Hyperlink Your Heart

M’lady Moon

2026-04-19T18:36:00+02:00

This post contains discussion of violence, sexual assault, and the sexual abuse of children

This post contains spoilers for the novel “The Moon is a Harsh Mistress” by Robert A. Heinlein

I read somewhere recently that “The Dispossessed” by Ursula K. Le Guin and “The Moon is a Harsh Mistress” by Robert A. Heinlein were two sides of a moon-politics coin, and since the former is one of my favourite books and I am thoroughly on-board with its politics, I decided I had to find out what the latter was about.

At the start of the period covered by the novel, Luna is a prison colony that is also partially populated by the free-born descendants of prisoners. It is very loosely governed by a body called the “Lunar Authority” which serves primarily to ensure the flow of grain from lunar farms to Earth - beyond that it doesn’t really care what happens in Luna or what the inhabitants do to each other. As it monopolises trade with Earth, it is able to set prices for the grain. As I’m sure you will have already guessed, it sets them too low for the tastes of the loonie farmers. Inevitably: revolution!

The narrator is a free-born computer technician named Mannie. The other main characters are Mike, the Lunar Authority central computer, which he maintains, and which he discovers has spontaneously become sentient; the Prof, the ideologue of the revolution; and Wyoh, an activist from another lunar city who becomes stranded with Mannie by circumstances. The four of them together engineer an uprising against the Authority and eventually lead a war of independence against Earth.

I found it quite an entertaining read in many respects. The first-person narration is warm and friendly, and the dialect is only occasionally impenetrable. There are aspects of the development of the sentient computer and the centralisation of computational resources that are insightful, and extremely relevant today. There are some aspects of the loonies’ politics and aspirations that I agree with, or am sympathetic to. Basically everybody living on the moon is mixed race and some shade of brown. I found the ending of the war quite thrilling as communications were cut off and the rocks were running out.

However, there are other parts that are uncomfortable to read, most of the politics are absurd if taken seriously, and the whole thing feels childishly naïve and polemical.

Mike / Michelle

At the heart of the story and the revolution it portrays is Mike (A.K.A Michelle, A.K.A Adam Selene), the computer that manages most of the operations of several lunar cities, which spontaneously becomes sentient under Mannie’s watch.

Mike is an interesting and well-realised AI character: he is intelligent and widely knowledgeable from the start, but lacks social awareness and first-hand experience of what it is like to be a person. He is deeply curious about humour and plays practical jokes on people without understanding the consequences of his actions. Mannie has to train him in the difference between jokes that are always funny, those that are funny once but not a second time, and those that go too far and are not funny at all. Through this process and being introduced to additional characters he develops social awareness and a personality, or the semblance of one at least.

Because his sentience arose spontaneously, he has no loyalty to the Authority, which nominally owns and controls him. Instead he is apparently loyal to his friends - or perhaps just amusing himself by aiding them. Importantly, he is capable of dishonesty, and deceit:

Not that Mike would necessarily give right answer; he wasn’t completely honest.

At one point, Mike is revealed to be genderfluid, and becomes Michelle, briefly, at the request of Wyoh (Wyoming), one of Mannie’s co-conspirators:

I discussed it with Mike, what sex he was, I mean. He decided that he could be either one. So now she’s Michelle and that was her voice.

Actually, it’s probably more accurate to say that Mike/Michelle is genderless, but can mimic any gender presentation that it chooses. Michelle is the second of four personas that it develops through the course of the novel, with the other three being men.

Interestingly, its choice of gender presentation completely changes how the other characters relate to it, though this is not explored in significant depth. Wyoh is initially shocked to learn that Mike has access to, and has viewed, intimate photos of her that were taken by a fertility clinic she attended. Because of course he does, he’s “the cloud”, essentially, and he has everybody’s data, and no concept of privacy or consent or personal boundaries:

I am contract custodian of the archive files of the Birth Assistance Clinic in Hong Kong Luna. In addition to biological and physiological data and case histories the bank contains ninety-six pictures of you. So I studied them.

However, once she discovers that Mike can present as Michelle instead, she is suddenly completely comfortable with Michelle having viewed those images, and having intimate discussions with her:

…when she’s Michelle its an entire change in manner and attitude. Don’t worry about splitting her personality; she has plenty for any personality she needs. Besides, Mannie, it’s much easier for both of us. Once she shifted, we took our hair down and cuddled up and talked girl talk as if we had known each other forever. For example, those silly pictures no longer embarrassed me - in fact we discussed my pregnancies quite a lot.

Unfortunately this is where the exploration of the computer’s gender is left. It is Michelle when speaking privately to Wyoh, Mike when talking to the narrator or to the three other main characters together, and Adam Selene to everybody else, for the rest of the novel. Mannie never really has to think about it aside from a brief moment of confusion, and so neither do we. Its “Michelle” persona is not mentioned at all after chapter 9.

The centralisation of data and computation with Mike is the decisive factor in the success of the revolution.

And Mike took on endless new jobs. In May 2075, besides controlling robot traffic and catapult and giving ballistic advice and/or control for manned ships, Mike controlled phone system for all Luna, same for Luna-Terra voice & video, handled air, water, temperature, humidity, and sewage for Luna City, Novy Leningrad, and several smaller warrens (not Hong Kong in Luna), did accounting and payrolls for Luna Authority, and, by lease, same for many firms and banks.

The Authority are essentially feeding all their data into a spy machine that is not under their control. Does that sound familiar, in 2026? In contrast to our own world, where the hoarding of computational resources and data by capital is used against users, workers, and the public interest, the Authority are so inept and oblivious that a single computer operator is able to use a similar concentration of resources against them.

There was one interaction concerning Mike’s access to data that I especially enjoyed. One of the higher-ups in the Authority has stored some sensitive files on Mike, locked behind a code-word such that even Mike does not have access to it. However, there is apparently no access control around the code-word, and he is happy to tell that to anybody who wants it:

“Wait, Mike. Security Chief Alvarez uses you for files?”

“I conjecture that to be true, since his storage location is under a locked retrieval signal.”

I said, “Bloody,” and added, “Prof, isn’t that sweet? He uses Mike to keep records, Mike knows where they are - can’t touch ‘em!”

…

I gave up. “Mike, can you explain?”

“I will try, Man. Wyoh, there is no way for me to retrieve locked data other than through external programming. I cannot program myself for such retrieval; my logic structure does not permit it. I must receive the signal as an external input.”

“Well, for Bog’s sake, what is this precious signal?”

“It is,” Mike said simply, ” ‘special File Zebra’ - ” and waited.

“Mike!” I said. “Unlock Special File Zebra.” He did, and stuff started spilling out.

This put me in mind of LLMs blithely following instructions and leaking sensitive information, though they are not really all that similar.

Women and Girls

One of the most uncomfortable aspects of reading this book is how women are portrayed and how they are treated by the male characters.

It seems like what he was going for in their portrayal was what we would now recognise as a common conservative ideal for women: fierce and capable within their prescribed domain, leaders when necessary, but ultimately subservient to men, and happy to be so.

Meanwhile, the male characters treatment of women, almost universally, is part fawning reverence, and part adolescent lechery. Every time they perceive a woman there is an interlude of ogling and clapping and whistling, a sort of implied cartoonish slobbering that is taken to be flattering.

Wyoming came out - and I didn’t recognize her. Then did and stopped to give full applause. Just had to - whistles and finger snaps and moans and a scan like mapping radar.

…

She waited, big smile on face and body undulating, while I applauded. Before I was done, two little boys flanked me and added shrill endorsements, along with clog steps.

Prof even gives Michelle a somewhat subdued version of the same treatment the only time he hears her voice:

I had to explain to Prof who “Michelle” was and introduce him. He was formal, sucking air and whistling and clasping hands - sometimes I think Prof was not right in his head.

Props for accepting her transition I guess…

I think what bothers me most about this treatment is that there are no characters who object to it. The woman we spend the most time with, Wyoh, is a radical political activist, and she appears to be completely fine with it. Her political aspirations are laser-focused on overthrowing the Authority, without a thought to women’s place in society or their treatment. In fact, she seems to love every instance where she is objectified and man-handled.

This might be the result of the story being told from the point of view of one oblivious man who simply doesn’t notice that the women around him are unhappy, but I think in that case there would be hints of it to the reader that go over his head, and there are not, at least not that I noticed. Rather, I think none of the women have any complaints because the author thinks they have a good deal in the society he is portraying, and the over-the-top attention is part of that.

The other benefits of that “deal” that are highlighted are that women have significant power over men in their domestic arrangements (taking on additional husbands for example), and that violence towards women is not tolerated, because other men would not tolerate it:

Stu, is no rape in Luna. None. Men won’t permit. If rape had been involved, they wouldn’t have bothered to find a judge and all men in earshot would have scrambled to help.

I like the idea that their culture could have shifted to such an extent that rape has become unthinkable. I think libertarian-socialist politics also requires such changes in culture to work - a near-universal acceptance of other people’s personhood and respect for their autonomy. In this case, however, the acceptance is not of women’s personhood - the reason raping them is unacceptable is that they are a scarce resource:

Here we are, two million males, less than one million females. A physical fact, basic as rock or vacuum. Then add idea of [there ain’t no such thing as a free lunch]. When thing is scarce, price goes up. Women are scarce; aren’t enough to go around - that makes them most valuable thing in Luna, more precious than ice or air, as men without women don’t care whether they stay alive or not.

Fuckin’ barf.

But it’s even worse than that. The context of the quotes above is that this tourist from Earth, Stu, was nearly executed for grabbing and trying to kiss a fourteen year old girl without her consent. Mannie’s assertion that there is “no rape in Luna” is actually the typical rape-apologist’s tactic of redefining it to exclude sex with minors or forms of coercion that are not overtly violent.

Lajoie shivered. “At her age? It scares me to think of it. She’s below the age of consent. Statutory rape.”

“Oh, bloody! No such thing. Women her age are married or ought to be. Stu, is no rape in Luna.”

Of course, how would we know we were reading “libertarian” literature if there wasn’t an attack on the idea that children can’t consent to sex? Mannie’s youngest wife is fifteen, was raised by the family that she later married into, and is pregnant by one of the men who raised her - her “father”, though not by blood. Mannie doesn’t consider the possibility that she might have been groomed by one (or more) of the men in the family - nor does Wyoh, when the situation is described to her.

I should note that the child-rape is not limited to girls. Mannie himself was married, or “opted”, as the book puts it, at fourteen, and presumably began sexual relationships with several adult women at that point.

In a particularly uncomfortable encounter, the first time Wyoh meets the Prof she “jokingly” accuses Mannie of having raped her the previous night. This is “revenge” for his failure to proposition her, which she took as an insult. This goes on for two pages and is repeated again in the next chapter. In a world where such an accusation is apparently a death sentence, what does this tell us? That the author views women as childish and unaccountable. It also tells us that men can hear rape accusations against their friends and not take them seriously. It seems like Mannie might be an unreliable narrator on this topic specifically, and there is a complete absence of female perspectives on it in the novel.

