Five Tabletop Games for Creating Stuff

We already know that Procedural Content Generation (PCG) is a masterful tool for building games. But can PGC become a game by itself? This seems a silly question at first. After all, what is the purpose of generating something if we do not use it afterward?

However, if you think that a bit more, you know that there is something else. If you are interested in PCG, you know that most enjoyment comes from the creation itself.

Therefore, the question is easy: of course, that PCG can be a game! And to prove that, I am going to show you five of the most beautiful examples of that I played in recent years.

And so you want to choose a Fantasy Console

Making a game on a Fantasy Console is one of the best activity for any game development enthusiast. This small, curated, nostalgic “emulators” for consoles that never existed can bring you back to a simpler time when hardware was less capable and developer needed to make every bit of memory and every pixel count.

There is always a reason to play with a Fantasy Console. If you are an experienced developer, Fantasy Consoles represents a good challenge. If you are a new developer, Fantasy Consoles allows you to focus on the game and on the basics of game development without being side-tracked by all the bells and whistles of modern game engines.

So, how can we chose the right one?

How to document a Kotlin/Spring application with Springdoc and OpenAI

Here we go again with a new article derived from my work notes. As you already know, I am rewriting a backend application in Kotlin and — in the process — I am improving all the horrors of legacy code I can find. In this article, we will look at one critical aspect of software development (especially for REST applications): the documentation.

The Great Convergence of AAA Games

Let’s be honest: nowadays, almost every AAA game looks the same. They are all action games with RGP elements and a crafting system and some kind of open world. It is almost like playing the same game over and over again. The latest God of War (2018) is a good example of this year-long trend in the gaming industry that I called The Convergence. Let’s talk a bit about this.

How to convert a Java/Spring project to Kotlin

In the last week I converted a medium-sized legacy Java/Spring codebase to Kotlin. In this article I’ll discuss the pro and the challenges I faced during this transition.

My First Deno Experiment

This is another not-requested opinion on Deno! But what can I do? When I read “node replacement,” “TypeScript,” and “Rust,” I lose any inhibition. Therefore, I ported to Deno an old npm package and wrote a brief report on my experience. What I liked? What I disliked? Will Deno be succesful in the overcrowded world of programming platforms? These are my answers.

Overwhelmed by your workflow? Reset it.

Productivity and organization workflows can quickly become addictive. If you like apps and all that comes with them, your workflows can snowball out of control. I run into this problem every couple of years, and until I become aware of that, I feel very frustrated. I feel like I am moving around a lot of stuff and spending many hours of my awake time producing nothing more than heat and entropy. Luckily the solution is easy: do a total reset.

Swift announces official Windows support — maybe too late

Swift is a pretty language that hits a sweet, sweet spot: it is a compiled language built around LLV, it is modern, it took advantage of decades of programming language design efforts, and it is esthetically pleasing. It is the kind of language that could have taken a lot of market shares. Unfortunately, official Windows support will come only with version 5.3. It may be already too late to wash away the “iOS Language” stigma.

How to Export your Kindle Highlights

This is a quick article to share a very surprising and beautiful thing I discovered today: it is possible to request a PDF with all your Kindle’s highlights directly from the Kindle interface. How it is possible nobody told me this before!!??

Overview of Three Techniques for Procedural Storytelling

Inspired by a recent paper I read this week, I decided to explain the three major “classic solutions” to the generative storytelling problem: Simulation, Planning, and Context-Free Grammars. Let’s what they are and what to choose.