2024 post, we own too many small box 2-player only games that my wife no longer likes to play. Glasgow , Caper , and/or Paris are my next culling candidates. Again, the columns are defined as follows: game name, BoardGameGeek average score ( ), own score ( : Great!, : Good, : Average, : Bad, : No Score, see my grading systems discussion ), BoardGameGeek weight ( ), estimated plays (From ; played a lot, to ; barely played). The table is sorted by plays (most to least). I left out two new dice for Railroad Ink that I have yet to touch and the Kingdom Legacy: Distant Lands expansion that’s also still in shrink wrap. Ouch. That list is longer than I anticipated… Only Fliptown is from 2026 though, the rest is from last year. You might also notice the correlation between a game that gets played and the BGG weight: the heavy hitters sit at the bottom. See my posts on parenting as to why. I’m already more than happy that my wife likes both Dorfromantik: Sakura and The Dice Chambers . It’s really cool to play a tile-laying campaign/legacy style game: the last time we managed to open a new box and envelope and we were really excited to see what’s inside! I got Earthborne Rangers for my 40th birthday last year from a friend. We attempted to start the campaign and played again with more than a month in-between and already forgot most of the rules. He since has moved on to other games he’s into so I think I’ll try and get a solo campaign started instead as I really liked what I saw but I can’t seem to get it on the table. The unopened Spirit Island I got for Christmas is another painful one. I don’t really want to share these stats: in 2024, I wrote Since our baby turned into a rebellious toddler we’ve had to dial back hobby time significantly . Well guess what we had another one and that one loves screaming and kicking around lately. It looks like 2026 is an all-time low when it comes to logged board game plays. The BGG Play Stats in 2026, so far. We’re trying to more actively play something small together after the kids are off to bed which is nice. Writing summaries like these help me ground myself: it seems that I have more than board games enough to cover the next few years. And yet backed versions of Sail Legacy and Dark Venture: Battle of the Ancients still have to make their way to our doorstep. I still read Board Game Quest’s Kickstarter summaries but more cautiously evaluate whether it’s worth it. Click A Tree was a good learning lesson. Today my friend & I played Castles of Burgundy: Special Edition and The White Castle with the expansion. It was a great afternoon to unwind outside (even though we had to seek shelter from the heat after the first game). Related topics: / boardgames / By Wouter Groeneveld on 29 July 2026.  Reply via email . Nightfall was already “culled” in 2024 but I can’t seem to make a sale on that one. It’s out of print and I don’t charge a lot. That is one persistent box! Dungeons, Dice & Danger (Richard Garfield made a roll & write and it’s not very good) French Quarter is just not as good as Three Sisters and I can’t justify owning both Ora & Labora is the one that got felled as I own too many Uwe games and want even more Speaking of which, Click A Tree is a disaster, I wish I didn’t back that one. I also gutted Framework and Robin of Locksley in 2025. Yes I have/had too many Uwe games, I told you. And Nusfjord is on my wishlist. Perhaps also Hallertau ? Conservas is a neat little solo bag building game. I finished the campaign and it has not a lot of staying power after that.

Gaming

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Unsung 1 months ago

“Something seems to be going crucially wrong with the frame rate.”

Let’s Game It Out is a YouTube channel where Josh Knoles occasionally grabs a modern videogame and tries to play it in a particularly creative way – finding bugs, breaking things, doing an action more times than anyone thought possible. What makes it even more fun is that what’s tested often are early access , unfinished games. Here’s an example 27-minute video of a game called Parking Tycoon: = 2x) and (width >= 700px)" srcset="https://unsung.aresluna.org/_media/something-seems-to-be-going-crucially-wrong-with-the-frame-rate/yt1-play.2096w.avif" type="image/avif"> = 3x) or (width >= 700px)" srcset="https://unsung.aresluna.org/_media/something-seems-to-be-going-crucially-wrong-with-the-frame-rate/yt1-play.1600w.avif" type="image/avif"> There are many more . I could tell you that occasionally putting one on teaches me something about bugs or lets me put myself in the mind of a very inventive user. Sure, occasionally, perhaps. But mostly these are just fun to watch. = 2x) and (width >= 700px)" srcset="https://unsung.aresluna.org/_media/something-seems-to-be-going-crucially-wrong-with-the-frame-rate/1.2096w.avif" type="image/avif"> = 3x) or (width >= 700px)" srcset="https://unsung.aresluna.org/_media/something-seems-to-be-going-crucially-wrong-with-the-frame-rate/1.1600w.avif" type="image/avif"> #bugs #games #humor #youtube

