So, I’m a repeat guest on a podcast called Battle of the Blorbos where the host sets challenges between blorbos brought by themselves and their guests (5 blorbos ranked per episode) to find the best blorbo.
i gave the host a small-scale ranker app i made for my own ranked list of videos games i beat but now… Now I made a ranking application specifically for the show.
it’s rough around the edges, surfaces and middle… but it was a fun challenge to tackle.
That leads me to ask, does anyone here make small, silly computer applications? This one was in Python. I’m not really a programmist nor a developer but reading up tutorials gave me enough skills to make something concrete, so I’m happy.
This topic is more for non-game applications but anything’s good to showcase and share.
Oh I love this! These kind of projects was how I learned to code: I’d build really basic apps in Godot or Android Studio that could help me with various bits around work or home. There’s a dumb little program which calculates how much water I should add to my rice, one that will tell me what to order with which supplier for work based on a stock count - just really basic things, but that make my life a little easier day-to-day
For a slightly more involved project, I built a web app that uses random noise to generate space backgrounds with nebulae, stars etc. There’s really something to be said for taking a little time away from main projects to just build something for fun
I love small, silly applications! Most of mine are command line utilities written once and then kept in case I need them again. Lots of ~100 to ~200 line C and Nim “scripts”, mostly.
But sometimes I make a more involved thing, like this current side project, R.A.W.:
It’s intended as a spiritual successor to ezmuze+, an old XBox 360 indie game for making music with preset loops. My wife used ezmuze+ a lot in her teens and it’s really hard to keep running nowadays, since it requires an XBox Live connection and that’s super flakey now.
I’ve been using LÖVE a lot lately for another project, so I’m using it to make this on the side as a gift. I dragged in the ezmuze loop library just for my wife / household, but we can’t release that publicly - the plan is to make our own library of loops to release under CC0, and then ship that as a “starter pack” and make the program itself FOSS, when time permits. ^_^
Silly little programs are the future, I think. Enterprise stuff sold to end consumers has never been worse, is only getting even worse, and a Renaissance of little shareware / free / donation supported things seems imminent to me. Maybe I’m wrong! Time will tell.
Using Processing I made a dazzle camo designer called Dazzle Designer. I should really work on again! Basically it generates the design randomly from a sprites textures but gives you some tools to move it around and adjust the scaling of each point. It’s good fun and can produce some pretty cool repeating backgrounds!
This blorbos concept is new to me, but I just researched it and it sounds fun. :D
I’ve been feeling pretty frustrated over feeling like there were no good tools for level designing for my usecase so I started making my own, kinda inspired by some Tomb Raider level editors I’ve seen around. It’s pretty silly in that all of my choices regarding UI are driven solely by whats convenient for me to implement, so the entire thing outside of the 3D preview is keyboard driven with vim-style commands so no serious person would ever use it.
