Neon Chain v1.6.1 is finally out. The numbers... eh. They're moving, just not with the kind of urgency I'd like them to. I was supposed to be working on daily rewards and power-ups. More reasons for people to come back.

Instead I've spent the last 24 hours pretending it's 1984 again.

The 1.44MB Challenge has completely hijacked my brain. What's funny is the game isn't really new. I'm rebuilding something I wrote on my Commodore 64 almost forty years ago. Apparently sixteen-year-old me wasn't finished with it yet.

I think I've figured out why this project grabbed me so hard. For the last year I've been living inside game engines. Godot decides how a lot of things work and I work with it. This doesn't. Every pixel. Every buffer. Every Windows message. Every stupid little bug belongs to me.

I'm not trying to become John Carmack. There will only ever be one Carmack. But I wouldn't mind borrowing the way his brain attacks a problem for a while. Strip away the engine and talk directly to the machine. Figure out how it actually works instead of asking someone else's code to do it for you.

Maybe that's why this feels less like making a new game and more like picking up a conversation I started with myself on a Commodore 64 four decades ago.

Tomorrow's my mom's birthday, which has me thinking about something I probably should have appreciated a long time ago.

Anyone who was a hemophilia mom in the '80s deserves more credit than they'll ever get. While the rest of the world was panicking over HIV and contaminated blood products, they still had to keep their kids alive, fight with doctors, deal with insurance, and somehow convince us everything was going to be okay. Mine did.

Looking back, I don't think I appreciated how much weight she was carrying at the time. I do now.