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722 - Star Wars: Squadrons

Mon, 07 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Best Games - Star Wars: Squadrons

If a VR experience can make you ill, maybe more of that experience can set you right again.

At least that was the hypothesis I was testing when I kept playing Star Wars: Squadrons well past the point where I was alternating hot and cold sweats, dry mouth, and motion induced dizziness. Piloting an X-Wing or Tie Fighter, even in smooth and languid dogfights turned my stomach. At first.

I pushed past the discomfort, because the game was so engaging and compelling. There are plenty of space combat games, even some Star Wars ones, but Squadrons was the first game that made me feel like I was actually in an X-Wing.

I did tap out pretty quickly that first time, but the feeling of sitting in a Tie Interceptor’s ball cockpit or looking down the nose of a Y-Wing was just too cool. Motion sick or not, that was a feeling I had to come back to.

So I did. Over and over again. I finished the campaign, and even played a few online matches. By the time I was nearing the end of the game’s main story, I was deliberately pulling off intense turns and rolls through floating wreckage. I was scraping the deck of massive Star Destroyers. I would look for places to weave in and around asteroids and capital ships, flipping over so I could get the canopy of my ship uncomfortably close to disaster.

Other than feeling excited and a little light headed, I never felt sick again. I pushed past it.

If the game were even half as good as it is, I doubt that I would have risked the motion sickness. There have been a small number of games and experiences in VR that would make me feel ill, and I would usually drop them pretty quickly. There was just no reason to make myself feel bad.

Star Wars Squadrons feels that good to play. It is so much fun that I turned the motion sickness knob until I broke it off.

I suppose you can also play it on a screen, but why would you want to do that. If you can feel like you sitting in one of the Star Wars fighters, why wouldn’t you?

Star Wars: Squadrons, at least in VR, is certainly one of the Best Games.

721

Mon, 31 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

About a week ago I rearranged my whole desk. It’s sort of funny how set you can get, working in a certain way, with things in a certain place. It’s sometimes difficult to imagine that there might be a better way until you move a few things around.

Now I have a new keyboard, the position of my drawing tablet doesn’t strain my shoulder, and my monitors are all at a very neutral height. I even have more desk space, which is interesting since I have all the same stuff on my desk. Maybe even more.

I don’t think that my set up is ergonomically perfect or anything. I probably still have a ways to go before I have everything set up for every situation, but this is the place I make art, code, write, and play games. Having the space be more comfortable will always be a priority.

But that leads me to questions. What would be better? What do I already have that I’m not using well? What could I assemble or move or get that would make the space better? I don’t really know, but now that my desk is so much better than it was, I find myself asking these questions a lot more often.

My new keyboard is really nice.

720

Mon, 24 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

After writing a few new stories, I have to edit them. This is easily the hardest part of writing. Coming up with ideas is easy. There are nearly infinite ideas that other people haven’t worked on, nearly infinite ways to remix the ones that they have, and nearly infinite ways to tell a story based on these ideas. So, yeah, ideas are easy.

Writing a first line is pretty easy. Start somewhere, come up with an opening line that you think would make a reader want to continue reading, and then write it down. Easy.

Writing a last line is pretty easy. Think of something that summarizes your thoughts and feelings on the story and write that down.

Now write all the stuff that goes between that first line and the last one.

All of this writing stuff is easy.

Now, make it not terrible. That’s editing and it’s horrifically difficult. Does this word go here, or here? Does this feeling come across in this paragraph? If someone who isn’t me read it, would they think that same feeling came across in that paragraph? Do we need two sentences or thirty seven? Is all of this actually terrible and am I a terrible writer?

If you ever wanted to ask yourself any or all of those questions, maybe give editing a story a shot.

Anyway, enough of this diversion. Back to editing.

719

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

It’s no secret that I am into a lot of old games. I’m also into a lot of new games, so it’s not like I think old games a somehow inherently better. Some of my favorite experiences playing games were relatively recent. Nostalgia is a trap that can make you believe the things you once loved are better than anything new. Taken to an extreme, it can make you think that the best times are in the past and we would all be better off rolling back the clock. But that’s more of a political conversation than one about games.

What if you don’t have any nostalgia for a thing from the past but nonetheless you find yourself fascinated with it? What do you call that? I don’t know.

Recently, I have been checking out a lot of games that came out on the MSX, a uniquely Japanese computer.

While I am sure that people in Canada got their hands on an MSX machine when they were a going concern, I certainly wasn’t aware of the thing. Maybe I saw it in some game magazine or other, or I saw a game with MSX compatibility on it’s packaging, but none of that made much of an impression.

Now, through emulation, you can play any number of games for the MSX. Oddly enough, not knowing Japanese isn’t really much of a hurdle for most of them either. They either have some info or instructions in English, or they are so simple that it’s pretty easy to get into them.

I think what I am liking about messing around with MSX games is that they are familiar, we did after all have a lot of access to Japanese made games in the west, but because they were made with a different market in mind, they are also subtly different.

So it’s not nostalgia, it’s novelty, but novelty from the past. Like an alternate history to the games I played growing up. This is some other persons nostalgia. Out there somewhere in Japan there is another guy about my age, with older kids and sore knees, and he is getting into playing old North American and British dos games. Or Commodore 64 games. Or Atari 8bit computer games. He has no nostalgia for them, but he finds the idea of exploring the joys of someone else’s childhood fascinating. It makes his world smaller.

I haven’t found any wild surprises, or discovered any games that completely blew me away, but the search is enjoyable, so I think I will keep dabbling with these old computers. Maybe I will play some games made for the FM Towns Marty next. That might be fun.

718 - Kung-Fu Master

Mon, 10 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

What would you do if you were suddenly attacked by several unknown guys?

Since I played Kung-Fu Master, I know what Thomas, the kung-fu master would do. He would punch and kick his way through a lot of unknown guys. Way more than several. It’s a full regiment of unknown guys. Way more guys than would ever fit in the Devil’s Temple.

A KUNG-FU MASTER, THOMAS AND

SILVIA WERE SUDDENLY ATTACKED

BY SEVERAL UNKNOWN GUYS.

Now that I read that again, maybe Thomas isn't the kung-fu master. It might be that the kung-fu master is a completely different person in that list. Or even more interesting, Thomas and Sylvia might, collectively, be a singular kung-fu master. A sort of Dragon Ball fusion dance situation.

No. It’s just awkwardly written. Thomas is the master of kung-fu.

Thomas is also Jackie Chan.

Well that was the plan, anyway.

Kung-Fu Master (also titled Spartan X in Japan) was intended as an adaptation of the 1984 Sammo Hung/Jackie Chan action comedy Wheels on Meals (Food Truck in Chinese) (also titled Spartan X in Japan).

At some point during development the game deviated pretty wildly from the movie. For games, that’s a good thing.

As Thomas, you march either left or right punching and kicking every unknown guy that comes close. Most of the guys will try to grab hold of you in some sort of rugby scrum until you get so tired you fall off the world. A few of them will throw knives at you. A few of the guys are actually snakes that leap out of baskets. And then you get to the bosses.

There is a guy (unknown, it has to be assumed) who hits you with a stick, a guy who throws a boomerang, a big guy, a wizard (maybe?), and another kung-fu master named X. X, it seems, is the one known guy.

All of this might seem like standard fare. Of course, in 1984, it wasn’t. The one-two shot of Kung-Fu Master and Karateka kicked off the long history of characters walking in one direction while punching and kicking. The Beat-em-up or belt scroller starts here. And it already has all the features in place.

Health bars, different high and low punches and kicks, end of level bosses. The only thing Kung-Fu Master is really missing is the ability to block. You do have to dodge knives though, so that’s something. Spartan X is even cited as one of the inspirations for Super Mario Bros. continuous scrolling.

A Jackie Chan licensed game spin off that really didn’t happen and a blue sky attitude made for one of the longest lasting genres in video games. Not only that, but Kung-Fu Master is still a fun game to play.

Kung-Fu Master is simply one of the Best Games.

717

Mon, 03 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

It’s a holiday for us here today. That just means I’m going to work on some writing and maybe a bit of game dev, but I won’t do a bunch of writing here.

716

Mon, 27 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Going through the process of constructively critiquing a lot of work, I think I have boiled my approach down to one simple rule.

Now, there are as many ways to critique as there are people, but if you actually want to be helpful to someone’s creative process I think the ways to do that are shockingly few. Pointing out mistakes or flaws isn’t it. Being whatever you think of as brutally honest isn’t it. Stroking their ego isn’t it.

All you really have to do is imagine that no matter what part of their work or step in their process you are focusing on, that they have thought more about it than you have.

And that would be true. No matter how much experience you have, no matter how long you have been doing it, that particular piece of work you are critiquing, the person who created it has thought more about it than you have. They have reasons for doing what they did and they have a depth of understanding of their work that you could never begin to imagine.

That doesn’t mean that their work is flawless or it couldn’t be helped by another set of eyes and another point of view. But if you see some mistake, there is a real good chance that it was a decision made intentionally. Even if it wasn’t, you should approach it as if it was.

That will instantly change how you approach critique. It isn’t about what you would do with that same medium. It’s what they did, and all the choices that they did or did not make.

Quite often, you might find that they had already considered your brilliant advice, but went down another path for reasons that you aren’t aware of.

Assume that they are the experts on their own work. Tell them what parts connected with you and what parts didn’t. Don’t bother telling them how to fix it, because you will be wrong and they will have likely already thought about that course of action and abandoned it.

But pointing out what did or did not connect with you will help them tailor their revisions to make sure that their intentions are clear and come across in their work. Approaches that were too subtle can be bolstered, often in ways that are much simpler than you would ever come up with. Because, again, they have thought more about this than you have.

That’s my only real approach now. Imagine that whatever I might say in a critique, they have already thought of, so I am just here to support or focus their own internal arguments.

Learning to take criticism in the same way is an ongoing learning process.

715

Mon, 20 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Yep. Still writing stories this week. In fact, I was in the middle of writing one when I left to write this post and I really should be getting back to it.

My last story was fine, I guess. I liked the premise and the some of the execution, but it needed to be much longer than it was and some character interactions need to be strengthened quite a lot. I will sit on it for a few weeks before going back to it and slotting it into my edit list somewhere. There are definitely several stories ahead of it in the list, but I will get to it eventually.

I need to get back to the story I was working on though. This one might end up being a little too short.

714

Mon, 13 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

For the next few weeks I will be working on a small handful of stories. And punching up some others to get them ready to submit. And I will be submitting the ones that are already punched up and waiting. And I will be resubmitting the ones that have already been rejected at least once. And I will be looking for new places to submit stories. And I will be working on game art and code for my own game projects. And I will be creating graphics for other game projects.

So pretty much just like any other few weeks then.

In short through, I will probably write a little less here over the next few weeks, since I will be spending my writing brain power working on stories.

713

Mon, 06 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Over the next few weeks I will be writing some more short stories for a contest. I will likely have some things to jot down here about writing.

So right now I am going to do something a little different. I’m going to tell you about the best joke I have ever seen.

Very early in I think my second or third year of university, I was walking past the archeology department building. I was probably on my way over to the drama department, or going To one of my very scattered labs. In any case I happened upon the best joke I have ever seen.

Someone had gotten hold of some tempera paint or chalk, I don’t remember which, and sketched out a large, say 6 or 8 foot long penis.

The drawing was crude and not very detailed, but that wasn’t the funny part. I mean, anybody can draw a dick. Sometimes that’s funny, but not usually.

The joke was the accompanying text. Under the giant dick, in full view of the the archeology building and written so that you could read through the windows, were the words “Dig this bone”

It is a joke that I think about a lot. It took into account, location, audience, breaking of expectations, and it was neither mean nor did it make the audience the butt of the joke. It was temporary paint, so it wasn’t even vandalism. It was just a precisely targeted and funny joke. The dick wasn’t even realistic enough to be offensive. It was just the most dumb, and the most clever joke I think I have ever seen.

I don’t know that I will ever write anything as good as that.

712

Mon, 29 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I have an absolutely enormous collection of old games. Literally thousands of them. While I do play a lot of newer games, I also dip into this collection on a near daily basis. It would be easy to write this off as nostalgia, but I don’t think that old games are better than newer ones, or that game development peaked sometime back when I was younger. It’s more that I think a good game is a good game, no matter when it was made. And sometimes a game that isn’t very good might have some aspect to it that is worth investigating. I play with old games, because I play games. All of them.

There is a trend that I am noticing in my explorations. Sometimes it can look like the game industry is dying, but that’s only because it is moving from one place to another, from one style to another, from one type of development to another. If your eyes are still on the old venues, yes, it will very much look like the game industry is dying. It never is.

I was playing some older arcade games and when you start to leave the 1990s and enter the 2000s you can see the ideas dry up. The arcade games become copies of copies of older games. It looks very much like the game industry is dying.

In the early 2000s game consoles went online and the people that played games didn’t frequent arcades anymore. They moved. They went home. They took the games with them. Gaming wasn’t dying, it changed.

One of the most expensive games ever made will release soon. It will probably do incredibly well. We probably will never see a game development that expensive any time soon. The level of production that can create a GTA6 just won’t happen again. When no game comes along to top it, that will look like this is the last gasp of a dying industry. It won’t be.

Games and game development is in the process of moving. It will move to the small studio creating something unique and new. It will move to individual developers creating experiences that are cherished by a smaller group of fans. They will be funded through direct sales, donations, and patrons. The creators of these games will be in direct communication with their audience in a way that a massive production never can.

Many of the massive companies making games today will fail and fold. This will appear to everyone still looking at where the industry used to be as an industry in decline. A death. It won’t be. People play. It’s what we do.

Someone right now is building a new collection. This collection includes works from creators that interact with their audience through twitch streams and regular small game releases. Those experiences aren’t peripheral to the games. They are integral to how this audience will play.

The game industry ten years, twenty years, from now will look different, but it isn’t going away. People play games. Old, new, big, small, expensively produced, made in a bedroom and given away for free. All of them. People play games, because games are fun. People make games for the same reason, and they always will.

711

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I solved some development problems today.

That isn’t really noteworthy. Making any part of a game is solving an unending torrent of problems. Nothing more, nothing less.

Making games, like any sort of creative work, never really has any procedural aspect. A point where you are going through the motions. You solve one problem, then another, then another. Maybe you make a new problem when you solved that third one, so you add that to the list and solve it as well.

I have about 7000 problems left on this tiny side project, but today I solved some of them.

And that’s pretty good.

710

Mon, 15 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

It ain’t perfect. It’s not even that much fun. But it works.

709 - Wave Race 64

Mon, 08 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Best Games - Wave Race 64

Some games just feel right.

There isn’t really much to Wave Race 64, when you get right down to it. The big, beautiful, 3D sequel to a simple Gameboy jet ski racing title. There aren’t really that many tracks. There are only a few riders and they aren’t very different from one another. There are stunt and time trial modes. You can play split screen multiplayer. On paper, a pretty uninspiring package for a racing game.

At the time, nothing felt like Wave Race 64. Even today, very few games feel as good as Wave Race 64.

You could sit someone down with Wave Race 64 and if they only have a passing familiarity with a game controller, they will be up an racing in a few minutes. The game just feels right.

It’s the water. Before 3D capable consoles and PCs, there was really no way to simulate a fluid, even in a rudimentary way. Sure you could have sprites slide around and be subject to momentum and gravity and any number of physics sims, but simulating movement on water in three dimensions was simply impossible. Then Nintendo nailed it first time out.

The way you tilt the stick to adjust your riders position in the water feels so natural there is almost no need for the simple tutorial included in Wave Race 64. Sure, it’s nice to know that you can do tricks like flips and hand-stands, but just steering your jet ski, but sliding your water craft around slalom buoys is a snap.

Wave Race 64 probably doesn’t stand out when it comes to other racing games. It’s not as complete or demanding as a Gran Turismo or even a Mario Kart. It’s own sequel Wave Race: Blue Storm is a much more complete package. Still, no game before, and shockingly few since, have just felt right the way that Wave Race 64 feels right.

Certainly one of the Best Games.

708

Mon, 01 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

There is a few pieces of text in Street Fighter III : Third Strike that I find fascinating.

They aren’t important to the game. They are mostly semi-nonsensical pump up quotes. One bit of text might have a typo in it. None of that is why I find it fascinating. It’s the technique that I love.

In 1998-1999 lcd and plasma monitors existed, but they were not the type of thing you would, or even could, use in an arcade machine. They were expensive and were riddled with too many downsides. On the other hand, CRT displays were common and generally pretty high quality.

That meant that not only would the games be displayed on a pretty descent, commercial grade, CRT screen, but the developers would likely be working with a very similar CRT display right on their desks.

Developers could be fairly certain that the artwork they created would be exactly what their players saw.

That’s the sort of convergence that lets you create this.

Tough to read, right? Well, kinda. It is legible, but only just. You can also see that they wrote ‘WINTER’ instead of ‘WINNER’. And that typo is even more funny when you consider that this is not at all how this text looked on the Third Strike screen.

Now that you had that warmup, try reading this list of locations.

Now these images come from asset rips from the game, but I can’t actually guarantee you that the color values of these pixels are correct. They probably are pretty close though. But that does mean that what you are looking at here and what the developers and players of Third Strike saw are very different.

CRT phosphors are relatively chunky when compared to the RGB pixel grids of modern screens. They are also ridiculously bright. Like tiny colored light bulbs that flick on for just a small fraction of a second. That means that the shapes they describe soft, cloudy, glowing shapes, not sharp, defined pixels.

These particular sets of pixels end up being quite legible when they are pushed through the aperture grill of a particular type of CRT.

Unfortunately there is not really a good way to replicate this, or even to take a photo of a CRT screen. You can, but it won’t look the same as it does with your own eyes.

The best I can do is to simulate it with shaders, and even that won’t look quite right because it lacks the physical characteristics of a specific type of CRT monitor. Still, these might give you a tiny indication of what it would have looked like.

That each of these characters is composed of only 9 pixels and is still identifiable as real text is amazing, and it just proves that sometimes the tools and the art are so intertwined that they can’t really be taken separately.

If you happen upon a real Third Strike machine in the wild, give it a play. It’s important art, and deserves your attention and love.

707

Mon, 25 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I wrote about the Calgary Arcade Jam last week. Well that got me inspired.

I’ve been working on an arcade style game for a while. That meant I have had to create a whole lot of systems and processes to make 3D meshes look and move like 2D sprites.

Why not just use sprites?

Because. That’s why.

Anyway, I have made all of these neat systems, but I haven’t done what I really should have and turned all of those systems into a reusable template.

Well, now I have.

Any I started working on a little test scrolling shooter. But with a time travel mechanic.

Anyway, this is a test of that template.

706

Mon, 18 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

https://itch.io/jam/arcade-jam-2026-cgda/entries

Yesterday I got the chance to participate in a game jam. This time I wasn’t jamming, I was judging. I played all the games and talked with all the teams. It was sort of fun to see a game jam from this angle.

Typically, by the end of a game jam, I am happy to have made something, but I am also so frazzled that I can’t really think that hard about any of the games, including my own. It was interesting viewing the games through a different lens. I know all too well what it takes to make a game in a very short period of time, and I know what it’s like to over scope and come up just short of your intentions.

Ultimately, every one of these games is a pretty incredible achievement and I had a good time playing and evaluating them.

Maybe next time I’ll make something again.

705

Mon, 11 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

For a while I had most of the control issues with my game worked out. You could run around and the screen would scroll at least as smoothly as a 1990s era arcade machine or console. I had introduced most of the same constraints, so I was met with the same results. The simulation of the game could move with sub-pixel precision but the graphics could only move in full pixel increments. That meant that some movements would look smooth, but moving in some directions, particularly diagonals would sometimes lead to a stepping or jitter.

Months ago I added fixes to my movement and camera scripts that minimized this jitter. They worked well. I moved on with other issues and systems and sort of forgot about my fixes.

A little while ago I reorganized most of the project. I simplified a lot of it and removed so much reused code, really leaning into Godot’s compositional nature.

While that was great for the project, it also meant that I did miss a few things. Most notably, I ended up doubling up my anti-jitter fix.

I had been working on different parts of the game and hadn’t really noticed until I played the game at full screen. The jitter was atrocious.

It was frustrating, because I was certain that I had fixed the problem literal months previous.

Long story short, I did find the problem. I had the jitter fix enabled both on the camera and on the target that the camera is meant to follow. Disabling it on the target sorted the whole thing out.

So I guess the moral is, if you are going to reorganize a project, test it for everything, and make sure that you turn off or delete any legacy code you aren’t using.

I’m certain that I will forget and this sort of thing will happen again in the future.

704

Mon, 04 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I hit a strange milestone recently. This is both the most stories I have had out on submission and the longest I have had multiple stories out on submission.

Let’s be completely honest, most, if not all, of them will be rejected. Now that’s not a defeatist attitude, that’s just the way this game goes. Most stories get rejected. Sometimes several times.

Maybe that means the story isn’t good. But maybe not, maybe it just means that the publisher had a similar story already, or that they don’t like that sort of thing, or that they have a specific theme they are going for in this issue and that particular story doesn’t match. Maybe they were just having a bad day and wanted to take it out on that story… who knows. Not really my business to know, and my job isn’t to cater to the whims of someone that I don’t know and may never meet. My job is to write these stories as well as I can and try to sell them.

That’s why this is an interesting milestone. As soon as any one of these stories is rejected, I actually have somewhere lined up to send it next. That’s a different thing for me. Typically I have one or two stories ready and I either have nowhere to send them, or they are already sold and I have nothing else in my back pocket to follow it up with.

I don’t know if I will ever sell any of these stories, but as long as I don’t suddenly sell all of them (a very unlikely eventuality) I will spend the next half year or more with at least one story out on submission. And I think that’s kind of a neat step in the right direction.

703

Mon, 27 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Turning an entirely 3D, triangle based, game into a 2D, pixel art, game takes a lot of fakery. Up until now, a lot of that fakery leaned on a few scripts and processes that were largely CPU based.

I spent a few days moving most of that work over to a couple of shader functions.

The result is that the CPU is now basically doing no work and the GPU is also doing almost no work, because even the weakest of modern GPUs can shift the small amount of pixels I am demanding of them without breaking a sweat.

Anyway, here is a video clip of the game running. Compression has really done it dirty so I might re-record this later and swap the video file.

702 - Return of the Obra Dinn

Mon, 20 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Best Games - Return of the Obra Dinn

It’s the sort of premise that could only come from an indie developer. At a larger development studio or publisher, Lucas Pope and Obra Dinn never make it past the first pitch meeting.

In Return of the Obra Dinn, you play as an early 19th century insurance investigator.

That description would have already lost half the room at Ubisoft.

You are tasked with figuring out what happened to a ghost ship that has recently washed ashore. Lost for years, the Obra Dinn is full of unimaginable secrets.

Maybe a producer or two finds this pitch interesting. They are quickly shouted down by someone in the room citing marketing metrics. Boats don’t appeal to a core demo.

As this investigator, you will use a supernatural stopwatch that lets you witness the exact moment of a persons death.

That seems like an amazing hook. Might be enough to raise a few eyebrows.

The visual aesthetic is stippled monochrome. The modern 3D equivalent of a 1985 Apple Macintosh.

And with that all the air leaves the room.

It probably goes without saying that Return of the Obra Dinn did extremely well both critically and commercially. After all, I am putting it on this list of Best Games. Pretty easy guess that it’s a good game.

It is a truly exceptional game, but it’s one that I really don’t see getting made if it wasn’t primarily created by one person. Or at least a very small number of people. The cascade of risk aversion once the team exceeds more than a few people would pretty much negate the chances of ever greenlighting a slow paced logical deduction game set on a boat in the early 1800s.

It would, but it shouldn’t.

All of the things that would make Obra Dinn unpalatable to an old guard publisher are all the things that they should be running toward.

A high concept premise wrapped around solid, even traditional, gameplay. A unique visual flare that usually doesn’t hamper the gameplay (though, from time to time it does make accurately reading what is going on a bit more difficult than it should). Good, but not overly showy, sound design.

It’s just a good, satisfying puzzle/deduction game. It’s fairly well priced. It isn’t overly long. A large publisher could bankroll several of these types of games from small indie studios every year. One or two of them would have the same success as Return of the Obra Dinn. A tidy profit every time.

But a tidy profit isn’t good enough. That’s why they don’t regularly make games as good as Return of the Obra Dinn.

It took a single developer, working without compromise, or sanding the edges off of their vision to create Return of the Obra Dinn. But that’s not because Lucas Pope is some sort of genius auteur. It’s just that he had to work within the limits of his own fears and limitations. He didn’t have to bow to the fears of a room of other people who believe they are being paid to say no.

Return of the Obra Dinn could only have been an indie game. It is also, undeniably, one of the Best Games.

701

Mon, 13 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Work continues slowly on my game.

I have reworked a lot of my Blender to Godot flow. I have simplified some of my shader setup so that my CRT effect lives completely independent of any graphics it’s modifying. I have added menus, proper pausing, and a save/load functionality, though most of that hasn’t gelled to anything close to final.

My main goal for the next month or so is to finish the most basic part of the play loop. Go out, find victim, get them out of danger without hurting yourself, do any rescue work required to stabilize them, get them back to your ambulance. Now do that four or five more times. That’s it. That’s the loop.

Then comes all the fun stuff. Building out levels. Adding new hazards. Working on the meta progression of making enough money to buy new equipment and supplies, while navigating a capitalistic dystopia… that’s all for the future though.

For now, it’s just get the loop done.

I already have a bunch of those systems built, but they aren’t bolted together in such a way that I can play the game yet. I’m a little scared to dive into all that, but I am also very excited to be able to play the game, even in a very prototype way.

I told myself at the start of this project, that if I couldn’t get it to look like an alternate history version of a 90’s arcade game, then I wouldn’t keep going on it and I would work on something else instead.

Well, is sort of looks like an alternate history 90’s arcade game where they had unreasonable levels of realtime lighting tech to work with now. I guess I did that. Time to take the next step and make it play like an alternate history arcade game with physics and ragdoll and analog control.

I hope it works.

700

Mon, 06 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

For my birthday I decided to gift myself not having to post something this week.

Shit. I just did, didn’t I.

699 - Punch-Out!!

Mon, 30 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Best Games - Punch-Out!!

Punch-Out!! only exists because of a mistake.

By 1984 Nintendo had already released three Donkey Kong titles and one Mario Bros. game. I don’t know if you heard, but the Donkey Kong and Mario games did quite well. Well, most of them did. I don’t believe Stanley from Donkey Kong 3 is really a household name. I wonder how that one sold.

In any event, Nintendo had purchased more monitors than they needed, and rather than have them sit in a warehouse waiting for a game that would sell as well as the first Donkey Kong, they decided to try something radical.

Why not make a game that needed two monitors?

They could sell these advanced cabinets for a bit more and clear out old inventory. At two birds one stone… or one cabinet two monitors, type situation. After all, this sort of tactic had worked out for them a few years earlier when they had a bunch of Radar Scope cabinets that weren’t selling and rather than take a hit on them, they filled them full of Donkey Kong boards and sold an absolute boatload of them. Couldn’t hurt to try it again.

They took a swipe at making a racing game, but processors at the time were just not up to the task of drawing fast racing action across two screens. Genyo Takeda ultimately decided on a boxing game, where the bottom screen contained the action and the top screen contained the clock, fighter banners, score, and stamina bars. All information you might only need once or twice a match and can easily be gathered in a glance.

The characters and action on the bottom screen were big and bold in a way that you didn’t see in games back then. Large cartoony boxers designed by Shigeru Miyamoto filled the screen and a green wireframe representation of your fighter faced them down. Add digitized speech and sound clips, and you had one of the more eye catching arcade cabinets of it’s time.

In the arcade, Punch-Out!! did fine. Not Donkey Kong sales, but fine.

When they significantly downgraded the game for a port to the single screen, much lower powered, NES, that’s when it really took off.

At first it launched as Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out!!, but it was later rereleased simply as Punch Out!! when the license for Mike Tyson’s name and likeness ran out. The man’s many legal and abuse issues probably helped convince Nintendo it was better to part ways. A cartoon version of Piston Honda or Soda Popinski might be slightly off-putting cultural stereotypes, but they were never going to assault their spouses, so that was probably a good business decision.

The NES version of Punch-Out!! plays very similarly to the arcade game. It isn’t really a game about boxing. It’s a sort of rhythm, pattern recognition game, where you have to watch for specific openings and tells and then punch, dodge, or block accordingly. When people say that From Soft took a page out of the Punch-Out!! book for their boss fights, they aren’t wrong. Dark Souls has sort of a freeform Punch-Out!! thing going for it.

Maybe you could have designed a real simulation of boxing on the NES. Maybe that would have been possible. But I doubt it. The gameplay of Punch-Out!! on the other hand, has absolutely stood the test of time. You could pick up and play Punch-Out!!, especially the NES version, right now and the gameplay would challenge and surprise you. You would have a pretty easy time with the first few fights, and then the next batch would give you trouble. But you would learn them. You would get better, and learn to anticipate each fighters set of attacks.

You would have fun playing the game.

Punch-Out!! went on to have sequels and reimaginings. Each one of them is compelling and fun, but anytime someone talks about Punch-Out!! it’s that NES version that they are likely talking about.

Maybe someone would have come up with a game like Punch-Out!! on their own, with no external pressures. But that’s not the world we live in. We live in the world where, because Nintendo over-ordered a certain monitor, they needed a way to justify putting two of them in one cabinet. Punch-Out!! is the end result of that pressure. And it is absolutely one of the Best Games.

698

Mon, 23 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

For the first time in quite a while, I have several stories out on submission.

If you have never sent stories out or submitted stories to a publisher, just sending the stories out means almost nothing.

The most likely thing that will happen is that these stories will be rejected. I will then have to either rework them to make them better or just send them back out someplace else. But, I’m not gonna lie, it feels good to have stories submitted rather than just sitting on my hard drive not doing anything.

I already had a handful of stories out and I just sent out another one. I know it might be a nice fantasy to imagine that I write these posts just seconds before you read them, but often I start one sometime around Tuesday or Wednesday and then finish it up on Sunday night so that it can get posted on Monday. Between starting this post and finishing it, I submitted another story.

I think it just feels nice to have them out there. I would rather that they were out there and published, but out there on submission is pretty good too.

Wish my handful of stories luck.

697

Mon, 16 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The game I am working on uses an orthographic perspective… orthographic perspective is sort of an oxymoron. Maybe orthographic projection. Orthographic camera? It tries to look like an old game, and so, it uses old game graphics limitations.

Except, of course, it doesn’t. I am making a fully 3D game using all sorts of modern shader trickery. Everything on screen is made of texture mapped polygons with all sorts of digital clamps applied to make it look like it is a 2D pixel art game.

Why?

Why not.

We have the whole world of possibilities and aesthetics available to us. This is the one I wanted to make.

In trying to get the orthographic perspective right I have worked through a lot of options and experimental processes. My current setup has me running standard 3D models though a geometry nodes process in Blender to have them come out at the proper skewed angle. It has worked well.

This weekend I went to an indie work event and a five minute conversation with another developer made me realize that I should go back to an earlier process that I had thought about and abandoned as too fiddly or costly or beyond my abilities at the time. Coming back to it, with my current level of understanding of shaders, it turns out it was actually pretty simple.

All of my meshes are pretty low vertex count affairs and they all need fragment shaders run on them already to make them look like pixel art so what’s a few more nanoseconds of processing to have the meshes skewed to an orthographic angle in the shader.

I wrote, implemented, and tested the shader in a couple of hours. It would have been even faster if I hadn’t spent a bunch of time messing around with different ways to test it out.

This does mean that I need to reorganize some of my game files, but it will mean reorganizing them to make them simpler, not more complex.

Turns out, I should go talk with other devs more often. It’s so easy to get stuck in a groove when you already have processes and tooling set up. Sometimes other avenues are not as far away as they appear.

696

Mon, 09 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

You know that thing where people ask ‘what’s something that you could talk for an hour about without any preparation?’ I think I have two of those.

One is old video games.

The other is 3D modelling and animation.

Okay, maybe three things. I could probably talk about Star Trek episodes starting at the original series through to the end of DS9, but no one would want to hear any of that.

Okay, so just the 3D modelling and animation stuff then.

The history of it. The processes and techniques. Different programs. The technology of chewing through polygons and spitting the resultant pixels up to a screen. Any part of it.

I have messed with so many different aspects of Computer Generated Imagery over the years that I think in vertices. I can picture Cartesian coordinates, matrix transforms, and vector manipulations in my head.

I know that isn’t special. There are lots of people out there who can do the same. Many who can do it way better than I can.

Today I was writing something a bit different. A class.

I don’t know. Maybe it’s a class. Maybe it’s a talk. Maybe it’s about 40 minutes of rambling. In any case, it’s about 3D graphics and how to think about setting up a workflow that gets objects out of Blender or Maya or whatever, and get those objects into whatever game engine you are using.

I am writing it out and making slides and visual material to go along with it, so the whole talk should be cleaner and easier to listen to than if I just went off the cuff, but I can say, without any doubt, that I could talk uninterrupted on this topic for an hour at least.

Hopefully that will end up being a good thing. I might just bore a room full of game devs for an hour.

Wouldn’t be the first time.

695

Mon, 02 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Recently I started combining all of my distributed experiments and gameplay tests for my game. That meant reorganizing a lot of the half baked scenes and projects that I have been working on into one unified project. Of course, that instantly broke everything. I have a slightly complex shader and viewport structure, and trying to combine that with other scenes that have things like basic menus, startup screens, pause menus, swapping levels, etc. caused all sorts of blank screen and screen size problems. Long story short, it broke my shader. The good news is that I made all of the shader and viewports setup. Since I was the one who made it, I was always going to be the one who had to fix it. So I did. It wasn’t easy, but I have now reworked the entire project so that I can run all of my menus and scenes in a really clean and efficient way. There is one main scene that runs all of the time and all of the child scenes either get loaded and unloaded, or set to visible, on the fly. All of my shaders and filters are on this main scene so that any popups menus or UI can run independent of the 3D portions of the game, but they get the appropriate filters applied. So yeah. game stuff is still happening and it’s still happening slowly.

694 - In Death

Mon, 23 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Best Games - In Death

There is no shortage of VR archery games. I think it’s the controllers. While there are many options that VR controllers present to developers, grasping, waving, punching, pointing, lifting, pushing, pulling, VR controllers usually translate to some sort of gun. Or, if you prefer a different sort of shooting, you can use one hand to aim a bow and the other to draw back a string. The hardware just sort of lends itself to that sort of gameplay.

The first couple of times I played In Death were frustrating. The archery was very precise and you couldn’t really lob shots off and hope for the best. There is a shield block and parry mechanic that requires pretty bang on timing. The movement mechanics are strange and can really throw you for a loop.

I played it a couple more times, and everything started to make sense. Started to feel right. The secret is that In Death doesn’t really play like a most regular video games. It is a VR game through and through. In Death is intensely physical. Just not in the same ways as a lot of other VR games.

Since In Death is a VR game, you can easily stand in one spot and rotate around or take a step or two in any direction. But that’s not really how you move around in this game. In Death has a teleport mechanic where any spot where you toss a shard, you will instantly travel to. You can toss that shard casually or try to throw it a long distance, but how well you can throw and how precisely you can land the shard determines where you will go. Moving around is a trainable skill and it feels great once you get it.

Not only that, but you have an arrow with the shard already on it. Load up that arrow and fire it to teleport yourself anywhere you can shoot an arrow. Which is pretty far away, as it turns out.

There are, of course, enemies to shoot with your bow and array of different arrows, but just standing still and launching arrows isn’t what this game is about.

In Death is a roguelike, so failing a run means that you loose all items and progress to that point. There are unlockable abilities and options that can make subsequent runs easier, but this is a game where you really don’t want to rush in and die.

Trying to keep the run going means you need to take full advantage of those movement abilities. You will be firing arrows to teleport yourself up onto rooftops and odd balconies. You will toss the shard behind you to give you some distance from attackers. You will look for spots in the level where you can get the best angle on enemies while making sure that they can’t get behind you. So, rather than a very physical game like Beat Saber where you wave your arms around, In Death is more about you mastering the physicality of a virtual space.

This is the sort of game that you really couldn’t do properly without VR. The movement mechanics would feel hopelessly restrictive in a regular FPS game, but here they feel natural.

Getting the drop on a bunch of crusades era knights and peppering them with arrows only to teleport behind them when they turn to rush you at the end of a hallways is a magical ‘super ninja’ type experience.

It’s a strange game, a difficult game to play for a lot of reasons, and one that I don’t think many people got a chance to play, but for me it’s one of the Best Games.

693

Mon, 16 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

We are over halfway through the Winter Olympics and, yep, I’ve been watching a lot of them. Just like the summer games, It’s not so much that I want to watch my favorite sports, it’s that I like the variety. Just today I watched some hockey, some speed skating, some figure skating, mogul skiing, and the highlights of a curling match. I’ll only ever watch the highlights of a curling match. Curling is like baseball. I’ve played it, and I can appreciate what people love about it, but it ain’t my thing. It’s just a firehose of sports. I’m starting to hit the point where it’s wearing me out, but I still really love it. By the closing ceremonies I will have worked it out of my system and I can spend several months after virtually sports free. A hockey game and figure skating tomorrow though. Lets Go!

692

Mon, 09 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I just finished writing and editing another very short story and I am all out of words. The story writing will be slowing down after next week so I will probably be more interested in writing here again. Until then, I hope you have been enjoying these slightly more burnt out posts.

691

Mon, 02 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

This weekend was the Global Game Jam, and once again, I didn’t participate. I would like to, but I have been doing a writing jam instead.

As much as I enjoy getting together with people to bang out a goofy game, I also enjoy spending a bunch of time with myself arguing over what word to put where. The arguments are, again, with myself.

While the approaches might be very different, the process is sort of the same. There are prompts, time limits, technical limits, and a bunch of technology involved.

The game technology is pretty obvious. Game engines, graphics tools, IDEs, and maybe even weird input devices.

The writing technology is a bit older and a bit less well understood. Writing is absolutely a technology, but stories are too. Writing is a technology created to allow people to speak to one another over distance and time. You can write something down and someone far away from you a few years from now can pick it up, read it, and understand what you were saying. Super useful.

Stories are a slightly different technology, since they existed before writing, but writing them down is probably the best way to trade them. Stories are a culture building survival technology that lets groups share learning and information and our feelings about those thing. It’s a way of packing up our thoughts and feelings into packages that we can then give to other.

So, older, weirder technology, but otherwise just the same as using Unity.

Back to jammin'

690

Mon, 26 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Since Christmas or so, I have been messing around with some old games. I say ‘messing around’ because I haven’t really been playing most of them. These are games from the dos and early windows 95 days. The days of the first 3D accelerators. Games where you had to manually configure IRQ assignments. If you know what an IRQ is, you know what era of games I’m talking about. Part of this is research. I like to mine old games for ideas and designs that might have been tried once or twice, but seem to have been abandoned in more recent games. Gameplay strategies, visual development, etc. etc. Part of it is fun. I mean games are fun, and sometimes games that haven’t been played in years are still fun. Another part is gauging nostalgia. Nostalgia is an awful thing. It can bring back good feelings, but it can also trick us into believing that the past was better than the present. I like to test that feeling. I can tell you, most of the time, you can’t go back. There are some amazing games from that era. True stand-outs that are still as fun as ever. They are good because they are good, not because they are of a certain vintage. Most of the time though, these games do not hold up. Things you may have tolerated in the past because there just weren’t that many fast paced dos game, or games rendered in full 3D, just are not tolerable anymore. We have moved past them. Part of me hoped that I would find a whole stack of new Best Games contenders among the early win95 games, but they are fairly thin on the ground in that era. That’s not to say that there are none. There are, and I will likely be writing about them in the future, but the past isn’t a treasure trove, it’s a painstaking excavation. I will still keep playing old, weird games, because that’s the sort of guy I am, but it does make me appreciate the golden era of games we currently find ourselves in.

689

Mon, 19 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve been working on a very short story all day and I’m mostly out of words.

I have been playing some weird old games though, so I might have some things to say about that next week, or soonish.

On the upside, I think I may have slightly better formatting worked out for these posts. I suppose we can all find out together after I post this.

688

Mon, 12 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I finished writing a new flash story a few hours ago. I will probably have to go back over it and do some editing work before it’s ready to send anywhere, but this is one of the rare occasions that I don’t think I will be adding many words.

Usually, when I finish a flash story that’s only the beginning. When I think of a story idea it usually occupies a 2000-4000 word space in my head and I squish it down to under a thousand words so that it can be flash sized. But restrictions are useful, so forcing myself to keep the word count low is good exercise. It means that every word has to do some sort of job and it can’t be just progressing your eyes through to the words I really want you to read.

This story is actually flash. I could maybe add 50 or so words, but that would be about it. The style and structure demand a small word count.

My plan right now, is to give it a once or twice over and then send it out to flash publishers, maybe as early as next week. Won’t that be something.

687

Mon, 05 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

This is the first post for 2026. So what am I doing.

Our oldest is back at university after the holidays, our youngest has been studying and getting ready for wrestling, and we have been wondering what we will do with ourselves when they are both out in the world doing things and we are at home alone.

I know what I might be doing.

Just this evening I wanted to play with some old games and apps that only work on older versions of windows. Compatibility mode can only get you so far, and these apps were not cooperating. So what is there to do.

I have now installed and set up an emulated windows 98 machine running under 86box. I know that I could have used any number of virtual environments, or I could have even installed windows 98 on some older hardware that we still have, but this seemed more convenient. And more fun.

Now I have a stupid little Pentium 2 machine with all the ram and an absolutely massive hard drive for the time… 32 whole Gigabytes! I topped it off with a video card, sound card, and fast CD-ROM drive that would make this the most expensive machine you could possibly assemble in 1998.

Now, it’s not perfect. The emulation doesn’t always run at full speed. I have had to play with settings and swap out virtual components a few times. But I knew what I was getting into. This is what I wanted.

I set this emulated machine up so that I could play with some old apps and I haven’t really done that at all. I swapped sound cards and video cards. I installed drivers. I formatted virtual drives. I messed around with old windows.

That’s what I like to do. I like to mess around with weird hardware and software. And I like to do that when the hardware is software. It’s fun.

I don’t imagine that will change. I will always play with these toys, and there will always be new toys.

686

Mon, 29 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

This will be my last post for 2025. Does that mean I need to make some sort of resolution of the new year? A semi-hollow promise to myself? Nah. I’m more than happy to make plans. Here are some things I plan to do. I will write a few more stories, finish editing a few that I have on the go, and have at least a half dozen out for submission at any given time. I will finish up the gameplay loop of my game and try to get it out to a few people for playtesting. I will work on another game and hopefully that one will be ready to go by fall. I will do some work on yet another game, and attempt to get some very experimental visuals up and running in an engine I don’t have that much experience using. Mostly, I plan to enjoy my work, enjoy my family, and enjoy my life. And I plan to do all of that for as long as I possibly can. Check in with me around 2075 and I’ll let you know how that plan is going.

685

Mon, 22 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

The saga of the nas is ongoing, but I think I have it pretty well in hand.

It’s a bunch of drives that sits and chugs along in my basement, and once in a while I write some files to it. Pretty standard stuff, but it’s one more thing that I don’t have to worry about… until I eventually do have to worry about it. That’s future me’s problem.

Anyway, that’s about it for this post. I’ll probably have a longer one next time, where I can talk about graphics for a bit. I always like to talk about graphics for a bit.

684 - Moss

Mon, 15 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

VR is a strange beast. If you are into playing video games and you are looking for an immersive experience, you will probably want to try VR. There you will find the most immersive, transporting experiences. Games that will place you inside their world and press your own out to the margins. The best VR games make you feel like you are some place else.

But that’s usually where they end.

You might feel like you are in a different place, inside a particular games world. The sense of immersion can make playing a game more active. Standing and using your whole body can boost your heart rate and trigger feelings that you just won’t get from playing a game on a screen. Some games can even give you a pretty good workout.

There is an active element to video games that hits differently than watching passive entertainment. There is all the drama on screen, of course, but there is also this sense that you still exist. You are part of this piece of entertainment. Probably the most important part. The player is not the audience of a video game. You are the motivation. The impulse. You make the game go. Press Start is an imperative of the medium.

VR games take this to an extreme. Not only are you, as the player, the driving force for a video game experience, in VR you are literally the center of the world. When you put on a headset and sync up controllers, you become the focal point of whatever world you are entering. In a very real sense, the world revolves around you.

Most VR games take that as a given, and then fully fail to acknowledge it. It is the very rare game that engages you so fully that you forget that you are standing in an empty space with a set of heavy screens strapped to your head and speakers over your ears. Extreme immersion is possible, but there is an extremely steep hill to climb before you get there.

Moss, at its core, is a capacity action game. An adventure game with a main character that you direct with control sticks and button inputs. You make Quill, a small mouse adventurer, run around levels, jump up ledges, and battle enemies. The same sort of things that you have done in countless character action platformer games. Think Mario, Spyro, Sonic, Ratchet and Clank. If you have played any video games you have been here before.

Moss could have been a game that was only ever played on a regular screen. It could have been like any other character action game. Beautiful to look at with a fun diorama aesthetic and snappy intuitive control. Probably not a standout in the genre, but certainly a solid entry.

Moss is a VR game.

Moss puts you in the game. Not you, as in you control a character as a player. You. The embodied you. You exist in the same space as the action that Quill is engaging in. You can see yourself reflected in pond water and you can interact with the world directly. Sure, you appear as a masked god-like figure in the world, but it is you. And Quill can see you too.

Instantly this changes how you play this game. Moss is not a game where you control a character. Moss is a partnership. You and Quill are in this together. You move objects and platforms around so that she can more easily reach them. You stun enemies so that she can dispatch them. You interact with puzzles so that she can pass through locked doors and evade traps. Quill will wave at you and communicate with your through gestures and sign language. You can give each other a high five.

Through this simple change of context, Quill becomes real. The world becomes real. Because you are real.

Rather than putting you in control as the master of this world, in Moss you become part of the world. You are welcomed into it, and you get to share it. Climbing the hill to create immersion becomes effortless. This isn’t a world made for you, this is a world that you can step into. That you want to step into.

Quill is one of the best game protagonists that far too few players have gotten the chance to meet, but that doesn’t stop Moss from being one of the Best Games.

683

Mon, 08 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

A few weeks ago I had a hard drive fail on me. It was a backup drive and thankfully it didn’t have anything important on it. Still, I did lose some non-essential files. I have lost drives before, but I tend to keep most important things backed up in a couple of places and very important stuff gets the local and cloud backup treatment. That doesn’t mean I was happy about it.

I have thought about setting up a proper nas for a while. One built around a raid or zfs or both. It just always seemed like overkill. I have work files back up automatically in the background, and anything else that I don’t want to lose gets occasional manual backups. It’s a system that has worked well for me for ages. But losing that drive was the last straw.

Disks are getting pretty big these days. Two terabytes is a pretty common size for a drive. That’s an awful lot of files to lose when the drive dies, even if they might be less important.

So, yeah. I bought a nas.

It’s not a super fancy or new one, but it is one that I can install a custom version of Linux on so that I can use zfs. So that’s nice.

I know that I will have another drive die on me. It’s just inevitable. With this setup I should be able to lose a drive, replace it, and never lose a thing.

I don’t have it yet, but soon. Either it works great and I never have to mention data storage again, or this might be the first of many posts ranting about owning a nas.

682

Mon, 01 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

For a very long time I used Photoshop, Illustrator, Premier, and After Effects. Probably the better part of two decades. I did more designs for signs, brochures, stickers, and vehicle wraps in illustrator than I care to count. I have used a lot of other art and illustration software over the years, but those are probably the ones I used the most.

I don’t miss them at all.

The current suite of tools I tend to use for that sort of stuff is Affinity. Affinity was three products, Designer, Photo, and Publisher, but now they are fused together into a single package simply called Affinity. When Canva, the company that bought Serif, the original developer of Affinity, announced that all three packages would be combined into one monolithic piece of design and art software, they also announced that it would be free. Well, mostly free.

This seemed to make a lot of people angry.

I know, I know. If a product is free, then you are the product and all that. Massive corporations don’t do things out of the kindness of their hearts, and they certainly don’t give away things for free.

So I understand why some people might be suspicious. They had come to like using Affinity tools and they are absolutely certain that Canva will ruin them. Just the same way that they have seen other promising tools ruined by huge corporations that didn’t know why the people who used those tools liked using them. They might be right too. Maybe Canva will ruin them. But that isn’t what has happened.

I think a lot of people who use Photoshop or Affinity photo or whatever graphics app like to think that there is a massive business in selling these programs. Sure, Adobe isn’t a small company, but relatively speaking, graphics software, especially professional level graphics software, is hyper niche. Not many people use it. And of the people who use it, not that many actually pay for it. Canva has the numbers. They know this too.

But Canva makes design software for people who are not professional designers or artists. They make software that you can quickly mock up web pages or meeting presentations. They make something closer to PowerPoint than Illustrator. Powerful design software, to be sure, but not the sort of thing a professional artist wants or needs. One brush can paint a fence, but you need decidedly different tools to paint a portrait. Not better. Just different. Affinity is different, and far fewer people use it.

Making Affinity subscription software, or continuing to have it be one time payment software, would probably make them enough money to continue development, but Affinity would be a tiny part of their Value as a company. They make so much more money selling parts of the Canva platform to companies that just need a ’good enough’ design tool.

Making it free though, that hurts Adobe. And hurting Adobe is worth so much more to them than what they could make selling Affinity. There are literally no excuses to giving Affinity a try now. If you are a professional artist or designer and you would rather not pay Adobe a lot of money every year, try Affinity. You have nothing to lose.

I have also read a lot of people complaining that Affinity isn’t good enough for professional work. That’s just dumb. I have used both Illustrator and Designer for professional work, and yes, they are different, and they have different workflows, but I actually like using Affinity more. It’s just a more fluid and modern workflow. There are a lot tools that I would like the to add and improve, but it is a thoroughly capable tool for professional work. Some folks have trouble separating ‘the way I’m comfortable working’ with ‘the right way to work’. As soon as you can do that, you will be much more able to shift from one software to another. Maybe you can paint that portrait with a four inch contractors brush.

Anyway, Affinity is free. Use it or don’t. I don’t really care either way, but I do know one thing. Getting mad about it won’t get your artwork done.

681

Mon, 24 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I just finished the latest rounds of revision on a couple of my stories. One, I think, is ready to send out now. The other might need another pass, but it’s getting close. These two are relatively short stories, so they are quicker to work on, but I do have a few longer ones that need some love. For those ones I have to work up some nerve before diving back into them. One thing though. I have been writing short stories for a few years now, so I have a backlog of ones that I haven’t finished polishing or sent out anywhere, and every once in a while I discover one that I had written, but completely forgotten about. While that is a strange feeling, it does mean that I won’t be running out of material to shine up and send out any time soon. That is in addition to the small handful of stories that have been rejected several times and I don’t really know what to do with now. They might end up in some sort of collection sometime, or maybe I will just post them up here if they can’t find some place that will publish them.

That’s all for this post I guess. I used up most of my word energy editing those stories. Maybe in some distant future I will be able to tell you about them, because they will be published someplace.

680 - Kickman

Mon, 17 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000

There is something to envy about the early days of video games. Sure, they were operating with the most limited of resources and just getting graphics drawn to the screen was a herculean task, but they had some pretty wild options available to them. I don’t know if you could even make Kickman today. In 1981, anything could be a game. There were the obvious ideas. Sports, car racing, old west gun fights, but what about a game like Pac-Man. That sort of game comes out of clever tricks that developers came up with while playing with the hardware. No one carefully plans out Pac-Man. They stumble over it. If I had to guess, the designer of Kickman figured out a physics routine for bouncing a balloon around the screen and went from there. No one plots out the idea of a unicycle riding clown popping or stacking balloons using a pin on his head. I mean, there is no way to sell that idea. There is no obvious game there. It sounds crazy. Of course, Kickman is amazing. You play as a clown on a unicycle moving back and forth across the bottom of the screen and balloons fall down from columns at the top of the screen. The first level has you popping them with a pin on your hat? Maybe? I don’t know. The balloons pop, okay. The second level has you catching balloons and stacking them on your head. Once the stack is sufficiently tall, they will all pop one at a time. Of course, you could also catch a Pac-Man that will eat the balloons giving you bonus points. Eventually you catch Pac-Man ghosts as well, and those can only be eaten by a Pac-Man. If you just catch and pop balloons, why is the game called Kickman? Well, because of the kick button of course. If a balloon manages to slip past you, you have one chance to kick it back up and catch it. That can be tricky because running into balloons with your body sends them drifting out of kick range. Of course, that isn’t the only use for the kick. If there is a Pac-Man falling but you haven’t yet gathered enough balloons to make it worthwhile, just kick it back up to the top of the screen. It will fall again soon enough. There is a bonus stage where people throw balloons and explosives at you. Dodge the explosives, catch the balloons. Obviously. Kickman is a very simple game, but then again, so were most of the games from 1981. But Kickman is also a very satisfying game to play. The movement speed, especially using the original arcade trackball, the speed and duration of the kick, the floaty arc of the balloons. It all just feels so satisfying. It is not as well remembered as its cameo character, Pac-Man, but there is no doubt, Kickman is one of the Best Games.

679

Mon, 10 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000

As I move incrementally forward on my personal game project, I keep updating how I do things behind the scenes. The game is a top down, 2D, arcade style, game with a look that aims to hover somewhere in the mid 90s. So 2D pixel art, but run on hardware that can throw some graphical sparkle around. Except the game isn’t 2D and none of what you are looking at is pixel art. Under the hood, it’s all 3D models, skeletal animations, and shaders. In some ways, that is a more difficult task than making a 2D game with 2D graphics, but it also lets me get away with a lot that would also be difficult in 2D. Besides, I know 3D graphics and shaders. It’s sort of cool to have fun with those. Up until recently, the game included a bunch of flat polygons with textures on them as a stand in for the tile based graphics of a lot of older arcade and console hardware. For a few reasons I have removed all of those textures and now everything in the game is actually flat-ish, shaded polygons. Again, some of the things I am doing to create the art might be easier with textured polygons, but this shaded polygon approach also lets me get away with some effects and animations that would be very difficult any other way. Making each tile or prop object is pretty quick and easy, and there are a load of Blender and Godot tricks that I am using to make 3D models look like 2D sprites. One day I will probably do a whole write up on how the graphics in my game get drawn to the screen, but for now, I think I will stick to working on getting more systems into a playable state. My hope is, once people are actually able to play it, they won’t much care how the pixels are being lit. They will just want to run around and interact with the world.

678

Mon, 03 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000

For the last few weeks I have been plunking away on a Discord Bot. The plan was for this to be a simple little thing. A sort of management agent for a group game critique. It keeps track of games that people want to suggest for critique, creates polls to gage interest, schedules critique events, and, with any luck, does all of this with very little effort. Of course, all of that might sound simple, but this involves python coding; something I’m familiar with but not to any sort of proficiency. It also involves hosting the thing and administrating a Linux server; something that I have a little more experience with. I did what anyone trying to set up something like this would do. I went out and found examples on GitHub and stole that code. If you have never written any code, I can’t begin to tell you how far you can get just by stealing some code. First, you see how someone else did the thing you are trying to do. Or a similar sort of thing at the very least. Second, you can break it without worrying too much that you won’t be able to fix it. You already have a working copy to refer back to. So I took my stolen code, mashed that more into the shape I was looking for, and then I set the AI on it. I have said before about using ML agents to work on code. I think it works really well if you already have a working thing that you want to clean up, optimize, or add features to. In this particular case, it worked extremely well. Since Discord bots are a pretty well understood topic, and I wasn’t attempting to do anything really wild, I was usually able to tell Copilot to look at a feature I already had working and extend it or create a new feature based on it. I went from having a little poll creating bot that read out of a database I hosted, to having a fairly full featured, not terribly ugly, critique management system, while only really working on it a few hours over a handful of weekends. Now I have to let some actual people mess with it and break it.

677

Mon, 27 Oct 2025 00:00:00 +0000

It’s a funny thing, when you go back to edit older stories. You notice things that you missed the first few times around.

The terrible parts stand out, of course. Stark and prickly. It’s hard to say why you ever wrote them in the first place. It’s easy to yank them out by the roots to make way for new sentences that fit the flow of the story much better. Well, maybe not easy, but doable.

It’s always the good parts that catch you by surprise though. The things that made you think the story was worth writing in the first place. The subtle things. The parts that set off little parts of you like emotional sparklers.

Before you go back to edit, it’s hard to imagine those good parts will even be there. I mean, there was a reason that you moved away from the story. There was a reason it sat, untouched, for so long. It must be terrible. It just has to be.

It never is. There is always some core to the story that made you want to write it. Something that made you stick with it long enough to get it all down at least once.

They always say that you should kill your darlings. Fuck that. Pull the weeds that are choking your darlings. Clear a space for them to grow. Those great parts of your stories need tending.

Editing isn’t a hostile act. It’s creative and nurturing. It’s making sure that the great parts of your stories are free to flourish.

676 - Double Dragon

Mon, 20 Oct 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Best Games - Double Dragon

Double Dragon is all about player expression. Before Double Dragon the variety of game character movements that you could expect might be a jump, maybe a shoot or punch action. Some games might even contain contextual action like climbing a ladder or interacting with part of the level. Never much more than that.

By comparison, Double Dragon blows the interaction doors wide open.

In a lot of ways Double Dragon hasn’t aged as well as some other games. It is plagued with terrible slowdown. Some of the jumps are designed to steal your quarters. Once you really learn the combat, you can get away with using only a few moves for most of the game.

Of course, when the game came out in 1988 (1987 in Japan) no one was thinking about any of that. No one had ever seen anything like Double Dragon, so it was easy to forgive its faults.

It is true that the only thing you do in Double Dragon is beat up gang members. But maybe that isn’t a problem. As the player, you have more say in the way that you beat all of these gang members than in any game before. Sure, you can punch and kick, but you also have combos, and grab moves, and jump kicks and attacks that aimed in front or behind you. You can change up the timing of your button presses to alter how certain attacks play out. Not only that, but you can move around the levels with amazing freedom. Your only influence on the game is to fight, but Double Dragon sure dos give you a lot of control over where and how you fight.

Double Dragon isn’t the first game to have hand to hand combat, or even hand to hand combat move sets beyond the one or two buttons available on your standard arcade cabinet. In fact, Double Dragon itself is the spiritual sequel to Nekketsu Kōha Kunio-kun (adapted and released as Renegade in the west), a game with incredibly dynamic hand to hand combat.

The real advances of Double Dragon were in making all of that combat variety and player expression accessible and enjoyable. Aside from a few of the quarter stealing jumps and unavoidable hits, Double Dragon is just pleasant to play.

There have been so many belt scroll beat-em up games. Challenges where you walk a character from the left to the right punching and kicking every thug that crosses your path. A great many of them are objectively better games than Double Dragon. More refined. More accomplished. But without Double Dragon, it’s tough to say if those would exist.

Double Dragon took a nascent genre and catapulted it countless steps forward. The developers at Technos got so many things right, maybe not the first time but certainly the second.

Double Dragon is still very fun to play today. It is certainly one of the Best Games.

675

Mon, 13 Oct 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Thankful today for all the people who are, and have been, in my life.

674

Mon, 06 Oct 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve done a lot of driving recently. Well for some of it I wasn’t driving. I was just a passenger. Either way, I have spent a lot of time out on stretches of the flattest, baldest prairie that you could imaging. Just endless miles of unpopulated farmland stretching out to the horizon. Here’s the thing though. That might seem terribly boring, but it really isn’t. I really do live in a very beautiful part of the planet. We watched the sun set multiple times over the last couple of weeks. Not just the twenty minutes or so that the sky turns red orange. The entire sunset, from wickedly bright afternoon to complete darkness. And out on the empty prairie, complete darkness can be pretty damned complete. We stopped to watch the northern lights dancing behind thin clouds. I looked up at the night sky and saw the sweeping arc of our galaxy. I watched dust clouds kicked up by combines finishing the harvest drift across the road in front of me. I drove past golden fields of barley that hadn’t yet been cut. All of that is incredibly beautiful. I used to think that where I grew up and lived was dull. Generic. But it was only generic to me, because that is where I live. I think a lot of people would think that the idea of driving for several hours without passing even a small town might sound boring. Like there is nothing worth looking at out there. That’s just not true. Where I live is amazing. It’s nice to remember that sometimes.

673

Mon, 29 Sep 2025 00:00:00 +0000

This hasn’t been the easiest week. I’ll likely write something longer next week.

672

Mon, 22 Sep 2025 00:00:00 +0000

A few years ago I wrote about riding my bike. At the time, I rode my bike most places. I still do, but maybe not quite as often. I might not ride as often, but I think I ride more than I ever did before.

The biggest change, is that when I ride, and I ride somewhere at least a couple of times a month, I ride the whole time. I used to blend a lot of riding and taking the train. Now, I don’t really take the train. I just ride the twenty or so kilometers to downtown. The four or so kilometers to the grocery store. I don’t ride the train much anymore.

I still very much enjoy a longer ride. It’s equal parts being sort of disconnected from the world, and hyper focused on everything around you. I have only been hit by a vehicle once, and I am not interested in trying that again. A long ride gets me into a flow state, similar to playing a good game.

This is all well and good, but it also means that my bike experiences a bit more wear and tear. Today I started fixing a broken spoke, only to realize that I don’t have any of the right length spokes for my wheels, so I’m off to order more.

Get a bike. They are fun to ride, they get you from place to place, and when you break them they are fairly easy to fix. As long as you have the parts on hand.

671

Mon, 15 Sep 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I like to use processes to create art. A while ago now, I came up with a method of creating a certain type of stylized art. It involves a set of layers interacting with each other in specific ways, but beneath all of that sits a regular old layer of pixels that you (or more specifically, I) paint onto to create the final look.

That isn’t all that surprising. What is surprising is that this is pretty much the same way that I have been making different styles for a long time, and I only recognized it now.

If you have dealt with photoshop or similar graphics programs any time in the last few decades, you will have come across very rapid fire tutorials designed around creating some effect or other. Usually they require a very specific set of steps to create a certain look. Occasionally the tutorial will have you punching specific numbers into a filter or adjustment layer. You will get the look, but only in a tightly prescribed way.

I tend to think that is bunk.

If the effect relies on certain magic numbers or sets of steps that you have to match exactly, well, that ain’t cooking. Cooking requires some looseness, some improvisation. You have to be able to substitute ingredients or swap spices.

The method I created is the same as most of the methods I create. It relies on passing the pixels through sets of operations, but at the lowest level, the artist has all the control. You get to paint or draw what you want.

I won’t share this method just yet, but maybe in a few months when I have the art all readied I will post some. Until then, this is just a weird, vague, jab at unhelpful tutorials.

670 - Porrasturvat - Stair Dismount

Mon, 08 Sep 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Best Games - Porrasturvat - Stair Dismount

What’s the dumbest thing that you can think of to build a game around. Whatever it is, it might not be dumber than Porrasturvat.

Porrasturvat, known in English as Stair Dismount, is a game about falling down a flight of stairs. A weird crash dummy looking character stand atop an unreasonably long flight of stairs. With the mouse, you control a motion vector that will push the character in whatever direction, with whatever force, that you want. That will start the character tumbling down the steps.

Every impact is recorded and the more damage the character receives, the higher the points.

You win by falling. With style.

That’s really all there is to the game. There is no progression. No alternate characters. Nothing that you can do to interact with it past that initial push. It shouldn’t work, but Porrasturvat is extremely addicting.

Maybe it’s the slapstick comedy of watching someone flail head over heels down some stairs. Maybe it’s the fact that it is only a representation of a person and can’t actually be hurt. Maybe it’s the rapid replay time. You can play a round and have the character back up at the top of the stairs and ready for mor in a few seconds.

Maybe it’s just that, in 2002, no one had really seen anything like that before. It wouldn’t be long before game characters would be comedically rag-dolling all over most games, but at the time it was fairly novel.

The early 2000s were a time of real experimentation in games and on the internet. Strange new ideas popped up every few weeks. People were really throwing it at the wall, or down the stairs, to see what sticks.

Porrasturvat might not be one of the biggest games, but it is one of the Best Games.

669

Mon, 01 Sep 2025 00:00:00 +0000

we are flying back after dropping our oldest son off for his first year of university. I found myself thinking about this older post (423) that I wrote several years ago.

There are so many firsts to anticipate. So many firsts that seem so important. So many that you try to record or inscribe to memory.

Most of them will be quickly lost amidst a flood of seconds and thirds and so on. Some you will regret losing to time, some will be better lost. Some will burn so deep in you that you will recall them perfectly and often for years after.

What people never tell you is all the lasts.

There will be a last diaper. A last toddlers tantrum. There will be a last breastfeed. A last daytime nap.

Lasts are usually things you are glad are over. I think this is why people don’t mention them. That last diaper is a real relief and something to look forward to, but you won’t remember it.

Every night before bed I would read to my kids. There was probably a first bedtime story for us, but I don’t remember what it was.

The last was only a few months ago. That was a last that will stick with me.

They like to read on their own now. At night or whenever. I understand it and appreciate it, but I don’t have to like it.

Over the years we went from reading picture books and small short stories to entire series of novels. I didn’t keep count but I know that I have read, out loud, at least 50 novels to my kids.

Some of them I did voices for the different characters. Some I didn’t. Some were so dull I would tune out and think about something else while I said the words on the page. Some I had to fight back tears to read certain scenes. During some of them, everyone was fighting back tears. Doing that every night. Reading stories out loud. That’s the sort of thing that wears a groove into your heart.

Giving that up, giving up reading to them wasn’t something I wanted to do. Of course there are lasts. I knew that this would be one of them. I knew it, but I don’t have to like it.

I know that when the next book in the Kingkiller Chronicle series comes out, I will likely read it on my own, as will they. We will be able to talk about it and discuss it and share it in the way that adults and young adults typically share stories, but I probably won’t read it out loud to them. That stings a little. But for them and for me I know it’s okay. Things change and just as there are firsts, there are lasts. As long as everyone is safe and healthy, lasts are something we all just need to accept. I know it’s more difficult for me than it is for them.

Don’t be too surprised if I start reading some of these posts and recording them. I’ll just call it therapy.

668

Mon, 25 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I’m a bad programmer.

I have written similar sentiments here before, and I likely followed up those comments with the same explanation that I will add here. Like I said, I’m a bad programmer, but that doesn’t mean I don’t program. I have written a fair number of computer programs in several different languages. I have written programs that convert data from one format to another. I have written library software for a large company. I have written enemy ai code for small games. And the list goes on and on. All of these programs worked. Most of them were bad. Badly optimized, badly structured, and badly maintained.

I think that last point might be the worst one.

In the recent past, I have been creating a lot of shaders. Shader programming has very specific requirements, and it’s own semi-specific language designed around manipulating triangles and pixels. Mostly pixels. I’m about as good at shader programming as I am at C# or python, which is not very. But I have been manipulating pixels for a long time, so I have a pretty good intuition about what is and is not possible in that space. I know roughly what effect any particular math operation might have on a pixel or set of pixels.

I can make a good shader. Still, I’m not great at programming them. My code is messy and probably not as efficient as it needs to be.

I have found LLMs like copilot or chatGPT invaluable for this. But there is a catch. I have tried to describe the result that I am looking for from a shader and found that none of these LLMs come anywhere close to creating a usable shader. It’s always borked in some new and exciting way. On the other hand, I am very good at writing code that works but is otherwise awful. The LLMs seem to be pretty good at cleaning that sort of thing up. Organizing and documenting. Pointing out small changes that enhance efficiency. When you are running a program every frame on every pixel, those efficiencies add up.

A bit ago, I adapted a fairly complex texture bombing shader that came on one of the old Nvidia GPU gems books. I could get it running in godot, and even managed to make it run fairly fast. I used an LLM, and it cleaned and organized. My framerate went from a few hundred (already respectable) to thousands. It made a few small tweaks that I may have gotten around to at some point, but I didn’t have to. The best part is that it made my code more readable. When I went back to the shader weeks later, it was so much easier to parse.

I haven’t really tried to use LLMs to create anything from scratch, because they do seem fairly bad at that, but I think I will continue to code badly and use them as an assistant to clean things up for me.

I won’t be using them to create art - ever - so don’t ask.

667

Mon, 18 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I recently finished the game Clair Obscur: Expedition 33. If you haven’t played the game and are spoiler averse, maybe you should just skip this one. I’m going to use this game as an example, but it might get a little bit spoilery.

A little while ago I wrote a thing about the concept of stakes in a story, and how a lot of people, including writers, misunderstand what stakes are and their function in effective fiction. My argument there boiled down to stakes being about empathy, not rising danger in the plot. Stakes are about you, as the audience, empathizing with the characters and what they personally have to lose or gain. Not in a material sense, but in an emotional sense. It doesn’t matter if they are a character that was always going to win, like a superhero or James Bond. Stakes are what James Bond has to gain or lose emotionally. Everything external is plot, not stakes. It’s the how, not the why. Stakes are about why.

