I’ve finally moved the website to a new server. My last webhost was pretty hopeless and my updates weren’t going through. Par for the course. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I’ve dropped the price on Well’s Rest. I wasn’t aware I was asking for thirty-three American dollars to purchase, that’s insane. If you’ve pirated the ebook online, great! That version is of lesser quality. The only way you can obtain the best digital version of Well’s Rest is by paying me three dollars and fifty cents.
SLOP FIGHTER is finalised, at least until runtime LoRAs work with Qwen3.5. I’ve made a little page for it here. If anything is updated, I’ll put it on that page or in an itch devlog, not on the main blog.
The new book is going well. I’ve updated the earlier chapters over on the Writing page.
UPDATE: Did anyone see Anthropic now somehow has a Tamagotchi-style buddy system built into Claude Code that parses your input and reacts dynamically? THAT’S WILD, DOGG.
I was having an issue with SLOP FIGHTER where the monsters weren’t talking about their mutations well enough. There was something missing. The monsters needed to talk about more than their physical abilities. They needed to talk about the forces that power them and the forces that emerged from them, also. It wasn’t too hard to work in a new category (of vital essences, if you’re interested) that give the monster linguistic context to feed its attacks. This solution didn’t require significant restructuring or cause smudged outputs. I’m pretty happy about that.
I also managed to (ask Claude to) solve a problem with animal parts not being connected to their semantic actions, e.g. teeth biting, claws tearing, etc. It’s one of those things where, like, I obviously don’t know how to code, but I can tell when words aren’t working. The problems get harder to find as the LLM smudges its outputs and I can’t tell if it’s just the LLM dropping the ball or if my sentences aren’t put together correctly.
Recently updated with transitive verbs that account for the new mutation vocabulary
I realise that the title of this post doesn’t quite describe what my video game does. My syntax machine belongs to a different branch of linguistic theory that developed both from and in opposition to Noam Chomsky. I’m no expert in syntax, though. I’m learning. I am reading textbooks. One of SLOP FIGHTER‘s original goals was to be educational. You’re not supposed to look at it and go “This sentence doesn’t work, this game is dumb”, you’re supposed to ask “Why doesn’t this sentence work? What is wrong with this word that it doesn’t match the action?” because we know that, despite this LLM’s inconsistency, a syntactically valid sentence can be parsed by the human mind even if the words themselves don’t make sense.
SLOP FIGHTER is done now (lol), and I think it stands as an example of what LLMs, and language as a whole, can achieve. The underlying technology is also pretty interesting. LoRA adapters are interesting. Small models that can be integrated into real-world tech are interesting. Imagine you’re out in a field driving a tractor and you just ask it exactly how many litres of diesel are left. ‘Heyo Daisy, what you got in yer?’ for a simple example. There are likely all sorts of complex questions you could ask of a tractor.
The day I release it Qwen releases new LLMs, so keep an eye out for future updates. I will be converting the adapters to work with the newer Qwen3.5 as soon as I am able. For now, here are two clips that show off the CPU battles:
Here’re some more pics/clips from SLOP FIGHTER. Up top is a real good go at battle flow, having straightened out much of the semantic graphing, finally. There are still some weird grammatical errors, but I am sure once I dig into those I will find it is the LLM making them.
Update: I’ve honed the systems for more contextually-aware and accurate battle narration. I really didn’t think it was possible to get responses this close to what I imagined. Now the monster should even more clearly parse what it’s doing. It’s alive!
A PVP battle snippetPVP battle snippet
The PVP screens:
So like you see how it works yeah? Here’s it running on Raspberry Pi 5 in Gameboy mode on my dirty-ass computer desk:
And here’s it connected to the fully compiled, basically ready-to-go game build on my computer:
I’m getting pretty bored of LLMs, though. I have other ideas for them which I probably just won’t bother with for a while. I’ve got something else to write about tech, Australia, and handling robot overlords, but after that I’m just going to get back to writing some books.
