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ArjinFerman  Tinfoil Gigachad  21hr ago (text post)   63 thread views

Tinker Tuesday for October 14, 2025

This thread is for anyone working on personal projects to share their progress, and hold themselves somewhat accountable to a group of peers.

Post your project, your progress from last week, and what you hope to accomplish this week.

If you want to be pinged with a reminder asking about your project, let me know, and I'll harass you each week until you cancel the service

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I am struggling to maintain motivation on the game I'm making (previously mentioned here ). I've spent too much time making stupid placeholder GUI stuff and it's taking too long to get to the cool gameplay features that I actually care about. I am reconsidering my stance on doing everything from scratch. Does anyone know of any useful libraries or stuff that I can import and/or copy/paste that would be useful? For context, it's a turn based grid dungeon crawling roguelite thing, so I don't need any 3D graphics or physics or anything. Just an easier way to have a bunch of menus and buttons that I can stick my game functions onto instead of wasting time re-inventing them all myself. I've never done proper game dev before, I don't have a CS degree, I'm a math dude who self-taught programming to do math research, so I have no idea what exists or is useful, and figured I'd ask here for recommendations before delving into google hell.

You could try libtcod (python 3), which I found on /r/roguelikedev. It sounds like it matches what you're doing.

GameMaker was good enough for Hotline Miami, so you could try it. If you're married to Python, you're stuck, as there aren't that many Python game engines that have enough plugins for you to skip the boring stuff.

Assuming you've been starting from absolute scratch, i.e. only the standard library, there are game engines that solve the question of "having a framework to click buttons in and have objects that move around". The problem might be that learning a game engine might be just as hard if not harder than learning a programming language.

Godot is one of the engines that people make 2D games with today.

I have to second this. Godot, for all that it infuriates me because it doesn't suit my very specific use-case, is actually a really good starter game-engine. It's lightweight, easy to use, and contains all the essential bits and bobs.

Working on a new project. There is an old out of print book about my family. "The [family name] and their kin". Old copies run for a hundred or more dollars on Amazon.

There is a free scanned version of the book too, but the scan isn't great quality. Adobe was able to figure out most of the words, but there are some glaring mistakes. Typically a mistake every 50 words or so, which is far too common.

I'd like to do a reprint. I just attended the annual meeting of the "[family name] society" and there was interest from everyone there in getting a new hard copy.

I've been copying and pasting the text from the PDF into a grok window and having it make corrections, re-italisize, and de-format the text. Might be another 20 hours to get it all converted.

I've looked up some print options as well and think with about a hundred copies I could get per book costs to $15-30. Depending on options I select. Color / hard back / images / etc.

have you tried using OCRmyPDF or Abbyy FineReader to do the first conversion? And then do the editing in docx/html.

I have not, I'll look into it, thanks for the recommendation.

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