Last month, slowing down with socials and news became mandatory. I “won” Camp NaNoWriMo and but I still have the last third of the story to write. Heatwaves are everywhere.

To hot to think and words order fine screen in! Let’s just look at this month update before I catch fire!

Yesterday I was reflecting about an interesting fact: in the list of “my favorite games of all times,” the top 10 is packed with games that share all a common element. The games are: Dark Souls Dark Souls II Well… every game of the soulborne genre. Hollow Knight The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild And more. Can you guess what they all have in common? Sure, they all have a decadent setting (the world is falling or is recovering after a cataclysm), but there is a way more common design element: narration through discovery.

This update will be quite straightforward: July will be the month of digital retreat. Summer is not for staying still. Summer is for side projects; summer is for recharging; summer is for everything but the mindless routines of the other seasons.

Seven years and eight months have passed since the release of the first really popular commercial virtual assistant (VA). Yet, seven years later, virtual assistants can do only marginally better.

Sure, they understand better, they speak better, they have learned some new trick; but in the end, they are still a funny but useless experience. After the first fun moments of experimentation when you start talking to them – that is, where you keep asking them silly jokes or dumb questions – they quickly came back to be pretty dumb object. I am pretty sure that the vast majority of user use a VA just for timers, weather and – occasionally – asking for the event on our calendar.

Every now and then, we see some headline about Turing Completeness of something. For example, Minecraft or Dwarf Fortress, or even Minesweeper are famous examples of accidentally Turing complete systems.

If you know what a Turing machine is (and you should) you will have an intuitive idea of the claim: you know that X can compute any computable function. Sure; but if you stop thinking about that for a bit, it is not so intuitive how we can prove that. If we think long enough, we can start understanding how X can simulate a Turing machine, but how can we be sure that we can encode a Universal Turing Machine and what is the program of a UTM and how we can prove that it is, in fact, universal?

May is over. Here in Italy, it rained every day. Everybody is still waiting for spring, and I am still waiting for… something. Now that summer is at the door, it is time for thinking about summer projects.

Kotlin is a really sweet language. It is the perfect thing in between a “super-powerful and but difficult language” like Rust or Modern C++, and a “super-easy but that seems to be designed in the 80s” like Go. With the upcoming release on Kotlin Native, then, you can even ditch the JVM!

However, while IntelliJ is a great IDE, often I do not like to rely on big IDEs — especially when VSCode works perfectly well for 90% of my use cases. Therefore, it is time to see if and how I can use Kotlin in VS Code (and see what is missing).

A Ranking Systems is a core element of every competitive game. Every game in which a player plays against another player need to have some way to rank them and compare the relative skill of each other. It happens for video games, but also sport (e.g., the FIFA ranking for football) or other games (e.g., FIDE Chess Ranking). Comparing stuff is in the human nature.

April has been strange. It has been a month of festivities, rain, and food: a lot of it. But it has also been a month that felt very fast and yet swamped. I did a lot in April, and however it felt so dumb.

I am re-reading Harry Potter for the n-th time. Even it Rowling if trying hard to make me hate it, Harry Potter heptology still have a special place in my hearth. However, there is something I have always hated: Quidditch. It never made sense to me and I always found reading the Quidditch parts very boring. It looks like a game invented by someone who does not know a lot about sports and games.

Reading those parts for the n-th times made me realize that Quidditch may be a good way to showcase common rookie mistakes done by people approaching game-design for the first time (and it also provide meaning for my struggle). So, that’s what we will do today!