The main characters of Clair Obscur are not only functionally immortal, they are mostly fictional. And by saying that, I mean that they are, in narrative, not real people. They are fictional constructs created by other characters in the story. Still, I dare someone to play through that game and not feel deeply for those characters. The creators of Clair Obscur understand stakes.

There is a point at the end of the game where one of the characters simply sits and stares at the camera. They convey a cold anger that forces you, as the player, to contend with all of decisions in the fictional world of the game. Have you treated this character well. Just because they aren’t real, does that give you give you the right to be dismissive of them. It is a moment that works on many levels. It works in the fiction of the game, but it is also unnerving to you, the actual person playing a video game. You have to accept the gravity of your choices. You empathize with this character, and you finally understand the stakes. By that point it is too late. The die has been cast.

The game includes plenty of apocalyptic moments, but it also understands that those aren’t stakes. Every characters connections with one another, those are valuable. Those are stakes.

There are so many more moments that I could mention, but I think that I have already been spoilery enough. If you have any intention at all of playing Clair Obscur, you should stop reading now and start working your way through the game. It is a really great game and it deserves your eyeballs.

666 - Devil’s Crush

Mon, 11 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Best Games - Devil’s Crush

There have been a lot of video pinball games. I’m talking video game simulations of traditional pinball here, not just pinball machines that incorporate some video elements. Most of the early ones were bad. Some of the new ones are quite good. 3D Pinball Space Cadet that came free on a lot of versions of windows is actually very good (but we will get to that one another time). But most of them have one tragic flaw in common. They are trying to be pinball.

I really enjoy pinball. I find a lot of the machines around the early to mid 90s really enjoyable to play. They have the right balance of challenge and exploration. Learning how the games work and then attempting to optimize shots until you can achieve decent scores is pretty fun.

Until very recently, computers couldn’t simulate the physics involved in actual pinball accurately enough for video pinball games to feel real. Most of the history of video pinball is filled with slightly interesting toys that tried to approximate pinball. Like a racing sim, it’s nothing like sitting in a real car but you might get a fun sense of speed out of it.

As soon as simulating fairly accurate physics became attainable, game developers spent a lot of time recreating those old games from the 90s, but didn’t really explore what video pinball could be.

Devil’s Crush, like Alien Crush before it, doesn’t really care how pinball works in the real world. This is video pinball, baby. Your real world rules don’t apply here.

Devil’s Crush is a playfield about eight miles long with zones and warps that transport you to the nether realms of pinball. You might put the ball in one hole only to have it come out into a boss fight against a whirling nightmare of bones. You might hit a target enough times that it transforms into some sort of reptilian ghoul. Strange creatures wander the playfield and redirect the ball every time they are hit by it.

It’s a whole lot of something.

But it isn’t pinball. It’s something else entirely.

I think a lot of times when video game developers try to adapt something from the real world into the digital, card games, board games, sports, they really do their best to preserve that original experience. The lesson of Devil’s Crush is — Don’t.

Video games are untethered to the real world in a way that other games could only dream of. They don’t need to be a simulation of a real thing. They can be weird and wild. They can be a pinball game that plays very little like pinball.

Devil’s Crush is a pinball game that doesn’t play like a pinball game. And that makes it one of the Best Games.

665

Mon, 04 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I just finished reviewing a whole raft of other peoples stories. you might think that it’s difficult to write a story, but trying to constructively critique other peoples stories is so much more difficult.

It’s not like the problem is trying to build up bad stories, or find flaws in good stories. All of the stories I was reading were very well written. it’s more like it was a matter of fine degrees. There might be one tiny thing in a story that otherwise works fantastically, that catches me as slightly off. Or there will be a story that I didn’t feel was working as it was, but is technically so well written. The writer could absolutely adjust the story so that it would work for me. They have the skill. But maybe they shouldn’t try to change it so that it works for me. Maybe I am not their audience. Maybe their audience wants exactly what they wrote.

So there you go. It’s very difficult. I want to be encouraging. Like I said, the writing is almost always great, but I was asked to provide suggestions on ways to improve it, so I tried.

I don’t envy editors. Seems like a difficult job.

664

Mon, 28 Jul 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I’m working on the last story in a group of stories. A bouquet of stories. Will I ever clean them up and send them off to get published? Who knows. Sometimes I just write to write, ya know. Anyway, I had this story idea worked out, but it wasn’t really crystallized. Like, all the vibes were there, but I didn’t have the details. So, instead of typing in random things, I went to exercise. I have a pretty strong belief in running background processes. When you aren’t actively trying to solve a problem, but are engaged in some other task that is more or less automatic, my brain at least, runs background processes. That’s when I figure out solutions to so many problems. Or, if not solutions, different angles of attack on particular problems. So I went to exercise and, whoosh, a whole wave of concrete ways to solve these story ideas flooded in. I had to stop at one point so that I could type up some point form story structure. Now, I’m back at the keyboard, and other than this short aside, I have been typing in actual prose rather than just mashing away at point form notes. I have a bunch more words to tap into this keyboard, so I think I will go do that. If I don’t it will be very late before I get it all punched in.

663 - Mr. Do!

Mon, 21 Jul 2025 00:00:00 +0000

The early days of video games were wild. One developer could come out with a game, and three to six months later another developer would come out with a blatant copy. They might slap on a different color palette, or change the music, but these games would be nearly identical.

The real wild part was, usually this wasn’t even an attempt to rip off someone else’s idea. They were just trying to make a game, any game, and trying to copy one that already existed was a good way to learn how to do that. This is the exact sort of thing that a school would have you do so you could learn the ropes. This is exactly what ninety percent of tutorials would have you do.

Releasing these games for commercial sale was just a consequence of there not being many developers, or rules about the copyright of games at the time.

Most of the time these games were exactly what I said before, copies. But every now and then a game would come along that wasn’t exactly a copy, but a riff on a common theme. Sometimes these games would even be better than the original.

Introducing, Mr. Do!

Mr. Do! Could easily be seen as just a Dig Dug clone. You crawl around in something that seems like it might be dirt just like Dig Dug. If you remove the support of heavy things they will fall down squishing anything below them. That’s straight out of Dig Dug. There are weird monsters chasing you, just like Dig Dug. Seems pretty open and shut, right? They went and cloned Dig Dug. Sure, except Mr. Do! plays nothing like Dig Dug.

Dig Dug is a puzzle action game where you can play fairly casually, if you manage the monsters. If you get caught by the monsters, you probably didn’t manage them well enough. You learn for next time and you do better.

Mr. Do! is a straight up action maze game where you create the maze. It’s what an arcade developer would come up with if you showed them a recording of Dig Dug and then placed them in a clean room to recreate it from scratch. You can see what they were going for, but it is so far removed from the original that it barely resembles it.

The object of the game is to collect every cherry on a level, not to destroy the monsters. Mr. Do, the character, has a long range superball to attack enemies with, but it bounces around, so it’s tricky to use and as soon as you throw it you are defenseless. If apples only fall one tile, they won’t break and you can push them over cliffs onto the monsters like you were defending a medieval castle.

Mr. Do! is not only a very different game from Dig Dug, it is a much more complex game. There are so many things to keep track of and manage, but after a few quick rounds you will start to figure it out. You will start to look for paths. You will always want to collect each group of eight cherries in one unbroken streak to get the collection bonus and listen to the music chime higher and higher.

Making anything is an iterative process. No video game sprang from nothing. Each game was, and continues to be, an iteration on what came before. Often, the next version of an idea will be better, more refined, than the previous one. In 1982 that process was happening at a breakneck pace. Dig Dug came out earlier the same year as Mr. Do!, yet Mr. Do! is packed with so much more.

The real kicker is, Dig Dug is not a bad game. Actually, it’s quite good. It’s just not as good as Mr. Do!. One of the Best Games.

662

Mon, 14 Jul 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I’m still writing short stories. Normally, I am pretty good at writing something based off prompts. It’s like rapid fire word association. I get a prompt, or a couple of prompts, as input, and my brain comes up with several potential stories a few minutes later. They are almost all terrible story ideas, to be sure, but I don’t really get ‘blocked’. I think I have recently experienced the closest I have ever had to being blocked. The last couple of stories that I have worked on have been more difficult than usual, but I think I might know why. I think I might just be less satisfied with my usual ideas. That’s not to say that I think my older stories are bad, but the seed ideas for them, I might pass on those now rather than writing those first few lines. So it’s less of a block and more of a slower ramp up and more searching before landing on an idea that I think might make for a good story. I don’t know if that means that I will be writing better things in the future, or maybe worse things. Maybe this is just normal, maybe it’s a passing phase. In any case, I do have an idea for this current story now, so I better get back to writing it.

661

Mon, 07 Jul 2025 00:00:00 +0000

When I’m creating new 3D models, I like to start with extremely sparse meshes and build them up gradually. The upside to working that way is that it is sort of like filling out a sketch or building simple forms first in a sculpture, and then only adding detail and refinement when you feel like the shapes are right.

The downside is that you end up spending a lot of time looking at very simple shapes and sometimes it seems like they will never look more complex or interesting.

It’s times like those that you have to trust the process. I know that I work simple at the start for a reason, and I have to trust that I will eventually turn those simple shapes into something slightly better to look at. I have plenty of evidence that this is how I have done it in the past and it’s worked out well so far, but every single time, I reach a point in creating new models where I think they will never look better than a few boxes and cylinders.

If you haven’t already guessed, I have reached that point now. I know way back somewhere in the dark parts of my mind, that I have just set up these models for texturing and detail work, but since I haven’t done that work yet the models still look a little bland.

So now I have to trust the process. Know that I will eventually take those simple shapes and make them into something I won’t hate looking at.

It’s happening though, so maybe with some luck, I will have better looking models on my screen later this week.

660

Mon, 30 Jun 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I’m writing a new flash story (under 1000 words) but this time I’m working on making it particularly ‘voicey’. I like to adopt a character for a story every now and then. It isn’t exactly easy to do, but it is an interesting challenge.

Well, this story isn’t going to write itself, so I’m gonna get back to it.

659

Mon, 23 Jun 2025 00:00:00 +0000

For now, this is some fire. I think this won’t be the last version of this fire.

658 - The Legend of Zelda: A Link Between Worlds

Mon, 16 Jun 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Best Games - The Legend of Zelda: A Link Between Worlds

As a series, The Legend of Zelda rarely misses. You could start up just about any entry from the last forty years and have yourself a pretty good time. Some have aged better than others, but they are all top quality games worthy of their own entry here. But right now, I’m gonna focus on one.

A Link Between Worlds is, more or less, the sequel to A Link to the Past. The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past was a magnificent feat of game design, but it came out on the Super Nintendo in 1991. A Link Between Worlds came out on the 3DS in 2013. So it’s maybe less of a sequel and more of a reimagining. A remake that doesn’t try to recreate the beats of its predecessor, but does try to recreate the same feelings. It succeeds at that, and so much more.

I didn’t play A Link to the Past in 1991. I had computers, and played pc games. I definitely played a little of Link to the Past, but it wasn’t until years and years later that I actually got into the game properly on emulators (and later still on real hardware). I didn’t really have the nostalgia that A Link Between Worlds expected to play on. That didn’t matter at all.

I think that A Link Between Worlds could easily be someone’s first Zelda game. But I also think that any game in the series could probably be someone’s first Zelda game. They will provide that nostalgic feeling, manifested from nothing, for every player, no matter their experience with the series. They are games that sort of feel like they have always been there, and, in a way, I suppose they have.

Creating that feeling, that this is a game that has always existed, and will always exist, is exactly what makes A Link Between Worlds feels special. There are so many novel concepts and game mechanics spread all over A Link Between Worlds, but it all feels so recognizable. So woven into the fabric of the medium. A Link Between Worlds is what video games aspire to be. Joyful and engaging, and experiential. It’s an adventure that you live through, just the same way that you have before. Just the same way that you will again, the next time you choose to pick up the controller or the console.

I could write about all the of the individual parts that make A Link Between Worlds so excellent, the graphics, the sounds, individual mechanics, but I think that would be missing the point. The game is an experience, and you can’t really atomize an experience. You just live it.

A Link Between Worlds is one of the Best Games.

657

Mon, 09 Jun 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Many, many years ago, during my university sculpture class, I spent a few weeks welding a lot.

There were a lot of options, but quite a few people in my class decided that they wanted to sculpt with metal. I made a couple of metal sculptures too, but I spent a lot of those few weeks welding up other peoples projects.

I am no expert welder. Far from it. But the studio had a stick welder, and I was one of the few student who had experience stick welding. I was sort of deputized by the professors and grad students to assist anyone who wanted to learn to weld. The result was that I did a lot of basic welding for a while. One evening there was even a line of people waiting for me to tack something up for them so that they could attempt to run a bead. At least a few of those ended in the student burning through the metal and asking me if I could fill it back in for them so the could grind it smooth again.

The end result of that time was that I got at least a little better at welding.

Then I spent literal decades not welding at all.

A few days ago, I broke one of our exercise machines. I knew it might break. In fact it had broken in that exact place before and I had roughly tacked it together with a cheap mig welder that I got at Canadian Tire.

Before this, I had never used a mig welder. I did a very poor job of it, so, of course the weld didn’t hold.

This time I was determined to actually get it right, so instead of just sort of winging it, I looked up some videos on mig welding and learned the proper techniques. Turns out it isn’t super complicated and my new welds are hundreds of times better than the old one.

I did run out of wire partway through the job, but I finally feel like I got the hang of it again.

Welding and grinding this part reminded me of something else. I really love the smell of burning metal. It’s probably horrifically toxic, but it’s a good smell.

656

Mon, 02 Jun 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I have a neat little stack of stories that I am punching up for submission right now. That’s nice and all, but sometimes it can be a bit tricky to take these flash length pieces and rework them in a way that fills them out, without losing that flash length immediacy.

I’ve written somewhere around 20 stories near to 1000 words each. They are all composed of a tight core idea, with very little room left over for character development and world building. Sometimes I manage to fit one or the other in there, but getting a story out of these flash length pieces that feels complete in the way I want, is tricky.

On the other hand, they all have a rapid pace to them that makes setups and payoffs feel snappy and, occasionally, land harder than normal. So the trick is, how to add all the fun character development and world building without losing that propulsive quality.

After a few dozen more stories I will probably have some idea how to pull off both.

655

Mon, 26 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I’m going to try to put some screen shots and a video or gif right at the bottom of this post. I’m not sure how that will work, but hopefully it will.

I changed something pretty fundamental to the graphics in my game, but I think it will be tough for people to figure out what changed, and that’s great. Exactly what I was hoping for. This is where I would probably bore you with the technical details, but I think I will just hold onto this one. I wanted this game to look sort of weird, and I think I might have achieved that now. It will look weird and most people won’t know exactly why. Anyway, enjoy some screenshots and videos if I happen to get them working.

(I haven’t gotten the videos working… yet)

654 - The Terminator : SkyNET

Mon, 19 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000

The 1984 movie The Terminator opens on a hellish version of 2029. A blasted wasteland patrolled by killer robots bent on eradicating all human life from the planet. The Terminator : SkyNET lets you live there.

First person shooters were really only a few years old by the time that SkyNET came out. Wolfenstein 3D came out in 1992 and SkyNET came out in 1996, the same year as Quake. That’s not a lot of time to go from the origin of a genre to fully 3D game engines.

While Quake might have been the more advanced 3D engine at the time, The Terminator : SkyNET was the game that truly nailed the first person 3D controls. You know, the important part. It wasn’t quite using wasd yet, but you could set up a pretty competent control scheme in the standard options menu. For quite a while quake would have players modifying text files to set up mouse and keyboard controls.

As soon as you wrap your head around the first person 3D controls, or modify them to your liking, you suddenly feel immersed in the world of The Terminator. It is bleak and eerie and hostile right from the very first location. You will learn to fear the sound of hunter-killer robot servo-motors since the robots seem to be able to hide virtually everywhere in the post apocalyptic rubble.

It’s unsurprising that developer Bethesda and Todd Howard in particular, would go on to be know for creating living, breathing fantasy worlds for you to play in. By comparison SkyNET is extremely linear, but it does everything it can with its early 3D engine, to feel like a real place. You move around in it like it’s a real place. It reacts to your actions like it’s a real place. It’s primitive, and your interactions are limited, but everything feels solid and connected in a way that wouldn’t happen for again for a few years.

If Quake was the best expression of the first person 3D action game, The Terminator games, Future Shock and SkyNET, were the industries first forays into the world of immersive sims and roll playing. It only gave you one roll to play, but SkyNET felt real in the way that the Elder Scrolls series would later go on to perfect.

I fired up SkyNET just a few nights ago. After changing the keyboard to a more comfortable wasd, I fell right into it again. The game holds up and feels challenging and immediate in a way that almost nothing from its era did. It is, after all, one of the Best Games

653

Mon, 12 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I wrote that whole thing last week about the rise, and repeated fall, of authentic media. It was a sort of eulogy of Giant Bomb, a website, and collection of revolving personalities, that I have followed since before its inception. I was a fan of GameSpot’s On the Spot podcast and the people there who eventually left to form Giant Bomb.

This week, the people who worked at Giant Bomb purchased it. It has now become what it always should have been. A fully independent games media, news, critique and comedy website. The people who own it could build it up or drive it off a cliff, but either way, it won’t be because they are trying to please an advertiser or pivoting to serve corporate whims.

For what it’s worth, I think that the site has done some of the best work it ever has in the past couple of years. If the people doing that work are the new owners, Giant Bomb is probably in very good hands.

I’m excited to see what they do.

652

Mon, 05 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Back before MTV or MuchMusic, there were music video shows. At first it was just segments of music or dance shows that would run a video or two. Eventually, there were hour long blocks of television reserved for music videos. The music video was a new and rising art form and at least a few people out there decided that there was an opportunity available for anyone who could present a platform for that art.

There was, of course, a need for someone to host such things. Radio DJs became video VJs. Someone who could throw to the next three minute clip and maybe conduct an interview or two. The hosts were always secondary to the content, the music videos.

When MTV, and then MuchMusic, launched in the early 80s, there were literally not enough music videos produced to fill an entire day of programming. That meant a lot of the hosts vamping to fill air time.

In the early days of MuchMusic it was fairly easy to tell that this was a scrappy operation. Maybe a dozen or so people just doing their best to keep an entire television station up and running. That meant that you, as the audience, got a lot of time with the hosts. They were trying to make something slick and well produced, but it leaked around the edges.

I’m not sure when, or even if, they figured it out but fairly soon, the hosts became as big a draw to the channel as the music videos. Their quips, interactions and ad-libs. Real, authentic personalities were why the audience came and stayed. That’s the sort of authenticity that only happens when you don’t have enough money or people to make something slick and well produced.

In the late 90’s, video streaming and on demand video were just starting up. Home internet fast enough to deal with streamed video wasn’t exactly commonplace, but a few pioneers started give it a try. Most failed quickly. Some failed due to lack of resources. Some due to lack of audience. Others failed due to gross mismanagement. You know, the normal ways companies die. Not one of them died because video streaming was the wrong business to be in.

My favorite industry to follow is, and always has been, video games. As soon as people were able to stream video, I knew that video commentary and reporting on video games was soon to follow. Not highly produced, timed, and packaged TV content either. This stuff would be made by people as interested in the game industry as their audience. I found a few.

I remember bringing a copy of a video from the AllGames Network to the animation studio where I was working at the time. Most people didn’t seem that interested. One person said that it seemed amateurish. I remember thinking then, that is what you want. Not badly done video work, but scrappy, authentic work. They started other shows and joined the Pseudo streaming video company. The whole thing was local UHF channel levels of bootstrapped, but it was streamed from a studio in New York to anywhere in the world.

It was authentic, and I knew it couldn’t last. Eventually those people went on to start the G4 channel. The shows were better produced. They had flashy intros and music. They didn’t feel authentic. This wasn’t a person who loves a thing talking to you, another person who loves that thing. This was a filtered and distilled version of that. A packaged thing made to appeal to advertisers. Prettier, but less authentic.

By the mid-2000s, streaming video had proven itself. The next big entertainment platform would be a series of audio and video streaming web sites. Of course, video game journalists were on the forefront of that. There were several groups that tried it, but the pattern was always the same.

Some people from editorial would manage to get enough of a budget to get a few people on camera to talk about games. The people on camera would put way more of themselves into it than the production warranted. The result would be something scrappy, a bit clunky, and extremely authentic.

That authentic thing would get attention, and someone higher up the corporate ladder would take notice. They would think that it looked amature or janky, but it would also cost a lot more to produce that slick, polished product that would appeal to advertisers. So they would shut it down. Why put money into a product that you can’t sell. The problem with that thinking is, authenticity draws an audience.

By the time Giant Bomb started in 2008, several companies had tried, and failed, to create a streaming channel about video games. Most of them had the right idea. Create videos that speak to your audience, grow that audience, sell advertisers on the size and dedication of the audience, not on the quality of the video being produced. Stay authentic and you can’t lose.

Giant Bomb had been around for seventeen years. In all that time people higher on the corporate ladder never really figured out the secret. The secret is, there is no secret. Let the VJs VJ, let the hosts talk. Let them connect with their audience and then sell advertisers on the size and dedication of that audience. Seems simple enough.

Well, maybe whatever new thing emerges from the husk of Giant Bomb will be the one that gets it right. I suppose we will see.

651

Mon, 28 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I’m making my game using the Godot game engine. I have used Unity pretty extensively in the past, and recently I have been using Unreal for some other work, but I’ll be sticking with Godot for my personal project.

One of the main reasons is that Godot is open source and free to use. Of course, that means that the tools and engine features aren’t as well developed as some of the other engines out there, but it also means that I should be able to keep using this particular version of Godot for as long as I want. My ability to keep working on my game isn’t subject to corporate whims.

Now, there is no guarantee that everyone currently working on Godot won’t suddenly quit, or that they won’t change the license terms to make it unpalatable or impossible to upgrade to a new version of the engine, but the current versions are under pretty permissive licenses. Nothing is 100%, but using Godot is, currently, a pretty safe bet.

The other reason I’m sticking with it, is that I can sort of bend it to do what I need. I am making a retro-looking 2D game that is actually nothing of the sort. It is a set of fairly complex shaders layered over 3D polygons and dynamic lighting systems. This is probably not the way most people would go about creating an arcade style pixel art game, but that’s what I wanted to do. Godot lets me create that.

Just this past week I had a technical issue with malfunctioning positioning, but, because you can sort of bend the engine to do what you need, I changed some scripts, wrote a couple new ones, and fixed the issue. Of course it wasn’t as easy as that sounds, and it took hours of very annoying testing and bug fixes, but it works now. I’m sure I could do similar things in Unity and Unreal, but not without difficulty. Some of the ways they work can be shockingly inflexible.

Work on the game is still progressing slowly, but it is progressing. In the last little while I made some pretty major updates to the way everything is rendered, that is not only faster and more memory efficient, but it looks better too.

One day I will get enough of it pieced together to put a demo on Itch, but that day isn’t today. Today, I’m making 3D tiles, gantries, and door frames.

650

Mon, 21 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I sat down here, an hour or so ago, with the intention of playing a game. I have a couple of new games I have been trying out, but I didn’t end up playing any of those. I played old games.

I know that might make some sense. Old guy, old games. Except these weren’t old games, like nostalgic from my childhood games, these were games from somewhere in the vicinity of the last generation of consoles. Maybe a bit older than that. So, some solidly PS4, late PS3 type games. In the orbit of ten years old.

I do a lot of going back and looking at games that were made many decades ago. Games that feel like they are from a different time. Mostly because they are. Games that have a very different feel. A different sensibility.

Games from late in the PS3 or anywhere in the PS4 lifespan, don’t actually feel that different from games that came out a few months ago. In the entire history of video games, that is a strange thing.

If you picked any two games ten years apart from each other, at any time in the history of this medium, which I’ll admit, only really spans about five decades, they would feel like completely different beasts.

Ten years before Super Mario Bros. Jerry Lawson is coming up with the idea for the first game cartridge. Pong is still a pretty neat thing, and almost every video game is a very simple black and white experience.

Ten years after Super Mario Bros. the selection seems limitless. You could play through a hand painted wonderland in Yoshi’s Island, or pilot fully 3D hovercraft at breakneck speed in Wipeout. If you time jumped from one to the other, the games from 1995 would have seemed like magic.

By 2005, video games had become highly interactive 3D worlds like Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas. Massively Multiplayer Online games let thousands of players connect, cooperate, and compete with one another in shared game worlds. Maybe these games are slightly more recognizable to players from 1995, but how people play them it wildly different.

There are many video games from 2015 that are still running, and still play very similar today. I play Rocket League semi-regularly. It has been tweaked behind the scenes, but it is largely the same game as it was a decade ago. Caves of Qud was released in early access in 2015. It was fully released a few months ago.

For all of video games five or six decade history, technology has pushed forward at such a breakneck pace that the art of the medium never settled. There were no classics of the medium that you could confidently suggest to someone new the video games. A person who has never seen Jaws, will still enjoy Jaws. A person who has never seen The Shawshank Redemption, or The Sound of Music, or so very many other movies could be handed a copy and they will probably enjoy it in the same way that audiences did when those films were new. You can’t give someone Breakout and expect that it will hold their attention for long.

The graphics and sound might be slightly less wowing in a game from a decade ago, but only slightly. And it’s not like there aren’t massive changes in technology and advances in the art of making games, there are. But just like Jaws and Jurassic Park both still land the same with audiences, even with decades between them, I think we have hit a similar place with video games. We have hit the point where the medium can grow.

One of my favourite pieces of art across all mediums and of all time, is a video game. Several are video games actually, but I am thinking of one in particular that uses the medium in such a unique and perfect way, but still has something important and human to say. Outer Wilds came out several years ago now, but I can’t imagine it will be any less potent in another decade or two. That is where this art form is now. It‘s not a gimmick or a diversion or a technical trick. It is an artistic medium where people removed by distance and time from their audience can still make a calculated impact.

Video games are great. You should go play some. New or old, because it just doesn’t matter anymore.

649

Mon, 14 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I had been writing a different thing about games for this post, but I thought instead that I would say this.

My story Birds, Vibrant and Wild, published in Kaleidotrope’s winter 2025 issue, received a nice review and recommendation in Locus.

While that is pretty cool, I did also receive an amazingly quick rejection for another story that I thought was not too bad, so there is some balance.

Anyway, if you haven’t read Birds, Vibrant and Wild, you should go do that. You can read it safely knowing that I’m not the only one who thinks you should.

648 - Grand Theft Auto

Mon, 07 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Best Games - Grand Theft Auto

If you made a pie chart of the entire video game industry, every property and title broken out into its own set of wedges, there would be a very slim few that would be instantly identifiable. Pokémon, Call of Duty, Minecraft, and, of course, Grand Theft Auto.

Modern Grand Theft Auto is an enormous blockbuster juggernaut absolutely stuffed with ways to dick around in a comically violent world. They are massive, sprawling things with massive, sprawling budgets. The only part of that description that doesn’t fit with the first entry in the series, is the budget.

Before GTA3 turned the entire franchise into a 3D, third person, narrative adventure, it was a top down crime playground.

It’s sort of amazing, going back to the original, how much of the series is already built out in that first entry. GTA is probably the most realized, living world available in a game at that time. The city (Liberty City, San Andreas, or Vice City) is just moving and living at all time. The streets are filled with traffic, the sidewalks are full of people. Emergency vehicles, taxies, and busses go about their business. And all of it is a sandbox waiting for you to create havoc.

That’s the thing that makes GTA fun. Havoc.

Yes, of course, there are missions that you need to complete to advance in the game, and yes, most of them require you to play things safe. You will need to drive safely, or get from place to place without drawing too much attention to yourself. But all of those are thin barriers set up around the things you really want to do in the game. Drive fast, crash cars, fire guns, wreck things, hurt people, etc. etc. etc. You can cut loose at any moment, but you won’t because that tension is also fun. Knowing that you can do anything at any moment, but choosing to play the game “by the rules” is very entertaining. You aren’t forced to play GTA in any specific way, but you are frequently asked. How you play is entirely up to you.

Most of the time when I played GTA, I would just cause as much chaos as possible and see how long it took the increasing police presence to stop me. Much the same way that people play the later entries in the series. When I got tired of that, I would play through the missions and progress the story. That is also the way people tend to play the later entries in the series.

More than the living open world, more than the over the top crime story, that is the success of GTA as a bit of game design. Allowing you to do anything you want at any time, but offering the player voluntary constraints on that type of play that you can dip in and out of at will, is a very sticky way to build a game.

Knowing what will be fun, and then letting players decide for themselves how to engage with that fun is what makes Grand Theft Auto one of the Best Games.

647

Mon, 31 Mar 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I haven’t written about it here, because it didn’t seem relevant to what I write, or draw, or model, or whatever, but I do have some thoughts about generative AI. Some of them are even good.

There is a lot of backlash against generative AI, specifically the models and tools that create its version of imagery, music, and creative writing. It can be easy for advocates of these tools to claim that any criticism of gen AI tools comes from a place of sour grapes and whining. After all, they say, gen AI tools are coming for artists jobs. That is both a tiny bit right, and entirely wrong. Let me explain.

Generative AI tools, the kinds that create art, are fascinating. They can iterate on patterns, often starting from little more than pseudo-random noise, until they create an image or bit of music that is recognizable as art. That is, and you will have to admit this even if you don’t like the results it produces, amazing. I even think it can be useful, just not in the way that is currently getting a lot of buzz.

Much of the backlash against gen AI tools is that they, necessarily, use the art of human creators to do what they do. Human art is just fodder for the machine and much of it is stolen, as none of the original creators gave permission for their art to be fed into the AI model. This is all one hundred percent correct and true. Gen AI tools do copy from human artists, and those human artists should have the rights to their works respected. This isn’t just me stating how I feel about the whole situation, this is how copyright law in most of the world works. If a company duplicates your work, for any reason, you should be compensated for that, or at the very least, you should be aware of it. And Gen AI tools do duplicate the artwork, in sort of a weird mish-mashy, cuisinart sort of way, but it is, provably, copied into a digital data-model.

So the artsies got that one right. The companies behind Gen AI models do steal copyrighted works to build their systems. Which is stupid, since there are many-many sources of copyright free or licensable art available. It would have honestly cost them very little to operate on the right side of that whole issue. But that’s not even my problem with Gen AI tools. But maybe I should get into what I think they can be good for first.

Photoshop, and other digital image manipulation tools, have had something like a generative fill, or content aware fill, for quite a while. This tool does a similar thing as most Gen AI tools. It creates a new bit of image to patch in an area with new content. Say you had a photo of a beach with a lighthouse over on the right side. You like the photo, but wish it were about twenty percent wider and that the lighthouse sat closer to two thirds of the way across the composition and that there was more beach and rocks on the right side of the photo. Content aware fill can help you to accomplish that. It will create some new beach over on the right and do it’s best to blend it all in. Again, it’s pretty amazing. Now, these tools won’t do this automatically, and it will take the work of a skilled photo manipulator to do a really good job of it, but this is an example of an artist using Gen AI as a tool to do something that would have been difficult, or even impossible, without it. I’m certain that there are many examples of similar tools used for music production, film production, wood carving, tile design, etc, etc, etc. But at the core of the work will be a person making choices. And here is were I think a lot of the hyped Gen AI stuff will always come up short, no matter how much computer power you throw at them.

Humans are humans. We have been around for a few hundred thousand years. Other hominids, for a few million years before that. Animals that would eventually evolve into humans, maybe five hundred or so million years before that. That is a lot of time. A lot of iteration. A lot of refinement. Our brains run on a fraction of the power of a typical computer, but process information with a complexity that we struggle to comprehend and are no where near replicating in a digital model. When you tell a computer to create art, that is the problem that you are trying to solve.

The problem is humans. The problem isn’t replicating an art style, or building a coherent song. The problem is people. Humans don’t even fully understand other humans, but we do know how to solve the human problem. We do know how to communicate, connect, and empathize. We have to, because solving the human problem is what keeps us alive.

We instinctively know what choice of words, what series of notes, what daub of color, will strike another human emotionally. We know what makes us tick. Even if we can’t always explain why.

I’m not even saying that there is anything special about humans. I think we are a solvable problem. I think an intelligence that isn’t us, could relate and interact with us. It’s just very, very hard. Much more difficult than our current AI tools are capable of solving. Humans are a more complicated problem than the hypsters are letting on.

We didn’t learn how to solve humans from our parents, we didn’t gradually build up a model for it as we grew. It is built into our cells. It’s fundamental to who we are as animals. It’s how we are built. It’s how we were built over millions and millions of years. It’s the only way we have made it this far.

That’s it. That’s the problem that a generative AI art machine needs to solve if whoever created it wants it to churn out art that doesn’t feel synthetic to human eyes, ears, and thoughts. It needs to be human. Or at least a really good simulation of one.

We ain’t there yet.

Current gen AI tools sort of average out all of the art that they have absorbed (stolen?) to present the viewer with something that seems similar to what a human would make. And of course it does, because humans already made all that art, it’s just been jumbled up and rearranged by a predictive algorithm to provide the nearest guess at what a human would have made. When it gets that guess right, it can look wonderful. It can be a useful tool. It can help an artist move a lighthouse a kilometer down the beach. When it gets it wrong, it will look exactly like what it is, a computers best approximation of what a human might have done.

You know who solves that problem with a shockingly high success rate? Humans. It’s not that Gen AI is a bad tool. It’s not, in fact it can be a great tool. It’s just not being used to solve the right problems at the moment.

646

Mon, 24 Mar 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I just prepped one story to send out (it will probably be in the hands of a publisher by the time I post this), and I am getting another one ready (again, it might be ready by the time you read this). It’s been a hot minute since I sent out a story. I’d almost forgotten how to format a story. Almost, but not quite. There is no single way to format a story for submission to an outlet. There is a standard, but there are usually unique requirements for each outlet. Just simple things. Specific fonts, ways to organize the header. Nothing onerous, but it does meant that you can’t just send things out on autopilot, you need to actually make the effort to figure out how an outlet likes to operate. And while you are there, maybe read some of the stories they publish and figure out if they are a good fit for what you are writing. I will likely get back a quick rejection or two, but I have to say, I sort of missed it. Maybe I should keep fixing up the many other stories that I have sitting on the back burner. At least one of them has to be good, right? That’s just normal odds.

645

Mon, 17 Mar 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I am redesigning some of the assets for my game, because a few of them didn’t fit the gameplay and level designs.

I tried to make the airship work, but it just didn’t. So now the airship is a lifter and the ambulance is a regular ground type vehicle. I really wanted the player to be able to fly around, but creating obstacles in the air felt false and arbitrary. I know that 90s arcade games could be arbitrary, but false always feels bad.

These are just drawings, but the model will be coming along shortly.

644 - No One Lives Forever

Mon, 10 Mar 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Best Games - The Operative: No One Lives Forever

Looking, and sounding, like the full color mod-styled version of Emma Peel, Kate Archer is the sort of protagonist that would be surprising and eye catching today. In the year 2000, she absolutely stood alone.

No One Lives Forever, is a great bit of tongue-in-cheek 60s spy fiction in a game genre that desperately needed some levity at that time. The game industry’s tendency to head straight toward grim military shooters was in full effect in the early 2000s, just not at Monolith. Even when they eventually did a military shooter, it was with a character driven horror twist. To this day, No One Lives Forever remains a pretty special game.

Graphically, it holds up very well for a Twenty-Five year old game. The stylization is subtle, but helps the game look better than it’s age. Similar to what a company like Arkane does with their characters, Monolith is creating caricatures that look just real enough that they mesh with their environment.

Gameplay-wise, NOLF is a pretty standard first person shooter. As secret agent Kate Archer you sneak around the lairs of evil masterminds taking out henchmen as you go. Unlike most shooter games, NOLF is riddled with quippy dialogue and knowing asides to the sexist attitudes of 60s spy fiction. It’s smart, it’s funny, it’s full of set pieces and dynamic action. Above all, it just feels great to play.

Monolith has appeared on this list of Best Games before, and I think they will likely show up again. They just made games a little different than most other studios. They had a better sense of pacing. They understood when to take control and when to leave it up to the player. NOLF isn’t a bombastic, over the top, experience. It’s subtle and restrained. That’s something extremely surprising from a game released in 2000. Honestly, it might be surprising in a game released today. A game doesn’t have to do everything, or be dozens of hours long. It can just be what it needs to be. Fun.

In a perfect world we would be reading announcements of a new NOLF game in development. Instead, the IP license for the game is stuck in legal quagmire where several companies literally don’t know if they own it or not, and Monolith, the original developer has been shuttered in an objectively stupid move by Warner Bros.

So that means there are shockingly few ways to find and play No One Lives Forever, but if you can, you probably should. It remains one of the Best Games.

643

Mon, 03 Mar 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Many months ago I started making the switch from using a lot of cloud services to backup and host files to a mostly self hosted setup. It hasn’t been entirely without issues, but I have been pleasantly surprised by how well a lot of these solutions work.

Most of my setup is based around a couple of Raspberry Pi single board computers running Dietpi Linux, a Debian Linux that has been optimized to run on very lightweight hardware. The name might imply that you need to run it on a Raspberry Pi, but it’s really just the same base OS as Ubuntu so it can run on whatever computer you have. A lot of ARM based computers, and pretty much 100% of X86 computers. If you have an old computer of any sort, you can probably run Dietpi on it.

Installed on one of them, I have Pihole, a dns based ad and pop up blocker. You point whatever device you have at that machine and it will preemptively block most ads before they ever have the chance to reach your computer or device. It really makes using the web much nicer. Even speeds up some slow sites.

On another I have Nextcloud for file storage and backup. Pretty much my own private Dropbox. It is possible to have Nextcloud set up for many users and use it to host and send files across the internet. But I ain’t having none of that. I’m using it as a NAS that automatically backs up the files that I want backed up. I know that I need offsite backup as well, and I have that mostly covered, or in the works.

Lastly, I have a Jellyfin server for movie and music rips. It’s nothing complicated, but it works.

I had most of this stuff up and running very quickly, but organizing and configuring it so that it works reliably and is expandable took some time. Now that it’s set up though, I really would never go back to paying for something like Dropbox. I like having easy access and control over the entire setup. Also I was born with the gene that makes me want to tinker with things, so really that’s probably what this whole thing was about anyway.

Now I may need to buy a rack… please, somebody stop me if I legitimately start shopping for a rack.

642

Mon, 24 Feb 2025 00:00:00 +0000

At the end of these story competitions it is customary to write a summary of all of your stories and how you arrived at them.

While I do enjoy reading other writers summaries, I really don’t like writing them myself.

I always sort of figure that I wrote the story, people read the story, that’s the end of it. If they want to tell me that they read the story, great. If they want to ask me anything about it, less great. Either I won’t have an answer, or worse, the answer I have won’t be very satisfying. It will probably be something along the lines of “oh, I lifted that particular bit of the story from an episode of Go-Bots”. And I don’t think that will be what most people are looking for.

I like to take concepts that I have seen in other media, and then rework them to be more grounded or more human. That’s about it. I do come up with new things along the way, or sometimes I might start with a “what if this anime went a different way” and then build from there, but I just don’t think knowing that makes the experience of the story any better.

That said, I will finish writing my summary, because I know that I enjoy reading other peoples, so maybe someone will enjoy reading mine.

641

Mon, 17 Feb 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Well, I wrapped up the last story for this short story competition thing. The results aren’t all in, but I did… fine.

A lot of my stories ended up somewhere in the middle of the list, but they got some decent comments. The thing with this competition is, it’s not really a competition at all. Really it’s a good way to get a lot of other writers, some of whom are very good, to look over a first draft of your work and offer a lot of opinions and advice.

The competition part of it Is just for fun, and a good way to try to push yourself, but really you do it for the reviews and comments.

Now I get to take all those comments and edit up these stories to send out. Weirdly enough, even though this is a flash (under 1000 words) competition, I think this might be the first year that I actually wrote things that could fit in a flash format.

Time to edit.

640 - Red Baron

Mon, 10 Feb 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Best Games - Red Baron

Anyone who played arcade games in the 80s remembers Battlezone. Battlezone was that tank game made up of vector lines and blocky shapes. It was in first person, felt fully three dimensional, and it was unlike any other game in the arcade at the time.

Well, unlike any other game except of Red Baron.

Battlezone was a ploddingly slow experience, where the tension you felt was mostly because you could see the shots coming but you just weren’t able to grind yourself out of the way in time.

Red Baron, on the other hand, can be blindingly fast.

In Red Baron, you take control of a WWI biplane firing inaccurate machine guns at other biplanes, zeppelins, gun turrets, and other targets. The action can be extremely frantic. You often have to dodge and weave around bullets coming at you from multiple attackers, all while not crashing into oncoming mountain ranges.

Red Baron is the sort of game that shouldn’t have existed in 1981. It moves too fast. It’s too sharp and fluid. It actually feels real. Not like a simulation or anything, but when you move the joystick, your biplane responds like you want it to. When you fire your machine gun, bullets spray in a wild, but tight, pattern. You don’t exactly have to lead targets, but you can see that bullets drift away from your heading. These are all things that wouldn’t really happen in flight simulator games for years.

Yes, it’s a simple game. Yes, after you have played it for a few minutes, you will have seen everything the game has to offer. There are no special stages or boss enemies. But, just because it’s a short game, doesn’t mean that it’s a bad game. You could say the same about PAC-MAN, and that game is great.

I found Red Baron in an arcade well after its prime. Not many people played it, but I put many quarters into that machine. It captured a very core felling of high speed 3 dimensional movement that I don’t think I experienced again until I played Quake, or Terminator Future Shock. On the other side of that screen was a real place, and I was moving through it.

Maybe if Battlezone had been a little faster or a little more nimble, I would be singing its praises, but no. I’m here for Red Baron, one of the Best Games.

639

Mon, 03 Feb 2025 00:00:00 +0000

If you read these, you’re probably getting as tired of reading about writing as I am about writing about writing. I just finished editing and submitting a story, so I’m low on words at the moment. I think I’ll just leave it at that. Maybe next week I’ll write about a game!

638

Mon, 27 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000

The Global Game Jam was this past weekend. And I didn’t participate. Because I was doing this writing jam. A jam is a jam though. One of the major parts of a jam is that you are given a prompt, or a bunch of prompts and what you make from those prompts will be anyone’s guess. I have done a lot of jams by now and I have a few rules for dealing with prompts. It turns out, for me at least, the rules are the same if I am jamming on a game or jamming on some writing. I’ll drop some of them here.

never take the prompt literally. If the prompt is, say, breaking glass, don’t just make a game about breaking glass. Like a breakout clone where all the bricks are glass. That’s dull. Maybe you are in a submarine and you are trying to patch a leaking window before too much water comes in or it shatters and kills you. Maybe you are doing a workplace simulation and you are trying to break the glass ceiling. Maybe you doing a crossing that transparent bridge… wait. No. Squid Game already did that. Just do something that isn’t the most obvious thing and you will have so much more fun.
Combine prompts. If you happen to get more than one prompt, or even if you didn’t, mix a couple together. This seems like it would make it more difficult, but, strangely enough, I usually find it makes the entire process easier. Something about adding extra constraints seems to make it more clear what sort of idea to chase.
Arrive with an idea. Now don’t come in thinking that you will make a certain sort of game or a certain sort of story, but set yourself some goals. One game jam I came in and my only goal was to animate something. Another jam, I only wanted to do pixel art. If it’s a writing jam, think about writing something sad, or in a strange style. Arrive thinking that you will write a sonnet and then work the prompts into that structure. But, of course, be ready to ditch that structure if you come up with a better idea during the jam. It will happen.
Do something fun. Doing jams is stressful, but it can be a very positive sort of stress. If you aren’t having fun with an idea pretty much right away, you definitely won’t be having fun when you are trying to squash some impossible bug at 3am. Same goes for writing… except without the bugs. Fun doesn’t have to mean funny or light hearted either. Sometimes making something very grim can be fun.

If you do any, or all, of those your jam experience will be so much better, believe me.

637

Mon, 20 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000

The writing competition I am in adheres to a very strict, very tight, word count. It’s pretty easy to blow past that limit and have to walk everything back, one word at a time. I managed to wrestle it down. This time. I have found this practice of hitting certain word counts really supercharges my editing. When you are looking for more concise ways to word things, you also find better ways to make an impact. Better ways to get to a certain feeling or vibe. You can’t count on long, flowery, descriptions. You need to get to the heart of what you are trying to say, quickly and efficiently. I have found that this practice had the effect of making me more aggressive when editing, even when I didn’t need to hit a specific limit. My current stories are more compact. I don’t know that this will work for everyone, but just like doing a lot of reps can strengthen your muscles, a lot of editing makes you better at editing. If you are looking to improve your writing, I fully recommend joining a similar competition or jam.

636

Mon, 13 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I’m doing another one of those writing contest things. Writing very short stories every weekend for at least a little while.

I’ve only just started, so I don’t really have much to say about it yet.

What I have done though, is learned a little more about how to use Obsidian.

This is the first time since I started using Obsidian that I have had to export something written in it to a manuscript format. I have worked on some stories here in this app, but I had them in other places and other apps where the formatting had already been worked out.

You might think that it should be easy. Pick a font, set your line spacing and done, right? I wish. There are a lot of differences between how obsidian treats text and how other apps, like Word, treat text. It’s much simpler and more flexible, but it’s also not what people reading short stories want to see. A standard Word .doc or .docx format file is just nicer to look at in a lot of software.

I have found a bunch of .css snippets that are starting to get the format looking right, and I have a handful of ways to export. Some are easy, but aren’t quite right. Some take a few more steps, but seem to get the job done.

I know this though. After a few weeks of pushing out formatted stories, I will probably have a solid workflow. And that’s good, because I have a few stories here that I have to try to sell.

635 - Full Throttle

Mon, 06 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Best Games - Full Throttle

The early to mid 90s, point and click adventure games were the hot genre. I mean, sure, there were lots of other types of games out there. Sports games were just ramping up and up. But point and click adventure games were really pushing the whole medium forward. If there was a new technology, point and click adventures had the budget to take advantage of it. CD-ROM, point and click adventure games. Broad color palettes, point and click adventure games. Full motion video, voice acting, character animation, dynamic soundtracks, digital recording. All point and click adventure games.

Let’s not forget, putting story in games. That’s all on adventure games… well, text adventure games first, of course, but point and click adventures picked up that flag and ran with it well into the early 2000s.

One thing that adventure games of that era didn’t usually do, was innovate on gameplay. For an awfully long time those types of games were called graphical adventure games, because they were text adventure games with a slight drizzle of graphics on the top half of the screen. They had a text parser and everything. You had to type in directions for the your character to walk north or west or climb up the stairs. I honestly think that is one of the reasons why almost everyone under 50 can type now. They had to learn so that they could play Kings Quest.

Eventually, the mouse became the de facto method of interacting with images on a screen, and you could just click on the verbs and nouns rather than keying them in. More of a lateral move than any real innovation.

In the very early 90s, a few games in the, now, point and click adventure genre, removed the words entirely and switched to an entirely icon based interface. There were icons for all of the major interactions that a player could attempt. Walk to a place, look at a thing, interact with or pick up that thing, talk to a person, etc.

While that did make the games more inviting, and quicker to navigate for experienced players, they also created a bit of thematic distance for the player. Sure, you can click on a thing, but will the hand icon pick up that thing, move that thing, or do some other action that you weren’t intending. Also, are computer icons, laid out in a line on the top or bottom of the screen, really appropriate for a swords and sorcery medieval world? All those icons meant that you were playing a game, and if you were looking to be immersed in a world, well here is your constant reminder that you are looking through a glass window on your computer screen.

I don’t know if Full Throttle was the first game to create a fully themed, pop up, interface. One with the absolute minimum of options needed to interact with the world. It might not have been the first, but it was easily the most successful.

In Full Throttle you control biker gang leader, Ben. Ben can talk to people and look at things, but otherwise he can really only grab, punch, or kick. That’s who he is. That’s how he deals with the world. He punches and kicks it.

When you aren’t punching or kicking, the interface just goes away, and suddenly you are watching a fairly funny animated movie.

The entire world of Full Throttle is sort of a “what if Mad Max, but kind of nice, and only a little devastated”. And the way you interact with the game reflects that. You punch and kicks things, but in a comic violence sort of way. Ben is sort of loveable, when you get to know him. Most of his rage is directed at kicking in doors.

Every point and click adventure game after Full Throttle adopted some form of context sensitive interface. A floating radial menu, or a system that tries to be clever and infers what the player might want in any given situation. It’s a system that can still be found in point and click adventure games 20 years later.

Maybe it’s time for a new innovation, or maybe it still works. Either way, Full Throttle is still a great game. I would even say, it’s one of the Best Games.

634

Mon, 30 Dec 2024 00:00:00 +0000

I hope everyone is having a happy holiday.

633

Mon, 23 Dec 2024 00:00:00 +0000

I would bet that everyone who writes fiction has some basic rules that they follow. Probably, a lot of them are rules learned from courses or instructional books on writing. At least a few of them will be something the writer came up with themselves. Some might even be unconscious or at least unvoiced directives.

I have a few rules for myself. They are simple things. Rules with lots of room in the margins. Here is a very short list.

The only grammar rule is clarity. Characters can get into trouble by accident, but they have to get out of trouble on purpose. Stakes are always personal.

I think the first two rules are fairly self explanatory. You could run any collection of words, use any punctuation, even modify spelling, but as long as your intentions are clear to the reader and it conveys the story you are intending to tell in the way you are trying to tell it, you’re good. Anyone who thinks that intentionally breaking grammar ‘rules’ is wrong, is a pedant who wouldn’t enjoy your story anyway. Shakespeare would have ignored them, and you can too.

The second one, I won’t get too much into. You know accidental solutions when you see them, and it never makes a story better.

The third one, I think needs some explanation, because I don’t think that people fully understand the concept of stakes.

Stakes in a story are not ‘the world could end’, ‘the universe is in danger’, or ‘someone could die”. None of those are stakes. They are plot. They are the answer to ‘what is happening in this story?’, not ‘why should I care?‘. Or, more important, why does a character in my story care, and why do I empathize with them. Stakes are about empathy.

You read a lot about things like superhero fatigue or that people find action movies boring. Often, they will often follow with, ‘If the audience knows the hero will succeed, there are no stakes’ , or that the stakes don’t feel realistic so they are taken out of the story. Of course it’s always painfully easy to point out exceptions, superhero movies that those same people enjoy, action movies that get them excited. Stakes are not about levels of danger, they are about empathy.

This is why the last rule on my list is there. Stakes are always personal. Stakes are not about the external events that put pressure on the protagonist. They are about the way the protagonist feels about them. They are not about the external people and things they could stand to lose. Stakes are about the parts of the character that could break as a result of those losses. The parts of their heart that couldn’t bear that level of suffering. Stakes are about burden. As an audience, we have to feel that burden too. Stakes are always personal, and stakes are about empathy.

So the next time you watch a show or read a book that leaves you feeling flat or unsatisfied, think about the stakes. Did they drive you to empathize with the protagonist. Did you feel what they feel. Did the writer make it matter to you. I think you will find, most attempts at stakes were only plot. They were an excuse for the action. They weren’t stakes at all. They weren’t personal.

If you really look at your favorite moments in any story I would guess that most of them don’t hinge on mortal danger. The risk isn’t life and limb. That can all be present, but the stakes will be emotional. If the hero survives this without saving the world, will they be able to live with themselves. Maybe it’s just a conversation. Is there something significant and personal to lose. Love, status, sense of self worth. Those are personal. Those are stakes.

When you write, make the stakes personal.

632

Mon, 16 Dec 2024 00:00:00 +0000

I don’t have much to write for this one.

I thought about writing some stuff about the games I’m working on, but none of that is in a place to talk about.

I thought about writing about writing, but that is moving forward slowly, and I will have more to talk about soon so it will have to wait.

I thought about writing some stuff about using Linux because that is something I have been doing a bit more of recently, but that’s boring.

I could talk about games in general, but I sort of don’t want to.

It’s one of those between weeks. I have a list of topics that I can pull from when one of these between weeks pops its head up, but I thought about that too and decided, you know what, no.

Sometimes it’s okay to not have anything to write about.

So that’s what this post is.

Sometimes it’s okay to not have a thing to say. Sometimes I can just sit here and type just to feel the keys. And that’s not a problem. It’s not a failure. It’s just a slow week.

Every once in a while, that’s kind of nice.

631

Mon, 09 Dec 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Well, I signed up for the weekend story writing competition again. It’s not for a few weeks, so I have time to back out if I want to.

I did consider that, instead of writing new stories for the contest, I would still block out that time for writing, but I would go back to some older stories that need a punch up. Try to finish more of them. Maybe even send them out and try to get them published. That seems like what I should do with these stories, right?

I have a small handful of stories that are a handful of edits away from being ready to submit somewhere. I have a few others that need some major reworking, but I haven’t given up on them yet. I think I only have a couple that I have firmly given up on. They will never see the light of day. I don’t think I even want to read them again to see if they could be fixed. But that’s okay.

There is a mild feeling of guilt that creeps in when I think about writing for one of these contests. It’s the thought of going to work on something new when there are perfectly good stories that still need attention siting, neglected, in a folder somewhere. Then again, the boost in general productivity I always have after working on one of these contests, or a game jam, is absolutely a real thing. So it might be the case that I need to shake off some cobwebs before I start back into those stories.

I don’t really have any answers. Who knows. I guess, either way, I’m going to be writing a bit more in January.

630 - Cannon Fodder

Mon, 02 Dec 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Best Games - Cannon Fodder

Do you know Jools and Jops. Do you know Stoo and RJ. If you do, it’s probably time for you to get some annual bloodwork done.

When I wrote the last one of these about Command and Conquer, I went on about the RTS being a genre defined by a control scheme. The use of the mouse as an input device sparked a few genres, or modified existing ones, like the text adventure morphing into the point and click adventure. There were mouse input games on the Macintosh and Amiga in the mid 80s, but the idea of real time strategy games being born not from anything the computer could do, but from the interface device attached to it, stuck with me.

Cannon Fodder is a game that evolved in parallel with rts games like Dune II and Warcraft. That isn’t exactly surprising since the same people who made it, British Amiga developers Sensible Software released a realtime strategy game, Mega-Lo-Mania, several months before Dune II came out. The mouse came with the Amiga and using it to control little digital minions just seemed the obvious choice. Maybe Lemmings is to blame for that.

Cannon Fodder is real time, and you use the mouse to point and click places you want squads of characters to move on a map, but it is in no way a strategy game. Cannon Fodder is a straight up action game.

You guide a group of soldiers around a map spraying machine gun fire and hurling grenades at anything that moves. Eventually you can even split the group into multiple squads. If some of your squad dies, Jools and Jops for instance, you get reinforced with the seemingly endless line of conscripts standing out front of the rapidly growing cemetery. Cannon Fodder wears its dark satire proudly. The screen between missions carries an Us and Them scoreboard. This is a parody of war.

Even though your men don’t always pathfind very accurately, control still feels breezy and quick. Popping out of cover to fire off a few shots is not only possible, but required. Aiming is required.

The game is ultimately pretty simple and doesn’t have the depth of anything in the RTS genre, but that is no great crime. It’s fun, and that is really what most of us want out of a game, isn’t it?

Cannon Fodder is one of the best games.

629

Mon, 25 Nov 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Making graphics for games is a bottomless task. No matter how deep you dig, you will always find more. More to learn. More tools, more tasks, more ways to build, and more ways to screw up.

I watch a lot of YouTube videos. There are a handful of channels I watch for entertainment. Things I find entertaining at least. It is mostly a cavalcade of old man nerd shit. Something that involves a fair bit of soldering. The other channels I watch are some sort of art, or technical art thing. A drawing or painting exercise I want to try, a procedural modelling technique, or some new way to compress textures more efficiently. I honestly can’t get enough.

I don’t just watch them though. I try a lot of these techniques. I test them out. A little at a time. Most of the time I try them once and then put them back on the mental shelf to collect dust. I can imagine to some people that would seem like a waste of time. Maybe they are right.

On the other hand, the absolute mishmash of techniques that make up my 2D game (that is really 3D) might not be possible any other way.

I recently watched a video about the graphics capabilities of the Sega Megadrive / Genesis. Something about the way the palette on that console worked triggered a thought and that reminded me of a modern technique for creating dither patterns and quantizing color in a fragment shader. A few code searches later and I had assembled a rough test of this technique for my game.

Is this the most efficient way to work? Am I getting enough work done on the game? Probably not, depending on the metric you measure that sort of thing by. But this is how my brain makes connections and how I work. With one foot firmly in the technical and the other in the artistic.

With that said, I also tested out some better ways to use color in my paintings, an area I know I struggle with. Those results are a little less easy to quantify. Shaders and code, though still creative, are a bit more concrete.

Maybe next week I can post up a few screen shots or a video of how it’s coming along.

628

Mon, 18 Nov 2024 00:00:00 +0000

I was going to write something about game dev and making graphics for games and how there are so many layers and intermeshing systems at work that it’s amazing anything ever gets made. I stashed that post for a later date.

Today, I’m just going to complain about snow for a very brief moment. It snowed this morning, so I had to shovel the driveway and sidewalk. Then my kids bus didn’t show up, so I drove them to school. Slowly. I will have to shovel the snow again later today and probably several more times this week. It’s difficult, but I don’t think I would want it any other way.

There was a brief window in my life where it looked like I might spend an entire winter without seeing snow. I did end up catching the end of the snowy season, so I can still say I have never not known snow.

Snow can be a hassle. It makes a lot of thing harder. I will still ride my bike through it. I will still go out and walk in it.

So maybe I will complain about snow, but I’m not sure what I would do without it.

627

Mon, 11 Nov 2024 00:00:00 +0000

I like working with fonts. That should probably come as no surprise. I was, after all, a designer of signs and posters and banners, etc. for years. Working with fonts is a big part of the job. Learning and relearning the rules of shape, and spacing, and balance. Learning them and then breaking them. Fonts are one of the actually fun parts of design work.

I think I have only made my own fonts, or subsets of fonts a very few times. A few weeks ago, I did it again.

If you do any design work, you should check out fontstruct.com. It is all at once a source for free or permissive licence fonts, and a toolset to create your own.

Any time I did this work in the past I either had to use complicated, task specific, tools, or I would bend Illustrator or Affinity or some other vector based drawing tool toward creating a font. A task they can do, but aren’t particularly suited to.

Fontstruct on the other hand is almost too easy to use. It offers very quick tools to get you going, but also contains a much deeper set, if you really want to dig into font creation work.

Maybe someday soon I can post up some of the font that I worked on, but for now I will keep that under wraps. I think I just have to go tweak the uppercase M, and then I will be more happy with it. And maybe the Z. And the W. … fonts.

626 - Command & Conquer

Mon, 04 Nov 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Best Games - Command & Conquer

In the mid to late 90s, if you were playing games on a PC you probably played some Real Time Strategy games.

They were the in thing. The fresh new genre. We had been playing action games, and role playing games, but the RTS genre was the first to be designed exclusively around a flashy new control device. The mouse.

It’s almost impossible to imagine now, but for quite a long time computers didn’t use mice. You had a keyboard, you might have had a joystick or even a gamepad, but mice weren’t really that common. In the late 80’s or early 90’s you would be more likely to see a tape drive or midi keyboard hooked up to a computer than a mouse.

Sure, Macintosh computers came equipped with mice since the mid 80s, but who used a Mac. Or, more to the point, who played games on a Mac. The Apple II series of computers had been spoken in the same breath as the Commodore 64 when it came to finding a place to play a particular game, but for whatever reason, the Mac never enjoyed that same level of devotion. The Mac did do one thing though. It got everyone who came into contact with it used to using a mouse.

Amiga users from back in the day, I see you. You can sit down.

The adoption of mouse input to PCs was a slow trickle and until around 1992 or 1993 you couldn’t reasonably expect a computer to be sold with a mouse. It would likely be an additional purchase. And if you had to go out and buy a mouse for a computer that was running a text only interface like DOS, what would you use that for? Spreadsheets? Nope. People buy extra computer hardware to play games.

There might be some precedent for RTS games before Herzog Zwei, an action strategy game for the Sega Genesis and a handful of Japanese computers, but in the west the game that people most associated with real-time strategy was Dune II developed by Westwood.

Dune II was the direct follow up to a point and click adventure game (that included a smattering of strategy). It was a profound shift, not just for the series but for PC games.

There had been a lot of strategy games on PC. CIV and Sim City were huge hits. They put demand on your planning and execution, but they never really put any demand on your reflexes. The shift with Dune II is that here was a game that forced you to plan and strategize while reacting at high speed to the action on screen. There were games that did this with a controller, like Herzog Zwei, but to be really fast and accurate in a strategy game required a mouse.

Dune II was a great game, but it had nothing on Westwood’s follow up RTS title, Command & Conquer.

Command & Conquer took everything that made Dune II revolutionary, and refined it. Honed it. Made it genre defining. Well, genre defining if we ignore that Warcraft pulled off a similar feat a few months earlier. Not nearly as well as Command & Conquer, though honestly.

Command & Conquer did something that not even much later RTS games could pull off. It was an RTS Game with a story. The single player missions were interesting, challenging, and you actually wanted to play though each one to see what would happen next. The live action actors on virtual sets knew the assignment all of the acting is cheesy, while actually being quite good. Not so bad it’s good. For real good, in a self aware sort of way.

In the alternate history of the world of Command & Conquer, the forces of the GDI do battle with the Brotherhood of NOD over control of a substance called Tiberium. A simple enough premise. The games eventually veer into time travel, dimensional travel, invading aliens, and on and on. It’s silly, but also a great excuse to click your mouse. I’m sure that at least a few mice didn’t make it all the way through the Command & Conquer campaign.

The single player game was amazing and revolutionary and all those things, but the game also came packed with a second disc that you could lend to a friend to play lan or networked multiplayer. This is fully in the time of dial up BBSs and no real internet. Even over a dial up modem it worked remarkably well.

So, because a mouse existed for DOS PCs before graphical interfaces were common, we have Command & Conquer. I spun up the remaster, as well as the original version and played a few missions just the other day. Command & Conquer is still one of the Best Games.

625

Mon, 28 Oct 2024 00:00:00 +0000

I have been using obsidian for notes and writing for a couple of months now. I’m surprised. Normally, when I’m using a tool like this, I would have found all sorts of limitations and problems by now. Something that would annoy me enough, or prove inconvenient enough that I would just stop using it. I haven’t, not so far anyway.

For a short while I used Scrivener for writing. It was good. Useful, but weirdly limited. And since I only had it as a pc application and I do most of my writing on an iPad with a wireless keyboard now, that just proved too much of a barrier.

For many years I used google docs for writing. It was available on any device I had at hand, and it was pretty easy to use, but I could never get over some of the awful export problems I had. Writing a blog post like this would be simple, but I would have to jump through a few hoops to actually post that post. Exporting, converting, checking that links or images didn’t get broken. I would often need to use a pc to post since I couldn’t get the files I needed in the places I needed on a phone or iPad.

Not only that, but google docs on iOS has a bad habit of popping the OS keyboard toolbar up over the words you are writing. It doesn’t know how to not be in the way. I would often find myself writing a line or two completely blind since the words were under the toolbar. It was an annoyance I got used to, but I still didn’t like it.

Obsidian has never done that, and even if it did I can actually scroll the page up manually or I can turn on typewriter scrolling that keeps the line you are working on more or less in the center of the page. Really useful for writing long documents or stories comfortably.

If I used google keep or notepad or notes to keep some link or idea or list, I would often forget I had even made the note. I would look weeks later and see that it said I should buy batteries or something. I haven’t only just started to use obsidian for this, but it seems a much better general purpose notebook than keep. I think I like that I get to organize it myself and it isn’t trying to help me out. It isn’t trying to be clever. It’s just a notebook.

One of the best things that I have found is that you can add the link to a YouTube video on a canvas and it will let you play that video right from the canvas. It’s an absolute game changer for organizing technical tutorials or videos on some esoteric art topic. Works for web pages too. You can scroll and read them right in the canvas panel. I recently wrote a few complex shaders and obsidian proved invaluable in keeping all of these sources organized.

And just today I discovered that the IPad version allows you to split screen two different documents. So I can have a story I’m working on right beside my notes and research document, because I always have a notes and research document for every story. If it’s a thousand word story I probably have a notes and research document that’s at least that length, if not longer. It’s just how I roll.

Having two documents up at once is an absolute game changer for writing on the iPad. I know it shouldn’t be. There are a lot of programs that do that, and I could always just use a PC and have as many windows open as I want, but writing on the iPad is very comfortable and gets me into a flow more easily than using my pc. The pc is for pc things. Big art tools and coding. Writing fits very comfortably on my iPad.

I haven’t really run into any roadblocks or inconveniences yet, and I don’t see any on the horizon. I used google docs for a lot of years, so I suppose that’s the record to beat. Well, obsidian, do you have it in you to take the title?

624

Mon, 21 Oct 2024 00:00:00 +0000

I have been following Formula 1 pretty casually for a decade or so. I’m a fan, but not really a super dedicated one. I usually watch the highlights, check the championship standings, follow some of the driver drama. I don’t really have any specific team or driver that I cheer for. I just like to see some good racing. It’s rare that I watch a whole race, but this weekend I did.

I got everyone in my house to watch the Netflix show Drive to Survive, because I knew that these race car drivers and team management people were wonderful weirdos. As long as the documentary team was good and did their job well, they couldn’t help but create interesting drama. They did. My family got hooked.

It’s pretty common for me to find my kids watching the race highlights on a Sunday morning. We talk about the standings. We talk about how certain drivers will or won’t perform. We enjoy it.

I can probably count on two hands the amount of full races that I have watched live. It’s a sport that caravans all over the world so some of the race times are pretty early in the morning where I am. This one was only an hour time difference for us, so I watched the whole race live. It was great.

Even though Formula 1 is extremely technical where data driven strategy could mean the difference between scoring points or being completely out of the race no matter how skilled the driver is, the sport has a purity to it. Every driver on the grid is in control of a super powered speed machine and even though some cars are better than others, any one of them has the potential to score points. And every season there are enough changes to the cars that last year’s champions could struggle to even make the top 10. It all comes down to that combination of car and driver on that day.

Honestly though, I think I just like it because it’s something I enjoyed alone, but now I can also enjoy it with my kids.

623

Mon, 14 Oct 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Work on my own game does continue. I promise. It’s just slow.

Recently I swapped the base shader that is applied to most objects in the game. This is the bit of code that tells the computer how to apply color and deals with lights. There are about a million other things it can do, but all I’m using it for is color and lights.

I had been using a sort of hybrid shader that was part stuff I downloaded from godotshaders.com and part I wrote myself. Eventually I had replaced enough of the stuff I had downloaded that I figured it was time to just pull the bandaid off and I wrote a new shader that only incorporated the things I needed.

Now it’s a simpler effect, but one that does only what I need.

I also wrote some more of the interaction code that lets my player character use and toss items and tools. I think that means that I only have a few more systems to get up and running before I can make a vertical slice.

My goal is to be able to get a full mission of the game out for people to demo. I would like that to happen in the next couple of months, but I’m also being realistic. I only work on this game a few hours a week and achieving any progress is a win in my book.

I think I will do a little work on the throwing mechanics now. Should be fun.

622 - Armored Warriors

Mon, 07 Oct 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Best Games - Armored Warriors / Powered Gear - Strategic Variant Armor Equipment

Capcom may not have invented the beat ‘em up genre, but you could probably argue that they perfected it.

From around 1985 until the late 90s, you could walk into any arcade and be reasonably sure that there would be a wall of beat ‘em up machines. Until Street Fighter 2 and the rise of versus fighting games, the beat ‘em up was king. It’s not hard to understand why either. They were fun, easy to figure out, and they all let you take on the challenge with a friend. They also ate quarters at a pretty reliable rate. That made them a hit with players and arcade operators.

I’m fairly certain that the heads of game dev studios would have loved it if they could churn out a game where you march a character from the left to the right punching and kicking other characters the entire way. Once you have the template it would be easy to just make tons of these games, right?

Of course not. Game development isn’t like that. Never has been, never will be. There is always some new problem. Some technical or artistic challenge. And frankly, that’s why people make games in the first place. Not because they are an easy way to make money, but because they are a difficult artistic challenge.

In 1989 Capcom created the game Final Fight. It was as close to a perfect beat ‘em up as existed at the time. It was fast, fun, varied (by the standards of the time), and vibrant. They could probably have made another Final Fight game every year for the next decade and they still would have made tons of cash. Never innovating. Never advancing. Never trying anything new.

Of course, Capcom employed game developers, so you know that was never an option. In fact, there wouldn’t even be a Final Fight 2 until four years later, and it came out on a console and not in arcades, where the genre flourished. Capcom wasn’t about playing it safe with sequels.

This has all been lead up. Setting the stage.

In 1993 Capcom introduced a brand new arcade system, the CP System II. It would go on to become one of the most successful arcade systems of all time, outliving its successor, the CPSIII, by years. When they launched the board, Capcom did what any game developer would do, they put it to the test.

