Problem Machine

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Posts posted by Problem Machine

  1. Posted

    I think Hillary could have been much better as a candidate if they'd ever tried to actually sell her as a candidate -- But they never really did, they just talked about what a massive shitgoblin Trump is. Which, you know, true, but it doesn't really get people excited to vote for the alternative. And, lo and behold, we see low turnout for both candidates, but ESPECIALLY for the candidate who was sold on the sole point that she was an alternative to the other. Never actually fighting back against the bullshit accusations, never actually trying to get people excited over a vision of Hillary's America, just harping on how terrible Trump is and hoping that would be enough.

     

    It turns out the largest effect of negative campaigning is that it gets fewer people to the polls. And it turns out that when fewer people vote, democratic candidates lose. Neither of these are really new information, yet they were so confident that Trump was SO BAD that it would play out differently this time. So, yes, I'm pretty angry at Hillary's campaign, and the greater democratic political strategy.

  2. Posted

    I'm still trying to figure out what I'm going to do next, but here's some things that I am looking at to help me think about it.

    A List of Pro-Women, Pro-Immigrant, Pro-Earth, Anti-Bigotry Organizations That Need Your Support

    Internet Privacy 101: VPNs, Encrypted Messaging, and Anonymous Browsing

    Mostly so far just watching game streams and other bullshit just to try to get to where I can think straight, though. One way or another, this is going to be some kind of war. Hopefully a relatively gentle sort, but there's already a death toll, and it's not clear yet how large it is or how much worse it will get.

  3. Posted

    Right, okay, but these are all cases where the system is too simple to capture subtleties we might expect or would like to see. What makes the original example so striking is that this is a way in which the system is unexpectedly complex, but in a way that only serves to reify regressive biases.

  5. Posted

    (This is the first crossposted devlog entry from my personal blog. I'll be posting these updates monthly from now on)

     

    EverEnding DevBlog, October 2016: Schedule

    This was an eventful month! Following my devblog post last month, I started sharing the project on a couple of game dev forums, and through a logical process which eludes me now 30 days later determined that a: I wanted to have the first chapter of the game complete by the end of 2017 and b: that in order to do this I should create a complete task-list and schedule for the project up to that point. This ended up taking me a few days, but I really feel like it was worth it. I now have, printed across 12 pages, a fairly comprehensive list of work that needs to be done in order to complete the first chapter of the game. There's going to be four chapters total, so a lot of work will remain to complete the game even after all this, but the scope of the work will be determined and I'll know how much time and effort it takes to create finished content for the game. All major gameplay bugs should get eliminated through this process, and all fundamental design code will be firmly in place.

     

    I broke the schedule up into a total of five three-month blocks, one for the rest of this year and four others for next year. Currently, for this year's block, I have 24/53 tasks completed or otherwise resolved. I also have a few tasks which I had to add to the list which aren't accounted for there, as well as a few that are partially complete, but it's still good progress and I'm proud of how quickly I'm getting the work done. Now, I expect some future tasks to be quite a bit trickier, and I also expect many unforeseen tasks to crop up, but that's why I'm trying to get ahead of schedule now – as well as acknowledging that December is likely to be so busy with other stuff that I'll probably only be able to work for half of it.

     

    The biggest task accomplished over this month is the attack animations. All right-facing attack animations are complete – well, except for the occasional mistake or two still to be fixed, a few of which I'm noticing as I watch the attack montage play below. About half of the left-facing attacks are complete as well, and they should progress more quickly on average now that I have the right-facing attacks to use as template and I've got so much sprite creation practice. There were a few big sticking points: I realized after mostly completing them that the original standing attack animation was a) boring and B) functionally redundant with the running attack animation. I've since replaced the former with the latter, but fortunately not all was lost: I was able to use the standing attack frames to resolve another issue that had cropped up. When I changed the crouching position of the right arm some time ago, I invalidated the entire swing arc of the primary crouching attack animation prototype. However, the new arm position made perfect sense for the motion of the unused standing attack animation, so I just pulled the torso from those frames into the crouch animation. I still had to redo the leg positions from scratch, but it was a nice shortcut into creating a good expressive attack.

