project in detail

An Unexpected Pachinko Machine Project, Part Two

Submitted by Josh on
I’d never laid eyes on a real Pachinko machine until this one, so I spent a long time at the sale trying to gauge whether it really worked or not. I didn’t know enough to be certain, so in the end I saw enough happening that I was willing to take a chance on it. It hadn’t been touched in a very long time, so our first step was to get as much dust and cobwebs out of it as possible with a rechargable air duster. After that, it took the better part of a weekend to work out why the firing mechanism didn’t actually want to fire, which helped me to learn about how the feeder tray and lower track worked to pay out winners. By the end of the first weekend, we knew enough to fire balls successfully into the play field, so we knew we had a working machine.

An Unexpected Pachinko Machine Project, Part One

Submitted by Josh on
I feel like a lot of kids, at least around my age, probably had little trinket Pachinko toys when they were younger; of course, pre-internet, I had no idea that’s what they were called as a kid but I definitely remember having a few small hand-held toys that more or less met the criteria. I actually remember my daughter having a little Mario-themed one that she got maybe in a Happy Meal or at a birthday party or something just a few years ago when she was little - though it’s just as likely that I’m imagining it. Anyway, I always thought the mechanics of the things were cool, and remained so once I found out about the real thing somewhere along the way, and I always thought it would be neat to have one (but not neat enough to actually go out and find one, I suppose). But now that we’re in 2026 and I have a little time and just enough disposable income, I stumbled across one at an estate sale and pretty quickly talked my way into buying it, with my daughter’s prodding, and bringing it home.

Project in Detail: Fuse Bead Color Matcher

Submitted by Josh on

My daughter's winter break got kind of blown up in 2022 due to some really broken weather patterns and Southwest Airlines' inability to cope with them, so we spent a lot more time at home than we expected. As it sometimes does, that resulted in a couple projects leveraging our big stash of Perler Beads, both in terms of making new designs and in sorting out some of our myriad colors that got mixed together.

Project in Detail: Caves of Narshe 25th Anniversary Logo

Submitted by Josh on

As I've now done for the last fifteen years, I've recently completed another alteration of the logo for my long-running website, Caves of Narshe, to celebrate the site's 25th anniversary. This one, while not altering the form nearly as much as the prior change for the 20th, takes the basic format of the current logo and does something very different with it to stand out from the site's long history.

Project in Detail: Caves of Narshe Logo Redesign (Part 1)

Submitted by Josh on

This is the first "Project in Detail" blog I've done about something that wasn't either explicitly web code, or heavily web code with some design enhancement along the way. This time around, I'm documenting the process involved in revamping the logo for Caves of Narshe to celebrate the site's 20th anniversary (on July 31, 2017).

The New Alvies.org, Part Two

Submitted by Josh on

In this second post discussing the current design of the website you're on as you read this, I go more into detail about how I drew out the art assets for alvies.org and built it all to go together. Of course, by the time you're reading this, the technical details are out of date, but I probably won't write much more about that.

The New Alvies.org, Part One

Submitted by Josh on

I hadn't done a whole lot with my eponymous website in a decade; not as if the thing gets a boatload of traffic, but as someone who makes his living and has his major hobbies all connected to the web, it was a bit awkward to have something quite so stale.

Project in Detail: CoN World Cup

Submitted by Josh on

I've been a soccer player for the vast majority of my life, but my path to being a soccer fan was a slower one. That's something for some other blog, probably. But over at the Caves of Narshe, still my primary online community, there have been over the years a lot of folks who have been soccer fans just like me, and a fair amount of banter around the Beautiful Game, as they say.

Project in Detail: Mobile Caves of Narshe

Submitted by Josh on
As most of the web development for the Caves of Narshe is a one-man operation, I admit that the site can be slow to adapt to trends. Most recently, that trend has been responsive web, which is particularly annoying given that the site's core competency, video game information and walkthroughs, lends itself extremely well to use on a mobile device. Most games now are played with the user either on the mobile device itself, or with the phone or tablet sitting next to them as they play from the couch.
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