clyde

As far as enjoying the world I've rescued like dartmonkey brings up, I like to think that this is representative of human-psychology; the war never ends for the soldier. The illusion of security is forever broken and an alertness is required to maintain peace. One potential addition to this narrative is having a playable child being born to the original protagonist. When this happens in 7 Grand Steps, a demarcation does occur in my mind where I have the residual motives of my ancestor initially, but they become increasingly irrelevant and are replaced with the current character's own motive. For the question of successful end-games in general, I'm fortunate in that I am not very good at optimization. I kinda suck at games. I end up with challenging end-games that may not actually be the end, but they provide a satisfying excercise that I can continually fail at. The example that comes to mind is Mount & Blade. I am not very good at being the Marshall, so it's exciting everytime and I reach some highs and then we go to war with another faction, they take away my title and I find out that my gains were fragile. I do that over and over again. Chime also has this end-game of a slope I can't entirely climb but that I enjoy banking off of.

I met my wife by drunkenly bumping into her at a work-party and explaining that her ta-ta's would look great on my chin. Not really. Actually Thrik, this is one of the reasons that I like the american version of The Office, because it explores these complexities in a considerate and entertaining way. Edit: damnit, I'm having a really hard time figuring out the best place to put that apostrophe on "ta-ta?s"

If we are talking about the explicit narrative of a cut-scene versus the subtle narrative of a simulation, then I typically prefer the latter. I'm not motivated to replay a game to get a different cut-scene, but I'll spend more time in a world where nothing feels like a prop (if I already enjoy the game). Btw: I hadn't heard of Chris Crawford. His writings are incredible seductive to me. Reading through the overview of Storytron, I think the plans for how the protagonist is designed is an interesting solution for the problem of "How can a player experience the complexity of a low-level simulation?"; the protagonist's choices are generated by the sim as per usual (because assumably, the protagonist just happens to be the portion of the simulation the player controls) and the the* player basically does the decision calculation themselves. I love this idea. That's basically how Civilization 5 works. *this was supposed to say "then the", but when I went to correct it, I liked how it sounds as if I'm stuttering in excitement.

I haven't looked into 3d modeling software yet, so I can't make a recommendation. I do like Audacity for audio and Gimp for drawing though. Both are free and have managed to do everything I need them to.

From my understanding, Unity is free unless you make $100,000 a year from selling games. If I make that much money selling games, I'd be happy to give them a share. As far as more strict licensing, I'm trying to rely on less expensive stuff and licenses like the one you describe would deter me. http://unity3d.com/unity/faq#section-452

I'll have to get to the audio chapter of my book or through that part of a tutorial to really have anything to add, but I think your experiment was inspiring and I look forward to seeing what Unity allows us to do with audio. I love anything synesthetic.

How can you use the waveform as an input? Yes, let's talk about this. I think that it would be cool to do some sort of environments in Unity. I don't have close to the knowledge yet, but it's a dream.

Have any other game-modes been announced (maybe a Lords Management mode?)

Is it fair to assume that Websense hires through college fraternity-ties? Nope, but I'm doing it anyway.

Learning about the computer-game craft shows me how many opportunities there are to contribute to a project: - terrain - 3d models - 2d art - textures - GUI skins - fonts And lots more stuff I haven't read about yet.

I'll start posting mine. Hehehehehe.

Progress Report for week #3 What were my goals? Which goals did I accomplish?-I did go through those two chapters on scripting and I feel reasonably confident about what I retained. I started the chapter on GUI and learned some stuff, but I only went through half of it, so I want to start that over at some point. Which goals did I not accomplish? - The GUI chapter -The chapter on prefabs -The chapter in character-controllers -A small Twine demo within Unity What happened? I read the chapters on scripting and then started going through the GUI chapter in front of the computer. Once I got the "Hello World" box to pop up on the screen I wanted to see if I could make it move around with the xbox controller. It did, but only one pixel, so then I played around with a public float that would show up in the inspector and act as a multiplier. That was successful. This excited me about movement again, so I went back to the scripting portion of the Space-Shooter tutorial and breezed through it. I continued on with that tutorial until I got to coroutines last night and was like "What?" Yesterday was not a good day for concentrating, so I decided to delay my plans. My most successful moment this week was when I went ahead and tried to figure out how to spawn many asteroids without watching the tutorial video. I managed to do it with a while-loop and enjoyed changing the frequency of them in the inspector. It was a proud moment. Then I watched the video and dude doesn't mention while-loops, but starts talking about coroutines and how they have a different syntax and I was like "What?" What is the long term goal? -The dance game Goals for week #4 -read the chapter on pre-fabs -do the excercises inthe GUI chapter -read the chapter on character-controllers -grok coroutines -do more of Space-Shooter tutorial -maybe make that twine demo. After reading Dewar's question about space-economies, I want to make sure that I'm moving forward on the simulation-track in some quantity. A twine demo using the GUI could get me started in thinking about changing variables between scripts without collision. What challenges might I face and how can I prepare for them? -I'm pretty sure I got this. I'll be working a regular schedule this week, but I will require naps. I am sleepy. -I expect that coroutines go pretty deep. But if I throw myself at them, I'll learn a lot more than I know (nothing). -The way that scripts speak to each other is still kind of ambigous to me. I know it has something to do with typing things like Destroy (other.gameObject) but I need to expose myself to that type of thing more and may not be about to make a twine demo in the GUI that can use interactions between more than one script. We will see. It's a low priority right now.

flpa flp alfa flpa falp falf alpfa

People are still stupid. It hasn't even come out yet, but the beta suggests that it will be that genre of game where you die and spawn a lot as you run around with guns and grenades. It feels fast-paced with drip-feed rewards and quickly determined skirmishes. That's exactly the type of thing I want to play today; shoot, shoot, die, shoot, shoot, die, upgrade.

