TopFish

Hi, I'm the Mark that wrote in about Racter - I'm sorry to say the the 'me' in the first poem was a typo on my part, but I'm glad you enjoyed my dumb mistake. Also, I was excited to hear about the Racter/Eliza conversation, I had no idea anyone had ever made them talk to each other. It's led me to this page which contains it, and a variety of other good dialogues, including the famous Eliza/Parry conversation: https://web.stanford.edu/group/SHR/4-2/text/dialogues.html

I'm really excited to see what happens with the new podcast. The moments that you guys go off-topic have always been some of the best, so the idea having a format that makes it easier for you all to talk about what you want to sounds great. I love the podcast for the way that you manage to combine some really interesting and mature discussion with a joyful and unabashed enthusiasm for glorious dumb shit. Over the years, you've introduced me to films and authors I might not have otherwise considered, as well as some great weird stuff - like the recent talk about Neil Cicierega's albums. It's a shame to hear about the declining readership, but if you're considering looking for other ways to fund the podcast besides advertising, then I'd be very happy to send a little money your way. I'm afraid I've always been reluctant to order stuff from the store - as great as it looks - because by the time transatlantic shipping is added on, $40+ for a T-shirt gets difficult for me to justify to myself. So yeah, I'd love to have a way to pay you guys back for all the entertainment you've given me over the last however-many years it's been. Anyway, I'll go wherever the Robot News goes.

Argh, I've made a lot of progress today, but nowhere near as much as I hoped I would. Most of my time has been squashing bugs, but I've also improved the handling and made the road route randomly generated. Nonetheless, it frankly isn't really a game. There's no challenge, and no proper ending - it just abruptly stops. However, I don't want to admit defeat on this, so it's up on itch.io and you can 'play' it: https://topfish.itch.io/yanis-last-move Hopefully I might flesh it out over the next couple of days. I know this is cheating, but I feel the need to do this for the sake of my own sanity.

Well, I've been extremely quiet for a while. I've made a very small amount of progress this week, but nothing gif-worthy. Still, I'm determined to submit something, so I'm going to try to get as much done tomorrow as possibly can, and perhaps I'll then cheat a little an fix things up a bit after the deadline.

Worked fine for me on Ubuntu 16.04! Also, this game has a really great look to it, I love the photo-collage faces.

Still no Yanis, but there is a really crappy looking motorbike now. I've also got the parallax backgrounds working, although the images I'm using don't wrap neatly, as you can see in the gif above. I've also restricted the road and the verges to the same 16-colour palette I was using before. I've done this by creating little 16x16 dithered pngs and using those to fill the polygons, and I'm fairly pleased with the result. I've also switched to using the Floyd-Steinberg dithering algorithm, which I really like. It results in slightly less obviously patterned images, and does a better job of preserving the overall intensity than the previous method I was using, which brightened the images considerably. At some point, I'm going to come back to the motorbike sprite and make it less shit. I guess I'll also have to try to draw Mr Varoufakis as well, so I'm going to put this off for as long as possible since I really can't draw.

oh man those sausage faces are great

Still no Yanis sprite, but there's a red box you can control instead. I've decided to deal with the visual glitches by, um, not doing, so I'm just going to make the game move fast enough that the problems are less noticeable. I'm pretty happy with how zippy it feels, but I'm still tempted to crank up the maximum speed a little further. I've also been thinking about what sort of look I'm trying to go for. I seem to have bit of a retro thing going on, so I'm going to try to stick with it by using pixel-y graphics and a limited palette. One of the next things on my list is to create a background image with a few parallax-scrolling layers, so I've written a little python script to quantize an image into a small set of colours, with some dithering. Here's a first attempt, using the 16-colour palette from PICO-8: [EDIT: If this looks crappy, please enlarge the image. The dithering doesn't seem to play nicely with being scaled down] I quite like the look of this, but I think that 16 colours is a little too restrictive, so what I'm going to try next is down-sampling the image into a smaller resolution to make it more pixel-y, but using a slightly bigger palette. I might also try blurring the image a little beforehand, to see if that helps the look of the dithering. Naturally, I'm hoping to get a lot done this weekend - how much I manage in the next two days will pretty much determine whether I finish this thing on time or not, although hopefully I should have a little more time to work in the evenings next week. Top of the list at the moment are other cars, sprites, and the background. I'd also love to make the route more visually varied - forests, tunnels, cities etc, but this is going to be a considerable amount of work, and less immediately important. I'm also hoping to write some music - I've been noodling around with Bosca Ceoil, and I think I've got the hang of it. My original plan was to write a high-tempo chiptune theme that used little bits of the melody from the Greek national anthem, but Hymn to Liberty is not exactly high-tempo so I think it'll end up either unnoticeable or a mess. Instead, my plan now is to use hints of Common People by Pulp, a song which as you may know is believed to be about Jarvis Cocker's encounter with the woman who would go on to be Varoufakis' wife.

