December Adventure 2025

The following in my journal for the December Adventure. The most recent post will always be a the top. You can jump to the start here.

December 1st (Day 1)

You are at the latest entry.

(Day 1) Day Dreaming

I've been apart of a langdev project for the past year now called Nova. I've mostly been exploring different textual representation. My latested daydream for a syntax. May not implement this in december as I've already got Wul.

note: search for the number 7 in the stack labelled "pile"
find 7. pile: 1 3 8 4 2 7 9 0.

[ find $x. pile: $x? position: $n ] {
    results: $x at $n
    fix pile.
}

[ find $x. pile: $y. position: $n ] {
    position << ($n + 1). find $x.
    pile explored: $y
}

[ find $x. position: $n ] {
    results: $x not found in pile.
    fix pile.
}

[ find $x? ] {
    position: 0
}

[ fix pile? pile expored: $x ] {
    pile: $x
}

(Day 1) Drawing

Happened to be out and about on Black Friday, there was a (terrible) discount on some (cheap) 12 pack canvas. Figured they could be fun with my crayons. And they were! Streched canvas was kinda the wrong choice here.

Buildings run at odd angles in ways that don't make physical sense. Green buildings run down to the right, behind them purple buildings run down to the left. The sun shines above as if you are looking towards its warmth on a chilly day. — A city on a sunny day.

Wax pastel on canvas.

(raw)

(Day 1) Random Stuff

Ending the day setting up some repos for a LOVE project. Shooting the shit with June and Yumaikas about Nova. Dreaming up some fun ideas.

_{(back to latest day)}

November 30th (Day 0)

I have a weird habit of making drawing tools.

A pair of ands trot across the screen while a pair of feral ands rest on the ground. The background repeats the word 'and'. The word ''and'' scrolls across the background repeatedly. Text in black boxes reads ''two-layer is a graphic-textual art tool. It's rather bare bones. Made out of spite and dissatification for Krita's text abilities. Really, all tools text abilities. I wanted something text box focused for quickly scrawling images and text in aggressive ways. — A drawing program made with LOVE design around floating text boxes and a canvas with two layers.

I've probably made a dozen of these things if not more. It's often the first thing I think to do. Lately, I've been feeling unsatified with the process of making interactive art.

A screenshot of a tool with multiple images (support for 64 images). Tools are listed down the left side using abstract shapes. The right has the various colors you can choose from. Each color has a switch next to it that controls the state that scene changes the color into. The bottom two rows of the image selector is used to control where colors take you when clicked. Text on the image reads ''a point and click tool'' — An interactive art tool built in LOVE designed around flick-like point and click games.

A lot of tools make the Art secondary. Many developers shy away at the vary thought of building even the most rudimentary drawing tool. Most interactive art tools are limited to tile-based games.

A drawing of and pressing its hooved paw against the screen. Text below and says ''Yet another program for editing text and images. This one actually has a whole text editor.'' Part of the text is selected and highlighted in black-on-white text. — A proof of concept drawing tool with a text area below the drawing area.

I've never felt satified with this tile-oriented design. The projects that had inspired my jounery into making games were Flash projects, weird hodgepodge projects like Peen Peen, concepts like SOUP-likes, and projects like 50 SHORT GAMES.

Isn't weird how no visual noval engine lets you pause a scene and start drawing stuff? If you know one, please hit me up.

Projects like Paradise and kooltool have always facinated me as means of crafting interactive art. There is no seperation between the art, the application development, and world. Projects like Decker get close, but ultimately push you into "building software".

two screenshot of decker. One shows a drawing with a cat (kinda) and a button that says 'hello world'. The second one shows the script editor with x-ray enable. The editor however only shows the button labelled with its name. — An example of one issue with Decker. When the script editor is pulled up, Decker will obscure the current card. X-ray mode can be used to see what's underneath, however, it only shows widgets. Additionally, every widget will be stripped of its appearance. Decker also has a "prototype editor" (prefabs in Unity lingo and Scenes in Godot lingo). However, this just compounds the problem. Prototpes are edited in a backrooms enviroment further removed from the main card.

Building interactive art and games has been rough this year. A bulk of my work is sexual. Pornographic is you will. And, the space has been devistated. Again. And, again. And again, for years.

With a full time job, I have little extrinsic motivations to actually deal with software, it's "engineering principles", and "programming language theory". None of it has made making art easier. And, I don't think any of it will.

This December, I want to mess about with making interactive art tools using LOVE. I'm not building tools for software, I think there is enough of that. Especially if that software is a database interface.

_{(back to latest day)}