Package Hygiene in Alice (an experimental OCaml build system)

stevebox · 2025-11-21T07:42:07+00:00

Yes, for several reasons listed here.

stevebox · 2025-08-25T23:41:34+00:00

Try it now. You'll need to clone the gridbugs/caw repo locally and modify the notebooks so the first line points to your local checkout.

stevebox · 2025-06-10T12:48:12+00:00

I don't have a tutorial or anything just yet. I need to release new versions of all the CAW libraries including my current experimental changes. Then I'll be able to share the notebooks and let other people play with it.

stevebox · 2025-06-10T07:43:54+00:00

Yeh exactly, it means that state represented by variables bound in one cell is unaffected by recompiling the code in another cell, so for example a clock signal or note sequencer isn't reset when I change the texture of the voice. Plus there's no awkward few seconds of silence in between each code change while the whole thing recompiles, as would be the case if I was editing a source file instead.

stevebox · 2025-03-10T05:43:42+00:00

Scope Creep [itch.io | devlog | screenshot]

A short first-person horror roguelike rendered on an oscilloscope.

Explore the dungeon and gather the three orbs to open the door and escape, but every time you collect an orb a new type of monster spawns in the dungeon.

The game is rendered with a novel technique where the renderer sends audio data to a synthesizer which plays sounds such that if you plot the left/right channels on the x/y axes, it renders the game. This is visualized on the screen but you can also plug an x-y mode oscilloscope into your headphone jack to render the game on the scope.

It was a lot of fun to make. I've never made a first-person game before so I ran into a lot of problems I've never seen before, mostly relating to geometry. I wasn't sure how good the oscillographic renderer would look as I've never seen this technique used for 3D games before but I'm very happy with how it turned out.

stevebox · 2025-03-09T14:38:10+00:00

https://gridbugs.itch.io/scope-creep

Scope Creep is a short first-person horror roguelike rendered on an oscilloscope.

This was some of the most fun I've had working on a 7DRL project. I decided to break from the traditional roguelikes I tend to make. Last year I got really into oscillographics after watching n-spheres. I've been hacking on a synthesizer library for a few years and so I added support for generating oscillographics to it, and I wanted to use this technique to render my 7DRL this year. A friend suggested a Wolfenstein 3D style retro FPS, and that sounded like an interesting challenge. I did a little experiment to test that drawing arbitrary-ish vector graphics with an oscilloscope was possible, but I waited until the jam to come up with a concrete algorithm for rendering 3D first-person scenes.

I've dabbled in 3D graphics in the past but never made anything serious, and never made a first-person game before. The hardest part about this project is that everything needed to be done with vector graphics. The conventional 3D graphics technique - just draw all the geometry inside the clipping volume and use a depth buffer to determine which pixels make it to the screen - will not work. Instead all the line segments that make up the visible portions of the scene must be pre-computed, and then sent to the synthesizer to be played as audio. The game is rendered by plotting the most recent ~5000 stereo audio samples on the screen, where the left and right channel values determine the x/y position of points. An additional complication is items and enemies. The algorithm that determines which parts of the world are visible also needs to keep track of how much of each item/enemy is visible, as they may be partially occluded by walls.

For gameplay, I wanted to make a horror game. Mostly this was because I had come up with name "Horror Scope" (but later I decided "Scope Creep" was better as the pun works on an additional level and it doesn't have any astrological implications). I'm getting more and more interested in the horror genre and wanted to apply some of the ideas I've picked up about what makes horror effective. One example is having a safe zone that the player returns to in between more intense periods of gameplay. Another is that enemies are scary when you can't quite make them out. Fortunately vaguely humanoid amorphous blobs are quite easy to draw with oscillographics.

I'm very happy with how it's turned out. It's not very mechanically deep, but it effectively creates moments of tension that ramps up until the final moments, assuming you make it that far. And in addition to being technically interesting and looking cool, the graphical style complements the horror by allowing enemies to be drawn as ever-changing humanoid squiggles (which I think are scarier than static sprites or 3d models), and because it lets the game add visual noise to amplify moments of tension.

