clyde

I decided that this is too interesting not to make a game about. This is in development. Your input on what I have so far would be useful. Appropriation

For the week of April 6th, 2015 we will be playing: Frank Tomato HD 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.

If they did something that was hateful, then I would have a problem with it because (whatever the reason that it is hateful). My problem would be that it was hateful, not that they did it without permission or compensation. But if they cast me as a villian or sex-object without providing reimbursent, I'd be cool with it. I know that other people feel differently. I want to examine the concerns of misrespresentation so that I can decide how I feel about them myself. The contemporary mores on this issue are really far away from my own. There are so many double-standards and superstitious methods to avoid complaints that I think it's a mess that needs to be waded through. I suspect that there is middle-ground between always asking for permission and doing whatever I want in spite, for my personal ethics on the issue so I'm trying to figure out what that middle-ground is. This seems to be the going assumption, but I don't think it's very accurate. Let's Plays monetize their videos. Musician's sell tracks that include samples. Is all this just a matter of enforcement? If so then I can start thinking of it in terms of the benefits weighed by legal punishments. I would be thrilled. I know other people are not like me though.It really is more confusing than it first appears. If I screenshot and crop a vlogger and put them in my game is that unethical? What if I draw over them and only use their contour. What if I use their bedroom as a background? Can I sample their laugh for a sound-effect? What if I want to make a game about a restaraunt I frequent, but the owner is never there because it is a fast-food franchise and they say "no" anyway? Can I put a house from the real-estate ad in my game? Can I have that house be on fire in the game? I haven't yet heard a good blanket-policy for these questions.

In my initial play-through I really enjoyed the HQ/crush metaphor for it's cuteness and absurdity. The tropes or common experiences of reading too much into a trivial amount of affection (the emoticon) and the debilitating concern about how to effectively time a phone-call sustained the humor and cuteness of that theme. I eventually became more interested in the relationship between Meepo, Drizzly, and HQ. I think there is an implication that Drizzly likes-likes Meepo and is going through the confirmation that their affection towards Meepo is unrequited (something that Drizzly already knew, but there was still enough ambiguity to have hope). Meepo is so distracted by their own crush on HQ that they aren't observant of how Drizzly really feels. At this depth, the setting and narrative of Meepo In Love becomes rather interesting to me. Here is a pair that has been stationed together, assumably alone, to observe the existence of physical things of cosmic scale. Does Meepo not see how Drizzly feels towards them? Or does Meepo not care? Either way, it hurts Drizzly so much that all responses are either dismissive or angry. While Meepo is contemplating suicide over a hallucinated or contrived long-distance romance that has little chances of being confirmed, and even less of a chance of being consummated, Drizzly is stuck on the ship alone with a person they desire who has rejected them in a situation where the only competition for Meepo's heart is routine acknowledgement of infrequent data-reports from far away (now with an emoticon). I can see why it would be hard for Drizzly not to take this personally. The lack of information Meepo has about HQ gives the impression that the entire substance of this crush is a creation of Meepo; and it's such an absurd, desperate romance that Drizzly may suspect that Meepo is crafting it to avoid dealing with Drizzly's feelings. I enjoy that the setting hyperbolizes this form of unrequited love with its implied distances and tour-lengths. There is another quality to it demonstrated by the scene in the lab. The lab-scene gives me the feeling that Meepo has been investing all of their efforts into distant objects; Drizzly is too near to be of relevance.

