My new school – at Grit Academy – began in January, 2025.
A vocational university. The game programmer course.

Board games!

First two weeks was a game design course, fun and aloof.
We got to develop board games. A lot of board games.
The point was to learn to make prototypes, bad ones, to be able to throw it out when testing proved it wasn’t good enough.

I still tinker on one of them… I like making board games as well.

C++

We started to study C++ around February, second time for me.
It was fun and I felt that I knew all of it, until I started to properly learn about pointers…
That shit is crazy, until you get it.
I can’t say I’m fluid in pointers yet. But what finally made me get it was the realization that C# does it for you, in the background.
Every time I send parameters into a function, C# sends a pointer – or not a pointer – with every parameter.
Having learned a good bit about pointers, suddenly getting that made it all fit into… my brain. Somehow.

As a final project for that course I made a text based version of an old swedish board game called ”Drakborgen”. In English it was called DungeonQuest.
I’m calling it Drakborgen++.

I changed things because of the text based only graphic limitations, but I try to keep it true to the original.
It’s an interpretation of course.
Still plan to finish it. It didn’t have to be a full game for the presentation.

Eventually I will put it up on Github and itch.io, as well as having a page for it here in my projects.

Unreal Engine

In Mars we started to study Unreal Engine.
That was really exciting, although frustrating as well. Nodes are a real change in thinking if you’re a programmer of script based languages.

We first had a personal project to present, and later we got group assignments.
Three weeks were given to make a game, groups were five to six people. Us, the programmers, collaborated with the graphic artist course.

In my group we created the project ShapeShifter, and the game’s final name is Jespurr’s Journey.
It’s a platformer with a shape shifting character/vehicle, letting the player freely shift between sphere, cube and pyramid.
The different shapes grant the player different platforming abilities.

I was the group leader but also mainly responsible for the controls of the platforming. And I’m proud of how it turned out.
Most of all, I put a lot of time into making the sphere shape move like a ball and still be controllable.
In Unreal Engine, it turns out that you can’t both have a sphere rolling like a sphere through the built in physics and control it at the same time.
If you want to control it, you have to make the rolling physics by yourself. And I kind of did.

In the end I found that altering the slope walkability in real time based on the character speed was the easiest way to get it to work the way I wanted it.
And the rolling is simply rotating the mesh based on speed as well.
So there’s not actually any rolling of a sphere going on, but it looks like it. And that’s pretty cool if I say so myself.

Android game making and VR – with Unreal Engine

Around April I created an itch.io account to upload school projects.

After this, we did a few more group projects, and tested both android mobile game making and VR game making in Unreal Engine.
Those were small prototypes only for testing some functionality of each.

There was a lot of problems getting it to run and testing it properly, and it was too little time to get any good understanding of it all, in my opinion.
I basically only learned that I will never try to make mobile games or VR games through Unreal Engine.

A bit of a stressful and frustrating end of the first term, but there was still a lot of fun.

I have an itch.io account now! It’s https://alyxes.itch.io/.
It actually began earlier than this post, around may or late april. But I haven’t had time to write anything here until now.

The game project ShapeShifter aka Jespurr’s Journey is a group project from my ongoing studies at Grit Academy.
You play as a shape shifting character, or rather a space cat inside a shape shifting vehicle. Sphere, cube and pyramid (tetrahedron to be absolutely correct), and these shapes grant you different controls and physics for the platforming. You can shift at will, and it works with an xbox controller as well as keyboard and mouse.
But it’s not a finished game, there’s only one level and the pyramid doesn’t do much. And since it’s a school project it never will be, but I might update it once or twice again to get som more functionality in there.
I’m really proud of the controls which I was mainly responsible for, especially the rolling around as a sphere.

The other visible project there, Gyro Space Shooter is for android mobile. The development was short and full of problems even getting it to run on a phone.
It’s broken, controls only work if you can install it on your phone and it doesn’t have much working functionality, so don’t try to play it…
Because it was such a problematic development I will likely never work and upload anything more on it. But I do have a slightly better version on my laptop, where the basic controls works with a mouse. Maybe that will get uploaded in the future.

