/home/mole - Blog

What is local color?

Unknown — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Local color is a concept we all understand intuitively. Roses are red, violets are blue. We perceive things as having colors in some intrinsic sort of way. However, this property of things is not actually a color but something subtly different. Understanding the difference gives us a powerful way to think about color in painting.

Finding my artistic voice

Unknown — Sun, 25 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

"Finding one's voice" is a phrase that doesn't admit a rigorous definition but feels like an accurate description of my current moment with visual art. I've been thinking about why I relate so strongly with these words right now, and wanted to dump some of those thoughts into a brief blog post.

Stuff I liked in 2025

Unknown — Wed, 31 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

It's time for another year-end list of good stuff. Metal records, books, and games I enjoyed in 2025, with the music restricted to new releases. Also some personal retrospecting at the end.

Art rules from first principles, part 1: Perspective

Unknown — Wed, 02 Jul 2025 00:00:00 +0000

There are many shorthands and rules of thumb one encounters when learning the fundamentals of representational art — vanishing points, warm-cool contrasts, grouping of values into light, midtone and shadow, etc. There are many good non-technical explanations of these ideas out there, but I wanted to dive deeper and investigate how they arise from the physics of light and geometry of space. In this first part we'll look at geometric interpretations of common perspective drawing methods.

Painting normal maps, and other Krita tips

Unknown — Sat, 08 Mar 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I'm a big fan of using software effectively and optimizing my workflows, so over my years using Krita</a> I've spent quite a bit of time digging into its features. In this post I want to talk about how I use this wonderful piece of software and highlight some not-so-obvious bits that have made a difference in my process. I'll do general painting first, hopefully in a way that is useful to beginners, and then indulge in some nerding out about normal maps and how to make them.

A decade of digital art

Unknown — Mon, 27 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000

The oldest digital drawing I have on my computer turns ten years old today. This post is a self-indulgent trip down memory lane, looking back at landmark pieces and lessons learned throughout the years.

Game graphics: the journey so far

Unknown — Sun, 19 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000

The majority of my recent game development work has revolved around graphics — both workflows for making them and technology for rendering them. Many ideas have been had and many scrapped along the way, and the journey certainly isn't over yet, but I think I'm moving towards something pretty unique and cool. This is a devlog-style post where I meander through some of the more noteworthy moments so far without going very deep into technical details (but providing technical sources where relevant).

Rounding collider corners

Unknown — Sat, 04 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Back in 2022 I entirely rewrote one of the most complicated parts of Starframe</a>, the collision detection system. A notable feature of the new system is the ability to give any shape rounded corners. I also wrote most of this post back then, but things happened and it was left unfinished. Here it is now, more than two years later. Better late than never I suppose.

Stuff I liked in 2024

Unknown — Sun, 29 Dec 2024 00:00:00 +0000

In recent years I've made a habit of posting a list of my favorite heavy metal releases of the year on Mastodon. This year I decided to list more than just music and do it in a more permanent place here on my website. So here are some metal albums, books, and games I enjoyed in 2024.

Ten formative games

Unknown — Tue, 15 Oct 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Inspired by recent discussions in the Eggplant Show</a> Discord community, here's a list of ten video games. Not my favorite games (though many of them are that too), but ones that had a notable influence on who I am today.

Starframe devlog: Rope physics

Unknown — Thu, 30 Dec 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Starframe</a>'s rope physics is the first piece of physics code I've written that I designed entirely myself. This is a short story of that design process and the challenges and solutions found along the way.

Starframe devlog: Solving Constraints in Physics

Unknown — Wed, 31 Mar 2021 00:00:00 +0000

The Starframe</a> physics solver has gone through a few iterations recently as my understanding of the problem and knowledge of available methods have grown. In this post I attempt to explain what constraints are and detail a few game-engine-friendly ways of solving them. I'll try to make this understandable to someone with approximately the level of knowledge I had before starting this: decent linear algebra and calculus skills and a tiny bit of physics knowledge.

Starframe devlog: Architecture

Unknown — Sun, 30 Aug 2020 00:00:00 +0000

I've spent a large portion of the past two years writing and rewriting the basic structures that describe a game and its content in Starframe</a> (formerly known as MoleEngine). These are some notes on what I've done so far and what I've learned from it.

Starframe devlog: Introduction

Unknown — Sun, 23 Sep 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Starframe is an ambitious hobby project, still early on in development, aiming to create a general-purpose 2D game engine suitable for rapid prototyping and game jams as well as more polished, hopefully commercial-quality products. This blog is meant to document the development and ideas behind it in a fair bit of detail - mostly to organize and revise my own thoughts, but with the hope that someone else might also find it interesting and/or helpful. In this first post I will outline what exactly I am trying to accomplish and why I am doing it.