I’ve been creatively crazy the last few weeks since ramping up my Claude usage. Just today I got an almost exact copy of the classic arcade game Spy Hunter feature complete and playing nicely. I’ll do my usual routine of playing with it for a month or so intermittently so I can note any issues that I do spot and have another pass at a later date but it does feel like the full game already.
And it’s not just Spy Hunter I’ve been working on over the last few months:
As well as Swoop, I’ve completed a few other games. Monster crunch – which is a 3d maze avoid the dinosaur and collect the gold mini game based on the old ZX81 3D Monster maze. I’ve also created my own version of Skooldaze with some creative licence towards bits I liked and bits I didn’t from the original Spectrum & C64 game.
One of the new tools I’ve come up with is my own alternative application to Snaggit, which is a custom screen, window and snippet grabbing system from your screen. Very handy for screenshots, clips of areas on display and has a built in vault system so some images you can keep secure – for stuff like private documents maybe, and a normal viewing area where you can go through all your previous clips or remove them, if no longer required. That one will save me the yearly annual update cost on snaggit when I didn’t need anything else it did.
I also created an app called Plexible for working on my media folders and tidying up filenames so that Plex can match them with descriptions and the right images for each movie and tv show on my system.
I’ve done numerous portals for information that run externally via github pages for the online game Torn, which I play a lot. I even got one built on my NAS drive as it required an accessible database for other members of my faction rather than just me.
After getting hopelessly frustrated with my old development spreadsheet where I used to record information about all the games I can remember ever working on, I finally built a new system that runs from its own sql server in a web browser and is so much more powerful for recording all my memories and screenshots of stuff long lost to history. Literally just for me rather than sharing, that one is.
And just this weekend I’ve built myself a new project management system for all the many projects I’ve found myself working on with this new level of productivity and creative freedom that Claude has given me. I call that DevManifest and it’s got all the features i need in a bookshelf style UI for everything I work on, so I can jump in and out of projects at will and i’m able to pick up on them instantly. Bug fixes cards, idea sheets, screenshots, revision history – all the old favourites. I’ve always wanted to do this because there’s nothing better than writing your own tool to manage working on your other tools. If you get what I mean. Not sure I actually do 🙂
The main effort over the last month or so has gone into a new writing application that I’ve been developing to help me with my creative writing efforts I’ve worked on over the last 40 years. A lot of stuff was lost but I’m now working on shoveling the good stuff and the shit into my app, which is called Skrift. Rough translation is nordic for Script. It’s hard to find a good name for a writing application as there are quite a few out there. I wrote it to rival the kind of power that Scrivener has, as that was my tool of choice a few years ago when I previously decided I was going to pick up this creative writing hobby and somehow actually didn’t. I’ve added features like an AI assistant for shooting ideas and dialogue back and forth, though, as well as some other really handy features. I’m so proud of this app and what it can do for the people that find it that I’ve decided to put it out there so I’m looking into a payment partner to sell it and possibly I’ll end up putting this onto the Apple App Store as my first paid project, rather than Opal, as that’s still got some work to do to be sellable as it stands.
Progress on Dev20 is still happening as well. My last major work was putting in support to build turbo rascal pascal source code as another compile option. This does work now in the latest build, but I need to do more testing and accounting for external files that may be part of the project and in TRSE’s own format, such as character sets and screens. Dev20 will be given away for free, though. Just like every other retro development system I’ve ever used. I’m not breaking that unwritten rule, for sure.
I’ve not even mentioned my 3d racing game prototype that I put together a few weeks ago for testing a concept. Or the Meme generator I’m planning for the people that use forums and like to place these for fun. There have also been a couple of work tools I’ve come up with that are helping me with that day to day.
I should also mention a project I’ve called lander which gets rid of the default microsoft clickshitbait articles when you open a new tab and just shows me nice space pictures instead as well as custom buttons that launch different apps and documents from it. Definitely one of my better ideas.
And finally I remade Rhino. That won’t mean anything to anyone else but me but it’s a remake of a type-in Vic 20 game that I played with my grandfather back in 1982. I think it was the first Vic 20 game I ever saw, apart from Ski in the old Rabbit software store in Harrow while I was still in school.