Undergrove is a modern board game by Elizabeth Hargrave and Mark Wootton. Elizabeth Hargrave also designed Wingspan, a wildly popular game, so I had high expectations for Undergrove. After a single play with everyone at the table playing it for the first time, I saw that it has…
Continue readingAfter playing the board game Arcs recently, I realized that no matter how well a game’s theme is developed, that theme can be weakened if the action selection mechanism feels unthematic. In board games, “action selection” refers to the process of choosing what to do on a turn….
Continue readingAt work starting about 12 years ago, I was tasked with porting an old Android app to Windows phone. Then I ported that to Windows a year or two later. Many years after that, and after making many changes to those apps, I wrote an iOS app from…
Continue readingMuch of this post is written and/or edited by ChatGPT 4 based on my prompts. Abstract This paper presents a novel approach to simulating complex mechanical systems by representing mechanisms as collections of individual components that interact to form functional units. A key focus of the method is…
Continue readingThe editor has a lot of missing features, but a lot of it works. You can create mechanisms, save them, and load them later. There is no simulation and no undo feature. Feel free to try it, and let me know how it works for you. I would…
Continue readingI’m working on the Linkage app for Mac, and I’m a little annoyed at the online comments about installers in general and Windows in particular. I appreciate many of the shortcomings of the Windows MSI files and how a simple drag-drop action to install an app is simple….
Continue readingI’m always trying to write software that is as elegant and readable as possible. This often means identifying areas of confusion in the code and improving it. This also often means picking between styles or ideas that are all equally crappy. Today’s dilemma concerns snap lines. Snap lines…
Continue readingI liked Cobra Kai in the first few seasons when Johnny Lawrence had a lot of personal growth. His story and his character development were very interesting, especially considering that Daniel LaRusso was the bad guy in Johnny’s story. These days, I’m just disappointed with how Daniel LaRusso…
Continue readingI was playing Evacuation a few days ago with three other people. One of those people had played the game with me one-on-one about six months ago. I skimmed the rule book and tried to explain just enough so we could start taking turns. I did that because…
Continue readingOccasionally, I see a video recommendation or stumble on a blog post about inheritance in programming. For those who don’t know, object-oriented programming languages usually allow an object to be defined as a “child” of another object. For example, you could define a “vehicle” object and then create…
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