JoelleCorgi

Hello! I am an old scruffy corgi in a tin foil hat. Before you ask: yes, I work in security, and yes, the hat is standard equipment. It has never once been breached.  And yes, we have access to both a big keyboard and the interwebs.  Permission, not so much.

I started my winding and aimless life as a developer (programmer in those days), spent a good stretch in DevOps keeping developers happy, servers purring, and pipelines running, and for the past few years I have been a security engineer, where my job is to be politely suspicious of everything. It suits me. The hat fits, and I get to growl grumpily at other people and it's expected.

Games have some of the most interesting and fun problems to solve. Solving problems, or figuring out how to shortcut the solution to a problem, is actually fun for me for some unknown reason. For the past decade and change, I have been busily making problem-solving projects in C, C++, and Unity/C#... All sorts of topics: physics simulations, game AI, tools and utilities, plus plenty of goofing off and shenanigans. GOAP and Utility AI are favourites. Every option a peon has gets a score, and the peon picks the best one, which is roughly how I choose lunch. I have also spent many happy hours rediscovering how painful A* pathfinding is, and that literally doing it backwards is the right way, because a character that takes the long way round is a bug I cannot leave alone.

Then Unity changed its licensing in a way that surprised a lot of developers, including me, which is odd since I likely would *NEVER* publish anything, let alone sell it. Obviously, I took that personally. So now I am learning Godot 4. It is free, it is new to me, and its licence has not surprised me yet. Though I need glasses to read that small print, and currently they're on the cat.

The games that shaped me are a mixed bag. There is the whole X series, where I loved the depth of the game. The more you put into it, the more you got out of it. It never punished you for NOT becoming a merchant magnate or a pirate king or star fleet admiral, and the idea of writing scripts to run your own ships and fleets was intensely compelling. Then there are the city builders and management games, RPGs like Skyrim and Fallout, building games like Stormworks, hard sims, and the absolutely weird No Man's Sky and Starfield. Very few of them scratched the itch of in-game coding of a physical entity as much as I wanted, so I decided to build my own.

That is BeltScript: a top-down 2D space sim where you write code to run your ship, from the reactor to the mining laser. It is a proof of concept, so it is bare, but I would love to hear what you think.

Away from the keyboard, I really like lobstah and carrots. Not together. Probably. That you're aware of.