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Wounds & Rescue The climb left its mark. Not all at once. Not dramatically. Just enough to realise that pushing the story forward, really pushing it had taken more than I’d noticed at the time. Not just tiredness, but the kind that settles deeper. The sort that makes even good progress feel heavy, and turns momentum into something that needs carrying. The direction was still right. The story still mattered. But continuing without pause would have been careless. Suziedog clock

Weathertop With Strider walking beside me, the journey felt steadier. There was direction now and fewer guesses. A sense that the story had a spine, even if the details were still changing. So I did what felt like the obvious next thing. I pushed the story forward. And almost immediately, it pushed back. A scene didn’t land the way I expected. A character choice felt thin under scrutiny. The shape of the story revealed a weak point, not loudly, but enough that it couldn’t be

Strider Strider didn’t arrive with instructions. No grand plan. No dramatic entrance. Just a steady presence and a sense of knowing the road a little better than I did. At this stage, the journey is still about shaping the story, the choices, the structure, the direction it might take, not writing anything yet, just learning how to move forward with intent. This wasn’t about handing anything over. The story was still mine. The choices were still mine. But suddenly I was

Bree After the ferry, the pressure lifted. Not completely, but enough to breathe again. Enough to enjoy the process instead of bracing against it. The story stopped chasing me, and for a moment, I let myself relax. As the ideas got a little messier, the laughter crept back in. I stopped gripping the outline so tightly and remembered why this was fun in the first place. Gandalf was still there, the spark, the belief, the reason I started, but he wasn’t standing next to m

Series: The Challenge of Cross-Platform Reality - Part 3 In the natural universe, harmony doesn’t arise because every environment is the same. It emerges because systems adapt to the conditions they inhabit. Cross-platform software follows the same principle. Rather than pretending operating systems are identical, robust systems acknowledge their differences. Platform-specific behaviours are isolated. Shared logic is protected. Interfaces are designed to translate intent, not

Series: The Challenge of Cross-Platform Reality - Part 2 When code moves from one platform to another, it encounters a kind of environmental resistance - not dramatic, not obvious, but persistent. A file path that once resolved cleanly now breaks. A graphics call behaves slightly differently. A background process stalls under a new security model. An input event arrives out of order, or not at all. None of these are errors in isolation. Each platform is behaving exactly as it

Series: The Challenge of Cross-Platform Reality - Part 1 In theory, code feels universal. Logic is logic. Algorithms behave the same wherever they are executed. A completed system can feel like a finished universe - self-contained, stable, complete. But the moment we ask that universe to exist on more than one platform, everything changes. Operating systems look similar on the surface, yet beneath their interfaces lie fundamentally different environments - different file syst

Series: The Architecture of Presence - Part 3 As systems mature, you begin to see the pattern. Spawn points. Checkpoints. Audio emitters. Trigger locations. Moments of interaction. They are not separate ideas - they are expressions of the same underlying truth: that worlds are shaped not just by geometry, but by meaningful locations within that geometry. By treating these as a unified concept - points that describe intent rather than implementation - the engine gains a quiet

Series: The Architecture of Presence - Part 2 Once a spawn point exists, something curious happens. It stops being just about spawning. Because the engine begins to recognise that this point in space holds meaning.Not visually - but logically. The same information that places a player can place a sound. The same context that defines a safe arrival can define a checkpoint. The same orientation that frames a first moment can frame an encounter, a memory, a decision. And so, the

Series: The Architecture of Presence - Part 1 In the natural universe, nothing truly begins at a single point. Stars form from vast clouds of matter. Planets emerge from slow, gravitational collapse. Even life itself appears not as a moment, but as a process. Game worlds, however, demand a beginning. When a player enters a world, game engines must answer a deceptively simple question: W here do you exist? This is the role of the spawn point. At first glance, it feels trivial

