clyde

Power Gloves.

I'm having a really hard time switching to a refinement phase from one in which I create mechanics. I walked around town all day because the weather was nice and I have been spending a lot of time staring at the computer. I thought about how I could make the ball game look awesome. Here are the sketchbook pages I explored my ideas on. Tonight I spent a few hours playing with using the lerping script (that is currently unused) for point lights to give the game some pizzazz. I didn't end up with anything workable. I just ended up in the same mentality I have been in, which is getting an idea of some cool behavior I'd like to play with and trying to write it into the script. BUT THIS IS PHASE 2! I'm supposed to stop doing that and embellish or highlight what I currently have. If you've played the current build, you know that the menu is ridiculously obtuse and the game lacks a sense of objective. These are the problems I need to be tackling with design, not additional mechanics. First thing I'm going to do tomorrow is clean up my scripts. I'll erase all the shit that isn't doing anything. I think that will get me into the idea that the game is feature complete and simultaneously re-familiarize myself with everything in there. Then I'll spend the rest of the day just making things intuitive. Players really shouldn't be going into a menu at all. I have an unreasonable belief that when I come up with a theme, all these user-interface problems will solve themselves. That would be dangerous if it happens, that sounds like a bad habit. I don't know, we will see, I shouldn't be too judgmental. If someone else did it that way, I would think it was cool. Tomorrow is another day!

Here is an experiment. Think of something that can be attributed to you that you know people can use in public to discredit or embarrass you. Basically, think of something that you would be afraid of someone calling you in front of the person who signs your pay-check or a group of people who might do you harm. I try to use this as a not completely unsatisfactory equivalent when considering these issues. I think the impact of these terms are often discussed as if anyone of any race or gender is capable of understanding the power-dynamics that are involved; I don't believe this is the case. Because of my life experiences, because of the way I identify the power-relationship between myself and the world around me, there are certain words that alert me when hearing. There are words that make some part of my lizard-brain say "You are about to be physically attacked". That's how I try to think of pejoratives that involve institutional power-dynamics, as threats that don't apply to me but do apply to others in severe ways due to their own experiences.

I LUV edible utensils. They have such great risk/reward. The stick in Fun-Dip is my favorite, but I also enjoy many starchy delivery systems such as ice-cream cones, chips, ... I'm sure there are others.

Ok. So my initial reasons for using Twitter in the first place was to be entertained and inspired by micro-celebrities whose thoughts entertain and inspire me. I have a few friends on Twitter, but our communication usually takes place on Facebook; I guess they are just following celebrities too. But eventually, what happens is that someone I follow says something that I have an opinion about and I feel the need to state it, in an absurdly small quanity of characters. I totally understand the value of a character limit... when writing a headline. But Twitter's neglect of a place to allow long form after an inspiring phrase is incredibly frustrating to me. Everyday I see tweets like "[interesting thought] but I guess it's not a conversation to have on Twitter". No kidding, this template is prone to advertisement with no product. But it's initially SO accessible. So then, let's talk about the cut-up piece that results from the inevitable attempts of in-depth discussion. What a fucking nightmare. I only see the portions of the conversations by the people I follow or who have been selectively promoted by them. The idea seems like a good one; remove the internet noise of 12 "lolz" for every complete thought. But in reality, what happens is that participants are responding to multiple people during a twittersion and all of those responses inform the ones you actually see. Let me diagram a bit: Sasha says "Games suck because I hate jumping." Bethany responds "Not all games require jumping, like most strategy-games" Sasha responds (just to Bethany) "Do you have to drive? I hate driving." Seung-jo responds (just to Sasha) "You don't jump in most driving-games, maybe you shoud try Blur." Then Sasha responds "Lol." In an attempt to have a conversation with multiple people, the form inherently forces it to splits into three conversations which unintentionally inform one another. Twitter is pretty much the worst. How did this become widely adopted? It's impossible to engage in a conversation after a thesis is stated publically. I'll still use it and struggle with it, but I'll spend more time making compromises and misinterpreting than I will spend developing thought with others.

I'd love to have a respectful discussion about weaponized hashtags with y'all. http://m.us.wsj.com/articles/BL-SEB-80544

That chicken is rad. What's next? Please keep us updated.

In regards to Merus's game: It's really hard to come up with any suggestions on a semi-developed game without being able to play it.

That's aweaome Erkki. I'm so glad you don't smoke anymore. It's also cool that you seem to be like "Well, I might as well find more ways to improve my fitness." Smoking is so hard to quit. That's a huge accomplishment.