In 1994, they launched Armored Warriors, a mecha centered beat ‘em up. Armored Warriors remains one of the most dynamic and innovative games of the move left to right punching things genre. It is a true showcase of what this new arcade system could do. Large, vivid, sprites. Fast action. In game storytelling with pop outs of talking heads. The star of the show, though, is the modular mech system.

Every player selectable mech comes with a stock array of short and long range combat tools and movement options. Some of them move faster or hit harder or jump higher. But just because that is the default, that doesn’t mean you have to play that way.

Each mech has three interchangeable components. One Arm, a movement base, and a long range weapon. Swapping any of these out with parts stolen from shattered enemies will change how your mech moves and plays. You can switch from walking to hovering, opt for a drill arm over a laser, pick up a machine gun or a missile rack. It all means that the way you start playing a stage won’t be the way you end it.

There are even enhancement module team up moves where you can combine with the other players to execute a devastating attack.

As far as beat ’em up games go, Armored Warriors is spectacularly deep. For every button press and joystick movement, there are a huge variety of potential effects. The game is tough. You will need to use all those tools, or spend a lot of quarters.

About a year later, Capcom took a lot of the sprites, and the build your own mech mechanics and created Cyberbots: Full Metal Madness, a spin off versus fighting game. I will probably get to writing about Cyberbots one day, since it also deservers to be on this list, but for now, I’ll wrap up talking about Armored Warriors.

Capcom took a popular, but flagging, genre and added all sorts of complexity to it. The result is one of the Best Games

621

Mon, 30 Sep 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Recently I have been doing a lot of work with shaders. If you are unfamiliar, shaders are little programs that typically run on computer and console graphics processing units. They tell the GPU how to draw pixels to the screen.

I think most artists don’t want anything to do with shaders. They are technical, the programming languages used to write them are a little arcane, and they don’t really offer the instant feedback of making a mark on paper. I think a lot of artists find creating or working with shaders sort of antithetical to making art. I know this, because they have told me as much.

I sort of love it.

I don’t know if I am actually that great at working on shaders. I have to consult cheat sheets for a lot of the basic functions like matrix rotation transforms because I don’t have those committed to memory. It sometimes takes me a minute to visualize some of the vector math. But still, I sort of love it.

I think of it like this. In the realm of digital art, especially realtime 3D game art, knowing how shaders work is sort of like making your own paint. You certainly don’t have to mix and prepare your own paint to lay color down on a canvas, but if you do know how paint is made, you are going to know how each pigment will blend, how the medium with flow. You won’t just be painting. You will know how paint works.

There is a huge incentive to specialize when working on commercial games. Stay in your lane. Only focus on your part of the assembly line. For an artist, that might mean only creating textures or only building models, with no concern for the people before or after you on that assembly line. You do your job and they do theirs. That’s fine I suppose, if you have an assembly line.

When you don’t have people before and after you on the line, when you are the line, it becomes very important that you understand how your medium works. My medium is digital graphics. Part of that medium is programming shaders to run on GPUs. Even if it’s not my specialty or I’m not the greatest at it, I think it makes me better at the rest of my work to understand how shaders work. A big part of that is making them. And I sort of love it.

620

Mon, 23 Sep 2024 00:00:00 +0000

So this is week two of using Obsidian to write these posts.

It’s just a tool, so using Obsidian hasn’t really changed how I write. I have used a lot of different word processors and WYSIWYG text editors. For a hot minute, I used VS Code to write. I have tried writing with a pen and paper and transferring the words to digital later. I really hated that and it doesn’t really align with the way my brain works.

I thought that using scrivener might change the way I write. It didn’t. Nothing really did. My process seems to be my process. I like to type. I like to have full freedom to change and edit on the fly. I like spellcheck. Any specialty tools don’t do much to change that.

The only thing that Obsidian has done for me is make it simpler. No converting documents. No changing file formats. No selecting fonts. Just writing. On whatever keyboard and screen I have available.

For the most part, I like to write with a small wireless keyboard on an iPad. I will use a full keyboard if I need to, but I sort of prefer this. It’s simple.

I think that’s what I like. I want to use Obsidian, because it’s simple. It’s quick, there is very little mental overhead, and I can pull out my phone and start using it in a few seconds.

It’s also very complicated. And I like that too.

The techy part of my brain that likes to have control over all the programs I use loved that I was able to set up my own GitHub repository for Obsidian and have everything sync through there. I can secure it how I like, and add the features I need without any of the cruft I’m never going to use.

When I write stories I like to have several documents open with my research and bits I have cut, but might use some other place. Doing that with Obsidian is trivial. It takes the best parts of VS Code and simplifies them down to only the essentials.

I know that I could use an Obsidian vault as a full blown project management system, and maybe someday I will, but for now I think I just really like the simplicity.

619

Mon, 16 Sep 2024 00:00:00 +0000

I’m testing out a new way of writing these post. I’m not sure if it will work for me yet, but I’ve been having problems with the way I have been doing it for the last (checks watch) ten years or so.

My method is usually to write them in google docs and then copy/paste them into whatever content management system I had going and then publish them to my website.

My site used to be hosted at one of the big hosting places as a custom built site. I changed over to one of them big Site Builder services for many years because they offered a really good deal and, up until a couple years ago, I was able to keep re-uping my subscription at that price. They stopped offering that price, so I opted to build the site myself and host it in a much more agnostic way. If, for whatever reason I have to change hosts now, I shouldn’t have to change my site at all.

This move has made it much easier for me to maintain my site, but I still had a problem. If I were to write a post on my iPad or on my phone, It became significantly more difficult to upload those to the site, at least not without turning on my PC to push the changes.

I have done some minor work on that, and now I can push changes and add posts from a few places, but writing the posts in google docs and then copy/pasting them had become fairly unwieldy. If there were any images or videos attached to a post, it became difficult to move a post without breaking formatting.

I have just now moved over to Obsidian for writing posts, which has the added benefit of being Markdown from the start. All my posts are now in markdown files on the site, so it makes sense to write them that way. I keep it all in a Git repository, and sync between devices using GitHub. I’ll test it out with images in a week or two. For now I think I’ll just play it safe with text only.

So far, this system seems like it should work pretty well. I suppose we will see, but I hope that I will be happier with this system than I have been with my old one for the past decade.

618 - Final Fantasy

Mon, 09 Sep 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Best Games - Final Fantasy

It might seem strange to list a game that isn’t even recognized as the best in its series among the best games, but that’s not really what I do here. This isn’t a ranking of games. This is a celebration.

Computer (and for this example I am counting game consoles as computers) role playing games have changed a lot over nearly four decades. From simple games with simple graphics, to complex games also with simple graphics, to majestically rendered multi part fully voiced and scored monstrosities that take months for the average player to complete.

There are any number of games that one could point to as the original instigator of the genre. Ultima, Dragon Quest, Wizardry, Dragonstomper, maybe even Rogue. They are all potentially the starting point for someone. More likely though, it’s the fusion of ideas and game systems from so many early games that makes the RPG genre what it is today.

And all of that brings us to Final Fantasy. It is all at once a fusion of the games that came before it, and the jumping off point for so many other games. In some ways, it is a simplification and streamlining of the RPG genre. In others, it is a very complex combination of systems that can create some early emergent gameplay.

Final Fantasy is a game that shouldn’t really be fun. Most of what you will be doing is navigating menus. A task that doesn’t exactly scream ‘fun’. But that abstraction fades away as you get into more difficult fights. You aren’t stepping through menus, you are strategizing intense combat. You are weighing using limited magic and items against sword swings and even running away. Can you defeat this mob of creatures before they take out your White Mage? Can your Fighter absorb one more hit, or is it time to spend a turn drinking a health potion.

There is no ticking clock. No time pressure to contend with. But each selection has consequences. It is a system that still works, and almost 40 years on, the original Final Fantasy is still fun.

Like I said at the top, Final Fantasy isn’t even the best game in the series. Later entries tell vibrant stories and vary up the mechanics with novel sequences. It’s not the best, but everything is here. It plays well. The adventure pulls you in. Every button press has to be carefully considered. Every victory feels earned. Every victory feels exciting.

No modern RPG could get away with being so spare and raw as Final Fantasy, but the foundation is there and the foundation is solid. Final Fantasy is one of the best games.

617

Mon, 02 Sep 2024 00:00:00 +0000

In my quest to eliminate Adobe products from my life, I have started adopting a fully blender texturing workflow.

This is probably something that I should have done a while ago, but substance painter works quite well.

Maybe that’s the problem. Most Adobe products do work quite well. I used Photoshop, Illustrator, and After Effects for years. I liked them. They did what I needed them to do. Adobe’s relationship to its customers is something that doesn’t work anymore. And now there are alternatives.

When I bought Substance Painter it wasn’t under the Adobe banner yet, and Allegorithmic, by contrast, was a company that was quite good to its customers. The software, while not exactly cheap, was reasonably priced and the contract terms were pretty good.

Since Adobe bought them, I have not, and will not, upgraded or paid for a subscription. It simply isn’t worth it.

There were a small handful of texturing addons for Blender that did some of what Substance can do. I even used a few to decent effect.

Times change and people like to build things. I don’t know of any addons that cover the full feature set of Substance yet, but there are a couple now that maybe do just enough.

Ucupaint is a real, layer based texturing tool that works in a very Blender like way. It’s not as much a painting tool, as it is a layering and masking tool. Much like Substance. Figuring out ways to wrangle fill layers and procedural masking layers to create the effect you are looking for, while occasionally hand painting a mask or two, is the order of the day. It can be a bit of a puzzle sometimes, but the extreme amount of control you get can’t be overlooked.

Layer Painter does a lot of what Ucupaint does, with a slightly friendlier interface. I haven’t used it since it went completely open source and had a major overhaul, but I remember it being quite easy to get into. I will have to try it again when it’s a little more stable.

HAS painter and Ravage are two that I honestly haven’t tried, but from videos they seem to be doing a lot of the same things in slightly different ways. I will have to look into them.

The long and short of it is, if you are using Blender and you would rather not use Substance painter, you are probably in luck. There are a lot of options and some of them might just do everything you need Substance for anyway.

Now I just need to recreate my texture and material library for use in Blender. It might be slightly more DIY than just using Substance, but I will probably be happier for it.

616

Mon, 26 Aug 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Here is something to know about me. I have almost no interest in gambling.

Sure, I get the same thrill as most people when you play a ‘press your luck game’ and it pays off, but going to a casino and plunking down a few bucks gives me no joy.

I have played some blackjack and a few VLT’s. I have bet on sports. I have played a few hands of poker. I have, and do, buy lottery tickets. I could also do none of these and not feel like I’m missing out.

I have absolutely zero interest in playing slot machines.

Since I am a lifelong video game player, not having any interest in a certain type of bright, noisy, machines that are designed to be attractive might seem odd to some people. We could get into what the difference is, but that might be a whole other topic.

Well, now I do have some interest in slot machines, but not in the way casino owners would want.

We recently went on a trip to Las Vegas. Weird, interesting, terrible place. I’m glad we went. I never want to go back.

Wouldn’t you guess it, but when we went to Vegas we saw a lot of slot machines. So, god damn many slot machines. I found them fascinating. Not because I wanted to play them, but because I wanted to know how they are made.

I have a pretty good working knowledge of how games get made. The technology and methods involved. I make graphics and write code. I know what it takes to get images on a screen. When I was looking at many of the slot machines, I could see some of the underlying techniques. Some of the flashy effects even looked pretty familiar.

I did several searches trying to figure out how they were made and what engine or frameworks are used on them. As you might expect, gambling industry people are pretty tight lipped about the development of their games. There aren’t really any ‘Game Developer’ style articles out there for slot machines. You likely won’t read a postmortem on the latest Vegas money maker.

So I did what anyone would do. I started looking at job listings.

I found, pretty quickly, that while some slot machines use proprietary engines or some form of html 5 framework, the overwhelming majority seem to be developed in Unity. I happen to know quite a lot about Unity. I recognized those visual effects, because they are standard features built into the engine. Particle effects and glow effects right out of ‘make your first game’ tutorials. Not that there is any problem with those, but they are fairly generic.

I did some more searching and found the small handful of companies that actually make the games. It also turns out that you can make an awful lot of money being a mathematician for the gambling industry. Much less so if you work as an artist or animator. I do suspect that they are probably working on ways to use AI generated images for slot machines right this very minute. Who cares what the art looks like. If you can get away with a bog standard particle effect some AI generated icons probably aren’t too far down the road.

I will probably keep looking into these things, in a very casual way. I don’t think I will play any of them. Still not that interesting.

615 - E.T. Phone Home!

Mon, 19 Aug 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Best Games - E.T. Phone Home!

If you have any interest in the history of video games, or just pop history of the last half century, you know about the E.T. video game. You might have heard that it is terrible. One of the worst games ever made. Well, it isn’t and it wasn’t, but I’m not even writing about that game.

Actually, I will write about that game for a moment. I think it’s important. For context.

In 1982 Howard Scott Warshaw was given just over a month to design and create an E.T. video game for the atari 2600 so that it could be ready and in stores for Christmas of that year. The results were not great.

I don’t even hate that game as much as most people seem to. It plays fine, but it really could have used a round or two of testing, and maybe the opinions of some more developers, before being packaged into a cartridge and being sent out to die. The game is not as awful as everyone says it is, but having one person work on a brand new game for a month never was, or will be, enough people or time to create a good game.

Fortunately, the team working on the E.T. game for Atari’s line of 8-bit computers had slightly more time and slightly more people. Unfortunately, not that many Atari computers were out in the world. If people were going to buy an E.T. game to play at home, it was going to be the one on the 2600 console. And that really is a shame.

Launching only a few months later, E.T. Phone Home! Is, in sharp contrast, a very good game.

The objective of E.T. Phone Home! is what you might expect. As Elliott, you run around your suburban neighborhood and surrounding woods, collecting pieces of trash that E.T. will assemble into his long range phone. Umbrellas, coils of wire, forks, that sort of thing.

On easier levels you only have to collect a few of them. As you crank up the difficulty, you have to collect more parts and only certain colors will work. You can’t just substitute a red wire when E.T. needs the black one. I can tell you from personal experience, that makes the game much more difficult when you are playing it on a black and white TV as your monitor.

As Elliott, you have to avoid scientists and agents who will follow you and steal any parts you are carrying. You can run and hide around houses and trees, but it can be tricky to evade all of the people following you. You can also use your telepathic link to find out what parts E.T. still needs and what color they are, but that wastes some of your most precious resource, time.

Like in the movie, E.T. can’t live for very long on earth. His health is tracked by a few flowers. As you play each flower will wither and die. You can replenish a flower or two by collecting phone parts quickly, but there is no way to fully outrun the clock. E.T. is dying and the only way to save him is to get him back to his ship.

When you finally assemble the phone E.T. shows up on screen and speaks. A rare thing on 8-bit computers. He says his line, phones home, and now it’s a race to get to the ship before it leaves earth forever.

As E.T. you run your way through the houses and woods, get to the ship and win.

That’s it. That’s the whole game. It’s simple, but solid. Beating it on the hardest difficulty is truly challenging. It moves well, and the whole game only requires one joystick and one button. In a sea of actually terrible licensed games, of which the Atari 2600 E.T. game is not even the worst, E.T. Phone Home! stands out. It would be a good game even without the movie tie in.

I have included a couple of links here for further reading about this game, because I think that it’s well worth your time.

https://www.atarimania.com/game-atari-400-800-xl-xe-et-phone-home_1881.html

https://www.atari-computermuseum.de/rx8030.htm

Maybe it’s only nostalgia talking, but I played both the Atari 2600 E.T. and this one back in the 80s, and again just last night. E.T. Phone Home! is actually a good game, and it still plays very well.

I meant to only test it out to jog my memory, but I found myself playing it all the way through multiple times. It was properly enjoyable. Maybe even one of the Best Games.

614

Mon, 12 Aug 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Just like at the end of any writing stint, I have found myself with a lot of words.

Some of those words are great. They might be the best words I have ever written. At least they might be when they are arranged in this exact configuration. Move them around a little, and they will be terrible. Or great. I’m not really sure yet.

I have written about editing stories here several times, but I have to admit that I am not very good at it. I can write a thing, and I can rewrite a thing, but just moving pieces around I don’t know how to do. At least not well.

I have found what works for me is to take a section of a story I know needs some work and comment it out like code. I either make some marks around the section (/* — */), or I use line breaks, or I just cut it and move it to a different document. Then I read that section and rewrite it. Usually I clean up the flow of words, or I end up refocusing the segment on the right subject of character when I rewrite. It isn’t particularly intentional. After that, I go back to the original chunk of writing and lift particular sentences or phrases that I still like, and see if I can make them fit into the new writing.

I don’t think my method is particularly sophisticated. Other than being comfortable identifying comment marks at a glance, I’m not doing anything that requires more than a simple text editor. In fact, for a little while I used VSCODE as my main writing tool. Now, it’s mostly just google docs. I have scrivener but I barely use it.

I have a list of edits (rewrites) to do on two stories before I try sending them out. Then I have about five more stories that could use some tweaking. Then a couple more after that.

Best get to it.

613

Mon, 05 Aug 2024 00:00:00 +0000

We’ve been watching the Olympics here for a few days. It’s great. Just wall to wall weird sports.

I know, the sports aren’t exactly weird, but they aren’t the ones that you commonly see on tv either. I like to see a bunch of volleyball, or badminton, or BMX racing, or sailing, or judo, or track and field. Pretty much anything but baseball or golf. How much more baseball or golf do we need on tv. Soccer gets a pass because it isn’t on as often in North America… that window is closing though. Your novel sport days are numbered, soccer. Soon, you will be as common as baseball.

That really is the thing I love most about watching the Olympics. A grab bag of sports that don’t get enough attention. When was the last time a whole lot of people cared about competitive diving? Probably the last Olympics.

When was the last time you got really into a rugby match? If you live anywhere but the five percent of the earth that cares deeply about rugby, it’s probably been a while. But maybe we should. Rugby is a cool sport. It sort of looks like they started with soccer and stripped rules away until a few people died, and then added back the ones that made it mildly safer than that. Like I said, cool sport.

I can barely tell what’s going on in fencing, but it’s kind of neat. A boxing tournament might be one of the most harrowing and hardcore legitimate sporting events that humans have ever come up with. It’s potentially a CTE speedrun, but these athletes might compete multiple times in their career. Trampoline is just daring the universe to give you a spinal injury.

What other time will you see all of these sports back to back over a couple of weeks. If you haven’t been, you should probably watch some Olympics.

612

Mon, 29 Jul 2024 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve just finished writing the comments for this story contest I’m doing. I said it before, but it bears repeating. Reading, reviewing, and commenting on other people’s stories is so much more difficult than writing an original story. It’s so much more nerve wracking. Like what If I don’t like the story, like, I really think it stinks? (this did not happen to me this time thankfully) What sort of constructive criticism am I supposed to offer in that case? What if I love the story and think it’s perfect? I suppose that is easier, because it’s never hard delivering someone good news. But is it actually helpful to someone if I just praise their writing but really don’t give them any worthwhile feedback?

Also, there are real people on the other end of these comments. People with feelings. And they are writers, which means they are likely a touch unstable (writers seem a wackier bunch than game developers). I’m joking, but I am serious about all of them being real people.

We have all opted in to this, and we all want our peers to review our work and offer their honest opinions. Not platitudes, not ego stroking, but genuine constructive criticism. Criticism to help each other build up what is good about our stories, not just point out what is bad. Or, more to the point, what is in one person’s subjective opinion, bad.

So I maintain, writing the comments is harder than writing the stories. But I chose this, so I have to write my comments now.

611

Mon, 22 Jul 2024 00:00:00 +0000

I’m partway through writing the last story for this story competition that I have been doing.

It’s a funny thing, but I have found myself trending slightly darker writing these stories. If I have a particular writing style, it’s probably to be a little tragic and a little hopeful. A little more StarTrek than Black Mirror. Well, not this time I guess.

I have written here before that one of my favourite TV shows of all time is The Twilight Zone. I love that the show often carried both pessimistic and optimistic views in a single episode. The stories could veer dark, but often while pointing to an alternative, more positive direction the story could have taken. I suppose that might be expected of a show titled The Twilight Zone.

Maybe these stories are me testing out my take on a type of Twilight Zone. If I’m ever going to find out, I should probably get back to writing this one.

610 - Golly! Ghost!

Mon, 15 Jul 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Best Games - Golly! Ghost!

You have played lightgun shooting gallery games before, and you have played ticket redemption games, and you have played pinball games full of electromechanical toys. You just might not have played them all at once.

Golly! Ghost! Is a strange animal. As far as the gameplay goes, it is very simple. It’s a precise and responsive, but fairly average shooting gallery. A wide variety of ghosts pop out of different spots on the playfield and your job is to zap them with your legally distinct ghost catching gun. It’s so average and basic that there is only one level. Only one background. And there is a very good reason for that.

Where most video games would have pixel painted and animated artwork for their backgrounds, Golly! Ghost! has a real dollhouse-like diorama back there. With a door, fridge, chest, and even a toilet seat that fling open to spew out ghosts.

The game uses the Pepper’s ghost effect to project both the ghosts (rendered conventionally on a screen) and the diorama background into the same space. The result is actually pretty convincing. Lots of little animated special effects flicker and sparkle at the edges of objects, but the objects themselves are real. It looks amazing.

Of course, looks help, but if the game isn’t fun no one will want to play it more than a couple of times. I said earlier that it’s a fairly average shooting gallery. So why would average gameplay be noteworthy? Well, Golly! Ghost! isn’t like most video games. It isn’t intended to be a thrill ride of ramping challenge. As a game, Golly! Ghost! has more in common with skeeball than House of the Dead. It’s a game that you play multiple times just to slightly improve your scores and consistency. And, like skeeball, the game will reward your high scores with tickets you can redeem at the arcade shop for an eraser or whatever.

If you plunked Golly! Ghost! between a hoop shot and a beanbag toss, maybe people would be likely to play it. Unfortunately it looks a lot more like a conventional light gun games and tends to get lumped in with those, and, like I have said twice now, it’s only an average light gun game. But it is a stellar ticket redemption game.

So yeah, Golly! Ghost! might be a strange one, but it’s still one of the Best Games.

609

Mon, 08 Jul 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Writing continues on these short contest stories. Having more time than two days is sort of nice, but it does introduce a small snag.

During the ultra fast, two day contests, I don’t have time to write multiple things or change direction if the story isn’t working. I pretty much go with my first instinct and start writing. Sometimes that works out and sometimes it doesn’t, but I don’t really have time to worry about it. I also know that everyone is in the same boat so some minor grammar issues or typos are easy to ignore completely.

Having more time means that I try to fix problems while they are happening. I do a lot more on the fly editing. This isn’t too huge of a problem for me since that’s typically how I work anyway, but, normally, I also write quite slowly. This extra time has meant that I changed directions twice this weekend. Maybe it’s for the best, since I don’t think my first ideas were working well, but introducing doubt can make me toss out ideas that might have worked.

I’ll stop rambling about writing process and get back to it. Maybe next week I will write something about games again. That’s always fun.

608

Mon, 01 Jul 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Part of doing these writing contests is you have to review and comment on all the other stories entered. As you might have guessed, this is significantly more difficult than just writing a new story. You might think the difficulty might be because you don’t want to insult anyone by being mean to a less than stellar story. No. The issue I usually find is that so many of the stories are so damned good that it’s difficult to find anything real to criticize.

Once in a while I will read a story that is truncated or still shows evidence of some desperate cuts to fit into the one thousand word cap. Those usually show some promise, and often you can tell that the writer is very talented with words, but just missed the target on scope. Nothing a version without those restrictions couldn’t fix.

But what do you say about a story that seems almost perfect. One that hits all the right notes in only a handful of paragraphs. I think I might just start giving them all thumbs up emojis.

607

Mon, 24 Jun 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Once again, I am working on a short (under one thousand words) story for a contest. This one is a bit different though. Where the past ones I have done are all pretty fast two day affairs, this one offers a leisurely five day window before you have to submit. That, of course, means that I spent the first two days only thinking about writing.

That isn’t entirely true. I did write an outline. Something I find is a bit of a luxury when doing the super quick turnaround story competitions. Either way, This is a much more leisurely pace. We will have to see if that affects the finished quality of the work.

I best get to it. It would be great if I could get a few hundred words down before any sort of panic sets in.

606 - Gunstar Heroes

Mon, 17 Jun 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Best Games - Gunstar Heroes

Even before you press start on Gunstar Heroes, you know you are in for something special. There is a propulsive energy to the opening cinematic that sets the tone and the game keeps that same pace for the duration.

Gunstar Heroes is a run, shoot, jump, kick, slide, fly, roll dice, and throw action game released for the Sega Genesis/Mega-Drive in 1993. The waning days of the 16-bit era. The Sony PlayStation was about a year away, and many development studios were neck deep in learning the new 3D game technology, but developers who had been working with 2D sprites and FM synth were at the height of their power. Gunstar heroes probably couldn’t have been made any earlier or later.

Up until this point, there had been countless run sideways and shoot games released both for home consoles and in arcades. At first glance, Gunstar Heroes appears to be just another one of those. And it is. Sort of.

All of the verbs I listed above are for real. You really will find yourself using a very robust jump kick mechanic in this shooting game. You really will opt to close some distance so you can execute a hip toss on an enemy rather than hanging back and using your weapons. You really will fly, and you really will roll dice. Gunstar Heroes is relentlessly inventive. There are new fun ways to play every few minutes. At one point, the entire game changes to a space shooter for a while.

The modular weapon system offers no fewer than ten different ways to annihilate your enemies. Mixing a homing with a fire weapon, or an electric blast with a rapid fire make for extremely satisfying action. And there are no duds in this list. Every single combination feels, looks, and sounds great.

If you said that Gunstar Heroes does nothing new, nothing truly novel, you would be right. Anything that happens here can probably be found in another game. Likely many other games. But, no other games do it all. No other games successfully maintain the same breakneck pace while still feeling cohesive and consistent.

Treasure developed a lot of fantastic games in their time, but Gunstar Heroes might be their strongest showing. It is, after all, one of the best games.

605

Mon, 10 Jun 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Early last year, I wrote a post here about a piece of digital art software that I thought was really neat. Pixel Composer was, and is, really neat, but after I wrote that post I didn’t use it again for months. That was no fault of the software. Pixel Composer is great. It just wasn’t something that I could fit into my regular workflow. I do a lot of 3D modeling and rigging and drawing and texture painting and creating shaders and materials. Almost none of that requires the use of a tool almost exclusively designed around pixel art.

Until the arcade jam.

I wrote about participating in the arcade jam last weekend, but I didn’t say much about what we made.

Both Kyle and I grew up in the days when arcade machines represented the pinnacle of interactive technology, so it should come as no surprise that we set out to create some sort of simulacrum of that arcade style of game. That meant, on my end, it also had to look the part.

I have done very little pixel art. When I draw or paint, I tend to work pretty large. For a pixel art game, a tile of 64x64 pixels is actually quite large, but I’m more accustomed to working at scale many times larger than that. 2048 or 4096 textures are fairly common. If I’m painting I’ll even go larger than that. For the game jam, that was never going to work. I had a maximum working space of 480x270 pixels.

I have been doing some pixel art for my game, so I have a couple of my regular apps configured for that style of artwork, but I knew that wasn’t going to cover everything that I wanted to do. I needed some big guns. Or at least some different guns.

It was time to dust off Pixel Composer.

I know that last time I heaped praise on Pixel Composer for being this weird and unconventional image editing tool. If there is some way that you would like to process an image and you can’t figure out how to do that with Pixel Composer it’s probably because you aren’t trying hard enough.

I can’t even say that it’s a program that you should use for creating pixel art. It’s not geared for that. It’s an image processing tool. If you have a sprite that you would like to add an effect to, or spin, or scale, or convert to 3D, or layer, or recolor, or anything else that you can imagine, you can do that with Pixel Composer. If you would like to create a processor that you can dump an entire projects worth of images in one end and get a converted batch out the other, it is honestly astounding.

Pixel Composer is an extendable, programmable image engine that I am honestly surprised wasn’t already a product.

If you have read this far and have absolutely any interest in pixel art tools, you should probably just seek it out and buy it. It costs about 10 bucks and it’s great.

I used it to make tile sheets and animate a fireball.

604

Mon, 03 Jun 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Over the weekend I participated in the first Calgary Arcade Jam. Our local game developer association has been assembling a few arcade cabinets for years. To get them kick started, we held a jam so that there would be games to play on them when they went out into the world.

I worked with Kyle Nissen to create a throwback arcade game we called CASH CLASH. Like all jam games, it’s a little janky, but in a charming way, I hope.

You can play all the games that were made here https://itch.io/jam/arcade-jam-2024

603

Mon, 27 May 2024 00:00:00 +0000

I have had a small home server running here for years. I never asked that much of it. It hosts some files, a handful of movies and shows, some backups, etc. It just sits in the basement, and spins up occasionally when I need it. Recently I decided to change that.

As part of moving my website to its current location, I started to look into what services I was paying for that I would rather just handle myself. One of those things turned out to be backup and file sharing.

Years ago, when I started using Dropbox, there really weren’t many good alternatives. Well not unless you wanted to pay commercial server prices. The options were; set up a temperamental NAS at home, or pay a lot for cloud storage. Instead of either of those, I would just buy more external hard drives and make sure that I had multiple copies of any important files.

When Dropbox came along, I did what everyone else did. I got the free account and didn’t really use it. It wasn’t until I worked on a project where I needed to share some files remotely, that Dropbox started to make sense. Pretty soon after that, I started paying for it.

As a service, Dropbox has worked pretty well for me. I have, on several occasions, used its version control and synced storage. I move from one device to another confident that I will be able to reach certain files when I need to. I paid for Dropbox, and have felt that it was worth the price. Until recently.

I decided to have a look into the state of self hosted file backup and sharing. Turns out, in the time I have been using Dropbox there have been some major advances. And I have a little server just sitting there not doing anything.

Now, I know a small local server wouldn’t solve the problem of having some sort of off site backup for critical files, but, as it also turns out, many of the solutions also have ways of dealing with that problem too. It might mean setting up two small servers, but I think I can swing that.

Even with the power and time requirements of setting up and running two small servers, it wouldn’t even come near the cost of re-upping Dropbox for a couple more years.

All this said, if someone asked me if they should set up their own server or just pay for Dropbox, I would probably say that they should just pay the money. It’s a good service, and I have enjoyed using it, but it’s just my time to move on to new things.

That does mean that I have been having to deal with a lot of Linux… but there’s always a downside.

602 - Star Wars : Dark Forces

Mon, 20 May 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Best Games - Star Wars : Dark Forces

Before Rogue One or Andor, every Star Wars fan knew that it was former Imperial officer turned rebel mercenary, Kyle Katarn, who stole the Death Star plans. Most of those fans probably even remember exactly where the plans were hidden. In fact, those fans had done it themselves.

Doom clones were thick on the ground by the time Dark Forces came out. It had been two years since the original Doom had come out and several other first person shooters quickly followed. Some used the Doom engine, while others used custom engines like Build or the Jedi Engine developed for Dark Forces, but the intent behind all of them was similar. Capture the fast action and first person excitement found in Doom.

Most of those Doom clones were just that. Clones. Soulless, inferior copies. When you play Dark Forces, you notice instantly that this game is more than a clone. Dark Forces is doing something different.

The Star Wars license, the iconic designs and unmistakable sounds, I will admit, help Dark Forces to stand out from the crowd. But that is all surface. As a game, Dark forces just feels different.

It’s the way the spaces are constructed. Buildings and environments that make sense. Rooms that join other rooms, not because the game designers thought that could make for an interesting maze to walk through, but because they wanted it to feel like an actual building. A place where people would work… well not so much people, a place where Imperial officers and stormtroopers would work. So, blue-grey rooms filled with red and blue lights and tall walkways with no guard rails. You know, Empire type stuff. I wouldn’t go so far as to say that these levels feel realistic, but they do feel authentic.

Doom itself is mostly filled with levels that only exist to put you in a variety of combat situations. Other than playing them repeatedly, there is nothing inherent to the levels that makes them memorable. Dark Forces includes many areas where there isn’t much combat, but that only burns those maps deeper into your memory. That authenticity makes them memorable.

There was a point in games where creating memorable and recognizable worlds became as important as the moment to moment action you experienced in them. Slow paced adventure games took the lead in this regard, but it took a while for that design style to filter down into action games. Even as late as 1995, Dark Forces was a pioneer. Now, even the most simple of games would feel incomplete if it didn’t exist in a recognizable and detailed world.

Again, I think that the Star Wars license gave Dark Forces a leg up in creating a sense of place and recognizable, memorable, levels. But that design direction wasn’t guaranteed. The developers of Dark Forces could very easily have coasted on that license and churned out a bog standard Doom Clone. It still would have sold. Instead, they opted to head down the path that would eventually lead to games like Half-Life and the Dark Forces own sequels, the Jedi Knight series of games. Games where the world is memorable and the adventure is interesting and varied. It isn’t enough to move around clicking your mouse, you need to engage with the world and its inhabitants.

Dark Forces could have been a simple copy, a mod of Doom, and it would probably have held a place in the history of games. Instead, it elevated a genre, and secured its place as one of the Best Games

601

Mon, 13 May 2024 00:00:00 +0000

In the last few weeks I fixed a few things in my game, added some animation, completely broke everything, patched it back together, and then added some control and organization code that will make everything else I have to do so much easier.

Normally when someone says that they broke everything on a contraption as complex as a video game that usually means that they have a lot of work and tears ahead of them. I would usually agree. Had I still been using Unity, I would almost certainly agree. But I’m not using Unity.

Godot might make some things more difficult.

For example, if I don’t have to code, I usually won’t. Using Godot means I have to code. On the other hand, the code I have to write tends to be pretty simple, and constrained to calling built in functions of Godot.

I like to write in C#. Godot allows this, but it’s always slightly more roundabout than just writing my code in its native GDScript. GDScript is python-like and I have some familiarity with python from using Blender, but I am nowhere near as comfortable with it as I am with C#.

Again, none of this is very tough, but it is slightly more arduous than starting up Unity and pulling a lot of stuff from the asset store. Until something breaks.

Something in my game broke. The engine and editor wouldn’t talk to VSCode, the game wouldn’t build, the frame rate was in the toilet, and I wasn’t able to update my model and animation files. If this happened in Unity, you might expect to spend days just figuring out what went wrong. Even if you managed to fix it, you would spend the rest of your time side-eyeing the engine and wondering when it would let you down again.

Since this is Godot, and I own and understand everything I put into the game, I ripped out my stuff, reinstalled the Godot engine, and had everything back to working within an hour. I then went on to make some changes I had been wanting to make that should speed up adding new assets to the game.

I will never be the sort of person who would learn to code their own engine. I would never be the sort of person who would advocate that other people do that. But maybe I get the appeal now. There is a sort of calm that you feel when you understand a system well enough to disassemble and reassemble it. I will never claim to understand the Godot code fully, but I know what I built, and I know how cleanly separate my stuff is from the rest of the engine.

I have a couple more core components that I have to add to my game before it’s ready for a field test, but I am pretty excited by the idea of putting it in front of players. I move pretty slowly on this project, but with any luck, and a couple impromptu rebuilds, I hope to have something ready later this year.

Then I will only have the other 90% of the game to finish.

600

Mon, 06 May 2024 00:00:00 +0000

If you happen to be reading this where it lives on my website, you will probably notice that it all looks a little different. A little simpler. A few of the links and menus are missing. Welcome to the new home of whatever it is I’m doing here.

For the moment, there will be a few broken links and missing features. I will be gradually adding back all of that stuff, and hopefully making it a little easier to search for old posts and images here.

I will be adding a page of external links to places like my Artstation gallery or any of my published stories. With any luck, by the time you are reading this, that page will be up.

There are a handful of other things that I will be cleaning up, gradually, over time. I would like to make sections and tags more of a thing here. Tags for posts on writing or game dev, tags for entries in my Best Games series. Things like that. Doing that effectively was always sort of out of reach with the old website. Now that I have full control over all the data, it should at least be doable. I might have to write some small programs to get it done, but that’s okay. I don’t hate programming. I’m just not that great at it.

Finally, at some point I plan to dress the new digs up a bit. Change out the art, maybe play with some color here and there. Just make it overall a touch more pleasant. And don’t we all just want things to be a touch more pleasant.

599

Mon, 29 Apr 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Sometime in the next couple of weeks, this site will probably experience some interruptions. It may even go offline for a bit. The time has come for the move.

I have been hosting it in one place for a while, but I am finding that the small amount of convenience that I get from hosting where it is now, does not make up for the lack of flexibility and portability I could have if I hosted it either myself, or at a place like GitHub.

Also, I’m sick of paying for hosting when I’m never going to use any of the extended features.

This would all be a tedious headache if it wasn’t for me from the past setting it all up and transferring most of the content of this site over to the new one. Thanks past me.

That’s not to say that it will all go perfectly smoothly. I’m sure there will be hiccups. There might be weeks when my post doesn’t go up exactly when I want and I might lose some links here and there. I think I have most of my post content intact, but I also know that there are a small handful of broken links scattered through my older posts.

On the upside, after I move everything over and do all the redirect shenanigans in the background, this site should be blazing fast and much easier for me to do weird things with. I tried embedding text adventures into some of the older post and it always proved to be a pain. Now that I will be in charge of all the backend code, I can probably add whatever sort of Twine or web player nonsense I want.

And I do want.

I still haven’t decided whether I will keep posting once a week like I have for almost 600 weeks, but probably. It’s a habit now.

598 - Populous

Mon, 22 Apr 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Best Games - Populous

Populous is a game where your primary method of interaction is to raise and lower the level of the ground one small patch at a time. Understandably, that might not sound very compelling, but when you play Populous hours disappear in a snap.

While there might be an argument to be made that there are a couple of simulations that might count as the first ‘God Game’, I don’t know if there are any contenders for the first truly enjoyable ‘God Game”. Populous is it.

Before Populous there was no ‘God Game’ genre. A game where you don’t directly control the tiny characters running around on screen, but instead, you control the world they inhabit. Changing the land to direct outcomes. Using natural disasters as weapons. Reinforcing your followers’ zealotry, making them more formidable and destructive when they tangle with an opposing god’s followers.

And that’s the magic of Populous. While you are consistently told that your followers are good and the opposing followers are evil, when you survey the world this other god’s followers largely resemble your own. They build the same homes and structures. They operate by the same rules. They are a palette swapped version of your own people. So that means you must destroy them.

You probably won’t be more than a few levels into Populous when it occurs to you. Am I the baddie? Is there anything that truly makes my people different from the ‘Evil’ populous. Did they do something to deserve the volcanoes, earthquakes, and floods you send their way?

Of course, that’s a question the game will never answer. If they are left uncontested, the other god’s people will surely eradicate your own. So there is no sense equivocating. An uncaring world has set you in opposition, so you must fight. Or tip the balance in favour of your own people so that they can fight.

Certainly, the structure of how the game is played, with very clear and simple icons as an interface, might make it compelling. Especially for people in 1989, accustomed to much more arcane and impenetrable game interfaces. But I think it’s simpler than that.

Populous, like a lot of other Bullfrog and Peter Molyneux designed games, the morality of Populous is grey at best. There is something inherently exciting about being a tiny bit evil. Synthetically dark hearted. Populous is a game that understand that the very notion of an all powerful god that favors one people over another comes from a very bad place in human nature, and then makes light of it. After all, these are just a bunch of goofy little pixel people, right? When you destroyed a thriving village with an earthquake just so it would be easier for your devoted knights could more easily walk in and slaughter the survivors, that was all in the name of good, right? It’s just a bit of digital fun.

If you can play all 500 levels of Populous and come away with a positive outlook on the way people have conducted themselves religiously over the past several thousand years, I would be very surprised.

On the upside, you would probably have had a lot of fun.

Populous is, absolutely, one of the Best Games.

597

Sun, 14 Apr 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Enjoy this test video!

596

Mon, 08 Apr 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Writing recently has been … slow.

I think doing the ‘write a story every week for six weeks’ thing is great for getting a bunch of practice coming up with concepts. It’s even great for completing projects, since you pretty much have to complete them to submit them. It does burn you out on writing for a bit though.

I got back rejections for the last of the stories I had out, so for the first time in a while, I don’t have anything in a queue at a magazine. I will send them back out, well at least one of them will be going back out, but still, it’s a bit of a bummer to not have any out right now.

I know that at least one of my six week stories can probably sell, but I also didn’t want to turn around and send any out before I had a chance to really punch them up. I think I have forgotten them enough at this point to be able to edit and revise with a clear head.

And then I have my two - no - three almost finished stories that I need to wrap up and send out. Along with all the flash stories I wrote last year. So there is no shortage of things to write or submit.

I guess it’s time to go peruse the markets again.

595

Mon, 01 Apr 2024 00:00:00 +0000

If you have read many of these posts, you know that this place has always been about video game ephemera, from actual development talk to musings on old titles. More recently these posts have also been about fiction writing and everything that goes along with it.
Well that ends today.

Unbeknownst to you, and even me, I have spent the last decade writing a collection of the filthiest limericks ever conceived. Each one more grotesquely bawdy than the last. All of this work was conducted while in a deep, near comatose, sleep, and hidden below the foundation of my home.
I believe that, in some self preserving subconscious place, I knew that these verses were not meant for waking eyes. But I have unearthed them, and I have read them, and I must unburden myself of them.

Every week from here on out, I will release a single line from one of these foul poems. The first line of the first limerick is at the bottom of this page. With that, this place will forever become a marathon of horror, and for that I am sorry.

There once was a man from Regina -

594

Mon, 25 Mar 2024 00:00:00 +0000

The 90’s era arcade game that I have been working on for some time is finally starting to gel.
The shaders that were very difficult to get right are nearly perfect.
The pixel alignment script that took a while is now rock solid.
The scale and angle of objects that didn’t want to comfortably fit under an orthographic camera now seem to work properly.
One of the last things I needed to nail down was how to consistently create textures that look and feel like sprite and tile pixel art. In common fashion, I’m not creating them in the traditional way.
People have been creating pixel art since the late 70s. Images that can be moved around a screen on discrete pixel unit at a time. That usually meant that they would draw the image out on graph paper, highlight specific colors if that was a capability of the hardware they were using, and then enter that ‘map’ into their game as code. Or, if they were an artist and not a programmer, they would hand that sheet over to someone else to punch into the computer.
That went on for quite a long time, well into the late 80’s. Eventually computer aided art tools were developed that allowed artists to handle the art side independently. They would create the graphics and hand the finished file over to whoever was tasked with squeezing it into the game.
A much cleaner workflow, but creating pixel art typically meant creating art a pixel at a time. Like a slightly less cumbersome light-bright.
Gradually we got to the point where pressure sensitive tablets and screens using extremely sensitive electronic pens can pair with ridiculously sophisticated art software allow an artist to draw and paint as though they were using traditional media. It’s actually sort of amazing.
I’m mostly using vector tools.
Vectors drawing is like using mathematically defined shapes and regions to create art as opposed to scratching a mark onto a surface. The mark is easy to make, but it’s mostly static. It stays how and where you put it. That can be very useful. Sometimes you just want to make a mark in a specific place in a specific color. But sometimes, you want to make a box, and then have that box remain scalable, rotateable, and variable forever. When I create using vector tools, I am defining the parameters of the image, parameters that I can change at almost any time.
Creating pixel art with vectors lets you get away with a lot of strange things. Tiling and palette swaps are trivial. Creating variations on a single tile is not only easy, but kind of leans into how these vector packages work. It’s playing to their strengths.
I’m sure that I’m not the first person to do this. There are probably countless artists currently using this workflow for pixel art, but I haven’t really seen it out there in the wild.
Anyway, here, enjoy some parametrically created pixel art.

593 - PaRappa the Rapper

Mon, 18 Mar 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Best Games - PaRappa the Rapper

Hit buttons in time with the music. That’s the pitch. That’s PaRappa. It shouldn’t work. It shouldn’t be fun. For a time, rhythm games were the biggest thing in the world. Dance Dance Revolution, Beatmania, Guitar Hero, Rock Band, and on and on. They still exist, of course. No real arcade would be complete without some sort of dance based rhythm game at this point. They aren’t as prominent as they once were, but it’s almost difficult to imagine the world before rhythm games. Back when the most rhythm adjacent game you could find was Simon.

I’m not sure if the core gameplay of PaRappa the Rapper would have worked if it had been as lean as many DDR games. Had the presentation of the game been as spare.

At its core, Parappa is a timeline with timing marks on it. An icon travels along the timeline and when it is over certain segments, it prompts you to press a button. That’s it. That’s the game. When the icon reaches a certain point on the timeline, a timeline that corresponds with the beat of the music, you press a preselected button. You can play around with other buttons at different points on the timeline, but the game really only requires you to press a button at that one particular moment.

All of the things that videogames are known for, freedom of movement, improvisation, variable interactivity, those aren’t required in PaRappa. Just press the button when you are asked to and the game will be satisfied. Now, you can improvise, and you can play with the beat outside of the required hits, and the game will reward you for that, but you don’t need to. You can just hit the beats, and you will progress.

If you aren’t familiar with rhythm games, I can imagine that this description doesn’t sound very fun. You’re right. It shouldn’t be. But it is.

Maybe that shouldn’t be surprising. After all, playing music is fun. In some ways, a game like PaRappa turns the PlayStation controller into a musical instrument. When you hit a button the game will make a corresponding sound and it is up to you then to make those sounds rhythmic. The game is asking you to do the fun part.

There is another aspect of PaRappa the Rapper that I should probably touch on. It’s the part that most commentary on the game would probably get to first. PaRappa is completely unhinged.

The game plays out in a series of animated skits populated by a cast of paper thin characters. Each skit concluding with a song for you to play along with.

The skits typically involve the title character, PaRappa the Rapper, rapping along to some sort of skill building life event. Learning Karate, taking a driving test, learning to bake. It’s all very simple and silly, but every aspect of the game is painted with levels of bizarre and surreal. Character dialog is often nonsensical. Line deliveries are spectacularly odd. Considered motivations are usually nonexistent. In PaRappa’s world things happen simply because things happen. You just have to go with the flow, and, as you are constantly reminded, you ‘gotta believe’.

The packaging of this very simple gameplay loop is lively and odd and perfectly charming. If rhythm games needed a kickstart, PaRappa was designed to deliver.

Now, decades later, PaRappa doesn’t really compete with the Rock Bands and Guitar Heros of the world, but it is still a very special game. As goofy as it is challenging and without a doubt, one of the best games.

592

Mon, 11 Mar 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Work continues slowly, but slowly, on my 2D pixel art game that is neither 2D nor pixel art.

I redesigned and rebuilt the player character model and started the process of rigging it for animation.

This game is going to be a strange looking thing. Like an alternate history version of a Capcom CP System game where they put in support for colored lighting, shadow casting, and 16x9 displays. A real chimera of the old and the new.

I also started on (restarted really) level and environment design. A lot of the things I didn’t think I would be able to get away with, It turns out I can, as long as I manage any moving objects with a little piece of code I wrote that keeps everything snapped to perfect screen pixels.

There are a lot of pixelation shaders out there that crunch polygons and textures down to strictly paletted pixels but there is no fooling anyone if the models still move like they are 3D objects. Spinning, moving too smoothly, antialiasing in sub pixels, or picking up specific specular highlights. They can be 3D objects, but they have to move like they have the limitations of sprites.
When I first tested the animation, I found that making some very crisp, pose to pose, animations without a lot of in-betweening looked pretty good, but it was missing something.

When I finally figured out what the problem was it seemed pretty obvious. What I needed to do was to make a set of very fixed poses and then do a small handful of tweens, but with no real timing between them. So no held frames would be baked into the animation. Instead, I used the game engine to pull the frames one at a time when they were called for the specific animation. Running for instance might be 6 or 7 frames. But rather than just play “run” as a complete animation, I found that I would call each frame based on the speed or direction of player input. Speeding up or slowing down the animation the way you normally would added some extra smoothing and mush that looked every inch a 3D model pretending to be a 2D sprite. Calling on each frame in the sequence as needed, looked very different. It looks more like 2D animation.

It shouldn’t be shocking at all, since that’s more or less the procedure you would use to animate a game character circa 1990. Sometimes the old tricks can be the new tricks, only with colored lighting, collision physics, and shadow casters.

591

Mon, 04 Mar 2024 00:00:00 +0000

I know it’s a cliche line to say that there is always more than one way to accomplish anything. I think that might be especially true for computer graphics. Of course, there are as many paths and processes to creating something like a painting as there are people who paint them, but you would think that with a system as rigid and, literally binary, as a computer, that there would be some processes that can only be done in one way.
I have a recent example. I am trying to achieve an effect, something sort of like feathers or the little strips of paper dangling in layers from a pinata. Over the course of a few hours I discovered about a dozen ways to do that. Some of them are existing, even old by computer graphics standards, techniques. Some of them are combinations of strategies. A couple I came up with and for all I know they are completely novel.
Some of them are purely geometry based. Just manipulation of triangles. Some of them are combinations of geometry and shader programs written to run extremely quickly on a computer’s GPU. A couple are purely image based, using layers of textures. The best ones for my purposes are probably combinations of all of these. Not one of them is the wrong or right choice. They all have their tradeoffs.
I have thought many times over the years of getting a job teaching 3D modelling or animation. I have even applied a few times. I was once offered a job almost on the spot to teach a 3D course, but I turned it down. I didn’t think the school’s curriculum really aligned with the way I think digital art should be taught. There is not just one way to create anything, and there is not just one way to teach it.
I think that might be my problem. I have been doing computer graphics a long time, and I can see so many potential paths. Trying to tell someone new to it that there is a right way to do anything, or that they should try to do things the way that I do them just seems so wrong. Wrong and possibly harmful. People should work the way that works for them. But that also means that you need to try a bit of everything, be a generalist, before you know what does and doesn’t work for you.
Should a person new to, say, 3D modelling start by sculpting, hard low polygon modelling one vertex at a time, work orthographic or in perspective? I don’t know. I have a lot of tools in my arsenal at this point, but mostly, I know that I don’t know everything. I don’t have that self assured bravado that someone might need to walk into a classroom and declare that they know the path to getting you from zero to 3D artist in a few months. I know too much to think that I know that much.

590 - The Irritating Maze

Mon, 26 Feb 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Best Games - The Irritating Maze

The Irritating Maze is not a complex game. It is not a game that defines or extends a genre. You will not find a compelling narrative or ingenious mechanics here. The Irritating Maze is simple. But it’s the right kind of simple.

The Irritating maze is the most pure sort of game there is. A test of skill.

When you start you get to choose from a wide selection of playable characters. Either Man or Lady. It doesn’t really matter, though, because the game plays identically no matter who you choose.

After that, you guide the tip of a metal rod through an electrified maze filled with hazards. That’s it. That’s the game. Guide what amounts to a round cursor through a maze. Don’t touch the walls. Then do it again. Then again. Win.

But you probably won’t win. The Irritating Maze might be simple in concept and design, but it is ridiculously hard to play. There are only three levels, but just making it halfway through the second one is an accomplishment. Some of the hazards are truly devious. Parts of the maze move, there are rapidly moving wheels, and at one point the game traps you in a small box, and then moves the box around. Sinister.

Released to arcades by SNK in 1997 without much fanfare and based on a mid 90s Japanese variety show segment that very few people in North America and Europe would have been familiar with, it’s no wonder that The Irritating Maze is not a very well known game. Maybe you will just have to trust me then, that this game is so perfectly executed that it’s amazing it didn’t spawn a wave of copycats and sequels.

The Irritating Maze is one of the few Neo Geo arcade games of the time to be built into a special cabinet. It used a trackball controller and sported an air cannon that would blast air in the players face when they collided with one of the walls. I suppose that incorporating a metal trackball that would actually shock the player would have been a lawyer’s nightmare, so they went with the air cannon. Probably a safer choice. Still, the game starts with a warning that any person who is pregnant or has a heart condition should not play The Irritating Maze.

Maybe they should have put that on the cabinet in bright glowing letters. We would probably be playing The Irritating Maze 15 today if they had.

There is a place in this world for wild dynamic systems based games and vast arrays of player verbs, but sometimes, sometimes, you just want to move carefully through a maze.

That makes The Irritating Maze one of the Best Games.

589

Mon, 19 Feb 2024 00:00:00 +0000

588

Mon, 12 Feb 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Today I submitted the last of my ‘one story a week for six weeks’ stories.
I’m gonna take a little break from writing (like a couple days… not like a break break) so I think this is all the words I have left in me this week.

587

Mon, 05 Feb 2024 00:00:00 +0000

I only have one more story to write for the ‘write one short story every weekend jam type thing’ that I have been doing.
I will be glad to be done, since it is slightly stressful coming up with something new every weekend and then having a bunch of strangers judge it and pick it apart. On the other hand, it is pretty fun to push yourself and just see what you are capable of coming up with. And maybe it’s even a little fun to have a bunch of strangers pick apart your work, while you pick apart theirs. The hope is That in the end any story that comes out of this process will be that much better. You have passed that first draft, first read hurdle, and you can really try to send it.

I still find that writer’s block is not a thing. At least not for me. I can pretty easily come up with a handful of story ideas for any given prompt, toss out all the really bad ones and run with the sort of okay one that I have left over.

It usually takes me a couple of hours of jotting notes and stray lines to come up with something approaching cohesive, but coming up with new story ideas or scenes, or characters, or situations. That’s not really a problem.

That doesn’t mean that I write fast though. Many people in the competition would write a couple of stories and choose the one they liked best. A weekend is just enough time for me to write one sub 1000 word story and polish it up to any sort of presentable state. If I thought I had a few thousand words to work with, maybe I would write faster. Long dialog scenes or detailed action scenes. Stuff that can really get away from you if you have no hard word cap to deal with. That’s that sort of stuff that can really flow out of you when you get going. Or, to be more specific, If I really get going. I don’t know how you write. Maybe you are one of those fast people.

Over the past year, I have only finished a couple of stories. I have two that are on the verge of done, and another two that need a bit of work but are otherwise humming along fine. But, like I said, I don’t write fast. I like to take some time and consider words and phrases. Try on different ways to describe things. Rewrite a single sentence 7 or 8 or 25 times until I get it just right.
I do think that, for the most part, my stories this year are better, or more workable than last year. It’s tough for me to judge. I think I have less trouble getting them out, at any rate.

Well, it’s time I submit my story for this week. Wish me luck.

586

Mon, 29 Jan 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Quite a few months ago, I bought the full Affinity suite of products. Before you ask, of course they were on sale.
I have used Affinity Designer for a few years now, but up until recently, I haven’t had much reason to use Affinity Photo. I use Krita for most of my painting and image editing, and I still like it, but recently I have been working on my IPad more and more often. Drawing and painting directly on the screen has its advantages. Since Serif offered a single licence for Windows, Mac, and IOS, doing some image editing and painting in Affinity Photo was sort of a no-brainer.

It’s fantastic.

So I was a Photoshop and Illustrator guy. I used them both for almost twenty years. Professionally. I can honestly say that there are a lot of reasons that I prefer the Affinity suite. And no, it’s not just the price.
Having pretty much the full toolset on the iPad is great. That I can use the same file on IPad and desktop is phenomenal. And, for the most part, the non-destructive tools are at least on par with Adobe’s, if not better. Compound masks are a must have for me now.

I think they may have a little way to go with their brush engine, but I have been able to paint most of what I want to with very few issues or problems.

The vector tools are solid, and if I ever find them lacking it’s pretty easy to hop over to Designer and build out a mask or text.
If Photo has some decent vector tools, then it shouldn’t be surprising that Designer has some decent raster tools. Pixel paint brushes and patterns that an Illustrator artist would kill for.

I used to promote Affinity Designer, because I used it nearly every day, but now, after using both Designer and Photo extensively, I can easily say it might be worth it for you to switch from Adobe products.

Until something much better comes along, I will happily continue paying the very low upgrade price for the Affinity suite of products.

585 - Money Puzzle Exchanger / Money Idol Exchanger

Mon, 22 Jan 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Best Games - Money Puzzle Exchanger / Money Idol Exchanger

If you’re like me, you think about Magical Drop 3 more than a person really should. Almost immediately after thinking about Magical Drop 3, you think of Money Puzzle Exchanger. It turns out, Face, the developer of Money Puzzle Exchanger, might be like me.

The similarities between Money Puzzle Exchanger and Magical Drop are maybe what you might call legally actionable. Both games play very similarly. Circles that march down from the top of the screen and you as the player have the ability to grab one, or a similar group of those circles, pull them down to the bottom, move them to a new column and fire them back up to the top. If you make certain combinations of circles touch at the top, they will clear, or in the case of Money Puzzle Exchanger, they will be replaced by a circle of a different value.

That’s the biggest difference here. In Magical Drop, making a line of three or more of the same color bubble will cause those bubbles, and any other similarly colored bubble touching them, to pop. In Money Puzzle Exchanger those circles represent coins and matching, say, five coins with a one on them will convert them all into a single coin with a value of five. Two fives make a ten, five tens makes a fifty, two fifties makes a hundred, and five hundreds makes a five hundred. Match two five hundreds and they will disappear, clearing them from the board permanently.

While that all sounds sort of straight forward, imagine trying to make several matching patterns like that at high speed. Magical Drop can be difficult, but matching colors is trivial compared to that.

On the surface, the gameplay of these two games might seem extremely similar, so similar that Data East may have sued Face over it, the experience of playing Money Puzzle Exchanger is very different from Magical Drop. There is so much more strategy and planning involved. The action is not as fast paced, but maybe even more hectic. More mentally stressful. In a good way.
For a moment I thought that Money Puzzle Exchanger might have the wackier cast of fun characters, but they both post up a good showing in that department.

So, Money Puzzle Exchanger is a lot like Magical Drop. And that’s great. But it also plays differently, and maybe is a bit more difficult. And that’s also great.

It’s a lot like one of the other best games, but I don’t think that’s disqualifying. Money Puzzle Exchanger is different enough that I think it stands on its own as one of the best games.

584

Mon, 15 Jan 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Every once in a while, I come across a game that I just don’t get. I can’t understand why other people enjoy it. This is very much a ‘not for me’ thing. I mean, go enjoy whatever games you like, I’m not going to tell you no, or tell you that you are wrong for liking it.

Almost always, I come across these games because someone recommended it to me. Or someone wrote an article about it. Or they talked glowingly about it on a podcast or YouTube video. Because they like it. They enjoyed it. And then I try it, and I don’t.
The common public reaction seems to be to tell everyone who likes that thing, that they are wrong for liking it. I don’t and can’t subscribe to that. I know that there are things that I like that other people won’t. Usually I can try to articulate why it is that I like that thing, but I don’t actually expect my opinion to sway anyone.

There are legions of games, and I won’t attempt to name them here, that I don’t enjoy, but I can imagine how someone else might. There is a much shorter list of games that I have a lot of trouble understanding who they are for. And yet, these games still have their proponents.

I recently played a game, that I won’t name here, that came highly recommended. There are even some people out there calling it potentially their game of the year.

I’m baffled. I played it. I think I explored it fully. I think I played enough to see what other people see in it… and I’m baffled. I hated almost every bit of playing it.

No, the kids are not wrong. This is just something that is very much not for me. And that’s okay.

I truly hope that the person for whom this is their game of the year, enjoyed every second of their time with it. I will be playing something else. There are so very many games to choose from.

583

Mon, 08 Jan 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Last year I took part in a sort of challenge. Every weekend for five weekends write one story under 750 words. By the end of the challenge you end up with five stories (or six if you take part in the warmup round).

Even though I haven’t sold, or even finished rewrites and edits on any of the stories from last year, I’m trying it again this year (though 2 of them are very close).

I did find that 750 words is not really enough for me. I had a tendency to come up with two or four thousand word stories and I would try to cram them down into 750. As you can guess, this didn’t always work.

I think I will start being concise by ending this post here. After all, I already wrote a ~500 word story this weekend for the warmup round.

582 - Asteroids

Mon, 01 Jan 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Best Games - Asteroids

There is nothing quite like a game that lets you do battle with mans oldest foe. Rocks.

Big rocks, little rocks, medium sized rocks that split into two smaller rocks. Rocks and void. The way it started. The way it was always going to end.

Asteroids may have started as a way to create a single player Space War experience but it ended up as so much more.
Asteroids may be the first real test of endurance for a video game. Several games had unending waves of enemies. Space Invaders is all about unending waves of enemies. But Space Invaders offers the player a shield to hide behind. Reprieve from the continuous assault of descending invaders. A moment to blink. Asteroids never lets up. There is always another rock to destroy or be destroyed by.

Asteroids, while initially less challenging than something like Space Invaders, quickly ramps to test your perception and reflexes. The rocks drift smoother than any other game at the time. Your ship reacts with a realistic momentum and inertia. If you let it get away from you just trying to drive the ship will kill you faster than any rock out there.

Occasionally a saucer will zip across the screen taking pot shots at you, but that doesn’t matter, your real nemesis is the rocks. All of the rocks.

It’s Asteroids, you fight rocks, it’s one of the best games.

581

Mon, 25 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Merry Christmas and happy holidays!

580

Mon, 18 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0000

One of my favorite game experiences this year was the surprise of Hi-Fi Rush, a rhythm stylish action combat game that was as unexpectedly funny and charming as it was fun to play.

I say unexpectedly because, when I saw the first trailer for the game I did blurt, out loud to no one ‘Fuck off!’. The first line spoken in the trailer, right after the requisite pause and record scratch is “Yep, that’s me.” A trailer moment so cliche that it is constantly parodied. I was almost certain that this moment was a portent of awful things. Even if the game played well, the writing was sure to drive me away. I am glad to say that I was very wrong.

There is a sort of winking self awareness in some writing that rings completely false. A style of writing that lets you know that the writer considers the content and characters worthy of ridicule. The writer wants the audience to know that they are smarter than the material. Above it. Almost no one likes this style of writing.

Recently, this has led to a lot of internet chatter about Marvel and Star Wars movies and Whedonesque dialog. Now you can say what you want about Joss Whedon as a person, and his output as a writer, but a solid majority of the detractors are simply wrong. Quippy, snarky, irreverent dialog is not always bad dialog. If it’s true to the character and true to the moment, it’s not bad dialog. You might not like it, but hey there are lots of things you might not like, but nothing about that makes them objectively bad. Being snarky at the expense of the character or the reality of the moment might be.

Here’s the problem. There have been a lot of shows, movies, plays, games, comic books, and novels written that try to play with that light, irreverent style, but they do that at the expense of the truth of the characters. Hi-Fi Rush loves its characters and wants you to love them too.

The game’s main character, Chai, is an idiot, and the writers are very aware of this, but he never says or does anything just for the joke. Other characters comment on him being an idiot, but not for the joke. The spirit of the joke isn’t mean or opportunistic. It’s just true. And funny.

The dialog in Hi-Fi Rush is quippy, snarky, and irreverent, but never at the expense of the characters or the truth of the moment. The world of Hi-Fi Rush is goofy and light and fun, but when it needs to be honest or heartfelt there really is no tonal shift that takes place. Honesty is where the game always is. It’s goofy, but there is no indication that the writers think that the game is dumb or bad or lesser than. The writing is always fully honest and fully earnest. Because of that, it is also very funny.

Maybe someone thought it would be fun to start the trailer in that cliched way. Maybe they were so fully invested in the story that they didn’t realize that the trailer could be interpreted as punching down at the characters or story. Maybe different people wrote and created the trailer. Not an uncommon practice.

Hi-Fi Rush is very funny. But it’s also very earnest. It’s silly, but it’s heartfelt.

The internet at large might want claim to be over snarky, self aware writing, but I think what they are actually done with is dishonest writing. Writing that doesn’t take the world or characters seriously. Writing that doesn’t love its subject. After all, if the writers don’t love their characters, why should we.

579

Mon, 11 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve been working on a 2D game project for a little while now. You might say I have been working on this project since the early 90s.

I have always been fascinated by video games. Since the time I was probably three and played a Space Wars arcade machine with my mom in the alcove between a bar and a restaurant, I have been amazed by them. That I can press a button or move a stick or wiggle a mouse or move my hands around in space with a screen strapped to my face, and something deep inside a computer will respond to that input, is pure magic.

It’s only been very recently that I have been able to make any video games of my own. Nothing about making games has made them any less magical to me. Difficult work, but not less magical. I have modelled, rigged, and animated a character. I chose and painted the colors of that character. I wrote the code that makes that character move around based on inputs that I specified, and it still seems magical.

I do program a little, and I know enough of the internals and technicalities of how games work that I can muddle through, but, as you may have guessed, my main area of interest is graphics. I’m a 3D artist, with a helping of traditional 2D and illustration on the side, then season all that with some animation. I like to analyze art, partly for the aesthetic, but mostly for the technical processes that it takes to create that art. I find the how more interesting than the why. And I’m especially interested in when the how influences the why. I’m talking about constraints.

The 2D game I am working on has the benefits of a ridiculous amount of graphics and cpu processing power. I am using a 3D engine that is capable of real time lighting and shadowing. One that can change every pixel on a 4K display in a few milliseconds. One that can process millions of polygons into finished images faster than the human eye can follow. And I am trying to make all of that look like an arcade machine several decades old.

It’s working.

I think understanding the constraints, the how, of why older arcade art looked the way it looked, is informing how I aim the vast armada of graphics processing I have available at the problem of achieving that aesthetic. It’s not just a matter of using those same tools or techniques, it’s a matter of emulating how pixels in those games got drawn to the screen. The hows can determine the whys.

There are a lot of pixel art games out there that choose pixel art as an aesthetic, and that’s fine. I enjoy looking at an awful lot of them. But they are using that aesthetic in a very loose way. In a way that is determined more by choice than by constraint.

I’m attempting to work in the other direction. I am using new tools and then placing a constraint on how I use them and letting the constraint determine how the final art will look.

That might be a semantic difference, but it’s my semantic difference.

I’m making a new game that looks like an old game, but sort of plays like a new game. And every time I press a button or push a stick, it feels like magic.

578

Mon, 04 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0000

I haven’t written about writing for a while. I tend to not want to, since, well, if I’m writing about writing I figure I should just be writing.

The last time I did a writing update, I had a story out for submission and another one almost ready to go out. Both of those stories ended up getting rejected, but one of them was on hold for its third time (fourth maybe, but two of those times were at the same place).

I haven’t sent that story back out, and I’m not sure why. I think I want to have several ready to go at once. It’s tough to hang all your hopes on one story, even if you know it’s good and you have had several outlets tell you it’s good (just not good enough for them right now for whatever reason).

I have three stories almost ready to go, but I probably won’t have them done until the new year at the rate I write.
So I guess that’s it. Not much to add for this update. I’m still writing… slowly. I have about eight other stories started, but I have put them all on hold until I finish this first batch.

577 - SubSpace

Mon, 27 Nov 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Best Games - SubSpace

In 1997 you would be lucky to get two computers to talk with one another long enough to play a short game of quake.
It wasn’t impossible. Networked multiplayer games existed. Lots of people played them. I played them. But they weren’t exactly easy to get running. They weren’t exactly responsive. They weren’t exactly stable. The idea of running a single game that could accommodate over two hundred players on a single server, over a dial up modems, well that was sorcery.

Higher speed connections to the internet were available, but they were either extremely expensive or only in specific locales. Wherever you happened to be, that is where high speed internet probably wasn’t. It was all a little too big an ask just to play a multiplayer game. If you wanted to do that you would pack up your pc and move it to where you could hook up a LAN. With a bunch of other people. Maybe even a party. A LAN party.

Now, if I want to play a game with any number of other people I can turn on one of the many devices within arms reach that will let me do that. Including this IPad I am typing on right now.

What if there were some sorcery that let you do that in 1997? What if there was at least one game where you could join in and play with an absolutely staggering amount of people.

SubSpace is all at once close to a decade ahead of its time while also being a throwback to the very early days of video games.
SubSpace is multiplayer Asteroids. Actually, it might be more accurate to say that SubSpace is massively multiplayer Spacewar!.
Spacewar! is a head to head space combat game from the early 60’s. You control a spaceship in pitched combat against another spaceship. There is gravity, inertia, explosions, a star you can slingshot your ship around. It’s actually pretty impressive. And it is likely the first ever video game.

SubSpace is that, but if two hundred other people were also playing and there are missions and team and sometimes you would join up with a bunch of random people from anywhere in the world to play some spaceship soccer.
It felt like it shouldn’t work, but it did. It was amazing.

Unfortunately, being amazing doesn’t always mean commercial success. Subspace didn’t sell well enough to keep the servers running for very long. And like far too many online games, that would have been the end of it. With no server, the game had nothing to call in to, no place in the world to call home.

But SubSpace was amazing, and a lot of people knew that. These people did what people who love something amazing do. They made it their own.

Today on Steam you can play SubSpace Continuum. It is a aground up recreation of SubSpace. I don’t know if there are people playing it now, but I think it might be worth your while to try. Get a group of two hundred or so people together. Go fly tiny 2D spaceships around 2D mazes and shoot at each other. It’s fun. It’s one of the Best Games.

576

Mon, 20 Nov 2023 00:00:00 +0000

About a half an hour ago I solved an issue I have been having with my 2D (but actually 3D) game project. It feels great.

