Into the oubliette

First post.

What is Deck of Dwarf?

I thought it’d be fun to make a game.

I’ve been working with software for ages, but never built a desktop game, so figured I’d start with a card game.

Nice and simple.

Almost … too simple.

So I thought: hey, you know what would be funny? A card game with the most ludicrously overbuilt simulation mechanics a card game has ever seen. A card game where every system - even the most ancillary to its actual purpose as a game - is designed with a relentless, fanatical zeal for realism and verisimilitude.

A simple card game. On the surface of a vast ocean of coherent, interlocking mechanisms which have absolutely no excuse for even entering the imagination of someone building a card game.

It’s a good joke. A bit like the idea that this would be my retreat from a year beset on all sides by the agentic hype train: a loving paean to artisanal software craftsmanship, laid down with by hand with a steadily held magnet, and nothing to guide me but a strong sense of aesthetics and the terse Zig documentation.

Well, that was nice, but it turns out I’m even more motivated by progress than contrarianism. So when I get into details here, it’s as likely to be an interesting pattern or game design challenge, or a meditation on adapting adversarial interview techniques from the Spanish Inquisition to keep Claude in check.

A brief disclaimer: yes, I know our timeline is fucked. Big tech oligarchs are a scourge, and I too grieve for the death of software engineering as we know it. But if I can get 5-10x as much done by building a system to whip LLMs to write code than by writing it myself … well, it is what it is.

With that out of the way: strap in, it’s going to be a ride. Subscribe via RSS if that’s your thing.

Tech

• Zig 0.15.2
• ZigFSM
• SDL 3
• Cue
• Python
• Claude Code: worker bees
• ChatGPT: Chief Hierophants, keepers of the doctrine
• Neovim, Zed, Ghostty, zsh + friends
• NixOS / MacOS

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That’s it for now. Back to work.