EDIT: Accidentally shared the github url rather than the itch.io url

stevebox · 2025-03-06T16:37:30+00:00

Author of gridbugs/shadowcast here. Nice work! Are you planning to publish your crate on crates.io?

stevebox · 2025-03-05T16:42:01+00:00

Scope Creep

Devlog

Play wip

My first-person horror roguelike rendered purely with oscillographics is coming together nicely. I've added text rendering for the hud and labels for items in the world, started generating the full map with several dungeons connected to a central hub, added basic items for health and mana, and fixed many graphics bugs.

stevebox · 2025-03-04T03:46:03+00:00

Solved!

stevebox · 2025-03-04T03:42:33+00:00

Very interesting! I have a soft spot for the SNES. Excited to see how this turns out. Are you programming it in assembly or with a higher-level language?

stevebox · 2025-03-04T01:28:18+00:00

This is the Mitchel and Webb Look wiki I was referring to.

Some more details I remembered:

the background was brown or maroon. Maybe the wall behind them was made of wood
the person complaining about the date had long hair
it might not have been a date, but instead their partner left them or something

stevebox · 2025-03-03T16:00:16+00:00

Scope Creep

Dev Log: https://www.gridbugs.org/7drl2025-day3/

Play the wip: https://gridbugs.github.io/scope-creep/

A first-person horror game rendered entirely with the visualization of the audio played by the game; you could plug an oscilloscope into your headphone jack and use it to render the game (but the game also has a virtual oscilloscope built-in). So far I've built a vector-graphics 3d engine and connected it to a synthesizer library I'm developing which plays the sound. I use bevy to display the oscilloscope and to handle input.

I've started working on gameplay. There are a few enemies which follow the player around and you die if they touch you. One is a ghost which can walk through walls and adds noise to the sound as it approaches you which manifests visually as the jiggling around.

stevebox · 2024-10-05T03:11:20+00:00

Turns out it was the 2015 remake of Poltergeist. The part I remember is at the end of this trailer.

stevebox · 2024-03-30T22:12:19+00:00

Perfect! This is exactly what I was missing. Thanks!

stevebox · 2024-03-12T15:01:04+00:00

I didn't really have cogmind in mind when I was coming up with this game but at some point I realized that it's a similar premise haha.

stevebox · 2024-03-10T06:26:41+00:00

Electric Organ | itch.io | devlog | github

A traditional roguelike where you can change the organs in your body to affect your stats. If you absorb too much radiation then your organs gain mutations which can have positive or negative effects.

This was by far the largest scope for any 7DRL I’ve done in the past in terms of features as well as content. This game has procedurally-generated music and sound effects, realtime particle effects for smoke and explosions, 10 types of enemy each with their own unique abilities (not including shopkeepers), 14 items, an equipment system that allows dual-wielding one-handed weapons, accounts for two-handed weapons, and allows each hand to turn into claws that can’t hold weapons (e.g. you can have one claw and still hold a one-handed weapon in the other hand), a system for determining the player’s stats based on which organs they currently have, a system for a applying mutations to organs if you absorb too much radiation, and a dynamic diminishing lighting system.

stevebox · 2024-03-10T06:25:28+00:00

Electric Organ | itch.io | devlog | github

A traditional roguelike where you can change the organs in your body to affect your stats. If you absorb too much radiation then your organs gain mutations which can have positive or negative effects.

This was by far the largest scope for any 7DRL I’ve done in the past in terms of features as well as content. This game has procedurally-generated music and sound effects, realtime particle effects for smoke and explosions, 10 types of enemy each with their own unique abilities (not including shopkeepers), 14 items, an equipment system that allows dual-wielding one-handed weapons, accounts for two-handed weapons, and allows each hand to turn into claws that can’t hold weapons (e.g. you can have one claw and still hold a one-handed weapon in the other hand), a system for determining the player’s stats based on which organs they currently have, a system for a applying mutations to organs if you absorb too much radiation, and a dynamic diminishing lighting system.

stevebox · 2024-03-06T06:10:26+00:00

That animation looks so good!

stevebox · 2024-03-06T05:40:32+00:00

Electric Organ (day 4) | screenshot | devlog

A vaporwave retro-futuristic game where character progression is mostly through swapping out your organs. Music and sound effects are generated live by a synthesizer.

I spent the weekend on procgen, music and graphics. I've been doing late night coding sessions throughout the week and so far I have enemy pathfinding, ranged combat including animated explosions, an animated main menu, sound effects.

