clyde

I imagine a game where at the bottom of the screen there is a hand that moves horizontally. An object could fall from the top of the screen slowly. When the player changes their elbow-joint angle, the hand moves across the screen. So the right-side of the screen might be a full extension and the left-side might me touching their shoulder. As the game continues, more objects fall onto the stack and may wobble as it gets taller. The player would have to take corrective measures to account for the wobble. As the game progresses, the objects could symbolize more and more valuable/fragile things. If they manage to balance a baby on a stack of fine china, they win!

Progress Report for Week #15 What were my goals for week 15? Which of my goals did I accomplish? -I did finish watching the videos. Then I read about using Unity's TextAsset class and implemented that enough to get something from a .txt to show up in a Debug.Log() but it stopped there. At that point I had to figure out how I wanted to format the .txt file so I could write the script to read it. I the considered using Twine's export format and found a few references to doing that online. I found a tutorial on the subject that seems legit, but I didn't look all the way through it yet. Partially Accomplished What are my goals for week #16? -I want to put the weekly progress-report on indefinate hiatus. I'm not sure if I should though. Why do you want to stop doing weekly progress reports for now? -I don't think that specific goals are motivating me right now. It's hard to write goals when I think I might just change my mind as soon as I open up Unity. Why do you want to continue with the weekly progress reports? - well, when I started typing this one, I had assumed that I did absolutely nothing this week. But looking at where I was at the beginning of the week made me realize that I did make progress. That acknowledgement makes me feel like I'm making progress. How can I have what I want without the stuff I don't want? -well I obviously need markers of some sort, but I want to just doodle in Unity. I would just submit dated builds of a single project, but I move around between projects and the builds don't always show the work. This doesn't make any sense. The progress reports are the only way I have to show myself that I am moving forward. I'm keeping them. If I want more general goals, then I should write more general goals. Why would I stop doing something useful if I enjoy it and it continues to benefit me? I wouldn't. I think I just feel pressure or something, but why would I care? Onward! What are my goals for week #16? -doodle some bullshit. Put some words in it too. -start working on a narrative project that I can just add to and publish incremental builds until it stops working. -fix the sequencer so it shows that correct amounts in the settings menu. What difficulties might I have and how can I prepare for them? -right now, I think this section is the problem. this.section, I find you tedious. I'm going to stop writing you.

I made minimal improvements to my sequencer. It's not complete or anything, but I'm starting to wonder if it ever will be. I wanted to put a newer build up because the basics are there though it has problems like that the numbers in the menu don't refresh as they should. It mostly works though and I enjoy it so much that I wanted to make sure that the other people like me can play with it now. I especially enjoy making very large grids and massive amounts of notes between octaves. Then I kind of wander around on it which changes the music because the audio has a fixed range. https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/92741283/Sequencer/sequencer%205-26-14/Menu%20improved%20with%20numbers.html

That makes the game even more interesting. I think we just assumed that the runner could trash whatever they want because the corp can trash cards when they install them. I'm re-reading some of the rules now.

Just to be sure, when Theophilius Backbiter is installed, your maximum hand-size fluctuates with your credit-pool over time correct? I just played this card with an anarchy deck and it was massive amounts of fun. I took a total of four braindamage. Then I spent all my credits on a run. At the end of my turn, Capt. Hastings said "Aren't you dead?" Pointing out that with only one credit and four pieces of brain-damage, my maximum hand-size was -3. I threw my cards down and hung my head in shame. Then she goes, "Just trash Backbiter before your turn ends." That turned my frown upside-down. I won that game.

Dance Central was crazy innovative, but it didn't seem to catch on with a wide enough populous to sustain its cost. We have all three games, I can't imagine needing more of them though. On the flip-side, Minecraft was incredibly innovative and has had a huge impact. If sustained innovation spawned from anything about the last consoles, I'd say that it spawned from the market that appeared in the smaller downloadable game stores. Maybe the inexpense and ease of use with using Unity or Unreal will have a similar impact.

