clyde

It's nice to see not only that devs are responsive, but that the most unassuming advocacy can allow people to consider new and exciting perspectives, as seen in the comments for Gone Home Alone http://gamejolt.com/games/arcade/gone-home-alone/39248/

The latest patch removed auto-selling for everything but power. It's so significant of a change that it feels like a completely different game. It eradicated my hypothesis of what type of game they are going for. I'm not complaining, it's interesting to see an economic RTS develop over time. The estimated fuel cost seems to have also disappeared when placing mines. I might just not be looking in the right place. I really like this game.

I like thinking about it not only in terms of racial diversity, but also how I like to surround myself with people that enjoy art.

Chris Priestman wrote a piece about Secret Habitat that I like. http://killscreendaily.com/articles/secret-habitat/ The imagery at the beginning of the article and the propositions about frames of context in a procedurally generated world are my favorite parts. I have some things I'd like to say about Secret Habitat too regarding what it says about value, permanence, and preservation that slots in well with Priestman's observations about galleries, frames, and screens. I guess I should just go ahead and do so now. When I spend time in Secret Habitat I start to develop some hypothesis about the algorithmic artists and create imaginary narratives about their experiences. In reality, these artists do have identifiable and somewhat consistent technique and subjects; that part is really there. What I bring to the game is the story I develop for the artist. I was wandering one gallery and the artist named multiple paintings using the word "prison" and there seemed to be a chronology that went from minimal color to monotone. How could I not start to have an opinion about that bot's bio. Sometimes the tapes compliment the tone of the pieces so that the title, the image, and the audio create some rather distinct and amusing apophenia. There's another tendency I notice after about 20 minutes inside the world. First I'm looking at paintings, then I'm examining wall-paper, then I'm noticing the procedurally generated architecture of the buildings. In some of the physical-space museums I've visited, there tends to be an architectural influence that can add a curator's perspective to the piece based on placement and order. A simple example of this would be that a sculpture in the entryway can influence the museum-goer's baseline as they approach and expose themselves to the collection which often has a chronology or pacing determined by their order. This occurs in Secret Habitat as well. An extreme example in the game was that I was walking through a gallery and studied an image for a bit, then continued on a path that spiraled inward to a small, outdoor courtyard with a single window that framed that same image in a different way and with a new tint. I can understand why my observations might seem a bit pretentious and foolishly hallucinatory, largely based on the fact that the art is procedurally generated. But think of it this way, how often do we have an opportunity to compare the experience of walking through a gallery of art contexted by commerce or perceived social canon with the experience of walking through galleries of procedurally generated art that has never existed and will never exist again. This is where Secret Habitat has a lot to say about permanance and value (I'll get back to that). I could speedrun a roll of Secret Habitat and value nothing but the spacial layout of the buildings and interiors. But I could do the same in the National Museum of Art. Actually I think this is the appeal of zombie-games that take place in shopping-malls and movies like The Breakfast Club and Diehard; architecture and space that has a strong, ingrained, context for us is being repurposed. First-person shooter maps and action movies do this all the time by using strongly themed places that have nothing to do with combat as playgrounds for marksmanship, flanking, and cover. My point here is that it's not actually pretentious to walk around procedural galleries, taking your time to examine pieces and make associations, it's just unfamiliar as gameplay. So regarding permanance and value, there are infinite ways to value anything. Some methods are more pragmatic and/or common. Most of the well known methods of valuing art are dependent on both percieved permanance and shared experience. Van Gogh isn't objectively one of the top 100 artists in all of history, but his paintings and narrative is a shared experience for us. What if all of Van Gogh's oeuvre had been procedurally generated in less than a second and destroyed when the executable was closed? The value of examining use of color, brush-stroke, and subject-matter would still be available, but what happens to narrative of the mad genius that cuts off his ear in a fit of passion that we often assume is reflected in those saturated colors and heavy oils? Even if that narrative was procedurally generated along with the paintings, the experience would be neither widely shared or canonical. I'm not saying that the procedurally generated art in Secret Habitat has the visual depth or could have the history of Starry Night; what I'm saying is that Secret Habitat provides us with an interesting comparison. This is not only because the art is procedurally generated and placed in a context representative of the circumstances that we typically experience Art, but also because each roll is impermanent and the only multiplayer support is collecting and publishing asunder screenshots. I think it's really interesting.