Soon, I will put Treasure Cave up there as well.
New test projects made in unreal engine will probably get there if I get something playable done that I’m at least a little proud of.
And eventually other personal stuff might get there.

I’m starting a new school, in game programming!

I have finally got myself in to a higher form of school than I’ve ever attended to. This is a ”vocational university” according to my best googling for a proper translation.
Grit Academy in Malmö, Sweden.

When I was younger, after the Comic School in Malmö, I tried a few times to enter some game developer educations. This was almost twenty years ago now…
I never succeeded, because I didn’t have the grades for it. And my attempts to tell the schools that I really would be ready didn’t help.
As I have a hard time studying things I’m not really interested in, I’ve always shunned raising all the grades needed to be able to apply to higher education. And they are some, not just one or two…
And I also failed a few attempts at it, which frankly scared me.
I thought I just never would be able to get here. Hard work on my spare time and self educating myself seemed to be my only option.
That is of course not the worst option, I would never look down on those who’ve taken that path, and so many great developers have come through it.

Now, my life experience (I assume twenty more years of living has accumulated something of worth), programming and game releasing experience have proven to be enough!
As of january 20th I am starting to study game programming! And two years later, I will have the actual education needed to be hired by game companies.
This is really big for me, and I’m super thrilled!
Happy smiley! Fireworks and shit!

I’ve been to school to study programming in recent years, but they were only single high school courses. They didn’t really prepare me for applying to real jobs, which I naively hoped for.
Since this site was built during one of those courses, and I always intended to use it for blogging about my game programming progress… It feels like the beginning of this journey is actually coming to an end, and the actual journey is starting.
In my new school I will definitely learn tons of exciting new things, and I will have to make test programs to learn them properly. So I will hopefully have a lot to write about it here.
I’m just hoping I will have time to make a post now and then…

Maybe nobody knows about my site yet! Quite definitely almost nobody does.
I’m quite certain that very few will be dissappointed when I forget to update here.
That’s nice.
I will never be great at advertising myself…

I have finally created a repository on GitHub, with the code to Treasure Cave public.
Now anyone can test my game!
It’s reachable through the Treasure Cave page of course, where I’ve also written a dummy explanation on how to test the game, for non technical people.
And here’s the link as well:
https://github.com/Alyxes/Treasure-Cave

It would be really fun if people wanted to try it and finds it fun at all.
Other programmers that might check it out can look at all the code. Please be kind.
I have commented on most methods and a lot of other places too, but I’m sure there are short comings in the transparency yet.
If you wonder something, just ask! Email me, don’t be shy. It would be really fun to talk to other coders about my stuff, and coding in general.

GitHub is a great page for sharing code and collaborating, I’m just really late to start using it thoroughly.
I will update the files on the project when I’m done with a new part.

The long term javascript game project that me and my brother’s been working on, Teradoña and the Caves of Nevermind, now has its own page here!
Finally, both my ongoing projects has a fair presentation (Teradoña will always be ”ongoing”, regardless of how on hold it actually is).
Page Teradoña has several nice screenshots from the game, and even a few game play videos! They are viewable at our Madskull Creations youtube channel.

I hurried up to get this page up because I am applying to a game designer school very soon. Even so, the page is of course neat.
As always I’m a perfectionist and works at stuff to the very end.

I am also trying to get project Treasure Cave in better shape for sharing…
But I’m not sure that’s doable before applying.

I am currently working hard to make the mobile version of the site better.
Using @media and orientation: portrait.

It should already be a noticeable difference, the font size is larger and the to-top-button (the triangle) is moved to the right side of the screen, allowing easier access for at least right handed people.

There was a row of buttons at the very top before. They are now moved, but that isn’t finished… So right now it’s tricky to navigate all parts of the site. Sorry.
It will be another pop up button, above the triangle button, that will reveal the ’Home’, ’Projects’ and so on buttons.
It’s gonna be neat.