As a larger point, the next ten years will be when people who think of smart-phones first when some says "games" will have a large amount of disposable cash. I don't know how that will pan out, but I imagine that things that promise micro-celebrietism and sponsorship while not requiring a controller (instead using hardware that is already omnipresent) will hatch a few mega-successes tht we can not currently fathom. When a game scores daily vlogs using likes from a bot-net indistinguishable from human fans that will truly be next-gen.

Of course, I was referring to my own laziness and lack of willingness to spend more and more on building supplies. Dealing with "professionals" hasn't been a silver-bullet for us. Finding a contractor that is willing to do the work for a reasonable price, within a designated time frame, and who seems to actually know what they are doing is a near impossibility in my area. And I don't think it's right for me to have a problem with that. A benifit that apartment-buildings have is that the larger ones can keep a maintanence person on salary. From my experience, many times when work is done to a home, by a professional or not, there will often be complications that show up months later. For instance, we had a new roof installed by professionals and a year later there is mold in the attic because the new roof is much tighter (no holes) and additional ventilation was not added. I expected that the contractor might should have expected this since they are more experienced, but nothing was mentioned. And this was the only contractor that didn't jerk us around about dates. My personality type is not cut out for negotiations, spending large amounts of money on things I know little about, or forcing other people to be accountable. Plus, I'm lazy and unskilled. I don't even think I could install a door in this house, especially considering that nothing is the standard size.

I'm going through my old super-hero comic-books to find some stuff to give to a the ten year-old child of Capt. Hasting's co-worker. My first thought was the X-men reboot from the early 90's, but upon looking through them, I was surprised that they are so racy. That must have been why I liked it so much as a 13 year-old heterosexual boy. I put together a pile of comics that I wouldn't feel weird about giving him. Interestingly Web of Spider-man was a bit *hmm* while The Spectacular Spider-Man is safer (though one issue is about a Appalachian family of mutated hicks). I also noticed that X-men is more of a Halo multiplayer style of comic, while Silver Surfer is all introspective psuedo-religious like a fantasy RPG or something. Anyway, I had no idea that all of the ads in the comic-books are for games, table-top and video variety. I didn't consider video-gaming as a hobby at the time (though it totally was) and it's weird that there is such a broad cross-section. Here are a few of the ads.

And I love how as soon as it starts feeling stale, you can switch sides and play a completely different game.

Quicksilver? I will forever remember his description of his power being like having to wait in the grocery store's express-lane for someone who takes their time and has an amount of items over the limit.

Owning a house is stressful when you are too lazy and cheap to do repairs in the correct fashion. My wife and I are considering going back to being renters, but the common consensus is that this would be detrimental to our long-term finances. The thing I hate most about the idea is that someone else would have a key to my door; I don't like that at all.

These are great pointers. I never even considered that I could count the opponent's influence.

Do you think Scorched Earth is over-powered? We've been trying to figure out if knowing that there could be a Scorched Earth in any deck makes the game better or worse.

This looks like a good project for me to do. It's a Twine parser that someone built for use in Unity. http://www.maximumverbosity.net/1GAM/2013/03/twine.html

Yesterday Capt. Hastings beat me 11-0 in two turns. First turn she ran on my unprotected R&D (2 points), ran on R&D again (trashing my mining asset), ran on R&D the third time (2 points). On the second turn she installed Sneakdoor Beta, used Legwork and grabbed three agendas from my hand (7 points). It was brutal. [ Once I typed this out I realized that you can't use Legwork and Sneakdoor Beta simultaneously, doh. We are still learning.] Also, it wasn't until recently that we started caring about traces and tags. We had viewed them as a waste of time for the corporation. But I started playing NBN to get a better feel of it and now we see what's up. It's interesting to me because now I see traces and tags as necessary for fully balancing the game. Now I view it as a way for corporations to leverage their savings without necessarily spending it. And it also forces the runner to put some fat into their deck.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art is digitizing their collection and making it available for non-commercial purposes. http://www.metmuseum.org/collection/the-collection-online I don't understand how they can claim that this stuff is still protected by copyright when it's hundreds of years old. I think its bullshit. But I'm still not going to use this stuff in a commercial endeavor.

In my experience, doing something fun publically attracts all sorts very quickly, some of them aren't dangerous.