That camera behaviour looks like it is the platonic ideal of top-down camera behaviours. I'd love to see how it looks from the player's perspective.

So, four days in and I've been rather quiet. Unfortunately, time, alcohol and javascript have conspired against me. I have decided to code this thing using the javascript of the future (ES6 and all that). I've been wanting to get to grips with this stuff for a while, mostly because I like the idea of being able to write classes in a way that seems like it might have been designed for use be something at least approximating a normal sane human being. This has also meant having to get used to using npm, since I now need to build my code using babel and browserify. I can't say I'm particularly keen on the notion of having build javascript, but I'm told this is the future so I guess I'd better just get used to it. Anyway, this is all a very long-winded way of making excuses for the fact that I haven't done much. I have made a little progress however, and I've got a video to prove it: As you can see, there's not much here at the moment, I don't even have a sprite for the motorbike yet. Still, the fundamental system for rendering the road is there, even if the graphics are a little glitchty. Writing this was initially a little mind-bending - the coordinate system works in a rather odd way. The z-axis runs along the centre of the road, and the x-axis runs left-to-right. Curves in the road are created by essentially distorting the z-axis. However, now that I've got to grips with it, I can see how this is going to make a lot of things easier - for example, other cars will only need to move along the z-axis and they will 'steer' around corners automatically as their position will get distorted along with the shape of the road. That was a pretty terrible explanation, so if anyone's interested I'd encourage you to look at the links in the first post of this thread, which explain it a lot better than I can.

I love everything about this. Good luck!

Thanks! Naturally, I'm a little disappointed that the 'Hat Baron' diversifier didn't make the final list, since it'd be such a great fit. Nonetheless, if I have time, of course I would love to add some sort of pointlessly facile millinery-based mechanics in order to better honour the full arc of Varoufakis' slightly surreal career.

I don't think I entirely understand what this is, but I'm definitely looking forward to finding out.

Yanis' Last Move: Some Kind of Drifter It is June 2015, the Greek financial crisis has reached its peak. You are Yanis Varoufakis, finance minister and former Valve employee. You have tried to persuade the Troika of your Keynesian anti-austerity principles, but Wolfgang Schraube and the ECB are deaf to your arguments and refuse to allow you to enact your policies. There's only one option left to you - you don your helmet and your leather jacket, climb atop your iconic motorcycle. Maybe you can still save Syriza, the Greek economy, and the Eurozone - but you're going to have to reach the European Commission before Schraube does! This is it, you think to yourself as you turn the ignition and hear the engine purr into life. Once last chance, one last move to be played... one last ride. About Everybody knows that any game worth its salt needs at least one colon-subtitle, and so I've decided to be greedy and choose two episode titles that I can slam inelegantly together. I would describe Yanis' Last Move as 'a cheerily irreverent alt-history motorcycle racing game', because saying those words makes me happy. I tried to do something for Winter Wizard last year, but didn't really get very far with it. So, I figure I'll try something a little less ambitious, and have another crack at it. This will probably be an unmitigated failure too, but there's only one way to find out. The Plan YLM: SKOD will have outrun-style 2D graphics, and (if I can manage it) wildly physically-inaccurate drifty handling. There's quite a lot of good stuff about on this 'ere internet about making pseudo-3D racing games like this, such as this and particularly this, but I'm not going to simply copy and adapt that code, partly because there's enough I would need to change that it'll probably be easier to write my own using the links above as a guideline, but mostly because I'd rather have the exercise of doing it myself. I don't want to commit to too many diversifiers just yet, apart from obviously 'mainstream thumbs'. However, time and progress permitting, I have a few ideas that I would like to incorporate. We'll see how it goes.

Sorry for the lack of updates this last couple of days. I had been hoping to try to post something roughly daily, but things at work have been chaotic today and yesterday. I've come up with methods to solve some of the mesh issues I'm having, but I haven't had time to implement them. Even then, I really need to press on with other parts of the code, so I think a better mesh algorithm is something I'll do if I have time towards the end of the jam. Fingers crossed for getting something done tomorrow, but I've been saying that pretty much every day so far. Thanks again for all the nice things you're saying. In spite of these set-backs, I'm still optimistic about getting this done. EDIT: A bit more progress today, but there's nothing exciting to show for it - mostly camera control stuff, such as zooming to a country when you click on it.