I've made a generator for pulp sci-fi settings inspired by How to Host a Dungeon and the Dwarf Fortress world generator. You can view an animated description of the setting's evolution, pause at any time, and export a detailed description of the world as a text file. Direct Download (450 kB jar file).

To try it out, launch the program and keep hitting space to advance, or press R to enter auto-advance mode and come back later. You can move around with the arrow keys and see information about planets by putting the cursor over them. Example Output. Screenshots: 1 2 3. GitHub Page

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A quick run through the major features of my flying saucer game prototype, set to a track of the game music. In the game, you control a flying saucer. Your aim is to mind-control the majority of people on the map before the other half catch on to your existence. To help you do this, you can abduct people, disguise yourself, replace them with doppelgangers, put drugs in their food supply, unleash monsters and generally murder and deceive as needed. Just avoid those pesky journalists and government agents.

So I'm thinking about doing a public alpha of the saucer game prototype to get some more feedback. I'm currently in a bit of a bind, because frankly, it seems a much more doable idea than finishing SE:SS, so maybe I should make this first and return to SE:SS later.

If I were to do an alpha, these are the conditions that would be attached.

• The game is going to be sold for money. Money with a two-digit price. This is because I need to eat.
• I don't care if it's derivative of game X I haven't actually heard of.
• I have a thin skin. I will disregard any even vaguely impolite comments. It's that or mountains of stress for me, and no final version of the game for you. Example: if you really don't like mechanic X, don't write X is shit. Write I think X doesn't work very well yet. Because of my 8 years spent in the UK, I will get the message, and internally translate this back to X is shit.
• No, there isn't going to be any DRM. DRM is evil.

Oh, and here's a new video of it:

When I first started using Twitter, like a lot of people, I excitedly twote about every little detail of my life. Once more people I knew joined it and started following me, my tweets became less frequent. I felt that I should restrict myself to saying only interesting things. Then, people from work started following me, and I pretty much stopped tweeting altogether. I didn't know them well enough, and I felt that I could hardly tweet about, say, a Monday morning hangover where my boss could read it. I tried locking the account and dumping a bunch of followers I didn't know well enough, but my enthusiasm had gone.

In retrospect, what I really enjoyed about my early days of using Twitter was that I could construct a narrative about my life. Everyone naturally creates such a narrative, but writing it out gives you the opportunity to shape it. You can emphasise and omit, and shape your perception of your own life.

So for the next month, I want to run an experiment: I will tweet to construct a positive narrative of my life.

This is not intended as some kind of bullshit oprahesque magical thinking exercise: I do not believe that positive thoughts are magic. But I do believe that your level of happiness depends on your perceptions. There are plenty of people who are unhappy because they are relentlessly negative: Their narrative is an endless string of disappointments and aggravations picked out from their experiences, instantly forgetting all joy. I want to make myself do the opposite.

This is not about lying. If I get hit by a car, I won't tweet "Hit by a car! Best feeling ever! #spinalinjuries". I want to highlight things that I enjoy and things that make me feel good about myself:

"Having delicious coffee. Now awake!"

"Just managed to shave off 25% running time from text recognition."

"Off to the theatre tonight to see X."

It's astounding just how hard it is for me to even contemplate publicly going on about my achievements and qualities. As a shy and nerdy kid I learned to be unobtrusive to avoid bullies, and most of a decade spent in the UK, the land of understatement, hasn't exactly changed this attitude. So I feel that I have to write this preamble and frame this (probably actually quite healthy and normal) thing as a time-limited experiment. I would put a giant blinking disclaimer in front of every single tweet if I had the space.

(And no, the feed still isn't public.)

Here's a video of me getting through level 3 of Dawn: 8 minutes of being chased by a vampire - it is possible!

(This one is recorded against a desktop version with audio I'm working on. I quite like the breathing effects, but dislike what I have for the other sound so far, which is why I went for the minimalist approach here.)

The finished version of Dawn is now available. Compressed, it weighs in at just under 4 kB, so it's ready for submission.

A new beta version of Dawn is available. This version has some bugfixes, some more items of furniture, and somewhat easier gameplay.

We should...

No, not the Federal Republic of Germany. Nazi Germany. We already won, you say? Well, they do still seem to be occupying pockets of France.

The Geneva Conventions make a clear distinctions between combatants - people who identify themselves with some form of uniform - and non-combatants, who are not in uniform and hence not part of the fight.

So if you find yourself in a restaurant with some Nazi soldiers, all you have to do is identify yourself as part of a military force, and the war can be on. Ideally, carry a cap or helmet with you, though traditionally speaking, a brightly-coloured handkerchief tied around your shoulder together with a verbal declaration of your combatant status should do as well.

While it is a bit unclear whether you are allowed to shoot the enemy soldiers at this point, as they are likely unarmed, you are definitely allowed to take them prisoners of war. You can then keep them in a prison camp (perhaps a large pit in your back yard?) until you receive confirmation of a formal surrender from a high Nazi official: say Hitler, or maybe Goebbels or Goering. Until the time where you have Hitler on your phone surrendering, you may keep them in that pit.

I envision a glorious if rather lengthy war.

The beta version of Dawn is now available to try out at this finely-crafted link.

If you have any feedback/suggestions, please email me.

This version features a much bigger house. Since a bigger house translates into more data used, I ended up removing the crucifix. It didn't work very well, and I needed the space to have some randomisation of where in the house you starts. (Otherwise, as Dave rightly pointed out, you quickly develop a particular pattern of movements that lets you win, which is boring. The game also has levels now, doubling the time you need to stay alive with each level, and decreasing your chances of finding things.

According to my compression chain, I have either 54 or 4 bytes spare at this point, depending on whether using JoGa breaks the code or not. I can't tell because you need special weird sauce to actually host hyper-compressed java applets. If I figure out the sauce, and it turns out I have 54 left, I might add a bed as an item of furniture.

As always, you can see the code for it on Github.

Your possessive, manipulative, jealous boyfriend has snapped and is coming after you. Unfortunately, he's a vampire.

You must survive until dawn.

I've finished with the alpha version of Dawn, which weighs in at 4025 bytes after a lot of compression. You'll have to wait a little bit for the playable version, because the controls are currently kind of awkward, and because I want to re-do the map to be more interesting.