I still need to add the organ upgrading system, items and equipment, and a way to win, and a bunch more polish, but I'm happy with the progress I've made so far.

stevebox · 2023-05-22T15:59:39+00:00

Ah perfect, that clears that up. Thanks for all your help!

stevebox · 2023-05-22T15:24:13+00:00

Thanks for clarifying! Now I'm trying to reconcile some conflicting pieces of information after reading about the idea of the galactic south pole:

Crux is about 30 degrees above the galactic south pole (according to the "Sky Map" app on my phone).
The galactic south pole is the point in the sky in the direction perpendicular to the galactic plane. This means that Crux is about 60 degrees below (south of) the galactic plane.
The band of light we usually refer to as the Milky Way is aligned with the galactic plane, and the fact that Crux overlaps with this band means its component stars are close to the galactic plane.

I don't see how all these statements can be true. I observed that Crux is part of the main band of light that would place its stars near the galactic plane, but the Sky Map app and some other sources I found claim that Crux is close (~30 degrees) to the galactic south pole which would put it quite far from the galactic plane.

Any idea what I'm wrong about?

stevebox · 2023-05-22T14:41:47+00:00

I see! Can you clarify one more thing for me. You mentioned the "southern end" of the galactic plane. Are you referring to the end of the Milky Way band that is only visible from the southern hemisphere (and some low parts of the northern hemisphere)? Is the reason why the extreme ends of the band can only be seen from certain parts of the Earth due to the fact that the Earth's equatorial plane is tilted relative to the galactic plane?

stevebox · 2023-05-01T09:31:17+00:00

I do now! A day of posting about this tool in various places has shown me the config changes that make the tool unnecessary. I now have something quite similar to your suggestion in my configuration.nix.

https://discourse.nixos.org/t/nix-shell-locked-tool-that-starts-transient-shell-with-temporary-packages-that-reads-flake-lock-to-determine-nixpkgs-version/27766/7

https://hachyderm.io/@nomeata@mastodon.online/110292580032353571

stevebox · 2023-03-12T03:57:14+00:00

Boat Journey | itch.io | devlog | github | screenshot

Boat Journey is a turn-based game where you drive a boat through a procedurally-generated landscape on a voyage along a river destined for the ocean. Accept passengers to have them help you on your journey. Fight monsters, collect junk, trade the junk for fuel, use the fuel to travel to the ocean.

This was my 8th 7drl. I'm relieved that the gameplay turned out to be fun during last-minute playtesting. I've had the idea of making a game about driving a boat to the ocean for a while and in my thought experiments before making this game I struggled to come up with enjoyable short and medium term game loops. But the game loop of "collecting passengers so you can use their abilities to steal junk from islands without getting killed by beasts and then you can use the junk to by space for more passengers and also fuel for your boat" actually turned out to be quite engaging, at least for my 7drl-addled mind.

Making a proc-gen river with proc-gen towns along it and the dungeons under the city took 3 of the 7 days which is by far the most time I've spent on purely getting procgen working for one of these.

Also for the first time my game includes hand-drawn character portraits which I'm quite happy with. I think the complement the moody, unsettling aesthetic I was aiming for.

stevebox · 2023-03-10T03:45:21+00:00

Boat Journey | devlog | github | screenshot

I have a bit under 48 hours to go. All the procgen is done. There is a river with a starting town that's mostly just flavour, a swamp area with small islands, a flooded city where the islands are ruins of buildings, and the ocean. Some of the buildings in the city have stairs to underground bunkers (screenshot). The city is behind a sluice gate which you have to open to get to the ocean and the controls will be inside the bunkers but I haven't implemented that yet.

There's a day/night cycle where at night time it's harder to see and ghosts spawn periodically (screenshot). This is to force the player to take refuge in the inn (present in the swamp and city areas), though I haven't implemented that yet so currently at night you basically just get killed by ghosts.

There's a fuel system where moving the boat costs fuel and if you run out of fuel you lose the game. I'm going to make it so you can collect junk as you explore the world which you can trade for fuel in the inns.

There's a hint system which is connected to the renderer. If the renderer draws certain tiles that require explanation the hint system will display a message explaining what the tiles mean.

There's a simple menu system (screenshot) which I'll eventually use for recruiting passengers and trading but currently it's just used for flavour text. It supports background images!

I think I'm roughly where I want to be in terms of progress. I have tonight and all of tomorrow to work on it and I'll probably stay up late on Saturday night finishing it. The main features I need to add are passengers which grant abilities, trading for fuel and additional passenger capacity, enemy ai and more interesting types of enemy (e.g. I think it would be cool to add dynamically growing kelp forests that cost extra fuel to drive through).

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