When I started this, I had an extremely specific aesthetic and feeling that I wanted to capture. A late 80’s to early 90’s arcade machine. The first part of the journey was creating a CRT effect. That came together fairly quickly. The next part was making properly looping animations and a system for making them either 3D or 2D rendered sprites. In the end I managed to make them 3D meshes that get rendered in a spritelike manner.

After that was control. I wanted analog control that still felt snappy like D-Pad or joystick inputs. I think I have that mostly taken care of, along with a simple, but solid general input component that handles button presses and gamepad or keyboard inputs. I have interaction with colliders and trigger volumes working. Animation trees are mostly ready to go. The only thing that never worked quite like I wanted was the camera.

Godot 4 is pretty well known for having camera jitter when trying to create pixel perfect movement and panning. I experienced a lot of it. Eventually I was able to get the player and object movement to be pretty crisp. There wouldn’t be very much pixel twitching when you ran the little character around. Background tiles would stay stuck to the simulated phosphors and CRT bloom. Until the camera moved. If it moved slowly, everything looked okay, but as soon as it started moving with any sort of speed things got very twitchy.

I did the first thing anyone would do, I looked it up on the internet. I watched tutorials. I snooped around in code off of GitHub. I did the research. There are a lot of people doing pixel art games and a lot of those people are working on pixel perfect cameras. Not one that I found were solving the same problems as me, and a lot of them required so many weird workarounds and caveats that it would be a chore to develop the actual game. I want aesthetic constraints, not arbitrary technical ones.
Anyway, at the end of all of that, I combined some techniques and figured out a solution that actually allows me more artistic freedom, and it looks damn near perfect.

I could try to explain, but you can just watch this and judge for yourself.

575

Mon, 13 Nov 2023 00:00:00 +0000

I have been playing some Atari 50. It’s part game, part documentary, part interactive museum highlighting some slices over the 50 year history of Atari.

It is packed with high resolution scans of game manuals and marketing materials. Most of them are what you would expect. Flyers filled with details about cabinets for arcade owners to peruse when making purchasing decisions, complete with the requisite amount of hype. I find all of this historical miscellany fascinating. This is the sort of stuff that typically gets tossed, since it doesn’t offer much value to the company. Not much money to be made with a flyer for an arcade machine that isn’t being produced or sold anymore. It’s even more difficult for people to see any value in artifacts created for temporary commercial purposes within their own lifetimes. The first Coca Cola logo ever produced is historically interesting, some slight change to that logo produced in the last five months is not. Maybe it should be. Maybe we should celebrate these small artifacts. Small works.

One of the things I have been extremely taken with when playing through Atari 50 is the T-Shirts. T-Shirts come up a lot. Pictures of people wearing weird T-Shirts, stories of people making T-Shirts, and the company using T-Shirts as marketing material. Compared to most corporate T-Shirts today, the design of a lot of these T-Shirts absolutely rips.

I’ll admit here and now that I haven’t done a ton of research on this, but I think there might be a reason these particular T-Shirts are great. Most of these T-Shirts are from the late 70s and early 80s. There was a certain confluence of technologies and design during that time that would lead to some really fantastic T-Shirts.

First, screen printing technology, which had been around for literally hundreds of years at the time, had fairly recently been commodified to the point that a person could buy or build a screen printing setup for a few hundred dollars. That meant that it became pretty easy for people to print images and words onto T-Shirts, at least if what you want is fairly basic.

Around the same time, graphic design and camera technology was going through a similar commodification. We weren’t quite to the point where all of this work could be done on a computer, setting up artwork was still mostly a manual process, but improved photographic film, emulsion, and lithograph materials helped designers work cheaper and quicker than ever before. This led to an absolute boom of high quality design being applied to products that never would have enjoyed such high quality artwork even a decade earlier. Toys and moderately priced consumer products started getting the premium artwork treatment. Artwork that could be resized and reused for anything and everything. Artwork that could be applied cheaply to something like a T-Shirt.

Of course, the graphic T-Shirt options somewhere in the vicinity of 1979 were nothing like they are today. You can get a cheap shirt with basically anything you want on it now. You can even have a place print something you drew with your finger in a jack box game and they will send you that shirt in a few days. Maybe even less. But that also means that most shirts are considered cheap, almost disposable, items. Companies that make shirts don’t always bring their A game.

In the late 70s they had a bunch of good artwork and it was very easy to make T-Shirts. Maybe not as easy as it is today, but if you are silk screening the shirts and not inkjet printing them, it was pretty close. If you are a company like Atari and you want to make some shirts to sell, and maybe promote your company and products, you will use the artwork that you have ready for screen printing. The best artwork your company can make. Simply put, nothing else is ready.

Almost all of the T-Shirts I am seeing in Atari 50 follow that model. They are screen prints of some bit of art that the company had already photographed and set up for making screens or plates. In other words, their best art. I’m sure they had a few duds, but I haven’t seen them.

While the flyers and other advertising materials were probably held in a flat file somewhere until they were scanned for this project, I doubt the T-Shirts exist now. T-shirts aren’t really known for their durability, but also, people don’t tend to consider artifacts like that important. At least not historically important.

That’s unfortunate, since they represent a lot of skilled artist’s work. That, and they were a damn sight better than just another corporate logo in the center of someone’s chest.

574 - Retro Game Challenge (GameCenter CX: Arino no Chosenjo)

Mon, 06 Nov 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Best Games - Retro Game Challenge (GameCenter CX: Arino no Chosenjo)

For the last twenty years the show GameCenter CX has played on Fuji TV One in Japan. It’s a comedy show where Shinya Arino attempts to play, and beat, old video games. Arino is an affable man, usually quick with a joke, who suffers the task of playing these games at the behest of the CX company, a company that gleefully promotes and demotes him based on his performance in the games, but one that he also appears to run. His assistants will show up to alternately help or torment him, whichever is funnier in the moment.

Between games, Arino and his crew tour around Japan interviewing legendary figures in the video game industry, and, more often than not, playing games with them.

The entire show is built on good natured enjoyment, and an honest love of video games.

When indieszero set out to make a game based on GameCenter CX, the only way to do the show justice would be to build into it that same love. So that is exactly what they did.

Since GameCenter CX isn’t really a known commodity outside of Japan, the English title of the game was changed to Retro Game Remix, but the content of the game is largely the same.

In Retro Game Challenge, you play as a young kid in the 80s, playing with your neighbor on what looks to be a Nintendo Famicom.

A low poly version of Arino will issue you challenges, much like he deals with during the show, and you must complete them by playing a series of fictional video games.

It would do a disservice to the games included, to call them minigames. The games are often more fully featured than a lot of early Famicom games. They are often ridiculously authentic. If a player weren’t familiar with the real games that these fictional facsimiles are referencing, they could fairly easily be confused for real games from the mid to late 80s.

The games are good too. They look good. They sound good. They play good. They are good. They aren’t just good enough for a minigame collection. They are legitimately enjoyable sans the game master Arino framing device, and arbitrary challenges.

Indieszero made games within a game, but they made them so well, many of them could have stood on their own, wrapped in a plastic cartridge and jammed into a Nintendo console.

The love for gaming doesn’t end with the high quality of the fictional games. Each game comes with a period perfect manual that you can flip through for background and tips on how to best play each game.

The manuals are beautifully designed and pitch perfect. There is a deep love that went into the fake packaging of these fake games. They feel real, because they are real.

The last threads of the nostalgia tapestry making up Retro Game Challenge, is the magazines. Every once in a while a magazine will be added to your shelf, and you can take it down and read it. The magazines are filled with poorly, but authentically, written reviews, hints, and articles about the games you are, and will be, playing. The magazines provide a sense of place. A connection to the time that these fictional games occupy.

Retro Game Challenge loves games just as much as the show it’s based on, and that love makes it one of the best games.

573

Mon, 30 Oct 2023 00:00:00 +0000

I don’t really have a style. I have a way that I draw or model or design characters, but I don’t really have a style.
I was watching an artist on YouTube, something I do quite a lot, and they were trying something a little outside of their ordinary, but they said that they were adapting it to their own style.

Have you ever seen those articles or news pieces about how some people think in fully formed images, some people only think in words. It often comes as a wonder to many of them that there are people out there that process the world in very different ways. That one person can hold an extremely vivid, three dimensional representation of a tomato in their imagination, while another person can clearly imagine a symbolic representation of the letters in the word tomato with only a tangential connection to what a tomato is or looks like.

I imagine that picturing the perfectly realized tomato is what knowing your own art style is like.
So I do what so many people with slightly different thought patterns do. I fake it.

I have a way that my hand likes to make lines. I have an attraction to certain forms and shapes. I put those into my work and shrug at it. Maybe that’s my style. I don’t feel like it is, but if other people can look at something I have drawn or sculpted, and recognize that it might have come from me, maybe that’s all that having a style is.

I watched that artist on YouTube draw a set of portraits. They were all recognizably from the same artist. They did what they said they would do. They adapted those portraits to their own style.

Did they just use shapes and arcs that their hand could draw, and continue to reuse shapes that they were attracted to. Maybe, but I don’t think so. It seemed like they had a personal style that they had spent time crafting. They chose an aesthetic and they bent all of their art toward it.

I can honestly say that I don’t know how to do that. I don’t know what that is. That tomato doesn’t exist for me. I fake it. I make the marks I make and I bend the image in a way that solves the problem I am trying to solve. I adjust proportions, I infer emotion, I attempt to tell a story. If any of that comes out as some sort of cohesive personal style might be for other people to decide. That part of my brain just doesn’t work that way.

572

Mon, 23 Oct 2023 00:00:00 +0000

I had reason to think recently about the way that art is taught.

I think there are a lot of art teachers, instructors, and professors out there that do a fantastic job. You can even find many of them on YouTube or various art instruction channels.

I’m talking ‘capital A’ art here. As in, any medium of expression that people use that is not purely informational. Visual art, music, performance, writing, interactive, culinary, fashion, architectural, competitive, martial, etc, etc, etc.

There are a thousand and one books on any artistic topic you might be interested in. Dozens of courses offered at an institute of learning near you. Art is our first, and most diverse, form of cultural communication. Art is the difference between loose groups of cave dwelling hominids and globe spanning civilizations. Art is on a very short list of the things that make humans human. And we keep on teaching it to each other wrong.

I have written here before about how art isn’t a thing you make, it’s a thing you do. There are exactly as many ways to do art as there are people. Every single one of us will do the things we do in slightly different ways. We will create our cultural artifacts or express our ephemeral performance arts in slightly different ways than any other person.

Art is also an industry, and industry requires some amount of consistency. A level of repeatability. The good thing is that a trained and practiced human is pretty adept at consistency. We are good at creating patterns and repetition. It’s in our nature. We build machines and tools that aid in our consistency.

The problem is, that sometimes, we mistake the industry and consistency for quality.

There is a large contingent of the art instruction world that would like nothing more than to create robots. Individuals that will, when asked, repeat a set of processes to create a consistent, repeatable, product. They think they are teaching art, but they are teaching the creation of artifacts. Art and artifacts are very different things. Artifacts might be what we make, but art is what we do and how we do it.

The only way to get better at anything, is through practice. Repetition. No person starts out making their first mark on paper and ends up producing a masterpiece. You have to practice. You have to work through processes. But that doesn’t mean that you only have to practice making that one mark.

I suppose it’s a mindset more than the actual, physical steps that you have to take. You can, of course, draw seven thousand circles so that you might be better at drawing circles. But that’s not all that you learned.

In drawing those circles, you learned the arc of your hand. The dexterity of your wrist. You learned the rhythm of movement. The pressure and angle you can apply to graphite. You didn’t just make circles. You aren’t only good at making circles. You have learned motions and processes that can be applied to drawing any form. You can draw a hip, an ear, a leaf, a stream flowing past a cottage illuminated by moonlight. You didn’t only learn to draw circles.

There are far too many teachers trying to teach new people to draw new circles so that they can take up positions in the circle drawing industry. These new people will be practiced, they will be consistent, but unless they realize the depth and breadth of what they have learned they will go on thinking that they are quite good at drawing circles, and nothing more.

Art is the act of creating.

That is the part that needs to be taught.

571 - Shatterhand (Tokkyū Shirei Solbrain)

Mon, 16 Oct 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Best Games - Shatterhand (Tokkyū Shirei Solbrain)

By 1991 the last nails were already being driven into the coffin of the NES. The console wouldn’t actually be discontinued for years, and in its home market of Japan, a full decade. Games would continue to trickle out during those years (there are still games being made for the old Famicom/Nintendo Entertainment System), but releasing a game for that machine in 1991 was just asking for it to be forgotten.

At the tail end of a console’s life there are usually only two kinds of games that get released. Weird licensed games and games that started development way earlier but took a long time to reach release. Either way, the results are not usually stellar.

Shatterhand is sort of an outlier. It originated as a licensed game based on a Japanese action show. Tokkyū Shirei Solbrain or Super Rescue Solbrain was a superhero show where cops wore special high tech armor to fight crime in Tokyo. This is the sort of thing that licensed game dreams are made of. If you want to make some money selling games to kids there are a few things you will need to do. Make something flashy, make it vaguely resemble the show, design and develop it quickly so that it comes out while the show is still relevant. Making the game good usually doesn’t factor into these equations. If you can, you just copy another game, a popular game, and you use all of those mechanics in your licensed game. Tokkyū Shirei Solbrain does none of that.

Actually, that’s not entirely true. They did make the game quickly, and it did come out when the show was still on the air, but Tokkyū Shirei Solbrain is not a quick flip of some existing game design. It is the height of what the developer, Angel, was capable of making at the time. Nearly a decade into working with the famicom hardware, they made a game that is rock solid, interesting, challenging, beautiful, and, above all, fun. That isn’t normal for licensed games.

Even if people from Angel or Bandai suspected that they may have a hit on their hands, localizing the game must have been difficult. Obviously, very few people outside of Japan had any reverence for Tokkyū Shirei Solbrain. Instead of a basic translation, the developers opted to create Shatterhand, a recreation of the original with new art, a slightly modified story, and some new level designs. Playing them back to back, I would even say that Shatterhand plays a bit nicer. Smoother. Better.

The game is, as the English name would suggest, all about punching. Unlike Mega Man your attack range is the length of your arm. That means that playing Shatterhand feels a lot more timing based and visceral. There is an immediacy to all your actions that just feels great to play.

You do have more than your fists to get you through the game. Shatterhand also has one of the most innovative upgrade systems I think I have ever seen. You collect Greek lettered power ups, either Alpha or Beta. When you collect three of them they combine to activate a satellite robot. Depending on the order you collected them, you will get a different helper, with different abilities. Trying them all out and finding which ones are the most useful for each stage offers a whole range of exploration that action games of this type just don’t have. To top that, if you collect two sets of the same robot helper in rapid succession, they will turn into a super armor that will give you enhanced abilities for a short while.

There are a lot of reasons that Shatterhand shouldn’t exist. It was released too late in its console’s life. It was a remake of a Japanese licensed game. It bucks convention for the type of platform action game that it is.

This is a game that should never have seen a North American release, and yet, here it is. Claiming its place as one of the Best Games.

570

Mon, 09 Oct 2023 00:00:00 +0000

I hope you have, or have had, a good Thanksgiving. If you are American, and you have your Thanksgiving one week before Christmas or Hanukkah or whatever, what are you doing. Spread your family holidays out a bit. That’s just wacky.

569

Mon, 02 Oct 2023 00:00:00 +0000

I’m fighting a battle against pixels and I’m losing.

Maybe I’m winning.

It’s hard to tell.

My pixel art game project is sort of stuck, but the wheels are still spinning.

This is the problem with working on something where you are going for an extremely specific look. You can get right up to the edge of that. You can have the look almost perfect, but if it’s not perfect it’s difficult to move forward.

The pixel look I am going for is like 95% right now, and I think I probably need it around 97% or 98% before I can really let loose on the artwork. It doesn’t seem that much does it, that 2 or 3 percent. It’s almost nothing.

I have done some work on the collision interactions and the animation pipeline. All of that is going fine. It’s drawing the pixels to the screen that need a tiny boost.

I have a very promising filtering shader on the go. I have a camera adjustment script that keeps things from looking twitchy. Maybe, just maybe, one of those will be the solution to my problem.

I literally have the shader open in another window while I type this and I keep jumping over there to make changes.
I trust that I will be able to shove this project that extra 2 or 3 percent, but to do that I will need to get back to it. So I guess I will.

568 - Advanced Dungeons and Dragons Treasure of Tarmin

Mon, 25 Sep 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Best Games - Advanced Dungeons and Dragons Treasure of Tarmin

The Intellivision video game console started development in 1977. The state of consumer processors in 1977 wasn’t really geared toward high fidelity gaming experiences. A lot of arcade machines of the time were still black and white and the most common video game that the public was familiar with was Pong. Pong isn’t a bad game, but no one would describe it as deep or dynamic.

The core of the machine was a CP1610. This was an update to a processor that was already close to a decade old at that point. CPUs in the ‘70s didn’t advance at the pace that they do now, but this wasn’t exactly state of the art hardware.

The good thing about any computer hardware is that it is always more capable than it seems at first glance. Given enough time and energy, people will come up with all sorts of interesting ways to use a processor or pool of memory. Things that seem impossible become common. Operations that used to take seconds are refined to the point that they happen before a CRT screen can draw the next frame.

There are limits, of course. You can‘t run Doom on an Intellivision. Still, the games released in the early ‘80s bear very little resemblance to the games released at launch. Advanced Dungeons and Dragons Treasure of Tarmin seems like it shouldn’t even exist on the same platform. It’s astounding.

Treasures of Tarmin is the second AD&D game for the Intellivision. The first is a fairly basic, but fun, roguelike. Now I can’t be sure if it takes any inspiration from Rogue, or if both games are simply dipping into the same Dungeons and Dragons well. Either could be true. In any case, Treasure of Tarmin does a much better job with the material. Both were made by the same single developer, Tom Loughry.

Treasures of Tarmin is a sprawling, first person, adventure game where you will have to explore dungeons, battle a legion of different monsters, collect and manage a fairly intricate yet intuitive inventory, and level up your weapons and items. It defies belief that this one guy was able to pack that much into a cartridge that couldn’t fit a JPEG. And a pretty small one at that.

I could attempt to describe the game, but you already know what it is. Imagine wandering around a meandering dungeon, picking up items and using them to smite skeletons, goblins, and the like. You know, D&D stuff.

It would be a few years before a game like Legend of Zelda would come along to advance console adventure gaming. For the most part, I imagine that developers simply didn’t think that it was possible. To create a wide ranging, dynamic adventure you needed the memory, processing, and storage space of a full blown personal computer. And they wouldn’t be wrong. There are very few outliers like Advanced Dungeons and Dragons Treasure of Tarmin. It’s surprisingly deep and fully featured.

This was an early 80s game made on late 70s hardware, and it can still manage to surprise all these decades later.

AD&D Treasure of Tarmin is one of the best games.

567

Mon, 18 Sep 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Recently, I tried drawing on actual paper. I mean, this isn’t a new thing. I used to draw on paper. I still scratch things out on paper all the time. Just rough notepad sketches when I’m testing out an idea or figuring out a shape. But I never actually draw on paper anymore. Not proper drawing. Not something I want to finish. It feels a little strange.

I used to draw on paper all the time. Like actually all the time. I spent years doing it. I bought special pencils for drawing. Then, when I realized I liked different pencils better, I bought those instead. Then I bought boxes of entirely different pencils, because these new ones turned out to be so much more to my liking. I tended toward the blue and red ones. Pencils with just the right amount of pigment and wax so the lines could stay sharp when I wanted and flow when I tilted my hand just so.

I bought special paper too. Paper with just the right amount of tooth and snap. Paper that wasn’t too white, wasn’t too thin. Paper that matched my style of drawing. Whatever I thought that was.

When I recently went to draw on paper, I couldn’t even find my pencils. I had become so divorced from the act of drawing on paper that the tools to do the job weren’t nearby.

My IPad pencil is literally right in front of me as I type this.

I still draw all the time. I draw at the very least several times a week. Some weeks it’s every day. But all of my drawing is done on a computer or a tablet. All of my drawing is done digitally.

I can imagine that there is some loss of romance to that. The act of putting pencil to paper should mean something. Making actual physical marks on real paper. Spreading molecules of tinted medium across plant fibres in a way that is permanent. In a way that will probably outlive me. That should mean something, right?

I found my pencils and I sketched in a sketch book. What I discovered is that I didn’t feel it. Whatever caveman part of my brain that should respond to the act of physical drawing, I didn’t have it.

Drawing digitally, with a glowing screen and an electronic pencil feels just as natural to me now as using graphite… or whatever is stuffed inside these really great pencils that I have.

It didn’t feel bad when I drew on paper. It just didn’t seem to matter. What I craved was the result. I want the smooth mark created by the arc my wrist and arm. I want the illusion of dimensionality created in a flat image. I want the soft gradient I make when I vary the pressure of my hand and the speed of my movement. I want the result and the process, but I don’t have any particular affinity toward how I go about that.

Digital is fine by me. As long as that’s an option, I’ll probably continue to draw that way.

566

Mon, 11 Sep 2023 00:00:00 +0000

An update from the writing front. I only have one story out for submission as I type this (though when you read this, it will probably be at least two). So that isn’t great. But I did enter a new story writing contest, so that’s a bit better.
Story writing contests are a bit weird.

I don’t actually care that much about how my story places in the contest. I am more concerned with the motivation and the deadline.

This contest is a Halloween-ish thing with no particular theme, but you are given two prompts that can be fairly abstract. Each person entering the contest will be provided prompts by another entrant. They can be a word, a phrase, a picture, sort of whatever. There should be a fairly wild array of stories that spawn from this format.

We all have one month to write a story under 5000 words. After that, we all review the stories, choose our favourites, and rank them.

Maybe when I’m done writing I will write here what my prompts were. Maybe.

No matter what happens, I win, because I will have a new story at the end of everything. At least that’s what’s supposed to happen. If I actually get this story done remains to be seen.

Based on the prompts I got, this story might be a little heavy. Not because the prompts were heavy, but what they made me think of is. So really, I suppose that’s on me, and not the prompts.

I took a few minutes out of writing that story to write this post. Maybe I should get back to the story.

565

Mon, 04 Sep 2023 00:00:00 +0000

I put up an image a few weeks ago. It was a screen capture of a game I have been working on for a little bit.

Here it is again.

That shot was from the old version of the game.

This one is from the new version.

I can imagine that most people won’t see much difference between the two. Sure, the background is different, and the character looks a little different, the second one isn’t so horrifically zoomed in, but other than that it probably doesn’t look like much has changed.

The first image is entirely 2D. The images are sprites layered one on top of the other. The second image is a blend of 2D textures and 3D models.

Getting to this point hasn’t been easy, and I can guess that some folks might not understand why I made the change in the first place.

I have spent a lot of years learning how to create art and animation in 3D and I know there are a few things that I can get away with if I work in 3D. The only problem here is I want this game to have a certain 2D retro look. So that means making 3D look like 2D.

While that might generally be considered more difficult than just working in 2D from the start, I decided that the benefits were worth it.

My hope is that this game looks weird. That people who play it won’t be able to decide what is going on with it. Is it an old 2D arcade game? Is it a modern 3D game?

If I do everything right, it will be both, and neither. With a bit of luck, it will look interesting.

564 - Elevator Action Returns

Mon, 28 Aug 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Best Games - Elevator Action Returns

Elevator Action is a classic arcade game from 1983, where you play as a spy infiltrating an office tower. Your mission involves ascending that tower to search for secret documents, and that will require the use of a lot of elevators. All the while, patrolling enemies will attempt to thwart your efforts. You have a few ways to fight them, but using the elevators against them is probably the most fun. It’s a great game. That’s not the game I’m writing about here.

In 1994, Taito released the sequel, Elevator Action Returns.

Eleven years and many generations of computer technology later, Elevator Action Returns is as much a leap ahead as it is a throwback. It looks every bit a 1994 arcade game. Great character art, fantastic animation, gameplay action spread over beautiful levels that change dynamically. It looks that way, but it plays very much like a tuned up version of the original. Don’t get me wrong, it plays great, but so did the original.

Had this sequel been made any sooner, it just wouldn’t have been the same. This is a dream remake of a game.

When you play Elevator Action Returns, you can kind of imagine what was going on in the developer’s heads. It’s like they wanted to make the version of the game they remembered. The game they imagined in their childhood reveries. In place of the tiny, blocky spy character from Elevator Action, they imagined a trio of anime inspired action heroes. In place of the building, a set of sprawling levels in a continuous campaign. In place of the replicated, fedora wearing enemies from the original, they created a whole army of enemies with different looks, behaviours, and attacks.

Older video games didn’t look very good. We can just accept that as fact. The resolution and color palettes of most games left a lot to the player’s imaginations. Characters and locations were representational glyphs, at best. When you play them, your brain sort of fills in the blanks. Making a sequel to a beloved game over a decade later, some things can remain the same, but others will require some translation. Elevator Action Returns is like the real working model based off the Elevator Action sketch. Similar, but fully realized.

The elevators are still elevators. They go up and down, but that’s not all that they are for. It’s not long before you are using them not just to travel the various buildings, but as strategic weapons against an array of terrorist baddies.

You probably won’t even play a full level before you are waiting for just the right moment to roll a barrel down on top of a group of enemies, lighting them all on fire, or tossing a grenade into an empty shaft to light a completely different group of enemies on fire. In no time, the motion of the elevators becomes your plaything.

Some reviews at the time of Elevator Action Returns release weren’t particularly kind. There were some sentiments that the game was too simple, or not up to the level of its contemporaries. By 1994, the trend toward 3D was in full swing, and punched up versions of older game mechanics were very much not in fashion. Oddly enough, had the sequel been made even later, the reception for it may have been warmer.

Now, Elevator Action Returns is pretty universally recognized as a lost gem. A game that did what it was intending to do so well that some many people missed out on it at the time. The only problem is, most people never really got around to playing it.

It’s a sequel. It’s a remake. It’s a reimagining of what might have been, had the technology been available eleven years earlier.

Elevator Action Returns is one of the Best Games.

563

Mon, 21 Aug 2023 00:00:00 +0000

During the Alberta Game Jam, Kyle Nissen and I created this nightmare. You are tasked with cleaning a set of teeth that will not stop chomping down on trash food.

You can play it here.

https://itch.io/jam/alberta-game-jam-2023/rate/2227895

562

Mon, 14 Aug 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Everything I have ever learned about logo design, I learned by tracing.

I’ve dealt with a lot of logos. I’ve probably only designed a few. More than ten, less than twenty, maybe. Might be more, but not a ton more. The amount of logos I have dealt with, I couldn’t even begin to count. And so very many of those I traced.

When you work in advertising or sign design (which, I suppose, is usually advertising too), you will get handed a lot of artwork. Companies will have existing designs and logos that they want put on whatever it is they have you making for them. From single page leaflets to magazine layouts to dimensional signs to enormous carvings to vehicle wraps to television commercials to full motion video billboards. The mediums and modes that advertising artwork can take are uncountable and ever expanding. Someone will hand you some artwork made with one of those mediums in mind and ask you to make it work on any of the others. All too often, that will mean recreating the artwork for that particular medium. You can, and will, ask them if they have their artwork in all the formats that you need. Most of the time they will say ‘no’, and send you a grainy jpeg sized for a letterhead, but what they need is a banner, or something that can look nice on the side of a bus.

Here is a common example of what I mean. Imagine that you are asked to make a set of stickers from that grainy jpeg. There are a lot of ways to make stickers.

You can print stickers onto some sticky backed surface, like paper or vinyl. The printer that you use might be something akin to the inkjet or laser printers that you are accustomed to, but it will likely not use the same type of ink. Industrial printers are made for industrial applications, and every printer uses a slightly different sort of ink and even sets of inks for the same printer can be slightly different. At the very least, the color of the artwork might have to change so that it can be properly reproduced by the printer.

You could also use a thermal transfer printer that uses cartridges of specific colored films. Very durable, but much difficult to use. Using a thermal printer usually means that the artwork will have to be in a vector format or converted to a vector format. If the artwork that you have is that grainy jpeg, it will have to be rebuilt.

Often, a sticker can be simply cut from the appropriate color vinyl. No printing necessary. That also means that the artwork needs to be converted to vector. Machines that drive cutting knives have no idea about color or pixels. They want paths to follow. You will have to redraw that artwork as a vector, AKA trace that thing.

Some artwork is pretty easy to trace. Others, not so much. But tracing, what has to be literally hundreds of logos, can teach you a lot about what makes a good logo. And what doesn’t.

You become accustomed to repeated shapes and recurrent arcs. Certain ways of composing and balancing.

I think you could go to art school, study design, attend classes and lectures put on by the best designers in the world, and you still wouldn’t learn as much as you would by cleaning up or adapting artwork. Tracing.

Tracing artwork, especially using vector tools, requires that you break down the original design process. You have to reverse engineer it. You have to understand how it was made in the first place.

Am I a master logo designer? No, probably not. But I did design this. I think it’s pretty good.

It’s balanced. There is a flow to it. You could scale it up to the size of a banner fairly easily, or cut it out with a vinyl plotter or cnc router, minus the glow effects of course. It could be a sticker or printed on clothing. I'm pretty certain it could be built from real neon or the led equivalent.

The only way I get from shaky legged art student to designing that with some confidence, is by tracing. A lot.

There is your permission. Go and trace some artwork, and improve your own skills in the process.

561

Mon, 07 Aug 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Neon Noodles, the game I did most of the art for, came out in full release this week. I think you should play it.

You can find it here

Steam https://store.steampowered.com/app/990900/Neon_Noodles__Cyberpunk_Kitchen_Automation/

Or here

GOG https://www.gog.com/en/game/neon_noodles_cyberpunk_kitchen_automation

Or here

Epic https://store.epicgames.com/en-US/p/neon-noodles-cyberpunk-kitchen-automation-16a476

Or here

Humble https://www.humblebundle.com/store/neon-noodles-cyberpunk-kitchen-automation

Or here

itch https://vividhelix.itch.io/neon-noodles

560

Mon, 31 Jul 2023 00:00:00 +0000

This is some concept art I am working on.

The game project this is for is a retro-pixel top down affair. The character won’t look like this in-game. It will look more like this.

I made this stand in so that I could test the perspective, the shaders, and the animation pipeline, but I always knew that the character would end up looking different. At the time, I hadn’t determined what that different would be.

I wanted a character and a style that fit the retro era of the game. So, sometime late 80’s to early 90’s. I wanted a touch of North American, a touch of European, and a touch of Japanese in the style. A game that could have spawned from that arcade, console, and micro-computer soup. This is the best I have come up with so far.

559 - Dead Connection

Mon, 24 Jul 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Best Games - Dead Connection

The attract mode for Dead Connection opens with a screen that says Taito Film Presents. So far as I can tell there was never an official division of Taito called Taito Film. That fictional declaration helps to set the tone. This won’t be the usual arcade action fare. Aliens, zombies, monsters, you aren’t going to find any of those here. Dead Connection borrows from a lot of sources, not the least of which are the historical crime dramas Untouchables and the Godfather. Gesturing toward film makes sense. This is a game that oozes cinematic style. That is far from being the most interesting thing about Dead Connection.

Dead Connection is set in 1953 in a big city somewhere. It says so in the opening titles. The game drapes itself in a film noir, gangster pastiche. Nothing about it is realistic or properly historical. It is, at times, anachronistic and overly cliche. But that’s okay. This is a fanciful take on the crime and revenge genres. More than that though, more than any of the trappings, Dead Connection is a game. The way it plays matters more than the way it presents itself. And it plays like no other game I know.

There are plenty of games where you direct a character to walk toward enemies and punch them. There are even more where you use some sort of weapon to shoot at enemies. There are games where you can interact with the background, and there are games where you can dodge and dive for cover. Dead Connection combines all of these, and it did so at a time when that didn’t happen. Games did one or two things very well. Or at least they tried to. Games didn’t try to incorporate multiple overlapping systems. Dead Connection is a piece of gaming history that is both obvious, and well ahead of its time.

I’ll attempt to explain why.

There were a few run and gun character shooting games made previous to Dead Connection’s release in 1992. Okay, more than a few. Literally hundreds of games had you controlling a character who runs around the screen and shoots at enemies. There were even a couple of games like Cabal, and Blood Bros. where you can dive and dodge enemy fire. It’s possible that Dead Connection took some inspiration from those games. There are a handful of games where they will give the player a certain amount to auto aim, inferring your intentions from simple directional and button inputs. Maybe Dead Connection is aping those games. There are even games that offer a variety of interactions with background elements in the levels using the same simple, context-sensitive, controls. It could be that Dead Connection is trying to be like one of those games.

Maybe. But Dead Connection is all of those things. All at once. The wild amount of potential interactions is staggering. You can set parts of each stage on fire. You can destroy almost everything in various ways, and they will display different levels of destruction depending on what happens to them. Cover comes and goes dynamically. You can hit the deck and enter buildings to hide behind walls. You can climb stairs and ladders to take the high ground, and you can lay prone behind a vehicle until it blows up. There are switches and doors. Glass that shatters. Chandeliers that can come crashing to the ground.

In 1992, arcade games simply did not have this level of interactivity. They just didn’t. And, as it turns out, they never would. Games like Dead Connection would never be the norm until they were developed specifically for powerful consoles and home computers.

There is a fairly minor tradeoff for all of that interactivity. Every level in Dead Connection takes place on only one screen. I said it was a tradeoff, but it may be a strength. Keeping the action on one screen means the player has some time with each level. They have time to investigate each of the interactive elements. They can try to use the level in different ways. If the levels were long, scrolling affairs, it would be likely that you would miss a stairway or switch in all the gunfire, and just walk right on by.

Dead Connection is an anomaly. A unicorn. The action arcade game that tried to do a lot with a little and succeeded.

At the end of the day, it’s still an arcade game. Relatively short, borderline impossible without spending a mountain in quarters. But that shouldn’t be too surprising. What is surprising is that this game wasn’t copied a million times. There are no home console ports. There isn’t a genre based around the Dead Connection framework. It is really one of a kind.

When you look into the resume of the team who worked on Dead Connection, it all starts to come into focus. They worked on several games that I have either covered in a Best Games or have on my list. Dead Connection was made by people who know how to push the envelope. Try new innovative game design solutions. They made sure that Dead Connection is one of the Best Games.

558

Mon, 17 Jul 2023 00:00:00 +0000

I have been sort of off and on with the game project recently. Between finishing up some polish work on Neon Noodles and getting a couple more stories ready to submit, I haven’t done much work on the coding and mechanics side of my 2D game.

That isn’t to say that nothing has moved forward. It most certainly has, but that movement is mostly in the process and visuals department.

I slightly revised my rendering process so that it is both faster and more customizable. I developed the technique of rendering crisp, low resolution, sprites based on 3D models in blender. It works well, but I built it to work on one particular set of animations at a particular scale. Part of my revising has been to make it a more general process. Something that can work for a bunch of different sprites at different scales.

As far as the style goes, the sprites don’t exactly look like 3D models rendered in Blender. They don’t look quite hand drawn, either. So some more work had to be done.

The process works, but to get the visuals where I want them, I’m going to have to work on my animation. For me, this is great news.

I’m an animator that rarely gets to do much animation. I spent a bunch of time training my eyes, brain, and hands to detect and recreate motion with life and feeling. I have done a lot of design, modelling, and illustration work over the last few decades, but only a tiny amount of animation. And even less character animation. Now, finding that animation is probably what I need to punch up my visuals is both exciting and terrifying.

What if I don’t remember how. What if I can’t animate something that matches my ambition. I guess I’m gonna find out.

557 - Silpheed

Mon, 10 Jul 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Best Games - Silpheed

Silpheed wants to set a mood.

The game opens with a few lines from the end of Julius Caesar over a simulated star field.

“How many ages hence / Shall this our lofty scene be acted over / In states unborn and accents yet unknown”

When Cassius speaks these words, he and his co-conspirators have just murdered Caesar and are in the process of smearing their arms with his blood. They want everyone to know what they have done. They are seeking infamy. They are seeking immortality.

The game itself is a fairly standard space shooter. The absolute earliest video games were stocked to the rafters with space shooters. They had the sci-fi obsessions of the day to thank for that. Star Trek and Star Wars stand as the inspiration for far too many video games. Early and recent. But, unlike their inspirations, very few of those games can claim to be space operas.

Silpheed wants to be a space opera.

Of course, the very limited scale provided by the japanese PC-88 computer would never allow for a soaring adventure. Not really. So the developers picked their battles. They would wrap a twenty level space shooter in the trappings of anime space operas. They would do anything to make the game feel grander. More important. It worked.

After the Shakespeare quote fades, you are immediately treated to a flythrough of a wireframe 3D spacecraft. So again, this game is punching well above its weight. The PC-88 has more in common with a ZX Spectrum than any modern computer. This is not the sort of machine that should be able to do 3D anything. Yet here we are. The effect still resonates today. This is a space shooter game with cinematic trappings. Operatic ambitions.

The FM synthesized music is on point throughout. While it’s not quite a John Williams score, the sense of grandeur is there.

While you start out in Silpheed destroying simple waves of enemy ships, the game quickly escalates to battles over planets, Star Wars style trench runs through massive space stations, and battles against devious boss craft. All of these are intermixed with cinematic interstitials. Silpheed wants so badly to be a grand anime, and for the most part, it hits.

When ( if ) you finally reach the climactic battle against the massive battleship, Gloire, you will have to contend with terrifying laser blasts, impenetrable shield walls, and every variety of bullets you have dealt with so far. It’s a fitting end to a spectacular game.

Silpheed is the sort of game that doesn’t seem to fit in the era when it was made. A game too ambitious for the hardware. Too far ahead of its contemporaries. It’s the sort of game that spawns a series, which it did, for better and worse. Most of the games that came after were space shooters, but they lacked the space opera wrapping that made the original so memorable.

Silpheed is one of the best games.

556

Mon, 03 Jul 2023 00:00:00 +0000

I’m in the cooldown period.

Whenever I finish a draft of a story (this is the second of this particular story) I set it aside for a little while before looking it over again. The cooldown period could last anywhere from a few days to a week or so. Just enough time for me to not feel so close to it, but short enough that I haven’t forgotten how I want it to feel.

It’s a luxury, I know. This idea of a cooldown period. Some people are writing at a breakneck pace, or writing to hit deadlines. I can afford a cooldown, and I hope that most other writers are able to find a way to fit such a thing into their schedule.

That doesn’t mean that I won’t be writing for a week. I will just move on to one of the other stories that I’ve been working on. I’ll just push that one to one side for a short while before I look it over again.

The hope is that when I read it over I don’t find too many glaring errors or deficiencies. There will likely be a few lines that get tweaked. Maybe some slight rewording here and there. After that, I will send it out into the world where it can gather a few rejections. Currently, I think it’s a fairly good story. Something with some sci-fi ideas, but a core of humanity. A story that will speak to at least some audiences out there. A story that says something to me, at the very least. It’s something I hope to ultimately sell to one of the major sci-fi outlets. We’ll see what I think of it in a week.

555

Mon, 19 Jun 2023 00:00:00 +0000

A while ago, I created a method of rendering out fixed direction Normal and Depth information from 3D models in milliseconds, rather than the seconds or tens of seconds that it would take using most common methods. That might not seem like a lot, but if you start rendering out animations, those seconds stack up.

I thought that I would mostly use this technique to make brushes and details for texturing 3D models. Sort of like 3D stickers. I’ve found a new use for it.

If you look up baking out maps using Blender or really any 3D software, there will likely be a convoluted method that you have to follow, because hey, that’s just how doing anything in 3D goes. It’s a set of difficult to memorize steps and processes and when anyone new to 3D asks why, 90% of the time the answer will just be ‘because’. Odds are, the person you ask will either not know why, or they will and the answer will be too tedious and convoluted to get into. It will probably involve some decision about rendering made in 1994. So, rather than asking why, you follow those steps and you get a result, but if your particular use case or problem is even slightly different than the tutorial, well good luck to you. You have strayed well into the realm of the technical artist.

The thing is, most applications don’t need the long route. The standard route. Sometimes you can ‘cheat’. Sometimes cheating is the best option. Cheating is what technical artists do.

I have been working on an old school arcade game project. Something that looks and, more importantly, feels like it came from a late 80s or early 90s arcade. But, just because I want it to feel that way, doesn’t mean that it has to be made that way, or even be possible on old hardware.

I started out by creating some hand animation, to test if what I wanted would be possible. It seemed like it was. Then I moved on to 3D art and animation. My experience very definitely lies in 3D animation, but I had to make sure that I could replicate a look similar to the 2D animation. After some work and some very distorted proportions, it worked. I made a set of 3D animations, that when rendered out, resembled my 2D tests.

Now that the art and animation was in the 3D space, I could get weird. I had already created the Normal and Depth techniques, so what would happen if I tossed those at the problem? Turns out, it works pretty well.

Rendering out an entire set of test animations from all the required angles takes a few seconds. Rendering out the extra Normal and Depth passes only adds another second or two. So, while the setup and animation times might be longer than a strictly 2D approach to art creation, for this project iteration takes almost no time at all. I can change an animation, change a model, change colours, and on and on with very little extra effort. I can change lighting on the resulting 2D sprites in realtime, thanks to the Normal and Depth maps. The result is probably not something that arcade hardware could do in 1990, but that’s not important. What’s important is that it feels like it could really be from that time. I’m probably going to waste more memory space than any of those old machines had just on a single character sprite.

This project is only just getting started, and I’m not exactly sure where it will end up, but small successes like this are what move the whole thing forward. Now I know that the process works. The type of graphics I want are possible, and more importantly, possible by me as a solo developer. Maybe I will get to the place where I want to pay someone else to work on this with me, but right now I have to do what I can to make it real on my own.

554

Mon, 12 Jun 2023 00:00:00 +0000

As I type this, my son is downstairs playing Legend of Zelda Tears of the Kingdom. When he’s not playing it, he’s watching videos about it. The rest of the time, I’m probably playing it.

It’s a very good game.

The controls are great, but not entirely friction free. The puzzles are great, but not entirely satisfying. The construction is great, but occasionally tedious. It’s pretty close to a perfect game. I think it might be that “pretty close” that makes me want to play more of it.

When Breath of the Wild came out, a lot of people got very angry about weapon and shield degradation. It’s true that having a bow or sword shatter mid-fight is annoying, but it very quickly reached the same level of annoyance as having to reload in a shooter. It only slightly breaks your flow and, if you are ready for it, you can easily switch weapons to keep swinging. So what that teaches you, is to be ready for it.

In the previous game, weapons shattering meant that you would have to sample all the weapons the game had on offer. At some point you would be up against a tough enemy and you would have to pull out that club or spear that you would never otherwise use. I thought it added some fun to the game, but some people, by virtue of being forced into it, were not as interested.

In Tears of the Kingdom you can essentially create new types of weapons at any time by fusing items together. This flips the weapon breakage mechanic on its head. Instead of requiring that you use different weapons, you will want to try all of them. What happens if you fuse a stick to a rock, a sword to a glowing flower, an arrow to some monster parts? Who can say? It doesn’t take long before you are just hitting things with a badly fused weapon to break it intentionally so that you can try one of your new ones. Testing new weapons has become part of the game that you will want to engage with.

Other than that one small change, the weapon degradation system is mostly intact. One simple change. Fusing weapons to create new items turns a mechanic that could be tedious into an opportunity to play.

There is a school of game design wisdom that says you should always be building toward whatever is the most fun. When people bristled against the previous design, rather than tossing it out, Nintendo built toward something more fun. I think it worked.

553 - Area 51

Mon, 05 Jun 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Best Games - Area 51

Arcade light gun games are a tough one. I can write about them here, but unless you happen to have an arcade or a barcade near you, I don’t know that there is an easy way to play them. You could always play them using a mouse on an emulator, but I can’t recommend that. It feels pretty bad.

Years ago I bought a light gun that works with non-crt displays, but due to time and old drivers getting it to run on current hardware is challenging. It sits in a box inside my arcade cabinet. It will likely continue to. As a result I haven’t played many light gun games unless I happen to be at an arcade. That’s unfortunate because I truly love some of them. Area 51 is near the top of that list.

Area 51 didn’t break any new ground for the genre. There were already more technically advanced light gun games available when it came out. It did some new things, combining pre-rendered and live action footage was fairly novel. It used some interesting hardware that was across between a home console and a pc. None of that makes Area 51 good. Area 51 is good, because it excels at hitting that ball straight down the middle.

Arcade games are experiences. Some can offer a challenge or provide a way for people to compete head-to-head. Games can create a sort of fantasy or sense of escapism. At their heart, they are experiences, just like amusement park rides. Some of the best amusement park rides give you exactly what you are expecting. No hidden twists, no surprise endings. It’s just exactly what you are looking for.

That might seem like another way of saying ‘mediocre’ or ‘dull’. It’s anything but. It takes real skill to create exactly the sort of experience a player is looking for, and keep that experience going for as long as they are playing. Not only that, but they have to want to come back to play again and again. Area 51 absolutely nails it. It is a consistently solid experience every single time you play.

Here’s where I get to be very specifically nerdy. I used to play Area 51 using both guns. Every Area 51 cabinet has two light guns tethered to it so two people can play together. One day, on a whim, I thought ‘why don’t I just try both’. I wanted to play it that way ever since. John Woo-ing it up at the arcade. I tried the same trick playing Lethal Enforcers and the like, but only Virtua Cop played as well with both guns.

I got pretty good at it too. Like actually good. I didn’t feel like I played well unless my left hand accuracy was above 80% and my score was similar on both hands. I’m not left handed. I probably didn’t set any records, but I was good at it.

It was easy to get good, because the game is easy to love. It’s simple, straight forward, and it does exactly what you want it to do, and it does it very well.

Area 51 might be a simple game, but it’s one of the best games.

552

Mon, 29 May 2023 00:00:00 +0000

I haven’t done a writing update in a while. So, what’s the state of my writing at the moment? Not good. Or fine. Maybe it’s actually good. I don’t know.

A while ago I set a goal of creating one new first draft of a short story every month. Keeping that schedule has been pretty easy. What hasn’t been as easy, is finishing a final draft that I can send out, that hasn’t gone as well.

I have two stories out for consideration as I write this (might be three when you read it) but they have been out for quite a while. One of them has really done the rounds. It’s been held for repeat reads and comments multiple times but ultimately, in every case so far, it hasn’t been accepted.

They places they are waiting at right now have had them for quite a while. Like several months. That’s sort of the way it goes sometimes, but still, it’s been long enough that I occasionally forget what story has gone where.

Still no word on when my second published story will see print, but that too will just have to wait.

In the meantime, I keep working on these stories that I wrote first drafts of. I have four of them up on blocks, and I dig around under their hoods every few days. One is pretty close to ready. Another needs a bit more work, but it’s not terribly far off. The other two are in states of disarray. I have half a dozen more that I haven’t even taken a second look at, but they will all need work.

At some point I will probably have several stories submitted to outlets at once, but not yet.

It would be easy to see not having a bunch of stories ready as some sort of failure, but I keep working on them so that’s better than abandoning them.

I know that I’m not a particularly fast or prolific writer, I just hope that when I get a story out there for people to read that they enjoy it. I’ll take making enjoyable stories over making a lot of stories anytime.

551

Mon, 22 May 2023 00:00:00 +0000

This week, I did my first bit of 2D, by hand, frame to frame, animation in more than twenty years. To be clear, this wasn’t on paper, it’s likely been even longer since I’ve done that, but it was the same sort of -flip back and forth making small changes by hand- style of animation that I haven’t done since school.

If you aren’t familiar with different styles of animation, traditional animation is a very different process than 3D animation, or even present day, computer assisted 2D animation. What I was doing was the computer assisted 2D style, but even that is very different from what I usually do.

Just to get ahead of it here, if you are reading this and you aren’t familiar with different styles of animation, no, 3D animation is not easier. Computer assisted 2D animation is not easier. They are different in the details and tools, but extremely similar in the fundamentals. There are certain ways that 3D animation is more conveniently fit into a tight schedule and pipeline that make it attractive for movie and TV production, but that has more to do with division of labour than actually doing any animation. For games, the reason to do 3D over 2D is more technical, and related to how the hardware works. There is no secret tool or style that makes animation ‘easy’. It’s slow and methodical work, no matter how you do it.

The style of animation that I am trained to do, and have done off an on for most of my life at this point, is 3D. That involves building digital puppets, ‘rigging’ them with digital bones and controls, and then recording the movement of those bones through space and time. It’s a style of animation where most of the work is loaded on the front end of the process. When all the set-up and animation is done, the end of the job might be as simple as pressing the ‘render’ button. It’s a style of working that is very technical and heavy on planning and you have to work very hard to make it feel intuitive or improvisational.

2D animation, on the other hand, is very quick to get started. Simply draw a line, flip to a new sheet of paper or create a new frame in your computer assisted animation program, and draw another line in a slightly different position. Flip back and forth between the two frames and you have created motion. Keep adding lines and frames and you can make a character move, dance, fight, laugh, breath, live. Starting is easy, but there is no ‘Render’ button. You never need to read documentation to figure out how to ‘rig’ a bit of traditional animation, but you will need to learn and internalize anatomy and kinematics.

I disagree with a lot of teaching that would have you learn traditional animation before 3D, as if one is an extension of the other. They are very different, but at their core they share the disciplines of observation, movement, timing, and acting. Learning one will inform the other.

Soccer is not built on the foundations of track and field. They are different sports with different skills required, but they do share enough basics that a person skilled at one may be able to learn the other.

So, in an afternoon this week, I managed to create a simple hand drawn, 2D animation. Admittedly, it isn’t very good animation, but it worked for my tests.

There will be a combination of 3D and 2D animation in my Godot project, but all of that is filtered through a very 2D presentation. I needed to know that I could combine the two while still having it look cohesive. So far, it’s working quite well. I sort of hope that I can fool at least a couple of people into believing that this project could have been made on an arcade machine in the early 90s. Technically, it works. I’ll have to work on making my animation slightly better than test quality to really sell it. I don’t mind being the weakest link in that chain.

550 - Duke Nukem 3D

Mon, 15 May 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Best Games - Duke Nukem 3D

I’ll start this off by addressing the realities of time. Just trust that I will get around to why Duke Nukem 3D deserves to be on the list of best games, but we have a necessary detour to travel first.

The Character and tone of Duke Nukem has not aged well. Or maybe it would be more accurate to say that the framing of the character hasn’t aged well. If you go back and play Duke Nukem 3D, it seems fairly obvious that the creators of the game made Duke the butt of a lot of his own jokes. Most of his one-liners are simply lifted from films and TV shows, and often in a way that seems to suggest that Duke himself is unaware of context or nuance. This isn’t an example of a character saying or doing things that were once okay and now aren’t. Duke isn’t cool, he’s a misogynistic, meathead, dumbass, and he sucked back then too. The problem is, this doesn’t always come across, and there are far too many people that assumed if Duke was the main character of the game, then he must also be the ‘Hero’ of the game. Duke is the protagonist, but he is not heroic.

This is an absolutely valid way to write a protagonist. There is no rule that says protagonists need to be likeable, or right, or decent people. They only have to be the point of view character for your story. Or, in this instance, game.

There is a possible timeline where Duke Nukem Forever doesn’t come out. Where Duke Nukem 3D is the one game that exists where Duke has been gifted any sort of personality at all. He is seen for what he is, terrible, but comedic and farcical. And the game shines because of that knowing farce, and not in spite of it.

Unfortunately, we live in this reality, this timeline. People have wilfully misinterpreted a buffoon as heroic, and we have to address that.

There, now that that’s out of the way, we can get to it.

Duke Nukem 3D is a masterpiece of design.

In a time when first person shooter game design meant navigating what are essentially mazes and occasionally shooting at monsters, Duke Nukem 3D aimed to create spaces. When you play Duke 3D, you will run around a lot and you will shoot a lot of alien monsters, but the spaces that you are playing in feel a lot more real and a lot less mazelike. They are recreations of spaces you might recognize. Streets, a theatre, stores, offices, apartments, and even when the game swerves into more alien architecture, the sense that these are usable spaces is still there. Despite the slightly janky pseudo 3D graphics of the build engine, navigation in Duke 3D feels, for lack of a more accurate term, real.

Duke 3D is also one of the first games to create a sense of place by having a lot of intractable elements. Light switches turn on and off lights. Security cameras show different parts of the level. Urinals, toilets, and mirrors work. They do the things you expect they will do. The game is a long way from a systems based simulation, but just having a few things function as you would expect means that the spaces those interactables inhabit feel more real as well. It’s a necessary step forward.

Other complex simulation games existed, System Shock, for example, but they tended to be fiddly and complicated in a way that didn’t really provide that sense of place. Place has to feel easy. It has to feel natural. It has to feel intuitive. Duke Nukem 3D does that. That ease makes the gameplay feel real. It’s truly a wonderful thing, and makes for one of the best games.

549

Mon, 08 May 2023 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve been working on a bunch of shaders recently. Some of them do things to the pixels as they are drawn to the screen and some of them do stuff to the geometry before the pixels get drawn to the screen. It doesn’t really matter, the result is the same. There is some input information, a program beats that up a little, and then it draws the result.

I’ve said before, here and elsewhere, that I’m a pretty mediocre programmer. I’m very good at organizing procedures. Planning out all the steps it will take to go from, say, input pixels to output results. The job of creating digital art, be it 3D, 2D, animated, or some mix of all of them, is 99% that. Creating a pipeline from input to result. It’s a lot less “feel” or “intuition” based than most people would think. There are practiced steps that get the work from start to whatever anyone wants to call finished.

So maybe what I mean when I say ‘mediocre programmer’ is that I program like an artist.

I don’t know what I’m saying.

I’m going to go back to these shaders. I almost have one of them modifying some pixels in just the way I want.

548

Mon, 01 May 2023 00:00:00 +0000

My 2D game project is coming along. Most of my time with it has just been learning the ins and outs of Godot 4.

Like I said before, I have only really done a very small amount of dabbling with Godot, and that was quite a while ago. It seems like a very competent engine, and everything that I have wanted to do with it, I have been able to get working. After a while.

The biggest issue I’m having is that most of the tutorials and learning material are made in their built-in language, GDScript. GDScript is a python-like programming language that is, by all reports, made to be very easy to use.

I hate it.

I’m sure I could learn to use it. I’m sure I would even like using it after a while, but when I want to just make a thing that is in my head, I can’t stand programming in it.

Luckily, the developers of Godot have added C# support. Coming from years of messing with Unity, I am so much more comfortable with C#. That means that the code I write is at least readable by me, and the things I try I can usually get to work.

The downside of using C#, is again, all the learning material is written in GDScript. I’m finding that I spend a lot of my ‘development’ time translating from GDScript examples to C#. I could just follow the examples, but then when I go to change something or extend the example script, something I will always have to do, I have trouble figuring it out. It’s a language barrier issue. So, I’m finding it’s actually easier to translate to C# and go from there.

On one hand, that does make my work a lot slower. On the other hand, future me will understand what I did and will be able to make changes. I’m doing future me a favour here. I hope he’s thankful for it.

547 - Half-Life

Mon, 24 Apr 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Best Games - Half-Life

Half-Life isn’t a game. It’s a place. It’s somewhere you go for a while. You spend time there. Like going on vacation or travelling to an amusement park.

You will have fun. You will have new and uncommon experiences. A lot of those experiences will be designed for you. You wouldn’t call an amusement park a game. You wouldn’t call a holiday a game. They’re different.

Half-Life is like that.

There were, of course, many first person games, adventure games, and even first person adventure games, before Half-Life. Half-Life was built on a modified Quake engine, so there was already a legacy of first person games when Valve started working on it.

It’s not surprising that Half-Life shares a lot with those earlier games. Fast action, lots of shooting, encounter spaces custom built to deliver certain moments. The difference is, most previous games are sort of a set of toys, or a series of challenges. Half-Life is a place that you inhabit for a while.

The story for the original Half-Life is not earth shaking. You won’t feel emotionally invested in the characters or plot, but it’s serviceable. There is enough there to give purpose to your actions.

What you will feel, is a sense of place. You will recognize the shape of the world of the game. It will be encoded in you as if it were real. That makes everything you do there much more meaningful.

In the very opening moments of Half-Life, you are introduced peacefully to the environments you will later be fighting through. The opening of the game is slow and methodical and mundane. You have time to wander. You become accustomed to the lighting, the sounds. How common and normal everything is. You are given just enough time before everything changes.

I think that the first person perspective does a lot of the heavy lifting when it comes to really burning the locations and events of Half-Life into your brain. Doom was probably the first game that gave me that feeling of truly playing in a new environment. I remember those places, but there was no logic or reason to Doom or Quake levels. They are built for your enjoyment, not for practical reasons. The areas from Half-Life are pulling double duty. They act as interesting gameplay spaces, but they also have a sense of practical realism to them. This is a place where people worked and lived. They did paperwork here. They chatted with friends here. They picked fantasy football teams and brought their kids to work. This is a recognizable and real place. Until it isn’t. And that makes the events of the entire Half-Life series so much more memorable and terrifying.

Maybe Half-Life isn’t the absolute first game to create this sense of place, but nothing before (and even for a while after) took advantage of that feeling in quite the same way.

Half-Life is one of the most enjoyable adventure travel destinations, and maybe even best games.

546

Mon, 17 Apr 2023 00:00:00 +0000

I like to ride my bike. If I’m going somewhere fairly nearby, I will probably take my bike. If I’m going somewhere further, but plan to stay a while, I will probably take my bike. If I’m going to be drinking, I will absolutely take my bike.

For quite a while, if I was headed downtown, I would bike to the train and ride it the rest of the way. More and more often, I have been riding the entire 10 to 20km for events. If the weather is nice and the paths are mostly clear, it’s great. If there is snow on the path, but it’s packed down, I just take the fat tire bike, and it’s great. If it’s really cold, I dress warmer.

I’m sure this sounds bonkers to a lot of people, but think of it this way. I never need to look for or pay for parking. I can always choose to have another beer before I leave a place (I never do, but I could). My bike never runs out of fuel and I never have to fill it up. My largest ongoing expense is extra train tickets when I don’t want to ride.

Then there is the maintenance. Most bike parts last for years or even decades. My main bike frame is about 20 years old. I have replaced a lot of the main components in that time, but not all of them. The real kicker is that when those parts did need replacing, I did it myself. If you look around a bit you can get most of the parts cheaper than at a bike shop too. I think there are two special purpose tools that you need to fix a bicycle. A chain tool, and a crank puller. A bike stand is nice, but not required. Other than that, it’s all wrenches and screwdrivers.

I know to some people I’m ‘that guy who rides his bike everywhere’ but it’s just so much easier than driving sometimes. More relaxed. Safer. Even in the cold. You put on a snow helmet, goggles, and mask, and you can ride through a lot of weather.

Except rain. I hate riding in the rain.

That’s all. I did some seasonal tune-ups on my bike and it made me think about how much I like biking. Nothing more to it. Go ride a bike. They’re good.

545

Mon, 10 Apr 2023 00:00:00 +0000

544

Mon, 03 Apr 2023 00:00:00 +0000

I’m working on a small test project with Godot. The last, and only, time that I did anything significant with Godot was a game jam back in 2019. Safe to say that it’s been a while. Also, safe to say that Godot has changed a lot in that time.

I’m only at the very beginnings of figuring out how the engine works, and I’m pretty certain I didn’t understand it back when I made a whole game jam project with it. On one hand, I miss some of the nifty tools and add-ons for Unity. On the other hand, I really like how uncluttered and simple it is. Where Unity has some pretty prescribed ways of working, Godot is a bit more “shrug how do you want to do it”. There are a lot of ways to achieve the same goal, but a handful of them are sort of built for you. Maybe. To translate it into terms that only my old 3d modeller brain will understand, it’s more like Maya 1.0 and less like whatever Maya is now. All the parts are there, but some assembly might be required.

If you haven’t been reading any of these, or you don’t know me very well, you might not know that ‘some assembly required’ is pretty much my happy place. I like to put stuff together, and I like to figure out new ways of making things, but I’m not about to try to program my own engine or anything.

I will be posting sporadic updates on the progress of this thing. If you recall, a few weeks ago, I posted an image of a CRT filter painting setup. Well, here is what that same (similar) setup looks like running in the Godot engine.

543 - Driver : You are the Wheelman

Mon, 27 Mar 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Best Games - Driver : You are the Wheelman

Driver is filthy. It looks filthy. It sounds filthy. The slap base, funk soundtrack is filthy. The 70s exploitation storyline is filthy.

The driving is absolutely spotless.

That’s a very good thing, because the only thing you do in Driver, is drive.

There are a lot of driving games, but they tend to be racing centric. You might race around virtual versions of real tracks with virtual versions of real cars, or you might race on fictional tracks with fictional cars. No matter the combination of those, you will be ‘simulating’ a sport. Getting from one place to another, in competition with other drivers. That means you are primarily using the car to travel forward as fast as possible. There are other ways to use a car.

Driver is a semi-open world game based on real locations, where you may as well be playing as the car. There is a story, involving you taking on the role of an undercover cop, but there are no real opportunities for you to interact with the world outside of a car.

The game is called Driver, and you drive.

What driver did, that only Grand Theft Auto 3 would do a few months later, was to treat a car as a way of navigating a space. Going flat out at all times isn’t the way to beat the game. Turning, sliding, going in reverse, and even driving casually at the speed limit are all tools you will need to master in Driver. Since you are, allegedly, an undercover cop and not an autonomous vehicle, keeping a low profile is pretty important. Why draw the wrath of random patrol cars when you don’t need to.

None of that would work if the driving didn’t feel right. There is a weight and momentum to the vehicles in Driver that is extremely satisfying. You spend most of your time in American muscle cars and huge boxy sedans with chromed steel bumpers. These aren’t twitchy sports cars that stick to a track. They want to keep moving in whatever direction you propel them. Sometimes that means driving up a curb or through a park or crashing through other cars.

There are other modes that task you with either chasing or evading other cars, and despite the developers putting time into the mission based story mode, these are where you will have the most fun playing Driver. This is what the game is really about. Using a car to navigate a space in any way that a Playstation game from 1999 could muster.

There is something to be said for exploring a mechanic fully. Using all of the available verbs. There are more verbs when driving a car than just racing, and all of them can be fun. Games that set up playgrounds for that sort of mechanical exploration aren’t super common, so when they come along, we should celebrate them.

Driver is about driving, and it’s one of the best games.

542

Mon, 20 Mar 2023 00:00:00 +0000

I’m currently getting a story ready for submission. I haven’t sold any stories recently, but I have gotten a couple of holds and a couple more personal rejections. I’m not completely numb to rejection yet, but I have to tell you, anything you do a lot of, you get better at. I have a large collection of rejection letters, so I suppose I’m getting better at that.

I wrote a bit about editing not that long ago, so I’m not going to get too deep into it here, but I do have something else that I would like to touch on.

My own personal inclination is working on multiple projects at once. I know that is anathema to some people, but I constantly find it to be a reinforcing practice. Working on one thing will improve another thing I am thinking about, or working on. Editing this particular story helped me find solutions to problems I was having with two other stories. These are solutions that I might have come to if I had only worked on one story at a time, but I doubt it.

I have also talked about how brains like to work on background processes. At least that seems to be how my brain works. Setting a story as a background process means that I will probably figure out some way to improve it while I work on something else. Sometimes that other thing I’m working on is a piece of art, or code, or construction, or metal work, or even another story. Stories seem to be particularly good at running as a background process. Again, this is in my brain. Maybe your brain might be better at running different things as background processes.

Mine likes stories.

There is, of course, an upside and a downside to working this way. On the upside, nothing is ever abandoned, because you can have a lot of background processes running. On the downside, you have to be extremely disciplined about keeping notes, and knowing the difference between being distracted away from whatever your main task is, and taking a moment to make a note.

I still have to work at both of those, but just like rejection, everything you do a lot of, you get better at. I have made it a habit to quickly mark up stories so that I can remember how to fix them when I eventually get around to it. I usually write in Scrivener, but I keep google doc versions of most of my writing, so that I can make those notes no matter where I am, but in both, I use the same system for adding notes to already written passages. I use a hierarchy of folders and files, and all of that is automatically backed up so that I don’t accidentally lose any stories or notes and I know where to look when I get back to working on a particular story.

It is likely that very little of this is helpful to anyone else writing, or trying to write, but you can take this as permission to work on more than one thing. Absolutely, make a habit of finishing stories, but bouncing from one to the other and pushing them all forward is absolutely a valid way to work. In some cases, it will even be helpful. Let those background processes run.

541

Mon, 13 Mar 2023 00:00:00 +0000

I went back and counted. The graphics tablet I use, nearly daily, is the fifth I’ve owned and the seventh I’ve used. If I don’t count the iPad. Actually, come to think of it, I think I have to count the iPad now. I can’t use it with Blender or Krita or the desktop version of Affinity Designer, at least not easily, and all three of those are go to apps for me, but I do use the iPad to draw and paint pretty regularly. So, eight. The number of graphics tablets I have used is eight. That seems like a lot.

I am thinking about this now, because several times a year, every year, I consider getting a new graphics tablet. This is just part of the natural cycle of things.

The one I currently use is a Huion HS610. It’s perfectly capable and I like it quite a bit. Other than occasionally brushing the scroll wheel with my hand, I don’t think I have any issues with it. The only reason I have for thinking about a new tablet, is that I saw there were some screen based pen displays on sale. I don’t really need one, but that never stopped anyone from wanting a thing.

Very recently, I saw a pixel artist (who apparently used a mouse?) asking the game dev community whether a graphics tablet is worth it. As someone who has owned six of the things (I think we decided on six) I had to say, emphatically, yes.

Not only are graphics tablets amazing tools for artists at any stage of their career or development, having one has almost certainly saved me from worse RSI than I currently have. I switch constantly, from tablet, to trackball, to mouse. The changing hand positions and movement ranges keep my carpal tunnels from getting too distressed.

The other reason I can recommend a graphics tablet is pretty simple. They are so much cheaper now than they have ever been. A new Huion tablet can be picked up for the same price as a mid range mouse. My second Wacom Intuos cost something like $200 and it was far less capable than anything you can buy today.

Even if you only think you will use it occasionally, I think a graphics tablet is a purchase you likely won’t regret.

I think that’s all I have to say this week. I just think graphics tablets are nifty keen and worth getting. I think I’ll go back to drooling over some glossy, 4k, pen displays, and convincing myself that I don’t really need one.

540

Mon, 06 Mar 2023 00:00:00 +0000

There is a particular look that some old games have that I love. I’ve been chasing it for ages, and I think I’ve finally figured out how to achieve it.

I’m the sort of guy who still plays some game from the early 90s almost daily. Usually it’s some flavour of street fighter. I know the nostalgia for those games is deep in my bones. Nostalgia can be a positive force, or a negative one. People suffering from nostalgia can sometimes convince themselves that the past was better. That the way things worked were better. What they remember was better than what currently is. This is almost universally wrong.

I still love those old games. They are still enjoyable, even without the nostalgia. They are not better. In so many ways, they are far worse than what we have now. That doesn’t mean that there aren’t aspects of those games to love.

I got rid of the last CRT in this house a few years ago, and I have no intention of obtaining another one. It’s worse than what we have now in so many ways that it’s difficult to compare. The LCD, and OLED screens that we have now, are better. Period. By any reasonable metric, just better. But they are different.

So, here’s my issue, I love old games, and I love the look of some old games, but I think breaking out the old hardware just to see them is ludicrous. If I can’t be bothered to break out a CRT to play these games, you can be damn sure that I won’t be using ancient tools to create these sorts of graphics.

CRTs work very differently to modern displays, and the artifacts of how they function are part of how those old games looked. There is some tendency among game nostalgia sufferers to believe that artist of that time were wizards or more capable than modern artists. Of course, that’s nonsense. They were doing the best they could with what they had. What they had were displays that glow and fluoresce in uneven, but controllable, ways. None of the pixel art in CRT based games was ever intended to be seen unfiltered by an aperture grill. Unblurred by light bleed. It is an art form tied to a specific technology with specific limitations and specific qualities. Qualities that you can fake well enough, if you mess around with digital art tools long enough.

I know there are a lot of CRT filter shaders out there. Some of them are very good and very convincing. What I couldn’t find were any art creation tools that would help an artist to create graphics that would look correct when run through one of these filters. So I made one.

Currently this is a series of Krita layers that mimic a set of optical effects. They are mostly just Multiply and Addition filters, literally taking the base pixel values and multiplying or adding them by another value. Basic stuff that computers are great at. I also have a set of blurs that are slightly more difficult, but also something that modern computers can crunch through very quickly.

My set of layers let me paint with any tool in Krita’s box of brushes. It all updates in real-time to look like a limited set of colors are being represented as large chunky pixels and filtered through a CRT screen. It’s all instantaneous. No waiting for something to render. No testing my pixel art through a secondary CRT filter. No creating using a limited set of pixel art tools. Just paint, and see it as if it were the early 90s.

I don’t know about you, but that seems to satisfy my nostalgia.

