Some notes on apost-midnight party prod a.k.a. Demolab entry made at MountainBytes 2025. I was showing TIC-80 to my friendly table-neighbors, who spent most of the night working on a game written with vi in pure C on an OpenBSD machine. Cute, this idea of a "fantasy emulator". Anyway, after a few (or a few more) rounds of Parodius in a NES emulator, the old brain was definitely not getting any sleep... So out came the TIC-80 again and I started punching in the code for a sketch I made a couple of days ago ...

It was inspired by an earthquake felt in my dream, which I wrote out in detail on the other page. Maybe it was actually a real quake in the middle of the night? I checked the service, as usual there weren't any in my region. By the way, did you hear about the big disappearing data mystery they had a few years ago?

Fascinating story. So it is just the neighbour moving some chairs around, or something. Aanyway.. here I was in the middle of the night making lines jitter in Python. Why not Lua? It turns out, besides the default there is today the option of using ruby, js, moon, fennel, scheme, squirrel, wren, wasm, janet and python. There's a handy wiki page that links to all of them and might help you to decide to learn them. I wanted to see if Python actually worked as promised, and can happily report about it now. It's mighty, quick and well documented - just don't expect to use NumPy or some other random library without having to compile custom builds.

The Lovebyte 2025 was going in the background, inspiring me very much with prods like this. I don't actually know how this beautiful Japanese train animation is called or who made it, please leave me a note if you do. Of course I also browsed around a few minutes for inspiring code on the TIC-80 demoscene showcase, and ended up using one line from ENTRAPPY by ps made for inercia24. This line specifically, even if it is probably very standard, helped me to "think more like a demoscientist":

After messing around for a half hour I had a funky little line strobbler, and would have left it at that ...

This is how the prod looked like when I asked moovie whether I should submit something into the compo. And that's the version unfortunately that got played on the big screen. Because I was too inept to check that I actually uploaded the saved final version. Anyway it's here for you to see now!

In any case thanks to all of you being a wonderful and supportive community even when things in life and the world are not ..as patchy-peachy as they could be.