Series: The Journey from Legacy to Modern APIs - Part 3 Upgrading from an unsupported API to a modern one, without direct replacements, is not an act of substitution. It is an act of translation. The goal is not to recreate the old system line by line, but to preserve its intent - the behaviours, guarantees, and experiences it once provided - using a new set of laws. This requires patience. It requires restraint. And above all, it requires understanding. You begin to see the

The Ferry Once we were back on the road, it was obvious we weren’t alone anymore. The Dark Riders don’t arrive with drama. They arrive quietly, as questions that won’t let you rest. Is this storyline good enough? What if the story doesn’t work? What if you’re not the right person to write this? They followed close. Not visible but felt. Every step forward brought another whisper, another reason to slow down, to turn back, to make the whole thing smaller and safer. The pace pi

Series: The Journey from Legacy to Modern APIs - Part 2 When there is no direct replacement for an old API, the difficulty isn’t technical alone - it’s conceptual. The original system didn’t just provide functions. It provided meaning . A way of thinking about data, behaviour, and responsibility. The new API offers something different. Not better or worse - just different. Concepts have shifted. Responsibilities have moved. What was once implicit is now explicit. What was onc

Get off the Road! Up until now, this journey had felt noisy but safe. Ideas flying around. Laughter. Snacks. The comfort of thinking rather than committing. Then the road changed. It wasn’t dramatic. There was no announcement. Just a quiet, unmistakable shift, like when you realise you’ve stopped wandering through fields and are now very much on the road . The outline in front of me suddenly felt heavier. The gaps more obvious. The responsibility sharper. That’s when the doub

Series: The Journey from Legacy to Modern APIs - Part 1 In physics, the laws of the universe feel immutable. Gravity does not deprecate itself. Time does not announce a new major version. The cosmos moves forward without regard for compatibility. Software, however, does. Deep within many systems lies a quiet dependency - an API written years ago, stable, familiar, and deeply woven into the fabric of a product. It has its own logic, its own assumptions, its own way of interpre

Series: The Journey from Code to Hardware - Part 3 If development environments are like idealised universes - all clarity, symmetry, and predictable rules - then hardware is the cosmos as it truly is: dynamic, imperfect, full of unseen forces and silent variables. The goal is not to conquer these imperfections, but to understand them. To design systems that aren’t fragile, but adaptive. To build logic that can withstand the shifting landscape of real-world constraints. So we

When Merry & Pippin Arrived I’m still at the beginning of this journey, shaping ideas, sketching outlines, trying to coax a game story into existence one scribble at a time. It’s that fragile, exciting stage where everything feels possible…and a bit overwhelming. And right on cue, my own Merry and Pippin arrived. (not two people, just one friend who somehow channels both energies at full volume) They didn’t wait to be invited. They just bounced into the outlining process wit

Series: The Journey from Code to Hardware - Part 2 The Journey from Code to Hardware - Part 2 In the sanctuary of a development environment, algorithms behave like celestial equations - elegant, precise, and unbothered by the frictions of reality. But hardware has its own quiet personality. It is not a passive canvas for ideas; it reacts, resists, and reveals flaws the simulation never had to consider. And so, when code leaves the safety of abstraction, it encounters a landsc

The First Step Outside the Shire A clay-style animated scene featuring two fantasy characters and a small dog in front of a hobbit-style house. A short video introducing Chapter 5 of The Baldr Experiment: taking the first step outside the Shire. Every great story begins with an unexpected visitor. Not always at the door, sometimes during a dog walk. Yesterday, my Gandalf arrived. I’d done my Mission Possible planning, stages mapped, colour-coded, feeling organised, composed,

Representing accessible innovation and no-code game creation at SXSW A fun way to share a serious milestone: we’re heading to SXSW to showcase accessible game creation Visual Description: Clay-style animated cowboy riding a brown horse in a colourful western scene. Behind him is a large SXSW sign and stylised desert elements including cacti, buildings and figures. The image feels playful and celebratory Every once in a while, an opportunity comes along that doesn’t just open