Johannes Wรคrnโ€™s Tilde

๐Ÿ’ฉ๐Ÿญ๐Ÿข๐Ÿ˜€๐Ÿ@johanneswarn.com

True e-mail

Mail sent to [anything]@johanneswarn.com is set to redirect to my in use mail address. Nothing special. It does however also mean that email sent to ๐Ÿ’ฉ๐Ÿญ๐Ÿข๐Ÿ˜€๐Ÿ, or any other combination of emoji, @johanneswarn.com is redirected to me. ๐ŸŽ‰๐ŸŽ‰๐ŸŽ‰

Appleโ€™s mail apps arenโ€™t too happy though: โ€œ๐Ÿ‘…@johanneswarn.comโ€ does not appear to be a valid email address. Verify the address and try again.

December 20, 2014

Iโ€™ve had a small Threes clone codenamed โ€œSquaredโ€ on my hard-drive for a while. Think Threes with colours instead of numbers, and combined tiles remain the same rather than doubling their number.

It started as a HTML5 prototype: no animation, horrible colours, arrows to move. Just enough for me to evaluate if I liked it or not. I did. Still it was a Threes clone, and it didnโ€™t quite feel right.

A month later I started a iOS version, didnโ€™t come much further than starting it.

Months later I made a proper iOS version: nice enough animations, good colours, swipe controls. Then I left it to sit on my hard-drive. Showed it to some friends a family. My grandmother called and told me my sister had shown it to her and that she wanted me to send it to herยน; a friend is determined to beat my highscore of 1125.

Two days ago I decided: fuck my angst. Added a life meter with accompanying in-app purchase, leaderboards, and some first-time instructions. Yesterday I took some screenshots and submitted it to the app-store. โ€œSquared: A Cleaning Simulatorโ€ is no waiting for review.

ยน: Forgot my computer when visiting, and beta-distribution felt a bit too complicated.

December 8, 2014

My December games are all written using SpriteKit, Appleโ€™s 2D game framework. First thing I do is cmd+shift+N to create a new project, and then I select the SpriteKit template. Problem is, it isnโ€™t right for me โ€“ there is a bit of cruft. First thing I do, every time, is remove the cruft. Same way, everytime.

I really should do my own template.

December 4, 2014

The main idea for the RPG was to try and do a touch button, swipe up to item in menu, release interaction. In context: touch โ€œattacksโ€, swipe up to the kick row, release. Or: touch โ€œitemsโ€, swipe up to the potion row, release.

Didnโ€™t manage to get that working, and the battle system is nothing special. Still this kind of RPG battle system is rather addictive.

December 3, 2014

December third ended with a rather non-game game. Wanted to have a walking square. I finnaly have a walking square, but it isnโ€™t very nice. Oh well.

Still want to play around with tilt controls. Want to try doing camera tricks to give the player an idea of where theyโ€™re tilting (and a deadzone to removing noisy small movements and giving the player a safespot).

(I forgot to put the link to the GitHub page for my December games. Itโ€™s there now.)

December 2, 2014

Got this stupid idea to make to make a game for every day of December. So far so good. Theyโ€™ll probably all be iOS games, exploring control-mechanics. If you have a developer account feel free to download the projects, build and try them out; if you donโ€™t and for some reason really want to try them out โ€“ send me an email.

Yesterday became a Tetris Attack clone, and today a space shooter. Both are very rough around the edges, but the controls feel pretty solid.

November 2, 2014

My feed reader is still not parsing the content of an entry (just showing raw HTML) and there are some random crashed. Still, somehow, I look at it and feel โ€œpretty usableโ€.

November 1, 2014

So the capitals and โ€œรคโ€ in my name is causing quite a few problems (neither IRC, mail nor scp works). I emailed ~ford about it without a response, and I donโ€™t want to bother him too much.


Reading ~silverโ€™s kind of blog about โ€œPumpkin Spiceโ€ (and ~joeldโ€™s โ€œMicroblogging with RSSโ€) canโ€™t help but feel โ€œhey, thatโ€™s what Iโ€™m doingโ€.

October 30, 2014

Inspired by ~mathowie I removed a flag from ~delfuegoโ€™s shell scripts and added some JavaScript: tilde sorted.

October 25, 2014

Parsing dates from strings, that may or may not conform to a particular standard, is not particularly fun.

October 24, 2014

Everything is more or less โ€œworkingโ€. Just not in a very pretty way.

October 23, 2014

Thought I hade โ€œpass the batonโ€ figured out โ€ฆ


Changed the encoding in VIM to utf-8. Sanity.

October 22, 2014

Beat ~tristanโ€™s memory game.

October 20, 2014

Discovered p5.js. Tan curves are interesting. So are offsetting sin and cos curves by 3 and 5. Or offsettng a lot of curves (give it some time). Or just letting things pulse. The source for all four is here.

October 19, 2014

Iโ€™ve been writing a Mac/iOS RSS-reader for a while. It is slowly moving forward. A bit too slowly. Learning Core Data with a bit of frustrartion. It feels like the sort of frustration you have before it clicks and then you can breeze through for a while. I hope itโ€™s that kind of frustration.


Sarkeesianโ€™s end-goal appears to be asking game developers to write better characters for women, portray them well in games, and not go to the well with lazy female story tropes weโ€™ve seen hundreds of times before. My daughter just wants to play games with a character that looks like her.

~mathowie