Tinkerer's Notebook

I should be upfront about something before we get into it today. I’m a scientist who builds games and apps as a hobby. I’m not a professional software developer. I started learning Swift before the AI revolution and it was slow, and tedious. I’d spend more time searching StackOverflow, watching YouTube videos and googling specific problems that didn’t have answers than actually working on the proj...

The Stack is almost done. I know what almost done feels like because I’ve been almost done for a while now. The card mechanics work. The reward loop is solid. The difficulty system runs from calm cyan through ten tiers of escalating threat to deep warning red. The app icon is mostly decided (man that was an experiment in and of itself). TestFlight is close. I can feel it. There’s one thing left th...

I did not choose this experiment. It arrived at my door in a gift bag. A family friend gave my daughter a five gallon tank for her sixth birthday. Cruel joke or thoughtful gift — you can decide after we get to the end of this story. At the very least it was well intentioned as their kid, my daughter’s “best friend”, recently got his own betta fish. So now we can all go on this journey together. Ya...

The Stack was working. Mechanically, technically, objectively working. Cards played. Enemies attacked. Health depleted. The win condition triggered. I could playtest a full run from start to finish without hitting a single bug. It worked . And, yet, it felt like nothing. It’s not that it felt bad. More like it was missing something. It felt hollow. The kind of hollow that’s hard to diagnose. Every...

Podcasts are still in right? Testing the idea of recording my written notebook ideas into a simple podcast. Recorded while the family was a sleep please forgive the slightly above a whisper voice. Get full access to Tinkerer's Notebook at johndav.substack.com/subscribe