clyde

Since I uploaded some of the earlier versions of the game for team-members and testing, I figure I can put a link here for the curious. Note: It's probably not worth your time to look at this earlier versions of this game. I just like showing work. 2015-4-18

For the week of May 4th, 2015 we will be playing: Donald Fuck by thecatamites You can play the game in your browser here. You can download the single game from here for free Or you can buy the entire collection of 50 games from here.

I like the audio of this game. The distant pops are neat. If the crowd didn't reward my shots, I wouldn't be half as interested. I was constantly peeking at the variatated crowd every time they rose. Missles don't seem to hit when the ufos are on the lower half of their path. It took me a while to figure that out because there's no audio-cue or sprite change that informs me that missles are going to pass through. The only way I can see to destroy them on the lower path is to cause chain-reactions. I used to play Every Extend Extra Extreme a lot. I like chain-reactions. I love that I can always see one of the little dudes' hair. I get a kick out of seeing the boom-mic in television shows.

Self Portrait reminds me of Björk's It's Not Up To You. I thought of Self Portrait as a simple game where a player-avatar moves towards consumable rewards and success is largely determined by the orientation of the arms at the time of collision. I see the rotation of the arms (and the portion of the circumference they take up) as this general clumsiness that is outside of the protagonist's control. The rhythmic cycle with which they move feels representative of my fluctuations in ability in my own life. This is what Björk's It's Not Up To You signifies for me, the idea that we fool ourselves into believing that we have complete control over our capability everyday. I operated myself on that basis for a long time and when I listened to the song it was an enormous relief to hear Björk tell me that I was being too simple minded and self-centered about the matter. Though I can show up and put effort towards something, optimal achievement isn't going to happen everytime I do that and I shouldn't think that it is all up to me because it just stresses me the fuck out. I should mention that I see the cherries as being a cutely video-gamey signifier of general instances of success. For the first part of the week, this was the totality of how I saw Self Portrait; a demonstration that the success of your approaches are not completely up to you (with an emphasis on your body getting in the way). I saw Self Portrait as a depiction of a self that clumsily knocks away what it desires with dumb, trumping indifference as often as it happens to achieve what moves towards. During the second part of the week, I started thinking more and more about two aspects of the game: the spiralling mouse-cursor and the title in conceptual terms (I never got around to figuring out the background). Spiraling shapes have a certain significance for me. I think of them as a symbol for focus. So I started realizing that in Self Portrait, I'm not directly controlling the avatar. I'm not directly controlling what I was considering the "self" of Self Portrait. In computer-games, I identify as the potential actions I am executing through the interface rather than as a character on the screen which I see as my body. The lag between the control and the character-sprite (and the point of control having a persistent visual representation) distances the body in the game from the self (what I'm actually controlling and paying the most attention to); this is what I find most interesting about the game. I'm not a person that thinks about my body much. I have learned that my body affects my mind so synergistically that I can't separate them when considering a self, and instead that, I am everything including the circumstances that surround me; because any useful definition of self will conceptualize my agency in this world, and my perception of circumstances, my body, and my conditioning, all impact my agency simultaneously. But still, I am always moving towards accepting my body as part of my self rather than starting from it, I think that this is a significant difference between myself and many other people. What I'm trying to say was that I was ready to think of the self in Self Portrait as a spiral rather than as a sprite depicting body-parts. And when I did, it made a lot of sense. I often define myself based off of one simple question that I am constantly answering: "What am I paying attention to at this moment?" After watching some people be hurt who were spacially close to me, I think I may have been traumatized into constantly making myself accountable to what (and who) I am paying attention to at any given moment. If I'm distracted, then I might not be ready to intervene in a timely manner. This has certainly affected the way I see my self. I am my interests and enthusiasms, I am defined by what I pay attention to. The logics I craft and the voices I choose to want to listen to are my methods by which I can influence what my interests and enthusiasm are. I don't have complete control as I do in Self Portrait, but it's impressive to me that Self Portrait demonstrates the focus of attention as the self rather than as the clumsy body that follows it like an spoiled dog. The "self" of Self Portrait is the spiralling-shape mouse-cursor which signifies a focus of attention.

Is there something cheap that is better for making animated pixel art than Gimp?

Personally, I'm most interested in reading about the high art side of things in reference to pixel art. I'd also be interested in finding a technical manual of some sort that describes tricks that pixel art uses and provides convincing arguments about what makes those tricks attractive. Anything that references some pop-psychoigy or real psychology might give me explanations I can get down with. This is a good example of what I'm looking for, now I can look at pixel art and ask myself "What in this picture is ambigious due to the large resolution?" and "How are they using that tiny amount of space?" By the way, these are the examples by @Cellusious that are making me interested in the decision to use pixel art. pic.twitter.com/OcdARjcg8b — Olav (@Cellusious) May 2, 2015

Apparently development for Steam's VR can be done with Unreal Engine 4 http://www.polygon.com/2015/4/30/8521469/steamvr-epic-unreal-engine-4-ue4-free

If you make a mock-up of what the game might look like and what the interface will be like, I might have a suggestion.

