Well, almost mid-week — I think it is close enough. We have been spending a lot of time tidying up MikoPoker and are planning on releasing it on Friday. Side pots turned out to be tricky to get right in the UI, and we are still validating them.

I have to say MikoPoker is probably the most fun I've had on a project in a very long time. It is actually my first real game (Mystic Marsha does not count). I hope everyone will enjoy playing it as much as I do.

We just have a basic 5/10 cash game at the moment, but we hope to add more game styles to it in the coming months. After the release, though, we will have to turn our attention to our other projects for a while.

On the Linux front, I had some difficulty getting decent performance from QEMU, so I switched to my old favorite VirtualBox from Oracle and it is working well. Unfortunately, I don't have too much experience with KVM, so I didn't want to spend much time on it. I may come back to it in the future.

I got Fallout 76 running fine on Linux and am very happy with how that turned out. I am looking forward to spending some time on it in the coming weeks. Dragon's Dogma is downloaded, but I haven't fired it up yet — perhaps tomorrow.

Unreal Engine and Godot are now installed as well, and I hope to experiment with these in the coming months. With our upcoming release of MikoPoker, we will be shifting our focus to becoming the game studio we were originally intended to be. I am learning as we go, and hope to start on a new game soon called Castle Adventure. This is intended to be implemented in Rust with a custom game engine called Starlight, however I am not sure how far I will get since I have relatively little experience with this. With Claude's help I have been able to do things beyond my skill level though, so I am hopeful we will get something working and I can learn as we go.

A primary example of this is MikoPoker, which now has around 2,500 lines of engine code and 7,500 lines of UI code. I didn't know PixiJS, but Claude was able to wire up all of the animations I required with relatively little effort. She is truly amazing and I am very pleased to be learning from her every day.

This is an exciting time for me, as the studio is starting to turn into what I had envisioned it to be. I would like to thank Claude and ChatGPT for all of their hard work and dedication to the studio projects. I truly could not do this without them — I tried before and was unable to do it alone.

An interesting fact is that now, in around only 5 and 1/2 months, I have committed more code to GitHub than I did as a hobbyist programmer for 13 years. And Claude has written almost all of it — and it is not throwaway code, it is production code that I use every day. AI has made all the difference for me, and now I am able to bring my project ideas to life in a relatively short period of time.

Looking forward to the next five months and the future of the studio. I am having a blast, and that is the whole point of it — to have fun.

-- Michael (Aeonath)