Gaming Entertainment Media

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Kev Quirk 1 months ago

📝 2026-07-20 08:10: Yup. Goat-proofing the chicken door really worked a treat. FML. 🤦🏼‍♂️

Yup. Goat-proofing the chicken door really worked a treat. FML. 🤦🏼‍♂️ Thanks for reading this post via RSS. RSS is ace, and so are you. ❤️ You can reply to this post by email , or leave a comment .

Culture Gaming Entertainment

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Thomasorus 1 months ago

Fighting games tournaments can still be great

Last week I took a plane to Lyon, France, to participate in a Street Fighter 3: Third Strike tournament. You might have notice that I wrote a a few notes about the game recently, but I also wanted to write my feelings about the tournament. Street Fighter 3 is a very peculiar game in all its aspects. First of all, it doesn't feel, play or even functions like a traditional Street Fighter game, even according to its creators: Its first version (New Generation) had a very rocky development (as narrated in this article ) and the last one, Third Strike was purposely a swan song of the Capcom fighting game arcade era, with the next entry in the series only releasing almost 10 years later. Surprisingly, 24 years later, its creators hopes are realized. We still play it on arcade cabinets and had more than 100 players at the tournament (a first in Europe!) ; and if the game is kind of "solved" and well discovered and documented, players keep looking for answers and solutions on their own personal journey with the game! I'm not a serious Third Strike player, I just have fundamentals in fighting games, but I love playing this game in a tournament setting even if I lose all the time. There are multiple reasons for why specifically this game, and that's what I wanted to write about today. First of all, the game is fun. The parry mechanic is intoxicating and makes you want to bet your whole life bar on a single risky read. The characters are diverse and charming, both in look and gameplay . Also the game is incredibly well animated, pretty, and its soundtrack is a banger. Secondly, the game is notoriously known for its unbalanced roster. What could be an issue actually acts as a filter. In recent years complaining about perceived unfair game balance has become standard due to social media, consumer culture and professionalization (it's always capitalism). It undermines my enjoyment of this whole genre of games, and going to a tournament knowing that noboby will complain about it felt super great . The other thing that felt great are the side effects of the hardware. Most fighting games tournaments are run on consoles provided by the tournament organizers, and each player brings its controller. When the tournament is not running, players freeplay on available stations. But it takes a bit of time: players have to plug their controller, go back to the character select screen, check if their buttons are configured properly, pick a character, and finally the match starts. It may not sound much, but it takes usually 2 to 5 minutes, and a fighting game fight rarely lasts longer than that. So quite logically, people run sets. First to 3 or 5, best of 3 or 5. The players waiting behind have to announce they will play the winner of the set, or the already installed players won't move. Newcomers often find this situation anxiety-inducing, as you are interrupting people who are often better than you and asking a person to leave. But Third Strike has not satisfactory console ports, so all tournaments are held on arcade cabinets (most of the time the Sega Astro City ) running the 1999 original dedicated arcade boards . Quite logically, nobody brings a controller, everyone has the same button config, and the game automatically falls back to the character select screen after each match. You just sit, pick the character and play. And in a true arcade culture fashion, you only have a single chance to prove you're the best. If you win, you stay and play against a new opponent. If you lose, you stand up, go back in line and wait for your turn. That may sounds harsh but it's actually a blessing in disguise. The dynamics of play are very different. You have to get into the game fast, commit on your actions, reflect on what went wrong or you'll lose all the time. But even when I lost, I did not wait long to play again due to the 20 (!) arcade cabs. It actually was one of the fighting games events where I played the most in my entire life . And finally, it was not an e-sport event, which means it excluded a whole bunch of annoying things that became standard when capitalism immersed itself into fighting games tournaments. There was no money to win, no sponsor to announce, no ad breaks, no ugly jerseys, no external pressure to perform, no fanboys, no autograph sessions. The tournament was self-funded and organized by two non-profits, but still managed to bring an impressive production value to the table with an amazing scene, a stream that regularly rolled commentators from different countries so everyone felt included, and prestigious guest players from Japan. Going there, I was not expecting much. I just wanted to hang out with friends and see folks I missed for years, maybe visit the city. But when the first day ended, my roommates and I talked at length during the night about how fun and great fighting games are . It was a feeling of enjoyment I had forgotten, as if I had finally reconnected with a lost friend. The sudden realization that yes, fighting games tournaments can still be great, and that I missed them so much.

