Creative Direction

  • Presentation

  • Project Planning

  • Visualization

One of the extra classes I had in design school, before I dropped out, was app design. The instructor gave us the assignment to make a game concept and present proposal like it would be in an app store. This seems like an easier way to present my ideas to myself and others. Even back then I wanted to make a grid based RPG. Dungeon Crawls are classic, fun, there has been one swimming in my mind for years now. At this point putting pen to paper can not be writing it down. "I am not an writer, I am an illustrator. That does not draw for months." Just making this development log has been a torturous experience that only rambling to my phone and truncating massive blocks of text could solve. If anything is going to get me to be creative it's just framing this as project proposal. The fact that writing my ideas down and making a chart has been the only way to organize my thoughts says so much about me. A co-worker asking me,

"What am I planning on doing with all this?"
- Co-Worker

It feels nice when people in my IRL life asked me questions about these projects.

Role Playing Games

  • Net/hack

  • Art Fight '26

  • PAWN STAR

According to the Berlin Interpretation1 PAWN STAR so far does not fit the standard of a Rogue-like. I'm a little scared of a making a procedural map in GB Studio. So instead a map with randomly switching rooms, seems less constricting. Until I feel capable of handling the Hard-Values, let us refer to PAWN STAR as a Chess-Like. The ancient game has been a round for years. Leaving so much documentation that just learning about it leaves my notes flooded with more resource then I could hope to use. This game will follow a pawn that defeats enemy pieces to unlock their attacking moves. The hope is to use procedure difficulty based on the about of skills a player acquires. Say, a new game is started and the player can only attack normally. Rooks will roam through maps without hostility but will attack once the Pawn has acquired one of them. As more enemies are defeated stronger enemies are unlocked. The hope is to have random pieces appear in 'openings' that challenge the player to think critically instead of behave aggressively.

Art Fight '26 will hopefully be a dungeon crawl/first person game... I not know... Maybe, my opinion will would be better if I played Rogue. Yeah, it probably would be. With every page I read about C/C++ programming I realize these little games are actually magnum opus in their own right.

Homebrew ROM & Operating Systems

  • GB Studio ROM OS

  • Endless Sky DE-make

  • Dislyte DE-mix

Picotron2 looks so cool, but C/C++ is taking up so much of my time. Learning Lua 3is just not in the cards for me. The commitment to GB Studio and eventually Nintendo 64 Home brews feels like the constraint that can keep me on the right path. Thankfully Lua and C/C++ are compatible enough to make the integration seem plausible. The OS will end up being a series of mini-games that emulate the computer experience a calculator, text editor, alarm, and maybe games.

Projects like the Stardust: Stadium, Dislyte DE-mix, Endless Sky DE-make. Might end up being a more complicated version of what I want to do in the next five years time. Writing this down now, I might try to create an Mod for Endless Sky before creating the DE-make. This could give me a better understanding of the source code? Dislyte a gacha game with style that I love will be another passion project, or excuse just to play the game again. Cute Games Club4 has become my Pastor and guiding light in embracing feminine aesthetics designs chooses. She dropped a bar about, "Dress-up games are a great way to learn inventory systems," I love that so much. The goal of Art Fight 2026 is to have playable characters that use RPG mechanics for combat and skill interactions. Just deconstructing the mechanics of Dislyte has left me scared of what an RPG would actually require. My initial plan for Art Fight 2025 was to make a dress up game based around characters other made available. I had to drop that because inventory systems seemed to complicated. The DE-mix would need some variant of Dislyte's equipment system to be true to the mechanics of a gacha game.

Again writing this is giving me ideas of what needs to study and deconstructed in order to achieve these lofty goals. Endless Sky DE-make will have to be the tutorial and maybe three other solar systems. We will worry more about that once the design are ironed out.

Endless Sky Fleet GUI

  • Trader Fleet

  • Combat Fleet; Pirate; Militia

  • Traveling Company

I'll have to grade all the formations and maybe call other for help. I find myself making ships with dumb names and worse configuration. Thankfully there is Discord Communityand activity Modding community, find a should be straight forward. Using resource slike the Simple Free Media Library would probably be the best bet, and some Database Management System for grading all the equipment, and handling math expressions like Heat, Weight, Speed, and Inertia.All things accessible from the Endless Sky GitHub. Even though the game is made with OpenGL, SFML seems less frightening, plus there is a college professor explaining how to use it.

C/C++ Journey Summary

  • Reading List

  • Magnum Opus

  • Nintendo 64

  • Tools?

After reading Mike McGarth's book on C++ programming, the life and love that header files provide radiates toward me. Every closed door becomes an opportunity to write one unnecessarily file, in the name of clean code. Before, any progress can be started on the Endless Sky Fleet GUI. The other projects need to be completed. Maybe, a few more projects in the future to help me block out what I want the ESF GUI to do.

Moving forward with 3D projects Crocotile 3D might be the better option. If it proves to be easier on my Laptop CPU. I saw this really interesting thing, an Operating System for the Picotron. I need to squash any hope or dream of making something like that for the Nintendo 64, but maybe I could make a simple OS Wario-ware like for the Game Boy. I'm not making an OS for, um, Nintendo, even though that'll be astonishing

Maybe one day, I will be creatively fulfilled and happy.

It will be a long journey, but I want to make my Art Fight '30 game a N64 home brew game. Honestly in fives years I would like to be proficient in C/C++ and Lau enough to just mod the original Pokemon: Stadium. Another game I should play and take notes on.

Footnotes

Endless sky blog

. Endless Sky, an open source space trading and combat game. RetrievedĀ SeptemberĀ 2, 2025, from

Endless Sky Blog
28 Jun 2025
https://endless-sky.github.io/blog.html