539 - Final Fight

Mon, 27 Feb 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Best Games - Final Fight

There were side scrolling beat ‘em up games before Final Fight. Capcom didn’t invent the genre. That honor should probably go to Technos and the Kunio-kun series. The Technos game Double Dragon may have even been the first game to truly nail walking right and punching. Those games are great too, and I will probably get to them at some point, but this write up is about Final Fight.

First, let’s talk about the characters. The bigness of the characters. Can you imagine, walking into an arcade in 1990 and seeing a lot of games with little characters or planes or spaceships, and then you look over and there are these positively giant men of this one screen just punching the crap out of each other? It’s not only a couple of dudes, either. The screen is full of huge men and women. All of them are punching and kicking and flipping.

There have been some big guys on screens before Final Fight. Some of the guys on Double Dragon are pretty big. Nothing like this though. The guys on screen in Final Fight are enormous. They are detailed and vibrant in a way that’s still pretty shocking to look at today.

Just look at that. Also, that door has DICK written on it.

Big, glorious sprites are great and all, but if the game doesn’t play well, it really doesn’t matter how pretty it is.

This is a developer that is one iteration away from creating Street Fighter II, inarguably one of the best fighting games ever made. While games like Streets of Rage, and subsequent brawler games, might feel as good or even better than Final Fight, at the time when it was released, Final Fight had the fastest, most precise, most solid feeling hand to hand combat that had ever graced an arcade machine. Characters punch and kick almost as fast as you can press the buttons. There are a small set of special moves for each character, and some unique joystick and button inputs. A combination of speed, animation, and sound effects make punches and kicks feel like they land. Sprites don’t just overlap or pass through each other, they hit. It’s all an illusion, but it’s a satisfying one.

Other developers would go on to make better, faster, more complicated brawlers in the years after Final Fight, but this is the game that gave those other teams permission. This is the one that paved the way.

It’s so beloved that most, if not all, characters from Final Fight have made appearances in other Capcom games, several of them showing up as playable characters in the Street Fighter series.

Final Fight is one of the best games, and that door just has DICK written on it.

538

Mon, 20 Feb 2023 00:00:00 +0000

While I can’t post the stories that came out of the writing jam thing I did for the last six weeks, I can put up my postmortem wrap up on how the whole thing went for me. I’ve done a few edits to remove spoilers and such.

Without the stories to go with them, this set of write-ups might not have a lot of context, but I think there is enough of the process of going from idea to story, that it might be interesting for some people.

–

I’ve only recently joined Codex. I don’t really know anyone here, and no one knows me, so I’ve been fairly quiet. When I saw that this contest/story jam was happening, I jumped at it. I’m glad I did. I’ve had fun coming up with new stories every week. I normally work much slower. I think at least 3 out of the 6 can be made into something good. I waffle between which 3 that might be on an hourly basis.

I’m still fairly quiet, and I’ll probably stay that way for a while, but interacting with a few of you during this was nice.

I’ve never done anything like this for writing before, and I’ve never attempted Flash length, but I have participated in a lot of game jams. For better or worse, I approached WW in much the same way. Arrive each week as blank a slate as I can, and say yes to the ideas as they come.

I hadn’t really considered the scores (and to be completely honest, I don’t think I understood the competition format of WW until about week 3), so those didn’t really factor into what I chose to write. The comments, on the other hand, were great. Almost all the criticisms of my stories I found myself agreeing with, especially if they were pointing out something I cut or wish I could have added or clarified. Others were pointing out something I hadn’t considered or didn’t know might be a stumbling block for readers, and those are always immensely helpful.

So, thank you. I hope to use all of that and get these stories out into the wild, where all stories belong.

Week 0

Title - Know thy Enemy, Know thyself

Prompt - Are you familiar with the works of Sun Tzu?

Fun fact about me. Before I switched to art and animation, I studied poli sci. I read, wrote about, and talked about a lot of ‘classics in political thought’, Sun Tzu among them.

As a result of all that reading, I might have a different take on these writings. I’m usually pretty baffled by the typical business bro take on the likes of Machiavelli, Musashi, or Sun Tzu. I think it might be fair to say that many of them have read these books and misinterpreted them badly.

One fun direction to take a game jam prompt is to go absolutely, painfully, literal. I figured that might be fun, since the characters in my story were going to be blissfully unaware of nuance or irony.

I think the result is something sort of fun and goofy, but not the kind of story I could expand or refine into anything worthwhile. It’s sort of a skit.

It was a silly thing and a fun warm up, but I can’t imagine taking it much further than that.

Week 1

Title - Tortoises

Prompt - Break Something

This prompt made me think, what if you fixed something so hard that you broke it? What if that something was a person?

This led to wild thoughts of immortality and the mental consequences of dealing with that much time.

I considered the counter to that. A group of people that had become, or had been created, immortal. The spawned mind is a person that can’t conceive of its own end. Linear time is an inconvenient part of existing, but they don’t understand mortality. They are young (perpetually?) and inquisitive.

So the story is an eternal child trying to understand an eternally old man trying to understand a very old tortoise. Each of them trying to deal with time in their own way, and none of them ever being able to truly connect.

I think I managed to capture a bit of what I was going for in 750 words, but this is a story that needs a little more room. I’ll be reworking it and filling out the character of the spawned mind a bit more to establish how completely alien the characters are to one another, while still being recognizable as human.

This was probably my most evenly successful story for readers. I think the parts I had to cut (about 500 words) didn’t harm the flow of it too badly, but several comments hit on things that I left ambiguous only because the passages that clarified them had been cut.

This story has already grown a bit, but it will probably top out around 2000 words or so.

Week 2

Title - So Much More Than Magic

Prompt - “all adventures, especially into new territory, are scary.” Sally Ride

I batted around a few of the prompts this week, but Sally Ride’s quote stuck with me. Sally Ride was, above all else, a scientist. That made me think, what’s a more frightening adventure than changing the way you think. How you ask questions. The transition from knowing that the world works one way and then being shown that there might be a new way to look at it. A way with more questions than established answers. At least it might be frightening at the start.

I don’t think I succeeded with the way I wrote this story. After I posted it, I thought of so many revisions and refinements. Things to remove, things to add. I think I will be able to pull this one together, but it might take a few passes.

This one came in right at the bottom of my group for the week. That was a little disheartening, until I read the comments. The parts that I wanted to hit seemed to be hitting, but the cuts I had to make to stuff it all down to size were just too harsh. Many of the comments cited things that I had cut to an almost eerie degree of specificity. It was probably pretty obvious those parts were missing.

I think my main failure here was properly scoping the story and pace to the constraints.

Week 3

Title - Zero Regrets for the Apocalypse (rummage sale title)

Prompt - What’s the strangest thing you have ever eaten?

I looked at the prompts. Nothing stuck.

I spun through the title rummage sale. Nothing kicked off any ideas.

As soon as I put the prompts in one window and the titles in another, the two parts of this story snapped together.

What if someone ate the moon? And they loved it. They wanted more, even if that means an apocalypse, everyone else be damned. When making the decision between personal desire and potential annihilation, what if a seemingly good person chose desire. It’s not that hard to imagine. It happens all the time. We all do it constantly.

Maybe this is an allegory, maybe this is just a goofy, absurdist story. Maybe it’s both.

Most people seemed to be on board with this story. Others, not so much.

I don’t think it’s a much larger story, probably still flash, but I think there is an audience for it. I’m going to do some more work on it to find out.

Week 4

Title - Excerpts from the notes of Lance Corporal Thomas Dusanne

Prompts - Open a book randomly and find the second paragraph - and - you discover a family secret

I had been thinking about writing in an epistolary format, simply because I have never tried that before. Discovering a family secret, or long-lost document, seemed to fit the bill. I was still floundering a bit so I tried the Open a Book prompt and stumbled onto a date in 1915. Add a dash of can-con and some horror elements and I was off and running.

I did a lot of research for this one, read and listened to many letters and notebooks of Canadian soldiers from WWI, and wrote several other passages that I had to cut. I will be adding those back, because honestly it flows better with them.

This seemed to land very well with some people, and not so well with others. A few people picked up on some of the parts I thought might be too subtle, so that’s good.

Something about this story is telling me that it wants to be a comic. I’m looking into making that happen.

Week 5

Title - After Hours at JD’s Salvage Yard

Prompt- Who is the strongest person?

I think the strongest person is one who continues on in the face of adversity. One who retains their joy even when it would be easier to let it go. Sometimes the strongest people are strong because they have help.

This story started out as an action packed arm wrestling scene between mechs. I didn’t get very far in before all I wanted to do was examine what sort of person would do that.

I shifted everything over to a very simple scene where I could get to know Zenon.

A lot of readers in my division didn’t like this story (scene) very much, and that’s completely okay. If you are reading this, and you didn’t like it, that’s fine. I didn’t write it for you. I wrote it for me. I like to write these scenes to get to know my characters, and if everything goes well, I can start to like them.

Zenon and JD will absolutely become characters in a new story, but it probably won’t be this one. It might involve mech arm wrestling, and it might not, but it will be about dudes being good to each other. Even though the world around them might be a bit grimy, the story will be joyful.

I’ve started to put together what shape this new story will take.

537

Mon, 13 Feb 2023 00:00:00 +0000

A few times on here, I have taken a little time to point out some graphics tools I like. Recently, it’s just been a bunch of different ways to use Blender. I started using Blender for some stuff that I don’t think it was really intended for, but it doesn’t seem to care. Just chews right through those graphics.

This time, it’s not Blender. This time I’m going to write something about Pixel Composer

( https://makham.itch.io/pixel-composer )

There are about a million pixel art tools. Aseprite( https://www.aseprite.org/ ) is probably the current darling, and it’s easy to see why. It does a lot. You can paint, edit, and animate with really intuitive tools. On the other hand, Aseprite is more a refinement of the sort of tools we have been using for computer graphics for decades now than it is something new or revolutionary. Most of the time, that’s what people want. A tool that is dialed in for their particular task.

Pixel Composer isn’t that. It’s a different sort of animal. Pixel Composer is more like programming pixel art pipelines than a traditional art tool. You string together a network of processes with whatever your input art is at one end, and some animated, distorted, or created pixel art comes out the other end. It has a lot more in common with procedural video compositing systems than it does with something like photoshop.

It doesn’t seem to be the best tool for every task, but it does make some workflows possible that would be very difficult without it. I suppose you could wrangle Blender into doing that sort of thing for you, but, try as I might, Blender can’t be the tool for every job.

536

Mon, 06 Feb 2023 00:00:00 +0000

So, five weeks of writing flash stories, and I now have at least 3 good starts to stories I might be able to sell. I don’t think any of them work the way I want in the form they are in now, but writing sellable flash stories was never my intent. I sort of just wanted to see if I could do it. If a few extra stories fall out the other end, well that would be nice too.

I hadn’t put it down here before, because it felt weird or braggy or something else, but after thinking about it, I don’t know that it is. A few months ago, I applied to join Codex. Codex is a forum and community of neo-pro writers. People who have sold a few stories or completed certain writing courses. Some are full time professional writers, some are part time, or very part time, but all are more serious than hobby level. At least one person there is selling a story or a book ever few days. Dedicated discussions and resources on the ins and outs of professional writing (think basic contract and tax stuff) are almost as common as those on craft and technique. It’s a place where writers hang out. I think I felt weird about talking about it, because I don’t often feel like a writer. I’m a commercial artist that sometimes pretends to be a writer.

Fairly soon after I applied, they started running their yearly flash fiction contest. It’s like a series of writing jams. All the writers are given a set of prompts, and a 48 hour deadline. You need to come up with an idea based on one (or a few) of the prompts and then execute it in under 750 words in under two days. I am quite familiar with game jams, so the vibe is similar. It’s a contest in the same way that Ludum Dare is a contest. There will be a ‘winner’ but no one outside codex will know or care, and there aren’t really prizes. Well, maybe there are.

The real prize, for me anyway, is that over a dozen other writers will read, comment on, and rate your work every week. I have a story published in a literal paper book and I couldn’t tell you if a dozen people have actually read it. If they have, they certainly never told me about it. These stories are all short enough that anyone can buzz through several of them in a sitting. Little 750 word stories.

That’s the first prize, the second prize is that I will read more than a dozen (probably over 2 dozen) stories every week. I am getting a lot of exposure to what works and what doesn’t in these short bursts.

I suppose the aggravating part is, almost none of the stories I have read in the last few weeks have been bad. Some of them are so outrageously good that I can hardly believe they were written in less than two days. I take that back. It’s not aggravating, it’s inspiring. In an aggravating way.

The scores and comments on my own stories have been mixed to slightly favourable. Every week at least one person selected my story as one of their favourites for that round, and every one of them has received a couple of 8 or higher scores. That might not sound great, but trust me, if you read these stories, being anywhere in the top half is extremely flattering. The stories are good, and some folks grade extremely harshly. There are at least half a dozen that I have read that can probably be sold, as is, with no edits. These people are that good.

I just submitted my story for this week. I think it’s okay, but we’ll see. I think it would be better if it were longer than 750 words.

535 - Choplifter!

Mon, 30 Jan 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Best Games - Choplifter!

The best early 8-bit computer games did a lot with a little. They were written for computers built around MOS 6502 or Zilog Z80 processors. Moderately powerful chips at the time, but still absolutely dwarfed by the comparatively monstrous boards and chips in most arcade machines.

There was never any hope that the graphics of an Apple II would come anywhere near to the graphics of a contemporary arcade machine. The frame rate would never be as smooth. The sound would never be as rich and full. An Apple II computer can do a wide variety of things, but being a match for any arcade machine would never be one of them.

Maybe this is why a lot of the greatest innovations in gameplay arrived on computers first. If you can’t match them on razzle dazzle, you better be able to make the game interesting in other ways.

Choplifter! is a rare breed of game where the main objective is something ancillary to the main verbs the player has available.

If I told you that you are controlling a helicopter that can fly quickly or slowly, pitch up or down, fly backward or forward, rotate to face in one of three directions, and it can shoot in any of them, what would you imagine the main game objective would be? If you picked flying around and shooting, I wouldn’t be surprised. It seems obvious that the player would use those verbs to play the game.

Other than flying, you don’t really need any of them. It would be possible to play, and win Choplifter! never firing a shot and never rotating the helicopter.

The main objective of Choplifter! Is to save as many captured prisoners of war as you possibly can. Not all, not a set amount. As many as you can. Maybe that’s only one. Maybe that’s all of them. Honestly, that’s up to you. The game only demands that you save as many as you can.

You could fly out, land, pick up prisoners, and take them back, while never engaging with any other verb in the game. Never pressing a button on the controller. It wouldn’t be as much fun, but you could do it.

Add to that, all the small interactions in the game. There are tanks, airplanes, and depending on the version you play, ground based cannons, and some sort of drone unit. You can choose to fight them or avoid them, and most of the time it’s best to just avoid them. You can shoot open the prison huts, or get a tank to do it for you. Prisoners can be killed by tank fire, missiles from airplanes, your own shots, or just by landing on them.

The best part about all of this interactivity is, you don’t really need to engage with any of it to play the game. You will, because it’s fun, but you don’t need to. How you play the game is left to you.

This is really what I mean when I say ‘did a lot with a little’. Sure, the processors and memory of those 8-bit computers were laughably small by comparison to today, or even the arcade machines of the time, but that’s not what I’m getting at. Here is a game that is about a single objective. Rescue prisoners. But the way you go about doing that is extremely nuanced. You can shoot every enemy, or never shoot at all. You can pick up as many prisoners as your chopper can hold, or you can make dozens of small trips. The game doesn’t care. There are a lot of tools here, and you can use them however you like.

Choplifter! Lets you decide how you will play it, and that’s almost always a recipe for the best games.

534

Mon, 23 Jan 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Okay. Three weeks. Three stories under 1000 words.

While I don’t think that it’s getting any easier to write these things, I think, at least the last one, is a bit better than the others.

Just like anything, if you practice a little, you get more comfortable with it.

Gauging the pace of these sub 1000 word stories is tricky, but I think that’s the part I am getting better at. I like to open stories rather slowly. Give the reader lots of time to acclimatize and get into whatever it is I am writing. That’s not really a great way to write a story that only takes a few minutes to read. I still had to trim a little to get under the word count, but not over 200 words like the first week.

So, what do I hope to learn by writing these? In such a tight word count, I can’t be flowery or wander too far. I have to make sure my dialog gets to the point, or if I’m doing my job right, several points. I’m learning to echo concepts, without, I hope, making the text repetitive. I’m learning that I can go from concept to finished story in a handful of hours, and I can do it repeatably. Reliably.

I think that all of these stories will require several passes and probably more than a handful of additional words before they are ready to send out, but they are done. They are self-contained, functional stories.

I think that’s all I really aspire to write.

533 - Best Albums Geddon Dangerous by Doublegeddon

Mon, 16 Jan 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Best Games Albums - Geddon Dangerous by Doublegeddon

Normally this is the place for games, best games even. I’m just going to drop a link here. If you are going to read this, you should at least have a listen to one of the best albums of last year.

https://youtu.be/h-iUtkleVt8

While you could just listen to this music and enjoy the blend of power metal and new wave synths, I don’t know if you would get the whole experience.

There are a lot of concept albums, but there are fewer concept bands, and only a tiny handful that make good music. Only really Ghost and Gorillaz come to mind.

To sum up, Doublegeddon is, at least by their descriptions, two 5000 year old Sumerian demigods who have re-emerged from the 7th dimension to play metal music. One lives on the moon and one lives in Antarctica. Since one hates heat and the other hates oxygen, it works out.

I’m a sucker for satirical lore. Doublegeddon has it in spades.

If you would like another link, here is an interview they did with a metal magazine.

https://www.filthydogsofmetal.com/interviews/interview-with-doublegeddon

All of their songs are similarly silly, but with a narrative consistency that speaks to some real writing talent. The lyrics of Revenge of the Vampire sounds like a bunch of metal tropes laid end to end, but it’s not just nonsense. The song tells a story. It’s a goofy story, but it’s fun, and good, and most important, well told.

None of these songs are just tossed out there. The musical skill is obvious, but there is some real songwriting skill on display as well. Writing almost forty minutes of good music in service of a joke is worthy of applause.

Jokes aside, Geddon Dangerous is just a really listenable album from end to end. I have put it on several times this year, and I will probably listen to is several more.

I look forward to whatever they do next.

532

Mon, 09 Jan 2023 00:00:00 +0000

I just tried writing my first flash fiction. Flash is a story that is typically under 1000 words, but I have read that some people consider anything under 2500 words flash fiction. A while ago I tried writing a drabble, that’s a story exactly 100 words in length. Here’s something that might seem counterintuitive. Writing short is very hard.

The story I wrote is less than 750 words, but I made sure that it had as many parts of a story as I could cram in there. There are defined characters, a goal, stakes, and a twist ending that seems obvious in retrospect. You know, story stuff.

Packing any of that into 750 words is really tricky. This post is more than 400 words and I am only telling you about the story. I write outlines longer than 750 words.

Flash fiction seems to be a popular format. Easily devoured by readers during a break or on their phone, but still long enough to deliver a compelling tale. I see a lot of other writers selling them. I don’t know if I’m going to be among them. It’s just really hard. I function better with a bit of room to breath. I often find getting under 5000 words to be difficult.

The obvious question would be, if it’s hard and I like writing longer stories, why try writing a flash story. The obvious, and correct answer, would be why not. You don’t learn anything by not trying.

I think I will try a few more in the coming weeks. I will probably find that I need to expand these stories quite a lot before I feel happy with them. On the upside, it seems to only take a day or two to write a 750 word story. That’s a far cry from the weeks or months that I spend on my more than 5000 word stories. To be perfectly clear though, it might be a small word count and a short time, but it does feel much more difficult than writing a longer story.

Unfortunately, like always, I won’t be posting them here, unless I really can’t see any way to sell them. I would like to. I would rather just post up anything that I write, but that doesn’t seem to be the way the publishing world works.

Until it does, I suppose you will just have to be satisfied with these vague descriptions of what I am writing.

Hopefully, in the near future, I can let you know about actual published stories I may or may not have coming out.

531

Mon, 02 Jan 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Are you supposed to make resolutions for the new year? I don’t really do that. I haven’t done that since I was a kid. I don’t really see the point.

To be clear, it’s not the resolutions, or the idea of making a promise to yourself and sticking to it. I love that sort of thing. I just don’t understand the timing.

This blog was a resolution of sorts. I wanted to write. I wanted to get better at writing. I decided that if, at the very least, I wrote one small thing every week, that would be good enough. I have continued to write, at least once a week, for ten years.

Has it made me a better writer? Difficult to say. It has done this though. Now, I can write on demand. I can sit down and start writing. I don’t have any delusions that the muses will work through me, or that I need to wait for inspiration. Writing, like drawing, is a practice of work. It’s a thing you do and a process for doing it. The piece of writing you have at the end of that practice may or may not be good, but making something good instantly, and without revision, isn’t the point. That’s not writing.

Drawing is a process of building up lines, finding the best lines in the noise, and refining those. 3D modeling is a process of building up forms, finding the best shapes in the noise, and refining those. There is a process for these practices that moves from undefined to precise in both of those arts. The only way to know how to select the precise shapes from the noise is by practicing. Moving through the process over and over and over again.

Writing, it would seem, is much the same. You do it over and over and over and you get used to finding forms in the noise. The only way to do that is practice. Moving through the process. You resolve to do it. It’s not a goal. It’s a constant and unending practice.

It doesn’t matter when you start, but there is no end. That’s a resolution, at least for me. So, for this year, I think I will continue to do what I have been doing.

Maybe I will draw a little more.

530

Mon, 26 Dec 2022 00:00:00 +0000

It’s Boxing Day where I’m at. I hope anyone reading this had, or is having, a great holiday. See you next week.

529

Mon, 19 Dec 2022 00:00:00 +0000

This past week, I sold one story and received a request for edits on another.

While that is pretty cool, I thought this might be a good opportunity to talk vaguely about editing.

There is no guarantee that I will sell that second story, but they seemed to like most of it. They had some problems with the flow of the story and how it would work for their particular venue. I agree with them. I hadn’t written it with them in mind, but for the way they work, there is a better configuration for this story.

I don’t know how other writers approach editing words, but I have done a lot of video and image editing, so it may come as no surprise, I work in a similar way with text. I like to take big chunks of story and reposition them on the page as if it were an editing timeline. Then I might pick individual words, phrases, or lines from one spot and move them to another, just to see how they would fit. I float paragraphs into gaps I have made and polish over the seams. That’s just the way my brain works now. It has spent far too much time dealing with the visual side of storytelling and if I can provide it with a metaphor it understands, dealing with language goes much smoother.

It was very heavily implied in the request for edits that some writers might not want to change anything about their stories. I get that, but my brain is also extremely used to making changes and revisions based on client requests. It’s practically my default state. Making the first thing is difficult, but making changes is conceptually so much simpler for me. Again, this is absolutely from the point of view of someone who has been a commercial artist for decades at this point.

Just like anyone, there are things I value in my stories, places where I won’t compromise, but I don’t think it’s out of some sort of quest for artistic purity. I always want to make whatever I’m working on better. If the suggestion or criticism could make the image or animation or story I’m working on better, I will almost always want to do that. If it breaks something core to the story, or changes it in a way that isn’t making it better, I think I would be more inclined to dig my heels in.

I don’t think that ‘going back to the drawing board’ is a thing that exists. People have too many internal biases and preconceptions. Once they see one version of a thing, erasing that and starting over truly fresh is not possible. That first experience will continue through the entire process. As will the second and third. Even if the final result doesn’t resemble the initial idea, there is no escaping it. The only real way to edit anything is by moving forward through the process. Every change and revision, even deleting something, is forward movement. Not because that sounds like good motivational poster fodder, but because the past impacts the future. What you did before, what you saw before, what you wrote or read before, will change the ultimate result of your work.

All of this is the long way of saying, I sort of like editing. It’s like having a lot of clay to work with and only during the editing process do you start to define forms and clarify details. And it works with my brain better than coming up with the initial ideas.

I’ll stop writing this and go back to editing.

528

Mon, 12 Dec 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Let’s talk about stealing. Stealing ideas. It’s what I do. If you write or code or make art or create anything, you probably steal too.

I have written here several times about stealing game ideas from past games I have played. Writing is no different.

When I write, I steal.

I have probably read several hundred comic books, honestly, it could be thousands. Comic books, movies, and TV shows. More than anything else, these are the ideas I mine to fill my stories. Usually not the good stories either. I’m not going to write my version of that one amazing Twilight Zone episode. I excavate the mine of the ones that could have been. The attempts that were partially successful. The seeds of ideas that never were.

Almost every story I have written starts out with me trying to finish a story that never was. Some bit of a comic that I thought was interesting, but never explored. Some part of an anime that would have gone in a totally different direction had the creators tried to adhere to some sort of realism. I mean, I’m glad they didn’t. I watched whatever anime it happened to be so that I could see giant robots or punch wizards battle, but what a story it would be if they had just followed that other interesting thread.

This is what I like to steal. Those ideas barely motioned toward and abandoned. What would happen if those stories were told fully.

By the time I finish a story, that original seed of an idea is barely recognizable. Sometimes it has been excised completely. Maybe there would be a few other people who know where the original idea came from, but most of them are so thoroughly modified by the end that it would be pretty difficult to puzzle it out.

I have a suspicion that this is how a lot of writers work. There have been a solid handful of excellent stories I have read recently that I could pretty easily point to what inspired them. That I could identify what they stole from didn’t make the stories worse. In fact, sometimes it made them better. More relatable. More grounded.

Everyone does the armchair quarterback routine when they see or read something that doesn’t quite live up to the seed idea. Something that could have been a little better if the creator had only done that one thing that you thought of.

While that probably isn’t entirely true, I think this is the place that a lot of writers come from. What would I do if this was my story. The difference between writers and non-writers is only that the first group actually try it out. They write their version. They tell the story they way they would, even if the core idea is stolen from something else.

So this is my direct endorsement for anyone reading this to go out and steal. Was there a bit of an old Star Trek or Columbo episode that you wish they had fleshed out? Write that story. Is there a bit of a comic or game or radio play that you can’t shake, but no one else ever seems to care about it? Write that story. Run down that thread.

If you don’t make the thing that you want to see, it’s unlikely anyone else will. They are too busy stealing from some little bit of story they can’t let go. Go out and steal something for yourself.

527 - Pitfall II

Mon, 05 Dec 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Best Games - Pitfall II : Lost Caverns

1984 was a weird year for video games in North America. Atari was the dominant player in the industry by an extremely wide margin, and they were absolutely failing. Arcades were still popular, but some of the shine was coming off. Games were changing, becoming more complex. The hobby wasn’t for everyone anymore. It was less accessible. Less inviting. Pong was a distant memory, and even Pac-Man had fallen out of fashion. Nintendo had already sold millions of Famicom consoles, and they hadn’t even released outside of Japan. Home computers had never been more popular. The industry was simultaneously dead, dying, or poised to become the most lucrative entertainment industry in the world, depending on who you asked.

As it turns out, it was the last one.

Game developers never stopped. For all the talk of a market crash around this time, the innovation and creation of new video game experiences just kept rolling.

Pitfall! Had been a real technical and artistic achievement. The Atari VCS wasn’t exactly known for beautiful games. If a few blocks could move their way around a TV screen, that was achievement enough. If you went looking for legitimately pretty Atari VCS games, it might just be Pitfall! and River Raid.

Pitfall! was a fairly simple game. Almost a proof of concept. A little stick man could be made to run across the screen in either direction dodging traps and jumping over obstacles. It was an adventure, in as far as it contained all the trappings of adventures. Dangerous pits, deadly creatures, swinging on a vine. Ultimately, though, there is no real adventure in the game. Just a series of procedurally generated screens for you to move through.

Pitfall II is astounding for the time and a technical marvel for the platform. A year before Super Mario Bros. Pitfall II presented a true adventure. A game that reveals itself over many attempts and failures. The opening few screens of Pitfall II are unlike anything else on the Atari VCS. It teaches you how to play. How to explore. How the game will unfold. You will have to take risks. You will have setbacks, but those will teach you what to do on the next run.

There are checkpoints that you will return to over and over. Reaching a new checkpoint is extremely satisfying. It’s similar to finding a bonfire in a souls game. You now have an anchor, but you know that the next leg of the adventure will only grow more difficult.

Pitfall II is an adventure game. Maybe one of the first. As you play through the game, attempting to retrieve some lost treasure while rescuing your niece and pet mountain lion, you will engage in an amazing variety of adventurey type activities. Every time you come across a new mechanic or a clever new environmental puzzle, it will be surprising and ingenious. All of this on a tiny Atari VCS cartridge.

Because of when it was released, during the decline of Atari and right before the rise of Nintendo, Pitfall II is a game that was destined to be lost. It was ported to other machines, but never with the same magic. Something about the stark block color images and clean, precise gameplay make Pitfall II rise above almost all other games of it’s era.

If you haven’t played it, and you probably haven’t, you should give Pitfall II a try. It’s one of the best games.

526

Mon, 28 Nov 2022 00:00:00 +0000

It won’t happen right away, but sometime soon, this blog will change. I’ve been undertaking the slow process of moving it to a new home for a while. It will look different, because, well, everything needs a change sometime. It will work in a slightly different way. If anyone is subscribed through rss I will try to make it seamless, or at least provide some forewarning before everything changes. There is one other change that will be the biggest one, at least for me. This blog may not post every Monday like it has in the past. Usually it will. I am moving from a web based hosting wysiwyg editor to a markdown based system. That in itself isn’t a big problem. I can deal with writing a few markdown tags. The problem might be that if I happen to not have a usable dev environment available on any given Monday, or I haven’t managed to schedule my post beforehand, they might not get posted up until I get back to my pc. I know that not many people read this blog. Most likely, no one will notice if a post goes up on a Tuesday or Wednesday. I’m not too worried about it. I think I like the idea that I will have more freedom with how I create posts. Sometimes I might have to be okay with them not getting posted at the same time every week. Regardless of when posts go up, I still plan on posting once a week until further notice. This post marks 526 weeks. That’s over 10 years. If I was going to quit writing, I would have done it a long time ago.

525

Mon, 21 Nov 2022 00:00:00 +0000

One of the benefits of having a massive library of classic arcade roms literally at my fingertips, is the art. Each of these games, thanks to all the people who preserve these sorts of things, has associated screenshots, flyers, cabinet art, and marques.

It is pretty common for me to go through the game collection just to look at the different marque art.

I was thinking about it, and arcades sometime between the mid 80’s to the mid 90’s are probably one of the most unique collections of visible commercial art.

Places like grocery stores and department stores absolutely hold the record for most publicly viewable commercial art, what with every product having a logo or package design. But the difference with an arcade is that the art is there to sell you more art. Every game is, inherently, art. Every marque, every piece of cabinet decoration, is enticing you to come forward and look at a screen that will continue to provide more art. Visual art, audio art, animation, interaction. All art.

Maybe a music or video store comes close, but neither of those are as immediate, as responsive. Arcades were a cacophony of art, and all of that art was made by people.

A lot of video games came out between 1980 and the mid 90s. Every single one of them had marque art and backglass art. A lot of them had art up the sides of the cabinet. Some of this art is amazing. You know what wasn’t very good then? Illustration software.

I have made a lot of logos. Designed a lot, redrew a lot, modified a lot. I have worked with massive font libraries and I’ve even made a few fonts myself. Every single one of them was created with the help of a computer. I have used Adobe Illustrator and Corel Draw and some more exotic illustration software that almost no one uses. I can’t imagine what it took to come up with the design for the Pac-Man logo.

That’s not entirely true. I have some idea. I have done some screen printing. I have hand cut vinyl and rubylith masks. None of that is particularly important, but trust me when I say that making the Pac-Man logo wasn’t just a simple drawing or painting job. It would have been a very labour intensive and technical multi-step process. Of course, the digital files I look at know have been vector traced, color matched, and cleaned up when compared to the originals. Still, there is something wonderful about all of these designs and text treatments that had to be worked on by hand.

I would never give up my Affinity Designer or other design tool. I have become accustomed to how they work, but I can appreciate how things were done before. The Pac-Man logo or the Galaxian logo, both amazing examples of modifying text to create something unique and eye-catching.

If you go to a site like www.arcadeartwork.org and start poking around, you will likely be astonished at the amount of artwork produced for these games over the years. Peripheral art, for a game, that is, in itself, art. Stunning.

This is just one particular venue for commercial art. Keep your eyes open and you will probably see so many more. Everything item that was made by people probably has some art associated with it. Somewhere, somewhen, somebody made a thing, and now you get to look at it. That’s worth appreciating.

524 - Warlords

Mon, 14 Nov 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Best Games - Warlords

Do you like pong? Yeah, that two player tennis type game that you play by twisting a knob.

Do you like Breakout? Yeah, that single player pong type game where you systematically smash a wall using a paddle and ball.

Did you have more than one other friend?

Warlords is what you get if you combine all of those things. It’s pong, it’s breakout, it’s four players. It’s great.

In Warlords you control a small shield defending one of four castles nestled neatly in the corners of a regular TV monitor. A dragon sweeps in at the start of each game and let’s loose a fireball. If the fireball hits a shield, it bounces off at fairly controllable angles. If the fireball hits a castle wall, it takes out chunks before bouncing off unpredictably. The harder the fireball hits, the more of the castle wall it destroys.

Each player has a button that lets you catch the fireball and, more or less, direct the angle that you release it. This lets you turn another player’s attack into a focused counterattack.

When a wall has a large enough gap in it, and a fireball makes its way inside the castle, that player is out.

The game continues until there is one Warlord left standing.

Warlords is so simple you will pick it up in seconds. By the end of your first game you will already have started to develop strategies and, more than likely, rivalries.

By the tenth game alliances will form. One player will be singled out as the strongest and everyone will gang up to take them out early. Deals will happen where two players will agree not to attack each other until one of the others is out.

Warlords will turn friends into enemies and mild-mannered souls into monsters.

You will likely enjoy every minute of it.

Warlords is elemental and primal.

Warlords works just as well today as it did in 1980 because it relies on the one part of the video game experience that hasn’t changed. Other people.

There is an AI that you can play against, and it’s useful for filling out the board in the case that you are missing one of your four, but the game is ultimately unsatisfying when played against a computer. You need another person there that you can kick under the cabinet when they mercilessly toss fireballs at you.

Because it exists solely to facilitate a good time, Warlords is one of the best games.

523

Mon, 07 Nov 2022 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve got a few stories out for consideration at different outlets right now. They keep getting to the second or even third read stage before getting rejected. Most of the story review process is pretty opaque to writers submitting stories, and I think that is something that could definitely change with better metrics and tools, but the Submission Grinder gives you a pretty good idea of how far along in the review process a particular outlet is.

The Submission Grinder is an amazing tool and probably the only reason I have been able to find and submit to as many outlets as I have. It depends on writers to track their own submissions, rejections, and acceptances, but even with incomplete data you can usually get a pretty good idea where your particular piece is in the process.

You can see how fast they are moving through submissions, and in the case of a couple I have out right now, how far past the usual rejection window they are. If it’s only a few days, that’s probably just normal lag, and it might be that no one has read it yet. If it’s a week or more, it’s probably being reviewed by another person on their editorial team. If it’s months passed the usual cutoff, either they lost it or you’re going to be receiving a personal rejection letter with comments and maybe an explanation why they passed on it. While an acceptance would always be preferable, those rejection letters are better than the usual form letters.

One could easily wonder why anyone would do this. Why would you spend weeks or even months writing a story just to have it be rejected over and over. I honestly can’t say that I would recommend it. But, and this is a huge but, I think I am ok at this story writing thing. I think if I keep doing it, I could be very good at it. I haven’t run out of ideas yet, and it doesn’t look like I ever will. I might as well write them down and send them out. They aren’t doing anyone any good if I just think about them.

522 - Pang

Mon, 31 Oct 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Best Games - Pang (or Pomping World or Buster Bros.)

The early 80s were a time of wild experimentation for computer and arcade games. Game ideas would come from clever bits of code that someone managed to write in their bedroom more often than any sort of high level concept. If someone figured out how to create a smooth scrolling background, they turned that into a game. Figured out how to make it look like you are travelling down a road or tunnel by cycling colors or scaling sprites? That’s a game idea. You can make a block or character jump when you press a button? Gotta make a game out of it.

Two games, Galaxian and Asteroids, came out right at the start of the decade. There were about a thousand riffs on both concepts. A two dimensional shooting gallery and a game where you shoot one thing and it splits into two smaller things. Both of these games are built on extremely basic concepts and probably no small amount of clever code entirely unrelated to creating a game.

It didn’t take long for someone to merge these two ideas. In 1983 Hudson Soft came out with the game Cannon Ball for the Japanese MSX series of computers. A game where you guide a character back and forth across the bottom of the screen shooting ropes upward at bouncing balls. When you hit a ball, or a ball ran into one of your ropes, it would pop and split into two smaller balls. At some point fairly early in the development of the MSX computer, someone figured out how to make balls bounce. They thought, why not make a game out of that.

Cannon Ball is pretty bare bones. It came out very early in the life of the MSX and what people were looking for out of their entertainment software was probably just that it existed and ran. Still, the core is already there.

It would be another six years before Mitchell Corporation would do something that was rarely done in those days, they would license Cannon Ball from Hudson Soft to create an updated version. They would call this new version Pomping World. Typically companies would just steal game concepts and move on. Just ask Mitchell Corporation who’s own concept for Puzz Loop would be lifted by Popcap to create Zuma. You could ask them, except Mitchell Corporation shut down only a few years later.

Treachery of the game industry aside, have a look at these two games. I think old MSX Cannon Ball polished up quite nicely.

In Pomping World (later retitled Pang) you direct a character left and right across the bottom of the screen and fire ropes upward. There are balls bouncing around up there and if you hit one of them it will split into two smaller balls, or bubbles. The object of the game is to clear out all the balls and their debris, without the character being hit by any of them.

While Pang does offer a nice graphical upgrade over Cannon Ball, the main difference between the two games is the power-ups.

You start out only being able to fire one rope projectile that disappears when it touches any barrier. You can pick up a power that lets you fire two ropes, one that lets you fire a rope that grapples in place, only dissolving after a set amount of time unless it’s hit by a bubble, or a gun that fires quickly but leaves no ropes behind that you can use as barriers or shields.

That’s the main mechanic in Pang that makes it different from something like Galaxian. When you shoot a rope up the screen, the bubbles can crash against the side of it and pop. That means, ropes aren’t just an offensive weapon against the bubbles. You can fire one and then step to the side, putting the rope between you and any bubbles coming to hit you. It’s not enough to just aim up-screen like you would in Space Invaders. In Pang you have to plan for bounces and deal with the smaller bubbles when the larger ones burst. It’s an action game that boarders on the strategy of a puzzle game. There are other power-ups that play with time, but none of them are an instant win. They all have upsides and downsides that you will have to get used to if you want to succeed.

Pang, and it’s sequels, are such simple and refined games. It takes a few minutes to develop a winning strategy. After a few more minutes you will discover that strategy was terrible and you will develop a new one. This will keep happening for as long as you play the game.

Pang may be one of the last games that sprang directly out of some clever thing that someone figured out how to do on a computer. Game development now is a much wider field. If you can think something up, there is probably a way to do it. Some clever person probably already has.

Pang is truly one of the best games.

521

Mon, 24 Oct 2022 00:00:00 +0000

I had planned to write about a fun old game this week. Or maybe I would have called an audible and wrote something about writing or submitting or art or how inspiration can come from anywhere and it’s great to use your diverse interests to feed your art.

Instead, I think I will write a very small amount about harassment. Online harassment to be specific.

We hear a lot about online harassment, and I don’t know if you know this, but the internet is not different from real life. It is a connected and shared space. It’s not physical, but actual people are on the other end of every interaction you have. They are very real, and they can, and often do, react in very real ways to the things that you do or say.

I write all of this, because this week I was harassed online. Well, sort of online, sort of in physical space. The details are, frankly, too stupid to reiterate, and the incident is over, but the anger, and even fear, I felt were very real.

I know that what I experienced is an absolute sliver of what people being systemically harassed experience. I also know that I will never suffer the way some people do. There is very little that any individual online can actually do to me. I did nothing to earn it, but I have a certain amount of armour, built of age, cultural privilege, and means. It makes me a very poor target. For one, I have the privilege of feeling and expressing anger rather than fear.

Not everyone has that armour. People I know and care about might not have that armour. And that was the part that made me the most angry.

I’m extremely lucky. I can laugh this sort of thing off. I spent a few tense hours communicating with people I know and preparing a defense that I knew I would never need. That was all. Nothing really. I will likely not come across an individual this misguided again, and if I do, the incident will likely follow this same pattern.

What about people who don’t have that armour? What about people who for whatever reason wouldn’t be able to talk to administrators, or management, or police? What about all the people who might have a legitimate need to keep a private life separate from their online one?

There are far too many people who could have been put in personal or professional danger from the sort of thing that just happened to me. I wish that everyone could be so impervious, but the fact is, they are not. And the internet is real life. Things said and done on the internet are real.

I know that I can’t do much to stop harassment from happening. I can attempt to shield my friends and family from it. I can try to ensure that the shared spaces I occupy are free of bullying and harmful attacks. I can intercede on others’ behalf, because, let’s face it, I might not deserve this armour, but I do wear it.

Online harassment is real. It’s not lesser. It’s not different. It can, and does, cause actual harm.

If you also wear this armour, use it. Make the spaces you share on the internet safer for those who don’t.

520

Mon, 17 Oct 2022 00:00:00 +0000

I finished the first draft of a new story. The first draft of anything is going to be lacking. It’s going to have typos, and missing words, and rough edges where the prose doesn’t flow. There are pacing issues and maybe even missing details, details that, were they there, would bring the story to life in the mind of the reader. I know this, and still I want it to be great right away. I want it to work the first time.

I draw. If you have read any of these posts previously, or you have known me for any length of time, you probably know this. I have drawn since I was very young. Every single time I make a mark on paper or activate a collection of pixels, I want it to work perfectly the first time. I want every mark to be perfect. They aren’t, and they have never been. I want it, but I know that’s not how it works.

When you draw anything, it usually helps to start out with a sketch. Some simple marks that won’t be part of the final image, but give you anchor points to build an image around. If the picture is a person, I like to create a line of action. One or two marks that represent the characters balance or movement in the image. Then I like to create certain anatomy landmarks. The rigid and immutable parts of a person work well. The skull, the rib cage, the positions of the joints. After that I build up the mass of the form. Muscles, fat, hair, clothing, etc. This is what gives the character their silhouette, their unique shape. Then I go in and create detail that defines that character.

I continue to do the same for every element of the image. Structures, machines, animals, garbage, all of it. Everything is built of layers, and every layer is dependent on the one before it being strong and accurate. But it isn’t only a one way process. Sometimes the shape of a hand will define the base structure of an arm and the line of action through the shoulder and down through the hips.

I only know this because I have been making drawings for a long time. Drawing for a long time means I have learned to trust this process. I know that it will get me from a blank page to a finished drawing.

Every single time I still think, this is the one where I do it all perfectly, right out of the gate. I won’t need a strong pose, because everything will work the first time. I won’t need to create landmarks because all the details will just be in the right place.

That never happens. So, instead, I trust the process. I work through the steps. I refine the drawing in stages.

I just finished writing a sketch. I haven’t been writing like this nearly as long as I have been drawing, so my path forward is a little more hazy, a little less practiced. But I know that I have a sketch. I think it’s a strong sketch, but I will have to move some landmarks. Maybe the line of action isn’t exactly balanced yet. I’ve been starting to develop a process for this, but it will take time. For now I just have to think that it will get there. It will be a finished story. It might take more than one pass is all.

519

Mon, 10 Oct 2022 00:00:00 +0000

When I started writing this blog, it was a sort of dev diary. I didn’t post once a week and I titled, rather than numbered, each post. While I thought that no one would likely read what I wrote here, on the off chance that they might, I tried to make it a somewhat pleasant experience. Somewhere along the line, I decided to both switch to one post a week and stop worrying that people might read it. That’s why the posts are numbered rather than titled, and I sometimes repeat myself. Like right now. I have written a very similar thing in an earlier post, but I don’t think that anyone has read all of them, so I can probably slip it by without anyone catching on.

There was one other thing that I decided when I switched to one post a week. I decided that this would be a place where I advocated for good things. Usually that takes the form of commenting on Best Games, video games from the past that are great and deserve praise and recognition. Usually those games are fairly old, and have had countless articles and other, more important, blog posts written about them. I don’t like to Best Games a game that is new or current or ‘hot’.

I’m going to break that trend here. Also, I’m not advocating for a game this time.

It’s pretty rare that the first few minutes of a TV show make my eyes go wide. I like a good show, but even when they start strong, most shows will have a lull in them that makes me think ‘oh, the creators of this didn’t think that hard about this part. It’s just filler until they get to the next set piece’.

The new Andor Star Wars show doesn’t do that. Every shot matters, and every bit of background minutia has been considered. This is a TV series made by people with a deep love of Star Wars, but also by people with a deep love of stories. How stories grow and build. How one moment that seems inconsequential, but still sticks in your mind, can become the spark for wonderful, powerful scenes down the line.

This is a TV show that expects you to pay attention. You have to bring yourself to the material. There are things happening when the camera isn’t on them. There are characters saying things counter to what they mean. There are threads working through the background, and you have to keep them in mind while watching a scene in another locations with other characters.

Now, they could easily fumble this show. They could have a great setup and fail to pay it off. But I don’t think so. There is too much care and affection in this show. The creators know where it’s going, and all the steady pacing is deliberate. When those threads start to entangle with each other, I think the payoffs will be well worth it.

When the first episode ended I wanted to cheer. This was a Star Wars show made by people who love Star Wars and it was like they were saying “just go on this ride with us, it’s gonna be great”.

I’m on the ride and so far, I’m loving it.

518 - Super Puzzle Fighter II Turbo

Mon, 03 Oct 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Best Games - Super Puzzle Fighter II Turbo

The time between the creation of Tetris and someone wanting to play Tetris competitively, in head-to-head fashion, is probably nanoseconds. At first, players would have been able to play against each other’s scores. Who got the most lines, or who could reach a certain score in the shortest amount of time, or who could beat Alexey at his own game. When you are working with soviet era computers, I’m sure you took what you could get.

Once the game was on more capable hardware, like the NES, it was inevitable. The official Nintendo version of the game didn’t have competitive multiplayer included, but the Tengen version did. There is an entire story behind that, but I’m not writing about Tetris today. I’m writing about Super Puzzle Fighter II Turbo. A game that might be the pinnacle of head-to-head puzzle games.

When you are playing a head-to-head game, say a fighting game, or Chess, or Battleship, it is assumed that each player starts out on roughly equal ground. Now, one player can work very hard at getting good at the game giving them an advantage, but just based on the rules of the game, neither side of the board should have an inherent advantage. Super Puzzle Fighter II Turbo is the ultimate expression of that.

Super Puzzle Fighter II Turbo is VS. only. Even if you play by yourself, you will be matched up against a computer opponent. There is nothing zen or meditative about this game.

Like Tetris, Super Puzzle Fighter II Turbo is a game about dropping things into a well. In this case, the things are gems. If you stack up a bunch of the same color, they become larger gems. There are also special exploding diamonds. If you drop one of the same color on a column or series of connected gems, they all break. The ability to combo those gem breaks into other gem breaks is the very core of Super Puzzle Fighter II Turbo.

As the name might suggest, this game is part of Capcom’s fighting game renaissance. There are chibi versions of characters from the Street Fighter and Darkstalkers games that give Super Puzzle Fighter II Turbo an attraction that the gem based gameplay might not otherwise have on its own. It wouldn’t have needed it. The game is that strong.

Here is where it’s a different sort of puzzle game than Tetris. If you play VS. Tetris, the most skilled player will almost always win. The one who has had the most practice. Super Puzzle Fighter II Turbo is more intuitive than Tetris. It’s more improvisational, more dynamic. After a couple of games, a new player will probably give an experienced player a serious challenge. It’s a game with almost no learning curve, and a variety of strategies to victory. In that way, it is something like a fighting game. It is very difficult to get yourself into a hole so deep that you can’t dig yourself out of it with a series of good moves. It’s likely that you can set yourself up to deliver a powerful attack almost by accident. This is a game about taking advantage of the opportunities before you, not necessarily strategizing your way into them.

I could be wrong. There could be an extremely high level of play in Super Puzzle Fighter II Turbo where combatants plan many moves in advance. That has never been my experience. This is the accessible, party friendly, head-to-head puzzle game.

Super Puzzle Fighter II Turbo is a great game to introduce to people who don’t really play games. Simple to pick up, and fun to play, really it’s just one of the best games.

517

Mon, 26 Sep 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Whenever I start a new story, I open two documents. The first one is the story I’m trying to write, and the second is all the bits that I want to keep, but cut from the story for one reason or another. I usually call this document “cut bits” because I am extremely inventive like that.

As I go, I will usually add a few more documents. One to hold research or stuff I copied and pasted from Wikipedia. Maybe a timeline or a document with relevant full names, just so that I don’t forget them. But most of the work happens in those two documents.

Most of the time I wind up with the cut bits weighing in at roughly half the word count of the finished story. I probably deleted some stuff in there that would never be used, or pasted back some stuff after I found a place for it.

The story that I am currently writing is only a bit over 3000 words, but the cut bits document is well over 3500.

Now, I don’t store drafts in cut bits. This isn’t a bin to put all of my previous versions. I use a sort of version control for that. Cut bits is only for stuff that I can’t use right now, but I like the flow of a certain sentence or paragraph, so I keep it around to see if I can use it later. So I haven’t just typed in more than double the words, I have written, and discarded more than double the words in the story.

These are different words. Different paragraphs. Entirely different ideas that might still fit in the current story.

I don’t think this is a six or seven thousand-word story. This is a fairly short story, but I have had so much trouble with it that I have had to try it several different ways.

I still really like it though. There is something good in this story, but even after writing more than twice the words it needs (actually seven or eight times when you take the revisions into account), I haven’t quite nailed it. It’s very close, but it’s not there yet.

Maybe this week.

516 - Lode Runner

Mon, 19 Sep 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Best Games - Lode Runner

The first version of Lode Runner I ever played was on the Atari 800. Then I played it on a Commodore 64. And then on an Apple II. And then on a PC. I just played the Arcade version on a Steam Deck. And then again in a browser.

In every single case, Lode Runner is brilliant.

Developed by Doug Smith, allegedly Lode Runner was based off a recollection of a retelling of a kid’s time at an arcade playing Space Panic and a somewhat failed attempt to recreate Donkey Kong. Lode Runner and Space panic share the ability of the main character to dig holes and have pursuers fall into those holes, but that’s about it. Where Space Panic is an action game, Lode Runner is a puzzle game through and through.

I think that’s what makes Lode Runner so special. It’s a puzzle game, where you might have to play a little action game jazz to arrive at the solution. Juking and dodging are tools just as vital to your success as planning and strategizing. This ain’t Donkey Kong either. Moving in one direction and dealing with threats as they come to you won’t help win a level of Lode Runner.

Lode Runner is a game about stealing gold, including gold that guards might pick it up as they pursue you, escaping, and then stealing all the gold on the level. Sometimes you can approach the level in a haphazard manner, and sometimes only a perfectly precise path will solve a specific level’s puzzle. You won’t know what sort of level you are on until you fail at it a few times. Since the game has something like 150 of the things, you aren’t likely to get bored. And even if you do, Lode Runner has a remedy for that.

Lode Runner is one of the first games that shipped with a level editor. You could make your own levels, or modify the existing ones, to make any sort of challenge you want. The real joy of this feature would be to see your friends attempt to beat difficult levels that you created, unfortunately I didn’t have any friends with an Atari 8bit computer, so I just made weird levels for myself. Not gonna lie, it was still fun.

More important than the level editor, or the hybrid, action, puzzle gameplay was what Lode Runner meant to game design in general. While there eventually was an arcade port, Lode Runner isn’t an arcade game. Lode Runner takes advantage of the environment in which it is experienced. Lode Runner is a computer game. It expects that you will be at home, on your computer. You will try one puzzle room again and again to perfect it. This is one of the earliest games that understands where it is and how that changes the way you play it. Lode Runner is undoubtedly an influence on later home console games like Legend of Zelda, games that are built around a different way of playing. A different pace. A different level of focus. This is a game that isn’t content to only hold your attention for ten minutes at a time. This is a game that knows that you might have hours to devote, and it lets you.

Type Lode Runner into a web browser and go play any of the many html5 versions out there. You won’t be sorry. It is one of the best games, after all.

515

Mon, 12 Sep 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Sometime in the early 90s, I was flipping through channels and stopped on this amazing movie. I didn’t know what it was, I didn’t know how long it had already been running, and I barely knew what anyone was saying.

I watched all of it.

It was Wim Wenders 1987 film, Wings of Desire. It had just started, it was in German, French, and English, but it was playing on the French channel so I could only get so much context from the subtitles. It didn’t matter. It was absolutely wonderful.

A few years later, I watched it again, only this time with English subtitles. Aside from a few minor subtleties, I hadn’t really missed any of the core story or themes that first time. It was a movie you could watch without understanding most of the lines, and it still made sense.

While I think that Wings of Desire is a fantastic movie and you should probably watch it, if you haven’t, praising it isn’t the point I’m getting angling toward.

Wim Wenders understood the medium of film so well that he made a movie you could love without understanding any of the languages spoken in it.

I’ve played a few games, video games, recently that don’t seem to understand the medium they are working in. Where movies have to tell the story visually at least as much, if not more, than through dialog and description, games have to tell theirs through interaction.

The game Disco Elysium is incredibly dense with text and voice acting. It’s several novels worth of words and description, but it wouldn’t work without the interactive element. Creating the character, and the world, through your choices is at the core of the game. Everything is built around the interaction between the player and the systems of the game.

Several recent visual novel style games, on the other hand, have you click through a series of paragraphs that are delivered in an extremely linear style. This is the same level of interaction as turning the page of a book. Just because the player presses a button, does not mean that the interaction was meaningful or core to the experience.

I won’t ever go so far as to say, or even imply, that this makes these games bad or unenjoyable. There are a lot of people who dearly love the stories told in these visual novels. They are not wrong. The stories could be amazing, but the medium isn’t being used to enhance the experience. It’s a mismatch.

Wings of Desire held my attention for two hours because it used every part of every frame to tell the story. It is a movie, through and through.

Games are a much younger medium, so maybe the vocabulary hasn’t been fully developed yet. They are also a very important and impactful medium. There is so much yet to do in games. So many interactive experiences and stories. But to do it, I think it’s important to ask “why a game?” as opposed to a book or comic or film. If it’s difficult to answer “why a game?”, maybe what you are making is something else.

514

Mon, 05 Sep 2022 00:00:00 +0000

We’ve had the Steam Deck here for a while now. It’s a great machine. We have played a handful of modern games with it, but, in all honesty, I mostly play old games on it. Mostly Street Fighter.

I did play Street Fighter using a gamepad for a while when I first discovered Mame and other emulators. But not for very long, and not seriously.

I built my first arcade stick in about 1998. I have had an arcade stick or arcade cabinet ever since. At times, a couple of them. If I wanted to play arcade fighting games at any time in those years, I played on an arcade stick.

Any time I played a fighting game on a gamepad I didn’t really have a feel for it. I would swap back and forth between the stick and the D-Pad, never really finding my groove with either. I wouldn’t know how to map the buttons, so I would end up putting my heavies on the face buttons and just never using my medium punch or kick. It was so foreign to the way I was used to playing. I could get a fireball or hurricane kick to come out once or twice per match. Dragon punches? Forget about it. I just could not get my thumb to perform the movements.

The convenience of the Steam Deck has changed how I play fighting games. I think I will always prefer an arcade stick (bats not balls), but I think I get it now. I am incrementally catching up to all those kids who played a ton of Super Street Fighter II Turbo: Hyper Fighting on the SNES. I can crank out fireballs all day on a DPad now. I can even get the dreaded dragon punch to come out 9 times out of 10.

I am not now, nor will I ever be, a master at fighting games, but I still have fun playing them. I crank up the computer difficulty pretty high to make the early fights more difficult (though that does mean that the cpu does some pretty wild stuff that a human could never do) and I am getting more and more good wins with gamepad style controls. I still get stomped a little past halfway through the arcade campaign, but that is sort of intentional. These games were made to eat quarters after all.

I knew that we would use the Steam Deck to play current games, and I knew that I would put emulators on there and use it to play older games, but I didn’t really think that it would change the way I play one of my favorite genres. I have a noticeable callus on my left thumb from doing quarter circle swipes.

Maybe I can use it to understand the charge system in Art of Fighting. I doubt it.

513

Mon, 29 Aug 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Just a short writing update today. I have three short stories in various stages, one in the early edit and rewrite stage, one extremely early with only a concept and outline jotted down, and one that has been reworked so many times I’m not sure if it will ever get finished.

I have four stories submitted to a few magazines, but it could be literal months before I get a response back from any of them.

I also did a little more work on the draft of the novel I started during National Novel Writing Month. That will still take a while before it’s ready for major edits, but still, some movement is good.

And that’s writing. It’s slow. It’s mostly rejection. But I keep doing it, so there’s that.

512 - Street Fighter Alpha for the Game Boy Color

Mon, 22 Aug 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Best Games - Street Fighter Alpha for the Game Boy Color

This game has no business playing as well as it does on a Game Boy Color.

I bought a Game Boy Color in 2001. The Game Boy Advance had just come out and people were rightly more interested in the new handheld machine than the aging hardware of the Game Boy Color. I think I paid roughly $50 for it, and it came with a multi cart full of games. I remember playing a bit of Pokémon, a lot of Link’s Awakening, and more Street Fighter Alpha than I ever thought I would.

I tried the Game Boy port of Street Fighter II on a friend’s Game Boy once, and found the experience frustrating. Nothing worked right. The inputs felt off and everything ran at around ten frames per second. I think I played a couple matches before giving up.

I figured that the Game Boy was just not the right platform for a game so kinetic and demanding. Street Fighter Alpha proved that assumption wrong.

Whenever I write one of these, I always try to find a way to play at least a bit of the games that I am writing about. Often, I think a game would be a great candidate for a Best Games post, and find that raw nostalgia is not enough. They might have been interesting diversions at the time, but some games just don’t hold up as classics. In other words, they aren’t actually the best of games. I believe Street Fighter Alpha for Game Boy Color deserves a little context here.

I have been regularly playing a few rounds of Street Fighter III: Third Strike and Street Fighter Alpha 3 on a handheld device. These are arcade accurate. Tough act to follow. Not being able to find my old Game Boy Color, I tried Street Fighter Alpha on the same handheld, and it is absolutely breathtaking.

The pixel count and color pallet are extremely limited on the Game Boy Color, but the game is unmistakable. It looks and, more importantly, moves like Street Fighter Alpha. There are only two buttons, but the developers have somehow managed to fight most of what makes a fighting game work into those limited inputs. Specials, Supers, Counters, they are all in Street Fighter Alpha, and they work just like you would expect.

I went and looked up who could have executed such an amazing port. What I found was both astonishing and unsurprising.

The Game Boy Color port of Street Fighter Alpha appears to be mostly the work of two people. A tiny team managed to pack all this game into a tiny amount of space and processing power. It seems impossible until you look up the other things that they worked on.

Keith Burkhill is a British programmer that worked on some of the smoothest, fastest, and most technically impressive ZX Spectrum games. The ZX Spectrum was never a powerhouse, so lots of tricks had to be employed to get games to run well on a speccy. Kevin McMahon worked on some of the fastest pixel art games of the early 90’s.

There were probably a few people or teams that could have created a port as good as this one. I would guess that most of them had experience working with the extremely tight constraints of early home computers.

It might be fair to say that the title of Best Game should go to the original arcade version of Street Fighter Alpha, but I think that the ability to carry a game of this quality in your hand changes the way you relate to it. There was nothing else like it at the time, and while it was missing multiplayer, it truly felt like playing a good game of Street Fighter.

The Game Boy Advance would go on to have many spectacular ports of fighting games. Possibly the most impressive is Street Fighter Alpha 3, and it may come as no surprise that it was worked on by the same people.

At the twilight of the original Game Boy, there was no better way to play Street Fighter in your hand than Street Fighter Alpha on the Game Boy Color. An achievement, and still one of the best games.

511

Mon, 15 Aug 2022 00:00:00 +0000

I was going to post up a painting today. That was the plan.

I try to sketch or paint a bit every week. You know, just to keep limber or whatever.

I had a stint there where I was only really drawing when it was directly related to something I was working on. A concept sketch or a color study. Something quick and dirty that I would eventually turn into a 3D model or a vector illustration. One of the steps along the way, with no plan to create a final image.

The thing with doing anything repeatedly, you get a bit better at it. The drawings or paintings that I scratched out were good enough for my own exploration, but not really representative of the final model or scene. I did a bunch of drawings, got a bit better, and now I’m not really satisfied with what I paint.

There is a plateau that every artist hits. I know that I have hit it multiple times over the years. You’re good enough that you can sort of make what you imagine in your head, but you aren’t good enough to meet your own standards. Most artists just sort of learn to live with it. Once you hit a certain level of skill, you will never be satisfied with the quality of your work. So maybe it’s not fair to call it a plateau. I don’t think that my skill at drawing or painting is not improving, I think that I will always be reaching for a bit more than I am currently able to do.

So, long story short, I painted some stuff, I was going to post it, but I don’t like it. I’ll work on it some more and see if I like it next week. Maybe like is a strong word. See if I find it acceptable next week.

510

Mon, 08 Aug 2022 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve been doing a lot of stuff with procedural textures recently. I think that might be the way everything will have to go in the future.

3D graphics have gotten progressively better, more detailed, more reactive and interactive. Light bounces around in realistic ways, or if you like, unrealistic ways. Graphics cards can dynamically increase and decrease the resolution of models. We don’t really use that feature very often, but it exists and works fairly well.

One of the last frontiers of dynamic, resolution independent graphics, is the texture.

If you want to change the color of a surface in a 3D game or movie, one of the easiest ways is to apply a texture to it. It’s like an incredibly versatile sticker. It can be sliced up, moved around, rotated, adjusted, and animated. Everything that you can think to do to an image on a computer, you can probably do to a texture. Usually in real time.

The thing you can’t do is zoom in forever. There is a maximum number of pixels that you can store in a texture. If the texture you use to wrap a 3D surface is of a lower resolution than that image takes up on screen, you will see those pixels. If a player gets real close to a surface, they are going to see those pixels.

I don’t think this is really a problem, and most people who play games seem to agree, but there will come a time that being able to see the pixels won’t cut it.

There are two paths to go here. Bigger and bigger textures, or procedurally created materials that scale as they need to. The first one takes memory, the second one takes processing power.

For a long time in graphics, memory, or the time it took for a machine to swap images in and out of memory, was cheaper than processing. With textures already being made regularly at 4096x4096 the options for just making them bigger are sort of running out. Not only will we run out of memory to store huge textures, but we will run out of the ability for a person to meaningfully use that higher resolution.

I think the path over the next few years will be to use more small images in procedurally blended ways. Three, relatively tiny, grass textures mixed together to cover thousands of meters of plains terrain. Metal constructed surfaces made of a miniscule handful of textures covering huge surfaces with no visible repeats.

These materials are more complex to assemble, but they can take less memory while taking advantage of the massive amounts of processing power graphics cards have on tap.

A lot of these techniques are being used already in non-real time applications, but more and more this will be the path forward for games and VR content too.

If PBR setups were the revolution of the last decade, procedural materials will be the art creation workflow for the next decade, at least.

509 - Cameltry

Mon, 01 Aug 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Best Games - Cameltry

Sometimes games get lost. Even great ones.

A singularly brilliant idea and design, a game that should have spawned endless sequels and copycats, just disappears.

Cameltry is one of those. A forgotten gem.

The game itself is beyond simple to describe. A marble is dropped in a maze. The only thing the marble will do on its own is fall. The player of the game has no direct agency over the marble. The only thing the player can do, is spin the maze. By spinning the maze, you direct the path of the marble. Get the marble to the goal, repeat on the next maze. That’s the whole game.

There are, of course, some additional wrinkles. You have a limited amount of time to reach the goal. You can press a button to hop the marble a bit, or hold it down to speed the marbles fall. There are different obstacles and bonuses spread through the mazes that you will need to deal with.

There is no story to speak of. No indication of where the name comes from. There is an appearance from a goddess of space and time, but the reasons for that are never provided. None of the backgrounds seem to have anything to do with the maze game happening in front of them, and none of them seem to be connected to each other. The strict, beautiful, mechanics of directing a ball through a maze is the only through line for Cameltry, and that’s all that it needs.

The game, designed at Taito and released in 1989, sets out to do one thing, and does that one thing so extraordinarily well. It is almost unbelievable that we aren’t playing Cameltry XV right now. And yet, here we are, living in a world where most people have never even heard of the game.

When the arcade game got its eventual computer and SNES ports, it was renamed On the Ball. A slightly more memorable name, but nothing that stuck as a franchise. There was a version for the DS and iPhone called Labyrinth, but none of them gained any traction.

Maybe it’s because the game is so singular, so perfectly unadorned and uncomplicated, that no one ever tried to resurrect it or create new versions of Cameltry.

It could be argued that something like Monkey Ball might be a spiritual successor to Cameltry, but that’s a stretch. I think that maybe the game was so perfectly formed on the first version that no one ever tried to improve on it.

Lost or not, Cameltry is still one of the best games.

508

Mon, 25 Jul 2022 00:00:00 +0000

I wrote a story a few years ago that I keep wanting to go back to. It was a short little thing. Maybe 1500 words or so. It felt like a lot at the time. Now, I can’t sum up a single thought in less than 500.

I liked that story, but there was a major problem with it. It wasn’t actually a story. It had a start and middle, maybe, but that was about it. There was no end. There was no conclusion, nor was there really any plot. It was like a scene from a larger story that I never wrote. A character study with nothing for the character to actually do, or feel, be about. Just a sort of story-stub. Something that could be a story, if I was a better writer.

I don’t know if I am a better writer now, but I am, at least, a slightly more confident one.

As these things usually go, I thought of a way to actually write the story I had been attempting back then while I was writing a different story. The end result of working on story ideas, is always coming up with story ideas. They just might not always be for the story you are working on right then.

I decided to have a look at the old story and see if I could just punch it up a little. You know, give it a bit of a rework without actually rewriting everything. I’m thinking you can guess how well that went.

This will be a better direction and I might have a usable, maybe even sellable, story at the end of it, but it needs some major work to rebuild. Or, if this is a story-stub, a blueprint, then maybe this isn’t so much of a rebuild, but an actual build.

I could keep writing this vague and meandering thought salad, never saying exactly what I am working on or what the story used to be, or I can just go and write it.

I think I will do the second one.

507

Mon, 18 Jul 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Over the last week I taught my kids some 3D modelling in Blender. The task was to go from zero, downloading and starting Blender for the first time, to making a model and then printing that model on the 3D printer. I thought we might be at it for a week or two. It took them about three days. Four if you count the day of downloading and setting up Blender.

I started learning 3D modelling over twenty years ago. Tools and processes have improved somewhat since then.

The idea that someone could come to something like Alias Power Animator (the first pro level 3D software I ever used, at least the one that wasn’t AutoCAD) and make an object that would be prototype manufacturing ready in three days is laughable. Those were not user friendly tools at all. There was an expectation at the time that if you were ready to pay the tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars to use 3D software, a little bit of a learning curve was to be expected.

Strange that Blender, a program that is available for free, is a positive breeze to use by comparison. There is an inverted ratio of usability to money spent.

Of course a lot of that ease of use is just due to time. User interfaces have gotten better, more intuitive, over the years. Computers have gotten more powerful and the software more capable. I will give myself a small amount of credit. If I hadn’t used a variety of 3D programs over that 20-25 year period, I wouldn’t be able to field the questions they had or present the material in an easy to understand way. And when I didn’t know something (which happens a lot) I know how to look it up, so I taught them that too. That’s probably the most important skill I could impart.

We now have a couple of new printed plastic dodads in the house. I’ve shown my kids enough that they should be able to make more. I can’t wait to see what they come up with.

506

Mon, 11 Jul 2022 00:00:00 +0000

I painted my house today. Anyway, here’s a haiku

Rainbow soil scooped clear

A maze to garden trap tilt

Scored to footstep song

505 - Dig Dug

Mon, 04 Jul 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Best Games - Dig Dug

Pac-Man and Rally X have a lot to answer for. They spawned a genre so pervasive that, at one point, nearly all new arcade games were maze games. Not until fighting games would we see one genre so heavily over-represented in the industry.

The video games industry, with all its diversity of ideas and themes, is very much not immune to chasing trends. In fact, if there is one thing you can be sure of, any time there is a hit game there will be some sort of riff on that concept coming down the pike in short order.

When maze games became popular, you could be pretty certain that any and all types of maze chase games would be available soon.

There is another thing about the video games industry. It’s extremely iterative. If there is a good game out there, not only will there be a copy or clone available soon, there will also be new and interesting twists on the concept.

