Saving game data is easy. Making your save code survive every kind of hardware failure is not. A lot of these issues will never show up during testing, but if your game reaches a wide audience with many different kinds of hard drives in different states of degradation, you will start to get bug repo...

Evil Trout’s second game, The Incident at Galley House, is out now on Steam! Last year, after The Roottrees are Dead shipped, I wrote a technical blog post about its development, which was well received, so I decided to do the same thing for this game. Note: The images in this post have minor spoile...

During the last Steam Next Fest, I played a demo of a puzzle game called DEG that was getting a lot of buzz. The game is made for people who like grid puzzles like Sudoku, or Nurikabe, with many additional unique concepts and puzzle ideas that are tutorialized silently to the player. Needless to say...

Background Our next game, The Incident at Galley House, is an adaptation of a text-based game called Type Help. It takes place at Galley House, a dwelling in the English countryside, during a dinner party where things go sideways. Galley House is divided into many rooms, and the core gameplay involv...

The Roottrees are Dead was released on January 15, 2025 and it did much better than I ever expected. The reception has been amazing. In just over a week, the game hit the magic mark of 500 reviews on Steam, and triggered the “Overwhelmingly Positive” status. On BlueSky, Bloomberg writer Jason Schrei...

Last year I broke my elbow. This meant that I had to take a break from programming for about six weeks, and The Secrets of Skellig, my indie game, was put on hold. After a couple of weeks, I recovered enough to do some basic keyboard and mouse movements, and I stumbled on a free game called The Root...

Note: The Secrets of Skellig is on indefinite hold now while I work on other things. I’ve wanted to dip my feet back into game development for a while, and last year I decided to put my money where my mouth is. I resigned from my full time job at Discourse and pulled up a bunch of YouTube tutorials ...

Over the last couple of months, I’ve been posting a series of videos about early PC gaming and programming on my YouTube Channel. It’s been quite a fun journey and I thought I might write a few words about it. I have a lot of nostalgia for early games, which makes sense since it was how I spent most...

I have two 4K TVs at home, one in the bedroom and one in my living room. Both have consoles attached. One has a PS4 Pro and one has a Nintendo Switch and both are great. However, I also have a gaming PC in my office, which is quite powerful compared to any home console Mine is equipped with a RTX 20...

I recently moved into a bigger condo which had a wall mount pre-installed in the bedroom for a TV, so I decided to take advantage of it and bought a second TV. Previously, I was using an Intel NUC attached to my TV and running LibreElec. If you’ve not heard of LibreElec, it’s a very cool minimal Lin...

Once in a while, I daydream about being thrown back in time. I’d have no Wikipedia, no books, or any access to information except what’s already in my head. If I were thrown into Victorian London, what could I do? What could I teach them? Well, the first thing I would do is tell them to wash their h...

It’s been over a year since I wrote a blog entry! And while of course the universal excuse of “I’ve been busy” applies, I think we reached a point in Discourse’s development where we just were able to focus on the product without a lot of stuff getting in our way. I’ve now been working on Discourse ...

Back in September, Codinghorror wrote a popular post on the state of android Javascript performance on Discourse’s Meta forum. It drew a lot of attention, and led to some fascinating discussions on our forum and behind the scenes with browser engineers. The poor performance of Discourse on Android w...

Recently I became enamored with The Witness and after thinking about the game for a long time decided to sit down and record a little essay about it. Check it out below!

Recently I became infatuated with TIS-100, a game which aptly describes itself as “the assembly language programming game you never asked for!” The point of the game is to program the (imaginary) TIS-100 CPU to solve problems. For example, you might need to take input from two ports and swap them, t...

Previously I posted notes and links for my talk about “Ember at 10 feet” from the Embergarten Saturday Symposium. Today my awesome friends at Unspace posted a video of the talk, which you can watch below: Source Code | Online Demo

Over the weekend I spoke at the Embergarten Saturday Symposium, which was an awesome mini conference on Ember in Toronto. My topic was “Ember at 10ft”, and it was about how to build a TV friendly interface in Ember.js. The talk was recorded but not yet posted, however I’ve already posted the source ...

Recently I fell in love with Pretender, the mock server library in Javascript, so I decided to record a screencast showing how to use it in an Ember.js integration test: The source code for the login application is on github. The finished version is in the pretender branch.

I’ve found that a lot of people don’t know how powerful the Chrome Developer Tools are, especially when paired with the Ember Inspector. I recorded this short screencast to show a handful of tricks you can use when debugging Ember.js applications: The source code to the Bug Tracker project is on git...

Once upon a time it used to be difficult to create integration tests in Ember.js. Fortunately, the framework has come a long way and it’s now really easy to get integration testing working in your application. This screencast shows how to set it up with ember-cli: There is some boilerplate code requ...

Time for another screencast! This one is shorter and shows how easy it is to wrap a jQuery plugin in an Ember.js component for reuse.

One of my more popular blog entries is on using Ember.js without Ember Data. Recently I’ve been going through my old entries and making sure they don’t have any glaring mistakes, and I realized this would be a good opportunity to convert my emberreddit project to ember-cli. This screencast shows how...

Javascript is a fantastic example of how something, despite having visible warts and very poor design, can dominate the tech landscape. Nobody uses Javascript because it’s a beautiful language; they use it because it’s ubiquitous. Its warts are now well understood and most have workarounds. An amazi...

How many times has the following happened to you? You go to a web site and it asks you to create an account. You fill out a form with all the obvious fields and hit submit. The page refreshes and shows you the form again. Phone Number is required Well, that’s annoying. There was no indication that t...

Everything you render in a browser, whether it’s a blog post or a tweet or a video, has a performance cost. At the very least, you will be asking the browser to render a handful of tags and text elements that make up your user interface. That structure, a subtree in the browser’s DOM, can be quite c...

One thing I’m really proud of is that when we launched Discourse, we had first class Internationalization (i18n) support ready to be used. Our first release only English, but thanks to our community we have 18 localizations of our software in progress! Here’s what Discourse looks like in Simplified ...

I learned very quickly while working on a large open source project is that it is important to make my code hard to break. The primary line of defense for this is a comprehensive test suite, but I think it’s also very important to create functions that are easy to use and difficult to damage. I find...

Back in February, I gave a presentation on Discourse and client side MVC at TechTalksTO. It wasn’t recorded, but I’ve taken the liberty of creating a video version of the presentation with an audio track. While the presentation is about Browser Applications, I take a large detour in the beginning to...

Computed Properties By design, Handlebars templates don’t allow complex expressions. You are given an {{#if}} block helper, but it can only evaluate whether something is “truthy” (aka true, a non-empty string or array or other value that is not undefined or null.) For example, you can’t do something...

Important Update (May 25, 2014): Google has started parsing and indexing Javascript. The approach of this article is to use <noscript> tags but Google will likely ignore those now. We upgraded our site to sniff Google and other popular search engines and serve our simple content that way. However, i...