John Holdun

Jan 28th, 2026

Today is the 21st day of my Melodics streak. This past week I tried one of their keyboard lessons and it just does not jive with me. The way they present notes for a keyboard layout doesn’t connect my eyes to my fingers and I’m not sure why. I’d have more luck with sheet music, and I cannot read sheet music very well! I could probably get used to it but I don’t see as much value as the finger drumming lessons; when I’m playing a bassline or melody, I usually don’t feel constrained by my finger dexterity the way I feel constrained when I’m playing a rhythm part. So I am pretty comfortable not renewing my Melodics subscription next week.

On Sunday I saw David Lynch’s Inland Empire for the first time. It was screened at the David Geffen Theater at the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures, which has a really terrific sound system. Laura Dern was there to introduce it (!) and she told a story about how David Lynch decided to shoot this film on a camcorder, because he wanted to show kids that they could make movies without studio money. I learned about this movie in high school specifically because I was one of those inspired kids! I remember people talking about it with reverence on an indie filmmaking forum I frequented. I’m glad I didn’t see it then because it would have pissed me off as a teenager and a lot of shots genuinely look like shit (sorry), but I am pleasantly surprised to say that I think it’s a good movie and I enjoyed watching it. I found it strangely more accessible than a lot of the other David Lynch films I’ve seen?

Anyway that’s not what we’re here to talk about. You want to know about the video game. Last year I participated in Bigmode Game Jam 2025, contributing some music to a game my friends made. Videogamedunkey announced Bigmode Game Jam 2026 this past Wednesday, and I’ve spent the last seven days thinking about participating. My plan was that I would put together something before the jam, and if I liked doing it, I would do it again for real, building on what I started. I have no interest in learning to use a game engine but I know the web and I love the web, so I started developing a walking around type of game in the browser, just writing a lot of Javascript to smush pixels together on a canvas. I am really happy with what I came up with!

You can play my demo here. Use arrow keys or WASD to walk around; there is one interactive item that you can pick up by standing near it and pressing Space or Enter. That’s the whole thing, but it proved to me that there’s potential here. I focused a lot of attention on how to get art into the game so that I can make a big vibrant environment in an image editor, including using layers to identify things that are separate objects from the background and mark where they should collide with the player. I don’t intend to include any dialog or particularly complicated game mechanics, so most of my experience "making the game" will be spent drawing a big old map. That’s the thought, anyway.

I started building this with sprites from the SNES game Zombies Ate My Neighbors, and yesterday started making original art. I realized pretty quickly I don’t have the skill or patience to create good animated pixel art sprites, so I then started and finished a second prototype that allows me to build and pose a primitive 3D model in the browser, which I can export as a sprite sheet. You can play with this very janky tool here if you want to! I plan to expand on this to create sprites for the game, probably adding some complexity to the 3D model but also—time permitting—tweaking the exported sprite sheet by hand in an image editor.

There will be original music too. I don’t know what it’ll be yet but I know I want to incorporate multiple audio tracks that fade in and out based on how you’re progressing in the game, like how there is added percussion is Super Mario World when you are riding Yoshi.

The theme for the jam will be announced tomorrow morning and then the jam runs for a little over a week, to the following Saturday. I will probably blog about my process as it goes. I’m excited!

Oh one more thing: right after the jam ends on the night of February 7th, I’m DJing with my friend! It’ll be my third time DJing for a live audience in Los Angeles and I’m really looking forward to it. In between game jamming I will be practicing on the decks I keep set up in my garage at all times for moments of spontaneous mixing. Maybe I’ll also publish those photos from Japan lol