    attackmontage

    I've also been working on the music for the game. The first few areas largely have completed music tracks already, since I created music concurrent with them to figure out the tone I was going for, but as I made that music like five years ago there's a lot of rough edges in those old tracks and they're not necessarily well set up to work with the systems I want to have in place for the game. That is to say, I'm not planning on just creating a loop for each area, but having some degree of adaptive music based on where specifically the player is in an area and what the game state of that area is. Thus, I've been remastering the old tracks, making small composition tweaks, and rearranging the parts to make jumping between them work better. Fortunately, I found that by setting timers and jump points, I could very elegantly skip between segments of an adaptive track to switch playback to a new section. Less fortunately, I discovered that a track with tempo changes and heavy use of delay effects is probably the least optimal type of track to feed into such a system. Still, it's functional for now, even if some of the track transitions sound a bit odd. I've at least proven out the basic concept and built the architecture: If I need to change things up a bit later to resolve these issues, it should be quite feasible.

    hills

    I've also been working on tilesets and backgrounds here and there. I made this background very desaturated to create a clear delineation between background areas and gameplay areas, and also to reinforce the misty feel I was going for, but I worry a bit about how well it will work with the extremely vivid and saturated caves background I made before. I really love playing with color in unexpected ways, like I did with making the distance in the caves background a dark vivid red, but consistency is important as well. In the end, that's something I can only figure out by getting the assets into the game and playing around with them and seeing what works. Really, though, changing palettes is incredibly easy compared to creating new assets, so it probably won't be a big deal at any rate.

     

    In addition to the backgrounds, I've created a number of the transitional tilesets necessary to blend different tilesets together. Now I can have grass tiles next to stone tiles next to dirt tiles without them looking like artificial grid-based garbage. There's still some gaps in there, tiles that I'll need to create that I haven't noticed I'll need to create, but I can build out most of the environments I want to now, at least at a degree of rough detail.

     

    Over November I plan to finish out all of the character animations and start creating detail assets for the first section of the first chapter – Mostly just different kinds of grass and stone to start with but, again, in many of these cases I won't know what I've forgotten until I get there and find I don't have it. Still, finishing this game, as distant a goal as it remains, feels more concrete and feasible now than it has in a long time.

  7. Posted

    This looks really good. tbh I think that some color restraints are necessary to really get a nice pixelly feel. With no color restraints, the overall effect is often just that of down-rezzed normal art, which doesn't really look good IMO. I know it's frustrating, but this can force you to make choices that imply a lot of detail. I really like how the tiles turned out here, with the broken up lines. Owl might look a bit improved if it were less symmetrical and had a bit more of a light source, but the symmetrical look makes sense with the NES palette because then it could be just two sprites that are drawn once and then flipped and then drawn again. It doesn't adhere to the 8x8 boundaries one would expect then, but still.

  9. Posted

    I guess the shading portions. Like, the turning edge for the light, rather than the outline. It looks a little octagonal.

    Here, I did this real quick to illustrate what I mean. I also put a bit of the midtone along the dark edge for a bit of reflected light effect. The tongue looks really nice too, btw.

    birthdaygirledit.gif

  10. Posted

    I've been doing a lot of pixel art stuff for my game, but probably don't have time for additional challenges like these. I like your birthday cake -- looks a bit angular around the edges, if you don't have any tween colors might want to play around with some dithering.

    For pixel stuff I've been using Aseprite and it seems really good.

  11. Posted

    Excellent, added and followed.

    I haven't been streaming much recently since I got a bit discouraged about how much work I was putting in for absolutely zero traction, but I'll probably at very least be streaming the Dark Souls 3 DLC when it comes out in a few days, and I may try to follow up with more afterwards. Streaming is fun, but difficult to pursue in a way that doesn't interfere with my other work.

  14. Posted

    I've applied three times and never gotten in so I'd recommend getting in early if it's something you want to do. I didn't even know applications were open, guess I'll try again.

    Oh, if you're local you can get waitlisted, that might improve your odds.

  15. Posted

    Will post more ambient stuff as it comes, but this is probly a better representation of what I do & how I perform live: https://alexpieschel.bandcamp.com/album/waitin-around-ep

     

    It's an EP I recorded with friends on a four-track cassette. Hope to expand to a full-length album by the end of this year!

     

    Sorry, it took me a while to get around to checking this out; since it has lyrics and stuff I wanted to save it until a time when I could pay attention to it. I really like the low-fi recordings against the fairly raw synth patches. I am jealous of the ability to make proper music with a guitar whenever I hear it, since I still haven't figured out how to get anywhere near a finished performance with one. Ditto with integrating lyrics into music -- I took a rough attempt at it earlier this year but my anxiety around using my voice was too acute. Anyway, I like what you've got going on here, very chill and introspective. My favorite of the EP was probably Waitin' Around, which I guess is expected since it's the titular track. The reverby synth and backup vocals give a great feel, kind of like a prayer or dream heard through a radio.

