Waltzes, Photo Backlog

April 2026.

I have added a couple waltzes for piano. One is very small and one is somewhat big. The small one was actually written a few years ago but never written out fully until now. The big one I started in February or January at the earliest and finished relatively quickly. The small one is "D.C. Senza Fine", in otherwords repeat infinitely, in otherwords... videogame music? Chopin has a Mazurka with this marking, so he was writing videogame music, too. It's neat to think about.

I am clearing up my photo backlog, too. I spent about a year fine-tuning my photo editor and even re-read most of my calculus textbook, in vain, sort of. Nerd details but I also learned how lanczos works. As far as that goes, I'm still not totally happy with it: in particular I'm not convinced I am getting good enough colour precision somehow, and the pictures can be really noisy. (Next step is to add dithering.) But I want to get on with life and I have pictures to post and it's good enough.

For 2026 my way of working is that if I have something close to completion, I will push it out. This doesn't mean I always have to work on things that I can complete quickly, though— for instance I do have two or three short stories/novellas in progress but none of them are particularly close to being done, so I'll work on them as it suits me, which right now is not much. But if they say, get the first draft done, then I'll be disciplined and finish the revisions and put them out. And the Snowflake Waltz is kind of lovely and simple and has been sitting around for years, so that put it on my radar.

Paradise Never 2: Respawn vs. Rollback?

What happens when you die? April 1 2026, I certify this is not an April Fool's joke (what would the joke be, exactly?)

This is just to clarify a few thoughts.

Paradise Never 2 has a resurrection cycle-- basically, you pass through something called a "Time Torii" and it acts as a save point. When you die, you go through a sort-of intermission area that frames the game a little bit, and then perform an action whereupon you return to the latest Time Torii you walked through.

Central to Paradise Never 2 is a sense of consequence. You can take actions that (in some sense) close things off permanently for you-- but the game will have systems to compensate for "perpetual loss states". For instance, you might get stranded somewhere without fuel or a boat, but there will be a rescue system to solve that. And so on, in a kind of ad-hoc "I am not a competant game designer, but I know how to shore up an ugly wall with more and more ugly debris" kind of way-- perhaps.

So I have to decide whether or not rolling back to the Time Torii resets the entire game state to that point— what we would maybe call a "hard save", or whether it just returns you in space— a "respawn".

I had originally throught I would have a hard save. But I am rethinking that now.

Thinking as clearly as I can manage, I suppose my main motivation for wanting to do a hard save is to avoid a perpetual loss state. I had in fact envisioned that you could roll back multiple levels— and I could implement this— so for instance if you want to go back several steps to before a certain branch, once you realize you made a mistake, you can. Again, stuff you can typically do with hard saves in e.g., a PC game. It's just a file you can reload from, and you can have as many of them as you want. I guess Zelda Breath of the Wild did it too, which is a game I played recently, so this approach is modern and favours player in some ways— the designer relinquishes control over how player will use the save system.

But this is directly in opposition to the rescue systems I want to build, and more importantly to the general force of perserverence through trouble that I'm trying to create.

Let me talk about that for a second. Many people play videogames in an "abort early" mode. In other words, if they make a large mistake that will affect things later, people tend to save-scum in some way or another to try and return to before that point and do over. I don't like to play that way— instead, if I screw something up, I prefer to play through. Likewise, I tend to avoid "maxing" or "farming", insofar as I can. (I remember playing FF8 and finding it amazingly well balanced— everyone disagreed with me at the time— but the thing is that I didn't farm the draws. At all.) I don't let myself give up on bosses or other fights— if I have to burn through resurrection items to survive, I try to do it that way. This is different than how most people play but it's more roley-playey, in other words, I'm creating a story for myself about how I survived something. Roguelikes with permadeath force you into this, since choosing e.g., to give up on a boss battle to save elixirs or whatever is never an option— no matter what, you always want to survive. I love it.

I want to create that experience for player. I want player to feel like whatever has happened, they should adapt and find some way to push through. They need to change their plans, or even their larger goals, because something out of their control happened. This is a little mean but I like being a little mean in games design, it's part of the dialogue somehow.

Keep in mind, Paradise Never 2 is a longform roguelike, in the sense that the world is randomized to a large extent, and the idea is you would maybe play through multiple times. But longform in that you will be invested in the world, and also in that it's expressly non-permadeath. (So there is no reason to restart, other than you reach some kind of conclusion.) To that end, I have a "main path" endstate, which is, essentially, the "good ending", but I am hoping what makes the game interesting are myriad "bad endings"-- which I have yet to add.

All of this intended design is really in opposition to "hard saves" or being able to roll things back to an earlier state. If the player can roll back, the temptation becomes to "do it over" again and again (I'm now providing an explicit mechanic to enable this), and so player ends up in short loops of redoing boring or potentially tricky things, instead of pushing past mistakes. Ultimately it's not what I want to create for player.

Hard saves are also harder to implement and test-- that matters, at least a bit (a lot). Though I did sketch out in some detail how hard saves would work, respawn is really just about knowing the place to respawn to, and then going there.

