Good Name For A Blog

Very Average Prototypes

Sat, 04 Jul 2026 11:57:53 +1000

Earlier this year, I decided to give AI coding a go. In general, my emotional reaction to doing so was “anger and frustration”, but I found if I used it carefully it sped up what I was doing. It ate at me because all the ethical arguments against using it were strong.

Yet, well, indie game dev is a brutal industry that’s only getting harder, I was feeling dispirited, and doing largely solo dev meant that if I could speed up some aspects of what I do… I should at least consider it.

The Omni-Death of Gaming

Thu, 02 Jul 2026 08:54:41 +1000

Sony just announced that from the beginning of 2028 (which, a reminder if you’re reading this shortly after I post it - that’s not a long time away, despite that it feels like it) they will discontinue production on new Playstation games on disc. Digital is the only way to play new Playstation games from year after next on.

This has been a long time coming, of course. Xbox tried to get ahead of the competition to disastrous results with their Xbox One launch approximately one million years ago now. But things are different. These days, the majority of games, even on console, are bought digitally. So much so that base models of current Playstations simply do not come with optical drives - if you want one, you have to buy it and install it separately.

The Manor

Thu, 18 Jun 2026 09:50:59 +1000

The house is gnarled and almost organic. Less like it was constructed, and more like it was grown, fitfully and against its will. Inside, its walls are variously a sick white and a salmon pink. Outside, it varies. Its canted roofs are terracotta, it has exposed bricks and painted ones, but the fourth (and top) storey, smaller than every other floor of the building looks not only like the afterthought it was, but also has walls of the same salmon pink used inside - like the building was partly twisted inside-out.

Interactions 1

Wed, 01 Apr 2026 07:46:04 +1100

Interactions on my way to, or in the process of obtaining coffee of a morning.

Week: end of March, 2026

“Small flat white, please.”

“Sure. Ruby, isn’t it?”

“No. Elissa.”

“Oh! Sorry.”

[glancing down at my red and black dress, locks of red hair falling past my field of view.] “Though I can see why.”

“Found ya joy yet?”

“This week? No. Just mild discombobulation.”

“Look under the couch. Mine always falls under there.”

Returning to San Andreas

Wed, 28 Jan 2026 11:03:09 +1100

Well, after re-visiting GTA Vice City and getting a surprising amount of the way through it before running into missions that were too tough, there was really only one place to go: the great state of San Andreas. Going back to Vice City was interesting, because for all that its vibes remain immaculate, its incredibly fast turn-around time and original intent as an expansion for GTA III very much show through.

How to Escape When You Can't Escape

Mon, 26 Jan 2026 10:41:20 +1100

The first time I began to truly analyse how escapism and fantasy impacted me was about a year ago. I suppose it took me that long to begin to be able to think back to the time when it all began to crystallise and become something I could study. I needed space from it beforehand.

Second Hand Computer

Thu, 15 Jan 2026 15:31:00 +1100

Time to formally announce a new project!

SECOND HAND COMPUTER is a digital toy focused on letting you play and make text-based video games. It is part fantasy computer/console, part text adventure engine, and all about providing the vibes that using text-based early IBM PCs had.

It contains the following features:

FUNSCRIPT, a LUA-based language which lets you program text-mode games anyone with Second Hand Computer can play
ODYSSEY, an intentionally minimalist text-adventure engine which lets you play (and write) adventure games
SWORDS OF FREEPORT, the terminal-based play-once-a-day low-fantasy lite-RPG
BOOTLEG, a brand new text based game where you take on the role of a bootlegger in prohibition-era America
Several other classic text-based games ported to Second Hand Computer
Various small text based games common to 8-bit computers, ported to FUNSCRIPT and provided with full source code
A pixel-art computer and room, which can be customised and even fully replaced at the user’s desire
…all presented through a DOS-like operating system front-end called FUNTIME(FT) DOS

As for the system itself, the titular Second Hand Computer renders an 80x25 character display based roughly on IBM Codepage 437 with only minor changes, with the 16 original EGA/VGA base colours.

