10, 10, 10!

Stuff on GitHub I'm storing there the sources of most of the projects I worked on, small and large. « go there!

Heroes of Micro & Moji III A squashed tribute to the HOMM3 fantasy strategy game in 1 kb of printable JS code. « go there!

Notoner A simple tool thought to help you play some print and play games and tabletop RPGs. « go there!

RogueCairn A random generator of small worlds designed to be explored following Yochai Gal's Cairn adventure game rules. « go there!

Massive Randomness 2 A Massive Darkness 2 one-shot quest random generator. « go there!

Generals of Stampadia An open-source print-and-play single-player Expandable Card Game. « go there!

The Scroll of Many Glances An experimental app-supported masterless fantasy RPG thought for mobile devices and inspired by PbtA and OSR tabletop role-play games. « go there!

Dungeons of Crimsonbranch A tiny adventure dice game you can play on a computer, a mobile device, or a sheet of paper, inspired by looter hack'n'slash RPG videogames. « go there!

Kuroshimu A procedural black box investigation game: the game simulates 56 days of 6 persons and generates a PDF newspaper from their testimonies for the player to guess what happened. « go there!

Rogue Rogue A secrets-packed roguelite single-screen platformer arcade game for 1-2 players heavily inspired by the 1986 Taito masterpiece Bubble Bobble and other great games from the past. « go there!

LCD Game - World Changers A simulator of a never existed physical LCD handheld conversion of World Changers, an action game inspired by old classics, like Cabal, Contra, and OutRun, and modern games like Gears Of War and mobile casual gaming. « go there!

Wizard Survivors Wizard Survivors is a 500-characters codegolfed tribute to the infectious game Vampire Survivors. « go there!

Travelers Of Stampadia The Chronicles of Stampadia card game spin-off! A daily print-and-play roguelike adventure card game you can play offline. « go there!

Programmino An implementation of the machine I've seen in my dreams. « go there!

PvP An opensource web browser 1-4 Players arena shooter you can play offline in split-screen and networked (experimental). « go there!

Chronicles Of Stampadia A daily print-and-play roguelike adventure you can play offline. « go there!

Goldscrolls A fast Print-and-Play Roll-and-Write Deckbuilder for two players. « go there!

Cardcade An experimental opensource digital card game system that offers a mechanic inspired by deck-building games to implement multiple types of game. « go there!

Razorthought A single-player Card Battler game I worked on in 2020 during the pandemic lockdown caused by COVID-19 virus. « go there!

Rewtro Papercraft videogame cartridges you can print and pirate with a copy machine. « go there!

World Changers A Contra-GearsOfWar inspired third person shooter you can play with one finger that can change the world. « go there!

Tighty Deadline A puzzle/arcade about level design. Easy is hard to design. « go there!

Wright! Magazine A thoughtful full-stack reimplementation of gaming in 80's and 90's. « go there!

Atwenture An open-sourced surreal social-collaborative Twitter-based text adventure that changes unpredictably. - DEAD « go there!

The Last Of At A Fanfictional Tribute Survival Roguelike in 1K of JS. « go there!

Gamecora TV A HTML5/JS/CSS3 TV about gaming that goes to the sources. Nobody in the middle. « go there!

JSTV Suite Make your own TV Channel with HTML5/JS/CSS3. The Gamecora TV heart. « go there!

HotGun You don't have any index. Pick a weapon and hunt data by yourself. Introducing the First Person Search Engine. « go there!

KWGN KesieWoolf Gaming Network is just a personal catalogue of my and my GF's videogames. Except for his look, behaviour and contents that are like a real gaming site. (Italian only) « go there!

Magaka Magaka is an opensource javascript engine that allows to create modern digital magazines using open web technologies. « go there!

VanillaOS Do you think that scrollviews are the vanilla of mobile apps? Taste this javascript implementation. « go there!

Meltingbot Meltingbot is a magazine about. REST calls, rectangle packing and CSS transformations mixed together. « go there!

Akihabara Pixelated indie-style videogames for your browsers and touch devices using HTML5, Javascript and nothing more! « go there!

StripThis! Web. Comic. For real. Create simple webcomics actually made with web and write them like blogging. « go there!

Kesiev Chiefs A Ruby media player in 300 lines of code « go there!

About me About me and my life. « go there!

WTF? A (unfinished) manga about... well... videogames! « go there!

Ichigo A strawberry flavoured package manager for linux. Your tiny Gentoo. « go there!

Something White Un libro di Bianca Brenna « go there!

Grow You feed. It grows. An unfinished project store/blog. And a full featured JS blog. « go there!

Kitty A podcast (DTV, Yahoo! Podcast and more) client for KDE written in C++! « go there!

Noribasic A basic simulator for Firefox! A real tribute to the old Commodore 64! « go there!

Kemail A GMail clone in PHP/MySQL! - DEAD « go there!

Kiobashin A kioslave that creates virtual filesystems using bashscripts under KDE! « go there!

Norifeeder An RSS Aggregator written in Javascript that simply works. For some technical limit, a PHP proxy with time-limited cache was added. « go there!

Nori Nori Block Nori Nori Block is online multiplayer tetris with statistics, custom game modes and more! « go there!

JJogle A search engine for real good words - by JJ! « go there!

Kaffepot A (old and unfinished) manga by KesieV. (Storyboard by Posixe/Lucio) « go there!

