September 8, 2023

Squishy and the Fishes – Linux Game Development

Introduction I’ve previously written about the state of game development on Linux. While Unity, Unreal, Gamemaker, Godot, and a slew of other tools exist for Linux, it’s pretty rare to see someone actually completely developing a game using only open source tools. When I created Fasteroids, I used Gamemaker on Windows, but a lot of the other tools I used were free and open source tools that were available under…

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Knights of Pen & Paper II title screen
August 15, 2023

Knights of Pen & Paper II

A dice game with a sense of humour If games like Torchlight II, Diablo III, and Grim Dawn are your thing, Knights of Pen & Paper II will seem like a snooze-fest to you. While Knights has elements of a role playing game, it’s not an “Action” role playing game (ARPG), but more mimics the kind of play you might get from playing Dungeons and Dragons with a game master.…

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A list of git commits for Fasteroids
August 8, 2023

Fasteroids – August Update – Bugfixes

Silence? Back on July 7th I wrote about Fasteroids, the game I developed a few years ago. In that post I mentioned that I had some significant changes in mind for a new version. Then I went silent for a bit on social media about the game. This is an update about what’s going on with Fasteroids. Bumps along the way When I last wrote about Fasteroids the main thing…

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This is the initial startup screen of the Gamemaker game engine beta for Linux running under Xubuntu Linux.
August 3, 2023

Initial Gamemaker experience under Xubuntu Linux

Previous Gamemaker experience I bought version 1.4 of the Gamemaker game engine on a Humble Bundle many years ago. At the time Gamemaker ONLY ran under Microsoft Windows. It was possible to export games to Linux (Ubuntu/Debian-specifically), but you couldn’t run the game engine itself under Linux. Version 2.x came along, and I paid to upgrade to 2.x as well. Some time between when I bought 1.4 and 2.x I…

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Programming a Flappy-bird-like game in Unity under Xubuntu 22.04 Linux
July 26, 2023

First experience trying to learn Unity on Xubuntu Linux

The king of game engines Unity is considered the big kahuna of game engines. It is often cited as the best engine to learn if your end goal is to work in the game industry. Unity is cross-platform, meaning it can run on different operating systems. It can also compile programs for more than a dozen other platforms the engine itself doesn’t run on. I have very little experience with…

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Fasteroids is an Asteroids-like game for Linux (AppImage) and Windows
July 7, 2023

Fasteroids – An Asteroids-like game for Linux and Windows

Today I realized that, since redoing this web site, I still haven’t added any information about the game I made back in 2017-2020. Recently I revived Fasteroids, and made some changes to both simplify the game, but also with the idea that the game should be able to scale to 4k in the near future. Before I ramble on more, you can download Fasteroids for Linux or Windows from: https://chaslinux.itch.io/fasteroids…

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findmonitor.sh BASH shell script to detect and price monitors
July 7, 2023

Findmonitor BASH script – identify and price monitors with one script

Note: This script is NOT compatible with systems running Wayland. We use Xubuntu Linux at our project. The idea for this BASH shell script was born out of the need to process a lot of monitors in one sitting at The Working Centre’s Computer Recycling Project. The findmonitor.sh shell script collects EDID and DDC information from monitors. The script then produces a single letter-size page PDF with a box around…

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May 31, 2023

Anyone can learn Linux (it’s like using a pencil)

Over the years I’ve been fortunate enough to work with people at all computer skill levels. Regardless of what others say, my experience is that people at any skill level can learn Linux. Here’s a video why I feel this is so:

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Video for Xubuntu Interface Basics
May 30, 2023

Xubuntu Linux – Interface Basics

Anyone can learn Linux I’ve been blessed/cursed to have used Linux in one form or another since 1997, starting with the Slackware ’96 Linux distribution. I’m doubly lucky in that I’ve been able to use Linux every day at work since 2005. Since 2005 I’ve been able to talk to thousands of computer users at every skill level. One thing I’ve learned over the many years I’ve been blessed to…

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