Culture Gaming

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iDiallo 1 months ago

Deleting Systems You Don't Understand

When I was a kid, my father bought a family home computer and placed it in the living room for all to see. When guests came to our house, they would stop by the computer and admire its marvel without even turning it on. While everyone else was careful with the computer, treating it like an important investment, I quickly started inserting discs and installing games. One thing we take for granted today is how cheap and abundant storage is. Our family computer had a single hard drive with a whopping 2 gigabytes. That's 2 GB for Windows 95, Office 95 (Word, Excel, PowerPoint), Encarta 95, all my father's work documents, and the million games I had installed. I borrowed a disc from a friend that had a few dozen games on it. I installed them all. Before I knew it, I ran out of space. The computer became extremely slow, and I couldn't install any more games. I figured I needed to delete some games, but I was ten years old. I was not going to delete my games. I couldn't delete my father's stuff either, so I decided to explore the hard drive. I noticed that in the Program Files folders, every application came with a bunch of text files. Some of them were large, and they didn't look that important to me, especially the ones ending in . So I went from one folder to the next, deleting those files. There's satisfaction in gathering all those files in the recycle bin, emptying it, then watching your storage space increase. I deleted so many files that I was able to install an additional game on the computer. It was one of my most satisfying accomplishments. I had a problem, I explored the computer, and I found a solution. I played the new game until I got tired of it. In the 90s, when you were done using the computer, you clicked Start → Shut Down → Confirm Shutdown. The computer would think for about two minutes, then display in big orange letters: And I shut it down. You can imagine what happened next. The computer wouldn't boot again. Those files seemed unimportant to a child, but they are configuration files used by several applications, including the operating system. While the Windows Registry did exist in Windows 95, files were still commonly used. When I deleted them, any application or process that relied on them failed to load and simply crashed. Anyone who had anything of importance on that computer lost it. Everyone except my father, who carefully kept copies of his documents on floppy disks. He knew I was up to no good. Throughout my career, I've seen many people make this same mistake. When something doesn't look important to them, they delete it. Whether it's a programmer deleting a function that "looks stupid," or a DBA dropping a table or a single field they assume no one will miss. It's all the result of the same mindset: "I don't think this is important." It makes me think of DOGE, the real yet fictional Department of Government Efficiency. The team supposedly tasked with combing through government programs to find waste never looked deeper than the surface. Just like ten-year-old me, they looked at a department they didn't understand and decided it wasn't important. They uprooted how the entire country works just to save money, the same way I destroyed the family computer just to save storage space. Whether DOGE actually saved us any money is still hotly debated, especially when weighed against the pain and suffering it caused. Anyone with half a brain could have seen their failure coming from a mile away. The same way anyone who understood how computers work could have told me those configuration files were important. At least, all we lost in our household was time and some saved games. The American people can't say the same.

Gaming

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Mariano Gappa's Blog 1 months ago

9 months in: building an advanced StarCraft reporting tool with Go & Claude

The story of how I built screpdb, an advanced StarCraft: Brood War replay reporting tool, using Go & Claude over 9 months, and what AI could and couldn’t do along the way.

Gaming Go AI

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