Devlog

This was a day of small, oddly specific wins that make a game feel real again: better debug handling, path utilities, blend mode fixes, sprite drawing updates, F1 to F12 key mappings, waypoint table work, and even a nudge to the main menu logo script, which had apparently chosen drama. It was also exactly the kind of fiddly glue work that coding agents are great at, so Codex and Claude via GitHub Copilot handled most of the busy work while I did the supervision, because an AI will absolutely fix one thing and quietly invent two new problems nearby if you let it roam unsupervised.

Today added two extremely useful things to the revival effort: SDL2 audio support and better diagnostics, which is a polite way of saying the game got better at making noise and better at explaining itself before doing something strange. Codex and Claude via GitHub Copilot were doing most of the implementation by this point, especially the repetitive conversion work, while I learned the part that matters more in the long run: how to guide, review, and correct coding agents before they turn “helpful first pass” into “fresh exciting bug.”

This was a refactoring day rather than a flashy one: the new SDL2 platform, input, and renderer code got reorganised into something more readable and sustainable, which matters because messy migration code turns every future fix into archaeology. By now Codex and Claude via GitHub Copilot were doing most of the heavy lifting, and the real lesson for me was learning to manage coding agents well, because asking them to help is easy and stopping them from enthusiastically “improving” a load-bearing wall is the actual skill.

Day two was when the project stopped being just a Linux rescue and became an SDL2 migration, with new platform layers for input, windows, timing, and rendering, plus enough renderer scaffolding to draw lines, quads, textures, sprites, and rectangles while the old Allegro/OpenGL world began its slow march toward retirement. It was also when I really started using coding agents seriously, with Codex and Claude via GitHub Copilot doing most of the keystroke-heavy work while I learned the more important skill of managing them properly: breaking tasks down, reviewing changes, steering them away from confident nonsense, and using them to chew through boring but necessary scaffolding much faster than I could by hand.

This was the “can this ancient thing even run on modern Linux?” day, and the answer turned out to be “yes, but only after a lot of persuasion.” The first rescue pass got the recovered WizBall remake compiling, added sanitizer builds, cleaned out generated junk, hardened data and tilemap loading, added scripting diagnostics, updated the Linux audio side to newer FMOD APIs, and generally stopped the game from falling over at startup; a wonderfully specific frame-0 portal bug also died here, which is exactly the sort of sentence that makes old game code sound haunted.