Dinosaursssssss

Another might be "poppin' off"

Why bother creating robots to kill all humans, when we can just make bullets smarter? Cut out the middle man-bot, I say! http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/07/11/darpa_shows_off_first_successful_test_of_steerable_bullet/

These aren't babies I don't think, but they're small and it made me giggle.

Haha it didn't even occur to me writing that post but I imagine my use of the word "library" is probably really confusing in this context. What I'm talking about when I say library is really just a software package, I guess. A set of functions and objects that let you do a specific task, in this case voice recognition. Wikipedia definition here. But yeah, a grammar is the set of recognizable words and phrases. In the MS suite I believe you just pass a list of strings in to serve as the grammar. Also I remembered the name of the voice controlled squad tactics game I mentioned in my other post: There Came An Echo. Which I think is a really good title. Also here's a Polygon piece with some more info. http://www.polygon.com/2014/4/15/5606644/there-came-an-echo-preview-voice-controls-pax-east-2014

Does anyone have experience building Unity games for Windows Store and know of good guides/resources for doing so? I wanted to experiment a bit with touch controls, and I'm finding this process pretty aggravating and lacking in docs. I ended up downloading both the Windows 8.0 and 8.1 SDKs, then two separate versions of Visual Studio 2013 and eventually got it to work but it wasn't a pleasant experience. I get the feeling some of my frustration might be that I'm doing this from a Surface Pro, but it runs Windows 8 so I don't know why it would matter. I think the physics simulation is a little bit different now too, forces seem to be just a little stronger than they were. So if anyone knows of a place that talks a bit about these quirks (and what ever other potential issues I might hit) that'd be really useful. I was initially reading these http://docs.unity3d.com/Manual/windowsstore-gettingstarted.html but they're sort of vague in places, and didn't mention the version of VS I ended up needing.

I love me some Payday...think I'm around level 75-76 right now 'cause I was playing pretty regularly with a group at work for a while. I haven't really played in a while though so there are a bunch of heists I haven't played much of (basically all the post-release stuff) so I'd definitely be down to play some! I'm available most nights between about 7pm EST and 12pm EST (4 - 9 west coast). An organized time makes the most sense, but if anyone randomly throws me an invite, I have a hard time saying no to Payday http://steamcommunity.com/id/dinosaursssssss I'm mostly specced into Technician, but I have a bunch of handy stealth stuff too (body bags, extra pagers). Enough that I used to be able to solo stealth framing frame, though I haven't tried it since they added more guards and invincible cameras and such. I am quite bad at the stealth though, which in my case is mostly due to lack of patience I think. I usually attempt to be sneaky, but almost always end up standing on a table, firing a LMG on full auto.

I spent some time messing with the Microsoft .NET speech recognition libraries. They will let you specify a dictionary of phrases and fire events when one is hit, or attempt to capture all words. I personally found them to be a pretty inaccurate, but my use case was also pretty weird...I was trying to match audio being "spoken" by a text-to-speech app I wrote and was piping through the voice chat of a game. There were a few other weird things with these libs that I think would have made them hard to use to make a game or use in Unity, like the small windows application that apparently had to constantly be running for the recognition to capture audio at all. I spoke to some developers at PAX East who were making a squad tactics game (the name of which escapes me) where you controlled your troops using spoken commands and they seemed very happy with the MS tools, so maybe I just didn't spend enough time investigating. Docs: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.speech.recognition(v=vs.110).aspx I might be wrong but I believe all this MS speech stuff was originally based on CMU Sphinx, an open source Carnegie Mellon speech recognition project. http://cmusphinx.sourceforge.net/ Also, not totally related, but while I was looking into this stuff, I ended up reading this white paper from a Shazam developer that mostly went over my head, but was pretty interesting regardless. I imagine some of how their music-matching works would be very similar to matching speech. http://www.ee.columbia.edu/~dpwe/papers/Wang03-shazam.pdf A couple more libraries I know of: I haven't used it personally, but there's an Intel library on the Unity asset store called Intel Perceptual Computing that has some voice recognition that I believe also uses a dictionary of commands, and I think has some other funky stuff in it like motion controls/gesture recognition. This is a javascript voice recognition library for controlling websites via voice. I haven't done any web development or html5 game dev that would call for it, but I skimmed the docs and it seemed to be very flexible and incredibly easy to use. https://www.talater.com/annyang/ Edit: So to more directly answer your question, while the basics of the tech definitely exist and are actually pretty easy to get started with, it seems like tweaking those tools to fit every situation (different mics, voices, accents/dialects/languages, etc) is much harder. But, I think as people get comfortable with tools like Siri and Kinect and expect more from them, development will accelerate.

