I’ve been working with the MediaPlayer framework for the last couple of years, bumping my shins into its rough corners early and often. I file radars for what I find, but it always feels like shouting into the void, so I figured I might as well double-dip and write stuff over here, too!

On today’s exciting episode: the delightful setQueueWithItemCollection: method, and how it does something I really didn’t expect.

I’ve had an itch for awhile to write a little helper tool for managing which Xcode is currently, well, selected. It seemed like a good idea, even before I’d been bit a few times by an annoying bug involving bad environment state, but felt pretty obligatory once a dev friend of mine started yelling at me with similar complaints.

So, naturally, I decided to build one. I’m mostly pretty happy with it, it’s already saved my bacon a few times, and it’s free. I’m not sure I could pass app store review, and I don’t even know that I want to bother, so for now, it’s hosted here, on itch.io:

One of my favorite silliest parts of this game revolves around Olberic, a brave knight. Each playable character has their own way of interacting with the world around them. The nice priest lady can guide people through life, the trader can buy stuff off of people, and the knight -

Well. The knight can walk up to random fools, challenge them to a duel, and beat the everloving shit out of them.

This isn’t exactly a postmortem, because most jam games feel kind of unfinished. (At least, mine usually feel that way to me.)

So when this jam was first announced back in early June, I got pretty stoked. The technical theme - I tend to do better at those - was Minigames, which seemed great! My mind jumped first to the kind of dinky little silly-ass Warioware games, with just ridiculous hooks and gimmicks and 4 or 5 seconds of gameplay per screen.

I’ve been doing the occasional game jam for awhile now. They’re fun! It’s nice to throw yourself at something for a short amount of time just to see if anything good comes of it - more often than not, it’s totally worth the minor time investment. One thing that’s been a little annoying, though, comes down to infrastructure.

There’s a few different types of infrastructure, too, and maybe that’s a weird way to put it, but it’s the term I’m gonna use, so whatever! The tools, code, art, assets you’ve built up over time all count as infrastructure, but what I mean here is a literal kind of infrastructure.

Don’t buy the MacBook Pros even on sale, in my opinion | The Outline

So, that doesn’t seem great, does it? I really, really want to like that keyboard, I promise. I like the clicky feel of it, short-throw keys are my jam, I could even get used to the narrower gaps between keys.

(Don’t get me started on the inverted-T.)

But the reliability issues are maddening - key’s that would double fire, or not fire at all, or only fire at a particular angle or from a particular spot. C’mon, that’s no way for a computer to be.

I’m going to start this tiny bit of controversy with a warning: don’t @ me. You know what that means, so don’t. I liked the game just fine, don’t hassle me about any of this. Your efforts are better spent elsewhere.

Okay. So. Breath of the Wild was pretty great. I’ve put hundreds of hours into it and I’m still finding new stuff in it - little groves of trees, koroks (naturally), characters just hiding out in the middle of friggin’ nowhere.

I’ve been thinking about writing on here more, which is a thing I think about often and then never actually do anything about.

Oops.

The fact that it’s an ongoing concern is a more interesting part, and maybe the whys behind that, too. It’s neat looking back at the nonsense, and knowing I have basically zero audience means that I’m doing it just for me, which is kind of great from an intrinsic motivational perspective.

I’m a pretty big music fan. If I’m working at a computer, odds are good I’ve got music playing. If I’m writing, same thing, only it’ll all be instrumental stuff. (For whatever reason, I can’t write fiction and listen to something with vocals at the same time.)

My habits are pretty straightforward. I like listening to albums, complete albums, all the way through. I like sticking to particular genres or artists depending on my mood that day. I’m also stuck in iTunes, which is (fine, whatever, if only). In iTunes, I mark albums I really like as loved, and sort my albums by artist, then by year. This is mostly because I think it’s neat seeing how artists and groups evolve and change over time: it’s nice being able to see the usually-continuous line of creative output.

I (sorta) finished another jam, this time (mostly) making Lode Jogger!

Hooboy. This one was a doozy.

What Is It?

Lode Jogger is a gameboy jam game designed to be a near-copy of Lode Runner, one of my favorite childhood games. Players must run around a level, collecting treasure and avoiding the deadly monks, before escaping through the exit.

What Went Right

Mechanics - Mostly

All of the bits of Lode Runner are here! You can run around, you fall properly, you can climb ladders and go across ropes, and the crazy monks can do all of that, too! Treasure works, digging works, everything’s there.