A bit of Star Wars and some programming this week:

  • SC 38 Reimagined is a fan-made remake of the Obi-Wan vs Darth Vader fight in Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope. The film is short but it has high production values. It makes the original Alec Guinness vs David Prowse battle look rather geriatric, following Vader’s aggressive fighting style seen in the prequel films and TV shows. This fan-film even has a Wikipedia article.
  • Google may have profiled me after my previous Random Things Sunday post, as that list contained a reference to a piece of game-making software, and then YouTube’s algorithm recommended me the Make tiny games video by Juniper Dev. The video is about retro game engines, such as PICO-8, that force you to be creative by limiting the resources you have at your disposal, but that can also be fully mastered due to their limited size. If one wants to make games, start small, and nothing is smaller than these engines!
  • Finally, Joshua Barretto did a great write-up Writing Toy Software Is A Joy, which I think is a good follow-up to the previous point about tiny games. The point of the post is that if you’re a programmer, you should have hobby projects too. You cannot know how, but they’ll pay you back when you’ll acquire knowledge you didn’t know you’d need. And it’s also just more fun to program 20% the work for 80% the results, rather than trying to account for every exceptional case like you’d do if you were writing production quality software, where the first 90% of functionality takes 90% of effort and the final 10% of polish takes the other 90% of work.