This is incredible. I feel like the "actual lyrics" (I think that's what that meme is called?) thing is kinda tired, but the video cracked me up, old timey bathing suits are hilarious. I thought Electric Wizard claimed to be the loudest band ever, but on investigating I think their actual claim is that they're the "heaviest band in the universe," which I won't dispute.

I don't really like the direction their vocals have gone; I think somewhere around Blood Mountain/Crack the Skye the vocals got more...sing-y and it just doesn't do it for me. I don't dislike the newer stuff (including the new album) but it just doesn't grab me like Remission and Leviathan did. Anyway, I've been going through all the music on Free Music Archives, and on their blog today someone linked to this band Tunnel of Love that's just the grimiest, gnarliest hardcore punk I've heard in a while. This probably won't appeal to a lot of people but it's punk rock as fuck and I kinda love this cover of Paint it Black. I linked it to a friend who called it 'unlistenable' (not an unfair assessment) which then reminded me of Guitar Wolf, a Japanese punk band that's a lot more palatable. But I really love this quote about them: "frontman Seiji clarified, "I love jet plane. I love noisy music, too. So... There were records... many records... every record have no big sounds. So... easy to listen. I hate that! So! I add jet sounds. Bwaaaahng! Explosion!"" I was getting a headache not about a half hour ago, and in writing this post I think I've figured out why.

Going a little back to my earlier post, this is sort of the best part of jams though, isn't it? Now you have a Twine to Unity parser! That's awesome, and I imagine will be incredibly useful again. Making that little piece of tech or fucking around with that weird idea you never had an excuse to try, that eventually grows into something else is a much bigger win than some arbitrary number score on itch.io. There might not be a lot of content in your submission, but I bet a Twine -> Unity tool would do well on the asset store

Ben just falsely accused me in IRC of not following him on twitter, so TO CLEAR UP ALL THE CONFUSION I'm gonna post my twitter handle in this 2 month old thread https://twitter.com/dinosaursssssss And as is tradition (?) my first tweet: 5:18 PM - 29 Aug 2010 Tweet tweet #birdsounds I thought this hashtag was pretty funny for a while. I think my first dozen or so tweets all used it and I brought it back once in a while, to the amusement of no one (except myself).

I don't have any composing or music-playing ability, but I really love this little tune I had a friend make for my Public Domain Jam game, Surfenstein. I wanted a surf rock tune with a spooky vibe so what I initially asked for was " but played on an Organ." Before I got the first draft of his song, I was using a slowed down, echo-y version of as a placeholder. Where we ended up was a little more straight surf rock, which I think is tonally about perfect for the game. For context, the game: http://dinosaursssssss.itch.io/surfenstein The song: http://www.maximum-extreme.com/surfenstein/Frankenstein_Surf.mp3 And this is his bands tumblr, which mostly seems to be links to articles about NYCs rat infestation http://theratproblem.tumblr.com/

I've been poking through Free Music Archive to try and build up a little library of tunes I can easily throw into jam games, and while looking up license info found this page : http://creativecommons.org/legalmusicforvideos It has a couple handy links to CC music sites, but also an interesting licensing tidbit. Obviously, I am not a lawyer, but this seemed like it'd apply to games as well, and clears up some confusion I had about Creative Commons licensing: "Under CC licenses, synching the music to images amounts to transforming the music, so you can’t legally use a song under a CC No Derivative Works license in your video." Also here's a fun tune I found. These guys have a couple albums up under an attribution/sharealike license so they'd be perfect for a jam game or I guess an open source commercial release? http://freemusicarchive.org/music/The_Freak_Fandango_Orchestra/Tales_Of_A_Dead_Fish/Requiem_for_a_Fish_1403 edit: As I go through the ~2500 open license songs on here, I've noticed that I really like the stuff from the Incompetech guy (Kevin MacLeod). Most of it isn't super interesting but they're very well produced and each track feels very purposeful. For example this 80s-ass PR-person-walking-out-onto-a-stage song http://freemusicarchive.org/music/kevin_macleod/funk_sampler/presenterator

Eh, I don't put much stock in the rating system. And honestly I find its presence in these jams kinda counter to what I consider to be their purpose, which to me is learning and experimentation. I get that there needs to be a way to pick the best games, but exposing the raw numbers everywhere makes it feel more like much more of a competition than I like. I don't think it's in most peoples minds that they should be trying to beat each other, but I worry that the system encourages it.