Dig Dug is what happens when you make a maze chase game, but you take out the maze, and dramatically reframe the chase. In Pac-Man, you spend most of your time running away from pursuing ghost monsters. The corridors are unyielding, and you need to plan a head to stay just out of reach of the ghosts. Occasionally you can turn the tables for a few moments, but only a few.

Dig Dug removes the maze. You can go anywhere you want. Dig any patch of dirt. You create the maze. While you do move slightly faster through air than dirt, you are not constrained in any real way. That’s genre flip number one.

Genre flip number two? You aren’t running from the monsters. The player character, Taizo Hori, is easily the most dangerous thing on the screen. The monsters are running from you.

While the monsters outnumber you, they will try to be aggressive and chase you down, but you can pretty easily dispatch one monster. Even two is not much of a problem. You simply pump them up with your bicycle pump until they pop. Comical, but not exactly non-violent.

It’s only when you are swarmed that the monsters have much of a chance against you. You need to play smart to out maneuver them. Force them into tunnels that lead them right to you, or drop carefully timed rocks on their heads. If you plan well, you can crush a whole group of cartoon monsters under the same rock.

This is a maze chase, but you are the one doing the chasing.

These simple changes to the genre lead to a game that is far more strategic and thoughtful. You aren’t reacting. You are setting traps. You aren’t prey, you are the hunter. You are corralling and managing space.

It doesn’t hurt that Dig Dug is a cute and borderline delightful affair. There is a jaunty tune that plays every time you take a step, but stops when you stop. This gives the player a subtle nudge. If you keep moving, the music keeps playing, so you should always be moving. Moving, planning, scheming.

Dig Dug is not just another maze game. It’s a jazz remix of maze games, a stylistic bit of genre bending. Dig Dug is what happens when a developer doesn’t slavishly follow the trends, but instead plays with them. More than that, Dig Dug is one of the best games.

504

Mon, 27 Jun 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Opening lines are easy.

That’s a lie. Opening lines are terribly difficult. Unless they are easy. Sometimes they are easy

Closing lines are easy.

That’s a lie. Closing lines are, by far, the hardest lines to write. Unless they are not. Sometimes they are not difficult at all. They just flow naturally. Sometimes you write the last line first.

Middles are always hard.

No lie there. That’s just the truth. No matter how hard or easy the first and last lines are, everything in the middle is terrifyingly difficult. You can have the start and end all worked out and still there will be issues with the middle.

Where do you start? Where do you end? What do you do in between?

I suppose you start with something strong. Something that grabs attention. Something that invites them in.

Then you absolutely must end with something that will stick with them. Something that sums up everything before, but also leaves room for more.

Simple.

In the middle, you go from thing to thing, but not in a boring way. You can never be boring in the middle. Even when you absolutely need to. Even when there are things you need to say that aren’t as important. At least not important to that one person. You know the one. You never want to bore that one person.

Start strong.

Middle not boring.

End strong.

That’s it really.

It will all be easy, because really, when you get right down to it, opening lines are easy.

503

Mon, 20 Jun 2022 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve had the Steamdeck for a couple of weeks now. I have a few different thoughts about it. Mostly, it’s cool as hell, but only if you like messing with hardware and software.

I happen to love messing with hardware and software. I dig into some flavor of Linux about once a year. Not enough to remember everything, but just enough that I know I can usually fix what I break. If any piece of hardware has some sort of secret menu or hidden configuration, I will probably try to get into it. If, for example, my TV had a hidden menu, I would fiddle with it. It did, and I have.

It’s not that the steamdeck has a lot of secret stuff built into it. There is all sorts of hidden stuff, but it’s not really secret. It has a standard Linux desktop tucked neatly under the veneer of a user-friendly, steam only, interface. Dropping into desktop mode is pretty trivial, but if you aren’t used to that sort of thing, it might be like getting access to a vast trove of power you weren’t ready for.

Just like any Linux PC, you can install a lot of extra, non-steam stuff. Mostly that means emulators. And boy, does this unit ever run emulators.

I have probably played more SNES, Genesis, Dreamcast, Gamecube, PS2, and arcade games on it than modern games at this point. It’s an amazing Rocket League and HardSpace Shipbreaker device, of course, but it plays a mean game of Street Figher 3 as well.

Setting up emulators and other games on it is as simple as using any Linux based PC. Mostly, you just download and launch them. Not much to it. At least not much to it if you like doing that sort of thing.

I have had an issue getting some of the controls to work properly with Dark Souls 3. You can configure almost everything on the steamdeck, but that doesn’t mean that it will work flawlessly. It works pretty well, but, like any PC, it has quirks. Sometimes things just won’t work the first time, so you will have to dig in and adjust some settings or tweak config files. The battery life isn’t great, but it’s probably adequate for most uses. With all these caveats, it might not be right for the person who wants a console like experience. For me, it’s fantastic.

I haven’t set everything up on it yet, but so far I really like it. If you enjoy fiddling around with technology, a Steamdeck is a pretty neat toy.

502

Mon, 13 Jun 2022 00:00:00 +0000

This is just a short update on how writing is going.

Right now I have two short stories out for consideration, three more that are nearly done or in editing, and another one that was finished quite a while ago, but needs a rewrite in a few areas. I’m thinking it might be a numbers game.

Of the rejection letters I have received recently, a couple have been the usual form letters, but a couple have been personal and outlined why they were being rejected (and no, I won’t be saying what outlets or magazines these are, mostly because it doesn’t matter, but also because I will likely be sending them more submissions in the future). In two of those cases, the editor sending me the rejection letter said it was because the story didn’t fit the format or theme of the issue, but they asked for future submissions. While this could have been a case of someone trying to be polite, or spare a writer’s feelings, they probably would have just sent a form letter if they actually didn’t like it.

In the case of at least one of those rejection letters, I have to grudgingly agree. I mean, I like the story, but it would sort of be a stretch to imagine it fit with the theme of the collection they were putting together.

Here is the problem. When they ask for more submissions, that’s nice and all, but I don’t really have that many pieces of writing just sitting around waiting to send out. In the grand scheme of things, I haven’t really been writing fiction very long. Only a few years of serious effort, and maybe two years actually trying to sell the things I write. I just don’t have a big backlog of pages to dive into. And I very much don’t have submissions ready in a lot of genres or in different themes. For example, I don’t really have any horror stuff. I think that’s because I find a solid ninety percent of horror short stories either not scary or not interesting, and I can’t think of a good way to appeal to the people who do like those stories. What I find scary is more slow creeping dread, than shock and gore. That stuff usually gets flagged as literary fiction and not specifically horror. More Twilight Zone, less Tales from the Crypt.

Whatever the case, I will probably have a couple more stories submitted for consideration over the next couple of months. Maybe that will increase my chances of selling another one. Like I said, it might be a numbers game.

501 - Bagman

Mon, 06 Jun 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Best Games - Bagman

1982 was a pivot point year for video games. Games like Pac-Man and Donkey Kong were still riding high. To any arcade operator or game seller, it would have seemed like video games were on an unstoppable upward trajectory. Arcades were making money. Atari and Coleco were raking it in with their home consoles. Even home computers, like the Commodore 64, were driving huge game sales.

There was a slight snag for a year or two after that. Honestly, no one could have predicted it. Atari was the biggest player in the industry by far, and they over extended. The floor fell out, and for a hot minute it seemed like video games might be just another fad. If you were designing an arcade game set to be released in 1982, you could be excused for trying to make something a little more ambitious. Something that no one was doing. Something that players wouldn’t be ready for. If you were making an arcade game in that heady environment, you might make something a little weird. You might make Bagman.

Bagman, or Le Bagnard, is an action platform game made by French developer Valadon Automation. In it, you direct an escaped convict around an old mine in a mission to gather up your stashed loot, stuff it in a wheelbarrow, and cart it off screen. It’s a very simple idea, and it could easily have been a riff on Donkey Kong, or a clone of Space Panic, but it’s not. It’s an entirely different sort of beast. Bagman might be the world’s first systems based game.

Maybe that’s a stretch, but maybe it’s not.

Here are some things about Bagman. It’s a game played with a joystick and one button. With that stick and one button you can, climb ladders, pick up money, drop money, put money in a wheelbarrow, drop a bag of money on a guard from the top of a ladder, push a wheelbarrow, grab a mining pick, put down a mining pick, scare a guard with a mining pick, hit a guard with a mining pick, hang from a beam to avoid a minecart, ride in a minecart, garab a bag of money while riding in a minecart, and ride an elevator.

More than that, the state of the multiscreen mine is saved between lives. If you get caught or fall, all of the bags you have moved stay moved. It’s a small thing, but it also means that the game is built on independent systems that interact with one another in predictable and player influenceable ways. This was an extremely uncommon way to develop games at the time.

It’s sort of unbelievable that you can do so many, context-sensitive things in one game using only a stick and one button. Not only that, but so many of those actions combine and overlap. Bagman is one of the first ‘If it looks like you can do it, you probably can’ games. There are unique bits of animation and sound that kick off when you trigger most of these actions, but it’s really sort of amazing that you can do them at all. This was in the era of very simple arcade games that could be understood and played in seconds.

You might think that all this interactive complexity would make Bagman difficult to learn or understand, but it is just as intuitive as a game like Donkey Kong. Your goals are clear, and when you mess up, you know it’s your own fault.

So why then is Bagman not up there with Donkey Kong in the list of fondly remembered classics?

There are two reasons.

First, there might be a lot of ways to interact, but there are almost as many ways to get caught or killed. The game is incredibly difficult.

That difficulty is probably to the game’s detriment. Sure, it probably gathered a lot of quarters, at least for a while, but that sort of variety of player driven interaction wouldn’t be seen again in a game for a few years. Had it been even just a little easier, more arcade goers would have played it, and more developers would have tried to copy it. Maybe that doesn’t make the best short term business sense.

Second, It’s too easy. I know I just said that it was too difficult, but, like a lot of systems based games that would come later, there are ways to exploit that difficulty. Exploiting games usually means being very patient and taking your time to do everything. If you are willing to pick up a bag, move it a few steps, put it down again, use the pick for a few seconds, and then start moving the bag again, you can finish the game’s, single level. If you are very patient and willing to play for somewhere between twenty to forty minutes, you probably will finish it. Your time playing might not be the most exciting to watch, but it will be full of near misses and well planned escapes. Depending on how much you like exploiting systems, this could be a bad thing, or a very good thing.

I think that we have seen, time and time again, that letting the player win is a good business strategy when making games. Letting them win in a way that is satisfying and makes them feel like they earned it is even better. We did get a Super Bagman, but it was more of a minor iteration on the theme rather than a full evolution. I wonder what an entire series of Bagman games might have been. What could have been done with that innovative layering of actions and systems during those early stages of the industry. I suppose we will never know.

Regardless, Bagman is one of the best games.

500

Mon, 30 May 2022 00:00:00 +0000

This will be a short one. I’m really just here to praise the graphical Swiss army knife that is Blender.

So, a little bit ago, I was working on some textures. The task was to pack a non-alpha grayscale image into the alpha channel. Non-alpha, in that it wouldn’t be used as transparency data for the image. I figured that a channel was a channel so how hard could it be.

I’ll back up slightly.

Sometimes, when working with textures, especially for realtime 3d applications like games, you want to pack as much information as you can into each texture. Standard image files are made up of three or four channels. The Red, Green, Blue, and sometimes Alpha channels. Usually, each channel is a grayscale image that represents steps from black to white, the contribution of each channel’s pixels to the final image. If one pixel of the green channel is one hundred percent white, then the green contribution to that pixel will be turned up as high as it can be.

Now there are a lot of perceptual issues that mean that some images have higher contributions from some channels, or they apply different falloff curves to different parts of the color spectrum, for simplicity’s sake, let’s just say that each channel has a full range of 128 or 256 steps between black and white for each pixel.

There is nothing saying that you need to use those grayscale channels to build up parts of the same image. What if you have three, entirely different, grayscale images. Rather than using up all three channels of one texture, why not pack all of those into a single texture file using the R, G, and B channels. If you have a fourth one, you can pack that into the alpha channel. At least that’s what I thought.

Channel packing using the R, G, and B channels is pretty trivial, and pretty much any image editor will let you do that. Packing stuff into the Alpha channel proved to be a bit more difficult.

The Alpha channel is usually used for transparency. Same rules apply, though. It is a grayscale image that controls how transparent or opaque each pixel is. The problems happen when you make a pixel 100% transparent.

Most image editors are pretty smart. They will try to infer what you are trying to do. If you convert an image from say, RGB color format to CMYK for printers, there is a set of steps and conversions that the image editor will go through to try to keep the colors as accurate to what you intended as possible. The same thing happens when you set a pixel in the alpha channel all the way to transparent. Most image editors will set that same pixel in the R, G, and B channels to zero as well. It makes sense when you think about it. If you are saving that image out with a bunch of zeros, data compression schemes can shrink the file quite a bit. Only problem is, when you are trying to do channel packing, you don’t want to lose that information.

Now, not all image editors did this. Some kept all the info, but had other issues. They couldn’t read the input images properly, or they couldn’t create an output image properly. They didn’t work with the formats I needed, or they lacked support for linear color space (sort of a must for some texture work).

After trying all the standard image editing tools I have, and it’s not an exaggeration to say that I have an awful lot, I found that only Blender did everything that I needed. Not only that, but it did it better and easier than any of the others.

I will qualify that ‘easier’. Blender can look like the control panel of a 747 and it has functions buried under its function, but if you happen to know how it works, you can mix and match and mess with images in a truly unrestrained way.

I used the compositing part of Blender. It’s intended to be used to layer rendered or filmed images, blending them and adjusting them until they look seamless. It’s the sort of software used to piece together visual effects sequences in movies. Because of that raw image manipulating power, it’s also uniquely suited to ripping apart and reassembling textures in the most amazing ways.

I created a pipeline that split all of the channels and then recombined them in any way that I liked, and any set of images that I used as the input could be run through the system and recombined. Not only that, but Blender works with damn near any image format that you could imagine, and it’s all hardware accelerated. I could rip apart massive 5K textures and put them back together into uncompromising .EXR files (without a doubt, the best image format that people have come up with), in literal seconds.

I don’t know that a tutorial on how to do it is exactly warranted here, but this is a picture of the node tree that the textures run through.

Blender is really one of the best things to happen to graphics in a very long time.

499

Mon, 23 May 2022 00:00:00 +0000

I want to talk about sci fi doors. Okay, this is important.
Actually, you’re right. It is super not important. It’s silly. But I just want you all to know that I have a real problem with sci-fi doors.
Before I get too far ahead of myself and start ripping on some artist’s work, I know, I get it. I’m an artist too, and I have made a lot of sci-fi nonsense. Greebles and patterns that really don’t mean anything on machines of indeterminate function. I do it a lot. And I will do it again.
I get it. I understand. Designing something that looks futuristic and interesting is tough. There are only so many techy looking crates and boxes a person can think up before things start getting weird.
I do have a real problem with doors. Sci-fi doors. Some of ya’ll got to get it under control when you are thinking up doors.
Every single one of you has used a door. There is just no way that you are this far into an art career that you have been given the opportunity to draw, paint, model, or construct sci-fi decor and you don’t know that form and function of a door. It’s just not possible. You have used a door.
I went and typed ‘sci-fi door’ into google image search. Go ahead, try it now. Type that in. An awful lot of them look similar, don’t they. You know what they don’t look like. Doors.
Doors might be one of the most practical and least artistically adorned bits of architectural technology that we have come up with. They are never overly fancy, pokey, or embellished, because people will be interacting with a door on a near daily basis. They are usually pretty smooth. They have one extremely obvious interaction point. If they have hinges and rotate on those hinges, they have to be fairly light or at least well balanced. You know what I didn’t see in several pages of the google image search? A door on hinges. You know what most doors in the world have? Hinges. Even most doors in space and at sea have hinges. Because hinges are practical and reliable and if the door breaks, those hinges are easily accessible and repairable. You can make a solid airlock or water seal with a hinged door. Doors on hinges are good and useful, so I doubt that we will abandon them in the future.
Look at this regular ass door.

Not only is this door easy to understand, but depending on the frame it could also be watertight or even airtight. It could be fire poof, bulletproof, even blast resistant. This door probably has most of your door needs covered for centuries.
Okay, so let’s just say that we have figured out a really amazing and robust sliding door mechanism in the future. They are more reliable than elevator doors and we can install them everywhere. Fine. Maybe prefabricated doors that slide into a bulkhead or some other sci-fi structure can be made cheap and common. Totally fair.
Have a look at this thing.

Again, I don’t want to drag this artist. The modelling work on display here is pretty good. The material work is nice, and the color scheme is pleasant enough. But what the absolute fuck is going on here. How do I open this? Why are there so many angles and shapes? Why do the white paint lines cross multiple panels? Is it supposed to blend into the rest of the wall? Why are there so many bits you could catch your sleeve or finger on? This door looks like it’s always a little bit greasy. Or it might give you tetanus. Whatever it is, this doesn’t look like a practical door.
That door isn’t an outlier either. I didn’t pick it just to make a point. It was literally in the top row of images when I typed sci-fi door.
So was this.

Why is the edge lit up? Wouldn’t it make more sense to light up the latch or handle? Which brings us to, where is the latch or handle? Who knows. Maybe it’s an automatic door. If that’s the case, what are all those indents and shapes for? Does it have really high cat flaps? Are there multiple peep holes? Do you have to be close enough to read the text before the automatic door sensor goes off? I don’t know about you, but 99% of the automatic doors I come across are pretty smooth. Because there is no need for all that other crap. Smooth is all it needs to be to do its job as a door.
If you thought those were odd, have a look at this.

This door looks like it intends to open me up. I can’t even guess how this thing slides or pivots. Maybe it’s like a transformer and it unfolds into an entranceway. I feel like someone said sci-fi door and this just manifested. Like calling for the Candyman.
Again, and I can’t say this enough, I am not ripping on the art. Making any of these doors is tough. It takes work. What I am questioning is when did we decide this was what a sci-fi door looks like. What in the past several centuries makes us think that we will deviate so wildly from current trend of door technology. Doors are one of the few things we as a species have really nailed. Our doors work very well.
It’s not all terrible.Have a look at this

Other than have a jog in the split of the door for some reason, it’s not bad. There is a clear touch pad or entry system off to the right. There is a door mat for you to wipe your feet on. The light is aimed at the entrance so you can both see the door and, presumably, the occupants can see on video who is at the door. Surface adornment is kept to a minimum. Access panels might hide the workings of the door for maintenance or upgrade. All in all, a well considered door. Even if it is of the slidey variety.
Have a look at this one.

That looks like a regular old, hinge door.

Well, it’s a pressure door and it’s mounted in a ship bulkhead. So it is a specialized style of door.

Pretty basic. Functional. Recognizable. There is no doubt, it’s a door. Not a lot of extra nonsense bolted on there.

So, here is my plea. If you find yourself designing some sci-fi thing in the future, don’t overdo it. If the thing is a kettle, it’s okay if it just looks like a kettle. Doors can look like doors. Shoes can look like shoes. These are things that won’t change a lot as we venture out into the stars or to the depths of the ocean or across dimensions or whatever. A door can look like a door, and that is good enough.

498 - Karate Champ

Mon, 16 May 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Best Games - Karate Champ

Now hear me out. What if a game could be one of the best games ever made while being completely broken in very fundamental ways? What if a game could have innovative, even revolutionary, controls while being terrible to play? What if a game could represent a tectonic shift in what multiplayer games could be, while mostly coming down to random chance?

Without Karate Champ, we don’t get a Street Fighter or a Street Fighter 2. Without Karate Champ, there is no Mortal Kombat. Karate Champ represents a fundamental shift in how arcade games could, and would, be made.

If Karate Champ didn’t exist, we would have to invent it.

Karate Champ (or Karate Do in Japan) is a one on one fighting game released in 1984, well before fighting games were a genre.

It is a game that aims to be as much a simulation of a sport as it does a martial arts fantasy. In the single player mode, the player alternates between rounds of one on one fighting with computer opponents, and challenge stages where you have to break pots or bricks or fight a charging bull. It’s weird, but it all works as a piece. All at once, regional Karate tournament and martial arts action movie.

In the versus mode, you use all of those same Karate skills against a real live human on the same cabinet. It can make for very fast, fun, and dynamic matches.

The innovation in Karate Champ is, without a doubt, the control system. Most arcade games in 1984 used one joystick and one or two buttons. Any layout that varied from that template usually meant you were in for a wildly different game.

A couple years earlier, Robotron: 2084 operated with two joysticks. That game was a fairly standard move and shoot type game, but the two joystick control scheme allowed players to move in one direction while shooting in another. It was the game that created the twin stick shooter genre.

Karate Champ used that same control system, but combined the stick movements together in a sort of macro. The left stick was primarily used for moving your Karate combatant around, but when you chained movements on the left stick with directions on the right, you could pull off all sorts of authentic looking Karate moves. It introduces pull back to block. It includes high, middle, and low attacks. If you pull down on the right stick and up on the left, you can do a forward flip that can put you on the other side of your opponent. There are moves that attack behind you. There are jumping kicks. Link all of this with the ability to fight a real human opponent and, make no mistake, Karate Champ is a fighting game.

Karate Champ, out of the gate, incorporates so much of what would become the core of modern fighting games. It was an arcade hit, but it could have been massive. A cultural totem. It comes up short in one area, otherwise we would probably be playing Karate Champ 8 at EVO now. It’s the one thing that fighting games wouldn’t get right until Street Fighter 2. It’s really hard to hit anything.

The collision system for Karate Champ is odd. Often, your fist or foot will pass harmlessly through your opponent. Then, every once in a while, a strike that seemed to end a few pixels before them will land. In a game where it only takes two solid hits to win, it feels far too random. The hits, when they land, are solid and satisfying, but it could be anyone’s guess whether they will land at all.

Street Fighter 2 is far from any sort of simulation of fighting. There are a lot of strange impact shenanigans that happen every match. It is also extremely rare that a punch that looks like it hit, will whiff. You can always be reasonably sure that your range is right for a particular attack. It feels like what you try to do, you can do. Karate Champ is just too much of a constant dice roll. The same kick at the same range may or may not hit depending on the frame of animation your opponent is currently in.

If you played some chess, but on every turn three of your pieces went into a quantum superposition between two other pieces, it would become impossible to play. You wouldn’t know, until you made your move, if a piece was a pawn or a rook. If you lost, it wouldn’t feel fair. If you won, you would have no idea how to repeat it. That’s what playing a lot of Karate Champ feels like. A constant game of guessing if the thing you are doing with your hands will have the desired effect on screen.

I’m certain that there are people out there who have become deft at playing Karate Champ. Not nearly so many as there are for Street Fighter 2. It’s a matter of expectation and consistency. If you swirl the controls in a certain way in Street Fighter 2, you can be pretty sure what will happen. Not so for Karate Champ.

This is another one of those almost games. Arcade experiences that point the way to huge things in the future. I think it’s fair to say though, without Karate Champ, we may never have developers explore the one on one fighting space. It does so much right, and it is still fun to play. It came up inches short of being revolutionary.

Maybe it’s only for historical reasons, but Karate Champ is one of the best games.

497

Mon, 09 May 2022 00:00:00 +0000

We just got back from a trip to Disneyland. We’ve been a couple times, and I always wonder at their ability to design spaces. If you have done any game development, or even if you’ve just played a lot of games, you will know that most of game design is moving people from one place to another, one task to another. Doing that smoothly, interactively, and enjoyably, is arguably the core of game design. If a menu is difficult to use, if an interface is tricky to manage, people won’t play your game. If there are too many unintuitive moments or situations, people will quit playing. Difficult puzzles and complex interaction take a distant backseat to the more common knob twiddling and button pressing that players are required to do. It’s these spaces between the ‘gameplay’ where most players fall off. The people who design Disney’s parks are absolute masters at this. If the rides and shows are the ‘gameplay’ getting people from one to the other is the game design of a theme park.

I have written a little about how they use eyelines and the transitions between spaces to guide your experience. That’s probably what most people will notice and comment on. The physical movement from place to place. You usually won’t be able to see one area or land from another. Structures will block your view until you get pretty close to another area, and even then the transitions can take you by surprise. This makes you feel more immersed in the land you are in, but it also makes you feel like you are discovering things just by walking. You turn a corner, or pass under an archway, and suddenly you are in a whole new place.

This manipulation and crafting of physical space is amazing, and it’s worth studying if you are at all interested in how game levels work. Especially if that game level has to accommodate hundreds or thousands of players. I want to focus on something else. A little bit of UX that disney has really refined.
Information. It would be easy to just provide all information at all times. A lot of seasoned game designers often say that you should provide as much information to the player as you possibly can, and then let them decide what to do with it. Like most things, it’s never that simple, and the user experience can sometimes be improved by withholding some information. I will provide a couple of examples I noticed during this last disney trip.

First is the most obvious bit of information. The length of ride lines at Disneyland is posted at the entrance gate to each ride. This is something they have been doing for some time. They break the times up into five minute increments, but if the board says five minutes, that really means you can just walk right on. Anything from fifteen minutes to thirty minutes will probably be shockingly accurate.

Now this bit of information can do a few things. First, guests of the park can decide if they want to wait in line or not. Lines to ride popular attractions are a given, so some amount of waiting is expected. As the time to ride increases, the amount of people who are willing to wait decreases. Only the most popular rides will ever have line times longer than an hour. There are so many other attractions at the park, you might as well head off to one of the other ones. Just this little bit of information will naturally spread guests around the park, and get people to try out less popular attractions.

That bit of information does something else too. You can see most of the lines snaking out from the rides, but people are extremely bad at estimating. If you looked at the line to, say, The Haunted Mansion, it would be difficult to judge the difference between a half hour long line or a one hour long line. Often, parts of the line are out of view of the path, so you wouldn’t even be able to count the people if you wanted to. Ride operators will adjust the length of the line by opening and closing different loop-backs and u-turns. Visually, the lines can be very deceiving. The shape and space of the lines changes from ride to ride as well. Something that looks like a very long line on one ride might only be a few minutes on another. Those boards will help you decide how to spend your time at the park. Pair that with the phone app that provides you with the same information about ride wait times, and you have the makings of a really powerful queue and crowd management system. All you had to do is provide the information.

The next thing is maps. Disneyland has a distinct lack of maps. You know those ubiquitous mall guide boards? Yeah, Disneyland doesn’t have any of those. You can certainly grab a map from the information booth, or you can look at the one in the phone app, but everything in the park is set up so that you don’t need one. If you follow any path, it will loop back around to the main hub. Every path, eventually, feeds back into the central ring of the park. This means, if you know where it is you want to go, you are probably never very far from it. But also, if you don’t know where you want to go, and this is the important bit, you can just keep walking forward to inevitably see all of the park. You could just walk around and experience a constant sense of discovery.

There are no maps, and almost no road signs to direct you. They want you to feel like you are exploring and discovering. Because that makes simply walking around fun. There are lots of little alcoves and cul-de-sacs to find. All of them designed specifically for discovery.

If there were waypoints and road signs that pointed you directly to Space Mountain, there would be a lot of park goers who would miss other attractions.
So, here we have two very different examples of how to use information. Deliberately providing or withholding information can change user experience for the better. Disneyland has had decades to get it right, and for the most part they do.

I didn’t even get close to talking about how they pack ride lines into ridiculously small amounts of space, or provide a show experience while you are in line so that wait times don’t feel as long. I think I will go over those at some point, but these two bits of informational experience design should be enough to chew on for now.

496

Mon, 02 May 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Blender has a new-ish feature called geometry nodes. I won’t be doing any sort of tutorial or how-to about it here. I have done a few things with it, but I don’t have any level of expertise that I would feel comfortable sharing. At best, I might be able to explain it.

When you are modelling something… let’s use an example. Say you were modelling a drink vending machine. This is a vending machine that needs to be able to work, or at least look like it works. There is one of those little drink elevators and a bunch of slots that hold all of the beverages. This is the sort of thing that you could model traditionally. You could make all the parts. Find out what the average vending machine sizes are and scale a box to that size. Design each of the drink bottles or cans. Create a marquee and set up an array of lights behind it.

If you only need one of these drink machines, that’s it, you’re done. What if you need a handful of them? A few different sizes, different marquees, all with different drinks and different lights burnt out behind the marquee.

You could set up a few of them. But how many? Six? Twelve? How many different vending machines would it take to ensure that when you spread them out over an entire city, no one would be able to see the repeats? Each machine would seem unique.

Geometry nodes is a way of programming your models. You create a set of rules that spit out models, and then you can have it randomize the results. You can either feed the system a selection of prebuilt parts, or you can have it build the entire thing from a single vertex on up to a full object. The system incorporates the material nodes system as well, so you can have the surface color and texture change along with the model. You can have it swap out the type of drinks, what slots are full or empty, how many drinks are in each slot. There really is no end to it.

Every time the generator runs it will create a new vending machine based on those rules.

Geometry nodes can be more complicated to set up than regular, straight ahead modelling, but the end result can create a dizzying array of assets.
It’s not a tool that needs to be deployed in all cases. There are probably a lot of assets that are better built as one off models, but some things, things that are repeatable objects with slight, but important variations, could make excellent use of this tool.

Like I said, I’m not going to do any sort of breakdown of it, but I did use geometry nodes to create a system that can make any sort of rail line, or road, or path, or really anything that is roughly a repeated object along a curve. And it works.

495

Mon, 25 Apr 2022 00:00:00 +0000

I love to pick apart stories. Not to criticize or poke holes in them, but like tearing down a machine, I want to see how they work. Or don’t. How setups are paid off. How motivation is sold. Or isn’t.

We watched The Batman. I liked some of it. I didn’t like other parts. That’s not really important. I’m not going to review the movie or give it some sort of a score. If you want to want to watch something and be entertained for a couple hours, you could do worse than watching The Batman. When you open it up and start looking at the parts, there are some places I think they could have done better.

When I hear or read a critique of a story where it becomes clear that the person forwarding the criticism simply wanted a different story than was being told, I always bristle a bit. I’m not going to do that. I think the story, as they were telling it, is fine. But it could have been much better. The problem they have is with familiarity.

At this point, there should be very few people who would go to see a Batman movie who don’t know who Batman is. In fact, this movie is counting on it. They make reference to the Wayne family in ominous tones, but they never explicitly say what happened to Bruce Wayne’s parents. Because they don’t have to. They know that you know. They know that you know this character. They know that you know minute details about the crime families of Gotham. They need you to know, or this story doesn’t work. The success of this story, of this movie, depends on it.

And then they somehow forget.

I’m going to point out three scenes, three key moments, and this will get very spoilery. I’ll toss in a fourth for good measure.

The opening monologue is overwrought and emo, but it’s done in a fun and knowing way. I can let all that pass. It establishes that we are in a heightened reality. What you are about to see can be corny in an earnest way and as long as you are on board with that you might be in for a fun ride. That’s great. It establishes that tone and sets up the audience for the story to come.

During the opening monologue, Bruce Wayne as Batman tells us how he uses the shadows and fear as a weapon. We see miscreants scatter at the sight of his bat signal. Good stuff. Batman stuff. They know that we already know this and are attempting to meet our expectations. So far, so good.

We see a group of thugs accosting an innocent man. The writers also know that we know, Batman will always defend the innocent. That’s what he does. Our expectation is that he will show up to protect this man. They meet our expectations, but there is something wrong with this scene.

Batman does show up, but he pretty much just walks forward and punches them all. Fair. It’s a well done action scene. The punching looks sufficiently punchy. But we just heard how he uses the shadows and fear as weapons. This guy just marched forward and punched. More important, we as the audience know who Batman is. We know that isn’t what Batman does. He darts around, he uses the environment to his advantage. He fights smart. We have to know that he could just march forward and punch, and that would be enough, but that isn’t Batman. Batman isn’t strong, he’s smart. That’s the character.

Now, we can wave this scene off. Maybe this was put in to establish that he isn’t quite what he needs to be yet. He doesn’t fight smart yet. Plausible. Except the police already have a bat signal set up, specifically to instill fear in exactly this sort of miscreant. So the scene is very at odds with everything the storytellers want us to think.

Anyway, let’s move on to the next scene. A crime scene. The Mayor has been murdered and Batman shows up to the crime scene to, we can only assume, help with the investigation. When he arrives, Detective Jim Gordon vouches for him and the phalanx of officers lining the hall let him pass. This is a good detail. It establishes a history and a sense of trust. The officers don’t trust this masked vigilante, but a very senior detective does. That could only have happened if they had some history, if Batman had proven useful in previous investigations. This is the sort of welcome that you would expect from a Sherlock Holmes type character. A person who, while onerous, is extremely useful in exactly these circumstances. That’s good. That’s the Batman that we as an audience already know. The Batman that they need us to know for any of this to make sense.

Then they have him sort of stand there, in the way, and Jim Gordon tells him everything. Absolutely wild. It’s like whiffing a T-Ball. Had he walked in and immediately pointed out all the crime scene details the investigators were missing, put together the missing puzzle pieces, and basically did the job, it would have made sense to have him there. It would have made sense that Gordon vouched for him. He would have been acting like Batman. They had all the runway laid for this masked weirdo to be a superhero, and they just didn’t. Very strange.

Again, nothing else about the story would have to have changed for this to be added to the scene. The investigation would still go on because the riddler would still be ahead of them and the next plans were already in motion. But the character would be acting like the character. The one that they, as writers, need us to know before we started watching for any of this to work.

Next we have another scene with Batman and Jim Gordon. They are searching an old orphanage for clues. It has been abandoned for some time, and junkies hooked on the trendy new drug are squatting there. The two investigators are walking through darkened hallways, Gordon with his gun at the ready, and Batman skulking behind in the shadows. Good. That’s how these two men move through the world. That is their characters.

Suddenly, out of the dark, a junky runs into the beam of Gordon’s flashlight. That just sort of happens. He’s startled, but nothing else comes of it. Again, we have the opportunity for Batman to show who he is. Gordon is the grizzled detective who might raise his gun, and he might even fire. Batman would be the man who would stop him. These are junkies, but they are innocent. They are the type of people that Batman would protect. Him simply grabbing the gun and pushing it down would be enough. This is the guy that reacts faster than everyone else, who thinks faster than everyone else. He is the scary thing in the hallway, not the junky. We know that because we know this character. When given the opportunity to prove it, the filmmakers simply let it pass.

Again, we could be charitable. We could imagine that they intended this Batman to be young, unseasoned, early in his development. But that read falls flat. The film depends so much on the audience being familiar with this character and this world, that having him act counter to what we know is jarring. If this was a new superhero, if this was a new world, if this was a new story, by all means, write them any way you want. But it’s not, and we know that, and they know that we know that.

Those three scenes alone are enough to make me scratch my head, but, like I said before, I’ll toss in one more.

Near the end of the movie, the Riddler has amassed a reactionary army of disenfranchised and angry young men. Topical and mildly haunting to be sure. When Batman figures out the plot, he rushes off to intercept them before they can shoot a bunch of innocent people trapped in a building. There is an assumption made that there is no way one man, no matter how well-trained, well armored, or fanatical, in the pursuit of protecting people, could possibly stop all of these terrorists. It is assumed, but never voiced. Did it need to be voiced? Maybe not. Just running into danger with the intent to help is enough to prove that Batman is the hero in this situation. But there is also the assumption that he thinks he will win. There is an exchange omitted. Let me attempt to fill it in.

Batman moves to leave, the room. He and a police officer have just figured out Riddlers plan to have terrorists attack hundreds of trapped and defenseless people.

Cop - Where are you going? There are dozens of them. Even you can’t fight that many. What do you think you are going to do.

Batman - I’m going to give them something else to shoot at.

As the scene plays out, that is pretty much what happens. Batman acts as a distraction more than an actual assailing force. The terrorists are occupied long enough for people to start escaping, and for backup to arrive. The scene could be read that way, but it’s important for it to be voiced, or at least presented unambiguously. Why? Because we already know this character, and acting selflessly is what he does. It is always what he does. And you absolutely need to drive that point home at every opportunity for this story to work. Maybe that line is a bit cheesy. That would not have been out of place in this movie.

At no point did I expect a different story or tone than they delivered. The pacing could have been sped up significantly, but overall The Batman is competently made and assembled. It works. But for a movie that depends so heavily on the audience filling in blanks, they deviate from the main character that we already know quite well in strange and almost careless ways.

Superheroes are, at their core, deeply goofy. Not much of it makes any real world sense. But they are archetypes. Characters that act and react in a steadfast way. They are always that character. They have to be. It comes with the genre. It’s what people expect. Sometimes, meeting people’s expectations is just as important to telling a story as subverting them. It’s not always twists and character growth arcs. Sometimes these people just have to be who we already know they are. That’s the bar. That’s the assignment. Comic books understand that. We are getting to the point that most comic book based movies know that too. Apparently not all of them.

494

Mon, 18 Apr 2022 00:00:00 +0000

So, I have false teeth. I spent most of my life playing a lot of hockey, and I have found that pretty much everyone assumes it’s due to that. Fair enough. If the sport is associated with anything, it might be missing teeth. Nothing so gruesome happened. Honestly, in all the games I have played, I think I have only been hit in the mouth with sticks a couple of times, and pucks never. Well, maybe only once. Or twice. Who keeps track of these things. Nope, it’s the mundane genetic reason. I have hypodontia.

Hypodontia, if you are not familiar, is naturally missing teeth. I am specifically missing the lateral incisors. It’s so common that I have noticed it in a lot of other people. I have also noticed that most of them don’t like other people pointing it out. Oh well.

The long and short of it is that I have had false teeth since I was about fifteen. I try to take very good care of them, so I am only on my third set. This last set, they didn’t last as well as others. Yep. I broke my teeth.

Here’s the other thing about me. I’m that weirdo who will fix his own teeth. I’m also that weirdo that has acquired all the skills necessary to fix his own teeth. Life casting with alginate and plaster. Done that. 3D modelling and printing to make my own dental impression tray. Can do. Working with acrylics and acrylic solvents. Literal years of experience. Handy with a dremel. Sure.

I printed my own dental tray, got some alginate and plaster from one of those hobby hand impression kits from the dollar store (trust me, it’s exactly the same stuff), and got some acrylic powder and solvent from denture repair kits (also, trust me, exactly the same stuff). I made a positive cast of my upper teeth and mouth and used that to align my denture and teeth.

The first time I broke these teeth, I was able to put them back together, but I hadn’t mastered getting the bite right.

The second time they broke, I got them fitted really well, but the connections between the teeth and the plate were too thin. There was no way they were strong enough to last.

This time, I put them all back together, but the original plate has been taken apart and put back together too many times. I know what happens to acrylic when you repeatedly apply solvents to it. I don’t have a lot of confidence in it anymore. Also, I ran out of acrylic powder.

Even though I am exactly that weirdo who will fix his own teeth, it’s now time to call in the experts.

I’ll go in and get a new set of teeth made. Hopefully they last for another ten years or so. If they don’t, I suppose I could always fix them again.

493 - Final Fantasy Tactics Advance

Mon, 11 Apr 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Best Games - Final Fantasy Tactics Advance

The resolution of the gameboy advance screen is 240 x 160. That isn’t a lot of space. In the english version, a single font character is about six pixels tall by four pixels wide. That is extremely efficient for a font, but it also means that you can’t put pages of text on the screen. There just isn’t enough room for all of it. That’s why the menu system for Final Fantasy Tactics Advance is amazing.

I just finished looking at some old reviews of the game. Time capsule takes from the early 2000s. There were a lot of people praising the game, but the menu system was either not mentioned or maligned. I think a lot of people just didn’t know what they had on their hands. Or, in their hands.

Final Fantasy Tactics Advance is part of a long-ish series of strategy rpg game put out by Square. It is charming as hell, and mostly joyful. The art takes beautiful advantage of all 240x160 pixels of a Gameboy Advance screen. Subtle touches make the character designs and landscapes appear more detailed than they actually are.

The story, though slow to get going, is interesting and nuanced for a game like this.

The missions are fun and work like a multilayered puzzle, where you can sway the constraints and advantages in your favor even before your first attack.

Strategy games like this live and die on their interfaces. There is usually a lot of complicated machinery and statistics that the player needs to be aware of at all times, and 240x160 pixels is just not enough room to display it all. Rather than attempting that, the devs of FFTA decided to tuck all the relevant menus and UI away under a few button clicks.

I think this is what reviewers were complaining about. They would have rather had all information visible at all times. That would never have been possible on such a small screen. Instead, they made every relevant menu one click away.

Now this might sound obvious, or simplistic. Every PC game has pop out menus. Most PC apps have pop out menus. They are context aware so that only the stuff you truly need at the moment is available. You would think that game menus would be exactly the same. Except they aren’t, and back in 2003 on a handheld system, they super weren’t. Menus would commonly be stored in subscreens where you had to press the start or select button first, and then navigate around to what you were looking for. Or you would press ‘Attack’ and all of the relevant attack menus would become available.

FFTA uses true, context aware menus. For everything. No feature of the game is more than two or three button presses away. And as soon as you get used to navigating it, you can just fly around those menus. And that is where the interactivity of a strategy game lives. A series of menus and button presses.

Final Fantasy Tactics Advance is one of the best games, and it’s not because of the story or the art or the music or even the complex but satisfying strategy. It’s because they did menus so very, very well.

492

Mon, 04 Apr 2022 00:00:00 +0000

I started a story about two years ago. Best I can figure, anyway. The first date on the original document is April 11, 2020. I didn’t really know what the story was going to be about when I started it. That’s how it usually goes. I start with one image or idea and sort of figure it out from there. By the time I have a few pages typed up, I start to understand who the characters are and what they want. After that, I gradually walk my way to an ending.

That story, All Legacy Hardware, is now published in the sci-fi and fantasy magazine, Cossmass Infinities - issue 8.

Before it landed there, that story was all manner of things. Eventually it was whittled down and refined into what it is now. It had no title, and then a placeholder title, and then a different placeholder title for a bit. It was always about an athlete getting a spine replacement, but as soon as I added the sister character, the story became about two sisters. The order of the events changed. It was much longer, then only a little longer, then a tiny bit shorter, and finally the length that it is. Which, I will admit, might be slightly too long. Character names changed, events were rearranged. I did research and got the opinions of a lot of different folks. Some of them, former and current, professional writers, scientists, and athletes. I changed the story based on a lot of different feedback. Hopefully that made it better.

Before it found its home at Cossmass Infinities, I sent it out to a few other places. They all rejected it. I used that time to go back over the story and punch it up in places where it was lacking. I even got some useful feedback from a couple of them, so that was nice. I still think there are some spots that I would like to change, where it isn’t as good as it could be. But I know that when I started the story two years ago, that was the best I could do. Maybe I could write it better now, maybe not, but at the time, I tried to write the best story I could.

In any case, All Legacy Hardware, is my first professional sale, and my first published story.

In the two years between then and now, I have started, and finished, several more stories. Some of them, I have submitted to professional outlets for publishing. Most of them will probably get rejected, at least a few times. I think my writing has gotten better since I started that story, slightly more confident, a little more dexterous.

These posts here, these are stream of conscious things. They aren’t trying to be efficient or punchy. They will probably continue to be just as meandering and clunky as ever. But the stuff I take my time with and put some real work into, there are a few more of those floating around out there just waiting for a place to land. Hopefully one of them will eventually.

If they do, I will be sure to mention it here.

491

Mon, 28 Mar 2022 00:00:00 +0000

shhh. I’m editing a story right now. It’s broken, but sort of limping along. The fixing is happening.

Back to it.

490 - Sydicate

Mon, 21 Mar 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Best Games - Syndicate

Sometimes, one of these best games isn’t really a very good game. Sometimes it’s just the promise of the game. The thing it could be. What people imagine it to be.

I have played the first few missions of Syndicate many, many times. There are fifty missions in the game. I doubt if I have ever played more than twenty.

As a game, Syndicate controls pretty poorly. You point and click where you want your agents to go. You point and click where you want your agents to shoot. You point and click what you want your agents to carry. If there is a thing to do in Syndicate, you probably point and click it. While this does seem like the simplest type of interface on any computer with a mouse, this game is too complex for a simple point and click. Syndicate wants you to do a lot in a short amount of time. It gets really cumbersome, really fast.

Why then, have I played this game, or at least the start of this game, so many times over the years.

Syndicate has amazing promise.

It’s for the same reason that people bring the game up with fond nostalgia in their voices. It’s why the game shows up on a lot of classic games lists. It’s why people have tried to make sequels or successors over the years, and it’s why there is probably someone actively pitching for a new Syndicate right now.

Nothing ever comes close. Nothing ever will. Not even Syndicate comes close to being Syndicate.

The concept is the most jet black of dystopic fiction. The world is terrible. As an escape, the entire population is fitted with chips that distort reality for them just enough to not be constantly depressed. The sky is artificially just a little brighter. The earth just a little greener.

Of course, the same chips that keep people happy and docile can be used to control them. Corporations turn ordinary citizens into cyborg agents and wage wars for territory and control. The Syndicate with the most brains under their control wins.

Wins what exactly, we will never know. The world of the game is in a constant cycle of domination and control. The dominators change, but the world is stuck in an awful stasis.

It is unapologetically bleak. More important, you are not the hero of this story. You are not a savior that will free everyone from the shackles of evil. You are the evil. You are in control of a squad of agents on missions to murder, kidnap, and coerce until the world bows to you.

There is something very cathartic about that sort of fantasy. A perverse joy in being morally empty. It’s a role that very few games let you play.

Besides the setting, the world of the game is surprisingly dynamic. For a game from 1993, the world can occasionally feel alive. People and traffic follow their own patterns. Guards and police are usually quite stupid, but there are flashes of brilliance every once in a while.

But, not enough.

Syndicate is an almost game. It almost controls well enough. It almost breaks new ground for a an interactive, dynamic environment. It is almost fun enough to last for fifty levels. But it isn’t.

I think that is why it persists. Why people still remember this game. It’s a game where you can imagine all the things it could have been, but no other game has ever come close to matching that. Syndicate has never matched that.

It’s so very close though.

It’s like that movie that would have been wonderful if only they had a slightly higher budget, or that book that almost hits, but there are two chapters too many and a major plot element is unresolved.

Most games are either pretty good or pretty bad. There aren’t many ‘Almost’ games out there. Syndicate is one of them.

Is Syndicate one of the best games? No, not really. But it points firmly in the direction of greatness. The direction that games like Grand Theft Auto, and X-COM would eventually go.

I think that’s why Syndicate still lives in the memories of so many people who played it. Something about the setting and the dynamic open world really dug into players thoughts and expectations.

Syndicate might just be the best almost game.

489

Mon, 14 Mar 2022 00:00:00 +0000

I’m writing a story using the second person perspective. You know, the “you did this” “you went here” perspective. That’s right, like the Choose Your Own Adventure books. Except this isn’t a choose your own adventure. This is a horror story.

I don’t write a lot of horror stories. Over the last few years, I think that I have only written two. I started writing this one and nothing worked. It wasn’t scary or unnerving. I think I am going for unnerving, really. Unnerving is my center. That’s the pivot point for most of my stories. Even if the story is about something relatively mundane, I will always veer toward unnerving. Something fundamentally disquieting.

I was writing this story, and none of it worked. The images were supposed to be grim and upsetting, but they just seemed camp and pseudo-scary. Like ‘Spirit Halloween’ scary. Until I changed the perspective to second person.

Second person can be a gimmick. I don’t think it works for most stories. It works for games and game books, because, well, you are the one making the choices. For most stories, it doesn’t really land. The use of ‘You’ can be jarring. I think there are very few examples of it working.

There are a few rules that will make second person work properly in fiction. First, the narrator voice must be a character in the story, and the person being narrated to can’t be the reader. The reader knows who they are. The characters must be separate from them, and exist fully within the fiction of the story. There needs to be a little distance there.

If you follow those rules though, second person can be very unnerving. And that works well for horror.

I don’t know if this story will be successful, but I’m near finishing it. I guess I will find out when it’s all done and submitted.

488

Mon, 07 Mar 2022 00:00:00 +0000

I haven’t been playing the big, flashy, new Fromsoft game. I probably won’t play it for a while.

I mean, it seems great and all. I really do like their games. I think that they are tough, but not more so than old 8bit games. I will probably get around to the huge, open world spectacle that is Elden Ring, but right now I’m still enjoying Sekiro. A more than two year old game that I only just got around to playing recently.

I get to a lot of games late, but I have found that they are usually still pretty good by the time I play them. I think the same will probably be true of Elden Ring.

Every time I play a Fromsoft game, I am always amazed by the things that they can get away with, things that probably wouldn’t be tolerated from other developers, but I think I know why. Lets just break some of them down.

The interfaces are usually terrible.

Everything is heavily animation driven.

Those animations don’t have interrupts.

They can be janky as hell.

Signposting is usually pretty bad.

Sometimes, they are ridiculously difficult.

From the top, one of the main complaints levied against From games is that their interfaces are bad. And they are. Except that depends on what people are referring to as interface. Equipment menus and character stats screens in from games can be needlessly opaque or cluttered. You usually have more crap in your inventory than you know what to do with, and there is never a great way to organize it. The actual interface that you use to play the game, the camera controls, character controls, and buttons you need to press to get things done, those are great. The games feel great to play. There should be almost no reason for you to jump out to the inventory menu while you are playing. That’s stuff you manage in the quiet times between fights.

So, could those inventory menus be better? Of course. Should you be spending a lot of time in there rather than fighting or exploring? No. Do what you need to do in there, and get out. From just didn’t put that much thought into the parts of the game you are not meant to be playing.

The next two sort of go together. Things in From games, at least the recent set of them, are extremely animation driven. What do I mean by that? If you hit a button, your character will run through the same animation every time. The wind up, and the follow through, will always be the same length. They will take the same amount of time. Sure, most games do this, but the Souls series takes it to an extreme. There is often no way to cancel out of a move after it starts. You can’t tap another button and interrupt your sword swing with a dodge or shield swing. If you hit those buttons, you better mean it, because there are no take backs.

This goes extra for the enemies. Every enemy in a Souls game has a strict set of moves and times that they will launch them. The bad news is, even if you hit an enemy at the start of an attack, they will likely not stop or be interrupted if you slip a standard attack in before they hit you. They will just keep on rolling right over you. Those animations don’t stop for nothin’ baby.

While there is usually some sort of parry move that will deflect an attack, some stuff will just hit you no matter what you do. The only way to avoid being hit, is to just not be there.

While that isn’t very dynamic, it does mean that you can learn every single move and combo that an enemy has on tap. You can see them coming and respond accordingly. This is an extremely old-school way of designing fights, pulled right from the 8 and 16 bit era of games. It still works, so why not milk it for everything it’s worth and put new graphical clothes on it.

All of Fromsofts games have a slightly loose feeling. This is that jank I’m talking about. And also the signposting. If you see a ledge, you can probably figure out some sort of combination of jumps and roll that will get you there. If you walk up to an edge, you will probably fall off of it. The pathway from one area to another might not always be obvious, and the architecture seems to have been built, ramshackle, one thing on top of another over centuries. It’s all an accessibility and safety nightmare. You will never have any idea where to go, but you will usually be able to tell if you are somewhere new, because nothing looks the same from place to place.

What it does do, is it gives you an unending torrent of tiny corners to explore and dead ends to examine and explore. The Souls worlds feel like they are filled with adventure and danger. Nowhere is safe, but everywhere is a new opportunity. Finding out what treasure, or horror, sits waiting around the next corner, is why people play these games. Sometimes things will just glitch through walls or floors, and that is part of the fun too. What sort of weirdness, intentional or otherwise, will this game offer up today.

The last one is difficulty.

The Souls games can be tough. Sometimes frustratingly so. They are also incredibly generous. More than most games.

If you want to stop and catch your breath in any of these Fromsoft games, go right ahead. If you aren’t actively in a fight, just put the controller down. The game will wait for you. There are rarely any wandering monsters, or at least not many that travel any distance from their arenas. If you want a fight, You are going to have to go looking for it.

If you need to take a break, just stop right where you are. The games save all the time. If you don’t restart right where you were standing, you will only be a few seconds away.

When you engage with the game, it can be demanding, but the how and where you do that, is entirely up to you. You only need to focus on your terms.

Boss fights in any From game usually get my heart going, but the parts in between can be quite relaxing.

So why does From get away with making opaque, difficult games with terrible menus, when every other game maker would get roasted for doing the same. It’s because they get the core extremely right. They make interesting adventure games that feel like adventures. They make difficult games that let you chill out and wait for you to be ready before presenting a challenge. The menus that don’t really matter are sort of clunky, while the parts you actually interact with on a regular basis are extremely polished. Enemies will ignore your hits and throw unblockable attacks at you, but they are always the same so you can learn them and learn to exploit them. And most of the time, you can exploit the hell out of them. Seeing what cheesy nonsense you can get away with in a souls game is a lot of the fun.

Fromsoft gets away with all of this, because they make good, videogame-ass video games.

487

Mon, 28 Feb 2022 00:00:00 +0000

I have been writing a story, in bits and pieces, for the last two weeks or so. Earlier this week, I had started working on this post. I was going to write about how I took a very meandering route. How I had started the story from one characters perspective, and then changed it to be from another, and then changed it again to be from the perspective of an omniscient narrator, and how none of that was working. How I eventually changed it to a less conventional, but much more appropriate perspective.

None of that seems to matter very much at the moment.

There are more important things going on in the world.

The problem is, I don’t know how to write about them. I don’t know what words to use. I don’t know what order to put them in. I don’t know how to frame thoughtless tragedies and horrific, evil acts.

I know how to write stories. I know how to rework them so that they function. I know how to voice identifiable characters. At least, I think I do.

I don’t know how to write about any of this. I don’t know how to form my rage and despair into words that would be helpful to anyone.

I know how to write stories. I know how to write about games. Or movies. Or music. Or art. Or 3D animation software.

They are simple, silly, trivial things.

Maybe reading some of those things will bring someone some small amount of joy.

I believe I will keep writing about those things.

I don’t know how to write about what’s going on. That’s no reason to stop writing.

486 - Mass Effect (1, 2, and 3)

Mon, 21 Feb 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Best Games - Mass Effect (1, 2, and 3)

Games are games and movies are movie and books are books. They all work themselves into you. They all occupy different pockets of memory. Just like a song will bring me back to some specific moment, recalling a passage in a book or a sequence in a movie will set my feet in the past. Games are usually a little different, though.

Games aren’t a moment in time. A snapshot. Games are an era.

It’s partially about time. Games take a lot longer than a movie or a handful of pages to do their work. The emotional impact that etches itself into your memory takes a little longer. Occasionally, a lot longer.

I can only really compare Mass Effect to Star Trek. And it’s not for the obvious reasons. The apparent ones. That both are space faring adventures, or that both have a rich fictional history with memorable personalities from a variety of alien races. No, it’s not that. They are similar in the way that they burrowed their way into me. Slowly. Bit by bit. Scene by scene. Idea by idea.

There is no single scene that I can point to, and say ‘there, that’s Mass Effect’. There is no single combat encounter. There is no dialog sequence or character interaction. Mass Effect is the entire trilogy. All of its triumphs and fumbles. All of its strengths and failings.

I know things about Turian and Quarian Biology that will never help me in life. I can tell you the difference between a Salarian and Krogan and the complicated history of their people. This isn’t the sort of information that you casually accumulate. This is the sort of thing that you need to seek out. It needs to be reinforced over hours and hours of play time. You need to want to know this stuff. And I did. Still do.

With the singular exception of Metal Gear, I don’t think that any game series has the depth and detail that is woven into Mass Effect. None of them have spent the time. None are as cohesive. I could be wrong. I would be happy to be wrong. But I have played a lot of games. Frankly, nothing I’ve seen comes close.

Star Trek had many decades, hundreds of hours, three full, human, generations to develop its lore. Mass Effect did something similar in about a hundred hours over five years. Impressive, really, when you think about it.

I could attempt to list of great moments or characters in Mass Effect, but that’s not how they are structured in my memory. It isn’t moments. It isn’t single images. There was a time when I thought a lot about Mass Effect. An era. It is a game series tied to a time in my life. I suspect it’s similar for a lot of other people who played it. People who know, will know. For everyone else, I think I can only offer, You should play Mass Effect.

It’s one of the best games.

485

Mon, 14 Feb 2022 00:00:00 +0000

I would rather be writing something else.

I have a handful of unfinished shorts stories and a couple of finished ones that need edits. I would rather be writing those, but this is what I’m writing right now.

That doesn’t seem like an important detail. Like, so what. People work on the thing they don’t want to work on all the time. Maybe most of the time. That isn’t the point I’m driving toward. That’s a bigger problem, and one that I certainly won’t be able to tackle in a few hundred words. What I am going to attempt to touch on, is writers block. Or the illusion of writers block. Or dealing with it when it happens.

So, I will state up front here that I don’t think writers block is a real thing. Like, there is no point where you simply can’t get words out of the tips of your fingers, or whatever. The term ‘writers block’ is an inelegant blanket that covers a lot of subtler, but potentially more addressable, issues. I never have writers block. I have spent a lot of time not writing the thing I want to write, and I have spent a lot of time not advancing my writing. Sometimes the right words are just tough to dig up.

I think there are a lot of reasons that people aren’t able to write. Most of them come down to either expectations, or writing the wrong thing. Sometimes those are the same.

So, what am I talking about here. Well, first you have expectations. Everyone, and I do mean everyone, wants to write perfectly the first time. Every person who has ever written anything knows that the best work comes out of editing, maybe many rounds of editing. It doesn’t matter. Everyone wants to write the absolute perfect words in the absolute perfect order the first time. Suppressing the voice in your head that tells you this time it will be different, this time you will write perfectly the first time, takes practice. And time. And even then it won’t work. You will always hope you can write perfectly the first time. It will never, ever happen. Getting used to that is a huge step in the direction of living without ‘writers block’. Knowing that you will have more than one chance to get it right, that getting it right will take many rounds of editing, gives you the freedom to write poorly. Or well. It gives you the freedom to just write and figure it out later.

The second problem is sort of related to the first. Sometimes people just write the wrong thing. Not the wrong words, not the wrong content. Sometimes people feel like they have to write the part that they don’t want to deal with. The busy-work of writing. The ‘get you from here to there’ scenes or sections. This is usually because you got bogged down in the ‘Writing it properly the first time’ trap. You have started to think that there are parts you must write, even though they don’t interest you. There is an incredibly simple solution to this problem.

Don’t.

Don’t write that. Move on to a scene you want to write. Something interesting. Something exciting, or frightening, or powerful, or inspiring. Any of the things that you really want to write. Sticking all of those good parts together is a problem for ‘editing’ you. And ‘editing’ you will have a way easier time of it if all the scenes are exciting or interesting. They will be fun to edit, and they probably require less ‘non-interesting’ bridge material than you originally thought.

As long as you make everything you write a problem for a future version of you to deal with (this includes edits) you will eventually find that there is one version of you that has nothing left to do. That’s how you know you are done writing, and you never had to suffer through ‘writers block’ to get there. You only had to do the fun and exciting parts over and over and over again.

Everything will take way longer than you expect and most part of the process will be hard work, but none of it needs to be so terrible that you find yourself unable to write at all.

I would much rather have been writing a lot of other things, but I went and wrote all this by breaking it down into parts that I liked and worked my way though it in chunks.

Is it great. No. could it use edits. Of course. But I did write it. First word to last.

You can too.

484

Mon, 07 Feb 2022 00:00:00 +0000

I’m watching women’s Olympic Hockey as I write this. Earlier today, I watched Slopestyle snowboarding. Before that, we watched some Super-G skiing, and some Big Air Skiing.

I like sports. I know a lot of people don’t, even a lot of people who like games. I think maybe they should try watching the Olympics.

It’s the variety. There are just so many different types of competitions and events. All of them have their own rules and goals. Some have judging systems and points. There are so many systems and variables at work. I know that is true of all sports, but rather than having to go deep on one sport, knowing all the players, all the history, each Olympic sport will come with a lot of explanation from the commentators. No one expects the casual viewer to be acquainted with the specific degree of difficulty for a triple Salchow jump. I have been watching figure skating for years, I even used to compete in figure skating, and I could not tell you what, specifically, makes an Axel more difficult than a Salchow. Or why everyone pronounces it SowCow. That’s fine though. It doesn’t matter. As a viewer, you get to enjoy an incredible variety of sports being played at the highest level for a couple of weeks. And if you are a game designer, I think you absolutely have to watch the Olympics.

Maybe physical competition isn’t your thing. You are more of a strategy designer. Watch Curling. The nearly infinite possibility space of a game played with a few heavy pieces of granite and a giant bullseye is staggering. Maybe you like something with some team co-operation where unique roles complement each other. Watch Hockey. A team of players cycling a penalty kill effectively is beautiful, once you figure out what you are looking at. Here’s a tip. The players on the ice are rarely looking at the puck. There is no reason for you to look at the puck, either. Watch where the players go. That’s what’s important.

If you like displays of individual skill, the Winter Olympics have you covered. Any sort of ski or snowboard jumping, spinning, or flipping you can imagine. The judging of these events can be a little arcane, but it will be impressive nonetheless. And last, but not least, If you are looking for simple competitive drama, Speed Skating or snowboard cross has got you covered.

There aren’t many styles of games that aren’t covered by the Olympics. If you rope in the Summer Olympics, you also have a lot of combat sports to enjoy. Snowball fighting has not yet been declared an Olympic sport.

So, right now, the Canadian Women are dominating this game. It’s pretty much a lock. Of course, they will be playing the Americans tomorrow, so that will be more of a nail biter. I’ll probably be watching.

483 - Puzz Loop / Zuma

Mon, 31 Jan 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Best Games - Puzz Loop / Zuma

This is a tough one. I think Zuma is one of the best games of all time, but its core concept is also lifted from another game, Puzz Loop.

The problem I have, is that Puzz Loop is good, but not great. Zuma is great, but not original. So who do you give the honors to.

First, let me describe what we are working with here. Zuma, like Puzz Loop, is an action puzzle game. Think Tetris or Bejeweled. Three in a row, color matching mechanics, but with a ticking clock. You are trying to combine three orbs of the same color. Simple enough right? A snake of different colored balls travels along a set path. In the case of Puzz Loop, a spiral. In the case of Zuma, a slightly wiggly spiral that sometimes crosses over or under itself. In both, you operate a device in the center of the spiral that spits out different colored balls. You fire the balls out, lodge them in between segments of the snake, and, if you did it right, you match three of a kind, and they blow up. There are lots of little powerups and mechanics that add to that, but really that’s the core of both of these games. Shoot balls at other balls to make them go away before they reach the center. When they reach the center, the game is over.

Puzz Loop could have been a great game. It had all the features of a great game. Fairly simple to learn, high skill cap, lots of ways to approach the same situation. Unfortunately, it’s good, but not great.

Zuma took the concept and ran with it.

At the most basic level, just changing the path that the snake of orbs travels down is pretty profound. Both Zuma and Puzz Loop incorporate a travel time into their ball firing mechanic. When you shoot, it will take a moment for that shot to get to where you are aiming. This means that you will, however slightly, have to lead your targets. The further away they are, the more you will have to predict the path your shots will take. As soon as the snake starts to take a curvy, non-uniform, path, the skill requirement on your shots goes up. You are rewarded for playing better.

There are other, surface level, things that make Zuma better, like better graphics and sound. Those aren’t strictly tied to the quality of the game, but they are nice to have.

The real kicker is platform. Puzz Loop is an arcade game, and it lives in a standard arcade cabinet. The default control scheme for arcade machines are the venerable stick and buttons. While it works fine, Puzz Loop on a stick and buttons just can’t compare to Zuma using a mouse. The speed and accuracy of mouse control is tough to beat. It’s like going from a working concept to a full-fledged production model. Zuma is just a better game.

So what do you do when one developer lifts the ideas of another developer, but rather than creating a crass clone, actually enhances the core gameplay. It happens all the time in other genres. For a long time, first-person shooters were called Doom clones. RTS games were referred to in publications as ‘like Warcraft’ even though warcraft was like Dune II and Dune II was sort of like Herzog Zwai. Developers taking inspiration from a game and then pushing that ball further down the field is sort of how things have always been done.

Puzz Loop is en extremely simple game. The core mechanics can be intuited from a single image. It’s a good concept, but someone had to push that ball further down the field. There is a Puzz Loop 2. That game doesn’t advance the concept. Zuma does.

So, Zuma might be one of the best games, but Puzz Loop is one of the best game concepts. When offered the choice, I would pick Zuma every time.

482

Mon, 24 Jan 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Quite a few years ago, I decided to write something and post it up here at least once a week. So every week for at least four hundred and eighty-two weeks, I wrote (and occasionally drew or painted) something and posted it. At first, none of it was fiction. I didn’t know how to write fiction.

Then, slightly fewer years ago, I decided to write fiction. I’m not really sure why. I had an idea for a story, so that’s what I wrote. I wrote something short, because I thought that would be easier than writing something long. In one way, I suppose that is true. Since there are fewer words, you can look it over and see all the things that you want to change and wish you had written better in a shorter span of time. In that way, it’s easier. In another, much more real way, shorter stories aren’t easy at all.

By now, I have written somewhere around twenty short stories. And a few much longer ones. Most of them are finished. A few of them I am still working on. One of the unfinished ones is about a third of a book. In a lot of ways, writing that one is a lot easier than the short ones. In a longer story, you have more room to breath. You don’t need to be as precise. The words don’t need to be as densely packed.

In all this time, for whatever stupid reason, I haven’t been reading short stories. I have been reading novels, but I read fairly slowly, so I don’t plow through dense tomes or epic series. It didn’t occur to me that I could read short stories.

As soon as I decided to try to sell a few short stories, I figured I should read some.

Surprise, surprise, short stories are freakin great. They can get weird in ways that a novel rarely could. Exploring single topics fully without getting bogged down in too much extraneous drama. They usually take less than an hour or so to read, and if one of them doesn’t fully hit, you can probably move on to the next pretty easily.

I realize that it seems obvious and idiotic, that if I was going to write short stories, I should also read them, but what can I tell you, It honestly didn’t occur to me.

Also, it seems, the world of sci-if shorts, at the very least, is extremely punk. In all the good ways. In all the counterculture and nonconformist ways that you want good writing to be. That’s probably not me, since I am a pretty bland white guy, but I sure do like to read it.

If what I have been reading is any indication, the future of genre writing is a lot less bland and white. I’m 100% here for it. If I can slip one or two of my semi-optimistic adventures in there with all the punks, I will be grateful.

481

Mon, 17 Jan 2022 00:00:00 +0000

After I did NanoWriMo I took a bit of time off. I put the files away and didn’t look at any of the words I wrote for a good couple of weeks.

I think that’s a pretty natural impulse. I had worked on one story every day for a month and I needed a bit of distance from it before I came back to assess where to go from there.

I’m not super precious with my words, and I won’t hesitate to throw away and rework large chunks of text, if I think it will make the story better. Still, sometimes I think I need some time away from a bit of writing before I can really look at it and figure out what I can do to improve it.

Not what’s wrong. Imagining that something is ‘wrong’ with a piece of writing supposes that there is some way to make it right. I don’t think there is. I think there are ways to strengthen and improve a bit of writing. I think that you can make something better by reworking it, or rewriting it. But that isn’t a destructive act. You aren’t taking out what is broken and replacing it with something you fixed. You are refining a sketch.

Right now I have a bit over 50000 words of sketch. Some of the lines are very clear and I can just leave them as they are. Others wander all over the page and don’t really connect up to anything. The forms are undefined and the contrast between forms isn’t as strong as it needs to be.

I won’t use any color metaphors, since I’m no good at color in painting either.

In drawing terms, right now I have a line of action and some ill defined shapes. I have built up the faith in myself that if I were at this stage of a drawing, I could probably finish it. I don’t really have that with writing yet. I think I will get the story to where it needs to be, but I needed to take a few weeks away to regroup and refocus.

Now that I am back, looking at it again, I think the base sketch might be alright. I’ll keep working on it.

480 - Aliens TC Doom Mod

Mon, 10 Jan 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Best Games - Aliens TC Doom Mod

I realize this isn’t a game.

No. I’m not going to go that far. It is a game. It is a fully formed game. Not a wholly original work, but that’s not important, is it?.

It’s a mod. A mod of Doom.

The Aliens TC (total conversion) Doom Mod uses all the built-in content of Doom, controls, gameplay, a fair bit of the graphics and sounds, but it also adds a lot of its own additions.

There is no doubt that the movie Aliens had a massive impact on game development in the early 90s. Games where you battle against unstoppable hordes of monsters were nothing new, but the thrill ride mentality of Aliens was an easy bleed over to the newly minted genre of first person games. Doom already had a lot of Aliens in its DNA.

Licensed games in the early 90s were a bit of a crap shoot. Most of the ones made during that time were cross marketing tie-ins with little or no intrinsic value. There is a tragically large library of 8 and 16 bit licensed games that are absolute junk.

Making a game built on the Doom engine that follows the events of Aliens, seems like it would be a no-brainer. Space marine walks down darkened hallways shooting monsters. It’s surprising there wasn’t ten of them. Of course, due to the track record of movie tie-in games, they would probably have been awful.

So what’s to be done about it then. If you’re Justin Fisher, you pick up the Doom modding tools and do it yourself.