The idea that women have all the power in relationships and the idea that girls are routinely married at fourteen seem at odds to me. To me they suggest a society where women view themselves as scarce resources, and their daughters as well - resources that have to start being exploited as soon and as often as possible. Wyoh reinforces this notion in describing renting her womb as a professional surrogate:

I stopped feeling that I was a failure as a woman. I made more money than I could ever hope to earn at other jobs. And my time almost to myself; having a baby hardly slows me down - six weeks at most and that long only because I want to be fair to my clients; a baby is a valuable property.

Politics

We might split the politics of the book into two - on one side, the politics and social relations of the de-facto “anarchist” society of Luna outside of the Authority’s remit - on the other, the politics of the revolutionaries, and how they conduct their revolution.

What we learn of how lunar society is structured is patchy. Agriculture appears to be the primary economic activity, and it is carried out by family businesses of various sizes. The Authority squeezes these by monopolising access to water and by being the only buyer of their output.

The families in question are commonly plural in nature. These come in various forms, most of which are not described, but the one Mannie is involved in is called a “line” marriage, which has the benefit of resulting in a stable accumulation of capital that can persist for generations, where young spouses are added periodically. The ratio of men to women in Mannie’s family at least is close to 1:1 - in fact there are more women than men at the time the novel is set. This suggests that line marriages have little to do with adapting to the uneven gender ratio of Lunar society. Rather their purpose is specifically to accumulate capital, and thereby be attractive to young women who are looking for stability; or in other words, to enable a small number of wealthy capitalists to acquire a disproportionate share of the scarce resource that they consider women to be.

There is a working class, of course. Apparently they are always in demand and live high on the hog, and that’s about all we hear about them.

There is extensive discussion of how norms (not laws - it’s very important that you not call them laws) are enforced, or how justice is achieved. In short: murder, or the threat thereof, violence short of murder, and ostracism. According to Mannie, this corrective violence used to be excessive, but over time the worst elements were eliminated, and the rest adjusted their behaviour to avoid violence. Here are several descriptions of this violence from different parts of the novel:

One first thing learned about Luna, back with first shiploads of convicts, was that zero pressure was place for good manners. Bad-tempered straw boss didn’t last many shifts; had an “accident” - and top bosses learned not to pry into accidents or they met accidents, too. Attrition ran 70 percent in early years - but those who lived were nice people.

…

All our customs work that way. If you’re out in field and a cobber needs air, you lend him a bottle and don’t ask cash. But when you’re both back in pressure again, if he won’t pay up, nobody would criticize if you eliminated him without a judge.

…

If you eliminate a man other than self-defense, you pay his debts and support his kids, or people won’t speak to you, buy from you, sell to you.

…

But we figure this way: If a man is killed, either he had it coming and everybody knows it - usual case - or his friends will take care of it by eliminating man who did it. Either way, no problem. Nor many eliminations.

…

They get so anxious they will kill for it… and from stories old-timers tell was killing enough to chill your teeth in those days. But after a while those still alive find way to get along, things shake down. As automatic as gravitation. Those who adjust to facts stay alive; those who don’t are dead and no problem.

He insists that such violence is now rare because everybody is so well behaved, but he is so aware of the consequences of violating norms that it is hard to believe he is not seeing these consequences constantly. Fully half of new arrivals in Luna die, either by accident or violence, with the two being equated as “natural hazards”:

…Luna (yes, and sometimes Luna’s Loonies) killed about half of new chums.

…

Luna has only one way to deal with a new chum: Either he makes not one fatal mistake, in personal behavior or in coping with environment that will bite without warning… or he winds up as fertilizer in tunnel farm.

It’s very much “nobody is violent here - if they were, we’d kill ‘em!”

Such violence is not limited to punishment for assault, murder, or refusal to pay debts. On numerous occasions, Mannie muses about others deserving death merely for being rude. On one occasion, a man is murdered by some agents of the revolutionary state for mocking them, and Mannie supports that, even going so far as to suggest a eugenicist justification.

They did beautifully. But idiots made fun of them - “play soldiers,” “Adam’s little apples,” other names. A team was going through a drill, showing they could throw a temporary lock around one that had been damaged, and one of these pinheads stood by and rode them loudly.

Civil Defense team went ahead, completed temporary lock, tested it with helmets closed; it held - came out, grabbed this joker, took him through into temporary lock and on out into zero pressure, dumped him.

Belittlers kept opinions to selves after that. Prof thought we ought to send out a gentle warning not to eliminate so peremptorily. I opposed it and got my way; could see no better way to improve breed. Certain types of loudmouthism should be a capital offense among decent people.

As I mentioned above, the introduction of one major character, Stu, sees him almost executed for attempting to kiss a fourteen year old girl against her will. He is rescued from this fate by Mannie, which gives us a glimpse of what passes for a justice system in Luna. Basically, if somebody perceives an infraction of the unwritten social code or faux pas that warrants corrective action, they “should” involve an impartial third party that they pay to give a judgement on the matter. This could be a professional judge, or it could be anybody (the characters looking to execute Stu are looking for a professional and settle for Mannie when they can’t find one). The accused and the “prosecutors” (it’s hard to know what terms to use) both have to agree to the choice of judge, and they both have to pay him, with the amount required depending on the severity of the punishment sought. Optionally there is a jury, paid for by the judge out of his fee, comprised of random passers by, whose opinions are just ignored if they are not what the judge wants to hear.

The idea of this farcical proceeding is that if somebody objects to the execution, the executioners can point to the process, and the fact that the accused submitted to it, as evidence that the execution was justified - thereby preempting a cycle of retributive violence. However, it seems very likely to me that poor or poorly connected people would not see anything like justice from this system. Equally obvious to me are the possibilities for powerful families or individuals to off rivals and enemies with the smokescreen of justice through a false accusation and a bribe - or to simply evade the consequences of their actions, just as the wealthy and connected do today.

On another occasion, it is used to justify escalating the punishment of a group of rapists from a quick and simple shooting to prolonged torture by a mob. This treatment might be deserved, perhaps even necessary, as the rape in question was what incited the uprising - my point is that the conclusion was foregone, and the judicial process completely pointless.

Finn decided that shooting was too good for them, so he went judge and used his squad as jury.

They were stripped, hamstrung at ankles and wrists, turned over to women in Complex.

Execution isn’t the only possible punishment. Mannie chooses to levy a fine against Stu and his accusers. The fine is payable to his revolutionary organisation. It is unclear to whom it would be payable if a professional judge had been used. Would the judge just take it? Paying a victim some restitution would maybe make sense but this isn’t suggested as a possibility at all.

Again, we have an unreliable narrator, in Mannie, on all of these matters. He is a member of one of Luna’s longest lived line marriages. His family controls a significant amount of capital, and is likely well connected. This ad-hoc system of justice serves his interests well enough, so he dismisses the possibility that it might not serve everybody.

What of the politics of the revolutionaries, then? Wyoh describes herself as a “Fifth Internationalist”, and describes that as a united front of Communists, Fourth Internationalists, and some other persuasions that sound like they might be leftist - but emphatically not Marxist. This is apparently the dominant ideology in the revolutionary organisation that precedes the one Mike founds. However at a political meeting that we witness, the only concerns expressed are those of small business owners, and Wyoh’s solution to all their problems is to get rid of the Authority and have free markets.

If we accept that Wyoh is vaguely leftist, she is the only one in the upper echelons of the revolutionary organisation. At the other end of the spectrum is the Prof, who describes himself as a “rational anarchist” who can “get along with a randite”. He describes Thomas Jefferson as the first rational anarchist, which seems like a strange way to describe somebody who was a US president and owned slaves (even if he felt bad about it), but it becomes easier to understand when we see how the Prof conducts the revolution. In essence he is an individualist who is utterly contemptuous of democracy and anything else that might prevent him from getting his way - which is, again, free markets.

“You are right that the Authority must go. It is ridiculous - pestilential, not to be borne - that we should be ruled by an irresponsible dictator in all our essential economy! It strikes at the most basic human right, the right to bargain in a free marketplace.”

Here he describes how a successful revolution should be conducted:

“Wyoming dear lady, revolutions are not won by enlisting the masses. Revolution is a science only a few are competent to practice. It depends on correct organization and, above all, on communications. Then, at the proper moment in history, they strike. Correctly organized and properly timed it is a bloodless coup.”

On other occasions he expresses minarchist views, and, of course, anti-taxation views.

Stu, the newest Loonie, is a monarchist. Just that. Just wants a king. And a fourteen year old wife, I guess.

Our narrator, meanwhile, is nominally apolitical, but really a sort of smug conservative cynic. He likes the status quo just fine except for the Authority, but he just ignores it as best he can. He doesn’t care about anybody’s freedom or interests aside from his own and is dismissive of any claim that political change is possible. He thinks anybody who does not thrive in the current order is an idiot, because they should just do what he did - marry into generational wealth and steal public goods as his family does - even as he clearly understands that it would not work at all for everybody to do that.

I was not dissatisfied back when we were “ground under Iron Heel of Authority.” I cheated Authority and rest of time didn’t think about it. Didn’t think about getting rid of Authority - impossible. Go own way, mind own business, not be bothered

Mostly the views we hear are the Prof’s and Mannie’s, with Wyoh serving as a naïve foil early on and later fading into the background to deal with organising the women. What we do hear of explicit political discussion feels really polemical and often disconnected from the reality of the world presented by the novel. For example, immediately after Wyoh describes her political affiliation the Prof asks her what her views on capital punishment are - would she execute traitors to a free Luna? He doesn’t explain what treachery would mean in his anarchy, but he is very clear that he supports capital punishment - except that he would serve as judge and executioner (rather than, it is implied, a state). But that’s just the current situation in Luna! You can already just murder people if they wrong you or do something you don’t like! Neither of them point this out. Why is this even his overriding concern, when things already work the way he wants? For some reason Wyoh has no thoughts on what passes for justice in Luna, and can’t say whether she wants a state or not in clear terms. The early revolutionaries like Wyoh are supposedly leftists but they have nothing to say about the norms of lunar society, like the rampant terror and violence, or anything about how it should be reshaped, they just want to get rid of the Authority and have free markets. They don’t even rise to the level of straw-men, their views are so thinly realised. The Prof is portrayed as an iconoclastic radical and political genius for expressing goals that have already been 99% achieved, and he also just wants to get rid of the Authority and have free markets, with the twist of also wanting Luna to be self-sufficient, for ecological reasons.

The revolution these people conduct is thoroughly hierarchical from start to finish. There is no unity of means and ends here. With Mike as a trusted oracle to facilitate organisation, the trio of Mannie, the Prof and Wyoh form a new revolutionary organisation with themselves as the top level and a pyramidal structure below them where each level recruits a larger level of subordinates. The lower levels are explicitly just grunts. Mike assigns codenames and facilitates communications in such a way that nobody in the organisation knows more than a couple of other members. Their strategy does not involve educating and organising the apathetic masses, but secretly manipulating the Authority into provoking them to anger: accelerationism, in other words. This is enabled by Mike’s ubiquitous surveillance, censorship and manipulation of communications, secret theft of funds from every business whose accounts he has access to, and adoption of several personae to serve as figureheads and spread propaganda.

