These ideas sometimes seem at odds. A garden suggests curation, but brains aren’t curated (at least, mine isn’t!). But by building this space as both a digital garden and a second brain, I am (hopefully) reducing overhead and eliminating some of the difficulty of adoption. The end result treats meta-notes like these (and evergreen notes) the same way it treats random thoughts about worlds I’d like to build. That kind of makes sense—it’s a lot more like how my brain works, I guess.
And maybe the garden part of all this has less to do with how I curate this content and more to do with how I make it and share it:
digital gardening is not about specific tools – it's not a Wordpress plugin, Gastby theme, or Jekyll template. It's a different way of thinking about our online behaviour around information – one that accumulates personal knowledge over time in an explorable space. Maggie Appleton’s history and contextualization of digital gardens
It’s about behavior: by writing my unpolished thoughts here for my own benefit and connecting them using the magic of hyperlinks, I fall into a pattern that creates a space primed for wandering and exploration.
I bought my Kobo Glo#eink e-reader from eBay on October 25, 2019 for $23.50 plus about $10 shipping (though it looks like costs have increased since), and I’ve been using it for about a year and a half. Despite a few issues, it’s served me pretty well overall, and I see myself continuing to use it for at least a few more years.
I'd like to talk about my love of visiting state parks and playing what I'm calling “garden games”. These are games that are designed to reward exploration; the core game loop is a cycle of exploration and discovery in a carefully constructed environment. (If there's already another term for these games, please let me know! They're some of my favorites, and I'd love to find a way to search for them more easily.) For now, I'm taking the word “garden” after reading the below part of a review of my favorite game, Eastshade.
“Each painting costs inspiration, which you collect by visiting new areas or completing new tasks...Games being pretty isn’t unusual, but Eastshade’s design is closer to that of a grand garden. The buildings feel more like follies than functional houses, the bridges come straight from arcadian paintings, and curated lines of sight are key.” PCGamer (emphasis mine)
That review is describing Eastshade's environment design, and indeed in playing the game it seems every frame could be a carefully composed painting, but I think the depiction of Eastshade as a “grand garden” extends to the broader scope of its game design as well.
What's a garden?
A garden is a curated environment designed for the enjoyment of nature. According to the concept's Wikipedia entry, the defining feature of a garden is its curation; if a space hasn't been controlled and curated by a human, it isn't a garden. To extend the definition to games, I replace nature with the game world.
For gardens, the carefully curated experience centers the environment itself, not another end goal.
Web Monetization is a new way to monetize web games (and any other web content). Users can sign up through a Web Monetization provider (like Coil) to gain access all Web Monetized content, and creators of that content get paid based on the amount of time users spend on their sites. It uses Interledger, a protocol that allows for quick transfers of money, to enable very fast short-term payments.
We can use Web Monetization to earn money from web exported games made with Godot. We can even check if the user is paying and offer them exclusive content if they are! This tutorial offers example approaches to monetizing your web game using Godot and Web Monetization (WM). Check out the demo and source code below.
After poring over Eastshade's devblog, I became especially interested in the concept of the vertical slice. I had heard the term before, but reading this post helped me truly appreciate its value.
In game development, a vertical slice is a fully playable piece of a game, so named because when one imagines a game as horizontal layers of systems, a vertical slice takes the most important parts of those systems (usually including artwork) and combines them to create a small, playable chunk of the game.
Their value is somewhat debated in the game development world. What Games Are author Tadhg Kelly likens asking for a vertical slice to “asking to see a piece of the final cake before agreeing to pay for the whole,” arguing that creating a vertical slice actually requires completing most of the game, even though the slice may seem to lack content.
This week saw a rework of Homegrown's inventory system and the beginning of a rework of its U.I aesthetic. The U.I. system needed to improve for the title screen and inventory window, and the inventory system needed to adjust to store player models and be accessible for both inventory viewing and block placement and removal.
Homegrown is a multiplayer game in which players grow and build up their own small islands, accepting other players as visitors. Players can open up shops to trade their goods and add behaviors to animate their in-game models and make them interactive. The game’s primary goals are to provide an escape from the real world into a calming, nonviolent atmosphere and to foster a sense of safety and community among players.
Note: Homegrown is very early in development, and while a few of the elements discussed below are implemented, the game is very far from being finished.
As a multiplayer game, this sense of community comes from other players sharing and interacting with the same game worlds. In Homegrown, a 2D side-scrolling game, each player will begin with a small, forested island and a dock. Players will learn the ropes of the game by collecting materials and building a boat for the dock. Once the boat is completed, players can visit other players' islands. (A player can receive visitors before their boat is completed, though.) Servers reward players for performing actions like visiting their islands and trading with them.
Enchantments are ways for Homegrown players to further interact with models they build. Put simply, players can use a basic visual scripting system to give their models life and help them interact with the world. (Homegrown is a work in progress and is not at all ready for players, but I've been working on it for a while now.)
Each enchantment has a “root condition” that causes the enchantment to work. These conditions are split into triggers and gates. Triggers are conditions in the in-game world that players might want their models to observe: it's nighttime or daytime, it's sunny or rainy, a player just pressed a key, a player just said a special phrase in the chat, a model announced something (this works something like a function call), or something else. Gates are conditions that are true or false based on the states of other conditions. They are logic gates, and for now the game has three of them: And, Or, and Nand. Each gate can have any number of inputs.
Homegrown is a multiplayer game in which players grow and build up their own small islands, accepting other players as visitors. Players can open up shops to trade their goods and add behaviors to animate their in-game models and make them interactive.
Rarely do motivation and free time align as a student, so I'm taking development slowly but surely. A lot of the groundwork for these systems is already laid. As of now, I have accounts management, server connections, models (i.e. block placement, removal and selection), syncing of models, syncing of multiplayer player movements, and world and inventory saving. Frustratingly, not much of this is worth showing off to friends and family; it's hard to see the work I've done on the surface level. The game isn't a game yet but a collection of conversing, interactive systems.
A rambling discussion of online communities, from Facebook and Discord to an ideal of the entire web as a community and the Fediverse as our burgeoning compromise
Companies like Facebook and Discord, who provide very centralized, siloed community-building services, might claim “decentralized community” is an oxymoron. They'd argue that centralization is necessary for a community, that the very definition of a community is a single place where people come together to share ideas and keep in touch.
Indeed, both websites have a rules page about their respective “communities”. (Facebook's here and Discord's here. Facebook proclaims on the first line: “Every day, people come to Facebook to share their stories, see the world through the eyes of others, and connect with friends and causes,” and this frames Facebook as a massive community (containing many smaller ones, also locked to the platform).