For the week of December 8th, 2014 we will be playing: Tales of Terror 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.

You aren't wasting my time. I only have a few websites I like to check during commercial-breaks and during down-time at work. It's nice to have your existential doubts available for my perusal. As far as how to make a big game: I don't know anything about it, but if I was to try to do it I would probably concentrate on making all the components flexible and modular so that it would be easier to add stuff later. That includes trying to keep my scripts as specialized and small as possible. I didn't really know what people were talking about when they said "modular" for a while, but I found this tutorial series and the first were very helpful for me to start to understand what modular is and why it's a desirable characteristic. Even though he is just making a database for his favorite books, this demonstration of how to use properties and constructors in C# has been one of the most helpful things I've learned about how to organize my scripts for games.I actually have a bunch of unfinished projects that I haven't stopped working on. I've noticed that I get better at scripting over time, so I just open old projects when I'm in the mood and do something new in 3 hours that would have taken me a week back when I was last working on it. Sometimes I get freaked out by the enormity of all the potential consequences of the actions I am considering, what usually helps is just focusing on the most immediate next step like "How am I going to get this sprite to appear during this line of text?" instead of how much of a hassle my taxes are going to be when I get rich and how I might have to hire people that I can't trust to deal with all the money I'm going to be raking in from my sick games.

This is a good example of what excites me about games these days. There's nothing especially innovative about it; I feel like I get a pleasant, complete experience in ten minutes; I like knowing that this little simulated space exists; there appears to be some amount of care put into it, but there's also a distinct lack of obsessive labor. I just find these modular experiences so satisfying. http://svblm.itch.io/the-bends

I thought this game was pretty neat. It made me feel similar to listening to college-radio in New Orleans at night circa 2001. There was a lot of trip-hop in rotation and rave-culture was around though I never participated. This brings back memories of the carb-coma after a full day of eating buttery pasta with dried basil and salt applied, between doses of intoxication. http://barnaque.itch.io/resignation

I see Wrath Of The Serpent as being an attempt to create an icon of the positive feedback frustration of getting lost with your significant other. Two characters are controlled which makes me think the game is about a relationship more than an event. The text being pale blue and pale pink genders it for me. The ouroboros alludes to getting more and more annoyed as your partner and yourself blame each other for making it harder to deal with the obstacle at hand (eventually the two of you become the most difficult aspects for each other to deal with) when if both of you just stopped, then the majority of the frustration would have no fuel. Your frustration with the other is fueled by their frustration with you and vice-versa. Using an ancient symbol to frame this circumstance inflates the magnitude of the difficulty by suggesting that this tendency is archetypical (and prone to being explained with an appeal to nature). When I read the line about having pissed off the serpent, I begin to associate getting lost in heavy traffic on a hot day on the way to an urgent event, with Adam and Eve suddenly being outside the gates of Eden and blaming each other while trying to figure out where to go next. Ultimately I find the depiction hopeful since this is not a game about your partner being a fuck-up; instead it's presented as the frustrating feedback-loop that couples are inevitably going to encounter at some point in their relationship. These occasions are notoriously difficult to see objectively and rationally. It's always kinda depressing to see relationships between individuals that can only see the situation emotionally and from their individual perspective because they will never manage to escape the cycle of spite. The perspective displayed here is evidence of the objectivity necessary to escape the cycle; we are looking at it rather than from it.

16/66 of Jord Farell's project is interesting to me. http://t.co/yzPm02artZ

That sucks.

I'm such an idiot. I'm going through K-drama withdrawl at work so I decided to find some fanfic of the show I'm currently obsessed with. A substitute, so that I could be in that world until I have a television available. How did I rationalize any improbablity that spoilers would be in the first few sentences. Back to drugery til I get home for episode 13 of Spy Myung Wol. And probably episode 14. Maybe episode 15 too.

