Wiley Wiggins

Grotto down

Mon, 02 Mar 2026 10:21:12 +0000

mudroom.rip is currently giving error 500’s after login. Hopefully it wasn’t doing this while my Concordia application was being reviewed. I doubt it’s being looked at currently but I’ll investigate the issue.

DMK 0.9b

Wed, 21 Jan 2026 21:00:33 +0000

This is me putting everything that bogs the game down in a single level for stress testing Dungeon Mode Kit 0.9b update. See the CHANGELOG.

flexible?

Wed, 21 Jan 2026 21:00:33 +0000

can your roguelike toolkit run Conway’s game of life?

dmk embed test

Wed, 14 Jan 2026 15:38:34 +0000

Haven’t been posting about dungeon mode kit because it’s moving too fast and I already keep a changelog and do daily private posts in obsidian. I need to think about when it’s beneficial to do public posts again, probably when I’m back in a school context with advisors or playtesters (If I’m lucky enough to be back in that scenario).

Testing loading specific prototypes to embeds. I made a Jekyll include that should load dungeon mode prototypes into posts if I call them in the frontmatter.

studio notes Dec 15 2025

Mon, 15 Dec 2025 15:26:35 +0000

Dungeon Mode Kit - Development Log (no version number yet)

Turn Engine, Shadows, and Core Systems

Turn Engine

Implemented a turn-based system using ROT.js Scheduler.Simple. All actors with a personality or controlled attribute are added to the scheduler and take turns in sequence. Player-controlled actors lock the engine while waiting for input; AI actors execute their personality behaviors automatically.

Observer Mode: When no player-controlled actors exist (or when the player dies), the game enters observer mode. Turns auto-advance at a configurable speed (turn_speed in prototype.json, default 50ms). Press Space to play/pause, Escape to reload.

Shadow Rendering

Added addBaseAndShadows() to draw diagonal shadows beneath floor tiles when the darkness mechanic is disabled. This is based on the previous roguelike prototype and the tile drawings I’ve been doing.

Void and Death

When an actor moves onto a tile with no floor the actor’s fall() method is called.

Added getValidMoveDirections() for sighted actors to avoid void tiles when pathfinding.

Item Pickup and Inventory

Refactored inventory to be per-actor rather than a global prototype setting. Actors now have an inventory attribute (integer) that determines how many items they can carry. Actors without this attribute cannot pick up items.

Maze-Room Passageways

Rooms generated by the wildcard system now detect adjacent maze paths and omit walls at those positions, creating natural passageways. The wildcard processor now explicitly processes mazes before rooms to ensure floor tiles exist for intersection detection.

Other Changes
Fixed getAttribute() to return undefined for missing keys instead of false
Updated removeEntity() to properly destroy PIXI sprites when entities are removed
Added bounds checking to shadow rendering helpers

Dungeon Mode Kit

Wed, 26 Nov 2025 13:15:09 +0000

This is project start for Dungeon Mode Kit, a set of tools for prototyping games within the Dungeon Mode.

Right now this is an attempt at a more intentionally designed version of the roguelike experiment I did last year, which used Rot.js for maze drawing and pixi.js for rendering, but did some very elaborate (and brittle) stuff to draw height (walls and characters are two tiles high instead of looking directly down at a grid of single tile entities) and to draw these hard angular shadows out of tiles based on the walkable map. The result was kind of overly specific, crashy, and the way it built levels meant that I could never properly get saving and reloading levels to work, resulting in a single-floor prototype.

After that experiment I have a better idea of what I would like- something much more flexible, able to both display authored tilemaps using Tiled and proceral rot.js mazes together in the same level. Something totally attribute based where I could do different goals, skills, etc on each level. Basically each level is a different game built with the same tools, loading a json file to configure it. Something almost between Baba Is You and a roguelike, where if no actor has a player controllable attribute, the level would play as a cellular automata animation.

The goal here is that a book version of the Dungeon Mode would have tools ready for me to make small prototypes of each chapter topic, so there are small conceptual prototypes on those themes, game-a-week style.

This first pass has Tiled .tmj file loading working, rendering to the canvas, (including animated tiles), and the base classes (entity, actor, item). There’s also stubs for things like saving state between levels, but I am actually not sure I care about anything other than loading the games (it might be a cool easter egg to have a change in one prototype affect play in another but it could also be distracting) I’m going to take this fairly slow, but hope to have something functional by fall.

Video archive annotation tool

Sun, 23 Nov 2025 18:46:18 +0000

Created an electron app so Danny and I could both tag, merge and edit the subtitles of the clips in the video archive. I feel like engagement with the archive is an activity that will lead to better ideas on how to activate it for players. Some ideas forming between the two of us about game mechanics related to memory, collecting, media, obviously in concert with Danny’s work on The Little Database

Grotto v 1.0.5 update

Sun, 26 Oct 2025 19:02:12 +0000

[1.0.5] – framerate independence

Fixed

PIXI.js flipbook animations now run at consistent framerates across different monitor refresh rates and power management modes using performance.now() timing
now preventing the map hotkey from intruding on text entry like notes or character greetings
tapping the attract mode animation on a tablet continues to /game/play

Changed

Better new character creation footer link behavior, wait to show options till all are ready, show a working sign, prevent trying to make a new character when there are already 8
some filtering on history events in character view
use local storage for positions of items and occupants in room to prevent shuffling on actions and page reloads

Added

added a feedback sound for trying locked doors
Cors middleware

Soccerthon88 1.1a version notes

Mon, 11 Aug 2025 14:58:40 +0000

[unreleased, 1.1a] - 2025-07-07

Added

Save and Continue
- Switched to a persistent clock that continues when a game is not running, with periodic save and continue to load.
- Title screen now gives New Game and Continue as options instead of player modes.
- fatigue is applied to players on game load, when all players are asleep the game is over
- numerous tweaks and fixes across most of the scripts.

Known Issues

- seeing some issues determining who gets a kick when the ball is out or someone scores
- loading games will need a lot of testing

Studio Notes 6-18-25

Wed, 18 Jun 2025 14:48:00 +0000

Daniel Scott Snelson and I will be speaking remotely at DIGRA2025, Wednesday, July 2nd, about Soccerthon88, our artgame/documentary project in development. Abstract here.

I’m keeping as busy as I can as the world continues to burn, to the delight of the apocalyptic death cult that controls capital and is only willing to spend it on eternal war and conquest.

I’m in the last two weeks of an online class at the Brooklyn Institute of Social Research about architectural experiments, with the goal of understanding Manfredo Tafuri’s critiques of architectural avant gardes better. This is early research for an expansion of my “Arcology Mode” thesis writing into a book that would follow a “Dungeon Mode” book.

The class has been really informative so far, there’s been great background on early utopian thinkers and this week has been devoted to the context and architecture of Red Vienna.

Also doing some light carpentry work for household stuff, but it’s so hot now and I don’t have many tools so it’s slow going.

I can’t remember if I posted about it, but I took part in the DiscMaster game jam last month. It was a week long jam to make games using Archive.org’s enormous store of CD-ROM materials. Here’s the game I made: The Museum of Opportunity.