2025 Recap & 2026 Plans

Thu, 01 Jan 2026 15:56:32 +1100

Well, here where I sit in this little part of the globe it’s been 2026 for one sleep now, so I figure I might post a recap/plans thing. This post contains a list of things I did in 2025, and what my plans are for 2026. As much an inventory for myself as anyone else.

First, and most obviously, I shipped Death by Scrolling with Ron Gilbert (which you should go grab on mac/linux/windows if you haven’t).

Leica Repair

Sat, 27 Dec 2025 15:12:29 +1100

Some time back, I bought a Leica IIIf**, a 1955 model (one of the final ones produced - the III series was discontinued after 1960). It’s one of the last of the original Barnack-style Leica rangefinder cameras. I’d wanted one for a while, but to be honest the main reason I got it was that for a Leica with a lens it was absurdly cheap, and came with a 3.5cm lens which I knew I could use on my other rangefinders.

Games as Experiences

Mon, 24 Nov 2025 09:20:19 +1100

We live in a time where we have access to a true embarrassment of riches when it comes to media access. By that I mean, we have truly enormous number of movies, TV shows and video games are accessible to us across digital store fronts, physical media stores (at least, while they still exist at all), and thrift stores. If anything, the biggest issue many of us face when sitting down to watch a movie or play a game is choice paralysis. When you’ve got a collection of cartridges on your shelf to pick between, it’s a bit of a difference to your thousand-strong Steam library or the like. In a bad way for options; in a good way for choice.

Notes on Film 1 - Into the Jungles

Wed, 12 Nov 2025 08:17:07 +1100

Note: Yes, I know I wrote a complaint about ’everyone reviewing things’, and especially how ‘reviewing’ things meant I stopped enjoying them. I’m starting a new little series here, not to review films I watch, but to provide some thoughts on films I am re-watching. I’m going to putt them in sets, I think, several at a time. So, here’s the first bunch:

Sorcerer (1977) and The Thin Red Line (1998)

Undead Game Genres

Tue, 11 Nov 2025 09:15:00 +1100

Around the time I was pushing 18-20 years old, adventure games died. RIP adventure games. Gone forever, never to come back except in Germany, etc, etc.

I wasn’t particularly upset by this at the time, because iD software had let off an atomic bomb on PC gaming, and I was too busy being excited by 3D graphics and fast-paced action gameplay of a sort I had never even imagined before to actually recognise that I was not really that into playing what we now call first-person shooters.

It's Free! All Free!

Tue, 28 Oct 2025 09:14:25 +1100

Today is a big day. In a few hours as I type this Death by Scrolling, a game I made with the man who needs no introduction, Ron Gilbert, becomes available. It’s been an amazing project to work on. But it also got me thinking about my personal projects.

When I began to put up my vampire prose and my weird little throw-back BBS game (Swords of Freeport), I was struggling with a day job that was rapidly falling apart (because, video games industry). That’s no longer the case. I’m still in a messy place of having no real idea just what I’ll be doing next year, I now know that short of disaster I will be able to finish and release Dungeons of Freeport (a semi-classical roguelike) and Deck & Conn (a Super Star Trek-like game being published by Microprose).

Post-Expo Malaise

Wed, 22 Oct 2025 13:51:42 +1100

To get this out of the way: working from home is good. It’s good for me, it’s good for many other people. The studies agree. I’m not saying it’s always the best fit for every industry or even every company, but I am saying that most of the pressure to come ‘back into the office’ come from overly-controlling bosses and people who are sitting there eating the rent on very expensive offices for their companies.

Touch and a Burning World

Tue, 14 Oct 2025 10:20:41 +1100

Note: there are a lot of generalisations in this blog post, as it’s kind of a stream of thoughts. Most things are more complex than the way I word them below, so please don’t @ me saying as much - I’m well aware.

My life isn’t what I expected it to be. Not in a bad way, just in the kind of way where if you described who I’d become and what I was doing to me at age 25, you’d probably get a reaction of extreme confusion.

