December 2022 Updates and Upcoming Content!

by: TheHans255

December 14, 2022

Hello all! To all reading this blog, apologies that it's been a while! I thought that I might post some quick updates about what I've been working on, and some things I might post about in the near future!

Projects

First, some cool things I've made in the past few months:

• A proof-of-concept on how to use the Rust gba crate to send a Multiboot payload on the Nintendo Game Boy Advance. The GBA was the first Nintendo handheld that allowed multiple players to play multiplayer games using only a single cartridge, since the GBA had a 256K RAM bank that could store a small game (or client) downloaded from another system. This proof-of-concept, when provided with a sample (legally acquired or compiled) payload, can send that payload to up to three linked GBA systems.
• Another game jam game! Wizard Heist is my entry for Ludum Dare 51 in which you play as a sentient broom rebelling against its wizard master, making off with as much treasure as you can before escaping. Play on itch.io or right here on this website!
• Finally, lots of work on Clusterfun.tv! Clusterfun is a party game site using the phones-as-controllers method popularized by Jackbox Games, with a focus on engaging gameplay and a frictionless user experience. The premier game, Lexible, sorts players into teams and has them identifying words in a large word-search grid, building a path from one side of the board to the other. My work centered most around improving performance and building a robust inter-client communication system.

Now, some things I may post about in the near future!

• This website runs on IPFS! IPFS (or Inter-Planetary File System) is a decentralized web storage system that stores content by its SHA hash, allowing it to be confidently retrieved by any server on the IPFS peer-to-peer network. Users with an IPFS-capable browser or IPFS extension can immediately take advantage of this, but for everyone else, I've put together some infrastructure on Amazon AWS to serve the website over a traditional HTTPS channel. I'll definitely write about that, discussing options, tradeoffs, and future opportunities for improvement.
• Devlogs for more projects! There's definitely things I want to talk about from Lexible and Wizard Heist, and I will definitely write about future projects, such as my entry into Ludum Dare 52 in January. I may also do some dev streams (service TBD).
• More tutorials and coding adventures! The GBA multiboot protocol, cool as it is, is incomplete without instructions for building a payload for it, so that will be coming to the blog at some point. I'll also mirror both the code and the written instructions for sending a payload so that the full instructions are all in one place! Also expect tutorials on other topics, in the same vein as my password generation essay.
• More essays and things! These might be about more abstract computing topics, or thoughts picked up from books and articles I'm reading, or simply missives from my work and schooling. I also love gaming, so I'll probably write some short reviews and retrospectives, too!

Happy holidays, and happy coding! I'll see you all soon.