xikka - blog

Steepleclimb Concluded

Sunday, 13th November 2022 ◆ Celebrity's brief beginning (4) ◆ Comments (3)

Yesterday, we concluded our three-set Cloudpierce block by drafting and playing Steepleclimb . We introduced the set in a spoiler post earlier this month.

Busting open packs

Everyone showed up with their cards printed and trimmed, meaning we had a brief period where we had to sleeve the cards, but otherwise we got started very quickly. We prepared packs each with 1 rare, 3 uncommons, 10 commons, and one non-basic land, and put them into ziplock bags.

Painter/Decorator

Wednesday, 9th November 2022 ◆ Suffering plus time makes art (5)

Puzzlescript is a simple-yet-powerful game engine for tile-based puzzle games. I've played some really cool games made in Puzzlescript (you can see an absolute wealth of creativity in the gallery), and I've been intrigued by it, but I've never actually tried making a game with it.

Steepleclimb Spoilers

Tuesday, 1st November 2022 ◆ The French to pursue expensive tourelle (7)

After Cloudpierce (from 2018) and Towers Besieged (from 2019), our collaborative fan Magic: the Gathering block is due to conclude later this year with Steepleclimb .

Kingsville Returns

Monday, 24th October 2022 ◆ To describe Łapy's swings (10)

Kangaroo's predecessor was called Playground, and was a PHP-backed engine for playing turn-based games. The site offered two boardgames of my own devising: The Happiest Town and Kingsville. I found the old code for Playground, and decided to try reimplementing the latter in Kangaroo. I ended up blinding copying and translating swathes of PHP code into Java, and bizarrely, it was relatively quick and painless!

Octris

Sunday, 23rd October 2022 ◆ Number is consumed, we hear (5)

The mysteriously titled WDL by Internet Janitor popped its way into my Itch notifications recently. It is a Wordle variant with three-letter words, made in Chip-8 as a submission to Octojam. The game is great, and it inspired me to make an entry myself.

Octojam is a game jam dedictated to making games in Chip-8 (in October, of course) and Internet Janitor himself is its host, as well as the creator of Octo, a sublimely accessible online IDE for Chip-8.