Now
1 december 2024,
We’ve recently welcomed a new member to our home: Mangostine (Măng Cụt) - ridgeback Phu Quoc dog. It’s a joy to have Nahu and Mangostine to be around, in and under the desk.
Learning chinese
I really like the way the Chinese language works. Each week, I try to learn a few words with Hanzi.live, a web app that I’ve built for my language learning process.
It is intended to be used to access the knowledge tree of the language. I’ve condensed the grammar of the language into various types of sentences and words. It’s in Vietnamese though. It will stay free and ad-free as long as it exists. Probably, I will open-source it someday.
I’ve translated the Tao Te Ching in both Vietnamese and English. I’m quite happy with it.
Making music
Since March 2024, I’ve had to temporarily halt the process of composing a piano concerto and a symphony. Instead, with Jane and Pink Dawn, we’ve decided to make a RPG game in 2D with Godot, and mostly because it’s fun, and doing things together is even more fun. And, a game needs music too after all.
Since giving away my Roland piano in March, I’ve stopped playing for a while. We recently bought a new digital piano (Korg LP-380). The sound is quite good for a quite low price. Now, we can play and maybe compose some music for the game.
Making a game
The name of the game is: The wise whispers of the trees - (樹木的智慧低語 in Chinese, and 樹木の知恵のささやき in Japanese).
And we are the - c本y crew - (pronounced K crew).
The word “cây” means “tree” or “木” in Chinese and pronounced like “K” in Vietnamese, while “本” means “root” and looks like “”.
Our - c本y crew - office is set up; it is also our home, with around 100+ plants. Thanks to some friends, all our gears are set up: beefy pcs, drawing tablets, digital piano, etc.
We are building all the plans and stuff with Trello. I have a lot of fun coding with Gdscript, playing with Godot and implementing game design. Claude.ai has been a big help.
F, a friend since childhood, has recently joined the team. She worked as an architect until now; her latest project was a museum in Da Nang, which is to be opened soon. Now she will be drawing architectural designs, characters, and sceneries of the game.
Pink Dawn is teaching herself Python with help from Claude and me. She’ll be able to help me with coding in no time.
Jane is learning to draw pixel and to create character animations with Krita and Aseprite, and design other assets and architectural elements.
Now, I’m working on the game’s story, which is equivalent to writing a new book. We are drawing assets and characters for the first chapter of the game.
I’m also experimenting with local llms (large language models) for the next few weeks. I’ve played mostly with Ollama, Qwen2.5, and Open WebUI as the interface. It’s quite cool to be able to run a large language model on your own machine. Besides, I’m implementing Stable Diffusion with A1111 and ComfyUI.
The game right now has a workable backbone: a turn-based combat system, menu system, bartering system, scene management, items, spells, skills, etc. The plot, mechanics, and characters are somewhat worked out. There will be 30+ chapters, each relating to an aspect of life.
We are enjoying the process, and it’s been a pleasure doing things together. Even the potential financial return doesn’t seem to really matter at this point, though we are pretty sure it will be a success when the game will be out. Our aim is to make the best RPG game, which is also the best philosophical book, meaning it has to be beautiful, engaging and educational. And this kind of education is not based on discipline, meaning people are not made to conform.
Anyway, we are sharpening every little detail by the day.
Things that I like:
Things that I use: