These are already getting farther apart… life happens what can you do?

<Insert video here later>

Game Jam Submission: Fun or No Fun

Technically this falls into August, but I didn’t talk about it in August.

I decided to join the #LOWREZJAM 2026 game jam. This is my entry: Fun or No Fun.

Over all I scored 30th out of 122 entries, which was alright considering I bombed the authenticity category because it wasn’t a true 64x64 in all places (I learned from it though).

As usual my favorite metric is 24 comments out of 34 ratings. Granted, most of them were telling me where I messed up. I like that people are compelled to comment on my games.

Game: Bloop Towers v0.3.0

This month I released a new minor version of Bloop Towers. Key features of v0.3.0 are:

• Bigger, more colorful Bloops that splash into each other!
• Contraptions that level up
• Super Links that are… umm super
• Skippable story elements and improved tutorials
• 7 new, barely tested, stages

For the foreseeable future progress on this game will cease. I’m sorry to both fans. I ecstatic you enjoy what I’ve created, and the feedback has been phenomenal! Thank you :) I’ve learned so much from this one that will carry into other games.

Game: Everybody Hates You

Speaking of other games…

Okay, this is a working title, but I have to admit it provokes some questions.

I met with an artist and realized I needed to explain my goals. Bloop Towers didn’t meet that goal so I’ve switched to this project. It’s an RPG that focus on story. I’m learning all about building the kinds of systems RPGs need and it’s a lot more than I expected.

Right now I’m working towards a v0.1.0 and I’ll open it up to play test when I get there.

A short list of features for the first release:

• Save/load (most for debug and test)
• Proper player sprite
• Six, count ’em 6, NPCs
• More objects (the bucket and shovel are awesome, but might need more)
• Another quest

Now for Some Excuses…

There is a reason updates have slowed down. I got a job offer that looks like fun and I’m going ot take it.

The down side it I’ll have less time to work on games (the upside is I can pay rent and eat). I don’t consider this time lost, quite the contrary! This was an eye opener for me. For years, nay decades, I’ve worked on side projects and games for learning and amusement. Never with intent. These few months as a full-on indie dev have made me realize this is what I should have been doing all along. I’m grateful for what I’ve learned and hope to continue, albeit a little slower.

Internal Stuff

Website and Blog

I have them now, but it came at a minor embarrassment.

The Geekwagon logo is a representation of my current art ability.
Current Score: Plenty of room to grow!

I didn’t realize .games was a top level domain (TLD) until I saw geekwagon.games was available a few weeks ago. I’ve re-worked all the geekwagon.* TLD’s to make use of it. Except .com, for some reason it’s a valid business model to sit on unused domains and hope someone will pay $8k for it. I’m virtually the only customer for that product, so good luck HugeDomains.

The switchover was a bit of a process because .net has been my personal blog for years (dare I say decades). My personal blog is now at jamespryor.net (another .com I will never own) and deplicator.com.

OMG get to the embarrassing part!

About a week after the switchover I get an email from a guy that xkcd 1190 was no longer pointing to my At Your Pace project. It was redirecting to some nobody game site! AND they let Randall Munroe know too! Which is totally fair, but I felt pretty dumb.

It was a quick fix and now the redirect is handled at Cloudflare level instead relying my website. Sorry about that Mr. Munroe, I will do my best to prevent that from happening again because broken links are a pet-peeve of mine.

I know that seems silly. It’s still probably the most useful thing I’ve ever done on the Internet, so I’d like to keep it working for both of it’s users.

Also in news no one cares about but me, the website and blog are a single Hugo project now!

Internal Tools

These are internal tools. Some are new, they’ve all been iterated on, and I’m pretty sure they’ve never been mentioned in an update.

GitLab Activity

This collects activity on the Geekwagon GitLab group and creates a report. The sole purpose of this tool is to let me know how much I suck… okay it’s really to help me with this update. It’s not shared because it keeps the data in the repository and it’s pretty easy to vibe code if anyone wants their own. At it’s core, it keeps, categorizes, then makes a report of relative numbers of all the GitLab Event API data (this is the same stuff that makes the neat annual graphic of activity on a profile page).

Social Posts

This is another vibe coded tool that post to social media that isn’t problematic.

Problematic meaning, it’s not difficult to post to programmatically. Here is the short list:

• Federated socials (Bluesky and Mastodon) no problems
• Meta’s Facebook and Instagram were surprisingly easy
• Meta’s Threads, surprisingly different and impossible for my case
• YouTube doesn’t have an API for their Posts feature to impossible
• X/Twitter, I cannot pay a multi-billion dollar corporation to post on their platform once or twice a month, so impossible

Working out which ones are right for Geekwagon is an ongoing experiment. I’ve signed up for everything, and the ones I use through this tool are on the website. All the rest are on a list ascending order of how much I hate them. Maybe I’ll share that one day.

Gitlab Backup

Speaking of experiments, the commoditization of applications continue!

I found it easier to vibe code a GitLab backup tool instead of using an existing one. The key feature was to recursively backup groups and projects. The few that could were out of date or super complex. My version is available on GitLab, and yes, it backups up itself.