Dan Herbert

This was a great story short! There's a lot to be said about isolation...

Added to the list :)

Going deep on sci-fi horror themes for inspiration on a #gamedev concept.

Alien (1st movie), Pandorum, Blade Runner, Altered Carbon are the sort of vibe.

Any suggestions?

Had a great idea for a card game this morning. A couple mechanical inspirations, but overall fairly unique (I think?).

A bit of push your luck, a bit of exploration, simple battle encounters...

Could potentially be great as a video game or a physical game.

Had a chance to check it out - great demo! Love the vibe, really keen for more. Also a non-zero chance that I'll read your tweets in the intro narrator's voice from this point...

If it's of interest the demo worked great on Kubuntu with Steam+Proton.

Dan Herbert Development and production relating to: web, games, and music

Some notes on `@container style()` - danherbert.io/blog/2026013...

I'd love to see more posts/content on perf optimisation, rendering, and novel approaches to technical problems - deeper topics focused on learning and exploring.

Feels impossible to escape discourse about US politics or AI these days.

Dan Herbert Development and production relating to: web, games, and music

New post: danherbert.io/blog/2026012...

Tried Claude Code Pro for a week. It impressed me more than I expected, but ultimately didn't change much for me.

Wow I really botched the aspect ratio going through Clipchamp, didn't I. Oops!

Updated my #gamedev project to render Dear ImGui windows directly into textures which are then displayed via sprites (input is translated+mapped accordingly too).

Now I can tint/rotate/skew/scale/more ImGui UIs to make them fit into the vibe I want way more easily.

2026 refresh danherbert.io 💅

Clean, lean, and minimal.

A lesson learned in the last year of building: most people don't pay for "time saved".

The ones who do are rare, and not at all like the average user.

That place is just so awful now, between the hype and the sensationalism and bots and grok and how people use grok and *waves hand around in the air* everything else.

Comparing v1.1.0...v1.1.2 · danherbert-io/elide-for-laravel A package for Laravel and HTMX - streamline your Laravel+HTMX project with intuitive handling of Blade components for HTMX responses. - Comparing v1.1.0...v1.1.2 · danherbert-io/elide-for-laravel

Closing out the year with v1.1.2 of Elide for Laravel (a HTMX package).

1.1.1 + 1.1.2 include a small QoL facade function and a minor fix.

github.com/danherbert-i...

Taking a break from normal dev work for some pre-Christmas gamedev.

Super preliminary loadout screen and progress screens well underway, along with the data and internal systems to support those.

Specs/modifiers are all defined through editable files which may open the door to some basic mods.

Few updates atm, holiday season got things a bit all over the shop. Nevertheless, happy with what's going on.

Gamdev: Honing in on a pretty tight+cohesive vibe. If it proves unfun, lots I can reuse elsewhere

Elide: Starter kit coming along nicely

Xero PO importer: almost ready

- a DOM that's more readable and provides more context
- lighter HTML payload (if your site is busy enough that it matters)
- very clear+logical+understandable CSS when written with $vars and media queries

Given time + component evolution I almost always find myself wondering why I didn't just write CSS in the first place.

This button for example:

- size+status -> BEM modifiers
- the status colours could be a system reused wherever required
- conditional appearance offloaded to client rendering

Yes it is!

IntelliJ IDE's creating nested paths when you type "/" as part of a folder name was always one of my favourite QOL features.

Really pleased to discover it's present in KDE too!

Just over 3 weeks since installing Kubuntu. Aside from web dev which remains on the MacBook Air, this has become the daily driver.

Booted into Windows 11 only once to check something. Haven't missed it _at all_.

Every now and then I ponder if I should become a "cleanup guy" for projects. Refactoring and cleaning things up gives me oh so much joy...

Lots of things on the go, really happy with today's work - game dev, starter kit, Xero. Hopefully some time to get some screenshots and posts up in the next week or so

When PHP 8.5's pipe operator is more widely available, native syntax will be quite close out the box.

To see how* 🫠

You'll appreciate the switch by the sounds! Curious to how it goes in the coming projects.

Also got me wondering about any packages which would streamline modifiers to fill the gap (or making one 🤪)

Crazy idea while out driving today - Dear ImGui as a layout engine, widgets represented with entities & components, allowing for effect/rotation and other things not typically possible with Dear ImGui.

Quick experiment proved viability, stoked! Blog post later this week perhaps.

Got Dear ImGui windows rendering within the context of a scene with MonoGame+Nez today. Big step toward using ImGui for in-game controls and having it feel more grounded with scene effects and rendering, rather than a debug UI layer over the top.

That sounds interesting!

Music reactivity will be used for aesthetics - colour/bloom, some background effects. In the future beat timing might drive enemy movement/shooting perhaps.

The game controls the music loops, increasing or decreasing "tension" based on game events, increase player stress 🙂

Super crude gamedev demo -

MIDI files now spec which clips to play, loop/jump points, and other events/data for the game.

The game can now interact to musically timed events, and work with loop/jump points to change tension levels with transition periods.

Really happy w this!

Fun gamedev today. The music system I built wasn't proving enough reactivity between music and gameplay/ui/aesthetics.

Today moved to a system which uses MIDI files - notes => music clips, events & CC data define loops and game events/effects.

Clips soon, works really well!