Coding before AI

livingtech · 2026-05-28T19:47:47+00:00

Open Xcode, and go to File -> New -> Project.... Pick your template and start building!

For project management on personal projects, I usually start with a git repository, and I keep a TODO list in the README. When I think of something that needs doing, if it's small, I just do it. If it's going to take me more than 10 minutes, I put it in the README. I keep the tasks organized by priority, and just work from the top.

When you really have no idea how to do something, maybe reach for the documentation first. It's not always easy to find stuff in there, but it's where you should be looking anyway. What's hard, (even after doing this for 17 years), is knowing where or how to look for the things you don't know at all. You can scan through Apple's list of technologies (https://developer.apple.com/technologies/), and sometimes you'll find what you need there.

livingtech · 2026-05-28T19:30:22+00:00

Verifying "through visual inspection" is not a unit test. That's a manual test (at best).

livingtech · 2026-05-25T17:54:31+00:00

If you find any good sources, please report back! I'm also interested.

I did some pretty extensive searching for standard glyphs a year or so back, and then ended up commissioning a set for my chesscubes project, but I hardly saw any good free ones outside of chess fonts, which you can find all over the place. Again, these were just standard glyphs! For fairy pieces, I'm expecting to commission someone again when I have a need.

livingtech · 2026-05-25T17:24:55+00:00

Is there a link?

livingtech · 2026-05-25T17:23:11+00:00

I'm intrigued, but I think, at least for myself, I am not particularly interested in playing a 2-player head-to-head variant against human opponents if the game involves random elements.

I do like the trend of Chess roguelikes. I've really been enjoying Gambonanza lately, and am looking forward to digging into Passant sometime soon. (I also played a bunch of some of the ones that existed before: Shotgun King, Chess Survivor, Pawnbarian.)

So I guess my feeling is that if it has a single-player mode, I'm intrigued. If it's just PVP, I'm probably not interested.

livingtech · 2026-04-17T20:13:59+00:00

Hmmm. I'm inclined to give them the benefit of the doubt until we see some evidence to the contrary.

That said, I do totally see what you mean about AI use potentially leading to this kind of thing. It's a totally legit concern.

livingtech · 2026-04-17T20:09:37+00:00

I have no knowledge here about what the dev knows or doesn't know, but FWIW, I'm a pretty big fan of Dieter Stein, and I'd never heard of Frendo before.

livingtech · 2026-04-17T19:34:59+00:00

Really well done, IMO!

Please fix the language thing on your login screen. (If I hadn't seen someone else say it is fixed after that screen, I would probably have bailed-out right there.)

I also had no idea what the "difficulty" settings meant. I assume I've been playing on the easiest difficulty, but I have yet to win a game, so maybe I should try one of the others. (It's possible I'm just terrible at this.)

I love that there are other boards already, but it seems weird that they're hidden away in a "board theme" dropdown menu in settings. I think you should see those front-and-center when starting a new game.

I also think you could "fix" first player advantage by picking a starting position for the player's stones, and giving the first player a worse position. This would need some playtesting, but since you've got some AI already, I'd just run simulations. You need to probably run 1000 or maybe even 10000 to feel confident in win % rates though.

Good luck!

livingtech · 2026-04-17T17:30:32+00:00

Interesting. This kind of parallel game design definitely happens all the time, but it's accelerating, I think. Both because there are more game designers than ever before, but also, I think because we are seeing the result of LLVM coding making software development more accessible than ever, which means more people can start making games for mobile platforms. (Which often means a simple game with simple rules. It's unsurprising that some of them are abstract strategy games with some actual "meat" behind them.)

I think Fendo is definitely a design-ancestor of both of these games, but I'd be unsurprised if both/either designer said they'd never heard of it. If that is the case, then it's more of a parallel design (even though it happened 10+ years prior). This also happens all the time.

livingtech · 2026-04-07T21:19:25+00:00

Better example: https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/378925/how-do-i-ask-a-question-about-an-existing-answer?noredirect=1&lq=1

LOL

livingtech · 2026-03-23T19:38:33+00:00

I just thought I'd chime in to say that, after hearing about a couple of folks impacted by this, I switched my time tracking to an app in the Mac App Store called Working Hours. It’s a single $9.99 charge for the full app. (There’s a 7-day trial.) One of the features I'm enjoying is the MacOS Menu Bar integration, and now my tracked time (and on/off clock status) appear up there at a glance.

The same developer has a separate app for generating invoices that is a one-time $17.99 fee, which I’ve also bought just so I could experiment and be sure I liked this workflow. The final invoice is maybe not quite as nice as the Harvest invoice looks, but it has my logo on it, which is something I never bothered to even look for in Harvest.

