Q is for Quiet. And in this case it's a bit of a stretch, but I thought of "quietly doing my thing". I've always been making games in one way or another, but what pushed me to do this regularly is my fascination with old arcade score chasers. Things like Missile Commmand, Space Invaders - especially Space Invaders - or Robotron 2084. Games like these are easy to make in terms of technology and time investment; the challenge lies in their design. And I like it that way, which I need to remind myself of time after time, as I delve into endless rabbit holes of trying to make crafting RPGs or some other impossible stuff.

The recent release of the Atari 2600+ (which is insane, but the good kind of insane) re-ignited that spark inside me (see what I did there with Sparky?... oh, well...), so here's Mr Lander, lifted almost straight from Dylan Bennett's Pico-8 tutorial zine. I figured it was perfect for testing an engine designed to mimic the pico-8 API, only in Javascript. Sure enough, I was mostly able to take the code, translate it from lua to JS (it doesn't take too much effort if you don't use more in-depth features of these languages), add some polish and here we are.

Along the way, I've discovered some bugs in Sparky and in the Editor (which was one of the goals). I fixed some of those, but there is one that might slow the game down on older computers. Basically, when repeatedly calling the SFX function, the engine is generating a ton of sound nodes and connecting them to the audio context. They are deleted quickly, but not quickly enough. I don't know how to fix it yet, but I'll get there.