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August 2026

I have done a bit of work to get a couple very old games working.

pong2000 was a university project, I think it was supposed to be for "networked pong" and— this is definitely not networked? So did I just make this ridiculous pong game and completely miss the point of the assignment? Yes, I think yes I did that. It's fairly hard/chaotic to play.

pong2000 is made with Allegro and only the Linux build works. I went through a whole ugly process to try and get it working with Windows but it just won't. Sorry!

Miracle Bees was a Ludum Dare game jam game. It is sort-of an RTS. It plays foggy and slow.

I also threw some other unfinished things onto the "programming" page. I may make them buildable/runnable again.

Ultimately, here is just a place for me to dump things, because I want it to be that. Getting more of my very old stuff up on here has been a 2026 project. It feels good, if only because it feels bad for old projects to just vanish and disappear.

I will reflect here a bit on what it's doing for me to put them up. I'm not putting them up with any specific intent; I just feel like doing it so I'm doing it. That said, I am realizing some things:

• I should find a middle ground between a jam game and a decades long project. These works don't amount to much, because I was just trying to push something out in a couple days. OTOH, my extremely largescale projects are, well, that. It would feel good to make something that is too small to be commercially viable but large enough to be fun and interesting. The gap between "jam game" and "commercially viable" is large.
• Even the jam games focus too much on polish and unimportant details. Why does miracle bees have no sound, but a semi-slick menu? Why do none of these games have sound?
• I want to make an arkanoid clone. I think about it a lot: the main trouble with arkanoid clones is they need a spinning paddle controller to play properly. A left-right control scheme is too slow. Mouse control scheme is too fast. Can it be solved? The only time I played arkanoid properly was on a VIC-20.
• I am also playing a bunch of NES games: Zelda I and II, specifically. These are reminding me that it's possible and very wise to use a limited vocabularity to say a lot. The only problem is you have to be pretty smart to actually do that. It's much easier to constantly think about adding a new thing that does one specific thing. I have a semi-luxurious setup for NES games, basically a CRT and original NES, so this is a good experience. I will say: Zelda II is more compelling than I remember, it is hard but extremely fun. Zelda I the sound effects are incredible, particularly the rupee pickup and flying sword sounds. It is more carefully structured than I remember. It is more of an RPG with real progression than I remember. In Zelda I it's possible to wonder if you got everything you needed to out of a dungeon, and I imagine a lot of people missed the dungeons treasure. Zelda II seals off the dungeon when you get everything you need out of it, and I think maybe the designers were correcting for that.

I'll take a minute and say what else I'm up to.

I've been taking more photos of people; gradually I'm gravitating more to portraits rather than "street photography" because it is fun interacting with strangers. I am quite backlogged here but... whatever. I'm still often not happy with how my photos render in terms of colour.

I have done a fair bit of work this year for Paradise Never II, but essentially took a pause for July and the start of August to, well, get a few random games buildings. For personal life reasons (good ones (summer)) I have not had as much time to work on programming or game things.

Finally, I'm wrapping up a first draft on a short story. I have quite a few drafts of short stories that have been in progress for years, really.

Miracle Bees
Pong 2000
Programming (some misc projects added here)

July 2026.

Someone on fediverse reached out a few weeks (months) ago about Night Cruising, hopeful to play it. Night Cruising was a game I made back in 2008 (!) for Ludum Dare 13. Well, I appreciated this gesture so I did some work to make it playable and put up Linux and Windows Build. I also updated SourceHut with the new code-- the code I had put up was badly incomplete (I think basically the state of it after Day 1 of the compo) but I found another zip file with the complete game, and went from there.

I also found some old writing and have put this up. I'll only link the story fragment, Avalon, since it might be interesting.

Finally, I got some feedback on my RSS feed and fixed the date format. I will run it through an RSS validator next and see if there are other fixes needed.

Night Cruising
Into Avalon

April 2026.

I have added a couple waltzes for piano. One is very small and one is somewhat big. The small one was actually written a few years ago but never written out fully until now. The big one I started in February or January at the earliest and finished relatively quickly. The small one is "D.C. Senza Fine", in otherwords repeat infinitely, in otherwords... videogame music? Chopin has a Mazurka with this marking, so he was writing videogame music, too. It's neat to think about.

I am clearing up my photo backlog, too. I spent about a year fine-tuning my photo editor and even re-read most of my calculus textbook, in vain, sort of. Nerd details but I also learned how lanczos works. As far as that goes, I'm still not totally happy with it: in particular I'm not convinced I am getting good enough colour precision somehow, and the pictures can be really noisy. (Next step is to add dithering.) But I want to get on with life and I have pictures to post and it's good enough.

For 2026 my way of working is that if I have something close to completion, I will push it out. This doesn't mean I always have to work on things that I can complete quickly, though— for instance I do have two or three short stories/novellas in progress but none of them are particularly close to being done, so I'll work on them as it suits me, which right now is not much. But if they say, get the first draft done, then I'll be disciplined and finish the revisions and put them out. And the Snowflake Waltz is kind of lovely and simple and has been sitting around for years, so that put it on my radar.

Waltz for Piano Nr. 1
Snowflake Waltz

February 2026.

I have put up The Alone Sword, a game from 2011, including source code and a prototype. This is a little Zelda h'omage which I am really proud of.

The Alone Sword

February 2026. Continuing in my quest to dump more creative work onto my website.

The biggest thing for me, by far, is releasing two piano sonatas composed in 2023-2024. The second one I have notated in MuseScore, so there are PDFs that are readable and which I have done at least one set of revisions on. I really needed to get these out into the world.

There are also a few more tracks on the music page, and I'm going to dump some collected tracker music from around 2000 soon. (This is not very good music, though...)

I also dug up a new story fragment, "Down By Seattle", from 2015.

I have made just a couple of flash games playable (Craemle Zone, Whales of Aelia) via ruffle.rs, a Free Software web player for Flash content. Testing these out just now, the experience is a bit rough since for some reason there is no video acceleration in my browser. Please tell me on fedivers if it's OK for you. I'll make the rest of the flash games playable, regardless, though.

Finally-- there is an RSS feed. I have tested it in one RSS reader and it seems to work.

Piano Sonata 2
Piano Sonata 1
Down by Seattle
Whales of Aelia
Craemle Zone
RSS

Kitty Lambda is my project company to organize and release my games, writing, and art.

My name is Calvin French. I live in Calgary, Alberta, Canada.

I currently spend most of my creative energy working on Paradise Never 2, playing piano, and making photographs.

I send out kickstarter-like email updates. Very sporadically. Sign up here:

   

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For your reference, today you will have: great luck.