iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Nigel Kennington @nigelkennington.bsky.social · 26/04/2025

OK, so this week we have #noscreenshotsaturday. I love #monogame, but the 3d support is massively behind the 2d and my early decisions have started to smell so it's time to refactor of the 3d backend (a grander name than it deserves!) and clear some technical debt. Hopefully it won't take too long 🫣

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Nigel Kennington @nigelkennington.bsky.social · 19/04/2025

With some better code underneath - time to work on the card actions again. Firstly lets get some animation going as the cards transition between placements - a little lerp should do for now. Might make it fancier later... #monogame #indiedev #screenshotsaturday

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Nigel Kennington @nigelkennington.bsky.social · 12/04/2025

With a digital #boardgame like Microverse, the ability to cache player actions and undo them seems pretty important, so this week we have a simple command pattern layer between the player inputs and the game world. Very satisfying to build a galaxy and then undo it! #monogame #screenshotsaturday

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Nigel Kennington @nigelkennington.bsky.social · 06/04/2025

Late again! Microverse players now have their stock of influence and hexes, which doesn't sound like much, but it involved refactoring a bunch of stuff to c# Interfaces that *should* make things easier later on. Also cute rollout tooltips for funsies. #monogame #indiedev #screenshotsaturday

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Nigel Kennington @nigelkennington.bsky.social · 29/03/2025

Very litle time to work on Microverse this week. I wanted to get the "weird" systems implemented for #screenshotsaturday, but the Binary Star was being a bit of a dick so the Nebulae and Black Hole do exist, but the underlying code is bit of a mess. I'll regret that later... #indiedev #monogame

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Nigel Kennington @nigelkennington.bsky.social · 22/03/2025

Satisfying one this week! Cards are now in "hands" or "displays" and have backs. AND systems can now hold and display their influence totals. First time for #screenshotsaturday that Microverse has started to feel like the beginnings of a proper #monogame #boardgame thing!

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Nigel Kennington @nigelkennington.bsky.social · 16/03/2025

My god, it's full of cards! I think going "full nordic" with the feedback animations would be inappropriate for the theme, but a bit of bounce is still nice. #monogame #boardgame #indiedev

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Nigel Kennington @nigelkennington.bsky.social · 08/03/2025

Skipped last week: away somewhere lovely. Back for #screenshotsaturday now though and we have a skybox and a bit of 4x style camera control. Might need to dim the textures a wee bit though to keep the eye focused on the "table". #monogame #TheresNoSuchThingAsParallaxWhenYourHeadsInABucket

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Nigel Kennington @nigelkennington.bsky.social · 24/02/2025

Damnit. Missed #screenshotsaturday, but gotta keep it going! Got the grid done thanks to the most excellent www.redblobgames.com/grids/hexagons/ and a small amount of whimpering. Also, hello Binary Star: you were MUCH easier to casually write into a rulebook than to add to the system code.

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Nigel Kennington @nigelkennington.bsky.social · 15/02/2025

Microverse is very much a "spare time" project, so progress will be slow, but #screenshotsaturday will hopefully help keep it going! This week: all basic system tiles now have game traits. Oh and billboarded glow for the actual stars. Cause pretty things are pretty. #monogame #writingbadcodeslowly

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Nigel Kennington @nigelkennington.bsky.social · 08/02/2025

So: we were working on a #boardgame, a sequel to Microbrew: Microverse. It was a tiny abstract 4x game in a mint tin. It kinda got mothballed mid-pandemic but its been poking at me recently so I'm going to work on a #monogame version a bit and see what happens. Here's a VERY basic 1st POC! #indiedev

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Nigel Kennington @nigelkennington.bsky.social · 31/01/2025

The lego league regional at dundee and angus is the largest (i think) in Scotland. 16 teams of young people completing robotics challenges they've been preparing for for months. (This is one of the robot game judging tables mid-match!)

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Nigel Kennington @nigelkennington.bsky.social · 17/12/2024

Hardware lab at Edinburgh College is looking pretty festive!

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Nigel Kennington @nigelkennington.bsky.social · 15/12/2024

The problem was as soon as I tried to work with it in a practical scenario, well, I think the repo can speak for itself...

Repo commit log with most of the commits showing "restructuring" or "refactoring" and a light sprinking of "ranty old man" type comments.

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Nigel Kennington @nigelkennington.bsky.social · 12/12/2024

More like Pinkishorangesky this morning...

Pinkish orange sunrise. Does that count as a pun? I'm not a punologist...

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Nigel Kennington @nigelkennington.bsky.social · 27/11/2024

Oh, been there my friend! Soldier on, you got this!

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Nigel Kennington @nigelkennington.bsky.social · 26/11/2024

Pretty chuffed with how my hacky little #monogame asset processing widget for my novice/student game developers is working out. (Assets by @kenney.bsky.social and sample sheet by lyaseek.itch.io)

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