Iphone users are less lucky… The hover buttons doesn’t translate well into clickable versions on Iphones. I will solve that too, but it has lower priority.
I have no idea how it looks on laptop Safari. Will check it out as soon as I can.

I have made some SVGs into PNGs instead, making them less prone to freak out graphically.
Computer Chrome is obviously not exactly the same as Android Chrome (not really a surprise, I’m just disappointed!).

So, right in the middle of stuff. Please excuse the mess for a few days!

Finally, my site is online!

It’s really nice… But boy do I have stuff to fix and test and tinker with before it’s gonna feel ”perfect”.
Nothing ever feels perfect.

I’ve realized the mobile version needs upscaling everywhere, even the 1080p-version.
Some images are not back yet, on the school tasks, and therefore the About Me page as well. So don’t look at them yet!

But hey… Where are my manners… (in the toilet, I tell ya).

Hi everybody! This is the first new post any of you can read here.
However, I haven’t looked over google analythics stuff yet, so the chances that anybody finds me is probably really slim yet.
I think I’ll wait a little bit more with a really swell introduction of my place here.

But of course I’ll be glad if you have found my site. Please look around. Please have patience…

Have a look at my projects and my CV for starters. I plan to use this site as my portfolio.

It will update and look better on mobile platforms soon.

My text-based game project Treasure Cave has finally got itself its own page here.
I’ve been thinking about letting each project have its own individual page that’s reachable from the Projects page for a while, so it’s a good thing it happens before the site goes online.
Page Treasure Cave looks good with a matching colour scheme inspired by the game’s simple graphical presentation. That’s a fact, not an opinion!

The isometric game project Teradoña is still paused indefinitely, so it will take a while before it gets its own page.
But I will at least add a bit more info on its part before official shipping of this site.

Oh no! There is (will be according to the video date) an alien attack on the Statue of Liberty!
I totally saw it and recorded it! A UFO and everything.

There is proof on my youtube-channel, where I put up the video of it happening.

I have created a new page in swedish as well, where you can also get linked to the video.
First Impact is the page and video called. Please google translate the page if you hate swedish so much.

Ok… Please stop hyper ventilating, it is not real!!
I got you there.
The video is fake! Completely manufactured with the powers of computers. Except for the video of the Statue of Liberty, that’s a real video… I assume. I got it from school, so I don’t really know that it’s real.
Perhaps the Statue Herself is but a myth… Has anyone ever actually seen it in real life? I know I haven’t. And I can’t afford going there to check for myself, so… There’s no proof.
….

What’s not a myth is HitFilm, which I used to add the digital effects to the video.
I know, the video isn’t fantastic, I had to stop adding stuff because my laptop just couldn’t handle all the 4K graphics added to the project.
But HitFilm really packs a punch. It has a lot of stuff and when one actually follows instruction videos on how to do stuff, one can actually learn to use an advanced program…
That’s one important lesson my recent school time has taught me.

”Why swedish now again?” you might ask. Just might. And quite late by now. But I get it, you were initially upset about the precious statue…
Because it’s a school task again, from my Digital Creation 2-course that ended in december 2023.
And I haven’t uploaded the video until recently because I just wasn’t quite happy with the end result. As I said, my laptop couldn’t handle it, which cut my working on it short. I had more sparkles planned! And smoke.
And I could absolutely not render it in 4K. I had to render five seconds at a time sometimes, then put all the pieces together elsewhere. HitFilm would crash when I tried too hard.
I think my RAM is old and too low on my laptop. I think my laptop is over all too old.

Anyway, it turned out way less than I planned it, so it took some time for me to feel like I wanted to share it online.
But now I have.
Oh, about the sound. It’s all from freesound.org. But I have used many samples to put together more interesting sounds and music in Audacity.
So I’m a bit proud of the background music specifically.

If anyone is upset about the casual action entertainmentificationing of a hostile action of war in these times, do bear in mind that the specs for the task was specifically ”Make it so it looks like a UFO shoots at the Statue of Liberty. Adding an explosion will give extra points.” So… I just followed orders.

