Journal

The 2026 eclipse

2026-08-13T00:00:00Z

We got lucky and the eclipse was visible from our apartment's window, so we were able to take some photos.

Scrapping HLTB

2024-11-15T00:00:00Z

If you had a peek in my Now page, you may have seen I have a list of games categorized by state of play at the moment. This page is made thanks to a JSON Data File I generate by webscrapping my public How Long To Beat profile, and then use it to populate the HTML.

While I wanted to use an API to access HLTB data, I found a forum thread asking for the same, and found out there's no public API available at the moment. So as a temporary measure, I made a small Node script using Puppeteer to scrape the data I need and save it in my files from time to time.

It's fairly specific to my use case and it's not particularly performant or thought out, but if it can be of use to you, here you have it:

Download the script here.

How I deploy to Neocities

2024-11-14T00:00:00Z

This personal site is hosted in Neocities and built using 11ty. To simplify uploading my static files to Neocities, I wrote a very small shell script that I added to my package.json.

#! /bin/bash
rm -rf _site
npm run build
git add .
git commit -m "Updated: `date +'%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S'`"
neocities push _site

A brief explanation of what this script does:

Deletes the previous _site folder, where the static files live, to re-generate it.
Runs npm run build, which is the same as npx @11ty/eleventy.
Stages all changed files for git, and makes a commit with a message in the format "Updated: 2024-11-12 22:17:05"
Uses Neocities CLI to upload the static files to Neocities.

It's very simple, but if anyone has a similar work pipeline I hope it helps.

I'm playing Hades II

2024-05-27T00:00:00Z

I've been playing Hades II since it dropped in early access some time ago. I've put around 100h on the original Hades, and about 1/3 of that in the new one.

I've been having a blast. Even though it's early access, it's full of content both in terms of gameplay and story.

I've found it a bit more difficult than the original, specially the end game boss.

Spoilers - About the final boss

Even though Hades, the end boss of the original game was formidable, Chronos is another beast altogether. He's much faster, for starters. His attacks come out incredibly fast and has little anticipation to his movements. He deals a ton of damage and has much more environmental dangers with him. He also summons some of the most annoying enemies in both games (the satyrs, goddamn).

I've been able to defeat him a few times, but only once I got three Death Defiances and started to find out which builds are more effective. Generally with him, I either had to keep away with a Cast boon such as Demeter's, Hestia's or Zeus' or use a pure melee build with the axe and Demeter's freeze so enemies don't punish the slow attack speed of the weapon.

I've also found Hades II is harder just in terms of game progression. Where Hades I was fairly linear and had a small amount of progress resources (such as Darkness or Jewels), Hades II has two concurrent routes and tons more gathering materials: from what you use in the cauldron, everything related to the Arcana, and everything related to weapon progression, there's a lot of stuff to keep track of.

Still, I think it's a great game. I don't think everything I said is strictly a negative, either. Hades II is a bigger game, in general, and that also reflects on the story and characters. There's a ton of characters. If you're a fan of greek mythology, you'll have a field day meeting every character you can.

Also, the soundtrack is a bop.

I beat PokéRogue

2024-05-05T00:00:00Z

I've been playing PokéRogue on and off for about a week. In my most recent run (and the only successful one), I've finally beaten the game.

I started the run with Torchic, Magnemite and Magikarp. Through the game, I ended up forming a team of Blaziken, Magneton, Gyarados, Shiftry, Dusknoir and Seismitoad. At one point, I got both the Mega Bracelet, and the Blazikenite and Gyaradosite.

This was my set-up:


MEGA-BLAZIKEN	Fire Punch	Swords Dance	Double Kick	Aerial Ace
MEGA-GYARADOS	Waterfall	Ice Fang	Crunch	Dragon Dance
MAGNETON	Discharge	Confuse Ray	Tri-Attach	Flash Cannon
SHIFTRY	Leaf Blade	Nasty Plot	Sucker Punch	Synthesis
DUSKNOIR	Shadow Punch	Will-O-Wisp	Thunder Punch	Payback
SEISMITOAD	Hydro Pump	Earth Power	Hyper Voice	Acid

The battle with Eternatus was tense. I've lost most of my team against its base form, and by the time I was facing Eternamax Eternatus, I had only Magnezone, Dusknoir and Shiftry. Early on I also lost Shiftry to a Poison move, but I clutched it with my remaining Pokémon.

My strategy was, mostly, hax. Just the floor before Eternatus I got a TM for Mud-Slap and I taught it to my Mega Blaziken over Swords Dance, since I knew I would not be able to set-up in the fight. In the first few turns of the battle, I was able to drop the accuracy of Eternatus by a few levels, making it miss a few of its attacks.

During the Eternamax phase, I used Dusknoir's Will-O-Wisp and Magnezone's Confuse Ray to make it hit itself and wittle its HP down little by little. It used Recover once, but luckily it hit itself in confusion just when it hit red so it couldn't do it again.

I've finally beat him with that combination.

I'll probably do a few more classic runs with different teams before I tackle endless mode.

I highly recommend the game if you like roguelites and/or Pokémon battles.

Point and click

2024-04-25T00:00:00Z

As a continued effort to keep learning Godot, I've made a prototype system for omni-directional point and click movement system.

This also includes Nathan Hoad's Dialogue Manager plugin.

Tiles by Sodacoma and edits by me
Characters by AxulArt and edits by me

State machine

2024-02-26T00:00:00Z

In my previous post I've made some basic point and click movement, but now I've implemented a state machine to keep track of the player's character state.

I've done state machine in the past, but its my first time implementing it in C#.

- Tiles by Sodacoma and edits by me
- Characters by AxulArt and edits by me

Messing around with 3D

2023-09-09T00:00:00Z

A few months ago, I played A Short Hike by recommendation from my partner, and I fell in love with the aesthetic. The concept of the game is very nice and feel-good, but it made me remember how much I loved the look and feel of games like Digimon World and other PSX-era low-res 3D games.

While learning Godot, I thought it'd be nice to replicate that aesthetic. Luckily, there are lots of devs already applying this effect in their games.

What I made is just a prototype I made just lowering the values for the resolution of the game, but there are pros and cons about it.

I'm probably going to keep messing around with this until I have something I'm satisfied with.

Messing around with 3D... again

2023-04-20T00:00:00Z

In a previous post I've said how I'd keep trying some 3D stuff. While I did that, I also tried to replicate the look & feel of the text message system from A Short Hike. There's this helpful YouTube video by DashNothing that I've used as a starting point to develop what you see in the screenshot.

Roguelike prototype

2023-04-13T00:00:00Z

In a previous post, I've re-created BorisTheBrave's implementation of The Binding of Isaac's dungeon generation algorithm in Godot. In addition, I've also followed Matinator's roguelike tutorial series.

In this video I showcase a prototype I've made with a basic dungeon generation and character controller.