Divine Inspiration

Planet Quest is a single-button rhythm-game that I'm enjoying. https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/planet-quest/id922848069?mt=8 It does some unfair things to the player that make this game feel a little more playful than I am used to. So one thing I enjoy about listening to jazz-solos is that they often have an established melodic theme that each soloist riffs off of. So a very very simple example of this would be to have a drum-beat that goes xoooxoooxoooxooo and then someone plays with it a little bit by first referencing the pattern and then subverting it playfully. xoooxoooxoooxoox That slight variation of the theme reminds the listener that each beat remains a potential until hit. Of course there is infinite complexity to how this can be done. My personal hypothesis is that the biggest aspect of melodies (which are the pitches and their rhythms, think "twinkle twinkle little star") that causes me to be engaged with it is how it matches with my current conception of theme and variation. Remember, I'm mostly talking about the melody. It gets confusing, especially because I might not be using the right terminology. The way I think of dance-music is that there is an overall rhythm, a bass-line which adds pitches to the overall rhythm, and then melodies laid on top that have both pitches and rhythms of their own. So I'm talking about that top layer, but really it's all bullshit because one person's bassline might be another person's melody. I don't know what I'm talking about. Anyway my personal hypothesis is that I like things musically that are right on the edge of whether or not I can identify the repeating melodies; what I also think of as the "themes". If I can identify it easily and predict the entire song, I get bored musically (when the emotions of vocals and lyrics enter the picture things can drastically change), but if I can't identify the theme at all then I never feel engaged by the piece. My skill at identifying themes increases over listens, so my musical taste changes over time. I am attracted to things that I mostly don't understand, but which have enough familiarity that I know where to start. Planet Quest's music is not very complex, but it plays with the rhythms of the melodies in a way I find interesting. Most rhythm-games allow the player to trust that the rhythm will remain consistent with their expectations, Planet Quest does not seem to care. It wants to change the beat at the last minute to surprise you. That makes the player miss and it's "unfair" which I typically don't appreciate, but here the arbitrary changes of melodic rhythm surprise me and because of the 6 health-point system, there is enough flexibility that perfection is not necessary. Nor is perfection desired. I like making mistakes in this rhythm-game that I didn't have the knowledge to avoid. The songs trick and surprise me by skipping beats or quickly adding them in. That design-decision makes this significantly different from other rhythm-games which seem to be more interested in rote memorization of the rhythms and melodies. Planet Quest uses the surprises of variation that I enjoy while listening to music. While listening to music though, it takes visualization or audial imagination to invest in when the next note is going to hit and what pitch it will be. Here, the button-presses and the game's systems provide you feedback on how your investments do. The game requires action and grades the results. So here is a game I can show to people to demonstrate the beginnings of why I like musical theme and variation. As a bonus, the systems require flexibility In order to allow for the player to be surprised by variation. The game assumes that the player can not be perfect. I like how the game prevents the player from thinking that perfection is possible. That's super cool to me.

The makers of Dirt 3 stripped Games For Windows out, added in Steamworks and gave all existing owners all the DLC. This makes me feel good. I would have gotten stuck on the road this winter if it had not been for my experiences with this game. I had given up playing it because of all sorts of Games For Windows Problems. Psyched.

Shadowrun (Xbox360) recognizes teabagging in two ways. There is a resurrection mechanic. Teammates with the ability to resurrect you can cast the spell over your body (if you are killed) and you become a zombie which means that you can play, but if they die, you will eventually bleed out. It's one of the most interesting mechanics I've seen in a team-based shooter. So the act of mutilating the body (which I consider a more general form of tea-bagging) is encouraged; if you destroy the body, they cannot be resurrected. The other way was that there was an achievement that you could only get by tea-bagging someone else with the achievement; it was an STD-joke.

I stopped at the gas-station on the way to work. I said "hi" to my neighbor who happened to be there and then asked the cashier if it would be alright to put on a clown-nose and play a song on my accordion. I explained that I don't want to scare anyone. She crossed her arms and said "It would probably scare someone." I said "ok" and left. She was visibly frightened. Minda like she was shaking after an altercation with someone. I was super polite though, I still feel bad. I don't feel bad for asking, I feel bad that she feels so vulnerable. april Fools! Now I'm setting up scarecrows at work and making coffee. We are going to have a concert today. No one will believe them.

I made this track today and it was cathartic. I really like it, I'll probably put it into a game.

http://forum.starmen.net/forum/Fan/Games/OFF-by-Mortis-Ghost

How long does it take to finish OFF?