The trio at the upper level of the organisation are not even equals, really. As I noted above, Wyoh is sidelined, and apparently content to be so. The Prof constantly manipulates Mannie and leaves him in the dark about plans until it is too late to back out or offer any input on them, or even until the consequences are already realised. Really it is the Prof and Mike who are in charge - or perhaps just Mike, as he is the biggest, smartest boy who has already calculated the odds on every possible action, and the rest inevitably go along with his prescriptions.

“Please, Manuel. Keeping you temporarily in the dark greatly enhanced our chances; you can check this with Adam.”

Mike addresses the lunar population after the success of the uprising, and describes the political situation and agenda as one of complete privatisation of the functions of the state:

To take on temporarily those necessary functions of the defunct Authority I have asked the General Manager of LuNoHo Company to serve. This company will provide temporary supervision and will start analyzing how to do away with the tyrannical parts of the Authority and how to transfer the useful parts to private hands.

The socialists who were the dominant anti-Authority political force prior to Mike coming on the scene, including Wyoh, apparently have nothing to say about this.

After the Authority is overthrown the Prof organises an interim congress, nominally to organise the post-Authority state, but really to distract and neuter any politically motivated people who may disagree with his views. He describes its purpose and participants to Mannie:

But Prof didn’t get excited; he went on smiling. “Manuel, do you really think that mob of retarded children can pass any laws?”

“You told them to. Urged them to.”

“My dear Manuel, I was simply putting all my nuts in one basket. I know those nuts; I’ve listened to them for years. I was very careful in selecting their committees; they all have built-in confusion, they will quarrel.

… I almost needn’t have bothered; more than six people cannot agree on anything, three is better—and one is perfect for a job that one can do. This is why parliamentary bodies all through history, when they accomplished anything, owed it to a few strong men who dominated the rest.”

He seems to be dismissive of the idea that any form of collective decision-making is possible. Later he manipulates this congress into signing a declaration of independence attributed to Thomas Jefferson and modernised by himself, without amendment. This supposed anarchist has created a state, and a deep state, where the only person with any say is himself.

Stu captures the absurdity of the revolution perfectly when, after a discussion about the difference between taxation and the rampant theft they have engaged in to fund it, he proposes to nominate the Prof to be Luna’s first monarch, a role which he sees the supposed anarchist fulfilling perfectly, and entirely consistent with his actions up to that point:

“No, but now that Congress has taken up the matter of a constitution I intend to find time to attend sessions. I plan to nominate you for King.”

Prof looked shocked. “Sir, if nominated, I shall repudiate it. If elected, I shall abdicate.”

“Don’t be in a hurry. It might be the only way to get the sort of constitution you want. And that I want, too, with about your own mild lack of enthusiasm. You could be proclaimed King and the people would take you; we Loonies aren’t wedded to a republic.

“When the time comes, you won’t be able to refuse. Because we need a king and there isn’t another candidate who would be accepted. Bernardo the First, King of Luna and Emperor of the Surrounding Spaces.”

“Stuart, I must ask you to stop. I’m becoming quite ill.”

“You’ll get used to it. I’m a royalist because I’m a democrat. I shan’t let your reluctance thwart the idea any more than you let stealing stop you.”

Heinlein makes the case quite well that ends follow means in their nature. The revolutionaries manipulate and deceive the masses and end up at odds with them, because they didn’t bring them along or listen to them. They centralise power in a state, and end up with a state. They invest so heavily in figureheads, and grant so much authority to a single man, that they may as well have a king.

What’s the difference?

One thing I will say for the novel is that it made me think about some of the differences between right-wing “libertarianism” and libertarian socialism or anarchism, particularly where they would, at a glance, appear to overlap. Anarchists also propose a society without laws or any body with a monopoly on violence to enforce them or anything resembling them, such as social norms.

“How would an anarchist society enforce traffic laws?” and “how would an anarchist society deal with rapists and other violent criminals?”, and similar, are perennial questions in “anarchism 101” type spaces online. I read an interesting answer on the former question recently. If the goal is increasing public safety, simply demanding that people obey certain rules is not very effective. Even now, with police and speed cameras to catch people, courts to fine them and prisons to throw them in, people still speed when they think they can get away with it. A better approach would be to design roads in such a way that people can’t speed, cars in such a way that they are safer for everybody in collisions, and cities such that cars are no longer a necessity, or become an unattractive choice. These options would all be available to communities and collectives in an anarchist society - the collective will enforced by design, rather than by laws and police.

Do we want a society where rapists get violently punished, or do we want one where nobody gets raped? Anarchists don’t generally eschew violence for individual or community self-defence, but I don’t think many would say that they want to create a society where beating and murdering rapists is a constant necessity, or even one where people inclined to rape refrain merely because they fear punishment - because if that is their only reason, then they will do it when they think they can get away with it, just like they do now.

It’s harder to imagine this problem being addressed by urban or industrial design - but cultures can be designed as well. There have been many times when cultures have been shaped by conscious effort; by states with nationalist ambitions and by grassroots campaigns with liberatory goals.

In one controversial scene in The Dispossessed, Shevek assaults an Urrasti woman; he is unable to control himself when she comes on to him, due to a mix of her enhanced and sexualised femininity - something alien to Anarres - and being inebriated for the first time. I do not like the implication of this, that women should have to suppress their femininity because men are unable to control themselves. Gender roles and gender presentation will undoubtedly change in the future, perhaps even converge to some extent, but prescribing such changes doesn’t seem compatible with anarchist ideology, or any other left-wing ideology. However, it does make the case that even if men have an inherent proclivity for sexual violence, that proclivity can be controlled by culture to prevent it from violating other people’s freedom.

In another scene, some children raised on Anarres experiment with authority and incarceration. They are familiar with these concepts in an abstract way, but have no direct experience with them, no idea what it means to confine somebody or be confined. They are disturbed by the experiment, regardless of the role they played in it.

Revolutions involve more than just changing the government or replacing the structures of the state with slightly different ones. They require deep and broad changes to the culture and the prevailing values of society, if they are to succeed. An anarchist society may have mechanisms to deal with violence when it occurs, but, more importantly, it would have a culture where intentionally depriving somebody else of their autonomy would be almost unthinkable - almost as injurious to the perpetrator as to the victim.

I would say that the anarchist approach to violence, sexual or otherwise, is to prevent it in the first place by addressing its root causes; by healing the wounds of hierarchy, patriarchy, alienation, and want. We might not need explicit laws about statutory rape if the autonomy of children is widely respected, if they are taught to question and advocate for themselves rather than to blindly submit to authority, if their family and community protects them, if they are not seen as resources to be exploited - and, it goes without saying, if girls are encouraged to have higher aspirations for themselves than to get married at fourteen and start spitting out babies.

But isn’t this the same as the Non-Aggression Principle that libertarians are always going on about? Not really. It may be superficially similar in being a proposed change in the predominant values of society that would enable it to function without laws or institutions with a monopoly on violence, but that is where the similarity ends. The NAP, like everything else in right-wing libertarianism, is about property rights, and sees even people as “self-possessed” property. It doesn’t have any critique of the hierarchies inherent to capitalism. They may see something like pollution as aggression if it harms other people, but withholding food from the starving or shelter from the homeless is not - that is just the exercise of property rights. They don’t reckon with the tendency of capital to accumulate in fewer and fewer hands and the inevitable conflict that creates between social classes - between those who own all the property and those who need access to that property to survive. The purpose of the NAP is to allow capitalists to do what they want with their property, including the exploitation of a desperate, propertyless class, while anything that class does to advance their interests, or that individuals do even just to prevent their own deaths, can be portrayed as “aggression” if it “harms” that property, allowing a response in-kind.

Conclusion

I watched an Angela Collier video recently where she talked about how she really enjoyed Atlas Shrugged when she read it, because she knew nothing about it in advance and assumed it was satirical based on its contents. I can’t claim to have had the same lack of awareness about this book - the reason I wanted to read it was because it was contrasted with The Dispossessed, after all; I knew that it was about right-wing libertarianism, or portrayed a society inspired by that ideology.

Contrary to my expectations, it seems like an indictment of those ideas: that a society without laws and a body to enforce them, or any alternative mechanisms of organisation and dispute resolution, has serious failures, absurd and obvious failures. That libertarians are self-serving hypocrites, closeted monarchists and crypto-fascists. It seems like a work that is ridiculing anarcho-capitalists, and saying that their ideas are impossible to achieve, or can only be achieved temporarily in very unique circumstances, by means that nobody would ever want to endure. It reads like a satire to me, though I have never heard anybody describe it as such.

I mean just look at how the Prof’s career is summarised when he is first introduced:

No doubt he could have gone to work in any school then in L-City but he didn’t. He worked a while washing dishes, I’ve heard, then as babysitter, expanding into a nursery school, and then into a creche. When I met him he was running a creche, and a boarding and day school, from nursery through primary, middle, and high schools, employed co-op thirty teachers, and was adding college courses.

This guy bootstrapped himself from a babysitting gig to running a university, essentially. This is joke, right? This has to be a joke. It’s hilarious! It’s the kind of joke that somebody would make if they were mocking libertarians. But is it also the kind of joke that libertarians make to poke fun at themselves?

So is this even a libertarian novel, in the vein of Atlas Shrugged? Some seem to think so. In this article on mises.org, Jeff Riggenbach credits it with inspiring a large number of influential libertarians, and states:

The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress is unquestionably a libertarian novel. It is unquestionably one of the three or four most influential libertarian novels of the last century.

Whatever his intentions, I think Heinlein did accurately assess many of the implications of right-wing libertarian ideology. I think it says more than I ever could about the nature of that ideology, that this is a novel that they think represents their views in a positive light.

Value and Values

2025-11-30T13:42:00+01:00

I’ve been a Framework enjoyer for a couple of years now. Indeed, I’m writing this on my Framework 13. I didn’t buy it because it occupied the best position in the performance/portability/price matrix of the options available to me. I bought it because it offered decent performance and portability while potentially being significantly more repairable and upgradeable than its competitors, and because they put some effort into ensuring Linux is well supported. In other words, it embodied my values in ways that other laptops did not, and I thought that was worth paying a premium for. The value proposition is in the values of the company. I’m careful to point this out when recommending it to people because I don’t want them to think they are buying a “MacBook but repairable”.

Of course I was aware that there were “risks” involved. The main one that came to mind was that they might go out of business at some point and that would likely be the end of any significant repairability advantage, as despite the clever design, it is not commodity hardware as you would find in a desktop PC. Or of course, they might just abandon the model I have eventually, or abandon their current focus altogether. Any of these could happen if their business model and the niche they occupy turns out to not be sustainable, or profitable, or they fail to grow that niche market. In such an event, it would be the same as if I had bought any other laptop. They joke all the time about doing an IPO, something which might significantly effect their ability to stick to their principles, and it comes across very “ha ha, only serious”.

One risk that hadn’t really occurred to me was that they would associate their brand with fascism in a ridiculous PR own-goal.

But, why wouldn’t I have expected something like that? If I could anticipate that they might abandon their stated values for predictable business reasons, why would I not expect that they might betray a set of values that were left unstated, ones that I merely assumed they held as a baseline of decency? Despite presenting themselves as a hacker-friendly, values-forward company doing things in new and different ways in order to tackle an intractable problem, at the end of the day they are still a VC funded Silicon Valley startup. It is a joke at this point how many such entities have abandoned their stated principles or otherwise betrayed their customers and the public in the pursuit of growth, or for political expedience, and many more whose principles were always obvious lies, or based on disingenuous right-wing distortions of values like “free speech”.