But it doesn’t stop me from waking up every night… Thinking that I could have… I could have chosen the video where I was suppossed to make a cow explode from intestinal gases.

I’ve finished another SVG-icon.

It’s for the Digital Creation 1 course as well.
Here it is in a few different colours and a black and white version:

I call it ”Soy punche!” and it’s Nicaraguan spanish, meaning ”I am crab!”, roughly.
I think it’s mostly Nicaraguan, not certain wether that word is used in Spain…

The task in the course is to make an icon to use as ones brand for digital media, such as the film I presented in the last post.
I used Inkscape again, it continues to feel pretty intuitive. Maybe that’s because I have extensive experience from image programs already, making it easy for me to find and understand all the basics immediately.

I drew this crab icon many years ago, but I never really finished it. I thought it would be perfect for this task to find it and do so. So I did.
Then I imported it in Inkscape where you can easily (at least when you’ve found the function) transform the image to a vector based version.
After that, some fine tuning of the dots and angles is probably a good idea if you want a crisp and smooth icon. That requires some patience and time for a good result.
Lastly, I added colours, a shadow and the shine in the eyes.

I’m really proud of this one as it really has energy and momentum. Especially the ”feet” I think are a really good approximation of blurred running legs in a simplistic art style.
Why the triangle shape is there is because I based it on a different icon. One that I’ve used a long time as brand for my art and comics.

This is the old one, in a painted style with ink:

I assume the resemblence is apparent. I turned it upside down and made the sticks into claws and so on.
And yes, I like triangles. Who doesn’t?

Soy punche is such a sweet little icon, so I really want to have some real use for it. The film making won’t be a thing… It’s for the school, and I haven’t got enough ambitions about it to keep it up.
But I’ve thought about possibly having the little crab as my future game developer brand, and the name, Soy punche.
It’s just that there’s someone online calling themself Soy Punch… and I don’t wanna look like I’m stealing that name. It doesn’t mean nearly the same thing, but I don’t know if that matters when people give a verdict wether I stole the name or not…

Finding just the right name for your future brand is kinda hard. Many ideas have crossed my mind, but so many are taken.
So I haven’t decided yet. We’ll see.

I’ve made a little film!
That’s why I haven’t updated for a while again, basically.
I started a new course with a slightly different focus than my prior courses. Digital Creation 1.

I’ve learned some more photo editing, started working on another SVG-icon, and most of the time was put into making a film.

So I haven’t had much time over for… anything else really, on top of family life.
Which my film is sort of about (super sort of…).

I’ve made a new page under School Tasks where you can reach ”Familjelivet”, it means ”family life” simple enough.
I link to the film there, it’s on Youtube. It’s in swedish, but I’ve made sure there are english subtitles.
Here’s the link as well: Familjelivet on Youtube

There’s a short presentation of the film on the new page, it’s also in swedish, but as always, google translate is there to help out.
Basically it’s a comedic paraphrase of certain scenes from a famous old movie by Ingmar Bergman, The Seventh Seal.
The scenes with Death and the chess playing are the ones I’ve been inspired by.
It’s quite different in my version.

Also, me and my girlfriend are the actors, and our acting leaves some space for improvement…
The cutting and the adding of sounds, music and timing has been a lot of fun, and I’m a bit proud of it.

I have taken some time to use Inkscape, and created an SVG. Scalable Vector Graphic to be clear.

It’s the notepad image with a pencil that I have decided should be the Icon of this website.
There should be either one in full colours to the left of the site, or one in orange to the right beneath the text here, depending on your choice of device.
And there is also one black version next to the site name, and a tiny coloured version up on the browser tab.
You really shouldn’t be able to miss it.
And if you do, here it is in its full colour glory too.

I’m proud of the result, and I hope it feels iconic and unique, despite there being a gazillion icons representing specifically this out there on the web.
But lots of them are colourless and I hope I’ve found a quirky enough colour combo for it to be one of a kind.

After some testing and googling, it wasn’t too hard to make a pretty detailed SVG.  So, quite fun.
I might use it some more.