For me, I think it comes down to this: I want to be around people who seem happier when I am around. I don't want to be around people who have a sadness that I seem to be prolonging. When you consider behaviors such as self-harm, aggression, and depression to be diseases it can complicate matters. I don't want to abandon someone who needs a little support, but I don't want to enable aggressive and inconsiderate behavior either.

I probably should have assumed this from the beginning, but I get the impression that Storium's flexibilty and dependence on player-investment means that whether or not you have a good time is largely going to be based on the party and narrator you end up with. My first story (the murder mystery) was a disaster. There was no sense of who was in charge of what. The narrator wanted the party to talk amongst themselves and (I think) create clues that they woould eventually write into the actual solution, but we were all paralyzed with not understanding how much we were supposed to write into a mystery that the narrator may have already created. It was weird. It was fun though. The setting was that we were all a bunch of strangers who won vacations to a resort. For the first two days of playing, I got a real sensation that I was stuck in a public place making small-talk with strangers; it was thematically accurate. Our card-challenges were things like "Get to know each other" which was very awkward because the asynchronous format does not allow for a dialogue to be written by two. This means that you would have to make drastic assumptions about other player-characters in order to reveal anything interesting in the segment that you write. Once everyone lost faith that this was going to work out, there was a day of inactivity and I can now no longer access the story. I think the narrator deleted it, but it's possible that there might be some sort of "kick player" functionality that I'm unaware of. To be clear, I did get a cool experience out of it. I genuinely felt some aspect of being in that fictional setting. I'm now in my second story and the narrator seems much more comfortable in their role. It's a cyberpunk story and the narrator appears to be using a mixture of provided cards in their original form, provided cards with edits, and original cards that are written exclusively for our adventure. In this game, I'm seeing what the cards accomplish and what they do not. Think of cards like achievements or badges; they are digital reifications that have an psuedo-scarcity to them. Cards can be put into two main categories. Some are granted to players as awards, and some represent challenges for the player. The awarded cards represent abilities, weaknesses, motivations, and assets. Each one has a description to it that creates an expectation of the subject matter and influential details that you should include in the paragraph or two that you write to describe a action your character takes (including lesser consequences). The challenge cards are provided by the narrator to focus the collaborative writing on a few common non-player characters and obstacles. These challenge-cards have point values and two generally worded possible outcomes. Players use their awarded cards to match the point values of the challenge cards, taking note of what the cards they are using are supposed to represent and including those motivations, abilities, weaknesses, and assets in the segment they write. When a challenge-card's point value is satisfied with player-cards, a strong or weak outcome is determined (which has written guidelines) and the player that was the last to put points on that card includes the outcome in the segment they write. Now I know this sounds really flighty and loose (and it is), but it can totally work if you end up with a complementary group. Without the cards, there would be less common ground from which to work. The presentation of the cards adds an officiality to these nodes of communal fiction. As an example, in the story I'm currently in we had a challenge card that was to get away from the cops. There is an unstated expectation that all the party members need to stay together, use their awarded cards on the challenge-cards and write their segments in consideration of all that. So one player had a card that said they have a medical profession, they used it to procure an ambulance. One player had a card that said they have corporate connections, they used it to make a call to slow down the cops with an insider who had access to stop-lights. I used a teamwork card and a weakness card (one that explains I have confuse memories) to describe the scene of how my character responds to the flashing lights, explains their motivation for throwing another player into the ambulance and how the driver (another player) takes off. Because I completed the challenge with a strong outcome (determined by the cards used to satisfy the point value) I'm instructed to make sure I include the outcome that we successfully get away from the police. The narrator then creates a new scene and dispenses award cards. In this case, the narrator included character-specific flavor text to acknowledge how we had defined our characters in the previous scene (this is a very nice touch by the way). It can be rather enjoyable. In the two games I've been in, players submit moves every 3 hours or so. We end up with each player taking about two turns a day. The asynchronous drip-feed is a nice little flourish to my day. If I couldn't play this from my smart-phone, it wouldn't work for me.