  16. Posted

    I want the movement to feel a BIT floaty/ethereal, so I'm fine with that. The weapon is a sickle -- the overall design is kind of a take on the grim reaper, which is a super trite design archetype but I feel like I've got a fairly fresh approach to it here

  19. Posted

    It seems like despite the blase attitude he took in that interview a while back, the creator of Pepe seems to be taking steps to secure his, uh, pepe legacy against white supremacists.

  20. Posted

    Hi.

     

    I've been working on a game called EverEnding for like five years now, give or take. Most of this time has been taken by developing the base code for the game alongside the editors necessary for developing its content -- the room editor (tile data), map editor (arrangements of rooms), entity editor (all interactive data in a room), and detail editor (all non-interactive data in a room). This may have been a bit of an ass-backwards way to work -- I am still a while away from having a vertical slice -- but I did things the best way I could figure by myself.

     

    I've realized that's a problem though. Doing things by myself is an extremely inefficient way of doing things. And I'm not talking about getting other people to work on the game, which I couldn't afford to hire for and wouldn't feel comfortable asking people to volunteer for, but being willing to open up my process in a way that lets me give and receive advice and generally participate in a development community outside of my own brain.

     

    But I digress.

     

    Let's talk about the game. EverEnding is a story-focused 2d platformer, somewhat in the vein of Cave Story. I don't want to give everything away, since a big part of the game will be discovering what's going on as you go, but it takes place in a surreal post-apocalyptic setting. The player controls some sort of angelic character named Eve (the original title of the game, which I changed for reasons both numerous and obvious), tasked with collecting all of the stray souls left behind after the end of the world. Many of these are just lost, but as the game progresses those who remain become increasingly warped and malignant.

     

    The project is being developed in Haxe and compiled to AIR. This is subject to change, as one of the reasons I chose to switch to Haxe from AS3 was the flexibility in compile target, but for now AIR is suitable to my needs and from my brief experimentation with OpenFL (an open-source project that mimics the behavior of Flash's built-in classes) I would have to completely rewrite the rendering code to match or improve upon the current AIR performance. I'm targeting a 960x540 resolution with the intent that it will look nicely crunchily pixely at standard 1920x1080 resolution, and though I have no particular restrictions in the art pipeline I am attempting to minimalize the color palette within each asset. The hope is to capture the restrained abstraction of pixel art without hewing too closely to any particular era of retro gaming. As will become obvious, I'm not shying away from using certain non-retro effects, such as transparencies and blending layers, but want to maintain the tooth and style of the pixel while I do so.

     

    This is Eve, and one of the few pieces of concept art I've made and which I made four years ago:

    post-26188-0-46939500-1475401595_thumb.jpg

     

    And here's a little look at what the project looks like right now:

    adl-2016-08-31-23-24-23-25.gif

     

    Here's a little bit of music that is probably going to be in the game:

    Falling Angel

     

    The current state of the project is that most of the basic programming is done and I'm working on getting some good art assets made for the game: Final character animations, final tile sets, and soon extra details and particle effects. Once this stuff gets a bit further along I'll be making the enemy entities, which all the groundwork is laid for (including pathfinding, a notably tricky challenge) but which still need a lot of work to be finalized. Once the character animations, tilesets, details, and enemies are done, I'll have everything I need to construct the first chapter of the game -- well, everything except for some special effects programming and the first boss, which I expect to be a task beyond the scope of the enemy entities, who will hopefully be old-hat by then. I'd say realistically that's probably a goal I can aim to achieve by the end of next year, if everything goes very smoothly.

     

    I've been posting regular progress DevBlogs on my blog for the last four years or so, and am now going to start mirror-posting them in this thread as well. Thanks for taking the time to check my project out!

     

  22. Posted

    I made this tonight: https://soundcloud.com/apieschel/fall-remix001

     

    I took a track that I made with a Yamaha DX7 synthesizer and a cheap Boss loop pedal, then loaded it into Reason 4.0 as a sample. I ran the sample thru one of the echo reverbs in Reason and recorded myself messing with the echo effect settings while the sample was playing. the result is......a lot of delay

    Very atmospheric, though there's some clipping. You might try playing around with a compressor in Reason if you haven't already to see if that can improve the overall sound quality. I could see building something really nice on top of a sound like this.

  25. Posted

    Correct me if I'm wrong, but if a large enough segment of the population believes something is a nazi symbol... that basically makes it one, doesn't it? I mean that's how symbols work, right?