It was basically this that drove me to change the scaling of the site a whole lot as well.
The SVG was gonna scale and have a place on the site at all times, so I had to change some stuff and make it better.

I wanted my black version of the icon to change into all the different colours of my different pages, so I started looking for a way to change the colour of SVGs through css.  The css elements ’color’ or ’background-color’ does not work.
I found out about the filter-element, which lets you do just that.
And I found a good site to generate the colouring data/code that’s required, there’s no easy ”svg-color”-tag or element, oh no.
This site generates filter code for your SVG.

The generated code looks like this for example:
filter: invert(43%) sepia(29%) saturate(1816%) hue-rotate(61deg) brightness(116%) contrast(87%);
That generates a green, foresty colour.
Of course, once you have that data you can experiment with the numbers to see what happens. That’s how I learn, and I guess, most people.
I see how these settings are good to edit lighting and stuff on an icon or image, but too bad there isn’t a simple RGB-choice as well for monochrome icons.
Oh well. It works perfectly anyway.

I suppose my next step is to learn to animate SVGs… but that feels difficult and scary so I’ll wait until I absolutely must know how to do it.
Yes, that feels like my way.

The scalability of the site is now enhanced. A lot!

Before, it reshaped itself constantly to any window width, using percentage and vw-units.
Now I have made the tabletop version static in width until the screen is 1080 pixel wide only. Then I assume that someone is using a pad or a phone, and reshapes the site quite a bit.
After that, I have to reshape the site gradually as there are many different resolutions on handheld devices, and I want the wrapper to fill the entire width of the screen. But it has several steps now and looks good down to its minimum width, 320 pixel.
I’m still using @media for the scalability. Not sure if there are better ways out there. I haven’t taken any time to look into grid building yet.

As always, it still requires a little fine tuning here and there. There’s always something I notice that could get just a liiiittle better.

I have learned to create a download button!

My CV page now gives the user the option to save my CV as a pdf.
Turned out to be really simple, adding the download tag to the <a>-element.
Like this: <a href=”path to file” download=”filename.filetype”>Download as pdf</a>
Done!
Then of course some css to shape it like a button.

Real nice when things are this easy.
The path to a file can be a URL to another site as well.

I’m going to make this possible with my project Treasure Cave too, when I’ve finished some things that I’ve started there.
Until then, let’s hope my website isn’t online yet!

Finally the last pages of the site are up!

My CV page is looking good, please take a look. And my Ambitions page also.

One can’t yet download my CV, that will be made possible… in the future.
My ambitions are ready. At first I was a little uncertain about the colour choice, but it quickly grew on me.

Of course there’s a lot more to do on the site to have everything work the way I want, and there will be more stuff on some pages eventually.
But all pages are in place. That’s a nice milestone.

I have now made an official translation of the first school task, ”About me, Timothy”, to use as my About me page.

I changed the colours a little bit on this version because why not. Otherwise everything’s the same except the language.

Almost all the site’s links are finished, just CV and Ambitions left.
Then there will also be some more on Projects and Timeline before they are completely finished.

The search bar doesn’t work yet… I have no idea how to make it. So that will probaby be a lot of fun and/or difficult and super frustrating.

Oh well. On to the next task!

Now I’ve made a Links page.
Actually, it’s hyperlinks!

There’s links (hyperlinks!) to the famous w3schools and stack overflow which I have both had great help from during the years.
But also to a couple of swedish indie developers that I’m fond of.

The list will grow over time I think.
Hope it will be useful to someone.

I have added the Timeline page, and it’s reached through the button that says ”Timeline”.

It’s a page where I go through my history of game developing, in reverse chronological order (backwards, from latest stuff to earliest stuff).
It differs from my Projects page of course. To explain it, the Projects page is about things that I’m still working on from time to time, while Timeline is not. It’s about everything (almost) I’ve done.
My CV page is just that, a CV about my coding and game projects, but it doesn’t go through every little thing I’ve worked on.
And my About Me page doesn’t take up everything either, it tells my story, but it of course boils stuff down.

