Progress:
- Rope is largely functional (need to sharpen some of its segment creation/deletion logic)
- Collisions are easier assuming spherical cows of uniform density
- Vastly improved rope controls for player
- (Almost) workable collisions for player. Bugs abound, but not getting in the way.

And we can de-tangle ourselves now, too. (Collision and positioning need work, but one thing at a time...)

Focusing on rope wrapping and collisions this go around. Since roping is the core mechanic, it is critical to get it right while being performant. So, spending time with it.

Also changed to dark mode because it's no longer a daytime project but a nighttime one.

Back on my bullshit. (Using an older laptop to test some collision detection algorithms... and based on the stutters, clearly getting it wrong.)

Gemini 2.5 Pro was able to recreate about 2 hours of work in 3 prompts (and about 20 minutes of hand-debugging). Kinda neat.

Very broken code, but I can see this being very useful for testing out some ideas before premature optimization once the rest of the basic game physics are up and running.

The joys of coding with LLM support.

While the entire game logic can (currently) fit within a tiny context window, it doesn't seem to retain any context about how bounding boxes are drawn. (Corner vs center positioning.)

Time to refactor (the refactor) by hand.

Collision detection work is fun I’ll tell you what.

Really liked the jettison/propelling mechanic. Incorporated that in.

Instead of just cutting the rope and letting momentum carry you through the air, player can propel off in the direction of the rope. Will play with this force and see how it works out!

This was surprisingly annoying to get working. #maths

(Player input forces more aggressive than will likely make the final cut, but it makes it easier to stress-test.)

Mid-refactor, tried a “winch shot” mechanic idea. Instead of simply detaching from the rope, propel off of it in the direction of winch. (Logic: if the winch can fire off a super-fast rope, it should also be able to propel a player— will need to factor in relative masses and cooldown timing.)

Busy day—started from scratch

Scrapped all prior work to restructure project. (Previously a single main.go file… opted to rebuild it on ebitengine patterns.)

Got halfway.

Added a camera.

Also, seems I will still need to spoon-feed LLMs on physics and collision logic. (4 hours lost.) Witness:

Sometimes LLMs just don’t know when to quit.

(@zed.dev + GitHub copilot)

Work to date: not much.

I spent a few hours over thanksgiving hacking together a basic physics and player environment to see how different mechanics feel. Turns out there’s a bit of math to work out that’s beyond even the most advanced LLM’s comprehension, so will have to code it by hand. (Woo!)