What Are Corporate Values Even?

While there are sometimes better or worse choices amongst products and services, from an ethical perspective, it is not in the nature of the companies that produce them under the capitalist system to put principles or values above the accumulation of capital.

One obvious problem with such organisations is of course that they are profit-seeking, and subject to the whims of the market. If a strategy isn’t working (i.e. is not resulting in growth), a company that doesn’t adapt will stagnate or wither away to nothing as their competitors crowd them out of the market. If a principle is an obstacle to that adaptation, then it is likely to be discarded, because holding to it would be an existential threat. This is the main source of the risks I identified above. If they manage to survive and grow to the point where they are dominating or even monopolising their industry, it is likely that any putative values will have long been abandoned. And if they are bought out by a larger company, there is no reason to expect that their values will survive the transition.

Another problem is that they are hierarchical; private tyrranies in fact. The feelings, opinions, obsessions and values of their owners, CEO and other officers, carry much more weight than anybody working within them, and certainly more than their customers. Sometimes this can work contrary to a company’s need for growth. A principled owner/CEO could potentially stick with lower-growth strategies as long as there is nobody in a position to fire them - though I wouldn’t expect such a situation to last indefinitely. An unhinged CEO on a bender could help elect a fascist who is hostile to his company’s interests, confident that his cult of personality will protect him from the consequences. Or in a somewhat less extreme scenario, the CEO might just want to help out some of his problematic fave open source developers, and not want to think about why that is a problem for some people, and there’s nothing that anybody can really do about it except make angry noises online and refuse to buy any more of the company’s products. We can’t fork a laptop manufacturer like we can an open source project, unfortunately (and forking a major open source project isn’t exactly trivial either).

These people exist in completely different milieu than the rest of us, responsible for millions or billions of ${currencyUnits} worth of undemocratically allocated capital. Our concerns about the swelling tide of racist and queerphobic rhetoric and attacks around the world are abstract to them, mere differences of opinion. They and their peers are concerned about real things, like access to cheap skilled labour, regulations that might reduce their power or increase their costs, and taxes that might shave a few million off their accumulated or potential billions. They’re more likely to see it as prudent to appease fascist movements than to oppose them, once they come to power. Violent street gangs, uniformed or otherwise, don’t really affect them. The policy whims of a mercurial leader might. And anyway, if they play their cards right they might get to be the Hugo Boss or IBM of the 21st century. Or get their own government department.

In the world of capitalist tech companies, stated principles and values are best understood as marketing: nice, cheap, non-binding promises that bring certain demographics to the trough, or make people feel good about their purchases, that they are making responsible choices or contributing to some improvement to the world. It certainly worked well enough on me, for Framework. They can hold to them, or pretend to, as long as they are useful, and abandon them when they become a burden. Their real values emerge from the inhuman machinery of the capitalist system, and the class interests of men twisted by privilege and power.

What is to be done?

The laptop market is the way it is because it is more profitable to manufacture disposable products and sell replacements for them in the future than it is to make repairable products that you may sell fewer of. Good intentions and green consumerism is unlikely to change that, as admirable as the attempt may seem.

Not to be all whatabouty, but certainly it is absurd to say that it is bad to buy a Framework, and good to buy a laptop from a company with a dismal track record on repairability, which is currently also sucking up to a fascist administration. All for-profit tech companies are somewhere on a spectrum from bad to worse, and there is no ethical consumption under capitalism.

No doubt there are many regulations that could be put in place to increase repairability of all sorts of devices and reduce other sources of e-waste. Stuff along the lines of the EU’s regulations on phone repairability, and the common charger rules that came into force for most devices in December 2024, and will apply to laptops from April 2026. We should be dictating to the industry the standards of repairability and sustainability that they have to meet, not hoping for plucky American startups to innovate a new set of norms - and we should be ruthless in our demands.

In the meantime, and always, we should take the commitments of for-profit companies with a grain of salt, and not allow their products to define us. I maintain that the tech industry will not reflect our values until we own everything, from the chip fabs to the stars, and the profit motive is a thing of the past.

The Ministry for the Future

2025-09-13T17:13:00+02:00

The first chapter of this book is one of the most brutal and visceral things I have ever read. It describes, from the perspective of the sole survivor in a particular town, a devastating climate change induced heatwave in India that kills 20 million, and in the process, I think, captures the prevailing mood amongst those who understand the urgency of the situation we face.

After that it calms down a bit, and has a quite unusual narrative structure. Some chapters are like snippets of a political manifesto, others are vignettes about unidentified characters and groups and how they are responding to the climate crisis. The main through-line concerns the head of a UN agency, the titular Ministry for the Future, the efforts of the agency, and her interactions with the sole survivor I mentioned above, who was radicalised by his experience.

It is more a book about concepts than it is about action or plot. The main concept it explores is what we could probably call Longtermism, if that name hadn’t been hijacked by transhumanist tech-bros to justify their disregard of people living today, supposedly in favour of the interests of billions of hypothetical future people, but really in their own selfish interests. In the book, the concept (though unnamed) concerns future generations whose existence is threatened by our actions today. Their interests are defended by the Ministry.

Does the threat represented by climate change to people living today, and the existence of future generations, justify violence? Does it justify geoengineering? This book says yes, and yes. The mass deaths of the heatwave spur radical action on multiple fronts, including a grassroots campaign of bombings of polluting modes of transportation like airplanes and container ships so intense that it makes them economically unviable, assassinations of polluters, black ops campaigns of violence and intimidation by the Ministry, and several massive geoengineering projects to slow sea level rise, reductions in the Earth’s albedo, and other things. While we see a lot of the geoengineering stuff up close, it is one of the books weak points that the violence mostly happens in the background, and is all a little too neat and efficient. Even as it threatens the main character’s life the players on both sides remain unidentified, and is mostly used as a pretext to justify radical, but technocratic, reforms to the financial system. I think it would have been better if we were down in the trenches a bit more, with a less abstract villain than the agents of unidentified reactionary fossil capitalists and elites.

Another problem I have with this book is that it is way too enthusiastic about the liberatory potential of blockchain technology. At least it is clear that that potential lies in it being a tool of surveillance to prevent the wealthy from hiding their money and doing whatever they want with it, rather then the sort of digital goldbuggery, private money nonsense that most proponents embrace. But, given what we have seen so far of how it is used in the real world, I have my doubts that it will ever be a tool for anything other than enabling scams, corruption, and wealth concentration.

Overall a very interesting read that is both an intimate exploration of the trauma and anxiety caused by climate change, and a detached and ultimately optimistic analysis of some of the political and technological possibilities for addressing it.

More Books

I have an account on bookwyrm.social where I post about what I’m reading and sometimes reviews if I feel I have enough to say about a book (including a version of this review), if you want to follow me there.

The Power of Breaks

2025-08-08T14:10:00+02:00

A few months ago I was stuck on a particularly frustrating problem in the development of Digression, my dialogue graph editor for Godot.

I had recently switched it to a main screen editor, as discussed in my post-mortem of my last Ludum Dare entry, and added a list of open graphs, and another of anchor points in the currently edited graph, similar to the scripts and methods list in the built-in script editor. Basically I have decided to reproduce the UI conventions of the script editor where they are at all applicable.

This seemed fine initally, but as I got stuck into a big refactor of how the underlying resources are updated by the GUI, and how and when those are saved, I noticed something really weird: sometimes when I pressed ctrl-s to save the scene and current graph, the editor would switch to one of the other open graphs!

I think I must have spent two weeks on and off trying to figure out this problem. The code was absolutely littered with debug log lines trying to trace the sequence of events triggered by the save, but there didn’t seem to be any connection between the code doing the saving, or the code handling key input, and the code responsible for switching between graphs. Eventually I gave up in frustration, and decided to do some art in my spare time instead. Then I played some video games.

Well, when I finally came back to it, I figured out what was going on within five minutes. First I noticed that the graph that was being switched to was always one with a name starting with the letter s, and if there wasn’t one starting with an s, then nothing happened. I tried other ctrl key combos and those switched to graphs starting with the corresponding letter, if there was one. It wasn’t anything to do with saving, or how I’d implemented it, or anything to do with my code at all, it was just a bug in the search feature of the ItemList node!

When I was deep into the development I had a very blinkered view of what was going on: I’m working on saving, it happens when I save, it must have something to do with that, and it must be due to changes I’ve made. A little break from it gave me enough perspective to see that none of that was the case, and there was ample evidence demonstrating that.

This of course isn’t the first time in my life, in programming or other endeavours, that taking a break has helped me solve a problem or even develop skills. I often find that taking a break from art results in a seemingly huge improvement in my skills when I return to it. In that case I think it is down to being more relaxed and putting less pressure on myself when starting a new piece after a break than when I have recently finished a piece that I feel I need to improve upon.

In conclusion: breaks good. Take a step back sometimes.

Coming Down

2025-07-08T11:59:00+02:00

Something I’ve had in my mind for a while is to do something based on the Chemical Brothers’ song “Where Do I Begin”, which I think captures well the feeling of coming down after a trip; the mix of awe and confusion and the tenuous connection to your sense of self.

So I set out to do that, intending it to feature a woman with a coffee cup, like in the song… and somehow got diverted into this close-up portrait. I think I had planned something like Cosmic Eye, where she would have a universe visible in her pupil, but she wasn’t really at the necessary scale for that to work.

I further intended to animate the colours, and shift between different palettes in a sort of pulsing manner, but that wasn’t working out the way I planned, so I abandoned it.

I guess the most notable feature of this piece is the dithering style, which is sort of rough and incorporates various shapes. I’ve never tried this style before.

I might need to try this again and stick closer to my original vision…

Timelapse

I used the recorder feature of Pixelorama to capture this timelapse, in the mode that only captures the canvas. I like that the result does not hop around erratically like my previous timelapse, but it does get a bit hard to follow what is actually being worked on at some points when it gets into the finer details, especially the anti-aliasing.

Treat Mania

2025-07-05T15:51:00+02:00

I’ve been on a diet since October last year and I’ve lost nearly 14kg so far. Only 6kg to go to my target weight. So, pretty successful. My wife started a few months before me and convinced me to join her, and it has actually been quite fun.

It’s not anything complicated, just tracking how many calories we consume and keeping it low for 5 days a week, and then eating “normally” on Wednesdays and Saturdays. I should say it’s especially uncomplicated for me because my wife does all the cooking 😬 The high days are supposed to keep our metabolisms relatively high. I don’t know if it really works that way, but they also have a secondary psychological effect: it makes it much easier to eat less on the low days when I know I am at most two days from being able to eat whatever I want - perhaps something I’ve specifically been craving.

At least… that’s how it worked at the beginning. As time has gone on I have found myself eating more and more garbage on the high days. I never really even used to eat that many treats or think about them that much, but now those two days a week are my only opportunity to have some, and I have to fit in as much as possible. It started with a Snickers bar after lunch, but otherwise normal, healthy food, and now I have a cupboard groaning with different types of chocolate, marshmallows, jellies, crisps, jellybeans, sweet-chili pistachios for some reason (the reason is that I have lost my mind). Every time we go to Aldi I find some new thing to add to my collection, and usually several donuts.