So to give anyone curious enough the chance to read more about a lot of the little game projects I’ve worked on and a clearer timeline for everything I thought a page for that could be nice. I hope someone finds it interesting to read.

I made a little infobox on the Projects page.

I wanted it to animate and used transition to make it happen. The box expands on mouse over into a bigger rectangle.
Inside the div is a paragraph, they have different id.
The paragraph was initially set to display:none, and then display:block. But display are not animatable, so I used opacity. However, when display was set to ”block” instead of ”none” the transition didn’t happen, it just popped forth. It overrided the opacity.

So I thought ”Well, let’s skip display, opacity does the trick anyway”.
This gave me the problem that even though the text wasn’t visible it was still there and reacted on mouse over. Bad.
So I wanted a way to have the text not reacting when gone, but able to fade in.
I googled it, as you do.
And I found ”visibility”! Now this one doesn’t override opacity, so even if it’s set to ”visible” the text is fading in from opacity zero to one.

Looks like this in code:
visibility: hidden;
or
visibility: visible;

Great! Everything’s perfect.
….
Not completely. When setting visibility back to ”hidden” the transition is of course nullified.
I didn’t fix this right away as the text disappearing quickly is a good thing. And the solution probably would require javascript or jQuery to alter the css and make sure there is a short pause before visibility becomes ”hidden”. I didn’t feel like doing that right now as I have a deadline for school work again.

But it’s interesting stuff!

If you have found this post in the future and were happy to hear about this, or know how I could fix this neatly, please write a comment here, or email me! It will be possible by the time you can read this. I hope.

Another important part of my site has its first version.
Projects

I hope to add more than two of them in there eventually, but even more so I guess I hope to work more on my projects over all.

It’s a bit simple now. I will add more images and info about both of them soon.
Most likely, each of them will get their own page linking from the projects page, but right now it’s not necessary.

I’ve made the first version of a contact page!
But sending emails from it doesn’t work yet!
How lucky I am that nothing’s online yet.

Almost everything about it is done however, I just need to copy some php code from somewhere to implement and then voilá! Communication is possible.
But not at all of course, until this goes live.

It’s blue. I chose blue for the contact page. And made some iconic letters scattered on the background image.

You reach it from the footer of the site, in the middle (maybe not exactly in the middle in final version) you should see ”Contact me”, that’s the link to it.

I have began to make the site scalable.
As I’m writing this, only I can experience my site on a smart phone. *smug smiley here*.
With some workarounds…
As the site isn’t online yet, I have to create a static page with the style in the html-document to open on my phone.
But it works!

The site neatly reshapes itself at 1080 pixel width so that the side bars are above everything as an extra nav bar. Chances are that it’s the only version you, my potential future reader, will ever see, as surfing is mostly done on phones these days. Do I sound super old for even mentioning that? I guess there’s a lot of things I say here that make me sound super old.
Well, I am, or at least that’s what millenials and later generations think.
I’m trying to own it, but I’m not sure what that would mean…
I do still believe that programmers and coders sit by a computer when working though, so maybe my site will have actual desktop or laptop users, viewing THE REAL version of my site!

The scalability is done with ”@media only screen and (”max or min-width or other things here”)”. It works.
I have only done this for 1600 px, 1280 px and 1080 px as of yet. Aside from the today standard of 1920 px width. Isn’t it standard? Is it bigger nowadays?
More sizes will be added. I think I need at least two more steps for even smaller widths, and I will make a 4K-version where the font-size will be increased, well, many elements need to get bigger perhaps.
I learned recently how to ask for the orientation of a phone, which will be useful, but it’s not yet been tested or implemented.

I’ve just started looking at ”grid” as well and I hope to be able to understand it and use it on my site before it goes online. Possibly it will completely change the way I’m doing things now.

Right now, the wrapper (the white part in the middle where all the content appears) reshapes constantly as you reshape the window of the browser. I’m using percentage and at some places vw-units to achieve a scalable site.
But apparently, modern sites don’t scale that way. They stay rigid until the window size gets too small, then it shrinks a step.
That’s gonna be a big thing to change, as there are quite some elements here.

