APOCKETLYPSE
This project cycle happened at an interesting time for me. I found myself less and less interested in hobbyist programming as AI seeped deeper into "professional" coding, and I was simultaneously having a great nostalgia-dive into Digimon and some of the franchise's games.
I think there's an interesting overlap there -- the concept of semi-sapient digital creatures skulking around on the internet causing grief.
Around the same time the project began I had been thinking about uxn again which is a forth-inspired programming system where you work in bytecode. The antithesis of the kind of coding I do for a living -- somewhere I would be in control of every single byte instead of steeped in increasingly package-managed high-level environments. I knew I wanted to make some kind of tamagatchi/digimon-inspired device for this project, but wanted the inspiration, "The Triumph of Death" to colour the work. I ended up metabolizing the with the apocalyptic imagery and played off of how much I hated when my digital pets would die in the games or on the devices. It's silly, but even as a crotchety old adult playing crappy old PS1 Digimon games I still get upset when the damn things die.
So what if we flipped it, and the virtual pet didn't die, but killed everyone else? What if the monster you were raising wasn't a digital pet with a short lifespan, but an avatar of the apocalypse?
And so I give to you: APOCKETLYPSE, the digital creature you can raise to destroy humanity! Feed its lust for destruction by destroying hospitals and forests! Watch it evolve into a powerful deity and end the planet!
...It's a bit of a stretch, but I ran with it.
The result isn't anything particularly enjoyable, honestly. It's a bad tamagatchi knockoff with 6 total forms, a little casino game, 3 different things you can "feed" it, and some really basic stats. It isn't very fun to raise and there's no fail state -- just keep feeding it until it levels up and destroys the world.
Each of the final forms (3 final forms, 2 intermediary forms) represent an apocalypse -- we have a big cyborg box representing the rise of machines as humans become more reliant (destroy forests to get this guy), a plague-doctor scarecrow looking guy representing disease and the lack of trust in science (destroy hospitals for this one), and the middle character who sports a deer skull and mechanical arms, who I intended to embody pollution from vehicles. Each of them has their little epilogue when you max out their stats (cut me some slack here I was working with VERY small character limits):
-------------------------------------------------
Siknis, Plague Apocalypse
THE HOSPITALS FALL
PLAGUE SPREADS TO
EVERY CITY AND TOWN
YET FAITH IN SCIENCE
STILL DECLINES
THE LAST BREATH IS
SOUR AND FETID
-------------------------------------------------
Mach-N, The Machine Apocalypse
THE PEOPLE TURNED
TO MACHINES FOR
SALVATION AND FORGOT
WHAT MADE US HUMAN
EVENTUALLY THE
MACHINES FORGOT TOO
-------------------------------------------------
Killroad, The Pollution Apocalypse
THE AIR AND THE
SEA BECOME POISON
THE EARTH BECOMES
UNINHABITABLE TO ALL
BUT FOR A BRIEF
WONDERFUL TIME WE
HAD SUCH FAST CARS
-------------------------------------------------
Triumph of Death, Indeed!
The process of making this was the most fun I've had with a computer in a long while. Programming with nothing more than the uxn manual and a terminal literally byte-by-byte, keeping track of the stack in my head, debugging leaking bits I forgot to pop off the stack -- I don't think I would want to undertake a serious coding project in this ecosystem, but I'm ready to admit "serious" coding isn't what I do with my hobbies.
I loved the idea of uxn prior to this project, but now I get it. The concept of computing you can do in your head; the boiling down of abstract concepts to pushing and popping a byte at a time felt more like doing math on paper than writing loops.
As a bonus, the maker of uxn got it their emulator working on a little esp32 device called the "M5stack", so of course now the Apocketlypse device is real:
I'm including the source code and ROM of the device -- if you want to run it yourself I recommend getting a uxn version you can scale up since the screen I worked with is tiny.
I don't know if I'll write more uxn after this, but I'm coming away a slightly changed programmer.