Ok. Wednesday deadline has come and I must stop adding features. I made a build for y'all's amusement. Pitch Is Scale This was just me trying to get features in and making it kinda/mostly work, so some explanations are necessary. -Use the left mouse-button to make balls. -Press the spacebar to pause and unpause balls. -The "0"in the top left hand corner opens up the menu. --The slider does nothing currently (I was using it for something, but then I started using something else and I thought I may end up needing it so I left it in). --Here is the cool part. Clicking the button that talks about collision toggles that setting. The plus/minus buttons on the left adjust a pair of integers. This pair creates a simple fraction. When collision is turned on, the balls will change their pitch by this factor. You can also change the pitch of balls individually by clicking on them when this menu is open. --The plus/minus on the right is to change which sample the ball uses. I can't remember if the balls will change samples if they collide. I think it's only when you click on them. I'll eventually clean up those options. You will certainly be able to at least change which sample is active when you make balls. I can't remember if I did that yet. So that's the basic idea. I really wanted to make it so you can put ground in, but I ran into difficulties and Wednesday is my deadline. I may put them in if I have time for a another pass before Tuesday. I will definitely put them in in a future version of the game, but this is an exercise in bottling up the potential so that's what I am doing; I'm limiting my options in order to manifest a result. At my job today, I started thinking about how I can make everything look awesome (that is phase 2). That was when I realized that this week-deadline is actually kind of cool. I won't be able to do everything I want to it, but demarcating time for processes that I don't usually give time to is a good idea. I think I can make it look awesome, but I haven't tried making anything in a game look awesome yet, so here is my chance! I'm debating between sticking to minimalism or going for more of a children's book type of thing. I might start with making everything easy to understand with minimalist design and then embellishing it with animal characters and such. I have the rest of the week to do so. This is really fun. Here is all the code currently. I'm putting it up so it can be compared to the finished code. I've only gone in and erased a bunch of stuff once (turns out, that is my favorite part of writing scripts) so there is lots of stuff that doesn't actually do anything and a lot of the comments were things I turned off and on to debug and all that. I would be careful about using any of it. If I was you, I would wait until I put up the pure shit on Monday. Edit: HOW DID THE SCALE PITCH RELATIONSHIP INVERT??? I thought I just tested that a few hours ago. Oh well, it adds some absurdity to the build.

Paolo Pedercini suggests that scope is not only a technical decision, but also a political one. http://www.molleindustria.org/blog/invisible-walls-puffy-clouds/

It only took me two hours to convert what I have of the musical ball game into 2D. I was expecting to get a massive performance boost, but I'm not seeing it. Still, I'm excited about being familiar enough with the tools that I could convert it so quickly. I don't get it. The only think I can think is that it's because I'm using a sprite in the 2D version and internal assets in the 3D version. I have a hard time imagining that this would make up for all that additional geometry though. Theses two scenes are running the same scripts (except the 2D one has 2Dcolliders and such). The only other difference I can think of is that I created the physicsmaterial (within Unity) in the 2D version and used a standard asset in the 3D. This is the 3D version: This is the 2D version: Any ideas are welcome. I've never optimized before. As of now, I'm just going to drop the 2D version and continue working on the 3D one because it's more finely tuned and I like the look of it more.

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Progress report for week #8 What were my goals for this week? So before I looked over the posts I've made here in the last week, I was thinking that I didn't really do much except make the balls bounce around. I didn't realize that the text-box wasn't lerping last Monday. Reading the posts make me realize that I actually accomplished a good amount. Which of my goals did I accomplish? -I did animate the text-box. I also built the logic for the choice system. Accomplished! -I did end up working on the Hanenbow-inspired toy. Just in two dimensions, but that's arbitrary. I actually put a first-person character controller into the scene to walk around it for novelty so it was 3D at that point. Accomplished! and that wasn't even a real goal! -I did a lot of preparation for making a game on week #9, though it was mostly just trying to manage my expectations. Accomplished? What happened? -I learned how to lerp the text-box and I really like watching it go back and forth. I spent about as much time trying to get the portrait to move with the text-box, but it is super weird because viewports are significantly different from game-objects. The viewport does things like shrinking when it gets to the edge of the screen instead of just going off of it. Not that I got that far. I had a really hard time trying to convert the normalized whatever to spacial units. I might have given it more time if I had any amount of reasonable success, but I didn't so I moved on. I'm probably just going to attach static sprites to the text-box because I really don't care that much about the effect of having it be a camera. I actually worked on the text-box sprite for this purpose today. So then I got really curious about lerping; I wanted to see what happened when two lerping rigidbodies collided and so I made some spheres to find out. One thing led to another and I ended up adding sounds for the collision and then I got excited about the pitches and colors changing values with collisions. It was really fun. It was so much fun that I'm going to make it for this week's make-a-game project. I also made a lot of progress on the choice-system for the visual novel/twine system. I just wrote a bunch of confusing details about this. I don't want to erase it, but its just confusing so I put it in a spoiler-tag For my preparations of making a game on week #9, I came up with a bunch of dumb narrative ideas that would use a single mechanic that I've already been able to make. Then I didn't like those because I don't want to make something just to prove that I can make it, so I came up with some great game ideas that are beyond my current abilities or that can't be done well within a week. So then I was like "Fuck making a game, I'll just make something with the musical balls that I can feel proud of." So that is what I am doing. I am REALLY bad at being able to tell how long something will take me to make, so my plan is to work through Wednesday on making the musical toy (it's not really a game, see?) and then use Thursday, Friday, and Saturday to fix everything up and make it look awesome. What are my goals for week #9? -MAKE A GAME! Musical Toy! What challenges do I face and how can I prepare for them? -I have a really hard time properly allocating time because the weirdest shit causes problems for hours. So the plan is to try to finish it by Wednesday and then embellish it for the remainder of my time. To encourage myself to stay on schedule, I'll be writing progress reports on Wednesday (which is when the game is feature-complete) and then one on Friday (which is when it really should be kinda done). Psyched.

