miffy495

That may be the best possible summary of yesterday. We did it in the end though!

Two more up today. Read out some of the feedback to the kids. They're super happy about it and proud of themselves. Thanks, thumbs!

Hahaha. That's 10 year olds. I'll pass on the feedback that I get. The kids were pretty amazed when I told them I'd put a link to their work on a forum that honest-to-god GAME DEVELOPERS look at.

UPDATE: Students are nearly done with their first project games. I now have five examples up on the site, a mix of finished (or an 11 year old has said "I'm done!" without actually hitting all the assignment requirements but can't be convinced otherwise) and works-in-progress. Some have been getting more into the writing part than others. It's turning out to be a mix of genuine grade school interactive fiction and some animal trivia games from kids who weren't feeling as creative. Still, they loved the project and I'm now introducing TWINE around the school to other teachers who've had these kids run up to them saying "TRY MY VIDEO GAME!" and want to know what the hell this is. Very worthwhile project, and I'll be using TWINE as a way to show ideas with future classes for damn sure. This was a smash hit with the kids, got me better writing samples than any of the actual writing assignments they've had in language arts, and allowed me to explore concepts with them like second-person writing, which they'll be able to take with them to a bunch of future classes. IF as a learning tool is rad as hell. Results from the current project will be going up here as I get assignments in from the kids. There are five right now, and the rest should be trickling in over the course of the week. Thanks for the advice on this one, Thumbs!

I really liked Prime 2 when I played it for the first time ever about two months ago. It was fantastic, and while the ammo thing was annoying I never found it got in the way THAT much. If you blow up a box with light ammo, it will usually spit out dark, and vice-versa. Units will refill either 5 or 10 shots, and it seems sensitive to how much ammo you have remaining (if you're low, it'll give you more 10s). Beautiful design, amazing bosses. Just a wonderful game. I'm planning on kicking off summer break this year with Corruption. Those are some GAMES, man.

Ok, I thought I'd gone soft or something, but YES. I was wondering why Bayonetta was suddenly kicking my ass all over the place when I never had any trouble with it on 360...

Actually, my experience has been uncommonly smooth. I got on the sub list straight out of school, had two maternity leave temp contracts that lasted for all but a week of my first year, and got on a probationary contract before the end of my second September. Most of my friends from university are still subbing, if they got work at all. I have been very lucky in the opportunities I've had considering I'm only a second year teacher.Moddy, that shit is awful. I second Ben's recommendation.

I did this last week. I didn't find branding the war chiefs hard at all, but I had been obsessively branding every captain to that point. When I got to that, I had everyone BUT the Chiefs branded, so I just killed then and got dudes I already "owned" promoted. Agreed that the story kind of ends on a wet cart though. I just chalked it up to my not liking Tolkien to begin with.

James, that was a world class troll today. One of the greats. This dude sounds like something Tracy would make on 30 Rock. Fantastic work.

Dunno, the system is definitely heavily weighted towards seniority here though. There are 3 stages of teaching in Alberta: temp, probationary, and then permanent. If you're a temp, you're covering maternity leaves and such for people and working as a substitute when you're not on contract. You still can't have another job though, since you're on call from 6am to 6pm every weekday for sub work. As probationary, you get put on a "must place" list, which means that you have a job no matter what, but it is not necessarily going to be consistent in any way. This year I progressed from temp to probationary, and the way it works for me now is that my current class (grade 5) is mine for the year, but over the summer a teacher with a permanent contract could decide that they'd rather teach my class than whatever they're doing. At that point, I get placed on a shuffle list and am guaranteed some job by the time the fall rolls around but it could be literally anything from kindergarten to twelfth grade, whatever comes available first. As such, I'm guaranteed a job in the fall no matter what, and they all pay the same (your pay scales as a teacher based on how long you've been doing it and your level of university education, not what subject or grade you teach), but it won't necessarily be the same grade or even the same school I'm at now. Hell, it could be in a completely different quadrant of the city. Once I'm permanent (minimum two years of probationary work to qualify), I'm secure unless and until either I decide to switch careers/grades/fields/schools or I turn out to be grossly incompetent. Hopefully that latter one never happens.

Afternoon is good, and for us Canadians, Monday is Victoria Day so it's a long weekend and I'll be able to make that game as well. Good times!

