Software by Derek T. Jones

Paid Software

Obscurant

My version of the game Black Box. You can see a description of the game, and screenshots, here. You can get the game for your platform by clicking the appropriate badge below:

Download on the App Store Get it on the Snap Store
Get it on Google Play Available at Amazon Appstore

The first version of Obscurant was written in Objective-C++, and only ran on iOS. But when the iOS SDK changed too fast for me to keep up, I took some time in 2020 to rewrite it in Flutter. In so doing, I was able to build a single codebase for iOS, Android, and Ubuntu, with 60fps animations. The reduction in code size was astonishing, too; about 70%. The experience made me a fan of Flutter, and of Dart, its language.

Free Software

Archetype

I enjoy text-based adventure games. Even though I loved Myst, Riven, The Space Bar, Zork Nemesis, and others, there’s something nostalgic about the natural-language-like interface of a text adventure that keeps me coming back. In the early 90s I wrote an adventure creation language, Archetype, and some games you can play in it.

Inform 7 Adventures

I rewrote one of my Archetype adventures, The Gorreven Papers, in the Inform 7 language. Follow the link above and you can play it directly within your browser (Firefox recommended) or download the story file and a player.

Kandy Jump

Back in 2007, I helped one of my kids implement a game. She did the artwork and I did the code. I wrote it as a Java applet because Java applets were one of the most portable ways to share small programs across platforms, at the time.

How times change! Over ten years later, Java applets were software non grata, but Javascript, which has only a cynical brand-name relationship to it, is the cross-platform language of today. I rewrote Kandy Jump in Typescript (not willing to do it in bare Javascript). You can see the code on GitHub. Both versions weigh in at a little over 500 lines.

You can play it in your browser here.

Ancient Software

AppleScripts

My first Mac was a Macintosh Performa, running MacOS 7.6. Unlike modern Mac OS X, which has a real terminal and all the scripting languages you want, back in MacOS 7.6, AppleScript was the only out-of-the-box way to script anything. It was weird, required a special Script Editor, but I liked its ambition, which was the degree to which its syntax resembled natural language, and respected the localization settings, so that the reserved words and syntax changed (somewhat) to match the region. Whether this is a success is a matter of debate. (The result is more readable than writable, at least.) Here is a collection of fairly useful AppleScripts that I used to run daily on that Performa.