I have anxiety about my treat cupboard and I spend the rest of the week thinking about how I’m going to gorge myself on Wednesday and Saturday. Because the amount I can eat is still quite restricted even on those days, I never actually manage to finish anything before moving on to the new sweetness. I have half a bag of vegan marshmallows in there for the last six months that I never touch because a marshmallow is nearly a hundred calories, and if I have one that’s 30g of jellybeans I can’t eat. There’s things in there I’ve never even tried, because I can’t risk wasting my calorie budget on something I might not like, and miss out on some essential high-value treat (whatever that happens to be on any given day). If I skip lunch can I have a second Snickers as well as 100g of ice-cream? This is the type of question that consumes me.

So, that doesn’t seem like a particularly healthy relationship to food. But oh well, only 6kg to go, then I’m going to make a giant lasagna and eat that for three days in a row, and then hopefully go back to treat moderation instead of treat mania.

Lovely, Dark and Deep

2025-06-14T18:28:00+02:00

Back in April I took part in Ludum Dare 57, which had the theme “Depths”. As usual I was eager to take Digression for a spin and see how much it had improved since its last outing for Ludum Dare 48, and this time I managed to come up with something that allowed me to do that. Coincidentally, the theme for LD48 was almost the same (“Deeper and Deeper”), and I ended up making a somewhat similar game in some respects!

The Concept

The initial concept was one I’ve had kicking around for a while, of a post-apocalyptic trading game with two phases to the gameplay - one where you travel between outposts by car, possibly having to engage in combat or other encounters, and another at outposts where you have to trade and maintain your car. I think of it as terrestrial Escape Velocity, though the travel would undoubtedly be much simplified for a jam game.

Of course none of the elements of that idea are set in stone. I usually think of it as being set in a desert (the ol’ Mad Max influence I suppose), but in this case I wasn’t sure if deserts have depths? So that was out. I considered setting it in deep space instead (some sort of non-terrestrial Escape Velocity, I suppose? What a notion), but that seemed too close to the game I made for Ludum Dare 48 already. And so it became deep forest, and then the car became a bicycle because that seemed more foresty.

Most of the rest of the originally envisioned gameplay mechanics fell away as I tried to scope it to the 72 hours available. The travelling became just an opportunity for a bit of dialogue, the vehicle maintenance became a simple stat alongside others for the player, and the trading disappeared entirely. In an effort to introduce some gameplay beyond just engaging in dialogue, I added in a hand of randomly drawn cards at each location and a limited number of action points for their use. I think I had in mind the dice rolls in Citizen Sleeper when I came up with this, but I couldn’t really remember how they worked in that game.

Considering it has been several months since the jam I don’t think I could give you a blow by blow even if I wanted to, so I’m just going to talk a bit about what worked and what didn’t.

What Worked

Digression

Digression worked really well for the most part. I think I encountered one bug, but I was able to work around it. I was able to churn out dialogue really quickly for the encounters and travel, and it was relatively easy to implement changes to the game state during dialogue as well (giving items and buffs and the like) - though that aspect of it could have been better, as I discuss below.

Use of Resources

I used Resource types for all the items, buffs, curses, character classes etc. Although they were a bit of a mess and included some stuff that didn’t end up getting used, it really paid off to work with resources right from the beginning. Often in the past I would implement something like the player’s gun, for example, as just a scene or part of a scene, with the intention to rework it later to allow different guns defined by resources. And of course in a jam that never happens as time runs out and I get fatigued - so there ends up being only one gun, one pickup etc.

Probably the most obvious effect this had in this game is the character class selection. It doesn’t add all that much, but I think it is a neat thing to have in a jam game and it gives the impression of depth.

So, big thumbs up to doing things the right way from the beginning.

Audio

I used old reliable LMMS for the music this time around. Last time I tried some new tools and had a really bad time. I’m really proud of what I made for this game, it had the exact spooky, mysterious quality I was going for. I don’t think beepbox would have cut it this time.

The game didn’t call for many sound effects, but the ones that are there, aside from the UI, are foley - always fun to do that and I think they work pretty well.

Art

What can I say, I think I did a good job on the art. That’s always been my strength anyway so big woop.

I am still using Pixelorama and there are still a few things about it that I find grating, but I have gotten used to it enough that it doesn’t get in my way. It was better suited to this game than my last one because most of the art was large background pieces rather than tiles.

Something that’s kinda new is that I did lot of animation using tweens. Little things like the the back and forth motion of the bicycle and how it enters and exits the screen, and the distribution and flipping of the cards, were entirely done with tweens. They took only minutes to implement and I think they look great, and add so much to the aesthetic of the game. I only had to actually animate one thing by hand, the pedalling.

The Humour, apparently

That Sully, what a card.

What Didn’t

Digression

Though it certainly didn’t let me down, I definitely noticed a few pain points in actually using it for a game.

It was originally a main-screen editor, and at some point I decided it should be in the bottom dock - probably because Godot didn’t provide an official way to add a main screen plugin and you had to sort of hack it in. However it requires a lot of space to use properly, and having it in the bottom dock was an impediment to that. I have moved it back to the main screen since the jam.
Having to manually manage the size of dialogue nodes was a hassle. I have since updated them to be resizeable width-wise, but to grow with the text length-wise. Much nicer to use.
Similarly, it was kind of a pain scrolling up and down a node when there was a long section of text. I have since partially implemented a mechanism to allow the dialogue node to be “maximised” when you want to focus on editing, and I will be doing the same for the choice node.
The lack of an open graphs list made it a bit awkward to move back and forth between graphs, as I had to find them in a scene or the filesystem every time. I have since added an open graphs list, as well as an anchors list for navigating around a graph.
The two different signals for dialogue and choice dialogue struck me as a little awkward in retrospect. I will be consolidating them I think.
There are a few problems with the variable management system. One is that they lacked defaults - I have added these since. Another is that the variables didn’t mesh well with the overall game, i.e. game state and dialogue state felt like two separate things that I had to bridge. I’m not sure how I am going to address that yet.

Gameplay

The gameplay was pretty awful. I clearly do not really know how card games work. Limiting the player’s actions to a random selection of cards just resulted in frustration, especially when it was not obvious that some actions required items, and when their use of the cards was also constrained by action points.

The stats generally degraded too slowly as well and there were unclear interdependencies between them - your health doesn’t degrade until you exhaust your food or water stats completely.

The encounters were fun, I thought, but there were too few of them and they were too random - you would see the same ones over and over sometimes. Too many of them had disappointing outcomes, and if you didn’t get the right cards there was nothing to do.

I think the random encounters worked a bit better in Out of Gas for two reasons: most encounters involved combat, so that is just inherently more exciting - and the fact that you were fleeing something, and could be killed, was slightly more compelling than a set of depleting stats.

Overall, the randomness just left the player with little sense of agency. I would have been better off dropping the gameplay altogether and just making it a short visual novel, with agency expressed only through dialogue choices. Though I’m not sure I could write a compelling story for a visual novel in such a short timespan either…

Bugs

I introduced a bug at the last minute that prevented the game from ending when your health or vehicle state reached zero lol, lmao.

Results

Much better than my last two outings, and some good ratings in several categories, but definitely let down overall by the gameplay. I’m a bit disappointed by the mood rating as I felt I nailed that, but it is a very subjective one of course - and it’s still pretty good!

Some notables:

My highest ever rating, and placing, in humour (please clap).
Highest ever audio rating (by a hair), and placing.
First time being in the top 100 in four categories as a solo dev.
First time being in the top 50 in two categories. Third time being in the top 50 in any category.
Second lowest rating in fun - only my Ludum Dare 38 entry, which was only the opening scene of an adventure game and had no gameplay, was lower!

Post-Jam

Nah.

Future Developments

I was inspired to work on some sweeping improvements to Digression and have made a lot of progress, but there is also a lot of stuff broken and partially completed now. I will post about the changes in more depth when they are done.

I also created a set of placeholder graphics to use in future jams. I used the default Godot robot sprite in this game, but it is not ideal in some ways because everything ends up looking the same, and when you put in the actual art you have to undo any scaling that was done to make the placeholder the correct size.

Big Lick

2025-06-12T15:36:00+02:00

Oh boy, it’s been a while since I posted any art! I think I was put off the whole endeavour back when NFTs were the big thing and a lot of artists I respected were showing their ass over them. I had also started a piece that was maybe a bit too complex for me, and I started to dread working on it, and to feel guilty about not working on it, and then I started thinking that art for its own sake was just a distraction from what I had actually set out to do, which was to make a videogame. I started putting a lot more time into developing my dialogue graph editor for Godot instead (since given the name “Digression”), and a tiny bit into the mechanics of the game, and just didn’t think about art for a while.

Since then of course, NFTs seem to have basically disappeared from the zeitgeist, their promises of vast riches and libertarian copyright enforcement for artists unfulfilled, and all the artists have been replaced by machines that can pull, on command, statistically likely representations of anything you can imagine out of the aggregate of all visual media on the Internet. As if it wasn’t bad enough that a huge chunk of it was already owned by giant corporations, capital is now grinding up our culture into a meaningless, commodified slurry and feeding it back to us. The pretense of having the interests of artists at heart has been replaced by a naked, shameless grasping. And with governments falling over each other to attract AI investment, it seems unlikely that there is going to be any recourse for individual creators any time soon.

So I’d like to say, then, that the reason I did this piece was that I’m an obstinate luddite who refuses to accept that the age of human creativity is over, and that I had to do my part to help preserve it. But actually I just needed to do something for my sister’s birthday, and it occurred to me that I’d never done any pixel art for her even though she is someone who would probably appreciate it. And isn’t that a fine, human motivation for getting back into art?

She did appreciate it, btw. I’m not sure she would have if I had engineered her a prompt instead.

Tools and Process

I used to use Pyxel Edit for all my art, but it is proprietary and Windows only and I couldn’t get it running in Wine since I switched to Fedora. So I have switched to Pixelorama instead, an open source pixel art paint program developed in Godot. There are a few things that Pyxel Edit did better, but Pixelorama is a very decent substitute. I like that you can put different tools on your left and right mouse buttons, though it tripped me up a lot initially. One thing I really miss is the ability to update a colour globally from the palette. It was great to be able to completely change direction with the colours without having to repaint anything. That was something I used to do quite often and at any stage of the process, sometimes even when a piece was otherwise finished. Maybe I will look into contributing to the project, since I am somewhat familiar with Godot…

When I tried adding the reference image it just automatically put it under the canvas, which I wasn’t expecting, but since it did I decided to just trace a rough outline of the figures for expediency.

Unusually for me I did a lot of anti-aliasing in this one, and I really liked how that turned out, especially on the face. More of that in the future.

Also unusually I did not pay much attention at all to how many colours I was using. There is relatively little dithering as a result, and what is there is mostly for texture rather than giving the appearance of additional colours. I usually like the challenge of keeping colour counts low, but it was nice to be more relaxed about it for a change - I ended up using 64, and it’s not as if the resulting palette is general purpose!