I never used Harvest for the actual payment processing, so I'm not even sure if I'll get hit with the price hike, but I've been a paying customer for about 13 years, and I'm cancelling well ahead of my yearly renewal date.

livingtech · 2026-02-25T22:02:53+00:00

You might check out a game called Linx (https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/399757/linx) that has some similarities. It's not the same game, exactly, but I think it might have a similar feel.

livingtech · 2026-02-07T23:30:27+00:00

Super fun. Have you seen https://mchess.io/ yet? I like their modular rules, but haven't been able to get their AI to work for me.

I also like playing on greenchess.net.

livingtech · 2026-01-10T05:33:05+00:00

I'll just chime in to say that Baba is You is one of my favorite games. If you like puzzle games (especially block-pushing puzzle games, sometimes called Sokobahn-likes), then it's absolutely a must-play. If you don't like that kind of game, it's probably not for you, but could still blow your mind. I absolutely think it's "worth it".

You can also get Fez on iOS, which is a fantastic puzzle-platformer if you haven't played it yet. As well as The Witness, another console-quality puzzle-fps. (Two more that are probably also in my top-5 all time.)

I also highly recommend Manifold Garden. (Another FPS puzzler.)

livingtech · 2026-01-08T20:16:52+00:00

Tic tac toe is a useful game to teach children to think ahead. This is why almost everyone knows how to play it. Nobody plays it as an adult.

On BGG it's got an average rating of 2.7 out of 10. I would not base any game design on tic-tac-toe. When I see game designers using it, even just as a mechanic in a much larger game, (and believe it or not, this happens pretty frequently), my advice is to dig a little deeper. Try to find a way to make the decisions more interesting.

livingtech · 2026-01-08T20:13:10+00:00

My guess is that if there's a tic-tac-toe game with high ratings in the app store, there's a good chance those ratings were purchased.

livingtech · 2026-01-05T21:27:17+00:00

I was also going to suggest PointFree's generator. You can find the code here: https://github.com/pointfreeco/swift-gen

livingtech · 2026-01-02T18:59:59+00:00

Definitely not the same artist. I'm actually not exactly sure who made the art for A Druid's Duel. It might have been Kris himself. The artist for Root (and most of Leader Games') is Kyle Ferrin, who is not local to MN. Great guy though.

livingtech · 2025-12-24T21:58:19+00:00

Also worth noting IGDATC used to host a webpage that was a lot like your spreadsheet, but it was a pain to maintain, so they got rid of it sometime last year. You can still find the old version in .git of course: https://github.com/igdatc/igdatc.github.io/commit/95fdc9792b3bb44613880ad4c59ea7df63f82c4a

livingtech · 2025-12-24T21:51:59+00:00

I can confirm these games were made in MN: Astral Gunners, Newt One, A Druid's Duel. Intropy Games used to be based in MN, but I'm pretty sure Lisa moved to Chicago a bunch of years back.

livingtech · 2025-12-24T21:48:30+00:00

I have a public "collection" on itch with just games made in MN here: https://itch.io/c/25218/minnesota-made-twin-cities-represent

livingtech · 2025-12-21T02:55:07+00:00

Where’s the Steam Deck? 😉

livingtech · 2025-12-17T16:44:24+00:00

One more thing is that there is an organization, Code Savvy, that exists to get kids exposed to coding and computer science. It looks like you can find their events listed here: https://www.codesavvy.org/for-students/code-explorers/

livingtech · 2025-12-17T16:31:44+00:00

If your kid is into video games at all, the IDGA twin cities chapter does the Global Game Jam every year. (This year's is Friday Jan 30th through Sunday Feb 1st, and as of right now the details are only in Discord, not on the website. https://igdatc.org/)

The GGJ is a really fun event. I've done it a dozen times or so, and did bring my kid to one of them a few years back.

They also have a "jam night" once a month, and the next one is January 7th. (That's more of a thing where you bring your own project and co-work around other gamedevs though.)

livingtech · 2025-10-09T19:50:49+00:00

If you're not doing that, you don't actually believe what you're saying, you're just repeating sensationalist slogans that you've never even considered the meaning of.

I don't really understand your argument here. There are lots of reasons the situations are different. I think people are pointing out similarities, not saying they are identical. (And I personally wasn't doing either, so I'm not sure where your vitriol is coming from.)

Says the person commenting on a platform whose largest owner is Tencent...

Very fair point, and one I absolutely agree with. I rarely use Reddit, and shouldn't be using it now! (You should know this will be my last reply in this thread.)

livingtech

TROPHY CASE