This is the first game being co-developed by Fire Hose Games as part of the incubator program they're running for Boston area indie devs, and I think it was a really good choice to kick that program off. The prototype was entertaining and people seemed to think it was adorable, so I don't think it'll have problems getting funded or selling some copies. And with any luck the money from the game and this kickstarter will be a good launching point for the developer, Chris. I have high hopes for this all around so I was happy to kick in a few bucks!

I played through 30 Flights of Loving the other day. I thought it was phenomenal, and it really left an impression on me. The format fit the content in a really satisfying way, and it's surprisingly emotionally engaging for being a very short game featuring characters with cube heads. I didn't totally get the story, but I'm not sure you're supposed to(?). It's fun to think more about, and the brevity makes me think you're intended to replay it. The commentary mode is also insightful and has some good level design tips. Really a fantastic game.

I modeled a thing for the first time today! It's these six shooters I made in Blender. I think I did something wrong by extruding and solidifying the frame though, it's all...flickery. I feel a little bad that the first thing I ever modeled was a gun, but the only other model I reaaaally need for this game is a person and that seemed like a bit much for my first project.

...here's SpennyDubs handily defeating me at my own game: edit: Seems like itch.io recently added a page showing past/current/future jams in a nice timeline. Interestingly, it also shows the number of games submitted to each jam. The most popular one was the Flappy Jam at nearly 800 games (!!!), beating out the next most popular, Candy Jam, by about 350 submissions. Kinda wonder if their numbers are so much higher because of publicity, or just because it's relatively easy to make a flappy bird or candy crush clone. http://itch.io/jams

I really like the categories for rating games: Overall Audio Visual Romance Psychedelia Lonesomeness The Void Shootouts I submitted my game, though there was a lot of stuff I didn't have time for. All you can do now is shoot and throw dynamite at other players, though I did code (and remove) a couple sorta awkward grappling hooks. The gravity is kinda fun though, I think? I also didn't have time to get sound in, so instead I put a link to a sweet Cowboy Bebop track in the description. Close enough? http://dinosaursssssss.itch.io/high-moon

Uh so I sat down to do some work on my space cowboy game since they extended the deadline a couple days and in an effort to make this more cowboy-y, went to find a cowboy hat model online. And the description from the Turbosquid page: Free coyboy hat! Subdivision surfaces Only quads Special surprise as well!

Like so much of Bulletstorm, it's kind of a dumb gag but it made me giggle.

Whoa! What was her method?

I think some kind of cursor/reticle would be useful, or you should lock the cursor to the unity window, because I twice clicked outside the window and died. The latter probably makes more sense, so that players still have to aim using the line coming off the gun. I like the look overall and think the parallax background works well, but a little bit more differentiation between the different layers of the planet surface would make it a little more visually interesting. Doubt you'll have time to do it for tomorrow, but something that I think might work is an active reload to add a little challenge and make players try to shoot enemies earlier (rather than waiting for them to bounce into their sights). At some point once enemies just start flooding onto the screen, there's not much you can do to shoot them down fast enough, so I think keeping the number of enemies down but increasing the difficulty of shooting them (whether via active reload or maybe more complicated movement patterns) might feel more fair. For reference I wasn't able to get past around ~35 enemies before I wasn't reloading fast enough. How did you get that sweet kinda fiery-blue effect on the "wheels"? Particles with collisions? I like that a lot.

I can imagine a bunch of variations of Wizard Billiard Battle that would probably be weird and fun all of them say WIZARD BILLIARD BATTLE in the sky

I started playing some Dungeonmans last night, a roguelike that just went onto Steam Early Access yesterday. It was a Kickstarter project from a little under a year ago I think, being worked on by a an ex-Bioware Austin (by way of a few other studios) guy. I'm really digging it so far; it's definitely not feature complete yet, but I've been having fun and I'm really enjoying the writing. There are lots of jokes sprinkled throughout the dialog and flavor text, and I'm finding them to be really funny but restrained enough to never really be annoying or overbearing. Definitely worth checking out. http://www.dungeonmans.com/ Here's a a fierce enemy you may face in Dungeonmans, the Triger.