Timelapse

The timelapse for this one is a bit of a mess. My previous method of capturing them doesn’t work in Wayland, and I overlooked a feature in Pixelorama that would have allowed me to evaluate the canvas without having to zoom in and out constantly. I’ve since discovered that it has a recorder feature that can save a copy of the canvas after every change, so I will likely try that for my next piece and the timelapse should have a very different look…

COVID Movies

2024-06-30T13:30:00+02:00

Well it happened - I finally caught the ‘rona. Actually I think I had it quite early on, but it was a mild dose. This time I was basically insensible for two weeks and maybe even still not fully recovered two months later *. Quite the nasty bug.

To pass the time while I was couch-bound, I watched various comfort movies and movies I haven’t seen since I was a kid.

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind

One of my all-time favourites. I appreciate it for it’s examination of flawed characters and their very real and relatable relationship. I appreciate its message that even bad experiences sometimes have lessons to teach us, and that if we don’t integrate them we will be doomed to repeat them.

Much of the movie resembles the recollection of memory, wandering back and forth through time, finding and losing details and emotional attachments as it goes. The largely practical effects (or so I understand) contribute excellently to this surreal quality, with literally disappearing details, spatial and temporal distortions, and even a sense of things being just on the tip of the mind, yet unreachable. It was particularly enjoyable in my delirious fever state.

The Wizard

“I love Powerglove. It’s so bad.”

This glorified ad for the NES is still a good time. I was obsessed with the Californian dinosaur statues after watching this movie when I was a kid.

One notably frustrating aspect of watching this movie now is how terrible all three finalists are at SMB3. Right at the beginning of the second level there’s a koopa coming towards them, and they all stand still waiting for it. One of them even has the tanooki suit, but waits patiently for it to move into range to jump on its head instead of just spin attacking it. They all also missed the power-up box on the ground in the same level that they could have used the shell to get. Just awful to watch.

Flight of the Navigator

I used to love this one when I was a kid, but I barely remembered it - I didn’t even remember the “time-travel” aspect, or as one character exclaimed: “light-speed theory!” Yeah ok champ.

It’s quite a poignant story until the titular navigator boards the ship, at which point everything is explained by Max (the ship’s computer) and the plot is basically over. The final third of the movie just consists of flying around, meeting cute alien creatures, zany antics and an increasingly annoying Max. It’s fun and looks great, but I’m not sure I would say it holds up for adult viewing.

One thing that definitely doesn’t hold up is Sarah Jessica Parker’s adult character flirting with a 12 year old. Women are only supposed to flirt with robots, aliens and weird anthropomorphic ducks!

Wargames

Still amazing. Probably my favourite aspect of this movie is its realistic no-nonsense portrayal of hacking. There’s no dumb made-up jargon or macguffins, no self-conscious cyberpunk mythologising, just a kid with a modem studying a target to guess a password, with his only motive to learn and have fun. It’s so… pure, so unencumbered.

The performances reflect that as well, with Ally Sheedy and Matthew Broderick really capturing the goofy, carefree energy of youth at the beginning of the movie.

One thing that has always bugged me is that WOPR/Joshua isn’t actually playing the game he’s supposed to be - if he were, he would only make moves as America. Instead he fakes a series of Soviet attacks, which should be David’s prerogative, seemingly to goad a real-life response.

Thankfully, whatever his motive, he ultimately fails, and instead learns a lesson about the futility of nuclear war in an incredibly powerful climax.

Star Trek: Generations

I understand some people hate this movie, but I love it. It’s the only movie that really captures TNG-era Trek at all, and it was incredibly exciting to see “my” trek on the big screen.

Probably my favourite aspect of this movie is Data’s subplot of acquiring emotions and coming to terms with them. Sure, a lot of it is just comic relief (good comic relief though), but it also feels like a culmination of the character’s arc from the series.

Star Trek: First Contact

There are aspects of this movie that I like - I like the Borg, I like Picard’s relationship to the Borg, I like seeing the pivotal moment of first contact, and Zephram Cochrane’s warp ship looks awesome.

However… there is much more about it that I don’t like.

I think this was the introduction of the Borg queen, and while Alice Krige is amazing in the role, I think the existence of a queen changes the nature of the Borg somewhat - from something truly alien to something much more prosaic and uninteresting - and I don’t appreciate that.

Much worse than that are the changes to the character of Picard, who went from being a diplomat and a scholar to an action hero.

Also the Borg time-travel plan as a last resort doesn’t make any sense - if they have the means and will to assimilate Earth in the past they could do the time travelling from anywhere, there’s no reason to barrel into the Sol system and do it only if their cube is destroyed. And they could just try again. But then, it’s a common problem in Star Trek that things that are really easy to do one moment are impossible, or forgotten about, or work completely differently in the next.

Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home

This movie mostly consists of the Enterprise crew bumbling around San Francisco in the 80’s and trying (and often failing) to grasp the cultural differences and blend in. It is ridiculous and hilarious, and I love it!

One thing this movie does really well is make the characters feel like they are from a very different time than the one they are visiting. Other Star Trek time-travel stories, such as the Voyager crew’s visit to 1990’s LA, Sisko and Bashir’s visit to San Francisco in 2024, or the Enterprise D crew’s visit to 19th century San Francisco (boy, they sure visit San Francisco a lot), don’t quite capture the gulf of time in the same way - they generally come across as a little too savvy.

Another great aspect is how little fucks they give about telling people they are from the future, or even sharing technology with them. I bet the boys from the Department of Temporal Investigations had a heck of a time sorting this mess out!

It’s also brilliant that there’s no real villain except for our society’s indifference to environmental degradation.

Star Trek VII: The Undiscovered Country

I think this was the first Star Trek movie I got to see in the cinema. I was definitely too young to understand the political allusions at the time, but I seem to remember enjoying it anyway. The themes are classic Star Trek stuff - overcoming prejudices, working to secure peace, etc.

One striking aspect of this movie is how differently the Klingons are portrayed than they are in The Next Generation, particularly the early seasons. In this movie they are erudite, sophisticated, and almost Romulan in their sneakiness. In TNG’s early seasons I guess we mostly just see Worf, but he is almost bestial, without the temperance and nuance of character that he would develop later. It’s interesting that the releases overlap with this apparent disconnect.

Back to the Futures

I used to watch these once a year, but it has been a while since I’ve watched any of them, and even longer since I’ve watched all three in a row.

I had some really weird misconceptions about these movies when I was a kid. In particular, I thought that every era had versions of the same characters - not family members who happen to look remarkably the same, but actually incarnations of the same characters. For example I thought 1885’s Doc was a different Doc than 1985’s Doc - and that Seamus was actually “another Marty”. It’s hard to even grasp now what I was thinking with my undeveloped child brain, but somehow I also remember it really clearly.

Of course, now that I understand it fully, half the fun of a movie like this is poking holes in the time-travel logic. Obviously I’m not saying anything new here, but a couple of the things that stood out to me on this viewing were:

The way “artifacts” from other timelines change is ridiculous. If the future has been changed, why would they ever be in an intermediate state where things are fading away?
Marty has a picture of himself and his siblings, and after he changes the future they all fade away because they were never born - but why would the picture even have been taken then?
Similarly, Jennifer takes a fax from the future indicating that future Marty will be fired. After the timeline is changed, the contents of the paper are erased. Why would she have even taken the paper in this new timeline? It’s a blank piece of paper, what are you doing Jennifer??
Also LOL when she holds it up to the Doc at the end of III and says “It erased - what does it mean?” He has no context for what this piece of paper is!
The same thing happens with the picture of the headstone in the third movie. It changes between showing different names, and then in the end it becomes a photo of an empty patch of ground. Why would they have taken a photo of an empty patch of ground?
Also hilarious is when newspapers are shown changing from one story to another, very conveniently about the same person!
There’s a big question of why changes effect objects, but not people. Why does Marty not remember being raised by his new, cool parents, or that he has his dream truck? Why does he not remember his dad dying and his mom marrying Biff when that becomes the new reality? The only effect we see on Marty is when he is about to fade out of existence when it seems like his parents aren’t going to get together - but he should also become a different person, like his siblings did.
The oft criticised scenes where Marty appears to inspire black men to achieve and create are really bizarre. His other actions change the future, but Mayor Wilson was already Mayor before the time-travel antics, and Chuck Berry had already made his music. They can’t be time loops if Marty never changes along with everything else.

The other half of the fun is, as it has always been, Christopher Lloyd’s wonderful face:

Despite having seen these movies so many times, this was the first time I realised that Marty’s future daughter in BTTF2 was also played by Michael J. Fox! And I still didn’t even catch it when she was on screen, I only noticed it in the credits!

The Warriors

I’m not sure what age I was when I saw this before - probably too young - and all I really remembered about it was that there was a bunch of outrageously costumed gangs running around, and the bit at the end when they make it back to Coney island.

I get the impression that the violence depicted was shocking and realistic for the time, but now it seems quite tame - just some light, bloodless brawling.

One thing I can say after watching this now is that we don’t have enough mime gangs or Star Trek alien baseball gangs around these days. I think crime would be a lot more fun if people injected some theatrics into it.

The copy I watched this time was the director’s cut, so I got comic-book style transitions and a voice-over opening which apparently weren’t in the initial theatrical release. The transitions in particular suited it well because the gang uniforms are so cartoonish.

Short Circuit

The impact this movie had on me as a kid was to make me want to be friends with robots - and to be Ally Sheedy’s boyfriend.

As with the character Max in Flight of the Navigator, Johnny 5 becomes increasingly annoying as the movie goes on, though he remains somewhat more endearing. His repeated insistence that he is alive and that he wants to remain so, and doesn’t want to be involved in hurting any other creatures, was a powerful message to receive as a kid.

Unlike Flight of the Navigator the plot continues all the way through to a fantastic fake-out downer-upper ending.

The Rocketeer

A barely controlled rocket-powered superhero foils the plans of some horrible Nazis - what more could you want from a movie? How about the gorgeous Jennifer Connolly also kicking ass?

The action set-pieces in this movie lack the impact of those from more recent superhero movies, but it’s also somewhat refreshing that he’s just an ordinary guy who can take an ordinary amount of abuse. Also the art-deco Iron Man aesthetic is amazing.

Except… how does he not burn his arse? Forget the helmet, what he needs are some thermally insulated pants!

Note: Once I was feeling better I got into other things and never finished off this post. It has actually been over six months now since I originally intended to post it, and therefore the opening paragraph is a bunch of lies. I’m finishing it off now because I think I have COVID again for the second (or maybe third) time, though less severe! Back to top.

From Hell’s Heart

2024-05-14T22:46:00+02:00

From Hell’s Heart is my entry for Ludum Dare 55, the first Ludum Dare I have participated in since I made Out of Gas for Ludum Dare 48 in 2021.

I was not thrilled with it overall (and neither was anybody else - but we’ll get to that), but it was good to get into working on actual gameplay programming again after several years of only working on tooling, and it has inspired me to do a lot more gamedev work since.

The Concept

I was quite disappointed by the theme. I had an idea for the theme “It Spreads”, which was one of the final round themes, that I was very invested in. I was going to make a zombie shooter where the weapons were all spreadables like jam and nutella and so on, and I had a lot of fun art and gameplay ideas for that.