I actually played an hour or so of OFF, but I've never been able to get into JRPG's the combat becomes incredibly tiresome for me. I remember enjoying the sound-effect when the cat talked and how it was a great Cheshire Cat kinda character.I also seem to remember an interesting box-puzzle of some sort that I managed to solve.

I'm not sure how this sounds to other people, but this tweet describes an experience I've been having for a while with such accuracy that it made me smile. https://twitter.com/arthousegamesss/status/582767104350273536

For the week of March 30th, 2015 we will be playing: Meepo In Love 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.

SURREALISTa

So I'm currently making a visual novel and the claims that TyranoBuilder can speed up thr process was too much for my $12.50 My initial impressions are that it's pretty great. Just having a somewhat limited drag&drop visual-novel maker that allow you to export HTML5 is useful to me. There aren't any real default art-assets, so they still need to be created or found elsewhere, but look at what I put together today! I would have taken it further if I knew where it could go. https://s3.amazonaws.com/odds-and-ends/TyranoBuild/2015-3-28-lizard_doodle/index.html Edit: Holy shit, the build works on my iphone! There is no music, but I think that is part of the optimisation for the platform. Wow.

On that resource I linked, note that there is a little arrow at the bottom right. It's kinda useless without it. Here are the wki pages on functions and expressions in Twine which is what interests me most after learning the basics of how to link pages.

Notice the music. This is a great point. The most memorable parts of Metroid and Contra for me are the worlds, their atmospheres, monsters and machineries. It's fortunate for me that Metroid and Contra were given the 50 Short Games treatment because I get a sense of what the threat of death provided versus what the worlds contributed themselves. I think I played more Contra than any other Nintendo game, it's burned into my memory. The two things that Controid doesn't include that feel essential now that I see their absence is Controid seems like it is much more of blatant fangame than FF35. While FF35 was contextualized by its commentary, Controid feels more like a study to examine the parts or evoke the author's particular nostalgia. Coincidentally, I've been interested in fangames for the past few weeks. I'm starting to appreciate the way they express the most memorable aspects by only simulating the parts that take the most priority in the author's memory. Here is a great example of how hobbyist games provide something for me that I can't find elsewhere. In commercial releases, the sequel will inevitably add complexity to the visual fidelity, narrative, systems, environments and so on. Commercial relelases always provide older games with the treatment that contemporary techniques take for granted. But with hobbyist fangames, instead of trying to make the brand relevant again, they demonstrate what residue of the original games remain in the author's mind 25 years later. Both are valuable, I'm glad both exist.

Here are some Twine basics http://aliendovecote.com/twine101/#/ As far as the failstate/victory condition goes, I know that I prefer games that do one while my wife prefers games that do the other. Both of us think we are right. I think a good balance (though it takes a little more writting) is to give an interesting epilogue regardless of whether or not the player picks the real murderer. That way people like me don't feel like we wasted our time failing and people like my wife feel like there is a "real" answer. It does!'t hve to be much in order to feel like a reward, but it should be an interesting ending in all cases to make me feel accomplished.

I made another, there is no sound. https://s3.amazonaws.com/odds-and-ends/2015+Wizard+Jam/2015-3-27.html

It looks awesome.

Here is the relevant part, I put it on the boxes. Make sure to tag the player's transform and for some reason the preview-player will only show the Don't Clear if it's in Free Aspect. But it should work fine in the builds. void OnCollisionEnter(Collision other) { if(other.gameObject.tag=="Player") { Camera.main.clearFlags=CameraClearFlags.Nothing; } } ------ I'm not sure what you mean, but I just used the default third-person controller asset. I didn't program anything about him. It's actually a pretty complex controller, I wanted to mess with it, but it didn't seem like something I can really mess with.

So... This is what I ended up with when I went in tonight and tried to make another demo. You can reset the game by pressing "R" https://s3.amazonaws.com/odds-and-ends/2015+Wizard+Jam/2015-3-26.html

I'm having trouble opening the link into a game. I'm not sure why.