Back to the Grid!

Hey everyone!

It’s been a long time and I wanted to give an update! A lot has happened in the last 5.5 years (I realized that as I wrote it…) and time to touch base!

At this point I’ve put Periodic on pause for the time being, started up Subby – a Motherload style game under the oceans of Europa, released a fun little game as an experiment – TCG Trivia, upgraded my desktop and servers, swapped operating systems several times, and a whole lot more I probably can’t think of.

On top of that, I got married, and my wife and I had a baby back in June! Things have been a huge shift on time but it’s been probably one of the most rewarding things I’ve ever done.

And then there’s AI… This I feel is a double-edged sword. It’s been able to speed up work I’ve been doing, but at the same time the art of hand-crafting things that I care about has been a huge shift. I think my stance on it has changed as well. I’ve been using Claude for personal projects for the past year, but I’m trying to make sure my game development stays handcrafted. It’s also a big reason why I’ve decided to start working on a C++ game engine for all my games.

The things that I have been using AI for though deserve a mention though. I’ve built what I’ve been calling my “Command Center” that has API/SDK integrations for everything I use – GitLab, FreshBooks, YouTube, WordPress (for the blog), stream tools and OBS, and just about anything else you can think of. It’s also got spots for keeping tracking books, personal projects, and game development stuff! It’s basically a personal operating system to brain dump into. I’ll be doing a follow-up on this since it’s such a big thing.

On top of that, I’ve been working on an additional system I’ve been using for my own custom telemetry, delivery, and bug tracking! Once it’s polished enough I

I’m excited to be back to work on this, and it’s been too long. That changes now, not because I am promising a schedule, but because I have things worth writing about and the tooling to actually do it where it’s easy.

If you haven’t, please also subscribe to my newsletter (there are several channels to use) and you’ll be able to stay up to date!

Catch ya in the next one!

-TJ