StrangeThink's procedural art-gallery generator is out. It's kinda amazing. Secret Habitat

I wanted to make an HTML5 game, thinking that the Unity-plugin requirement might be too large of a barrier for friends and family who are not computer-savy. That led me to try the demo of ClickTeam Fusion 2.5 which is a visual scripting language game thing. I made it through the first tutorial, but it wasn't my thing because I've become accustomed to text-scripting. Still, there were some things I appreciated about ClickTeam Fusion 2.5 (or atleast the Breakout-clone tutorial). I decided that I need to start managing a permanent library of sounds and sprites for use in multiple games. I also saw great benefits in the my expected scope when working in that engine. Still, I would rather work in Unity, so I tried to design a top-down, collision-based template for use in games similar to those in 50 Short Games. I got the basics of that operational. Then it came to the text-display system and I was like "Why not just use my own voice work instead?" I wanted it to be flexible though, so I decided that I would chop up .wav files by their individual words so that I could just reuse them (remember how I'm trying to start and maintain a library of sounds?). I thought I should record everything around 110 hrtz so that I could manipulate pitches consistently, but now I think that is probably not a good idea. Anyway, I now have a top-down game template and a spoken-word component as a prefab that I can just put on any object with a trigger-collider. Then I can just drag and drop individual .wav files of words into the spoken-word component's public array in the inspector. This sounds simple, but there is something surreal about dragging words that haven't been heard together onto a gameObject and then hearing them together for the first time. My template feels pretty much complete so that now I can actually start to make something intentional, but I had to share the result because it is oddly endearing and strangely cute. https://db.tt/ViXV9XWn If anyone would find this template fun to play with, I'll put up the project file. https://db.tt/gSU7q6f2

I hate how Facebook defaults to show me what it thinks I want to see and hides tons of stuff. How arrogant can a social-media app get?

This article does a pretty good job of describing the game. Underground-nukes lower a mine's output though, I don't think it destroys buildings; dynamite does that. http://www.wargamespace.com/2014/11/28/greenmail-on-the-red-planet/

For the week of December 1st, 2014 we will be playing: Wrath Of The Serpent 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'm in the Appalachias too and I'm not excited about them releasing the Fracken.

So I've been playing every once in a while without tactical-mode. It's just not worthwhile for me. I really enjoy the pacing of the Dragon Age games when combat is slow and tactical; every battle is challenging, I pull off some interesting combos when the opportunities present themselves, I get a slightly better piece of armor and a bit of talking, repeat. But without tactical-mode the combat is over so quickly that I don't enjoy the loot or the banter because I just put new stuff on my peeps 1 minute ago and the banter doesn't have as much glue to it when I don't spend time telling the team how to work together. If they don't patch the 360 version to fix the tactical-mode then I will feel cheated regardless of whether or not I want to. Having to wait a few weeks after release is fine, but kinda rude.

I try to always congratulate 100+ scores in Attrition regardless of which team they are on.

That interpretation works for me.

Thanks Hermie. That made me feel better.

For those of you having super hard times, I'm glad your sharing and I would comment if I had any clever ideas on how to make it better, but I don't. Sometimes even drawing dinosaurs doesn't make me happy. What the fuck do you do when that is the case, I don't fuckin know. It usually works though. Maybe try it? See? I want y'all to feel better but I have no idea how to make that happen so I'm just throwing shit out there. I just read that excellent Austin Walker lecture about trauma. http://clockworkworlds.com/post/103676516984/a-short-lecture-on-trauma-the-stories-we-tell Maybe trying to come up with ways to deal with this stuff is that little bit of control, the story-telling, that he is talking about in it.

Sorry if this sounds patronizing, but remember to absorb these experiences because once you are cozy, it's hard to remember why other people are having such a hard time; that's a really important thing to remember when you are cozy.

My current plan to is write a bunch of scripts that will look for different types of trigger-events in the physical interactions of the gameObjects (things like collisions with each other and collisions with other areas, maybe speed from a hit). I'll also continue to write get/set methods for most of the interesting values. Basically I'm going to try and make it easy to mix and match them until I see combinations that are either super fun or intuitive.