This morning I had a dream with Jake in it. I was at a friend's house that was similar to a ski-lodge in that it had employees, a restaurant, and worker/consumer activity. I think I may have worked in the kitchen in the past, there was that type of famiarity with the cooks, but I felt no sense of duty. It was time for me to go home from a vacation and I remembered that my car was parked in the margins of a grocery store parking-lot that was the grocery store parking-lot when I was a child. It would be a 30-40 minute walk to get there. My wife and I packed my luggage and I headed downstairs where Jake said that he could give me a ride to my car. This entered us into that relationship you enter into when someone offers to give you a ride, following them around in directions that do not bring you closer to your destination. We went to some movie theater for a video-game event of some sort. Jake was sitting on the same row, but I was a few seats away and sitting near strangers. On the screen, as a game similar to Defense Grid was being shown (I've never played Defense Grid, the only reason it would be on my mind is because I read the beginning of a Polygon article about its difficulties getting published ) people could type messages that would show up on the screen. Jake typed some inside joke that involved a female name and some people in the theatre laughed, but I didn't get it. From there the dream moved on to me walking down a dirt road with a caravan of some sort. The weather was nice and sunny, cool and breezy. There was a troubador carriage that did a cute little performance. I quickly became friend with the four actors who were crammed into the carriage-stage thing (kinda like a puppet-show stage with the opening and cloth background). One of the actors was an attractive young woman whom I complimented on how she "looks good" when she seemed to have doubts about the quality of her portion of the performance. I immediately became concerned that I had just hit on her to make her feel better rather than talking about the actual performance. Then I continued to walk down the road. That's when the alarm went off and I stumbled out of bed to feed the cats.

Thursday I'm starting to get somewhere with making a text parser. There was a little bit of confusion involving using Unity's TextAsset functionality. But I just managed to piece together code from Unity forums that allows me to show a .txt file's contents in Debug.Log so it's just a matter of time now. Here is the parser thus far. void ReadFromTextFile() { //TextAsset textFile = (TextAsset)Resources.Load("myTextFile"), typeof(TextAsset)); TextAsset textAsset=(TextAsset)Resources.Load ("visualNovel"), TextAsset; string delimiter = ":"; string[] fullContents=textAsset.text.Split(delimiter[0]); for (int i=0; i<fullContents.Length; i++) { Debug.Log (i+" "+ fullContents[i]); } }

In reference to the juxtaposition of news and youth-culture formats. The debates between Obama and Romney in 2012 were featured as live-streams on Xbox Live. It wasn't completely passive; players could answer poll questions that seemed to be written during te debate and them see the final percentages. http://ign.com/articles/2012/10/04/xbox-live-presidential-debate-stats-revealed I watched the debates this way and I actually enjoyed the polling aspect. It kind of creeps me out though because I imagine that they use the data to deceptively change wording rather than reconsidering unpopular policies.

I think I do this too (except for the not-worth-arguing part) but I'm becoming concerned that it may appear that I am moving goal-posts or cherry-picking. I also see the value of poking a bit or focusing on the portions where we disagree. I'll poke when I suspect that different things are being said with the same words. My favorite example of this was one conversation about Dragon Age 2 on Neogaf where many people were saying that Dragon Age 2 sucked. After pushing against each particular person's argument, I found out that they thought it sucked for a different reasons, but the general language made it seem as if this was a consensus. I usually like focusing on the portions I disagree with because I want to see if I'm missing something, but sometimes it's because they don't seem to understand what I am saying. In a longer argument, this can create the appearance that I'm extreme and suffering from tunnel-vision. And then to confuse the matter, sometimes I do have extreme views because the center's paradigm on the issue seems unjust or unobservant. I don't know. I just see antagonism as helpful towards disclosure in some situations, but I don't want to be perceived as an arrogant wall.

This describes much of my movie-watching experience: https://youtube.com/watch?v=jOdJhPET8sg&list=PLD7nPL1U-R5o_GHb3XEx8XKCjzgCFCTuF%5B/media%5D'> Separately: Personally, I have a hard time balancing this. I'm willing to make this accomodation, but I don't want to look like I'm pandering. To compound the problem, I often assume that others know I'm conceding points if I move on from them. Maybe this is an unhealthy solipsism that I should buffer with an equal quantity of " I agree on [point A], but still disagree on [point B]". I want to encourage conversation, but I don't want to look like I'm consumed with niceties. Any recommendations?