Having the bullet-movement turned off puts my character in a weird state. I just go around placing bullets on trajectories that will be sick when time starts again. Firing weapons this way could make for an intertesting game. Kinda like Flotilla mixed with Geometry Wars.

After reading all the context in the intorduction and shooting a few flashing pizzas, I started seeing this is a space-marine adventure in a cyberpunk world. The puns about people being named from brands took on a meaning. I thought that the gamifying of shooting enemies and the way they are presented as flashing targets might be what has mutated from trying to solve the trauma of war, some automation is determining targets and then masking them as food, but a human is still required to pull the trigger. I started thinking that I wasn't shooting pizzas, they just look like pizzas because seeing combat that way is... easier to digest.

Sergio is working on a game that I found inspirational. I'm trying to make a 2D side-scrolling platformer just so I can play around with some concepts. It's not really anything yet, I'm not sure it will be, but I'm having a good time playing with it. Playable (not on Chrome)

I'm programming a side-scrolling platformer and having a blast with it. I made the basic character-controller with this tutorial and just added a wall-jump by adding in a wallCheck variable modeled after the groundCheck variable in the tutorial. I also made it so that the camera moves in steps whenever you reach the side of a screen. I did not expect to get as much enjoyment out of making this style of game. There is something really enjoyable about seeing what goes into a format that is so deeply embedded in my experiences with computer-games.

I haven't used any of the the javaScript functionality. Can you describe your experience with it?

A way to do this without punishing slow readers like myself would be to make a counter that gets closer to zero every time you choose a file or ask about a particular person during a interrogation.

I reported it to Steam. If I can figure out a useful approach for a PM to them I'd be willing to try, but I can't think of one. When I did the reverse search the only results were the avatar showing up on StormFront and another white-supremacy site that I had never heard of, but which was pretty suggestive of its content by its name. I don't think I'm capable of really caring what they have to say and that makes the possibility of positive interaction very unlikely. In my imagination, telling them that it's a bad joke will just get them excited about hooking an SWJ for a flame-war.

Her writtens are probably alright.

You write pulp extraordinarily well. Your characters felt distinct and interesting and attached to the speculative world you describe in different ways, all which make logical sense. You were able to explain everything with uneasy dialogues and evokative details. Your pacing between dialogues and imagery was arranged with such a pace that I never got bored and I looked through every file and talked to everyone about everything. I was really impressed; to be honest, this felt professional. This doesn't come from someone who just says "I'm going to write a story today because it will be something new for me." The world was well thought out and the premise was interesting. Some of the real-world references felt tacky, but that's what corporate-sponsorship of all public works would look like in a pulp world. I was constantly surprised by hints of depth and consistency in the implications of circumstances mentioned earlier in the story. The characters had motivations for their actions and actions for their motivations. Their personalities complemented the roles they had formed for themselves in the speculative world and I felt that they all used their particular advantages towards their own interests and perspectives. I would be interested in learning more about how you go about writing something so wholistically. Literally, I want to know the actual method of approaching this story and the design of the characters. Also, it was smart to give all the suspects reasons and means to commit the crime since it is a pulp murder-mystery; but we all know who really did it.

I used to listen to stuff like this all the time 10 years ago. It's really neat having a narrative leading you through a mixtape and acknowledging significance of particular tracks.

I would have thought I reached the end if not for one of the screen-shots.

Up until this point, it never occurred to me that her name is Tiffany Lavant, but they call her "Ms. Blemmings." It was just a place-holder name that never got swapped out because it became invisible as I played through so many times. What I mean to say is that she is recently married and they aren't close enough to her to know about it. Also she doesn't care enough about this office relationship to correct them. Thanks for pointing out the typo, I'm making a list of small corrections that need to be made for an improved build. I've heard some complaints about the pacing of the game, especially about how the final confrontation before the finale drags on or is unnecessary. Capt. Hastings has been trying to convince me that this is the case. I'm not sure if that is similar to your having difficulty to get into it, but I'd be interested to hear your thoughts on whether or not the game has doldrums.

For the week of April 27th, 2015 we will be playing: Self Portrait by thecatamites You can play the game in your browser here. You can download the single game from here for free Or you can buy the entire collection of 50 games from here.

No, so far I have only gotten to the part where the

Please make more.