It’s a bit of a chore to implement it for all resolutions one thinks need different versions. But still a fun thing to do as it makes my site more user friendly and looking more professional.
However, page making is suffering. I can’t do everything at the same time, sadly.

Writing this post is almost deviation from school work. But a site’s gotta have some posts.

As the headline say, all school tasks are up. They are four now. All reachable from the drop down menu under School Tasks.
They’ve been up for a while actually, more on that further down.

They’re all in swedish, but the google translation will be sufficient to experience them adequately. Especially (and mostly, to be frank) the one about internet history is kinda interesting, as it’s the one I felt the greatest need to do some actual research to write.
Link to Internet History essay page.
They all got their own background images that I have dug up from my own old library of artwork or photoshopped together. No borrowed free online artwork here.

As I have created those pages, I have also kept changing things under the hood of the site. I will get to that in a later post, and it will be here before this site launches so you won’t have to wait for it.

About the fact that they’ve already been up for a while.
I’ve been struggling with keeping up the pace for the school work and haven’t felt like I had the time to add posts when nothing is live yet and school work is due.
I’m on the second course of web development now, and I keep working on this site for that course as well. But I want to be more frequent about the posts here, they could work as some kind of journal over my work, which is exactly what this site is supposed to be about.

Rant warning ahead!
I hate documenting stuff. It’s not fun! But I get why it has to be done…
However, when I get to do it in my own way, by my own initiative, I think it’s a little bit fun. Did I mention that I’m a grown up?
Well, even grown ups are good at different things and therefore also good at dealing with different things in a sober way. And also therefore bad at dealing with some things.
But I do believe there are grown ups who can face anything with an open mind. And I also believe there are people that are generally good at learning new (even boring) things.
I’m just not one of them.

I guess I’m open minded about most stuff. I just don’t think that things that aren’t coding in itself is worth the while. Concerning coding of course, I have other interests than coding actually.
Documenting? Dealing with messed up interfaces? Writing evaluations on your own work!?
Not if I didn’t have to! Those things are not what makes ANYONE want to code!

I wish there were separate courses for all that…  ”Functional employee 101”, ”bureaucracy 101”, ”paperwork 101” and so on. So you could do that when having learned the interesting stuff first, and really feel that you also, maybe, wanna be hireable by an actual company.
Courses would possibly also have more time to teach actual coding stuff. Just because actual work is just 10 to 20 percent coding doesn’t mean that the classes about coding must be so.

A bit bitter, yes. But luckily, still mostly intrigued by learning.
Rant over.

Today I published the first new page, ”Om mig, Timothy”.
School task: Om mig, Timothy
But it’s in swedish! It means ”About me, Timothy”. So google translate it if you don’t understand swedish and absolutely want to read it. I tried it and… it gets a little weird at some places, but most of it is translated totally ok.

It’s a school task, and will always be found under School Tasks on the top menu.
I have made a proper drop down menu for it, and I’m quite impressed with myself. Of course I googled how to do it, but then I’ve changed it around to my liking, so now it’s my own work…
W3shools has been my savior so many times. Here’s the base I used:
https://www.w3schools.com/howto/howto_css_dropdown.asp
I switched out the button element because it came with weird secret margins and stuff that I had to work around. A regular div worked fine in the end.

Also, the Home button works on the side bar! All of them do, but they don’t go anywhere yet. Funcionality being implemented, very satisfying to see it come to life.

I used the button element a bit, for the triangle button down to the left on the site and for the side bar buttons.
I thought it made it easier to have the entire button functioning as the link or anchor, but I have tested around and realized I had forgot that you can just put the <a>-tag around just about anything.
Of course, this is certainly super basic html knowledge, but I am learning! And sometimes I just don’t do the math until later!
So now, all buttons are link elements containing the divs, no <button>-elements used.