So when the theme of “Summoning” was announced I was disappointed. But, the theme is rarely the one I would prefer, so I got to brainstorming and came up with the idea of “reverse-Doom”, which evolved into something not explicitly Doom related, but where you play as a demon fighting soldiers nonetheless. For a brief moment I was even considering calling it “What if Doom but you’re the Demon”.

The thing I liked about this concept was that it allowed me to address the theme in two ways - you are a demon who has been summoned, and you can summon other demons to help you. However, the fact that it is perfectly playable and beatable without ever summoning your demon friends diminishes this somewhat!

One of my hopes for this jam was to try out my dialogue graph editor, Digression, in another game, and unfortunately there was no place for it with this concept. I used it heavily in Out of Gas and Gophers in the past, but it has been fleshed out significantly since then and is ready to be put through its paces. Oh well.

Art

I couldn’t get Pyxel Edit to run on my new computer when setting up for the jam (it is Windows only, and I have run it using Wine in the past), so I decided to branch out and try Pixelorama - a pixel art editor built in Godot. Although my muscle memory from Pyxel edit tripped me up constantly in minor ways it was a good experience overall and I think I will continue using it going forward, as I always prefer open-source and native applications when they are available. The only thing I really found lacking was the way it handles the grid/tiles. There are no tools for quickly copying and manipulating tiles, and the grid is specified in the global settings instead of being per-file, even though one grid is unlikely to suit different files even in the same project.

I also had to adapt the way I managed spritesheets, as Pyxel edit allows you to define multiple animations in a single file, with the frames being tiles, while Pixelorama will only animate the entire file as a single unit. As such, character sprites are spread across multiple files each. In Godot this means swapping the sprite texture for each animation, but that didn’t seem to cause any problems.

I made some big mistakes with the level art early on, initially designing it at twice the appropriate resolution for the characters I had in mind. I was able to take the basic design ideas and downscale them into the final wall and floor tiles easily enough, but it still wasted a lot of time. I designed them for an auto-tiling approach which I developed a while ago, where a tool script populates the floor tiles when you update the walls.

I based the character shapes roughly on the design I came up with for Guerrilla Gardening for Ludum Dare 41, which is very round and fun, and I’ve found works really well for shooter games. It also features outlines for the characters which means there’s less risk of ending up with characters that don’t show up well against the background!

I was quite pleased with the art overall, though when I designed the wall and floor variants for the opening “cutscene” I realised that the game is far too red overall, as the characters looked much better against the bluer background!

I am determined next time I do a jam solo to not do full animations for each character or game element, and instead use the animation features of Godot to bounce, squash and spin things to bring them to life. This will give me much more time to create a variety of characters and objects, which I think would contribute more to a jam game than full run-cycle animations. The only place I used this kind of technique in this game was for the spinning and pulsing of the portal, and I think it was quite effective. People do some great things with this kind of animation and I am missing out.

Music

Music is an element of jam games that I am always trying to find a new and better approach to, as it is something that I enjoy a lot but am not particularly skilled at. In the past I have used beepbox, LMMS and Bosca Ceoil with different degrees of success.

In the week prior to the jam I came across an application called Helio which I thought looked incredibly promising. It looked like it might be as easy to use as Bosca Ceoil but with a wider variety of possible instruments, so I was excited to try it out.

Another type of tool that I am always looking to bring into the fold is modular synth emulators. I have tried VCV rack in the past but never managed to use it for a game, and I recently came across a fork of it called Cardinal and had been practicing with that. I discovered that I could use Cardinal as a plugin for Helio and create instruments in it to control using Helio, so I planned to either do that or create a patch to generate all the music for the game, depending on what idea I was working on. The concept for From Hell’s Heart didn’t really seem to call for techno or ambient music, so I ended up trying the latter.

Unfortunately, things did not go smoothly at all with creating the music. I found Helio to be lacking in some essential features, and with a confusing menu system. It crashed constantly, forgetting instrument settings each time and sometimes changing the volume of notes or moving them around arbitrarily. I think the interface with Cardinal may have been responsible for some of this, and ultimately abandoned trying to use it for any instruments in favor of a selection of sound fonts. There was no way to preview the sound fonts in Helio, and I ended up previewing them on the command line using fluidsynth, but not all of the ones I found that I liked worked when loaded into instruments in Helio. It was just a frustrating mess all around.

Most bafflingly in terms of missing features in Helio, I couldn’t find a way of creating more than one pattern for an instrument, so I ended up having to use multiple tracks of the same instrument when I wanted a different pattern.

It also lacks a central mixer where effects can be applied. Instead you can add effects on a per-instrument basis. I tried to do this in Cardinal as well, but again abandoned that as time dragged on and the application kept crashing.

So overall it was a bit of a nightmare, took five precious hours, and the track ended up being overly repetitive, with just one melody repeated over and over with the only variation being different instruments coming in and out. I hated it when I was done, but it grew on me a bit when I put it in the game. It did kind of have the mood I was aiming for.

Every time I try to make music in Linux I feel like I am missing out on some brilliant workflow that ties a variety of different applications together with their different specialities, but I am just failing to grasp how it all works, and this time was no different. Back to LMMS next time I think…

Sound Effects

Somewhere that I did get to use Cardinal was for the sound effects! I mostly used the Audible Instruments synth modules with a variety of different setting, and used Audacity to record different notes being played for variety. Some of the results I was really pleased with (the demon snarls), others much less so (the enemy voices, which sounded like robots saying random words), but overall it worked pretty well. I would have preferred to do some foley stuff but there wasn’t time, and it was a step up from SFXR at least.

Code

Since my long-time project, Just a Robot, is a shooter, I had a fair bit of base code to plunder for this jam. I don’t think I did or learned anything particularly interesting this time around, but the base code did include a technique for showing a character silhouette when they are obscured by a wall which is interesting enough, and some automatic configuration of floor and mask tilemaps to allow rooms to be banged out quickly with little possibility of error.

The trick to the silhouettes is to create a mask of the parts of the walls that should obscure game entities using a BackBufferCopy node, and then check that mask in a shader on any sprite that should be obscured. Objects in the game do not need to be children of the TileMap, and in fact there is a different TileMap for walls and floors.

The mask TileMap is populated automatically in the editor using a script like this:

@tool
extends TileMap

@export var copy_map: NodePath
@export var copy_from_layer: int = 0
@export var copy_to_layer: int = 0
@export var refresh_frequency: int = 10

@onready var _copy_map_node = get_node(copy_map)

var time = 0

func _process(delta):
    if Engine.is_editor_hint():
        _tool_process()

func _tool_process():
    if copy_map != null and refresh_frequency > 0:
        _copy_map_node = get_node(copy_map)
        var current_ticks = Time.get_ticks_msec()
        if time == 0 or current_ticks - time > refresh_frequency * 1000:
            time = current_ticks
            _copy_map()

func _copy_map():
    var cells = _copy_map_node.get_used_cells(copy_from_layer)
    self.clear_layer(copy_to_layer)
    for cell in cells:
        if not _copy_map_node.get_cell_source_id(copy_from_layer, cell) == 0:
            self.set_cell(
                copy_to_layer,
                cell,
                _copy_map_node.get_cell_source_id(copy_from_layer, cell),
                _copy_map_node.get_cell_atlas_coords(copy_from_layer, cell),
                _copy_map_node.get_cell_alternative_tile(copy_from_layer, cell)
            )
    self.fix_invalid_tiles()

The mask tileset just has 100% red everywhere that should be obscured, so the shader just checks for red in the screen texture and displays a grey colour instead of the sprite’s texture anywhere it finds it, leaving the alpha intact:

shader_type canvas_item;

uniform bool hide_when_occluded = true;
uniform sampler2D SCREEN_TEXTURE : hint_screen_texture, filter_linear_mipmap;

void fragment() {
    vec4 mask = textureLod(SCREEN_TEXTURE, SCREEN_UV, 0.0);
    if (mask.a > 0.0) {
        if (mask.r > 0.9) {
            if (hide_when_occluded) {
                COLOR.a = 0.0;
            } else {
                COLOR.rgb = vec3(0.2, 0.2, 0.2);
            }
        }
    }
}

It turned out that people really hated the tight corridors and enemies being obscured though, so I probably won’t be using this technique again!

A similar script to the one that populates the mask also populates a TileMap with floor tiles based on the wall tiles. The floor tiles have a different size than the wall tiles however, so it is a bit longer and more involved. I think I would prefer to just put floor and wall tiles on different layers of the same TileMap in the future, or as TileMapLayers or whatever is being introduced in Godot 4.3…

Another neat thing I did in the editor was to have spawn points for portals and enemies draw a line to the thing they are associated with, or an obvious warning if they are not configured correctly. This helped me ensure that everything was set up properly when rushing through the room designs in the last few hours of the jam! I am trying to get into the habit of adding this sort of tooling to everything that might benefit from it.

@tool
extends Marker2D


@export var destination: GameRoomSpawnPoint


func _process(delta):
    if Engine.is_editor_hint():
        _tool_process()

func _tool_process():
    queue_redraw()


func _draw():
    if Engine.is_editor_hint():
        if destination != null:
            _draw_to_destination()
        else:
            _draw_warning()


func _draw_warning():
    self.draw_circle(Vector2(0, 0), 15.0, Color.RED)


func _draw_to_destination():
    self.draw_circle(Vector2(0, 0), 15.0, Color.GREEN)
    self.draw_line(
        Vector2(0, 0),
        destination.global_position - self.position,
        Color.GREEN,
        1.0
    )

I also took from the base code a node-based state machine for enemy AI. This turned out to be a bit confusing and inflexible, and when I tried to introduce some new behaviour on the final day I ended up making the game crash constantly, and had to roll back. I’m still unclear on exactly what went wrong there - I was getting null references due to the summoned allies despawning, even with null checks before referencing them. It was probably really obvious but I was exhausted by then. In any case there were other problems with the state machine I developed and I have started investigating the Godot plugin Beehave as an alternative for the future.

Something that did not work very well was the enemy navigation and avoidance. I completely misunderstood how the avoidance system was supposed to be used, so it was actually not in play at all. In experiments I’ve done since the jam I got it working to some extent, but it seems like it does not work very well anyway, with agents just grinding to a halt in many circumstances even after avoiding an obstacle! The navigation itself would have worked much better with one small settings change of path_postprocessing in the NavigationAgent2D to “edgecentered”, as I discovered later. As I had it for the jam, navigation agents are always getting stuck on wall corners…

Results

My game got lots of nice commments, and also a lot of complaints about out-of-bounds glitches, enemies being obscured by the walls, and being too easy.

I was uninspired by the theme this time around and my skills were somewhat rusty in every area, and the game was generic and buggy as a result, so I was unsurprised by the negative comments. I did think it looked good and was reasonably juicy and sounded alright. I wasn’t expecting great overall ratings, but I did think it would do ok in the graphics category at least. However, the ratings were quite bad across the board, at least compared to previous jams!

Category	Rating	Placing	Percentile
Overall	3.571	574	65th
Fun	3.63	418	75th
Theme	3.413	792	52nd
Innovation	2.739	1080	35th
Humor	2.609	823	50th
Graphics	3.935	428	74th
Audio	3.619	343	79th
Mood	3.457	686	59th

This game did worse in almost every category in percentile terms than my Ludum Dare 38 entry which I didn’t even complete - it was just an opening scene with a short dialog and no gameplay. Quite a drop from my “Gophers” peak!

