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Castle of the Vampire – Day 10, pyrotechnics
The vampire’s castle is becoming less like a collection of rooms and corridors and more like a place where dangerous things have accumulated over time. There are chemical experiments in crates and jars, gunpowder stored in barrels, traps hidden among the architecture, and creatures that may be dangerous even after…
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nesifier- Days 2 and 3, web, with framing
nesifier is now available as a webapp! check it out at https://slashie.net/nesifier and have fun with it! Doing this involved refactoring the core to work in both a browser environment and a headless nodejs environment. The webapp is featureful and easy to use. Additionally, I figured something was missing: the…
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RogueBasin 2026 server migration
Prompted by the recent cybersecurity madness I was led to update roguebasin’s server setup – I guess it was due time, the server was already 5 years old Ubuntu box. So, I set up a brand new VPS with double the storage and about 80% cost, and went on to…
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Castle of the Vampire – Day 9, The BIOS Hack
I’ve been working on a larger change to how Castle of the Vampire presents itself. The game has always been built around a character grid, but the interface and the artwork have gradually grown beyond what a plain text display can comfortably communicate. I wanted to give the game more…
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Castle of the Vampire – Day 8, Lighting
This round of development touched nearly every part of the dungeon experience, from the traps waiting in the forest to the way the world fits on screen. The common thread has been making the game more readable without giving away its secrets. Traps for the outdoors The forest now has…
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nesifier – convert images to NES visuals
Just for fun, I created a small node.js cli tool to convert any image into strict NES visual constraints (more specifically, a NES background that could actually be displayed on a console). It’s on npm now. Some Recipes If you want to try it out, this is all you need…
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Roguelike Celebration 2026 Talks Series #1 – The City, The Street, The Lens by Mike Cook
Roguelike celebration 2026 just happened and I wanted to share some of my favorite talks. Let’s start with an awesome talk about Street Photography (?!) The City, The Street, The Lens: Perspectives on Building and Appreciating Generative Systems Cities are beautiful, complex systems that have been built over hundreds, often…
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Castle of the Vampire – Day 7, Fateful Accident
The biggest change today was adding a cinematic intro of the player running into the forest in a dark stormy night in a carriage that is attacked by a flock of crows resulting in tragedy for the driver and the horse. Rain and lighting effects were added for this sequence…
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Castle of the Vampire – Day 6, A Better View
This round of development was mostly about making the dungeon easier to read without making it easier to understand. Slashie worked on the DOS-style font, visibility, and the visual language of objects, then moved on to the mobile interface and the way the game communicates its puzzles. The DOS 8×8…
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Pixel Centurion – Day 9
Improved the scenario setup screen, instead of slides per unit type added a grid of cards per unit type, each card with the visuals of the unit, a smaller button to get the details, and a “spinner” (+ and – buttons with a label in the middle) to change the…
I’m Santiago Zapata, better known online as slashie, a Software Engineer and Independent Game Developer and from Medellín, Colombia.
You are in the devlog, a chronological collection of updates on my projects, alongside articles about software and game development. Subscribe to get these directly into your inbox.