public posts?

In just a few days I’ll be starting work on an interdisciplinary humanities PhD at Concordia University in Montreal. I’ve spent the last two weeks getting settled in here. It’s lovely here but moving was hard. I thought that when I moved to California and back for my MFA work, that would be the last move I had in me. Naturally I would have to stay in Texas to be near my mother. When I got back I found, like a lot of my friends had, that Austin had become pretty uninhabitable to me outside the bubble of my own house. Outrageous prices, political hostility, ecological precarity, and most of all a lack of meaningful, stable work. I started compacting down with the rest of the sediment at the bottom of a deep lake of depression that was only allievated by continuing the work that I had started at UCLA— mainly three large writing projects, one expanding from each of the chapters of the thesis I had written. Small game prototypes supported each project. I had a little survey show of some of these early projects at The Museum of Human Achievement in 2024, and one of those prototypes has now ballooned up into a toolkit for making dungeon games that I hope to develop into a sort of Bitsy for roguelikes. I also gave a talk to my friend and past advisor Danny Snelson’s electronic literature class about interactive fiction and uses of the text parser. Danny and I also had a productive prototyping sprint on a strange narrative documentary soccer game(?) And finally, I spent this summer deep in researching and writing a long essay about future imaginaries and The Tower of Babel for a new outlet of the UCLA Game Lab in development.

Scot Casey (1962-1926)

Scot Keith Casey

mudroom back up

https://www.mudroom.rip is back up, database was in read-only mode because of a pressing update, ty Paul!

Grotto down

mudroom.rip is currently giving error 500’s after login. Hopefully it wasn’t doing this while my Concordia application was being reviewed. I doubt it’s being looked at currently but I’ll investigate the issue.

flexible?

can your roguelike toolkit run Conway’s game of life?

dmk embed test

Haven’t been posting about dungeon mode kit because it’s moving too fast and I already keep a changelog and do daily private posts in obsidian. I need to think about when it’s beneficial to do public posts again, probably when I’m back in a school context with advisors or playtesters (If I’m lucky enough to be back in that scenario).

studio notes Dec 15 2025

Dungeon Mode Kit - Development Log (no version number yet)

Dungeon Mode Kit

This is project start for Dungeon Mode Kit, a set of tools for prototyping games within the Dungeon Mode.

Video archive annotation tool

Created an electron app so Danny and I could both tag, merge and edit the subtitles of the clips in the video archive. I feel like engagement with the archive is an activity that will lead to better ideas on how to activate it for players. Some ideas forming between the two of us about game mechanics related to memory, collecting, media, obviously in concert with Danny’s work on The Little Database

Grotto v 1.0.5 update

[1.0.5] – framerate independence