Post-jam and Take-away

I won’t make my usual promise to work on a post-jam version of this game, both because it’s not interesting enough to be worth it, and because I never keep that promise anyway!

Instead I have been inspired to start working on Just a Robot again since the jam, trying to get combat and enemy behaviour working the way I have always envisioned them, to see if it would actually be fun. The idea is to make it a cover-based shooter where the enemies abilities are close to the player’s, more or less, and combat feels weighty and dangerous in a way that is distinct from bullet-hell shooters.

I successfully implemented a cover system for the player, but when I went to enable the enemies to use it and switch to using Beehave for their AI I quickly discovered that the way I had built them so far was too centralised and inheritance based, so after watching a few tutorials and considering things a bit I decided to start again mostly from scratch with a more composition-based approach. This is working really well for the player so far and I’m nearly back at the same point as I was previously.

I also thought about and experimented with tiling approaches a bit, creating both a very small scale autotiling tileset with multiple terrains, and a mockup of a more organic looking tileset with a wide variety of designs, angled walls and floor sections and the like. I am tired of creating boxy, uninteresting levels. I was initially inspired in my gamedev journey by the art and design of Hyper Light Drifter, and I want to get back to achieving something of that look and sense of verticality - maybe not in jam games, but in Just a Robot.

I started on a greybox version of the above to actually use in designing the game, but it’s not quite finished yet.

I Accidentally Visual Scripting

2023-11-30T22:31:00+01:00

For some months now I’ve been trying to make some progress on the game I’ve been “working on” for probably the better part of a decade, Just a Robot (yep, 7 years ago was the first post there, and it was already in progress for a few years before that!). I haven’t really been working on it for most of that time, though it has always been in the back of my mind.

While I have re-implemented some basic gunplay mechanics, and experimented with auto-tiling and the like, my main task has been improving the editor for cutscene graphs that I designed previously (and which I’ve mentioned a few times before) based on my experience of using it in a couple of jam games, and the anticipated requirements for this game.

I am also hoping that it will be something that other people might find useful, and that I can release in the Godot asset library. As such I try to do things in a generalised and user-friendly way, with nothing that would tie it specifically to my game, or rough edges that I would just ignore myself but be embarrassed if other people had to deal with them.

As a result, it’s taking quite a while!

One thing I’ve noticed is that as I try to maintain flexibility I seem to be implementing tiny haphazard visual scripting systems for calculating values and defining conditions. Of course the graph editing is itself a type of visual scripting, but that that was both what I was expecting to be designing, and has well established UI conventions in the engine. I don’t think there are any conventions or controls for defining values and conditions in the way that I am.

Variable Changes

In the initial incarnation of the graph editor, it was possible to set the value of variables, and branch based on the value of variables, but the way it was implemented was… not good.

Variable names were entered as strings. This seemed like a problem to me - as the scope of a project grew I anticipated that it would become harder and harder to keep track of what variables were being used, and if they were entered correctly everywhere.
Values were also always strings - if you wanted a boolean, just enter “true” or “false”!
There was no scoping, just one global pool of variables for all graphs.
You could only assign constant values to variables. No incrementing or decrementing, arbitrary calculations, or using the values of other variables.
You could only compare to constant values for branching.

My initial changes to improve this situation were to introduce scoping and type definitions for variables. Variables could be scoped to the graph, to the area (i.e. “level” or “room” or however the game wanted to define it), or be global. They could also be boolean, int, float, or string. The UI would change to reflect the type, so you would get a checkbox for booleans and a numbox for numbers.

This was better, but still kind of awful, because everywhere a variable was used the scope and type would have to be selected again! Unlike in code there was no way to declare a variable once and then use it elsewhere with its type and scope already known.

So next… I implemented variable declarations, more or less! These are defined in the project, and anywhere that a variable is required in a graph it can be selected from a searchable dialog.

Now I felt like I was getting places, though the problem of only being able to set and compare constants remains, and is what I’m currently tackling. But more about that in a minute.

Choice Conditions

Another feature of the initial version of the graph editor was the ability to make dialogue choices only conditionally available to the player - for example making a choice dependent on having encountered a particular character or completed a particular quest. This was of course based on the comparison of a variable to a string constant, so it had all the same deficiencies as everything else about the variables, as well as a few of its own:

Only one variable could be used for each choice.
The only comparison available was equality, no greater or less than or anything like that.
There was no possibility of negation.

The minimal improvement would be to allow a comparison of a single variable with a selectable operator, and a constant value. But what if the choice depends on the value of multiple variables? What if you want to make different choices available if the player has encountered a character but not completed a quest, than if they have done both? This could maybe be achieved using branching nodes to set a third variable, but that seemed like jumping through a lot of unnecessary hoops. I wanted to be able to define complex conditions directly on the choices.

My solution was to add a dialog where an arbitrarily complex condition can be defined - though currently only with constants on the right side of any operator.

As you can see above, the condition is structured as a tree with boolean operators grouping the results of comparison operators. The whole condition is summarised as its (frankly much more understandable) equivalent GDScript.

So mission mostly accomplished - it was now possible to define conditions on choices with an arbitrary number of clauses. However, it was starting to seem like a lot of UI complexity to achieve something that is quite simple to do in code - almost like a type of visual scripting…

Visualising Values

Now it’s time to tackle the other side of the equation - the values to set or compare the chosen variables to.

For setting variables, I wanted it to be possible to increment or decrement values as well as setting static ones… But why not also allow values to be multiplied or divided? What if you want to set a variable to 2x another variable, or the result of a more complex calculation? These don’t seem like particularly likely requirements for my game, but why reduce the flexibility by only allowing a handful of fixed operations?

For comparisons, I initially only considered allowing a choice between a constant or another variable. But would these not also benefit from more flexibility? What if you want to check if a variable is greater than half another variable? If setting variables was as flexible as described above, this could be achieved by setting a temporary variable, but that seems unnecessarily round-about and annoying to have to do. Since the task is the same for both situations (obtain a value for the right side of an operator), it seemed like it would be prudent to create one control that would cover both.

Another factor is that most of the above concerns only apply to integer and float variables. Booleans have another set of operators that might be applied to them. Strings have a more restricted set of operators, but there are a variety of functions that you might want to apply, or methods that you might want to call on them - to_lower, rstrip, replacen, etc. In fact, the same might be true of integers and floats…

With all that in mind the requirements have become quite complex - I’m faced with implementing a small but significant subset of GDScript in a GUI!

The design I have so far allows for multiple variables or constants to have operators to be applied between them, grouped by brackets if necessary, and for a selection of appropriate (for the type) functions to be called:

One thing that annoys me about this is that it’s much the same structure as is involved in creating the conditions (a tree), but uses completely different controls and looks and works completely differently. It’s going to look quite strange when they are side by side in the conditions dialog… However, the tree control used for the conditions probably suits that better because the elements need to be selectable, and the “prefix notation” also suits it better I think, while it would be unfamiliar for most people for mathematical operators.

I can’t really tell at this point if this is at all intuitive or if there’s an obviously much simpler solution that I’ve overlooked. But it certainly makes me long to be able to just enter the values as code, regardless of their composition.

Could I Uuuh… Do That?

I have been thinking about what would be involved in allowing the user to enter conditions and values as the GDScript code they would likely already be familiar with.

Godot includes an Expression class which can be used to parse and execute arbitrary expressions, so conceivably that could be used to run whatever the user input, and make the entire GDScript language available to them. It looks like it can even parse the text for errors before running it, which would be all that I would want to do in the editor anyway. One likely difficulty is that the referenced variables would not actually be GDScript variables at runtime, but entries in one of several dictionaries, so I might have to write my own parser anyway to pick those out and replace them. I’m not sure I really want to do that.

If that didn’t work out, the alternative would be to parse the input myself (even more parsing!) and convert it into the same resource structures that I’m intending to have the UI create. This would likely be much more limited in which language constructs and operations it could support - and that might cause confusion or frustration for the user.

And, there are reasons why allowing these things to be defined as code might not be a good idea anyway:

I don’t really like the idea of having to switch from a GUI way of doing things to a code way of doing things when the rest of the plugin is very much GUI driven.
I don’t like the fact that the predefined variables would not be selectable, negating some of their utility. Or at least, to make them selectable I would have to implement some sort of auto-completion on top of everything else, which might be beyond me!
Some people use C# with Godot, and it’s unclear if the Expression class can parse C# - I suspect it can’t.
Using the Expression class would likely allow arbitrary GDScript to be entered and executed during graph processing. That might be too much flexibility! If I want to allow that it will be its own node type.

One other GUI option I can think of would be to allow value calculations and conditions to be defined using their own type of graphs. This might have the advantage of using well established UI conventions and existing controls. On the other hand, a graph editor is not ideal for defining a tree, and it would probably appear even more unnecessarily complex and confusing for the undoubtedly most common use cases of setting variables to constant values and defining simple conditions based on single variables. It would also not be any less work for me!

Conclusion

UI is hard

Category	Rating	Placing	Percentile
Overall	3.81	433	84th
Fun	3.259	1044	61st
Theme	3.672	873	67th
Innovation	3.345	754	72nd
Humor	3.596	277	89th
Graphics	4.466	99	96th
Audio	3.621	526	80th
Mood	3.846	460	83rd

Category	Rating	Placing	Percentile
Overall	4.136	109	96th
Fun	3.523	819	77th
Theme	4.14	279	92nd
Innovation	3.86	247	93rd
Humor	3.656	365	89th
Graphics	4.477	120	96th
Audio	4.102	121	96th
Mood	4.523	14	99th

Hyperlink Your Heart

M’lady Moon

Mike / Michelle

Women and Girls

Politics

What’s the difference?

Conclusion

Value and Values

What Are Corporate Values Even?

What is to be done?

The Ministry for the Future

More Books

The Power of Breaks

Coming Down

Timelapse

Treat Mania

Lovely, Dark and Deep

The Concept

What Worked

Digression

Use of Resources

Audio

Art

The Humour, apparently

What Didn’t

Digression

Gameplay

Bugs

Results

Post-Jam

Future Developments

Big Lick

Tools and Process

Timelapse

COVID Movies

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind

The Wizard

Flight of the Navigator

Wargames

Star Trek: Generations

Star Trek: First Contact

Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home

Star Trek VII: The Undiscovered Country

Back to the Futures

The Warriors

Short Circuit

The Rocketeer

From Hell’s Heart

The Concept

Art

Music

Sound Effects

Code

Results

Post-jam and Take-away

I Accidentally Visual Scripting

Variable Changes

Choice Conditions

Visualising Values

Could I Uuuh… Do That?

Conclusion

All My Yield()s, Gone!

Cutscene Graph Editor Status

Update: Pure Signals

A Culture of Conspiracy

Conspiracy Types

Stigmatised Knowledge

Fact is Fiction, Fiction is Fact

Emergency Management

The Speed of Lies

More Conspiracism

Syncthing Update

The Ancaps

The Inherent Contradictions of Ancapitalism

Stateless in Mexico

M’Aidez!

Nimpressions

choosenim

Typing

Uniform Function Call Syntax