So I think my choice is clear, the resurrection mechanic should just be a simple respawn, maybe with some material loss to add friction and cost to dying.

Alright-- thanks for reading!

Random addendum.

I have right now at my disposal these games, which all should appeal a lot to me: Super Mario Oddysee (at endgame), Zelda Skyward Sword (never played), Xenoblade Chronicles 2 (partway through), SMT4 (never played), Persona 5 (never played, probably top of my list), Tunic (partway through), and Suikoden II (partway through, but close to the start.)

By a fair bit, the one that appeals to me the most is Suikoden II. I can't really explain it, except that maybe it's something to do with the lower cognitive load in processing the visuals, combined with really liking the music, combined with nostalgia.

Waltz for Piano Nr. 1

The Alone Sword

February 2026.

I have put up The Alone Sword, a game from 2011, including source code and a prototype. This is a little Zelda h'omage which I am really proud of.

The Alone Sword

40,000 years from now, aliens we can scarce imagine will descend on earth.

Finding only the ruins of humanity, they will use retro-psychosomnal recall to piece together a record of our dreams.

In staying to their religious custom these invaders build a monument to a shared dream-- something they found that they did not understand.

This is the story of that monument.

⁂

This is a very complete little h'omage to Zelda I, with which I am very satisfied. Unlike most of my other Flash games, this wasn't made for a time-constrained competition so I had more time to flesh it out. At the same time, it's small.

I remember working on some of the music on my netbook in my sisters car in Grande Prairie, a funny memory.

Each screen is hand-drawn, which was a bit painstaking.

There is a prototype download below; I forgot about this completely until I put this site up, but basically it's the game but with black-and-white graphics. I didn't try to play very far in the prototype so I'm not sure how complete it is, but it's interesting to me.

Made and released in 2011.

Source code released 2026-02-22.

Play in Browser (Flash via ruffle.rs)
Download (.swf)
Download Prototype (.swf)
Official Site (maybe a bit broken)
Source code (Flash)

Site ©2014-2026 Calvin French

For your reference, today you will have: great luck.

Contact

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Piano Sonata 1 & 2, Some Flash Games, RSS

February 2026. Continuing in my quest to dump more creative work onto my website.

The biggest thing for me, by far, is releasing two piano sonatas composed in 2023-2024. The second one I have notated in MuseScore, so there are PDFs that are readable and which I have done at least one set of revisions on. I really needed to get these out into the world.

There are also a few more tracks on the music page, and I'm going to dump some collected tracker music from around 2000 soon. (This is not very good music, though...)

I also dug up a new story fragment, "Down By Seattle", from 2015.

I have made just a couple of flash games playable (Craemle Zone, Whales of Aelia) via ruffle.rs, a Free Software web player for Flash content. Testing these out just now, the experience is a bit rough since for some reason there is no video acceleration in my browser. Please tell me on fedivers if it's OK for you. I'll make the rest of the flash games playable, regardless, though.

Finally-- there is an RSS feed. I have tested it in one RSS reader and it seems to work.

Piano Sonata 2
Piano Sonata 1
Down by Seattle
Whales of Aelia
Craemle Zone
RSS
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Sonata for Piano Nr. 2

This was started-- I think-- not all that long after I finished the first piano sonata. I did make a note that I finished it on January 19, 2025.

I did put this into notation software, MuseScore. This was more work than I anticipated and not that much fun, but it does make it possible for me to (sort of) play through it. (I can't sight-read my own handwriting well enough.)

I think the process of notating it sort of slowed me down, and I want to continue to write music like this so I may not spend time notating the work but just try to get it out. I do enjoy writing pencil + paper.

Absolutely, anyone out there, please tell me if you attempt to play this.

Sonata for Piano Nr. 1

This was written in the winter of 2023-2024. I can't remember the order the movements were sketched out in, or finished in, but I did write "Feb 19 2024" at the end of the middle part of the third movement, which I think must have been when I finished writing it.

I don't have this entered into any music notation software but I will do that sometime. But I want to upload scans of this because I find it a terrible almost opressive feeling to have something complete and not released into the world. I would like to find a way to perform it or have someone play it.

I know I was listening to Good King Wenceslas sung by The Dellar Consort at bedtime and it struck me how beautiful this simple song really is. The second movement is also a set of variations on a melody by Yoko Kanno, from the videogame Ghengis Khan for the NES. It may be called "Mongol Theme." I find it incredibly beautiful. The third movement, if I remember, starts as a final variation from movement 2.

Spending time playing music from "The Real Book", which I discovered from YouTube videos during the pandemic enabled me to devise a way to sketch music more quickly. It also helped me build better intuition around harmony and even notes, and improved my piano playing incredibly. In terms of composition, I had always felt frustrated and in some sense trapped by digital tools-- what I really want is to just write music, not deal with sounds, per se. I finally felt able to do that, here.

Please tell me if you attempt to play this, it would mean a lot.