There's No Rain on the Internet

Sun, 12 Oct 2025 08:40:43 +1100

A good friend of mine just made an observation:

“We don’t have profit seeking capitalists anymore. They had a moral compass. Usually a fucked one but they had one. Now we have rent-seeking post-capitalists.”

If you ask anyone around my age or a bit younger (at least, one who wasn’t born with a silver spoon massaging their gums) which category of human they hate the most, they’ll probably answer landlords. See, most of us still rent the roofs over our heads. I don’t need to go into detail about all this because, frankly, there’s a million articles and videos on how the housing crisis and cost of living has fucked pretty much anyone who’s a millennial or younger.

Returning to Vice City

Thu, 02 Oct 2025 12:46:36 +1000

What follows is a sort of loose collection of thoughts I had during my current re-visit of 2002’s Grand Theft Auto: Vice City. Don’t expect some grand conclusion or an essay; just come with me on this little trip, won’t you?

Film and Digital

Mon, 29 Sep 2025 10:28:36 +1000

In the past four years or so, I went from having done a bit of photography in my past, to doing a lot of photography in my present. I went from owning merely a single beat-up rarely-used DSLR I’d owned since 2006, to having a spreadsheet full of cameras ranging from a modern mirrorless camera to dozens and dozens of old rangefinders and SLRs obtained from markets or found by friends in the bottom of parents’ cupboards.

Bathtub Soap Bubble OS

Fri, 26 Sep 2025 07:24:21 +1000

Like a lot of you, I recently upgraded (or downgraded, if you’re being unkind-but-fair) my iPhone OS to the new one, iOS 26, which has the biggest UI shakeup they’ve done for years. Gone is some variation of the semi-flat Apple UI elements, replaced instead with semi-transparent floating all over the application or web page’s content, floating in and out like that stoner at your friend’s house party.

I had briefly tried a beta of this new on OS on my iPad Pro (which is these days my primary portable computing device, unless I need to do a bunch of actual C++ game dev) but found the aesthetic and interface changes ruined almost every aspect of my work flow. I returned it to its original state, and as of this moment have no plans to sully my actual mac or iPad with the new system.

Everyone's a Critic but Me

Wed, 24 Sep 2025 08:48:37 +1000

Social media has a lot to answer for. Along with everything else truly terrible about it, we also have to suffer the indignities of the existence of Letterboxd. Beyond the horrid misspelling of the word, this service has resulted in friends at parties saying, “Did you read my letterboxd review of that new Marvel Film, Chongusman? Here, let me read it to you.”

In practice, of course, this is no worse or better than any other “Oh have you seen the new Clint Eastwood film?” conversation at a party. If you hadn’t figured out by my pre-coffee snarkiness, I am not on this service. Jokes aside, I recognise why people like it. I’m sure partly it’s the inherent voyeurism of knowing what friends and parasocials are watching. But it’s no doubt also that for the handful of people who follow you, you get to have a platform to espouse your opinions about films.

Writing Pulp

Mon, 22 Sep 2025 13:05:28 +1000

Part of my time in my recent two week micro-blogging absence has been spent writing. Quite a lot of writing, in fact. But also writing in a way that’s a bit different than my usual method.

As I’ve been working on Deck & Conn, I kept thinking back to the kind of materials that games like this might have had if they were released in big boxes back in the ’90s. Nice fat manuals full of background material too big or nuanced to be inside the game. Perhaps some designer’s notes. Hell, some of the O.G. MicroProse games had absurdly detailed material in their huge manuals. Hell, in the wonderful manual for the Gothic Germany-set RPG Darklands, there was a full bibliography, where the designers showed what books they’d used as research material for the game.

First Post

Mon, 22 Sep 2025 12:48:20 +1000

This is not my first blog. It’s not even my first blog that’s actually running. My main blog is over at elissablack.com, where I mostly talk about my game dev work. And that’s fine, of course. I even used to write personal blog posts there, though not in a while.

So how did this come about, and what is it?

I spent the last week or two offline. No social media, beyond browsing pixelfed because it’s quite relaxing to just look at photos. (Remember that? What Instagram used to be before it vanished up its own posterior?)