I released a new version of Pxlqst, my 16×16 dungeon adventure game (pictured above), and report in the release notes that:

• doors can now lead to new rooms
• new format for storing room “maps” as collections of strings
• updated README instructions for world generation and map editing
• Known bug: cake no longer nutritious :-(
• fewer dependencies
• rooms can be “slept” and “woken”

This is still not quite playable, but things are coming together enough that, once I get combat and inventory running, I think it’ll be possible to build a simple quest. I have been thinking about the separation between Pxlqst, the game, and Pxlngn, the game engine, upon which I expect pixel art enthusiasts will create many a 16×16 adventure game.

See the map format here:

Here’s a mechanical feldhellschreiber machine in red/blue stereo: http://unterbahn.com/2011/04/franks-n4spp-hellschreiber-page/

Anyways, Noah and I had always wanted to do an implementation in JavaScript, and created this repo long ago: https://github.com/jywarren/hellschreiber-js

Finally got around to more coding this weekend, and put together part of an encoder, a bit messily but short enough to be readable. You can try it out here:

http://jywarren.github.io/hellschreiber-js/

It doesn’t work.

Well, it does make noise, and write out letters how you’d expect them to appear in fldigi — but it’s not anywhere near synced and I’m struggling with adjusting the length and latency of the sound sample — generated in JS using riffwave.js as well as the setInterval of the script itself, which ought to run once per pixel. I’m also hobbled by using an awfully-encoded hellschreiber font from the fldigi source, which I refactored into JavaScript, but which is inexplicably stored as hex values in rows instead of columns, when Hellschreiber is an innately column-based format. But I don’t think that’s the limiting factor.

I’m starting to get diminishing returns for my debugging and am pretty tired, so I’m just going to put this out there and think on it and/or see if I can get help from someone who’s a bit more methodical of a coder. Sometimes I’m a bit too much of an empiricist, not to mention a cobbler-together, impatient as I am to get to Hello World.

Also — once I get an encoder working, I really want to move on to a decoder, so you can run this on a phone facing another phone, and send/receive messages that way. How efficient and historically accurate!

I couldn’t find the original files from when i was a kid, so i just rewrote it. Someone already found a bug:

https://github.com/jywarren/jurassic-park/issues/1

https://github.com/jywarren/jurassic-park/

http://pivotallabs.com/users/alex/blog/articles/1001-git-unadd