Ten Years

Oh, how time flies! Yesterday marked the tenth anniversary of this blog. To commemorate, I am relaunching my site under a new domain. Also in the spirit of renewal, I’ll be doing some spring cleaning, wrapping up old projects so I can focus on things that are more relevant to me now.

I’ve moved my site from its old domain, jacius.info, to croisant.net. The domain “jacius.info” comes from an old screen name I used for gaming and IRC, but have long since outgrown.

Besides moving to a new domain, I’ve migrated my blog from WordPress to Jekyll. I’m currently using a custom variant of the Hyde template for Jekyll. I have made extensive modifications to improve accessibility and add features like rendering comments on old posts, and a JavaScript-powered search system (using lunr.js).

There’s still work to do on the site. I’d like to further customize and improve the site’s visual design, and add portfolio and C.V. sections. Some of the old posts are missing images, which I hope to soon recover from my old computer’s hard drive. But this will suffice for now.

While migrating the blog, I had an opportunity to read through my old posts. My first post on this blog was on May 30, 2007. In it, I describe a freeform creative game/toy involving colorful, musical creatures.

Even back in 2007, that idea had already been a dream of mine for years, and it has continued to be ever since. Musical creatures came up again in 2008, then as a more fleshed-out idea in 2009. The idea inspired a small musical game/toy, Droplet, which I created for a 72-hour game jam in 2009. But it was not until 2011 that I made my first attempt at actually creating the game.

In that first blog post back in 2007, I also confronted my own struggles with perfectionism, and my tendency when working on side projects to lose motivation or get side-tracked. Sadly, these too have been recurring themes over the years. My 2011 attempt ultimately collapsed as I got side-tracked studying and trying to improve Common Lisp, eventually became disillusioned with it, and lost motivation to continue the project.

I haven’t written about that game idea since then, but I periodically come back to it. I took another stab at it in 2013 using CoffeeScript and WebGL, and most recently in August 2016 using Rust. I’ve also fleshed out and refined the game concept, started on a design document, created a “mood board” of visual inspirations (mostly deep sea creatures), and analyzed some games that provided inspiration.

I’ve gotten much further on this latest attempt than any before, mainly because of the accumulated experience and prior preparation. Progress stalled in November as more urgent events demanded my attention, but I’m looking forward to resuming work on it soon.