Reviews

A few months ago, my Steam Deck arrived. So, obviously, one of the first things I did was play Minetest. Whilst Minetest isn’t available on Steam yet, it is available on Flatpak and so can be installed from desktop mode.

Minetest plays very well on the Steam Deck, it performs great and Steam Input makes setting up controls easy. The Deck is an open console, so there’s full support for modding and you can cross-play with other platforms.

In this article, I will explain how to set up Minetest on the deck, and review the controls, performance, and experience. I’ve already written my thoughts about the Deck in another article, and recommend checking that out.

My Steam Deck arrived two months ago, and I’ve been having a blast ever since. I’m not much of a gamer; RimWorld and Skyrim are the only two games I’ve spent more than 100 hours in. I find it hard to play a game without wanting to do game dev instead. But with the Deck, I’ve been playing the games that have been on my play list for a while.

Since switching to GitLab, a few people have asked me why. There are several draws towards GitLab, and several pushes from GitHub.

SFML is an excellent library that can be used to create 2D games in C++. It’s an abstraction over OpenGL and various system APIs, presenting a consistent and nice interface.

There are many different approaches and use-cases to creating GUIs which a standard approach embedded in SFML would not be able to cover, which is why SFML leaves it to other libraries. Additionally, whilst the S in SFML stands for Simple, GUI code rarely is.

There are many different options to choose from when attempting to implement GUIs, some of these will be detailed below.

Lichess is an online chess game and community. It is free and open source, ad-free and subscription-free. You can play against your friends, random strangers and the computer. You can create teams to compete in tournaments. There are tournaments going on all the time.