New blog, new app, new screenshots

Lots of stuff going on this week.

New dev blog

First off, my website got a much-needed overhaul. The horrible slowness of Wordpress.com was driving me nuts, so I switched to a custom-built site.

I used Jekyll, which is a static site generator. It spits out a bunch of HTML files which you can upload to a server, as opposed to Wordpress, which generates fresh HTML every time someone loads your page.

Advantages:

• Absolute control. You can customize the site theme without dealing with mountains of horrible PHP. And I can finally post HTML5 videos.
• You can host your website on Amazon S3, which is about 50 cents per month, 10x faster than a normal server, and pretty much guaranteed to never go down. Wordpress absolutely crawls in comparison.
• Perfect for coders, because you can write articles in raw HTML or Markdown in your favorite text editor, and you can track your site in a Git repository.

Disadvantages:

• No easy way to offer email subscriptions to readers. RSS is easy to set up though.
• Jekyll is written in Ruby and thus has a bunch of annoying dependencies to install. Still, the whole process is definitely easier than setting up a fresh Wordpress install.

Migrating the comments to Disqus was super easy. I use s3_website to deploy the site to S3. It only updates diff'd files, so it only takes a few seconds in most cases.

Overall I recommend it if you're a coder.

New app

I got hired this summer to do a mobile game as part of a franchise tie-in. The game is finally out today for free on Android.

Here's some (raw, uncut) gameplay footage:

grepr patch

grepr has garnered a modest but promising amount of attention. Most notably, iDubbbzTV had some great things to say about it. (warning: language)

I mostly agreed with his bigger complaints, so I made a few tweaks:

• The terminal menu is now more simple and straightforward to operate
• The enemy AWK drone is now larger and easier to spot
• The third level, where the enemy AWK first appears, is now greatly simplified
• Some glitchiness pertaining to the data node collision volume is now fixed

More importantly, the game now runs on Linux! It's 64-bit only at the moment, but everything seems to run just fine. If the game glitches on you, make sure you have libsdl2-2.0.0 installed.

New screens

Amidst all this craziness you might think I've abandoned Lemma. And you'd be wrong. Here are some fresh new screens:

I also fleshed out a whole ton of writing:

So yeah, lots of stuff happening. Stay tuned.

That's it for this week. Thanks for reading!