Yeah, for years I was paying about half of what I make to rent. Then I got the job I had been going to school for, and that fraction changed to about 1/7th of what I make. I went nuts, bought two guitars and a bass, and just tonight am preparing to move into a much nicer place with my girlfriend of 8 years tomorrow. ...which brings me to why I'm in the life thread right now. I got some job stability! Being a beginning teacher is tough, as at the drop of a hat someone with more seniority can get you punted from your current classroom and back to the substitute roster. I seem to have a job guaranteed for next year though, things are stabilizing financially, and on the 10th of June, my girlfriend of 8 years has her graduation ceremony for university. As a result, she's going to work full time and can afford to move out of her parents' house. We're moving in together, I'm going to have cats again for the first time since years ago when I lived with my own parents, and we managed to find an apartment that is bloody beautiful for an amount that's about 40% of what I make on my own, and is totally manageable with us doing a 66%/33% split. As the icing on the cake, I hooked up a buddy who was looking for a place with the landlady I've had for the last 4 years and he'll be taking over the apartment I'm leaving. This means I don't even need to leave a forwarding address because anything that doesn't make it to my new address will be going to one of my best friends. He also has a vested interest in helping me move, because we're getting my stuff out and his in. This is a pretty fantastic month, though it is super high stress.

So this weekend I'm moving, but I have a couple of weeks to do the move over. I'm putting my bed, dresser, TV, consoles, bookshelves, etc. in the new house tomorrow, but since internet won't be at the new place for a while, I'm leaving my computer here for GTA on Sunday/Monday. When will games be happening?

So the kids are nowhere near done, but I have one boy who has used his week to get a pretty decent rough copy done. It is still riddled with errors, some spelling and some factual, but those curious to see what a 10 year old does with a week of TWINE, I put up his work in progress at gradeschoolif.weebly.com/nikolai.html. EDIT: Sorry, made that first post from my phone and couldn't work out the linking from the mobile version. Now you can actually click on a thing!

The map gets revealed as you capture the forts. All of the forts become available in Chapter 6, so I captured them all, opened up the map, and then went hunting. I also got all of the feathers and memory chunk things in AC3. I am the worst.

While I applaud you for taking a principled stand, I've been in situations before where I've had to do something I disagree with in order to afford to eat. I wouldn't begrudge you if you went the other way. In the end, you're the only one who knows your situation well enough to know if you can afford to stick to your principles. At the end of the day, a job is a job. If you can afford to not do it and still get by, then you should forgo things that you disagree with. We don't live in a world where that's always possible though, and everyone has their own line. Personally, "doing a contract job that may also help someone spread a shitty message" is not low enough on the morality scale to rule it out completely. There certainly are jobs that I'd say never really have an excuse (usually those that actively exploit people), but that isn't one of them. It's distasteful, definitely, but not so much so as to be unjustifiable by the "I really needed the money" line.

I thought this was a screenshot from Just Cause for a second. Then I got sad.

I have completed 100% of the side content in Black Flag and am about to start chapter 7 of the story. I have a sickness with these games. Because of the way I play them, I rarely finish them before the next is out. I'll probably finish Unity around the time the successor to Syndicate comes out, at the speed I'm going.

Yeah, GTA Online could be SO FUCKING AMAZING if only it weren't broken. I love what they've done with the actual game. It's like a complete other GTA game that also lets me do stupid shit with others. And then matchmaking, stability, and pretty much anything UI related makes me want to rip my hair out. WHY, Rockstar? Why do you do this?

I definitely will. Some of them were already working on it last night at home, so they came in to school today wanting to show me what they'd started. Like 4 of them left the classroom yesterday with "twinery.org" written on their palms in sharpie. When I told them that I'd linked to it already on the school's teacher blog, the response was all along the lines of "FINDING THAT LINK WILL TAKE AWAY FROM TIME THAT I COULD USE TO BE CREATING!", so I have high hopes for this project.

Anne, Becky, and Charlene look at her butt. By inductive reasoning, they conclude that she must be dating a rap guy.

Works like a charm! The kids are super excited and we put together a really quick example on the smart board today so that they could get a feel for it. We wrote the paragraphs together and I had kids come up to my laptop plugged into the board to write the links between pages themselves. They loved it and are totally ready to get into writing their own. If you're interested in seeing what ten year olds will do with TWINE, I hastily put together the site gradeschoolif.weebly.com (why yes, I am an artistically challenged grade school teacher and not a web designer, why do you ask?) for us to put our work up on as we finish. Right now, it's just the demo that we were building in class today, but they're stoked as hell to get writing. Cool stuff!

It's supposed to come out "before Zelda". That was originally before the end of the year. Now, who knows?

Ok, I created a quick test file on my home computer and uploaded the published html file to a shared drive folder (my school has google accounts for all students, so if we need cloud storage they already know to just upload stuff). When I get in to work tomorrow I'll download it to my work computer and see if I can keep it going. Thanks for the help!

I really want to be interested in Splatoon, but I think it comes down to the quality of the single player aspect for me. I just don't play that many online games, and I can't see a Nintendo console sustaining the community it needs. Keeping an eye on it still though.