I like being able to build things from scratch. So using WordPress is a little troublesome for me.
On one hand, a lot of great things come for free with it, and it’s definitely a great tool.
On the other hand, sometimes I want things a specific way, and know how to do it, but not how to get it so in the WordPress interface.
For example, getting my new page ”Om mig, Timothy” up, I pasted my own html right in (I’m grateful for that option), because I couldn’t get the images to be where I wanted them with the WordPress interface.
Also, in the post before this one, I put in a screenshot of the site, and would have preferred it to sit tightly to the sides of the article, but it refused. It insisted on having some extreme padding on its sides, forcing me to shrink the whole image until it wouldn’t poke out on the far right side.
Of course I could have tried poking around way more with the image interface buuut I didn’t.
I’ll get there.

As a last tiny complaint. 🙂 < WHAT is this? I hope I can choose somewhere wether this will happen automatically or not, because it is not something I want on my site.
I don’t know if they look different on different browsers, but here it is a dreadfully boring little fella.
It’s rather low ranked in the list of things I should learn though, so I must refrain from putting time into googling it. And using smileys.

I think my design of this site is starting to find its final form.
I had an idea, I made a testversion outside WordPress, and now I have implemented the ideas and style into the WordPress version and fine-tuned details for some time.

Here’s a screenshot of it.

This design is most likely not final, I still have no idea what will be the final colour scheme. And the empty background is a bit boring, perhaps I will add some images there instead…
I want the different pages to have different colour schemes, but I don’t know yet how to affect that properly. And the header, sidebar and footer are supposed to be unaltered between different pages, so I have to see if they can change.

Still lots to do! But it’s fun.

I didn’t ramble on forever this time! Progress!

Hello world. My name is Timothy.

This is my first post on this site. I hope to use it to document my coding, wether it be related to games, school tasks, tests of interesting things or trying out examples that teaches me something good.

As I’m writing this I’m still studying web development 1, so I’m learning html and css.
I knew the basics since long back, but it’s been good to renew my knowledge; it’s been years since I coded anything with it.
Although fun to design things, and to make things come to life on the screen, I am also reminded of how frustrating the positioning is in css. And however good I might get at it and laughable this mentioning might be later, right now, css positioning is the worst.
Why can’t stuff just get centered easily already!?
I have, and will not, read into historical reasons of why that is (this determination is of course something that might change over time, but again, now is now), because it will not make me less angry about it, possibly just more.
Still, I love to be able to create stuff, so I guess it’s worth it in the long run.

With this course I’m also learning to use WordPress, which is a first for me.
This is officially my very first blog post in WordPress, it’s 2023 and I’m 39 years old.
I leave the surprised/chocked gasping to you, dear reader. If it is over my late entry or my old age or both is your choice, just don’t let me know, I really don’t care, I haven’t had an age crisis worth mentioning (yet) and I don’t want emails that might trigger it.
Very likely scenario I painted there. Loook forward to more of them.

I think this is good enough for a first post. I didn’t really plan to write this much.
And seriously, will any one but my teacher ever read it? That’s one person. Will he even read the whole thing? There’s definitely going to be a few in my family that I will force to read this. So maybe three or four will read it eventually.
Hopefully I will add many more posts, and this one will be hopelessly far down and too old and meaningless to dig up.
If you do though (and aren’t my relative and reading this in 2023), I’m ok with you emailing and telling me (this I obviously care about?). I will tell you if you’re first, or the first one to email me about it anyway. And seriously, I don’t even know if I will have any means of seeing statistics over views on posts here, but I suppose that I will know that quite soon.
If I do have access to that statistics, it will feel meaningless to be emailed about it when I clearly see that some others already found it but didn’t care to write.
I guess I’ll let you know if you’re the first sucker to do it at least.

I really didn’t plan to write THIS much. There’s just no one around to stop me.
I have to stop myself, just deleted a part here to not get further into this.
You’re crazy for reading this far, thank you for your time, I’m sorry, please read other posts on my blog, I’ll let this one be a lesson to myself about staying on topic and so on, I’ll shut up now.