Flying to Portland for PIGCon, an indie game convention. It's a work trip, but I'm excited for the excuse to be around the indie gamedev scene for the first time. I've admired it from a distance for years (played plenty of games, watched documentaries, etc).

To get in the spirit I've been teaching myself Godot from scratch this week, building a dumb little browser rhythm game where everyone who loads it taps along to the same loop, in sync. I wanted to pick something with online interactivity without slamming myself face-first into full on multiplayer-netcode. It's been a lot of fun trying to foster an everyone-together vibe with clock sync and a bit of pub/sub: getting every client to the same point in the song, and sharing everyone's hits and misses.

Even with just this toe dip, I'm gaining a lot of respect for how this craft is quite different from the software engineering I'm familiar with. There's so much of the actual delivered surface area (audio, timing, feel) that you just can't, like, write a test for.

If any of you are PIGCon-bound, say hi!