Update: Lestac is now available in Early Access on itch.io! Read more on the official page

So, Lestac is out! Ain’t that something? For those who don’t know, it’s Sylvain and I’s entry for Ludum Dare 28, a video game jam that happens every four months.

Here’s how it looks:

You can play it now if you haven’t yet - it’s available for Linux, OS/X, and Windows. And then you can come back and read this postmortem if you will!

Another day, another problem.

This time the problem looks suspiciously like Conway’s Game of Life, or, I guess, any old Cellular automaton.

We have a map like so:

L.LL.LL.LL LLLLLLL.LL L.L.L..L.. LLLL.LL.LL L.LL.LL.LL L.LLLLL.LL ..L.L..... LLLLLLLLLL L.LLLLLL.L L.LLLLL.LL

And for each iteration:

• L symbols turn into # if there’s no # in any of the 8 adjacent cells

When I get a little bit too emotional about my current baby, the itch.io app, there’s always a timely support ticket reminding me that it is currently, still a glorified game downloader.

However true that is, that doesn’t mean it’s easy! In the past year, I’ve had to account for a bunch of failure conditions that can happen, some of which I didn’t realize were even possible. Let’s review them, for fun!

rock 0.9.5 is out! It’s the meanest, slimmest, baddest rock release yet.

To update, run git pull && make rescue as usual. To install from scratch, clone the repo, cd into it, and run make rescue from there - it’ll download the latest bootstrap, compile itself from C, then recompile itself from ooc.

Running rock -V should print this happy little version line:

A little less than two months after the previous release, I’m happy to announce that the ooc compiler rock 0.9.8, codename columbia is now out.

The impatients can readily skip to the release notes, but for those who prefer a narrative, let me tell you why I’m excited about this release.

String interpolation

We’ve thrown around this idea a lot since the early versions of rock since we have a few rubyists in our ranks, but only recently Alexandros Naskos took matters into his own hands and just implemented the fuck out of it.

In the last article, we found where code was hiding in our samples/hello executable, by disassembling the whole file and then looking for syscalls.

Later on, we learned how to inspect which memory ranges are mapped for a given PID (process identifier). We saw that memory areas weren’t all equal: they can be readable, writable, and/or executable.

Against all odds, it looks like the year 2020 will actually come to an end - in less than a day now. I know! Hard to believe for me too.

A lot of things have happened for me personally, and professionally. It’s been a big year in many ways, and I feel like, to get some closure, I need to highlight some of them.

From “looking at graphs” to “driving to the hospital”

Last week-end, I participated to Ludum Dare for the fourth time in a row!

Downloads: Linux (64) | OS/X | Windows

Story

So here is our entry: Legithief. The backstory is simple, yet cunning: you are an ordinary thief practicing ordinary acts of thievery in the houses of ordinary people to make a living. But one day.. you are quietly robbing yet another home, when you are suddenly smashed in the head with a bat.