Traversing the length of Rise without touching the ground is so much fun every time.

Fixed it.

If you were going to work in Unity, I would strongly recommend the Space Shooter tutorial. You would be surprised how much you understand even though it's a different language. I did the Code Academy section on Python and that was my reaction. I knew what loops were, I just had to get used to a diffent syntax. I don't know much about Game Maker though. Also, this would be a good time to mention that the javaScript that Unity uses is not javaScript. At least, that is what I have been told.

Scripting is SO MUCH FUN! I had no idea it would be like this. It wasn't really what I thought it would be like, it's what I didn't realize would be involved; Debug.Log() is awesome. I find myself looking for excuses to put Debug.Log() into the script just to see if the shit is firing off or not. This is an example of what I didn't know to ask about. The connotation of debugging that I got from dev-documentaries was that it was this crunch-time when you all have to stop doing fun stuff and just clean the kitchen. That may be what it is like in a studio, or with a large project; but debugging a small amount of script is more like a puzzle-game. It's super fun. You put little tracers in the code (this was alluded to in Idle Thumbs Episode 150, more accurately than I've ever seen it mentioned elsewhere) and then you just shorten the potential area until you figure out which spot isn't doing what you think it should be doing and then you stare at it for a while until you say something aloud like "There is no reason this shouldn't work" and then you go, "Oh." Super Fun. Another thing that I hadn't seen anyone mention in a compelling way, so much of programming seems to be just figuring out where different parts of the ideas should go. I had this image of programming that there was only one way to do things. NOpe. as in big NOPE. The sitch is that there are infinite ways of doing things, but the number of potential techniques decreases rapidly as you approach the ideal of optimization. You know how on Neo-gaf, all these crazy people are arguing over how a bus of a computer-chip matters more than a mega-hertz or whatever? I think I know why they do that now. In programming you have all these names that are relevant to other names. So when you change one, you change everything else. I think the ideal would be to have just one name that you change the value of to get the result you are hoping for, but as the specific result of a particular instance you are hoping for gets more divergent from the results of a general potential, you have to create more factors that affect the calculation. The optimal solution is to have the fewest factors that change each other in the appropriate ways. But being able to see how that works requires an omniscience of the entire system. So when people are arguing over parts of a system on Neo-gaf, they are just explaining the synergy of parts or worshiping a particular one. Time for a Buckminster Fuller quotation. I always thought this was a cool quotation. It appeals to my New-age hipsterness; but it wasn't until I started programming that I actually saw what he was talking about. As I'm figuring out how to write some script, I make some shit happen, but it doesn't happen, so I change it a little bit, and then it happens... except for this one case, so then I write a line for that particular case and it works. Then I go back to it later and I need something else to happen that depends on something I wrote before so I try to figure out how to dovetail into that value and the same process of trial and error occurs. Then once it works (or sometimes I just take a nap), I come back to look at it and I'm like "What does this part even do? I don't need this if I just put this part here" and I end up deleting a third of what I had just written and it works better than ever. Just changing the organization of the information fixes the problem. That is way fucking cool yo.

I just had a moment when I felt like I've been doing it wrong (that's good).

I was thinking of mortgage-backed securities or credit-default swaps, but cryptocurrencies certainly fit the bill.

Is a class just a method that other classes can use?

I am hoping to spend some time playing Titanfall today. Don't be shy about joining my game or whatever. Maybe we can get a crew running this afternoon.

I've heard that creating extravagant and complex financial instruments, promoting them as sure things, and then exchanging them frequently while taking a cut is a potential option.

I wonder if there is some specific activity that you really want to participate in, but that you don't feel that you have a good opportunity to do so. Something that you would want to identify yourself with. Something like "I want to be a fireman."