I would be playing a lot of this today if I owned it.

Personally, I'm not very interested in the competitive-scene, but this is happening this morning if anyone is interested. http://www.twitch.tv/papatvpinball

Pshaw. Science. I had a religious experience. When I was out, Super Junior told me that I had to bring a message back to my reality (this didn't really happen, but we were listening to K-pop at the time and I remember it being involved in my dream. It's actually all I remember about it.) ...and I don't think it was this song either. Don't worry, if I remember what song it was, I'll post it.

So this morning, one of the cats is acting crazy. I discover that it's because a cat I've never seen before is looking cute on the other side of the cat-door. Our largest cat of three comes up and is like "I got this." and puts on her war-face. I make a motion to close the cat-door with this slidy plastic thing and our large cat is so wired that she just swats at the circumstance and I feel a single claw go deep into the back of my hand. It hurt a surprising amount and I am jumping in pain as I go to the bathroom to poor alcohol on it. I tell Capt. Hastings that I'm hit and she comes in to help me bandage it. I'm like "It hurts a lot more than it looks like it would." I'm jumping around trying to distract myself from the pain and thinking about how deep in my hand that claw felt like it went. I sit down and tell the Capt. "I feel like I'm going to faint." Remember the visions that Shepard has when she touches the Conduit? Lots of really intense dreams mixed with a sense of urgency that occur quickly over a few seconds? I'm swimming through dark non-water with wind rushing past my ears and I have to get back into consciousness, but my body isn't moving and I have no clue where I am. Capt. Hastings is looking at me and laughing going are you ok and I am so confused. For about 2 seconds I had no idea where I was was or what year it is. "Are you ok? Your face hit the floor and you started snoring. It was really weird." Capt. Hastings laughs as she tells me. I just start weeping and explaining that I am really scared and I don't know what's going on. After sitting there the floor for a bit and sobbing, it didn't take long to recall everything, but my emotional state was too intense and took about 10 minutes to dissolve. It was like someone hit my reset-button the layers of meaning and identity immediately reapplied themselves. It was so fucking crazy. The rest of the day I'm philosophizing about the fragility of life how I've experience some perceptible experience of rebirth, and Capt. Hastings is responding with "I'm glad I cleaned the kitchen floor recently because you ate it." Everyone is ok so I think it was a super interesting morning.

The Idle Thumbs cast had a discussion at some point around Hotline Miami, where they discussed how games whose message is that games tend towards violent mechanics don't really say much more than that. I think the same issue could come up with games like Papers Please, Greed Corp. and some of Pedercini's games; they point out that optimization can make any process dehumanizing and result in a manifestation counter to the initial motive, but what do they say beyond that? Personally, I want to play more games like these because I'm trying to understand how alienation works, but I can see how it eventually will not be enough. At some point I'd like to play a game that explains to me how optimized strategies and centralized power can be compassionate to the individual and account for externalities.

I am really enjoying my new hobby.

This is true for me also. There are some awful things that happened and also ineffable ecstasies. Both were necessary to become who I am. If I had known the stuff I know now, I would have never taken some of the risks that allowed for this all. Not that everyone made it out alive. There is definitely some survivorship-bias to consider when getting the perspectives of older folk.

I like to imagine that Crosswalk Norway is simultaneously polling a mechanical engineering forum and a medical profession forum. I wonder how the answers vary. I want to answer the 19 year-old question for fun. The thing I would try to explain to my 19 year-old self is that people aren't doctors or mechanical engineers or game-developers. It's more like Natasha is a momma's girl who grew up on a southern Georgian commune that no one has ever heard of and has a free-spirit sister who lives in Hawaii and a baby-sister that follows her around. Childhood violin-lessons have given her a deep understanding of music, the capacity for discipline, and a skeptical view of everyone learning the same way. Deciding to study social-work in school bolsters her love of people and the ability to examine and treat behaviors. But after school, she realizes that the the south-east of the United-States will always be slower to move away from its racist, protestant beginnings and so she decides to move to the West Coast because the people she felt kinship with in school had come from that area. After getting a job as a nanny, she meets a lot of interesting people. One of them has a fetish for amateur-radio and house-bands just like her. After thrift-shopping for fun every Saturday for months, the two of them realize that they have enough radio equipment to actually do something with it (they don't know what). They end up starting a community run radio-station with their friends that eventually requires some licensing in order to be legal. Natasha is comfortable enough with bureacracy, so she goes ahead and jumps through the hoops. She finds herself running a radio-station out of her house and living with her thrift-store friend who she discovers, she has fallen in love with. What job is that? I'm not claiming that CrosswalkNorway's perspective is naively narrow, but when I was 19, mine was. I thought jobs were how lives were determined. They can certainly have a massive influence, but lives remain infinitely permutable regardless of profession.

Great comments in response to this Riendeau opinion piece. I'm addicted to watching crowds of individuals becoming aware that other people exist. It's like watching a plant grow or something.

I imagine the charity-simulator would reveal the inherent scope and dehumanization of optimization to the player. I need to state that I am deeply motivated by optimization when I play games. One of the reasons I'm interested in Pedercini's talk is that I have a hard time figuring out what motivates me besides optimization when I play games. I also have a hard time imagining an argument against using currency or resources in the most efficient manner when doing large-scale charitable works. I think there is one, I just don't know what it is. Maybe the charity-simulator game could take place on two scales. There would be the grand scale where resources are collected and distributed with general policy, and then there would be the human scale where you appear as a player character in the environment where the charity is targeted. I'm fascinated by the question "Does efficiency free us or enslave us?" When people do things inefficiently, it seems like a waste; but I would be completely demotivated if I had to do everything the most efficient way all the time.

If you never had to pay for anything, what would you do with your time?