Jubble Bobble A full featured clone of Bubble Bobble for Siemens Java phones. « go there!

Nori Nori Revolution A DDR style game from the old kesiev.com site. « go there!

Kesievaders A Space Invaders clone from the old kesiev.com site. « go there!

Io, Io, Io!

The Last Of At

2014-01-28 21:19:21

The brain is a fascinating blender of unrelated things.

I had a crush for roguelikes when Lucio, an old good friend and dungeon master of mine, introduced me to Angband (Link) ages ago.
I wasn't the RPG type and the meaningful but raw ASCII graphics weren't appealing for an arcade-lover Playstation kiddo like me but its procedural dungeon generator, variety and complexity managed to leave a scar in my heart.

In the following years I periodically tried playing different roguelike and mainstream RPGs, essentially failing every time.
I started to mature some kind of "RPG acceptance" only many years later.

When I started loosing my hair.

So years passed and, during the last winter, I decided to choose and buy a quite large selection of games from The Humble Bundle Store (Link) as Christmas self-present, which included "Hack, Slash, Loot" (Link), a neat roguelike with simplified gameplay and nice but still schematic pixelated graphics.
This time I ended to lose some serious hour playing it and started to understand the value behind these games - as more mature gamer and programmer.

These sneaky roguelike sessions, mostly placed early in the morning, while Bianca was sleeping in order to avoid her my not-so-interesting-to-see dungeon crawling, were in the days we played The Last Of Us (Link), the latest masterpiece by Naughty Dog and, in our opinion, the game which raised the bar of story driven games in terms of integration with gameplay and themes.

When everything blended with my "subconscious substrate of persistent addiction" to everything retro.

From the obscure cracktros (Link) of the Commodore 64 scene to the outstanding .kkrieger (Link), I'm still thirsty of the fine and dirty products of the demo scenes.
Over the years I've managed to figure out my personal reason for this addiction: I think creativity is something you can drive to a specific task but it moves unpredictably when facing real or fake limits. And seeing where it goes is an outstanding show.

In videogames nothing describes this concept better than a demake: the attempt to port as much as possible of a game built on a machine to another one less powerful.
While it looks a quite whacky hobby today, every porting on home computer or game console between 80s and 90s is actually a demake - the time spent playing them covers most of my youth.

I started to try some code golfing in JS instead of playing games during early evenings few days ago and ended writing a little chunk of code implementing a tiny Sokoban-like puzzle game. Not the shorter solution possible but I had a lot of fun putting it together.

This tiny piece of code worked as seed and, together with all the random thought and events I listed, it became "The Last Of At" (Link) without any control - a humble tribute to everything that is important for me about gaming.

The 1024 bytes limit immediately resulted a rule for different reasons: to give a challenge on programming, to limit the size of the project, to stimulate on feature selection and, most important, to be printable on a T-shirt or a small poster.
Honestly I don't know if I'll ever print it somewhere but I thought that having a working roguelike or a TLOU minigame printed on a T-shirt could be nerdly funny - Bianca just thought that's way too nerd.
JS Crushers allow to pack more features in 1Kb but sadly the resulting code contained not-printable characters so I decided to try to avoid it.

Permadeath, turn based gameplay, ASCII graphics, complex random generated mazes, inventory, strategic battles and raycasted sight are very distinctive traits of classic roguelikes so I started implementing tiny but recognizable versions of each feature. I never wanted to make the definitive roguelike (nor doing it in 1Kb) but I tried to make it the less boring possible - if not quite enjoyable.

Different kind of zombies, a friend that will help and put you in danger, weapon selection, in-game narration, a turn of events, a human plot and the sense of hunt and being hunted are distinctive of The Last Of Us and, some of them, of good modern story-driven games - sadly the zombies presence too.
Zombies can justify the not perfect "AI" I managed to fit in the game and I added some of them that will just run randomly in order to give a bit of variety and mock Runner zombies.
I also tried to put the knife, a key weapon of TLOU, allowing the player to choose which zombie to attack and in which way, making the game a little deeper. The real challenge was to put the narrative part, which was byte expansive and risked to be not so clear with ASCII graphics, but I wanted it way too much and I hope you'll recognize and enjoy it - don't worry, it is not taken from the original game :)

What was clear from the beginning was that probably everything would have felt like a cheap DOS porting of a fanfictional game so why not to work on it too? So I gave mocked names to the character, invented a storyline that resembled the original and added some ASCII art to the sources - they will be stripped by the minifier, giving the "I need to read the manual in order to understand the cheap plot" typical of old age games.

I commented everything to help myself on keeping track of variables and features (and entertain who will be interested enough to read the sources) and wrote everything in minified form natively, in order to better compare code shortenings on the fly.
I used uglifyjs (Link) as "computer opponent", which was helpful most of the times in the first phases of the development.

I had to skip a lot of features, like hearing zombies a-la Joel, guns, procedural weapons, simplified crafting, knife-opened doors and the ability to pick up your partner but I'm satisfied with the results: "The Last Of At" (Play it here (Link) Sources here (Link)) is my humble and spontaneous tribute to roguelikes, old school games, modern games with deeper stories and a diary of my life as gamer and programmer that fits in a pocket.

I hope you'll find it strange, funny and formative as much as it was for me making it.

by kesiev

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