Down by Seattle

When the moon came up, the navy sky hanging low and warm on S. Elk Street, it was like a sign to the group to move on. We had been sitting tight in a residence of Marley's sister's acquaintance's brother, but it was wearing thin. A host is like a natural resource that will replenish itself if not let run dry, so we tried not to.

We had only to move east out over the plains, into the unknown lands and the network of caches which was our real target. There wasn't any map that would much help us, overlaid with the familiar streets and avenues of America were the between spaces, abandoned lots that weren't abandoned, surveyed hills and mountains, barren and nameless save for "private property: no trespassing" signs posted along barbed-wire fence. These were the places we went after.

It's a common wisdom that you can hide a thing easily, at times, in plain sight. Likewise, to hide a place, you needed to make and widely publish maps of it. A small change or error it a remote place would at most be reported by one or two people, but so long as you chose a place that never would matter much to anyone if it was corrected or no, you would never need to correct it.

And people live at the ends, or at the edges of places. In between is what we travel past.

Sarkirk was definitely one of the best diviners any of the rest of us had ever met. We didn't know if what he did was really magic, or a blend of intuition, but his ableness to find was something we had over the last year of our journey learned to put a trust in.

We found him on a farm in Arizona, at that time I was divining for the group and doing a bad job. None of uhad really made any good money for a long while, and in truth we were living by now on Jordan's graces, who had made an immesurable hit about 10 years back. He would move on a little later, we never learned where.

Back to Sarkirk. He kept a shave head, stocky but without any kind of threatening demeanour. He had brown skin, tended to dress in linens. He was introduced to us by a host, the name escapes me, who was running a small bar-and-filling-station by the highway. He had recognized Sarkirk by his mannerisms, as being someone trained in Buddhist arts, or yoga, or something along those lines. When Sarkirk came to him it was looking for a job, and so our host in Arizona put him to work, waiting and evaluatig whether or not he should be told about the tree.

It wasn't an easy thing, to initiate someone into our line. Lots of things were running dry, food and water in many places, and the disconnection that bred in society bred in turn a lot of superstitions, and worse yet prejudice. People could turn to the government for survival, when it was able to provide it, and to the landowners for work, when they could, but religion was a more splintered affair.

Of course most would call themselves something along the lines of "Christian", but this hadn't meant anything for a long time, if it ever had. The religion people really clung to was really at it's core a desert mythology infused with mysticism that helped everyone understand the technology that surrounded them, that so little worked.

Sarkirk was a candidate, therefore, due not to any religious affiliation per se, but more due to the lack of one. He was centered if not in science then in a philosophical practice, in a way that few modern people were any longer. And so our host in Arizona, one calm night on a black moon, took him out to a rock and gave him the water and told him about us.

We had first come to Seattle as six: Marney, Jones, Sarkirk, Dal, Moshe, and myself (Lin.) Dal had decided to head south to join with another branch, which was unexpected as her chemistry was good. So she must have had a reason, and would have shared it if she wanted to, so we didn't ask.

Jones was the oldest, most experienced, and probably in some ways the best of us and Marney and myself both loved him. He was the one who recruited Sarkirk, he was often the one with a contact who could host us, and often knew of open hosts who weren't in any of the drive tables.

Hosts could be open or blind. A blind host, like the one we were staying with, didn't know about the tree. These had to be networked and given a reason. In the old days it was as simple as using a line service like HotStay but nowadays with the fibre all broke up most line services were closed, at least anything that required being up-to-date. So that left hotels, which were unaffordable and worse-yet conspicuous, camping (which worked away from cities but was, again, conspicuous, within), and the drive tables.

So if Jones (and next, Marney) were useful for hosts, Moshe and I were useful for more practical considerations. Chief among what I brought to the group was my sense of direction and uncanny ability with animals (people included.) Moshe was also good with people but even better with machines, whether they were of the computing or mechanical variety. He also had a fantastic sense of humour.

Where Jones would look out over a space from behind his wiry moustache, Moshe would tell a story about it, about who lived in a town we were coming into, how they thought, what the television had done to them, that kind of thing. Invariably these stories were clever and, although completely invented, insightful. I envied Moshe's ability to make people laugh, although we usually worked together if there was anybody around that needed prying open.

Seattle wasn't a bad town, in fact it was still mostly together. Occasionally it would be raided by sea, and if there weren't coastguard available thing would sometimes be lit up but all told the people were still very open and warm. When we arrived from further down the coast, and before that from China, it felt like finally a safe harbour. Of course we had the usual suspicion to cast off, a group of travelers with less-than-perfect documentation and an unlikely makeup. But here it was a bit easier as we could pass ourselves as hippies traveling to a commune in B.C., which was common enough.

Our hunt in Seattle, however, had been bust. There was supposed to be an open lot in which was buried a full-armoured horse and warrior statue, taken from Mongolia during the climate war. We arrived in the area and Sarkirk knew right away that it was dry.

And that is how we ended up in, and then shortly after leaving, for the east, down by Seattle.