Patch Notes - February 2023

Quick-ish update. Here's the tl;dr:

Portfolio

In my head I thought this was going to be a complete rework of what was there, but I was able to reuse a lot of the existing structure which meant this only took a few hours. It's also mobile friendly, which it was anyway, but the new simplicity of it makes it even more mobile friendly. 

The search bar is gone, and the projects I worked on when I had a job are now included. These are split into selectable categories.

Projects are now displayed with just a thumbnail, and clicking on them will reveal more details about it. Some have YouTube videos which show off / explain what I worked on, and others have links to where they are playable.

There is also a Source Code tab, which leads into...

Source Code

In an attempt to put some more of my code public, I dug through some projects to figure out what I could show off.

There is a simple 3DS homebrew port of an Android version of Tic Tac Toe I made. It's the only C++ project that I finished, and is unfortunate in that it doesn't really demonstrate it much as there's only 3 code files. Plus it was written about 8 years ago, so I'd probably do things differently now.

I commented all the code in There's Always a Bigger Fish, and removed some private keys from the Android project, as that is a fairly up-to-date demonstration of what I have done.

As well as that there is an "in-progress" Unity game called Balls (I Guess?) to show that I can use Unity. Functionally it works, but it needs more levels (and there is a bug that will occur with the level select once more levels go in which needs to be fixed). But I've spent the past 2 weeks playing Hogwarts Legacy instead, and forcing myself back into making more levels instead of working on something else is going to be tough.

Thingsies on Itch

Thingsies, the collection of word games that I spent a lot of time developing last year before nobody played it, is now on Itch.

I had tried releasing them on Itch originally but as soon as I made them public they broke. The Share functionality refused to work because permissions issues prevented data being copied to the clipboard, and even after removing that there were more issues with accessing localStorage.

I don't know what convinced me to give it another go, but it only took an hour to get all 4 of them working. The localStorage issue was something that only seemed to occur when incognito, so I wrapped the LoadData function in a try-catch and displayed an error to users to prompt them to either play in a standard window, or hop over to where they have been gathering dust for 6 months.

Because Itch displays them in an iframe, I also had to make sure that all the links would open in a new tab on the iframe's parent instead of opening the link in the iframe, as there was no way back if that happened.

And in less than 24 hours, they've now had more plays than any of my other games on Itch combined.

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