Souls Like Strings

• When fixing someone else's mistake it's generally best not to make one of your own
  • You can't rescue passing nil to JSON.parse for some reason
• The senior engineer who referred me for my job has (had) a blog!
• More of a 'today I remembered' but there's a native HTML progress element
  • It's much easier than using divs/pseudoelements
• expect_any_instance_of needs to go at the start of the spec, not the end
• Having a StandardError rescue for your controller action (or anything really) is a pretty bad idea
  • makes it very difficult...

Surprisingly souls-like

Why

• Nails the intangibles, feels better than it should
• Evocative pixel art
• Compact & fair, even on hard

Why Not

• Pretty short
• Not especially challenging, even on hard

Impressions

My expectations for this were right around Shantae given the similarities; retro pixel metroidvanias which at least from their store page look like they were drawn with one hand. In reality Momodora was more or less the exact opposite of Shantae; rather than being bright & cheery but clunky and frustrating Momodora sets a distinctly Dark Souls-like mood and plays with surprising...

• 'Next refresh' means 'next background refresh' not 'next time you can successfully request a refresh'
  • It's still wrong though haha
• Demoing is easier when you break it up into chunks
  • And have separate links/accounts for each chunk
  • And close the links from the previous section before starting a new one
  • Luckily for my talk at Tokyo Rubyist I have slides & no links
• Not for the first time, returning inside a block (like reject) actually returns in Ruby
  • What you're thinking of is next
  • Please do not get stuck on this for...

Projects

Continued writing this blog! Did not make as much progress on my meetup talk as I probably should have (i.e more than 0) but I've always worked best close to the deadline anyway.

Games

Despite being in Italy for 10 days of the month I racked up over 90 hours of Slay the Spire 2 in the 16 remaining days after its March 5th release. That's just over 5.5 hours a day which sounds about right haha, more or less every moment I could be using my laptop. As expected it's the original but better in every way in...

See you fantasy cowboy

Why

• Well written & voice acted
• A gigantic, crunchy CRPG to sink your teeth into
• Turn based mode! Very cool they went back to add it

Why Not

• You don't have 100+ hours to sink into a single game

Impressions

This is absolutely a game I would've burned 100+ hours on back in my days of gaming freedom, but with a wife and soon kids I do not have 100+ hours to burn.

Right from the start, Pillars makes it clear you're in for the long haul. There's more lore...