Aliens TC includes a full campaign of custom levels, sounds and graphics ripped from the movie, and reskinned and tuned weapons made to resemble the ones in the film. There had been game mods before Aliens TC, but none of them took the base of a game and built an entirely new one on top of it. There are games like Heretic, where Raven software took the Doom engine and built something else entirely out of it, but that was an effort on the scale that a single person could never have accomplished it. For the most part, the Aliens TC was made by one guy.

It was a good mod, and that is great and all, but why is Aliens TC important at all in the history of video games? Mods don’t typically deserve much mention in the history of the medium.

Aliens TC wasn’t just good. It was a fundamental shift in the way people thought about games. This was a massive effort, but one that could be accomplished by a single person. The tools that the original game developers used were available, and sometimes they shipped on the disc with the game. The separation of engine and game had just hit a pivot point, and one guy decided to take advantage of it.

For anyone that thought about getting into game development, there was before Aliens TC, when you needed a comp-sci degree or 10000 hours of bedroom coding on an 8bit computer, and there was after Aliens TC, when anyone sufficiently dedicated to the task could learn some tools and make a mod.

Even if you had no interest in making games, Aliens TC was an extremely fun way to play a game you already owned all over again. Only this time you get to shoot xenomorphs.

Aliens TC for Doom is one of the best games.

479

Mon, 03 Jan 2022 00:00:00 +0000

I’m almost done editing up one story, and I have another that is about fifty percent done. I don’t know if they will find homes anywhere, but I think at least one of them is pretty ‘marketable’. It’s short, concise, but presents a sense of place and time that is the sort of thing people look for in short stories. At least it’s the sort of thing that I look for, and last I checked, I was people.

That was all last year stuff. My goal for this year is one short story a month and finish the 70k or so words left in the book I’m writing. I’m much too far into it to stop now.

I think one short story a month is a pretty good pace for me. If I was writing all the time, I think I would go faster, but that seems like a totally workable pace.

I definitely have no lack of ideas. I have about twenty short story ideas in a document here, and that’s only the ones I already committed to digital paper. I probably have a notion for one or two new ones every week. Now, most of them suck, but there are a lot of ideas.

I have mostly focused on sci-fi stories and speculative fiction stories, because that is the sort of thing I like. I think I might branch out a bit though. I also like some other genre fiction. Some horror or fantasy. Mostly, I will continue my trend of writing characters that are, by a lot of people’s interpretation, bland. They will be mostly kind or nice, and if they are ‘the bad guy’ they will have to have a good and valid (to themselves) reason for it. There will be no moustache twirlers, dark lords, or Darth Sidious’s on my watch. I find those characters dull beyond reckoning. They are not the opposite of a moral protagonist. The opposite would be someone who chooses a malicious path because they can somehow justify the ends. That might be bland or not larger than life, but I will like them. Since I’m the one writing them, that’s what they will be.

478

Mon, 27 Dec 2021 00:00:00 +0000

tap and twitch long past

time and money frantic spent

gone without regret

477

Mon, 20 Dec 2021 00:00:00 +0000

I finished a game this week. I was glad to have played it, but I was sad to have finished it.

The DLC for the original Outer Wilds, Echoes of the Eye. It’s a DLC that is so substantial that it’s almost an entire game on its own.

This is a feeling that I never get from movies, very rarely get from TV series, and occasionally get from books. Games, though, I get it a lot from games.

I think it’s a factor of time spent and thoughts devoted. A really good book, with a story that hooks me, will have me thinking about it for days or weeks. It is the rare TV series that will make me think about it for a while after I’m done watching it. Games are experiences that you have to exist in. There are areas of the first Dark Souls that I know as well as streets of my home town. I expect they will echo back to me for years or even decades to come.

Outer Wilds is the sort of game that makes me wish I could experience it again for the first time.

When you finish this DLC, a story that is woven into the original so deftly that it could easily be part of the original play through, you have the option of stopping there or going back and completing the original game with the new knowledge you have acquired. I chose the second one.

It had been a while since I had finished the main game, so rather than puzzle out what I had to do again, I looked up a walkthrough. Outer Wilds is a game that you can finish in a matter of minutes once you know what to do, so I belted off and started getting things done. Turns out I probably didn’t need the walkthrough. As soon as I started completing tasks, it was like rapid fire nostalgia. I remembered everything and nailed every step. The story of that journey is part of me now. Just like the stories of Star Wars, or hundreds of episodes of Star Trek, Outer Wilds is embedded in my memory. Not because I watched it so many times, but because I experienced it. Games can do that. They create a different sort of memory. That’s why you feel it more when they are over. It’s not like a movie, with a two-hour runtime, or a book with a set number of pages. A lot of games are experiences you live in for as long as you want to keep going. And when you end them, it’s because you choose to end them. I didn’t want my time in Outer Wilds to be over, but I knew that I had seen all that it offered, and it was time to let it go. It didn’t end, I decided that it was time to stop playing. To stop existing in that world.

As far as storytelling mediums go, I think that is unique to games. The player chooses when they are over.

I was felt sad to finish Echoes of the Eye, but I am immensely glad that I played it. If you haven’t played Outer Wilds, you absolutely should. Just don’t blame me for your lingering ennui and melancholy. That’s just part of the experience.

476 - NHL 96

Mon, 13 Dec 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Best Games - NHL 96

I don’t play a lot of sports games. I have definitely dabbled. The odd baseball or football game. Maybe a basketball game or two. Many car racing games. I have always preferred video games that were fantasies. Things I could never do in real life. I have a ball glove and a baseball. I don’t have a rocket pack or a sword. Even if I did, I wouldn’t be able to use it. Playing a game of catch wouldn’t get anyone to look twice, but I really couldn’t walk down my back path with a katana.

The real world sport that I have played more than any other is hockey. I have only spent a few years of my life not playing hockey. Those were the first few and the most recent few. For the first few, I couldn’t skate, and for the last few, well, no one could.

There are a lot of sports game that are not simulations. They are arcade style games with a loose sports attachment. A sort of vestigial draw that people can recognize. Games like NBA Jam or NFL Blitz. They don’t really have a lot to do with the sports they are based on. Something like 90% of all car racing games are not really about the sport of racing.

This tends to work out in the game’s favour. The closer a game hews to actual simulation, the more likely it is to come up short. There are simply not enough buttons on a controller, not a granular enough interface available, to describe the intricacies of most sports. You can pretend to Quarterback the Dallas Cowboys, but you can’t simulate throwing a perfect thirty yard spiral with a game pad. Not really.

There is no way to properly simulate playing hockey in a video game. No VR system will ever have the fidelity to incorporate the full body experience of skating, slapping a one timer, or executing a poke check.

Still, I know what hockey is supposed to feel like. How the game is supposed to move and flow. NHL 96 (on PC, and even somewhat on consoles) was a massive leap above every video game representation of hockey before it. NHL 96 took the momentum and agility of moving on ice, and actually did a pretty good job of representing it. AI players made an attempt at playing their positions. The puck slid and bounced in ways that approximate realistic.

A lot of simplifications were made to keep the game fun and accessible, but, for someone who had, up to that point, played a lot of hockey, the game felt like hockey. Up until that point, I had never played a game that felt anything like a real sport.

Is it perfect? Of course not. Are any of the subsequent versions of the game perfect? Also, a big nope. They never will be, and that’s okay. Sometimes you want the feel of hockey without going to the rink and lacing up your skates. The developers of NHL 96 seemed to feel the same way. This is not an arcade game that looks sort of like hockey, it’s the feeling of hockey in a simplified form.

It probably won’t go down as the best sports game. Hockey games will never match the popularity of soccer, football, or basketball games. None of them will ever have the universal appeal of racing games. For one, brief shining moment, there was a sports game that aimed to simulate what the game felt like, and that deserves some recognition.

NHL 96 is one of the best games.

475

Mon, 06 Dec 2021 00:00:00 +0000

So I did it. I wrote a little over 50000 words in one month. Here is the postmortem.
I guess I’ll answer the two main questions that I had going in.
The first question I had was simple. Could I do it? And if I could, how hard would it be?
So the answer to the first was obviously, yes. I wrote around 1700 words every single day for 30 days. Some days I wrote slightly less, some days slightly more. There was one day that I wrote 3000. So the answer to the first question was, yep. I absolutely can write 50000 words in a month.
The second question is a little more difficult. Was it hard? Well, yes and no. Simply typing 2000 or even 3000 words in a day, or really in a few hours, isn’t that hard. Making up 1700 words of new story every day is a little more difficult. The main problem was that I didn’t have a super clear idea where the story was going sometimes, and I sort of had to make it up on the fly. Usually I would make some sort of plan for what I was going to write the next day and then try as hard as I could to follow that plan. Sometimes it went off the rails and I would have to backtrack to fix it.
The next things that I think people would want to know about taking on a challenge like this is, does it make you faster at writing? Does it make you a better writer?
To answer the first question, for me at least, it didn’t make me a faster writer. It took me anywhere from two to four hours every day to finish those words. Without fail. I never got faster. While I can type relatively quickly, I don’t think I’m a very fast writer. I make mistakes and I backtrack, and I have trouble finding the exact words I want sometimes.
I did notice that my writing got much more intricate as I went on. I started to take a wider view while still working on the sentence to sentence beats of a scene. I started to plan setups and reveals that would be pages or chapters away. While I don’t think that what I wrote is very good yet, it needs a lot of editing and scene changes to make the characters consistent and more fully featured. I started to work on the long arcs of the plot. I set up mysteries that I know how to pay off later (and some that I don’t yet). So far, for as thin as it is, the story functions. It does the things it needs to do to make a reader turn the page. It will take a lot of work to finish it, but it’s on its way.
Would I do it again? I don’t know. Maybe. It is a good way to kick-start a book. And it shows you how much work writing a whole book might be. I suppose you could write a novella in that time, but I scoped a story that will take between one hundred thousand and one hundred twenty thousand to tell. I only really got close to the middle of the book.
I think if I did it again, I would come with more planning. I had a short story and a handful of notes, but no real plan, so I had to make it up as I went. While that can work well, I wouldn’t recommend it as a method of creating very polished writing. What I have right now points me in a direction, but there is no way I could sell it. It’s just too messy.
What all of this did prove to me was, if you worked full time as a writer, you could write at least a book a year by typing up around 2000 words a day. It would take a few hours, and then you would have to spend the rest of the day fixing those words to make them something someone would want to read. It would be a full time job, but not an easy one.

474

Mon, 29 Nov 2021 00:00:00 +0000

I’m in the home stretch. Only a couple thousand words until I hit 50000 for NaNoWriMo.
I don’t know if what I have written can be made into something good, but, right now, it seems likely. There is enough here that I think the final book will be around 100,000-120,000 words… which falls right in line with average book length. I have no intention, or desire, at this point to turn it into a sprawling trilogy or grandiose expanded universe. It’s a single, contained story. A modern fantasy, semi-romantic comedy, with some darker real world themes. Mostly though, it’s an adventure story. It’s meant to be fun. So far I think it is.

473

Mon, 22 Nov 2021 00:00:00 +0000

NaNoWriMo continues. might post some of it later. Maybe.

472

Mon, 15 Nov 2021 00:00:00 +0000

I’m halfway through NaNoWriMo so I barely have any words left. With the laws of word supply and demand so totally out of wack these are the most expensive words I’ll write all year. That’s why there are so few of them here. They are just worth more.

471

Mon, 08 Nov 2021 00:00:00 +0000

For the past week I have been doing NaNoWriMo. In that time I have written a little over 12000 words. The challenge is to reach 50000 by the end of the month. As long as I don’t suddenly lose my fingers or suffer some sort of mental paralysis, it looks like I am on track to hit that target. After day one, I wasn’t very hopeful.

On that first day, every spare moment I had I would try to write. I would try and no words would come out. I would write ten or so words and then flounder around trying to follow that up. I’ve written stories before. It’s not like I don’t know how to type the words out.

I even had a plan. It was a pretty loose plan, but I had one. I knew that I wanted a cold open. You know when you watch a TV show and this batch of characters kick off the episode and not one of them is in the usual cast. You’re watching along and this big dramatic event happens but you’re not sure why you should care, because, like I said, none of these characters are the main cast of the show. Well what if the same thing happened, but you don’t know who the main cast is so you follow along with these characters and something exciting happens and ‘woosh’ you are off to some other story that is as completely divorced from what just happened as it could possibly be. And the show goes for a while and you think, “oh. These are the main characters. So what was all that about?”

That. That is what I wanted to do with my opening chapter. So I had the plan. I even knew what would happen to the characters from the cold open. I know why it will be important later. Didn’t matter. I just could not get the words to come out.

I just barely made my word count that first day. The second day was the same. The third, a little better. By day five I was able to get into a flow and type most of the 1667 required words in one go. Today I did nearly 2000 words in about two and a half hours. There really is something to this whole, getting into a rhythm thing.

I have no idea how the next weeks will go. Hopefully I can keep the pace up and not feel the stress of not hitting my word count every day. Lots of time left for the whole endeavor to go good or bad.

Either way, I probably have some limited number of keycaps my fingers can tap in a day before wearing down to boney nubs, so I’m going to keep these posts shorter for the next few weeks.

470 - Mortal Kombat

Mon, 01 Nov 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Best Games - Mortal Kombat

Mortal Kombat is a bait and switch.

I have talked about Mortal Kombat here a lot. I bring it up when referencing other fighting games. I mention it in passing when talking about controls or graphics or violence. Mortal Kombat is probably my second favourite fighting game series, second to Street Fighter. I love a round or three of Tekken or Samurai Shodown or Fatal Fury or Soulcalibur or Dark Stalkers or… you get it. I like fighting games. Mortal Kombat sits near the top of that list. I think I got into it for the same reasons that most people did, for the same reasons that most people think you would get into Mortal Kombat, but I keep playing games in the series for the same reasons that other fighting game fans do.

Mortal Kombat is the absolute picture perfect example of the bait and switch done right.

Digitized photos and animation of actual humans in costumes was the first dangling of bait. When MK1 came out in arcades, seeing realistic images of people on video game screens had only been done a few times and it never made for good games. It was, undoubtedly, a gimmick, but a rare enough one that the game could draw a crowd.

The characters could bleed. Not super uncommon in arcades at the time, but rare enough to be bait. Watching blood fly off of digital characters was novel enough that it caused a buzz.

If you won, you could kill your opponent in flashy and gory ways. The last piece of bait. The cherry on top. Any fighting game player, hell any arcade goer at the time had to at least see what Mortal Kombat was all about.

All gimmicks. All flash. Not the sort of thing that would land you on the Best Games list.

When that wears off, what are you left with. As it turns out, an extremely solid fighting game.

Mortal Kombat is a slower, harder hitting fighting game. Where Street Fighter 2 is a sort of high speed dance of feints and counters, Mortal Kombat is all marching forward and trading blows. Mortal Kombat is meatier. Heavier. When hits land, you feel them. If Street Fighter is like a kung fu movie, Mortal Kombat is like Rocky. Jumping in is not something you do without significant risk.

There is something about the pace of a Mortal Kombat fight that I really like. It can be over in an instant, but you will be aware of all of the times you messed up. Mashing buttons won’t help you. Range and timing matter more than speed. Special moves aren’t difficult to execute but they follow a slightly more aggressive pattern than most fighting games. Lots of double taps and quick back and forth movements of the stick versus Street Fighters lean toward smooth half and quarter circles and charge moves.

It would be pretty easy to argue, and I would probably agree, that the series didn’t really get going until Mortal Kombat II. The second game was more fluid, faster, more dynamic, but it still hit as hard and still felt stiff in a very good way. A drop kick to the face has weight and impact and stops the fight for a second while both combatants (Kombatants?) recover. It makes space for the players to respond with a block, counter, or follow up. It’s not uncommon to see a moment in a game of Mortal Kombat where both players just stop and stand perfectly still for a few frames. This hold or rest or break in the action is exactly what the game needs. It makes the next punch feel that much heavier, that much more damaging.

When you take away the bait, the digitized actors, the blood, the finishing moves, you are left with a fighting game with a slightly different rhythm. Something that feels like the more vicious martial arts movies the developers were trying to emulate. Something with some heft.

Both the Street Fighter and Mortal Kombat series are still going. They are both very good. They feel incredibly different to play.

Mortal Kombat is one of the best games.

469

Mon, 25 Oct 2021 00:00:00 +0000

So this past week I sold a story. It’s pretty exciting.

I’m going to do something here that I haven’t done in over 450 posts. I’m going to ‘reprint’ an old post from 2014. You see, there is a reason that I wanted to publish a story. It’s the same reason that I started writing it. It’s the same reason that I wrote any of the stories I have. It’s why I will keep writing.

Thanks again Grandma.

I remember leaning up against the stair railing in my grandmas house. She was watching Star Trek First Contact for the first time. I had seen it twice in the theatre and at least one more time when it came out on video, so I had it pretty much committed to memory. I was just passing through the house on my way somewhere, but I had stopped to watch the end of the movie with her. It would be more accurate to say that I stopped to watch her watching the movie. She was sitting intently, forward in her seat. She finished her cigarette about fifteen minutes before, but had been too engaged in the movie to light another one. The only other time that happened was when she was sleeping.

As the movie draws to a close there is a sequence where a passing alien ship notices the warp signature of the first human vessel to travel faster than light. The aliens set down beside a small settlement in Montana, in search the people that built or flew that warp ship. More specifically, they are looking for Zefram Cochrane, the inventor of the ships engine. They step out of their craft, and you see that they look a lot like us, clothed simply in humble hooded robes. When the captain, or emissary, approaches Cochrane he removes his hood revealing his swept up eyebrows and pointed ears. They are Vulcans. At that moment my grandma let out a joyful whoop and clapped her hands. Her smile was three feet wide.

If you have even a passing interest in Star Trek you know how pivotal this moment is to the entire series. You probably knew who the aliens were long before the reveal. My grandma knew. She knew every frame of that scene before she ever saw it. You see, my grandma was a scifi nerd. I don’t know that I have ever met, or will ever meet, anyone with a more encyclopedic knowledge of scifi and fantasy stories than her. Stacks and stacks well worn paperbacks from Andre Norton, Anne McCaffrey, Isaac Asimov, Robert Heinlein, among many, many others lined the walls of her room, and filled several more boxes. And those were only the books that she had kept. Countless other books and short stories lived in her memory, and she could recall the details of each with lighting speed. She would emphatically inform me of the difference between “good science fiction” and “crap” at any opportunity. I lapped it all up.

What I didn’t fully realize at the time was that my grandma was several thousand years old. In her life, she absorbed so many stories, so many past and future events, so many possibilities, so many eventualities, and she had weighed and considered them all. Intelligent machines, faster than light space travel, contact with alien life. These weren’t figments of fantastical imaginings for my grandma. These were very real, inevitable events. She had lived each of them dozens of times, in dozens of ways. How they would actually play out was anyone’s guess, but she had her favorites. Stories that were as romantic as they were real. Benevolent aliens, greeting us for the first time, with a warm handshake, like family we never knew. That was the kind of story she loved.

Thank you for sharing your love of stories with me, grandma. I miss you.

468

Mon, 18 Oct 2021 00:00:00 +0000

I’m gonna try to write a novel. Probably a bad one. I definitely won’t be doing any editing. It won’t be polished. It might not make sense. I’m gonna try anyway.

I have side-eyed NaNoWriMo (as well as Inktober, and other creative jam type events) for years. I have participated in several Game Jams (create a game in a few days alone or with a team). I have usually found the experience to be sort of rejuvenating. Packing that much effort into a short space of time can be exhausting, but I usually come out with way more ideas and energy than I went in with. At least after a good nights sleep.

NaNoWriMo is National Novel Writing Month. Over the course of November, people from all over try to write 50000 words. A novel.

There is no rule or guideline on content, genre, or quality. It’s just about getting the words out.

I will try it. Hopefully I can type enough to reach 50000 words. I have absolutely no ide what I will write. It’s an absolutely terrifying prospect.

I hope it’s fun.

467

Mon, 11 Oct 2021 00:00:00 +0000

466

Mon, 04 Oct 2021 00:00:00 +0000

For the past few months I have been trying to sell stories. Sell is a bit of a stretch I suppose. All the outlets that I have been sending them too would not have paid me much for them. In terms of per hour wages, I would be making less than pennies off these stories. That’s not really what I’m trying to do though is it? I’m not looking to get wealthy off these stories. I want people to read them.

I thought a lot about why. I thought maybe it was attention seeking, or validation, or some other ego issue. While all writing has a component of that, I’m not so sure that covers it anymore.

I have received a good handful of rejection letters. Not a ton, but more than a few. The last 3 have been of the ‘higher level’ variety. It seems there is a whole tier system for rejection letters. Almost all rejection letters people get are form letters, because the editors of magazines and podcasts receive a lot of submissions and don’t have time to respond to all of them with personalized criticism or comments. This makes perfect sense. What a lot of publishers do have is a set of modular rejection letters. They tack on bits and pieces depending on what feedback they want to send but don’t really have time to type out. Writers collect these letters to share and compare. They break them down into their component parts. The practice even has a name. Rejectomancy. The practice is so widespread that the word rejectomancy doesn’t set off this text editor’s spelling filters.

Since I can’t help but research anything and everything, I have done some research on rejectomancy. I tend to think that a very simple “Thanks, but we are going to pass” is a good enough rejection letter. It tells me what I need to know and lets me send the story to some other outlet. As it turns out, it isn’t that simple. Even in a form rejection letter there are a lot of little segments that publishers tend to add.

There is the ‘who’s desk did this come from?’. Usually it comes from ‘the magazine’ or ‘outlet’ and that would mean that a volunteer or contractor read the story and decided not to pass it up to the staff or editor. Then there is the editor’s desk. Depending on if they use ‘I’ or ‘We’ that might mean that they read it or not. Sometimes they just thank you for your time, but sometimes they say that they would like you to consider them when you are submitting other work. While it would be easy to see this as just being polite, it turns out that it usually isn’t, and depending on the outlet, when they say consider us with other work it means exactly that. They liked the story, but something about it didn’t fit. Could be the word count, could be the subject matter, could be the tone, could be anything. Maybe they had three dreary stories that issue and they wanted something upbeat to fill it out. Your story was a downer and they passed rather than holding it for a later issue. Or they had to pick between the 5000 word story and the 6000 word story and one of them just fit the space better.

I’ve gotten a couple of the ‘thanks’ variety and some of the ‘thanks, send more’ variety. I got a personal critique. I got at least one ‘thanks, it was yours or another one and we went with the other one’. A bummer, but also kind of encouraging.

Now that I have a few, I think rejection letters tell you what you are really looking for. If you were trying to please your ego, you would quit after receiving one or two. They do nothing good for the ego. I don’t quit though. I do some revisions and send them out again. And again. And again.

I’ve stopped submitting all scattershot. Instead I go out and look for the right place to send these stories, and I realize that it’s less about someone telling me that they like the story and more about getting it to the audience that would appreciate it. People who might read it and have it be important to them in some way. I want to give them away. I am making them to share. Of course I want people to like the stories, but I think, as I have gone through this process, It’s much less important that people like me.

If I could write a story that means something to someone else, someone that I have never met and will never meet, I think that is what I want. Publishing to these outlets is just the quickest way to get there. I could post them up here, where a dozen or so people would ever read them, but that’s not good enough. They need to get out of here and go have a life away from me. They need to have people read them or listen to them without ever having any idea who I am. They need another place to vouch for them and say ‘it’s okay, these are stories you might like’ to people far, far away from this keyboard that they came out of.

I’ll always love them, but I want them gone and off to their own adventures.

465

Mon, 27 Sep 2021 00:00:00 +0000

This is a picture. I made this picture. This picture gives me anxiety.

There is a state that all drawings and paintings go through that can be best classified as “unfortunate”. It’s the state that makes an artist want to cover the paper so people looking over your shoulder can’t see your mess. People who are not the artist might, rightly, think that this is as good as it will get and walk away disappointed. I have worked very long and very hard on myself to break the impulse to cover my paper.

I’ve been here before. Every time I draw, paint, write, model, texture, light, or animate anything, there is a point where the honest impulse would be to cover the paper. Hide the shame of a picture that is in that halfway and unfortunate state. Every time I hit that point, I feel it too. I think this picture, or story, or whatever, is always going to look like this and it will be terrible, and I am terrible, and why did I even try doing this thing in the first place.

Like I said though, I’ve been here before. I know what this feels like. I recognize what the unfortunate state looks like. Foggy as it might be, I can see the road ahead because it’s the one I walk every time I make anything. This unfortunate, halfway state is exactly that, halfway. Maybe a little more or less than halfway, but still, not the start or the end.

I will do some more work on this painting, and the story that goes with it. Both are in a similar state. They will get better. At some point they will be ‘done’. That point isn’t now, but that’s okay.

Artists should get used to showing off their process and their half-done work. The more you do it, the less scary it is. Being unafraid of the process of making things is probably the biggest hurdle an artist will ever have to leap.

Show off your bad work. Your stuff that is half done and mushy. Your thoughts half formed and half finished. Get used to working through that and improving them. This is what your creations look like today, just imagine how good they could look tomorrow.

464

Mon, 20 Sep 2021 00:00:00 +0000

I played a game that reinforced an opinion I have. I know, super scientific. I have, and will, substitute this opinion for actual research.

It’s a simple thing, but since this is more or less a notebook to my future self (who won’t go back and read it) I’ll jot it down here.

The most important thing to get right in a video game is control. It’s not graphics, it’s not sound, it’s not even ‘gameplay’. The single most important element of any video game is control.

If you watch a movie, the most important element is editing. If the editing is bad you won’t be able to follow the narrative. Second is sound. The visual quality can be trash, but if the movie sounds good. Mess up on editing and sound!?!? Forget about it. That movie won’t work.

Video games share a lot with movies and TV. They are all primarily visual mediums. They all have to deal with pacing, rising and falling tension, timing with soundtracks. The primary difference, you swap editing with control.

Ever since pong, the feeling of ‘I do this thing with a button or a switch or a knob and something happens on the screen’ has been the primary differentiator between video games and all other media. I do this, the game does that. That feedback loop has to be nearly instant for it to feel good.

Pong is a 2D game where input typically occupies a single plane. You turn the knob one way and the paddle goes up, you turn it the other way and it goes down. Simple.

Modern games have controls that operate on multiple planes with separate fine scale inputs on triggers and paddles and buttons and touch pads and touch screens and capacitive sensors and accelerometers and gyroscopic sensors and motion tracking and computer vision and outside in or inside out position tracking systems.

Exactly the same rules apply. When you do this, the game does that. And it must do that thing reliably and quickly and without disorienting the player. That is the end to end extent of the task. Do the thing, do it quickly, don’t do some other thing the player isn’t expecting.

When a game is bad, it’s almost always because they messed up on control.

Now that games are mostly 3D control often includes two in game entities. The thing the player is controlling and the camera that is showing it to you. It can be easy to imagine that these are separate problems. Like driving a car is the first problem and building a good chase camera is the second. It’s not. Those are the same problem. When the player presses a stick or trigger button the car has to react properly, quickly, and without doing anything unexpected, but so does the camera.

There is often a delay on the camera that lets it float a long lazily behind the action, but that doesn’t mean that it isn’t reacting quickly. It needs to respond instantly to player input, and sometimes that means that the camera doesn’t stay right behind the car. Sometimes that means that the camera follows the motion vector of the car or refuses to float back behind the car because, at that exact moment, the car is in a drift and it feels more natural to see the car from the side or front. It is about responding quickly to the player’s expectation of where the camera should be going and giving them the best view of the game they are playing.

With great controls, a pretty basic game can still feel fun to run around in. With poor controls, it won’t matter how good the game is. There will always be a certain amount of people that will be turned off and put the game down.

Controls are the editing of video games. Get them wrong, and the moment to moment just won’t make sense.

463 - SSX 3

Mon, 13 Sep 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Best Games - SSX 3

The first SSX game was a banger right out of the gate. It could easily be in the running for a ‘best games’ write up. It had a solid but sort of complicated trick system. It felt fast and smooth. It looked and sounded great. It was fun to play. All good. I think though, the third entry in the series is really something special.

It was probably the Tony Hawk games that made extreme sports prime video game fodder. There were skateboarding and snowboarding games before that, but none of them had the same feeling of flow. The accuracy of control and speed and great looking tricks that make the player feel like they are floating from one obstacle to the next.

There were a lot of imitators to the Tony Hawk formula. Like a lot, lot. Way too many. SSX sort of goes it’s own way. The action sport element is there but after that, they are very different games.

SSX captures the speed of snowboarding. It is trivial to go fast. It’s not all about tricks and spins. It’s about speed. And not just simple acceleration. The way you turn is fast. the way you recover from crashes is fast. The way you get in and out of events is fast. Everything in SSX happens fast.

By the second game in the series, SSX Tricky, the core of the game was rock solid. You ride a snowboard down mountain slopes doing tricks and catching air. Do a big enough trick and you pull the board right off your feet and spin it around your head or something wild like that. But both the first two entries in the series still feel a little broken up. Each event is it’s own track and you learn them, beat them, and move on.

SSX 3 lets you ride a mountain.

It is a proto open world type game that borrows a lot from some of the racing games of the time. You can start a run from a few different points along the mountain and do pretty much anything you want on the way down. Flips, spins, ride rails, pickup bonuses, do side missions, enter races, compete in trick contests. Or you could just glide down to the bottom of the mountain, ride back up and do it again.

If you want to go to a race you ride to it. If you want to go to the shop and change your gear you ride to it. If you want to go to a different part of the mountain you ride to it. You can do any sort of grind, trick, or jump you want along the way.

Some of the races can be difficult and frustrating, but fun is only a button press away. Whatever you find fun, you can do. You are never locked into anything.

SSX On Tour would expand on the idea by making a single mountain that is massive and seamless from top to bottom, but SSX 3 got so much right already that it just seemed like a rehash of the same ideas.

SSX 3 does the same stuff as the rest of the series, only more polished and geared toward fun above all else.

In the years following, almost every sports or racing game that leaned toward goofy, fun, action would include an open world element. It might be a coincidence, but probably not.

This is just one of those games that gets everything right.

SSX 3 is one of the best games.

462

Mon, 06 Sep 2021 00:00:00 +0000

I have been writing here for over ten years. Something like eight years of that has been once a week. Almost all of it I have done alone.

Like, of course all the typing was done by me. That shouldn’t be too surprising. It is, after all, very difficult for two or more people to use one keyboard. What I mean by writing alone is, I don’t run any of this by an editor or second set of eyes. I just type it out and post it up. Including most of the stories. This is sort of a problem.

Working with other people is always a bit of a challenge. Everyone will have competing ideas about how a thing should be done. If everyone is professional, cordial, and shares a mutual respect that doesn’t need to be a source of conflict. I have worked together with other people to create things that are, by far, better than anything we would have done individually lots of times. I would even say that it’s kind of fun. Bouncing ideas off each other. Building on ideas and making them better, funnier, deeper, richer. Working with other people can be a really good time.

When I’m writing I just haven’t found the opportunity. Maybe it is more accurate to say that I haven’t run into a willing collaborator.

I have recently started running a lot of my stories past what people call Beta readers. Really just some friends that are willing to be subjected to very early versions of my stories. I’m extremely grateful for that feedback but I also thought I could benefit from searching out a wider community. A group of people that don’t know me, have no reason to be nice to me, and could care less if I wrote or didn’t. You know, a writers group.

First I posted a few things on Reddit under the destructive readers group. I didn’t feel I was getting much actual feedback there. I still jump in and give some people notes on their work because I had hoped that was what they would do for me, but yeah, you can post stuff there and not get a lot back.

I tried joining a writing group here in the city, but that was right before Covid made in person meetups an impossibility. They only have a facebook and yahoo group and I use neither of those.

I have had a lot of luck using Discord with game development groups so I started looking there. I found one in Edmonton (only a few hours away and somewhere I regularly travel) but they chased me out because I didn’t live in Edmonton. Out of an online group. That can only meet online right now. Strange, but whatever.

I joined two other groups, but left one almost instantly when I discovered everyone else was high school age.

So now I am testing out this third one. The people seem okay, but they are definitely much younger than me. Not that surprising with an all online group. I have offered some feedback on writing posted, but I have yet to receive any for my own. Maybe it will turn out to be helpful, maybe it won’t. Maybe I’ll hop out of here and head over to a different group. We’ll see.

What I do know is, I think I am done with doing this all alone. If I want my writing to get better, I need some other people to work with.

461

Mon, 30 Aug 2021 00:00:00 +0000

This is where I would usually post part of a story I’m working on. Since it seems I can’t do that if I ever want to sell the thing, instead I will write this short blurb.

I have, at any point, two to four stories that I am working on. I find that the way my brain works, it’s better to have a few going rather than trying to plow through one that may or may not be working. Right now I have two main stories that are anywhere from a quarter to three quarters done. At least the first draft. Each of them will be around five thousand words.

It doesn’t take a long time to type up five thousand words. A few hours maybe. Putting together a story can take days, or weeks. It isn’t getting the words out that is the problem, it’s pacing, tone, pov, style. Working out the puzzle of what set of words works best for the feeling I’m trying to convey. That stuff takes time. Or at least it can.

I got about 3000 words into one story when I realized it wasn’t hitting like I wanted. I tried to solve that puzzle. It wasn’t working. So I switched gears and moved to the other story. The other story started strong but quickly floundered. I switched back. I got a little more done on the first story. I went back and forth like this for at least a week.

One morning I was exercising and one of the two stories solved itself. My brain had been running it as a background process for several days and then ‘pop’ it laid itself out. Beat to beat to beat.

I moved some style choices from one story to the other and I was off and writing again.

I don’t think there is any such thing as waiting for inspiration. To make anything you have to work through the steps and build it a little at a time. I didn’t have ‘writer’s block’. I didn’t wait for the muses to speak to me. I was doing the work. Chipping away at the task.

I get that the process I outlined above can make it seem like I waited and then all of a sudden, out of the blue, I thought of the whole story. It absolutely did not happen that way. I considered the problems, attempted to tackle them in many different ways and then, having solved several smaller puzzles, the solution to the larger puzzle came into view. It just happened to be when I was exercising and not when I was writing.

Stories are as much a mechanical puzzle as they are an emotional puzzle. Getting the words out efficiently and in the right order is part of the problem. Making them land so that the reader feels what you want them to feel is the other. It’s not enough to solve one or the other. They need to be solved together. Sometimes solving those puzzles can seem like magic. It can happen all at once. It can be surprising and exciting. In my experience, the only way to solve the puzzles is by doing the work. Gradually, even slowly, grinding through the problems until they are all complete. Sometimes that means that you get a clear picture of the whole thing early, sometimes it can seem to take ages.

It would be nice to think that one second I was spinning away on the elliptical and the next I had a fully formed story in my head, but that wouldn’t be the truth at all. I have pages of notes. I have many cut paragraphs and chunks of story written two, three, or four different ways. I did the work, solved the problems. After I had solved enough of the small ones I was able to solve the large ones all at once.

Now I only have the other story to fix, because that one isn’t working at all.

460 - Gunblade NY

Mon, 23 Aug 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Best Games - Gunblade NY

Some games just fill their niche perfectly. Simple, concise. No extraneous bits.

Gunblade NY is built to a spec.

You want a shooting game. How about if you never have to stop shooting. You want an action game. Gunblade never lets up. You want a short game you can enjoy for a few moments in an arcade or bar. Gunblade is only minutes long. You want to play with a friend. The game expects that you will.

This is a game that knows what it is, and more importantly what it isn’t. It’s quick, it’s fun, it’s ridiculous.

Let’s go back a bit. SEGA has a pretty good track record with light gun games. Most of that is on their consoles. Just a bit prior to Gunblade NY, Sega had a huge arcade hit with Virtua Cop. Virtua Cop is what you get when you take these newfangled polygon 3D game and pair it with tried and true lightgun shooting. Gunblade is what you get if you take all the best parts of Virtua Cop and get rid of everything else. All that’s left is high speed robot shooting action out the side of a physics defying helicopter. With a rip roaring soundtrack.

In a lot of these Best Games posts I like to look at a game that did one thing better, or earlier, or different, than all the other games. Something that blazed a trail. A game that designers can look to as a touchstone of the artform. Every once in a while it’s worth looking at a game that just does what it does very well with no missteps. A small, simple game that never claims to be more than it is.

In that same spirit, this is a small simple post that is only here to praise Gunblade NY. If you get a chance to play it, you should. Gunblade NY is one of the best games.

459

Mon, 16 Aug 2021 00:00:00 +0000

This weekend was the Alberta Game Jam. You know what I did. I didn’t do the Alberta Game Jam.

I thought about it. I registered for it. I forgot about it. I noticed a message about it a few hours before it was going to start. I watched the theme reveal. I got an idea for a game I could work on. Then I didn’t.

I don’t really feel bad about that.

Since using Twine a few years ago for a game jam, I have thought about using it again.

Twine is a sort of framework for text based, choose your own adventure and interactive fiction. It’s fairly easy to use and surprisingly powerful and flexible. As long as the game you are making is primarily text based.

When I made that previous jam game, I came up with a way to use 2D arrays for maps and navigation could be handled semi procedurally. I then found out that other people had the same idea and there were instructions and frameworks for just such a system. I ended up making a sort of hybrid. Taking parts of the system I found and the system I came up with to make something that worked for the random escape game I created.

Like all jam games, there were ideas that I wanted to implement that I ran out of time for. Like most jam games, I never went back to add those features.

I thought “here we go”. I had the opportunity and the idea that would let me add those missing elements to that Twine framework.

So I sat down and added those features.

I tested those features.

The features worked.

And I was done.

I found I didn’t really have any interest in making the game. It wouldn’t have been great. I don’t think I would be that happy with it. What I really wanted to do was tinker with that engine and add the stuff that I wasn’t able to before. Once I did that, well, I was done. And that’s just fine.

Sometimes you just want to make something. That something might not be that useful, or something that you need to share with others. Sometimes you just have to make a thing for your own damn self.

So I did. And I liked it. And I was okay with finishing it there and moving on to some other writing that I do want to complete. Something that I do want to get into a state that I can share with others. So I changed gears and did that instead.

All in all, not a terrible use of a weekend.

458 - Bushido Blade

Mon, 09 Aug 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Best Games - Bushido Blade

One perfect stroke. Perfectly timed. Perfectly executed. That is what we are told wins a sword fight.

I don’t know about you, but I don’t ever plan on being in a sword fight. It seems dangerous. All ,like, sharp and whatnot. Stabby. I’ll be content with sword fights of the virtual kind.

Most fighting games, even the ones with swords, are not very realistic. I can hit a character in Soul Calibur with a giant axe and they will be back up and swinging a few frames later. It doesn’t seem like that’s how that would happen. Of course I’ve never been in a sword fight, so what do I know.

I have played Bushido Blade. There are no health bars. No timers. No points. In Bushido Blade one slice to the legs or arms will maim. One good slash will kill . No counters, no reversals. Just stab and then dead. This makes every moment tense. Every button press counts. You can stand out of sword range or attempt to deflect an attack, but really, what you want to do is wait out your opponent and strike when they are defenseless. A match can last several minutes or a few seconds.

Input in Bushido Blade is incredibly slow and deliberate. That might sound like a bad thing. Most fighting games benefit from snappy responsive control. The slow control is part of the game’s design. You can’t mash buttons in Bushido Blade. You can’t jump in on your enemy. Nothing but steady precise attacks will win. The controls in Bushido Blade are telling you to slow down, focus, be patient, be decisive. Be a Samurai. Or at least pretend like you are a Samurai.

Bushido Blade isn’t the sort of game that gets played at tournaments. There aren’t going to be many master level players out there. There is a level of luck involved in the outcome of a fight. Skill alone won’t win. It just depends which player blinks first, strikes slowest, or misreads the opponent. Long stalemates are as common as instant wins. It’s not the best fighting game. What it is, is uncompromising.

When Bushido Blade was developed, the fighting game genre was in full swing. If you were looking to make a new one, there were many strong examples to “borrow” ideas from. Bushido Blade carved its own path. It’s a path that I don’t think any game will ever wander down again.

Games are made to be enjoyed. There are a lot of aspects of Bushido Blade that are not enjoyable. Stiff controls, impossibly high penalties for failure, and a singular focus that is almost adversarial to a casual player. There are a lot of aspects of Bushido Blade that would never pass a focus group or play testing. The game would be labeled “not fun” and that would be that.

What is here though, is incredibly compelling. You want to play round after round. You want to try different tactics, different weapons. You want to change up your attacks and play with adjusting stances. It’s a game that you want to play. You want to understand how and why it was made. How an idea so pure and uncompromised made it to release as a commercial product.

In spite of itself Bushido Blade is an excellent game and a really good time. There is some developer out there right now trying to capture that magic in their own uncompromised vision, and I wish them luck. Maybe they will be able to execute with one perfect stroke.

Bushido Blade is one of the best games.

457

Mon, 02 Aug 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Almost

456

Mon, 26 Jul 2021 00:00:00 +0000

This is a breakdown of my process on this painting so far.

First I start with a sketch. I wanted to create a tall, inline composition for this one. Something that looked powerful and imposing, but with bright, rich colors.

I didn't really like the feature characters head position so I adjusted it from a downward stare, to a more imperious looking chin lift. I also made the foreground figure larger with a more reclined or off balance pose.

The basic composition was working for me, but the perspective of the feature character was sort of all over the place. I searched around for some better reference but didn't find anything that suited my needs. Remembering that I am a 3D artist, I posed a simple 3D character and set up a low angle camera. That image, along with the figure reference that I gathered (I literally just googled stuff like 'wrestler low angle' and 'athlete leaning')

Then it's on to colors. I picked a palette that I thought might be directly counter to the image. If the characters are about being powerful and imposing, the colors are the opposite of that. Pink and blue that strays into the pastel and neon.

And now it's time to refine the features, sculpt the characters with highlights and shadows and just generally start finishing the damn thing.

When I have it all wrapped up I'll post the final image. bit more to go.

455

Mon, 19 Jul 2021 00:00:00 +0000

You have to start somewhere.

For a while I have been doing concept paintings based on the game I am making. This is the sort of thing that might typically be done before any game assets get made or early in development. Since I am the one doing all the work on this game at the moment I’ll do it in whatever order I damn well please. In this case that means I have set up a sort of feedback loop. The stuff I do in the game informs the paintings and vice versa. It’s a nonlinear workflow.

One thing that is absolutely linear for me though, I can’t paint without first doing a sketch. Usually many sketches. So here is a set of sketches that I will be turning into a painting. Next week I will have more of a breakdown and I will walk through some of the process of making a painting.

454

Mon, 12 Jul 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Roaring cars collide

Shattered fragments fill the air

You do it again

453

Mon, 05 Jul 2021 00:00:00 +0000

I’m just going to write this one as an aside.

A little something that isn’t what I am really writing. What I am really writing is another short story, but I have recently found out that if you actually want to get short stories published in places where people might read them you can’t post them on your own personal blog. Now I understand the initial reasoning behind that. A publisher doesn’t want to pay money for a story that can be found for free on the internet. I also think that sort of thinking ignores the realities of the internet. Almost anything can be had for free if you are willing to look around for it. Text is especially susceptible to being copied and redistributed. The other reality is that people are pretty lazy. The types of magazines and web sites that might publish one of my stories are probably safe. People aren’t hunting around for pirated sci-fi stories. They are going to the outlets that they know. The places that curate stories. They are either listening to the ad sponsored podcast versions of stories, or paying a small amount for the digital subscription, or reading off the ad sponsored web page. That a story exists on my blog, a blog that very few people read, it won’t really factor into their bottom line. Even if it were the blog of a very popular writer, there would likely be very little impact to a publisher.

Still, they have their rules and that means that as long as I am trying to sell any stories I will have to either pull early drafts from here or just never post them to begin with. It’s a bummer, but that’s how it goes.

I suppose if anyone reading this wants an early version of anything I am writing you could just contact me and I will hook you up.

And now back to writing what I was writing before this aside. It involves aliens. And mixed martial arts. Should be fun.

452 - Trial Bike

Mon, 28 Jun 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Best Games - Trial Bike

Imagine that all of the controls for a game exist on two axes. Up, down, backward, forward. That’s it. That’s all. I mean, Pac-Man manages to operate on only two axes, so maybe it isn’t that difficult to imagine. Now, how many games can you think of that both only use two axes for input and sparked a decades spanning franchise. A franchise that remains successful to this day? It’s probably only Pac-Man and Trial Bike, or Trials, as the series would come to be known.

I’ll back up slightly. Trials, in the real world, is a competition where people riding motorcycles attempt to climb, hop, and navigate increasingly bizarre obstacles. Rocks, logs, concrete blocks, child play structures, stacked barrels. If you could find it in a landscaping storage yard, these folks will probably ride a motorcycle on it. Some of the obstacles are twice as tall as the riders zipping over them and they roll up these things like a squirrel climbing a tree. It’s unreal to watch. I can honestly say that Trial Bike was my introduction to the sport. It’s the sort of thing that would pop up on late night sports networks between infomercials. So, of course, It’s amazing source material for a video game.

Here we have this Finnish game from the early 2000s that borrows its theme from an obscure motorcycle obstacle course competition. The original game was made in Java and then ported to Flash. You could play it in a browser. Nothing about that description should make you think ‘franchise spanning two decades’, but new games in the Trails series come out at a fairly regular pace. Not only that, they are still made by the original developer. Now they are highly polished 3D affairs with lots of particle effects and ragdoll physics, but they haven’t really deviated from the initial concept. Ride a motorcycle, climb obstacles, try not to crash. It just works.

The other thing that works is the control scheme. Web games of the early 2000’s were fairly simple out of necessity. There was no real way to stream high quality graphics to you at that time. You couldn’t use a webGL plugin to play a game in your browser. Web games were quick things that you could drop a few minutes on here and there. Unfortunately that does mean that a lot of them have been lost to time. There probably aren’t many that you would still want to play, but from a preservation standpoint, it’s upsetting that some games might be lost forever. Tangents aside, the control scheme of Trial Bike is really something special.

Like I said before, Trial Bike only uses two axes, or four buttons. Forward and back control the throttle and brake on your bike, up and down control where the rider balances their weight on the bike. When you press down the rider sits lower on the bike, but also further back on the seat. When you press up the rider stands and leans over the handlebars. Shifting the riders weight changes how and where your bike grips the ground. Press down and forward on the throttle and you can make you bike do a wheely. Press up and slam on the brakes kicks your back wheel up into an endo. Feather each of these controls just right and you are doing some Trials! You climb straight up that pipe that looked impossible to scale. You hop those boxes and land each tire perfectly straddling a dangerous gap. You ride just on the edge of control. You only use four buttons.

The legacy of Trial Bike is sort of a wild one and it’s really no surprise. Trial Bike is one of the best games.

451

Mon, 21 Jun 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Two weeks ago I posted up a painting. This is one of a series of concept paintings that I have been doing for my game. The aim with all of these paintings has been to create a sort of 70’s album cover aesthetic. The sort of fantasy art that would have been printed on 12 inch vinyls.

While I could have tried to just straight up copy the style of someone like Roger Dean, that would never have felt like something that I would actually paint. Instead, I started shifting whatever my own style is in the general direction of 70’s fantasy art.

The last painting I did was fine. I like some elements of it. The figure has some good energy and the palette fits the era, but I just didn’t like the painting. That happens. I think I actually like about three paintings from the entire series. Sometimes I don’t even like those. I read recently that the reason artists don’t like their own art is because it looks like they made it. I can second that. Anything that looks like I made it, I’m usually not that interested in.

Just to be absolutely clear, I am not some self flagellating artist. I don’t have a perfectionist complex or think that nothing is ever good enough. I’m just not that interested in looking at stuff I made, because I remember making it. More than that, I know that I can always do more. It’s very easy to see the potential in a thing that I made because I typically have no fear of changing it. If I want to repaint a thing, I repaint it. No big deal. When I look at someone else’s art I get to dissect it. I can imagine how it was made and reverse engineer the stroke choices, the techniques, the tricks. That is much more interesting to me.

Since that last painting wasn’t really doing it for me, I decided to try again. Usually I like to move on and paint something new since I will probably learn more from painting something new. This time I painted the same subject with a similar composition, but I attempted a bunch of the techniques I have been gathering from 70’s album art.

Maybe it’s successful, maybe it isn’t. That isn’t really for me to judge. I mean, I made it. I enjoyed making it. But I did make it, so I don’t really find it that interesting. Time to move on to the next one.

450 - Death Rally

Mon, 14 Jun 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Best Games - Death Rally

This post is not really about a game. I mean, don’t get me wrong, Death Rally is great. It’s as much fun now as it was when it launched as an Apogee published shareware title 25 years ago. This post is about first steps.

In 1995 a group of Finnish demo scene kids set out to make a game.

Let’s walk this back a little. The demo scene, if you’re not familiar, might be described as a loose network of extreme hacking clubs. These are the type of people that like to make dazzling animations set to electronic music on Commodore 64 and Amiga Machines. Sometimes long after the usable lifetime of the machine. They like to compact an unreasonable amount of data into a miniscule space just to watch it sing and dance. These are the type of folks that want to see what they can make a computer do. They are most often European. Not sure why. It might have something to do with the Amiga.

This group of demo scene kids had been dabbling with the PC. In 1990, no one would have tried to make a fast action game on a PC. PC’s were primarily business machines. Beige monoliths with green and amber crt screens. Good at crunching numbers, awful at moving pixels. Machines much more suited to spreadsheets than Mario. In five short years PC’s went from ascii art to Commander Keen to Doom. Formidable graphics and sound advancements, along with the concept of shareware, had made the PC the place to play for up and coming developers.

That’s the world that this group of Finnish demo scene kids were working in. They knew how to make a PC sing, and they wanted to try their hand at making a game. They pitched a car combat game to Apogee, the shareware people, and got to work. They needed some writing done, so they got their friend who was studying English literature to do it. They were in the right place at the right time, yes, but they had arrived there with the right skills.

Death Rally is a PC take on arcade and console driving games like Super Sprint and Badlands. It remains a great game to pick up and play. The controls feel great and the car combat is satisfying, if maybe a bit too difficult. It looks like a SNES or Genesis game that got dislodged from its cartridge and somehow ended up on a PC floppy disk. Suffice to say, the game is great but the real reason I selected Death Rally for a Best Games has less to do with the game and more to do with who made it.

The team at Remedy who made Death Rally went on to create Max Payne, Alan Wake, and Control. Some of those same demo scene kids are still there, still at it, making dazzling images set to phenomenal music. Death Rally was a first step. It’s a very good one. While their games diverged from Death Rally in terms of genre and point of view, one ingredient remains. You can tell that these games are made by people that aren’t aware of what the boundaries are. They don’t know what the ‘right and proper’ way to make a game is. They are still demo scene kids trying to pack as much of everything they love into every single game. As a result the pacing and tone of each of their games is slightly different than what most studios would make.

So there it is. As a first step, Death Rally is really quite phenomenal. Go give it a try. It’s one of the best games.

449

Mon, 07 Jun 2021 00:00:00 +0000

448

Mon, 31 May 2021 00:00:00 +0000

First, write something.

I write a lot here about games. I write here about game development. I write about art. I sometimes even write about movies. I write about all of these things, and even though I have been writing about them for about ten years, I never really write about something I spend a lot of my time doing. Writing.

It’s tough. I feel like I know a fair bit about the subject of games. Games and movies are absolutely the entertainment mediums that I have spent the most time in my life enjoying and analyzing. While they may not always be great opinions, I do have opinions on those forms of art. That means it’s pretty easy for me to rattle off a thousand words or so about some game or movie. The thoughts are all right there on the surface. I rarely write about writing because I don’t really feel like I have a lot of expertise in the field. I have opinions, but I am absolutely not an on the subject.

All that said, here are some thoughts on writing. At least how I do it. You can do it any way you like. If you have been thinking that you would like to write something but didn’t know where to start, this post might give you some ideas about how to get going. And more importantly, how to keep going when you feel stuck.

If you read this page at all regularly, it probably won’t come as a surprise to you that I don’t edit these posts very much. I read them over (usually). I fix major mistakes (usually) but I don’t pore over them. I don’t test and compare word choices or sentence structure. These are stream of consciousness posts, for the most part. When I write stories though, that is an entirely different beast.

When I write stories I like to get a first draft out of my head as quickly as I can. I stick to the concept and sort of see where it leads. I have been informed that this is the panster method. As in ‘by the seat of your pants’. The opposite of the pantser method is the plotter method, where you plot out every beat of your story before writing. So I suppose I am sort of a pantser-plotter, because when I edit, I like to plan.

Once the first draft is down and out of my head I feel like I have stuff to play with. Some paint to smear around. Some clay to work into shape. It gets fun, but also a little frightening. What if I plop the wrong paint daub down or lop off the wrong bit of clay. Something that was working might now look like a heap of word trash. That’s the fear and adventure of editing.

I open up a new document, or several new documents, and start making plans. I write out timelines. I gather research notes. I write short character biographies. All of this stuff will be only for me. Then I start working my way through the story pulling out parts, changing them, moving them around the timeline, clarifying them, and weaving them back into the rest of the story.

I take most of my inspiration from film so I tend to write in scenes. This is helpful for me since I can usually pull a scene out, change it, and put it back without disrupting the scenes around it. At least not too much. When I plan, each one of these scenes is usually represented by one or two lines that sum up what happens, and why the scene exists. The “why the scene exists” part is especially useful when it comes to cutting or removing scenes. Lots of times changing one scene will make another scene redundant and it becomes easier to pull it out. Of course I never just delete a scene. I cut it out and paste it into my orphan scene document, where all the ideas I liked but didn’t work go to spend languishing in digital eternity.

All of this is probably pretty standard editing workflow stuff. I’m sure there are tricks and techniques that authors use all of the time that dwarf my feeble nonsense. I’ll keep adding those tools as I carry on learning to write.

I think that might be the part I like about writing. There will never be any end to it. There will always be something new to learn. Some way to get better. Some new way to string one word after another to tell a story, or describe a process.

Really, I just bang out my thousand or so words here once a week and then write a few thousand more in the times between. That makes me feel like I accomplished something. It might never grow to anything larger than that, but I suppose that is okay too.

While writing this post, I removed two full paragraphs that didn’t need to be here. I changed a few dozen sentences, and several hundred words. That’s about as stream of consciousness as I get. So that distills it. My advice on writing anything. First, write something. Then read it to see if it makes any sense. Then change the parts that don’t. That may sound too simple but it’s that first step. The one that starts everything. First, write something.

447

Mon, 24 May 2021 00:00:00 +0000

I think I finally finished editing one of my stories. Kara’s Spine is a short, near future, sci if story about an elite athlete who receives a life changing surgery. I did a few rounds of edits and improvements on it over the last few weeks. A huge thank you goes out to the beta readers who helped me find places to revise and improve it. They know who they are. It might not be perfect, but I think it turned out alright. If you send me a note I can tell you were to read it and let me know what you think. Good or bad.

446

Mon, 17 May 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Working on my characters. Getting some Astar vibes.

445 - The Outer Wilds

Mon, 10 May 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Best Games - The Outer Wilds

Movies are linear, plays are linear, songs are linear, books are linear. They can all contain stories told from start to middle to end. There are Choose Your Own Adventure books and even some Choose Your Own Adventure style video things, but they are all, at their core, linear. You can make choices that change the moment to moment story, but you can’t experience that story in a way other than the way the authors intended. You can try but it just won’t make any sense.

The linear nature of stories isn’t a limitation. It’s a feature. Imagine trying to decipher a film that has been chopped up and rearranged in a random order. Each edit decoupled chronologically from the ones before or after it. I’m sure it would make the rest of your experimental film class very happy, but no one else would want to watch it. Our squishy meat brains can’t deal well with non-linear time. I mean, we can intellectualize it. We can wrap our minds around the idea of it. We just aren’t very entertained by it.

Now imagine this scenario. You walk out into the woods. You come across an abandoned cabin. Inside that cabin are the remnants of a life you weren’t aware of until now. Bits of writing. The places where people slept and ate. Things they collected but were unable to take with them when they left. You gaze around at all of this and then head back home. All of those tableaux tell a story through clues and inferences. It’s a story that you build in your head during the quiet parts of your hike. These sights become a story that you tell to yourself.

The story you create is linear. You left home, you saw things, you came back. Beginning, middle, end. It satisfies the arrow of time that our brains demand. But there was no authorial hand directing you to see the kitchen of the cabin before the bedroom. What is the story you tell yourself when you examine a poem etched into the doorframe before seeing the jar filled with potting soil or the yellowing single mattress? Is it different than when you see the unwashed dishes in the sink first? Does reading the signature on a painting determine what you think of the rest of the house? Does the story of the space feel different depending on how you experience it? This is storytelling through discovery and it is something only the real world, or a game, can do.

There are a great many games that tell their stories through discovery. This style has a name. Environmental storytelling. Most times, environmental storytelling is additive to a more explicit linear story. A narrator or quest giver will direct the player down a path and the environmental storytelling will be used to fill in the gaps. Apparently, a lot of game devs imagine that a person might write on a wall with their own blood rather than attempting to stop bleeding it. Unlikely, but it does tell a story I suppose.

The Outer Wilds is straight, uncut, and distilled environmental storytelling. Any bit of story, any strand of narrative, is something you, the player, must seek out or encounter on your travels. Not one bit of important story is required for you to ‘beat’ the game. You can easily bypass all of it. The entire game can be finished in minutes, but there is enough story written and presented visually to fill dozens of hours. This story won’t come to you. You will have to wander into those woods, open the door to that cabin, and find it for yourself. This can happen in literally any order. There are clues and processes that you discover while playing The Outer Wilds that will lead you to new mysteries and additional vignettes, but there are a lot of tales that you will come upon by chance.

In your life there will be stories that you remember because they were told to you. Everyone has their own favorite childhood movie or book. The sort of thing that you will recall with nostalgia years and decades later. These stories will be important because they mirror or inform a part of your life. Songs will bring back memories of impactful moments. These stories are tied to you, but they are separate from you. Distinct. Maybe more important are the stories you experience.

The Outer Wilds has its own story to tell. It’s a story that is as grand as it is simple and personal. It is melancholic, joyus, introspective, and harrowing. Most important, it is a story that you can only experience. No one can tell you this story second hand. You can’t watch a video of that first descent into the maelstrom of Giant’s Deep and feel what the game is presenting to you. Multiple trips into Dark Bramble wouldn’t stick with you unless you have felt your own pulse quicken in preparation for the trek. Stitching together the tales of Nomai travellers who came before you would have no impact if they were read from a script. They need to be found and discovered and mined for meaning. Each scrap of text landing harder as they lock, puzzle like, into empty spots in this story that you are telling to yourself.

The Outer Wilds is a walk in the woods where you stumble across a splayed out campsite. An abandoned cabin. A story that ended before you arrived. A story filled with danger and mystery and lightness and sadness. A story that you now have to tell yourself. It’s a walk in the woods on a universal scale. It’s also a small story that roots itself inside you, because the only way to really know this story is to experience it.

The Outer Wilds will be remembered as a pivot point in video game storytelling. It might not be a thing that can be replicated or even emulated. It might be that only the relatively small number of people who will ever play it will carry that story with them. Without a doubt though, The Outer Wilds will be a touchpoint for every game developer and serious storyteller creating from this point on. In a medium that values experiences over traditional, linear, storytelling, it is an important artifact. The one that showed how it is done.

I look forward to playing the descendants of The Outer Wilds style of storytelling. Truly some amazing experiences on the horizon.

And storytelling is only one of the reasons that The Outer Wilds is one of the best games. Really, you should play it.

444

Mon, 03 May 2021 00:00:00 +0000

I had a different thing queued up to write about this week, but I did another revision of the story over here.

It’s getting much closer to ‘done’ so if you came here before, saw it, and chose to wait until it was done, you could probably read it now. I meant to condense some stuff and ended up adding some. It happens.

443

Mon, 26 Apr 2021 00:00:00 +0000

I did a pretty major edit to the story over here. I think it has some promise and after reading a bunch of articles, some web how to’s, and more than 1 book on the topic, I finally have some idea how to fix the structural problems I keep running into when I’m writing. I doubt that I have cleared up 100% of the problems with that particular story, but I have pushed it further in the direction of ‘good’.

442 - Moto Racer

Mon, 19 Apr 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Best Games - Moto Racer

Moto Racer is a deeply unfair game. Every slight bend in the road could end your race. A mistimed button press could mean the difference between finishing first or last. Nailing every corner, every straightaway, every jump is absolutely required to win. That’s on the medium difficulty. Moto Racer demands perfection.

That might sound like a recipe for a bad game. Players typically don’t want to trial and error their way through most games, let alone a racing game. Racing games are supposed to be about speed and timing and weaving through opponents. Taking advantage of opportunities when they present themselves. Balancing aggression with racing tactics. Moto Racer isn’t that type of game.

There is a certain joy in learning and then perfecting a system. Optimizing to the minimum number of movements in the shortest span of time. That is the type of game Moto Racer is. You are presented with a handful of tracks in two different modes. In the street racing mode it’s all about speed and careful use of a turbo that boosts your bike forward, but also decimates your maneuverability. In motocross mode it’s about drifting hairpin turns and hitting jumps with the right amount of speed so you land cleanly with your speed intact. In both modes you will have to hit buttons and lean your bike at exactly the right time lap after lap after lap.

That’s really what this game is about. Moto Racer doesn’t boast a realistic physics model, or complex tracks, or deep upgrades. It’s about learning the tracks, perfecting the tracks, and then trying to shave millisecond off your lap times. It feels like racing.

You will not win the first time you play Moto Racer. Every time you start a new track, you will lose. It won’t matter how well you did on the previous track. It is unfair in that way. It is unfair as a game. Run a track 5, 10, 20 times though, and you will start to memorize it. When to let off the turbo and when to open it up. How early to start a turn, and when to dive out of a corner. You will master the tracks and you will win. You will have earned it.

Moto Racer might not be able to stand up to modern racing games, but the developers added something to the game that a lot of its current day counterparts lack. The heart pounding feeling of pushing your precision to the edge and succeeding.

Moto Racer is brilliant and it’s one of the best games.

441

Mon, 12 Apr 2021 00:00:00 +0000

A full first draft of the new story is up here. Like all first drafts it’s a little janky in places and will have errors, typos, and plain busted stuff all up in there. If you read it and have suggestions on how to correct that jank, please let me know. I’ll probably give it a couple weeks to breath and then revisit the story to punch it up. I have another one that I am in the process of punching up, so I’ll probably do that first. In any case, if you read it, I hope you enjoy it.

440

Mon, 05 Apr 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Added a few more pages. I thought this one was only going to be about 5 pages, but I blew past that and I’m only about half done. So probably closer to 15 or 20 pages when it’s all done. Not super short, but regular short story length. I’m getting better at predicting how long a story will be but I’m not good at it yet.

439

Mon, 29 Mar 2021 00:00:00 +0000

just a brief intermission. This is Nomad Sculpt. It’s a sculpting app for the Ipad and it rips.

438

Mon, 22 Mar 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Continuing to write this small story over here. I’ve plotted it out to only be between 5 and ten pages, so I’ll probably have it all wrapped up next week. If I were you, I would wait until then to read it.

437

Mon, 15 Mar 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Started a new one over here. It won’t be a very long one, but it might take a week or two to get it all out.

436

Mon, 08 Mar 2021 00:00:00 +0000

This is the Sorcerer of Vapor. Enjoy.

435

Mon, 01 Mar 2021 00:00:00 +0000

This page will be moving. Again.

I started this thing on Blogger. I only wrote about 20-30 posts before moving it all over to Weebly. I’ve spent the last several years posting at least once a week to weebly and now I’m moving again. It’s just not the right platform for what I’m doing.

Last time the move wasn’t too much of a problem. A couple dozen posts ranging anywhere from a few hundred words to just around a thousand. That was mostly just a copy and paste job. Well, copy, paste, and change some links and image locations.

Now I have added more than 400 posts. A dozen short stories. Some interactive fiction. I can’t really copy and paste all of that. I couldn’t even begin to imagine manually fixing all of the images and links.

Weebly doesn’t offer a great way to download blog content so I had to rip my own site from their servers in a really clumsy way. It kinda of sucked, but I have all of the content sort of in a messy pile. Now I have to organize that pile into something I can put up again. So, what to do, what to do?

I wasn’t about to do it manually, so I wrote a program. A pretty simple C# program that sifts through the pile, pulls out each of the over 400 posts, dusts them off, updates the image locations, repairs as many of the links as it can, and writes them back into cleanly formatted new files with the proper names and dates. It isn’t a complex program, but I don’t really write this sort of thing so it was a bit of a challenge. It took the better part of a day to make sure that the resulting posts contain the bare minimum of errors. On the upside, it only took about a day. Trying to move them over manually would have taken ages and I can’t imagine how monotonously soul crushing that task would have been. Just taking the chance that I would accidentally read an old post was too much to risk.

I still have some organizing and design cleanup to do before I can fully move the site over to its new home. When that happens I will post again to mention any changes to the RSS feed. I have two or three bugs to squash before the full move but it should be no longer than a couple weeks away.

434 - Burnout Paradise

Mon, 22 Feb 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Best Games - Burnout Paradise

Does the idea of spinning donuts around the infield of a baseball stadium sound appealing? Would you like to launch a car off a ramp, sail an unreasonable distance, and nail a perfect 4 wheel landing losing no momentum? Would you like to nudge a supercar into a barrier and watch it crumple like foil knowing there would be no consequences or injuries? What if you could drive impossibly fast not only over the road, but through buildings, on train tracks, on park pathways, and more? Burnout Paradise has you covered.

Burnout Paradise might be a perfect driving game. You will notice that I didn’t write ‘Racing Game’. Burnout Paradise is a driving game. It’s an exploration game. It’s a toy car sandbox game. There is racing in it but it’s not, strictly speaking, a racing game. The draw of the game is not the racing. I suppose for some people it might be but the game isn’t really designed around the racing. It’s designed around the driving.

No matter what you do in the open world of Burnout Paradise, the game tracks it. How far you drive. How fast you drive. How much time you spend in the air. How many flips and spins you do. How many cars you crash, both your own and your opponents. If it’s a trackable stat the game probably tracks it. The game tracks it and then rewards you for it. It incentivizes driving over winning races or completing challenges. Burnout Paradise is a game about driving.

There are a lot of people who didn’t like it when the Burnout series shifted from the focused event based structure to a flowing open world with potential events at every intersection. There were complaints that it took too long to get from one event to another, or that it was too easy to get lost in the labyrinth of city streets and shortcuts. Not liking a game is no real crime. There are and were certainly other games for people who didn’t enjoy the open world of Paradise, but I can’t help but feel like they missed the point.

It’s a driving game not a racing game.

The events are secondary to the reason you load the game up. You play Burnout Paradise to drive. You play it to drive in the most irresponsible and chaotic way possible. You play it to manifest fantastical driving situations. You play it to enjoy the feeling of speed and impact and exploration.

Burnout Paradise is about driving and it is one of the best games.

433

Mon, 15 Feb 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Imagine you were to get to see some amazing old sculpture. A real museum piece. The Venus De Milo. You get your eyes on the Venus De Milo. You’re looking at it and you want to steal it. There is a museum curator watching you, there are security guards, other museum patrons, etc. There is absolutely no way they will let you do that. Also, the statue has to weigh close to 2 tons. You aren’t going to be hauling it out on your back, but you can take a picture of it. Maybe a lot of pictures. Maybe a lot of pictures with a camera that can capture depth and minor variations in the surface of the marble. Pits, cracks, dust, all of it. You and your camera take a quick buzz around the Venus snapping shots the whole way, and bug out.

Now that you have all of this information in images, it should be possible for you to start with a blank approximation of the Venus De Milo and recreate all of those details. Will it be exactly the same? No, of course not. Could you deceive the other art thieves with it? Will it look convincing enough from a distance to get you into all of the art thief parties? Only one way to find out.

Now since I do most of my art stealing digitally and figuratively, I set up a tool to make that high detail image capture easier.

You see, when you set up digital 3D models for use in real time applications, that is exactly what you do. You take heavy, detailed, high resolution art and you crush it down to something that a computer can draw to a screen 30, 60, 90, or 120 times a second. The better you can steal that detail and pack it up into images, the more convincing the final result will be.

Some stuff I have been working on required nice seamless tiles of high detailed fakery. There are tools and techniques that let you do this, but most of them are clumsy, slow, or expensive. I spent some time this past week to fix that.

Just to be clear, I haven’t made anything revolutionary here. This isn’t some sort of stand alone tool. I put together the equivalent of a carpenters jig. A simple tool that helps you to do a more complicated job more easily.

If that sort of thing doesn’t seem up your alley you can bail now. It’s okay, I get it. I’m going to break down how I set up one of my tools in Blender.

Let’s start with the camera. I set up a single orthographic camera right above my work area and set the orthographic scale to 2. I set it to 2 because I will be using a 2x2 plane as the extents of my texture. You can set it to whatever size you like, but I find this works for me.

