Worst part is, it even affected my evening/night run --- though my average pace had been increasing over the past weeks, today it plummeted. I guess that's two outlets in one. Amazing misery/effort value there. Such is life.

Unfortunately, I've lost all motivation to work on my side projects after someone IRL decided to bring it up in person. Gah. Just when I had started to have fun again. Oh well. Sucks for mental health, but I guess I now have more cycles to think about research. Sigh.

adviser checked the fediverse

Old PL papers when comparing against related work: "underhanded methods"

My initial plan was to do map description entirely in Rhombus, but after thinking about it some more, I realised that using tiled was probably a better approach... and so --- tada! our neverending desert now has some character!

Added a bunch of LPC monsters and added a rudimentary inventory system. Next I'm going to add integration with tiled to simplify the process of making maps. Drawing sprites and UI elements was so easy because I wrote a Rhombus mega-macro to declaratively allow me to specify sprites and their locations!

Thanks for the kind words!

Got some smooth animations for dialog popups! In the process had to write a macro to encode ADTs in rhombus --- it turns out that you can piggyback on Rhombus' static information system to encode exhaustivity checking --- Amazing!

Got the basics of a dialog box working! Mostly just a matter of hacking on raylib stuff, not much interesting Rhombus things going on, but that should be changing soon... (Character art is generated using stable-diffusion, so I'm assigning it CC-BY-SA copyright).