I also set its render size to 4096 x 4096. You could set it to 2k or 8k or whatever size you want, but I wanted nice high resolution square textures at the end of this process. Your textures don’t need to be square, but that’s for you to decide.

You will also notice that I set the output to the openEXR file format. This isn’t strictly necessary but openEXR can contain a 32bit color depth and a linear color profile. sRGB non-linear color spaces, like 59.94hz NTSC signals, is one of those things that should probably be un-invented. Since we can’t do that, keeping your textures in a linear format, while not entirely required, is good texture hygiene.

Under Render Properties I set the display device in the color management dropdown to None. This prevents visual color crunching from alternate color profiles.

This is what the camera setup looks like with a 2x2 plane under it. Not really very interesting but it works.

Now that the camera is taken care of I need to model something under there. I quickly made up this screw head, since it’s the sort of thing that you wouldn’t want to model a thousand of and is a great candidate for casting off to the 2D world of texture images.

And this is what the camera sees.

That’s great and all but not really useful. To make it useful I needed to set up some materials.

This is what the same screw head looks like when I apply a normal shader to it. The normal shader encodes, in rgb pixels, the way that light would bounce off of a surface if it were 3 dimensional rather than 2 dimensional. The colors represent the deviation from the surface normal (perpendicular to the face). So it looks bumpy without actually being bumpy.

And this is what it looks like when I apply a depth shader to it. This one colors the surface in a smooth gradient from black to white based on the distance between two objects. I made these objects two non-rendering empties because that was a useful way to represent them. You could use anything. The distance between world 0 and the camera. The bounding box z dimensions of the model, or just some arbitrary numbers.

And this is the shader node graph for both the depth and normal shaders. I combined them for convenience and set up a switch to go between them, but you wouldn’t need to do that.

Since the entire depth graph is visible I will go over that first.

I’m passing all of these into an emission shader because emission is a pure representation of the output color we are looking for. No lights or shadows mucking things up. I get the position of the geometry that has the material applied to it with the geometry node and pass that to a Separate XYZ node. We are only interested in the Z position so I take that and pass it to a Map Range node. I want to take the distance between my two measurement objects, my ZMin and ZMax, and remap that distance to a 0-1 scale. This will give us a pure black to pure white gradient. I pipe that result into the emission shader and then pipe that to the material output. In this case I go though my mix shader for switching from depth to normal, but I wouldn’t need to.

You might notice that the ZMin and ZMax are purple. That is because those Value nodes contain a float driven by the Z position of my two measurement objects.

You can drive damn near any value with any other in blender just by right clicking on the input field and clicking on add driver. It’s something I don’t do nearly enough of but it’s very handy.

Now for the normal map. As you can see up there I use another geometry node (I could have used the same one, but whatever) and pass that into a node group that converts the normal vector into color data.

This is what’s in that node group.

I could absolutely clean this up and simplify it, but this is working. I’m taking the normal vector and converting each channel into the appropriate color. It set up like this because I was messing with each of the channels for a bit to get them tuned. I might clean it up, but it’s working now so I probably won’t bother. The Combine XYZ node is doubling for a Combine RGB node, but numbers are numbers and Blender doesn’t seem to care what node they come out of.

I take the new colors, put them into an emission shader and we’re almost done.

Now for the real reason I put together this setup. Baking.

The common workflow for this sort of setup is to make an empty image texture and ‘bake’ the detail from your screwheads or whatever into that image texture. Then you save that out to a file and you’re done. Great, right?.

No, it blows. Baking is slow, uses a different render path than I’m using to display the results, and sometimes contains artifacts and issues that you can’t see before the bake is done. I had depth and normal maps where two adjacent pixels that should have had a lot of contrast between each other turn into a mushy mess when baking.

To get the result out of the new method I use EEVEE (Blenders real time rendering engine) in the camera viewport and I press this.

Using this new method those pixels come out perfect. What you see is what you get. Not only that, but when reapplying the depth information, I now get perfectly sharp edges and details. What is the cost of this increased precision? Well I went from bake times I could measure in minutes to render times I can measure in seconds. More precise, faster, and easier to iterate. It’s vastly better.

Then it’s a click of Image - Save As to save the OpenEXR file and I’m done. I think that, in the future, I could set up a python script to run through the whole process for any maps I have to export and it could be a one click type of process. For now though, this works, and more important, it works so much better than baking.

Of course this works for flat surface details. Stealing the detail off the Venus De Milo might take a bit more work, but I have some ideas about that I might sort out one day.

432

Mon, 08 Feb 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Last Monday I posted a link. Just a link. The link led to the game that I finished during the Global Game Jam. Like everyone participating in the jam, I saw the theme on Friday, worked on the game Friday night and Saturday, and finished it up on Sunday.

That’s it. That is all the time you have to go from a topic to a concept to a finished game. Hopefully that’s enough time because you won’t be getting any more.

Even if you manage to finish up a game in that amount of time, the game you make will likely be bad, but fair’s fair, all games are bad in the first few days.

I had one main goal going into this jam. I was going to make a 2D game. Every other jam game I have worked on, except the text based ones, have included some 3D modelling at some point. So that was my hard limit. No 3D. I also wanted to do something with really tight pixel and palette restrictions. I went with only 6 colours and a resolution of 160 x 144. That was the resolution of the original Gameboy. I figured if that was enough for Tetris it would be enough for me. I thought about using an entirely 2D engine or framework, but I opted to use Unity since I am the most familiar with it and time is limited during a game jam. I also decided to do this one solo. Meaning that everything that isn’t included in the engine, I made. Graphics, I make em. Sounds, I make em. Game code, I write it. Physics… well physics comes with the engine but I did connect up all the systems to make a string that wouldn’t just suddenly break for no apparent reason. Getting that to work was much more difficult than I had anticipated.

Since I posted the game right after the jam, I have gone back to it and fixed up a couple of things to make it slightly less aggravating. It’s not what I, or any person who enjoys things, would call good. It’s bad, but at least it’s bad in the way that I intended. Also the sound doesn’t work in the web build. I’m not sure exactly why, but it might be something to do with not having a Start or Intro screen. I usually try to avoid having an intro screen for jam games just as a sort of aesthetic choice. I want people to be in and playing the game instantly. No preamble. No lore dump. Just load it up and start playing. Seems like, in this case, I might need to create a start screen to get sounds to play during the rest of the game.

I have participated in quite a few game jams. They are great for knocking the creative cobwebs off and getting you working and thinking about developing something functional. You don’t have time to get bogged down in trying to create an elegant solution to every problem. You just have to make it work. And when the weekend is over, so is the project. That’s it. You never have to think about it again. Game jams are excellent prototype, evaluate, and move on, training. I don’t tend to go back to jam games trying to make them better or continue developing them. If they are broken, I leave them that way. For this one, I will probably make a slight exception. I would like the sound to work on the web build, but I don’t want to put much time into fixing it. If I can get the sound working by adding a start screen, I suppose that is not a massive task. If that doesn’t work I fear the game will be doomed to silence forever. And that will be okay. After all, it’s a game I made over a literal weekend.

I did learn the ins and outs of Unity’s new input system, and that’s pretty good. I did learn about the 2D side of the Unity physics system, and that’s pretty good too. If I can get the sound working I will call the jam an unqualified success. Even if the game is sort of aggravating and not all that great. I’ll see what I can do.

431

Mon, 01 Feb 2021 00:00:00 +0000

https://eturnip.itch.io/getting-out-of-it

430

Mon, 25 Jan 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Some slow progress continues over here. I mostly wrote stuff that is out of sequence, so I haven’t included that, but I actually went back and did some writing in sequence as well. All told I think I only added about 1000 words to what I had before, but eventually I will be able to join it up to the stuff that comes further down the road. Eventually.

429 - Police 911 - The Keisatsukan

Mon, 18 Jan 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Best Games - Police 911 - The Keisatsukan

This one is a bit of a bummer. Not because the game is bad. The title right there says Best Games, and this game is fantastic. No, it’s a bummer because Police 911 is almost impossible to play now.

I think every game that I have written about in Best Games is pretty easy to get a hold of and play. A lot of them are available to play through your web browser with no special setup at all. While that might not be the best way to play them, they are available.

Police 911 is an arcade game that came out in 2000. It’s a lightgun shooting game that makes heavy use of motion tracking years before the Nintendo Wii would popularize motion controls.

First, here’s specifically why it’s a bummer. The only ways to play Police 911 are on an original arcade machine, or on a Playstation 2 port that was never released in North America. To play the PS2 port you will need to have a special Konami made usb camera and a Konami made light gun. You will also need a CRT screen. Also the PS2 will have to be able to play Japanese games. It’s worth noting here that none of this equipment is currently being manufactured so you would have to scour the used market to acquire any of it. It’s sort of a lot of kit to assemble just to play this one game, good as it is.

That aside, here is why it was so good. Police 911 is sort of slow. Well, it’s slow when it needs to be. You might say ‘hey that sounds like a bad thing for an action game to be’ but being slow is what makes this game great. This is the arcade machine. It has a place for you to stand so that you are the perfect distance from the screen, properly centered, and directly beneath some sensors. Those sensors keep track of where your head is at all times. This means that while you are playing the game you can lean, duck, and sway all over the place and the game will know where you are. This also means that the in game camera will move around changing the view on the screen to match your current position. There are no 3D glasses and no headset to wear, but the feeling of immersion and depth comes very close to a VR experience. An arcade game in 2000, displayed on a standard definition CRT and using some fairly common infrared sensors could offer up a VR like experience. It does that because the gameplay is sort of slow. Only a small handful of enemies will pop out at each checkpoint in a level and they will tend to wait until you are exposed before unloading on you. Most of them will go down from one of your shots. It is better in Police 911 to duck behind cover, lean out only as far as you need to, take careful aim, and fire only as often as you need to. Standing still and spraying bullets will get you killed very quickly.

The pace of the game forces you to use the movement mechanic and experience the immersion of having the view on screen track your head. That, in turn, makes you want to keep using the movement mechanic because just leaning around feels novel and fun. It’s a nifty feedback loop of joy. Konami could probably have made an entire game focused only on looking around corners using this same sensor hardware and it still would have been a hit because moving around in Police 911 is so much fun.

I like a lot of light gun games. I used to play Area 51 and Virtua Cop as both players with one gun in each hand. Getting an accuracy rating in the high 80s or low 90s on my left hand, my non dominant hand, was usually my goal. That is to say, I am pretty particular about how accurate light gun games are and how quickly you can move from target to target without the light gun letting you down. Police 911 (along with a lot of Konami light gun games come to think of it) is among the best. You can lean out, snap off 3 shots and drop 3 low poly bad guys in one movement. It plays great. If you can manage to play it.

So, that’s the conundrum. I thought about adding this game to the Best Games list a while ago, but I didn’t want to add something that is pretty much impossible to play. I thought, what the hell. If you do somehow manage to spot this cabinet in the wild, you should absolutely play it, because it’s one of the best games.

428

Mon, 11 Jan 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Sorcerer of Time

427

Mon, 04 Jan 2021 00:00:00 +0000

We are in the time of lists. At the transition point from year to year it’s customary to create lists. The best of, the worst of. The things that are memorable from the year gone by. A ranked index of towering works.

I don’t plan on doing that.

While we are closing out a year, we are also closing out a decade, and as far as video games are concerned maybe the best decade on record. Instead of making a “best of” list, I have written a completely unordered grab bag of games that I have enjoyed over the last 10 years. There were a lot of other games that I played and thought were great. This is far from comprehensive, but if you were looking for a good game to play, I don’t think you can go wrong with any of the bunch below. I’ll probably cover some of these games in longer Best Games pieces in the future, but I will keep the raving to a minimum here. I’ll limit the commentary to why these games were important to me.

Lets Go!

The Legend of Zelda : A Link Between Worlds

I played most of this game laying in bed waiting for one kid or another to wake up. It was a salve for the tension of not really sleeping a full night for a few years straight. Aside from that personal bit of nostalgia it was just a solid game. It’s like they were in the middle of a remake of Link to the Past and decided instead to go in a whole new direction. It feels classic and timeless in all the ways that you would want.

Portal 2

I played through the entirety of the co-op mode of Portal 2 with my oldest son. He would have been around 4. Sometimes it took a few tries to get through a particularly tricky puzzle that required accurate timing, but we did it. Now he plays Doom Eternal on Nightmare, so that early practice must have stuck.

We still sometimes talk about the lemons.

Metal Gear Solid V : The Phantom Pain

I Don’t think I have played a single game for as many hours as I did with Metal Gear Solid V. I played every mission. Every mission. Side stuff. Stuff you didn’t need to do. Stuff that didn’t matter. I ran every one of those missions multiple times. I think it was the freedom. You could literally approach most of the missions in that game from any direction with any equipment. You could sneak, you could shoot, you could use the games systems against it. I didn’t think we would ever see such an intricate framework of systems so expertly implemented. I hope there are more games like it.

Bloodstained : Ritual of the Night

There have been a lot of games that purported to be the spiritual successor to Castlevania Symphony of the night, but I think only Bloodstained : Ritual of the Night can truly claim that crown. It takes everything in Symphony and extends it, expands it, reworks it into a fully modern game that plays like you remember Symphony playing like without just aping a game that came out on the first playstation.

Mass Effect 2 and 3

The first Mass Effect game came out in 2007 and I won the 360 version of it in a giveaway at a microsoft game developers meetup sometime early in 2008. I don’t think that I actually had a 360 to play it on until sometime in 2009. It is possible that I played that entire series this past decade, but I don’t really remember. Still, if I could only include the second and third entry of the Mass Effect series, that would be good enough. Mass Effect kept me up late when I really needed the sleep. There are characters and moments in that series that I will hold with me for as long as I possibly can.

Into the Breach

The simplicity and tightness of the game loop for Into the Breach is absolutely stunning. I think the only game that I have come across that is equal to it is Might and Magic: Clash of Heroes, but that was too old to make the list.

Titanfall 2

The first person shooter is such well worn territory at this point that there aren’t many that can surprise me. Titanfall 2 is endlessly inventive and no mechanic ever overstays its welcome. It’s the sort of game that I can see myself replaying every now and then and wondering why no one makes ‘em like that anymore.

Dark Souls

I started Dark Souls a few times before I figured out what it was. I had to go back and play Demon’s Souls first before I got it. Dark Souls is a video game ass video game. It is what the makers of old NES side scrolling platformers would have made if they were suddenly gifted modern computer hardware and software tools. It is a modern game with a very old design attitude. I should probably go finish Dark Souls 3. I have a character stuck somewhere in the first third of that game.

Super Mario Odyssey

Most games frontload all of the good stuff. In the first few hours you will have seen everything the developers had in them. You will then spend the remaining hours of the game doing those same tasks over and over. For some games that’s enough. Others will start to drag. Super Mario Odyssey just keeps getting better and more fun the deeper you go. Every level is new and different. Very few games are so full of joy.

Super Mario 3D World

I came to this game late. It had been out for a few years before we got it, and I didn’t play it for probably another year more. When I did play it I didn’t want to put it down. Mario games have never been the sort that gives you that “one more level” feeling, but this one absolutely does. I really hope they make another.

Beat Saber

Any time we show someone VR, Beat Saber is one of the first games that we load up. It is a game that could not exist without VR. It just wouldn’t work. It’s more fun than pretty much any other rhythm game I have played and it’s simple enough that everyone gets what to do by their second or third attempt. It’s one of the only ‘must play’ VR experiences.

Dishonored and Dishonored 2

They went and made a world so beautifully ugly that I want to walk around in it. I want to be there, in that space. I want to be in Dunwall smelling the rot and feeling the roof shingles. The magical ninja power fantasy is one of the best in any game, but I think it is the setting that really makes me love the Dishonored series.

The Outer Wilds

The Outer Wilds is like a magic trick. It gets you looking in one direction while it is gradually unravelling a beautiful, tragic, exultant tale right under your nose. When you suddenly see the clockwork perfection of it, it’s staggering. The fate of an entire universe all woven together through little snippets of investigation and evidence gathering. I don’t know that I have ever played a game so filled with pleasant melancholy. The Outer Wilds is one of the best games I have ever played. Ever.

I’ll end it there. I could go on, and there are a few games that I cut from the list. None of them were bad, and at least a few would be someone else’s favorite of the decade. Like I said, this isn’t a ranked list, just some Best Games I look forward to writing about in the future.

426

Mon, 28 Dec 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Here are a couple of new concept paintings with their progress videos. Enjoy

425

Mon, 21 Dec 2020 00:00:00 +0000

There is a lot of amazing music in games. From the early 8bit days until now some of the best music written on this planet has been written in the service of games. The particular repetitive nature of game music has made it memorable both by circumstance and design. We have roughly 50 years worth of game music available to us. It would be pretty easy to argue that only since the 8bit era has game music been really great. Let’s call it 35 years. Since the NES and the 8bit computers, music for games has been increasingly spectacular. From the bouncy notes of Super Mario Bros. to the choral soundscapes of Halo to the surging metal power of Doom Eternal, music is an integral part of the video game experience. So why then do almost no game soundtracks have lyrics?

I was thinking about this recently. There are only a few successful examples of game music that include singing. There are lots with choral vocalizations, but only a handful of game soundtracks actually use music with lyrics. I think I might know why, but here is a bit of rambling exploration of that thought.

For quite a long time, the only way to get music out of a video game was to synthesize it. Computer memory limits meant that storing or playing back digitally recorded music was simply impossible. When it was no longer impossible, it was outlandishly expensive. When it was finally cheap enough, the technology wasn’t really in place to make it work.

Eventually, the CDROM disc emerged as the standard for storing and distributing video games. Before that, the only reasonable way to store music was to encode it as a sequence that could be played back in realtime by a synthesizer chip. This led to a lot of game soundtracks having very distinct sound signatures depending on the particular synth chip being used. NES music sounds different from C64 music which sounds different from Sega Genesis music. In concept these synth soundtracks are more like reading sheet music and playing it through a particular instrument than like playing back a recording of a performance. The distinctiveness of each tune helped to make older game music memorable. The music to Super Mario Bros. only sounds like that when it comes out of a real NES. Or at least it did until fairly recently.

Old video game cartridges and diskettes are very cramped spaces. Music had to fight for room alongside graphics and code so storing hours of a full orchestral arrangement was absolutely out of the realm of possibility. This meant that a lot of older game soundtracks had to be very tightly looped. Short segments of music playing again and again and again while the player attempts to defeat a given stage. Bad music became grating very quickly. Good music burrowed itself inside your head and wrapped around your nostalgia centers waiting to be reactivated with the remembrance of a few notes.

There is some wonderful music scattered throughout the 8 and 16 bit eras, but none of it has lyrics. By the time it was possible to weave a soundtrack containing recorded vocal performances into a video game, the pattern of short catchy loops with occasional changups and stings had become the established style. This sort of music worked for games and the gameplay fed into the music. Habits and expectations are tough to break.

Of course there is also the timing problem. While a music loop can be played over and over indefinitely, a song with verse and chorus sort of has a built in running length. Hearing someone sing the same thing many times in a row can get monotonous quickly. Making sure that a particular section of your game can be played through by a majority of the players in a certain span of time without putting the experience on rails sounds incredibly difficult. If you want the music to rise just as a player is doing something very cool, using a pre-recorded song might not cut it.

Since the advent of the CDROM there have been a lot of examples of games trying to incorporate music with lyrics with varying degrees of success. Here are a few of the better examples and why I think they worked.

The Metal Gear solid franchise has had some incredible music. Some of that music features great vocal performances. They hit at just the right times for maximum impact, but they almost always do it at the expense of game control. The sequence containing the track will be on rails or pre timed to match with the music.

The Microwave hall in Metal Gear 4:Guns of the Patriots

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mdjLBYxAcUI&ab_channel=hexen2k7

Matches an operatic piece with a gut wrenching gameplay sequence, but it is entirely scripted and timed out. There isn’t much that the player can do to change the pace of this segment.

Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain includes the song Sins of the Father

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5q-8syq9F74&ab_channel=KefkaProduction

Where the scene is again, preplanned and largely out of the players control.

Sonic Adventure 2 Sort of kicks off with a banger Escape From the City

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5WcyVvWZJU4&ab_channel=DeoxysPrime

The song is on loop but there is enough here for most players to only hear it a couple of times during the level. The song isn’t around long enough to overstay its welcome, but it adds some punch to an already fast and fun area of the game.

Super Mario Odyssey’s jazzy Jump Up, Super Star!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xjVFfjg8dds&t=0s

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h1IHvzwUd6w&ab_channel=AFGuidesHD

Likewise plays on loop, but the area has been timed out pretty tightly so you are unlikely to hear the 4 or so minute song more than once. When you do reach the end, you can listen to it again for as long as you want.

Also in Super Mario Odyssey, sounding like a lost The Bangles song Honeylune Ridge:Escape

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xjVFfjg8dds&t=7427s

Loops but doesn’t wear on the player due to how tightly timed the underlying level is.

Then you have Supergiant Games. Every one of their games include songs with lyrics that kick off and accentuate gameplay, but the reason these work is a little different.

From Supergiants first game, Bastion, a folk song that is heard as two solos during the game comes together as a duet in the finale.

https://youtu.be/9JvNhc13oKI?t=39

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g60bPpXEq9Q&ab_channel=SupergiantGames

This song isn’t a soundtrack to the game, it exists in world and characters can be found singing it. When you come across them it is extremely moving as the words have meaning in the world of the game, and it makes sense for the characters to be singing them. The songs not only feed into the story, but having them repeat makes perfect sense in a folk song tradition. These are characters Idly singing the songs of their respective cultures, that happen to be part of a fractured whole. In one sequence the player is under no threat, and in the other you can do nothing but walk forward.

Good Riddance from Hades is great for setting mood and is primarily sung by two characters, also in world.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yco-B4BSaj4&ab_channel=SupergiantGames

Again when the song plays, there will be no pressure on the player so focussing on the lyrics and the meaning behind them is possible.

We All Become from Transistor

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f9O2Rjn1azc&ab_channel=SupergiantGames

There are a couple of great songs with lyrics in this game about a singer. In the world of the game these are her songs. They feel connected and natural. They are also largely played during sequences when you have limited or no control over the character so timing isn’t much of an issue.

Control

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ods12uljo6w&ab_channel=CerebralTiger

This sequence has it all. A long but looping song, segments of action gameplay, segments of very linear movement, and timed progression. They also adjust the playback of the song on the fly so that the parts that need to rise and fall during the sequence can do so dynamically. When they want you to feel like an awesome, powerful superhero, metal music and growly vocals kick in at just the right moments. This might honestly be the current high water mark for using music with lyrics in a game, during gameplay, to reinforce gameplay.

Here is the Director of Control talking about how the sequence was accomplished.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YJsXZhSsaUk&feature=emb_logo&ab_channel=Noclip

So it seems like if you want to have lyrics in your game music, and you don’t want it to be jarring, you have to either have to run it over a cut scene or a limited interaction sequence, time it out impeccably and don’t be concerned with possible looping, or do what Remedy did with Control and layer every part of that sequence in a way that you can dial it up and down dynamically. Music playback technology has come far enough that it is possible to sequence pre-recorded vocals and music just like they did on the synth chips of the 8 bit era. That last option seems the most difficult to pull off, but now that a few game creators have proved that it is possible maybe we will hear a lot more music with lyrics in future games.

424 - Batman: The Video Game

Mon, 14 Dec 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Best Games - Batman: The Video Game

Look at this. Just look at it.

Okay. You seen that. Now look at this.

Did you take that in. Did you count how many colors are on screen. I did. The first screenshot has 8. There are 8 colors on the screen there. The second jumps it up all the way to 12. 12 colors. I suppose it’s technically 13 since one of the values in the foreground elements is transparent. The rest of the game proceeds the same way.

I’m no expert on the capabilities of the Nintendo Entertainment System, but from what I can gather it would have been possible to have around 24 colors on screen at any one time. 25 if you’re feeling squirrely. It might have even been possible to display more colors with some trickery, anywhere from the low 50’s all the way up to 256. Most devs at the time could assemble a solid palette of 24 colors from a preselected range of 64. Not great, but not too shabby.

When Sunsoft created Batman: The Video Game they looked at all of those available colors and just said ‘Nah, 12 and one transparent value is fine”. They were right.

More striking than the extremely limited palette is the use of black. The overwhelming majority of every frame this game draws to the screen is black. Background tiles blend away naturally. Shadows are so deep they swallow up everything leaving only the faintest hints of distant Gotham lights. It’s a bold choice. It feels very Batman.

There were a lot of games around the time that Batman came out that used very limited color palettes and spare background graphics. The NES, after all, was not a powerful machine even by the standards of the day. Most graphically constrained games on the hardware seem like compromises. For Batman, it seems like a choice.

I realize that I haven’t really talked about the gameplay. The game plays great. Extremely precise, extremely difficult. It’s not a hectic game. Every movement, every jump, every batarang toss, is demanding and calculated. In that way the game also plays like Batman. Every button press has to be considered, accurate, and timed perfectly. I know that I finished the game at one point, but I don’t think I ever made it past the 4th level without cheats. Games used to be really really hard.

I think that Batman: The Video Game is one of the best examples of a limitation being turned into an asset. The game remains as beautiful today as when it came out, and I doubt anyone would ever notice that the color palette is so limited.

It’s a great game, but even based on looks alone, Batman: The Video Game is one of the best games.

423

Mon, 07 Dec 2020 00:00:00 +0000

When you are expecting a new baby everyone is keen to tell you about all of the firsts. There will be a first poop. A first step. A first fall. A first full night sleep. A first real laugh. A first word. A first illness. A first solid meal. A first sentence. A first day of school.
There are so many firsts to anticipate. So many firsts that seem so important. So many that you try to record or inscribe to memory.
Most of them will be quickly lost amidst a flood of seconds and thirds and so on. Some you will regret losing to time, some will be better lost. Some will burn so deep in you that you will recall them perfectly and often for years after.
What people never tell you is all the lasts.
There will be a last diaper. A last toddlers tantrum. There will be a last breastfeed. A last daytime nap.
Lasts are usually things you are glad are over. I think this is why people don’t mention them. That last diaper is a real relief and something to look forward to, but you won’t remember it.
Every night before bed I would read to my kids. There was probably a first bedtime story for us, but I don’t remember what it was.
The last was only a few months ago. That was a last that will stick with me.
They like to read on their own now. At night or whenever. I understand it and appreciate it, but I don’t have to like it.
Over the years we went from reading picture books and small short stories to entire series of novels. I didn’t keep count but I know that I have read, out loud, at least 50 novels to my kids.
Some of them I did voices for the different characters. Some I didn’t. Some were so dull I would tune out and think about something else while I said the words on the page. Some I had to fight back tears to read certain scenes. During some of them, everyone was fighting back tears. Doing that every night. Reading stories out loud. That’s the sort of thing that wears a groove into your heart.
Giving that up, giving up reading to them wasn’t something I wanted to do. Of course there are lasts. I knew that this would be one of them. I knew it, but I don’t have to like it.
I know that when the next book in the Kingkiller Chronicle series comes out, I will likely read it on my own, as will they. We will be able to talk about it and discuss it and share it in the way that adults and young adults typically share stories, but I probably won’t read it out loud to them. That stings a little. But for them and for me I know it’s okay. Things change and just as there are firsts, there are lasts. As long as everyone is safe and healthy, lasts are something we all just need to accept. I know it’s more difficult for me than it is for them.
Don’t be too surprised if I start reading some of these posts and recording them. I’ll just call it therapy.

422

Mon, 30 Nov 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Here is a concept painting squeezed down to 30 seconds. Enjoy.

421

Mon, 23 Nov 2020 00:00:00 +0000

I started this one by quickly smashing some color down and starting the characters form and pose. After two false starts I finally got an angle that I thought I could work with and build on.

I’m not someone who sees an image fully formed in their head and then tries to recreate it. I start with some sketches in pencil or paint approximating roughly what I want and then go in search of some pose reference to solidify it. Google image search is absolutely vital, but more often then not I watch videos. Even when I try to capture a single moment, I still think in motion. When I look at this picture I see the frames before and after it. I could probably come up with more dynamic looks if I could focus on getting one single perfect frame out of the end of the stylus and, in this case, onto the iPad screen.

Anyway, here is another picture and some progression pics I snapped on the way there. style=“padding-top:10px;padding-bottom:10px;margin-left:0;margin-right:0;text-align:center”>

420 - Karateka

Mon, 16 Nov 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Best Games - Karateka

Fighting games are all about range and timing. You press the kick button of this side of the screen and a few milliseconds later your character has their leg extended reaching for the unguarded midsection of your opponent. Let that kick fly from too far a distance and the game’s hidden collision boxes strike nothing. Too close and your opponent can intercept with a shorter range, but slightly quicker attack of their own. Range and timing.

Karateka is probably best known as one of the first, if not the first, cinematic games. Jordan Mechner was a college student studying film when he developed Karateka. The game wears those film school influences proudly. Musical stings. Cuts to establishing and framing shots. Presenting your progress through the stages with wordless camera movements rather than scripted story dumps. Fluid rotoscope style character animation. It all works to propel you through the game, but I don’t want to talk about any of that.

It is amazing to me how successful Karateka is as a fighting game.

Karate Champ is typically thought of as the first arcade fighting game. It is a twin stick game where you can use fairly complex inputs to manipulate the would-be Karate Champ. You can engage in martial combat against a computer opponent or against another person.

While firing off attacks in Karate Champ isn’t too terribly difficult, actually landing them is. Still, as a first shot in a genre Karate Champ is a decent game. A flawed early step into what would eventually be the last great arcade genre before home consoles overtook location based games.

In contrast, Karateka nearly knocks it out of the park.

Karateka, Karate Champ, and side scroller beat’em up Kung Fu Master, were released the same year so it is pretty much impossible that Jordan Mechner took any inspiration from them, or any other fighting game for that matter. Karateka is a fully formed singular creation. Punch and kick fighting was just in the early 80’s air. Even with that ‘first game in a genre’ deficit Karateka manages to nail the fighting game formula. It’s all about range and timing.

It’s true that Karateka offers no player vs. player mode, but in the game’s defence, it was programmed on an Apple II. Not a real powerhouse of computer hardware, even at the time. The best that could be accomplished was pitting the player against one solitary computer enemy at a time. It does help that this limitation plays into all the Kung Fu and Karate movie tropes of a lone warrior defeating a cadre of villains singlehanded. Only Karateka seems to be set in a world where no one ever learned to turn around.

The fighting system itself does seem like it would probably work in a player vs player mode, as evidenced by this patch to the game that lets a second person play as the enemies ( https://archive.org/details/karateka-two-player ).

Karateka is a smooth and deliberate game. You will quickly learn over the first handful of enemies that you can’t mash on the attack button and hope to win. You need to wait for your enemy to overextend themselves before you dive in to deliver a kick or series of quick punches. The whole game is range and timing. You can keep yourself a hair out of their range, rocking back and forth in a crossover step just waiting for enemy goons to slip up and launch a kick at the air where your head used to be. And if things are getting too hot and your health is dwindling you can retreat a few steps.

Jordan Mechner recounts in the journals he kept while making Karateka how he thought games needed to have two different but overlapping goals. In Karateka you need to balance the fights against individual enemies with the total ground you have to cover. You will need to start at the edge of a cliff and fight all the way through a fortress in order to battle the final enemy, Akuma. If you retreat more than you advance during a fight you won’t reach the next checkpoint before a fresh guard appears. Retreat too far, and you fall off the cliff. The faster you close the distance between you and Akuma, the fewer guards you will have to deal with. Some of the later fights can be very tough so you won’t want to retreat much if you can help it. Even the meta game of Karateka hinges on range and timing. It is a fighting game to its core.

Karateka might be one of the earliest fighting games, but it’s also one of the best games.

419

Mon, 09 Nov 2020 00:00:00 +0000

sadstronaut

418

Mon, 02 Nov 2020 00:00:00 +0000

This guy here came out of the new resin 3d printer currently humming along in my basement. I think I would like to make more of this sort of thing. Miniatures, figurines, toys. When I work on the game I'm making, I think of all the characters in terms of action figures and toys. They have to look like they are meant to be played with. The robot characters I designed for Neon Noodles have an air of "miniature" about them. I've sort of always wanted to make stuff like this guy. I suppose this printer is one more tool to making that happen.

417

Mon, 26 Oct 2020 00:00:00 +0000

416 - Metal Gear Solid V

Mon, 19 Oct 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Best Games - Metal Gear Solid V

Imagine you are in a forest. It’s a pleasant day. You hear birds chirping in the treetops above you. Enough shade to be cool, enough sunlight to be warm. There is a shallow creek in your path that you would like to cross. What do you do?

You could simply walk through the water counting on the heat of the day to dry out your shoes and socks. You could toss enough fist sized stones into the water to create a makeshift bridge. You could fell a nearby tree to span the creek. You could scrounge through the forest for enough deadfall to create a pathway over the water. You could walk until you found a path around the water, assuming it pooled at some point. You could leave and come back tomorrow with a truck or a bulldozer and bend the earth to your wants.

Any of these are possible because this is a real world situation that involves real world interactions. In the real world there are more options than there are constraints. Sometimes there are so many options that it seems like none of them are viable. Unlimited interactions, unlimited choice, unlimited solutions to unlimited problems.

Videogames are not like the real world. Videogames are extremely limited sets of systems that play off of one another. Pac-Man eats dots, ghosts eat Pac-Man, Pac-Man eats big dot, Pac-Man eats ghosts. Repeat. This limited interaction space is one of the things that makes videogames fun. When a player can explore the boundaries of the play experience quickly they can also attempt to optimize for better solutions quickly. Optimizing for better solutions to seemingly random problems is something that humans find fun, so getting there quickly is often a good thing.

What if, instead of creating a small interaction space to get to ‘fun’ quickly, you went huge. Like ridiculously huge. What if you layered systems on top of systems on top of systems and created so many potential solutions that it would be difficult to untangle them all or to determine which ones are viable. While you would never be able to create so many possible interactions that it rivaled the real world, what if you made a videogame that gave you a taste of that real world interaction space. Just enough to trick your brain into thinking that anything you attempt might be possible. What if enough of those attempts actually did turn out to be possible, not because they were specifically designed to be possible, but because there was no restriction against whatever weird garbage you tried. Now you have a different sort of fun. The type where you aren’t compelled to optimize, but to experiment. To improvise. To see how far you can push the simulation before you break it. To push the simulation with the intention of breaking it.

Pac-Man is a fun game. It’s fun for about 15 to 20 minutes. That’s enough time for a couple games usually. Maybe you play really well and you manage to extend one game for that entire 20 minutes. You leave the game satisfied and you can probably go back and play again in a day or two for another 20 minutes. That’s great. It’s a great way to design a game.

Metal Gear Solid V is the other type of game. It’s a game that you explore and experiment with. It’s a collection of systems so deep that you can run the same mission countless times (and you will) without ever exhausting the potential solution space. You can improvise or plan, use the systems or rail against them. You can play it whatever way you want for 100 hours and still never see every possible interaction.

Is Metal Gear Solid V the best game in the Metal Gear series? Yes. And No. I suppose it depends who you ask and when.

Is Metal Gear Solid V one of the best games? Absolutely.

415

Mon, 12 Oct 2020 00:00:00 +0000

I have had a 3D printer for about 5 years. This is it.

Right from the hop this thing never worked right. Turns out, after running the thing through all sorts of tests, the board that came with it had a counterfeit chip. Oh sure it could move around and print plastic bits, but it never really worked the way it was supposed to. I have had to recalibrate it several times and each time it would run well for months and then suddenly screw up a batch of prints. Then it would be time to recalibrate it again.

I mean look at this thing.

Honestly I would probably have let it go on like that. I mean it works well enough for what I use it for. Then about a month ago I spun it back up and it had no end of issues. Every print came out awful.

Eventually I figured out that this new problem wasn’t with the board at all, but the actual print hardware. The tube that the plastic ran through on the way to the heater was cracked. I figured If I needed some new hardware to get it working again, I should probably swap out that bad board at the same time.

Here is the new board.

The only problem is that the new board and the old board are nothing alike and I can’t mount the new one where the old one sat. So I had to make one of these.

There are all sorts of cases and enclosures for this new type of board, so I could have used one of those but really all I needed was something to keep the board up off the table and stable so I designed and printed (on my limp along printer) this base. In addition to that I made a stand for the new screen and control panel.

I’ll probably put these up on thingiverse in case anyone else is like me and only needs the bare minimum to hold these boards in place.

At present it’s about 80% of the way back to working. Here’s hoping it prints better and more consistently now.

414

Mon, 05 Oct 2020 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve been doing some work over here. I try to write on it at least once a week, but I haven’t been posting them up because most of what I have been writing doesn’t directly follow what is already there. I have some holes in the story. Great wide gaping ones. Ones that would cause the whole thing not make a lot of sense if you tried to read it. I don’t know about you, but that doesn’t sound like a story that would be much fun if you randomly came across it.

Nearly every one of these over 400 posts have been written using Google Docs. It’s easy to use, convenient, and it autosaves to a server somewhere that I can access through whatever device I happen to have available. I type most of these on a computer but I have written them on phones and tablets. For whatever reason, I didn’t think that Google Docs was what I needed for more long term writing.

I have tried using a lot of open source and commercial writing apps and none of them really did what I needed. Most recently I have been using Wavemaker. In fact almost everything over there was written using Wavemaker. It works well. It’s multiplatform and it works on mobile devices, but it is just a little bit too fiddly for my purposes. I like it, I just don’t think I need it.

So in the last few days I have taken all my pages, my notes, my character bios, my outlines and backstory, and moved it all over to Google Docs. I use the outliner panel to break up chapters and scenes and I have everything else split up into different docs in a directory. Right now it feels fairly organized. I will probably clutter it all up soon enough, but for now it’s everything I need to keep writing without all of the “writing tools” that I never use.

Eventually I will stitch enough of the holes together so that I can start posting up chapters again, but until then I can at least feel comfortable writing and editing with whatever device I happen to have close at hand. Writing 3 sentences on my phone is better than not writing at all because I don’t have my laptop nearby or I don’t have my files synced up.

413 - Star Wars - The Empire Strikes Back

Mon, 28 Sep 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Best Games - Star Wars - The Empire Strikes Back

Action video games are all about feel. The feel of connection between your fingertips and flickering pools of light on a screen. Get that feel wrong and it won’t matter how clever your mechanics are or how inventive your puzzles or how engaging your story, no one will want to play it. Get that feel right and it won’t matter that every other aspect of the game comes up short.

Star Wars - The Empire Strikes back on the Atari 2600 is Star Wars as imagined by Mondrian. Large flat blocks of color with a palette counted in single digits. It is a representation of the battle of Hoth in abstract. Imperial walkers look more like paper cutouts pasted in a shoebox diorama. The hero snow speeder is a rectangle with one bit jutting out the side. Sound effects are tinny digital farts and bloops. Even with all that simplification, the game feels like the battle of Hoth. It’s all here, just compacted down to the thinnest of essentials.

This game works, because it feels right. Your snow speeder can whip along at a staggering pace, but it can also stop and reverse direction with shocking agility. There is a slight drift to all of your movements that presents a sense of weight, but doesn’t feel out of control. The horizontal flight of the ship is incredibly smooth for the Atari 2600, a system not really known for its smoothness. The walkers are menacing and durable, but not indestructible. The odds are stacked against you, but there is at least a feeling of hope.

The truth is, there is no hope. This is a game, like the movie sequence it represents, where the good guys will lose. You will either see all of your ships destroyed by blaster fire or the inevitable march of Imperial walkers will overrun your base. Those are the only two ways this game ends. Surprising enough this only adds to the game’s feel. Letting the player change the fictional history of the battle would just feel wrong I suppose.

The game is simple, spare even, but it feels great to play. Smooth and fun and correct under your fingertips. More than the setting, more than the visuals, more than the mechanics, this is what matters. When a game feels right, it plays right.

This is why Star Wars - The Empire Strikes Back is one of the best games.

412

Mon, 21 Sep 2020 00:00:00 +0000

411

Mon, 14 Sep 2020 00:00:00 +0000

I have played two games recently that only exist because of the terrible power of nostalgia. Ah nostalgia, come to bite us again have you?

I’m glad these games exist because they are both good, but nostalgia did them no favours in a couple of different ways. I’ll get to that. First, the requisite old man recap.

Side scrolling brawlers, or beat ‘em up’s, were extremely popular in arcades during the mid to late 80’s. It was a genre that served both the player and the arcade owner so it is no real surprise that they became so dominant. For the player, they initially provide a lot of variety and action. You can usually play them cooperatively with a friend and, at least for the first few areas, you can play for quite a while on a single quarter. As the game wears on though they often become quite difficult and that means, if you want to continue, more quarters dropped. More profit for the owner of the arcade machine. The success of the brawler genre was almost assured.

As home consoles became more capable, creating ports of the best arcade hits was just smart business. And so, beat ‘em up’s like kung fu master, double dragon, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, and Final Fight made their way to living room tv’s. Never underestimate the video game industries ability to sell the same thing to the same people over and over and over again.

It wasn’t long before developers started making original games in the genre specifically for consoles. Almost 30 years ago Streets of Rage came out for the Sega Genesis and Battletoads made its debut on the NES. Equally coincidental, both series have received brand new entries this year. Coincidental, or nostalgia runs on a very specific time cycle.

I played through Streets of Rage 4 and I am most of the way through Battletoads. Both of these games are side scrolling brawlers, now a largely dead genre. Both of these games are slavish to this largely dead genre, but suffer for that in different ways. I think one of these games is much better than the other. Nostalgia has ways of muddying which one that is. I suppose it’s worth noting that I played neither of these series much and have no particular affinity to either. I just like games where you can punch stuff.

As I was playing Streets of Rage I found that I enjoyed the visual design and the music, I felt the game played fairly well and seemed very much “one of those”. A Beat ‘em up. A good beat ‘em up, but it did nothing particularly interesting either. All in all a fun couple of hours. But there is a reason this is a mostly dead genre.

The beat ‘em up works well for the arcade. It’s fast, kinetic, easy to pick up, and short. All things that players and arcade owners want. When you have the game at home, with no risk of spending any extra quarters, the design and play cycle is a tad on the simplistic side. 30 years later this continues to be true.

Battletoads on the other hand attempts to mix up the regular button mashy punching with all sorts of puzzles, mini-games, and comedic diversions. The previous Battletoads games contained sudden, radical difficulty spikes, so of course this one does too. Thankfully they took a more modern approach to these spikes and pretty much let you brute force them by never really punishing you for failure. As a result it ends up being a much better, more modern, game than Streets of Rage 4. Problem is, nostalgia is a real kick in the head.

The Streets of Rage series, in its time, was much more highly regarded than Battletoads. Streets of Rage simply looked, sounded, and played better back when both game series were still young. If you look up reviews for the recent versions you will see a marked trend where reviewers heap praise on Streets of Rage 4 and are mostly lukewarm on Battletoads. Completely inverted from how I would evaluate them, but exactly as I would expect, nostalgia being what it is.

So nostalgia created these new games, nostalgia kept them stuck in old, mostly abandoned conventions, and nostalgia distorted the public perception of them when they were done.

Maybe it’s time for everyone to admit that nostalgia really does this art form no favours and maybe, if we just frame past works as they really were rather than chasing how they made us feel, we could better appreciate the past, present, and future of this medium.

But we won’t. And I would absolutely play a new Legendary Wings game.

410

Mon, 07 Sep 2020 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve been doing some editing on the last story I wrote. It’s pretty amazing what changing 100 or so words can do. The tone of a lot of sentences can change drastically with one or two small adjustments. And sometimes changing the setting or wording of an entire scene can change the story.

Editors jobs are tough I think.

409

Mon, 31 Aug 2020 00:00:00 +0000

For both of these I tried to paint more like I would with regular paints. Laying down daubs of color and pushing and pulling them around on one layer rather than creating masks and layers like I would often do while painting digitally. Mostly I’m just trying to get better at painting.

408 - Trackmania

Mon, 24 Aug 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Best Games - Trackmania

You could learn how to race a car. You could study every minuscule technical detail that makes one car perform better than another. You could master aerodynamics and the physics of rubber on asphalt. You could steel your will and steady your hand when contending with other vehicles and drivers traveling down the same track at high speed. You could simulate all of this in a racing game.

Or you could do none of that and play Trackmania.

You pilot a car, yes, around a track, yes, but Trackmania is nothing like Forza or Gran Turismo. Trackmania is not like car racing.

Trackmania is filled with impossible tracks that you careen down as fast as you possibly can. There are other vehicles on the track but they are intangible and you will have no interaction with them besides watching the path that they drive. There are special interactive zones on the track that will speed up or slow down your car. Some will cut your engine forcing you to glide the remainder of your race so you best have your speed up before you hit them. Solving this puzzle of speed and angles, drift and airtime, that’s what Trackmania is.

You can play it with the four arrow keys on your keyboard. That might be the best way to play Trackmania.

There have been about 150 different Trackmania games. Don’t let that fool you. They are all the same game. They are all a perfect distillation of speed, reaction, and anticipation. They are all perfect games.

Trackmania is one of the best games.

407

Mon, 17 Aug 2020 00:00:00 +0000

This past weekend I participated in the Alberta Game Jam. Game creators from all over the province convened over Discord to put on this remote version of the game jam. While I usually find the fun of a game jam is working with a team, I opted to attempt this one solo. It wasn’t very successful.

The past two times I did a solo jam it was so that I could try something different. I wrote a random text adventure that you couldn’t win and made a single pixel at a time drawing program with no instructions.

Both times I was working with tools I wasn’t very familiar with and using it as an excuse to mess around. This time was very similar. There were a few things that I wanted to test out using tools that I am fairly familiar with but never have the opportunity to try. Some of those things worked, but even more of them didn’t.

In the end I wound up making the beginnings of a 2d platformer. I had even intended to use a readily available character controller script but when that didn’t pan out like I had hoped I ended up writing my own. It’s not perfect but it has most of the features I wanted to add and it would be fairly simple to reuse or extend it in the future.

I tried a bunch of stuff with shaders and some of that worked and some of it didn’t.

In the end I didn’t make much of a game, but I did learn a few things and I now have all the basics for a simple 2d character controller. So that’s not nothing I guess.

I wouldn’t recommend it but if you want to poke at the thing I made it’s over here.

<a href=“https://eturnip.itch.io/after-the-storm" style=“font-family: “Droid Serif”; background-color: transparent;">https://eturnip.itch.io/after-the-storm

406

Mon, 10 Aug 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Did some editing and rewriting over here. This story isn’t fully working yet, but it’s getting better. Probably needs another pass or two. and maybe some structure changes. and maybe some more eyes on it. If you know what’s broken here and have ideas on how to fix it, let me know.

405

Mon, 03 Aug 2020 00:00:00 +0000

404

Mon, 27 Jul 2020 00:00:00 +0000

I sort of want to talk about machine learning and intelligence.

I spent a bunch of time over the last few weeks messing around with Unity’s machine learning tools. I won’t be putting together any kind of tutorial or forwarding any real actionable info here, because honestly I don’t think I am in any position to offer any. I have a better idea how ML works and what sort of problems it seems to be good at, but I think that there are some very harsh limits to what machine learning is capable of. I also think that there are a lot of people out there who are quick to overlook those limits. There is this commonly held belief that machine learning will be the thing that makes computers smarter than humans. Let me tell you, Skynet, this ain’t.

If you aren’t familiar, machine learning or neural net computing or tensorflow ai or evolutionary algorithms, or any of a million other names, are ways of getting a computer to solve problems by iteratively teaching itself. Rather than getting a programmer to study the problem and come up with a generalized solution, machine learning is a method of showing the system the problem, giving it a desired goal, or goals, and then leaving the actual problem solving up to the software. It just sort of fumbles forward until it comes up with a solution that gets to the goal in as efficient a way as it can. It might not be the best solution, but it will be fairly efficient and all it will have cost is computer time.

If they were to read that last paragraph there would, no doubt, be a bunch of machine learning researchers tripping over themselves to tell me what I got wrong. There would also be another gang of researchers behind them eager to point out what the first group got wrong. It seems to be that sort of field. Everyone is pretty sure that it’s great, but none of them really know how it works. When they tell you they know how it works they are usually wrong. What they probably won’t say is that machine learning solutions are ‘smarter’ than humans.

Let me rephrase some of that. They know how machine learning works, like technically how it functions. Maybe it would be better to say that they disagree on how to make it work. Or how to make it work well. Those are really just nuances. Academic inconsistencies.

I used machine learning to teach a marble how to not fall off a track. Not how to get anywhere. Not what anything in their environment is. Nope. Just how to not fall. They don’t even avoid the edge of the track very well. They like getting right up beside the edge and not falling off. Many hours of training over a few weeks, and they will try their damndest to not fall off a track. At this point they usually succeed.

I made a machine learning agent reproduce a certain behavior that I was looking for in a variety of situations, but I don’t know thing one about machine learning. I do know this. It’s not smarter than a human.

The human brain is a massively parallel, analog, electro-chemical, comparative decision making system that never, ever stops running. Sleeping, still running. Chemically unbalanced, still running. Physically compromised, still running. Nothing short of death stops an animal brain from running. What’s more, human societies have developed high density communication systems that transfer information from one individual’s brain to another. These communication systems developed over hundreds of thousands of years. The amount of information conveyed in a simple interaction between people is absolutely staggering, but of course we take it for granted, because we are humans and we are uniquely equipped to be able to decipher that much data presented in that specific way. Tone of voice, cadence of speech, flutters of the eyelids, physical gestures of all types. Communication as dense and varied as there are groups of people to engage in them. Nothing in the realm of machine learning systems even comes close.

A computer beat several top level players at Go. That doesn’t prove that machines are smarter than humans. It proves that humans built a tool. If I use a wrench to turn a nut, that doesn’t mean that the wrench is better than my hand. It means that people have created a tool that solves the problem of enhancing grip and leverage. Wrenches are crap at shuffling cards. I can’t use a wrench to solve a rubik’s cube or type this post. It is a tool that enhances human ability. The machine that is good at playing Go is just that. A machine that is good at playing Go, because people wanted to make a tool that was good at playing Go. It can’t tell me if the milk in the back of my fridge has gone bad. That would require a different tool. Maybe machine learning could be used to make it. That would not and will not make that machine smarter than the human who wanted to know about the state of their milk.

Let me also be clear here, this is not because I think that there is some intangible, fundamental, superiority of humans over the machines they create. Not even close. This is just a matter of time. Human brains run constantly and have run constantly for hundreds of thousands of years. Animal brains for hundreds of millions before that. And those brains don’t run slower than computer circuits, just different. All brains have done for over 500 million years, is figure out how to solve problems. You could throw all the Nvidia GTX cards you want into the machine learning arena, they just can’t compete with that much iteration time.

I think what a lot of folks who tout the idea of a generalized AI that’s smarter than people forget is that people created Go. It was people who created a game with such a wide possibility space that they themselves couldn’t competently calculate it. They created a problem they couldn’t solve and then hammered away on it for a couple thousand years because it was fun.

This isn’t the sort of species that you just surpass because you built a machine that can do multiplication real good. When it comes to being clever, humans are certifiable badasses. Problem solving, Iteration, intuitive lateral thinking. Really nothing tops us. We’ve just been doing it longer.

403

Mon, 20 Jul 2020 00:00:00 +0000

The wizard sits.

The wizard reclines, luxuriating upon the fabric of the universe pulled taut. Seated on a product of their own will. The imposition of their desire on local space. A type of calm radiates through their form. A body of flesh and metal coalesced through technology and sorcery. All one and the same, at a fundamental level. The forces and the fabric. The knowledge and the tools. Blood and muscle and conduits and electrical load. The suppression of fear, hesitation. The intent to manipulate. All the same. All the same. At a fundamental level.

The wizard sits and thinks.

Plans. Strategies. Tactics. Reflex and reaction. Everything must be aligned toward one singular goal. Visualize and execute.

The Void Lords demand entertainment. Diversion from the ceaseless roar of the void. In exchange they provide reward. To the victorious. To defeat a Sorcerer is to become a Sorcerer. Use of power begets power. Victory begets victory. These are the terms of existence decreed by the void. Stakes of life and power. Wizards will battle, Sorcerers will topple, a Sorcerer’s aspect consumed by another. But a wizards charge, above all else, is to put on a good show.

The wizard sits. The wizard waits.

Some pace. Some wail. Some seethe, rending the air about them with arcs of furious power. The wizard sits. The wizard contemplates. When the darkened gyre gapes and ushers them toward combat, the wizard will be ready. When the buzzer sounds, when the shot is fired, the wizard will be ready.

For now, the wizard sits.

402 - Saints Row IV

Mon, 13 Jul 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Best Games - Saints Row IV

Let’s get this straight right off the jump. Saints Row: The Third is the best game in the Saints Row series. Volition made two games that could be fairly summed up as Grand Theft Auto clones with toilet humor before reworking the 3rd into a self aware comedy that was as much parody as it was forward looking. Saints Row: The Third raised the bar for what an open world character driven game could be and stood out as a truly wonderful experience all it’s own.

Then they made Saints Row IV. It would be easy to see this followup game as derivative. After all it did use a lot of the same assets and gameplay loops. The mission structures and events in Saints Row: The Third that seemed fresh and interesting were rehashed with the thinnest layers of polish in the 4th game. All of your favorite old characters were back. But they were old, and they were back. Like from before. Previous.

Still Saints Row IV made it here into one of my Best Games posts.

With Saints Row IV, Volition chose fun. If there was a decision to make between difficulty and fun they chose fun. If they had to choose between realism and fun they chose fun. If there was an opportunity to prioritize fun over engaging with the systems already in the game, they chose fun.

This is a game world full of a variety of fun cars and planes you can steal and roam around in, but your character can run like the flash so that is usually more fun than driving. This is a game with an arsenal ten miles deep and you never need to use it because running up a building and jumping down with the force of a small nuke is more fun. The story is absolute nonsense that straddles the line between The Matrix and Independence Day and it wears all of its influences proudly on its sleeve, but it is fun.

If you look back to reviews of the game you will see a lot of folks taking a few points off the game for being too easy. And it is. Saints Row IV is an absolute cakewalk. Past the halfway point there will rarely be anything that pops up that challenges the player in the slightest. And it doesn’t matter at all. Sometimes fun is what matters. Sometimes you have to prioritize fun.

The characters and their antics are genuinely funny, if a certain level of side eyed lowbrow is something you find funny. The kind of irreverent that is smart enough to know where to land it’s punches and when to just be silly. The writing in Saints Row IV prioritizes fun.

Saints Row: The Third is a rare beast. An open world comedy action game that refuses to be snide or gritty. There is an upbeat optimism woven into the mayhem. Violence so bizarre and unrealistic that it lends the game a sort of helium filled buoyancy. It was and is a brilliant game.

Saints Row IV does that all again but removes any and all barriers to fun. Do what you want. Be what you want. Become an agent of chaos in this simulated world. Just don’t worry, the pins will be set back up for you to knock them down all over again and again and again. In any way you like.

You know, Fun.

Fun is why Saints Row IV is one of the best games

401

Mon, 06 Jul 2020 00:00:00 +0000

The first draft of the new story is complete and up over here. There will be revisions, but it’s a story start to finish.

400

Mon, 29 Jun 2020 00:00:00 +0000

I was about nearing the end of this short story when I realized that the story isn’t actually about what I though it was about. I think this is probably a pretty common occurrence. Scripts often go through many rewrites, adjusting and molding the story the entire time. Short stories are the same. I have been going back over it and cutting out a lot of cruft. It feels similar to sculpting. cept with words. and mud. always there is mud.

Anyway don’t read it, because it’s not done but it’s over here if you don’t follow directions well.

399

Mon, 22 Jun 2020 00:00:00 +0000

So we were sitting around watching cartoons, like ya do, and I started messing around painting on the ipad. I took a bunch of disjointed ideas and sort of mashed them together. The result was this green and yellow, off kilter, poor anatomy, unplanned sketch.

While I didn’t think it was very successful it did make me wonder what a considered version of this same feeling might be. Something where I pay attention to perspective and composition. Where I think about tone and drama. The series that follows is where that process eventually led. enjoy.

398

Mon, 15 Jun 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Sometimes you have to step back to move forward. I realized partway through writing this story that something was off. something felt flat.

That isn’t uncommon. Stories, like most things, are sort of bad until they aren’t. Sometimes they even get good. This story wasn’t going to reach the lofty heights of ’not bad’ unless I went back in a reworked some stuff. So that’s exactly what I did.

I’ll keep chipping away at it.

397

Mon, 08 Jun 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Still working away over here. I got to the end of the story and I realized that I really needed some more… something. I’m working at adding that something in. Like always, this story is very much open on the table so I wouldn’t suggest reading it unless you want to see how much it changes between now and when I finally call it done. So you probably shouldn’t read it yet, but I won’t stop you if you want to.

396

Mon, 01 Jun 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Some more work being done over here. I think this story is in need of some heavy editing and rewriting. I find it’s telling and not showing and that distances the reader from the characters too much. It’ll get there. Just needs some work.

395 - Dragon's Lair

Mon, 25 May 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Best Games - Dragon’s Lair

What if one of the best games is actually a very bad game. I mean that’s nonsense right? It can’t be both one of the best games and be bad right? It absolutely can if that game is Dragon’s Lair.

Dragon’s Lair was released into arcades in 1983 and it’s safe to say that no one had ever seen anything like it. Every other arcade game at the time featured screens filled with blocky pixelated graphics or sharp but simple vector graphics. Pac-Man, Dig Dug, and Mario Bros. were bright and colorful. They were accompanied by memorable bits of music and catchy sound effects. Not one of them looked and sounded like Dragon’s Lair. How could they. Dragon’s Lair was a fully voiced, orchestrated, and animated production created by Don Bluth’s studio. Former Disney animators had worked on this game. All of the movement and life that went into an animated feature film was on display in this stand up arcade machine. No video game had ever looked and sounded like Dragon’s Lair.

It was the most popular game of it’s time, and one of the most popular games of all time. There are three arcade games on permanent display in the Smithsonian and Dragon’s Lair is one of them. It also absolutely sucks.

The technological beating heart of the Dragon’s Lair arcade cabinet was a laserdisc video player. Laserdiscs weren’t a new technology in 1983. The format was created more than a decade earlier and enjoyed a limited commercial release during the late 1970’s. To oversimplify it, a Laserdisc is like a video record that is read with a laser rather than a physical needle. Because the video is stored on a disc, the laser can move to a new track very quickly and play back a video clip in a blink. Someone at some point noted this fact and wondered if it would be fast enough to react to a person’s inputs, like a video game.

It sort of almost works too.

When you play Dragon’s Lair it starts playing a video clip of a gangly looking knight walking across a drawbridge. You are told during the attract animation that this is Dirk the Daring and you are leading him in his quest through a wizard’s castle to save Princess Daphne from an evil dragon. Pretty standard fare.

In an instant, part of the drawbridge collapses and Dirk almost plunges into the monster infested water below. In that sliver of a moment you are able to select from one of five different inputs. Up, down, left, right, or sword. If you do nothing you will be pulled down by the monster. If you attempt to move in any direction you will be pulled down by the monster. If you use the sword and then push up on the joystick you will succeed and Dirk will move on to the next scene. There is no nuance, zero room for error. You enter the correct inputs within the time window available or you watch Dirk succumb to one of many grisly ends.

What you are really doing when you enter inputs into a Dragon’s Lair cabinet is selecting what video clip will play next. Most inputs are accompanied by a slight pause in the video while the Laserdisc player’s read head is seeking for the appropriate clip. Since the outcomes of each scene are predetermined and had been hand animated, painted, and transferred to that Laserdisc months earlier, all of the clips are laid out in such a way to minimize those seek times. It is hard to imagine that anyone was ever convinced that they were actually in control of Dirk’s movements. You were absolutely at the helm of the world’s quickest (at the time) fast forward and rewind buttons.

The animation on display is absolutely top quality, but as a game experience Dragon’s Lair is terrible. There is only a tenuous connection between what you are doing with the controls and what happens on screen. The game often requires inputs that would be impossible to decipher in a time window that borders on prescience. While some of the scenes provide flashing hints toward your next action the only real way through a lot of the scenes is by trial and error. When you break it down there really isn’t much ‘game’ to this game. No decisions to make, no puzzles to solve, no emergent behaviors to react to. Nothing gamelike at all. You tap out the predetermined inputs to watch a video.

But.

Dragon’s Lair did something to video games. Something important. Dragon’s Lair was the push. Every game released through the rest of the 80s and 90s would be compared to Dragon’s Lair.

That game is great, but it doesn’t look like Dragon’s Lair.

That game is great, but it doesn’t sound like Dragon’s Lair.

That game is great, but the animation isn’t as good as Dragon’s Lair.

This was the game that set the impossible standard. A standard that even it didn’t live up to. The standard that would drive game creators to try to make a game that looked as good as Dragon’s Lair but actually played as well as you hoped it would when you stepped up to the cabinet.

We have hit that point now. Many times. Games with fluid, responsive animation that looks and plays beautifully. Fully voiced and orchestrated games that sound at least as good as their non-interactive film counterparts. Games with life and energy and dazzling visual effects. Games that make good on the promise that Dragon’s Lair offered.

So why is Dragon’s Lair one of the best games? It set the standard in presentation for decades and influenced countless creators. It was a bar to leap over, a record to break. Had it been a film or a saturday morning cartoon, game creators would have paid little to no attention to it. But it wasn’t. It was a game. And a challenge. People who create, enjoy nothing more than a challenge. From the moment that the first Dragon’s Lair cabinet was powered in an arcade it was inevitable that another game would eventually be made that would look as good or better and would play as well as you wished Dragon’s Lair did. It was a goal too tempting. A challenge too worth undertaking.

Dragon’s Lair is a terrible game, but it is absolutely one of the best games.

394

Mon, 18 May 2020 00:00:00 +0000

it continues here, but I think I’ll switch it up an write something else next week, in addition to working on the story. Too many -it continues- posts in a row makes me feel antsy.

393

Mon, 11 May 2020 00:00:00 +0000

the story continues over here but as always, it’s not done yet and there are some major edits that I will need to do, so read it at your own risk I suppose.

392

Mon, 04 May 2020 00:00:00 +0000

More work over here . I haven’t really added any ‘story’ past where I was last time, but I have reworked a lot of the preceding stuff to better match where it will be going. When I though of this story I though it was probably a 2 or 3 pager, but I think it will be a little longer than that. That is the problem with stories I suppose, they are as long as they need to be, and this one needs to be slightly longer than I thought. No problem though. It’ll get there.

391

Mon, 27 Apr 2020 00:00:00 +0000

the story continues.

390

Mon, 20 Apr 2020 00:00:00 +0000

I probably have one more week until I finish up over here. Maybe more… hard to say at this point.

389

Mon, 13 Apr 2020 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve started a new story over here. It’s another sci-fi leaning story but mostly about people and the things they do, because really that’s what I like to write… maybe that’s just what I can write. I’ve only just started on it but, if you want, you can head over to that link and read it. I won’t stop you.

388 - Zork

Mon, 06 Apr 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Best Games - Zork

Screen as a window
To an underground empire
vistas in your mind

387

Mon, 30 Mar 2020 00:00:00 +0000

I was doing some more quick concept sketches. Here is a breakdown of this newest one.

First off, before anything else, I watched a bunch of professional wrestling. Specifically a lot of 'off the top rope' moves. I was looking for some dynamic reference and watching video is always better than looking at posed still images if you can do that. Peoples bodies do a lot of really strange stuff that no one would ever pose, but it looks great when you capture just the right frames out of a few videos and use those as your reference. With those references and some simple 3D models that I pose, sort of like the traditional artists wooden doll, I assemble a composition, and then draw it.

Now that I have a simple line drawing, I have to turn them into characters. In the case of this game I am working on, the characters are all about costume. So I dress them up. In the process I try to fix some issues I had with the original line drawing.

At this point I have erased a lot of construction lines and random sketches, but there are still a lot of lines that truck all over the place. I could refine them and erase the mess, Ink on another layer, or go straight to painting. I sort of split the difference here and refined a lot of edges, but since I will be painting over it I didn't ink all the lines or make nice clean line work. This is, after all, a concept sketch.

Got some tighter lines in there so I pick a very limited palette and add some color.

Is it done? Maybe, maybe not. The whole purpose of a concept sketch is to illustrate a concept. It's like writing a mission statement or broad outline. It only has to convey to the intended audience (in this case, me) what the finished product might feel like. I know this game is about a bunch of magical weirdos that roll around in balls and fight each other, but what is that exactly? What does that look and feel like? This is what I'm trying to find. Every drawing brings that concept more and more into focus.

386

Mon, 23 Mar 2020 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve been working on a game and this is just a quick update on how that is going.

I rigged up a control scheme that let me roll a ball around using Unity physics. That part is pretty simple since all of those systems, the physics and the input handling, are built into the engine. Next I set up a camera that would follow the ball. This is also not too difficult since cameras and their basic controls are also built into unity. It only got tricky when I tried to use my physics based control system along with my following camera.

I set up the controls in the simplest way I possibly could, which I think is the only way any game feature should get implemented. I took the value sent from the left thumbstick on a standard gamepad and translated that into physics forces on the ball along the horizontal plane. Pretty simple right? I could move the ball around, but only if the camera stayed directly behind the ball. As soon as the camera lagged a little left or right the entire axis of motion would be different from what your brain expected. To fix that I needed to make the input relative to the camera and not the world or the ball object. Less simple, but not much of a problem. Computers are really good at solving math problems as long as you input the problem properly.

Now none of this is anything new for games, and it’s not even new for me. I knew this would be an issue that would take some tuning right from the start. That’s why I prioritized the feel of movement and camera. It was always going to be something that was going to take some work, and I will be adjusting and changing it all through this project no matter what I do. As a result, the first few iterations were not great, but the potential was there with only a few tweaked parameters and a few lines of code.

Since then I have tested and adjusted the basic control many many times. It’s getting much closer, but I know that I’m still not quite done.

After basic movement, I needed to create a place to move in. At first that was just a large flat plane with a few boxes sticking out of it. Next it was a sort of hot wheels track snap together set that included curved and straight pieces. After that it was those same track pieces with banked curves and quarter pipe ramps around bowl structures. Now I have surfaces that can curve in any direction and ramps that can kick the ball high up into the air if you hit them with enough speed.

I have just barely started dealing with proper collisions between your player controlled ball and other balls in the world, but that is moving along better than I had expected. I am still having issues with gravity not really feeling right, but I tweak and adjust it all the time.

Like any large project, I keep breaking it into bite sized chunks that I can wrap my head around and I deal with them one at a time. So far that seems to be working, but I do wish I could get the gravity problem solved sooner rather than later, because I would like to have more people test it with some good feeling gravity. I don’t think that is asking too much.

385

Mon, 16 Mar 2020 00:00:00 +0000

384 - Chrono Trigger

Mon, 09 Mar 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Best Games - Chrono Trigger

During the heyday of the SNES, I was playing games on a PC. It’s not that I wasn’t interested in console games. I would enjoy them given the opportunity. I just rarely had access to any 8 or 16 bit console during the time they were popular. That meant the only games I ever really played on SNES or Genesis were bite sized, single sitting games. Street Fighter, Mortal Kombat, the first few stages of Super Mario World, NHL, that sort of thing. I didn’t even bother approaching RPGs. I mean, what would be the point? I could rent a system and some games for a weekend, but there is no way I would finish some 40 hour monstrosity in 2 days, and if I tried to rent it again the save would probably be overwritten. It wasn’t really a problem though. I had text adventures and D&D gold box games and Star Control 2. Those were meaty enough games for a 1 PC kid.

It wasn’t until emulation in the late 90’s that I ever even saw Chrono Trigger on a screen. I had read about it in magazines and looked at the box in stores, but I never saw or heard it until it was running, dubiously, on a PC.

It was amazing. During the late 90’s era of ‘tude and grit, Chrono Trigger is a decidedly more complex beast. Fun and fanciful, but also much more nuanced than a lot of other media of the time.

During that first playthrough I could detect echoes of Star Control 2. Like that game Chrono Trigger seems, on its surface, so charming and joyous that you are often caught off guard when the narrative would dwell on very dark subject matter. There is a pleasant anime veneer on Chrono Trigger telling you that the game won’t ever take itself too seriously, and it doesn’t, but then it suddenly swerves into themes of fascizm, genocide, and hopelessness. It doesn’t just touch on those themes superficially. It sits in them, lingers on them, and makes sure that you are fully uncomfortable before moving on.

The bleakness of the world in Chrono Trigger connects in a much more profound way than any of the grim-dark nonsense that permeated turn of the millenium. Because it is so pleasant, so kind, so vivid, the underlying desperation of its time travelling story can be felt more deeply.

Don’t get me wrong, Chrono Trigger is not a slog of a game. Quite the opposite. It is a grand epic adventure that always feels fun to play. Just the simple act of pushing buttons in the overworld and in combat has a brisk joy to it that tells you that it knows it’s a game, and that you have come to play. But here, that play will have consequences, maybe not right away, but sometime during the centuries of time hopping, you will have to confront things that you have or haven’t done. It’s clever and fun and thoughtful in a way that games rarely are.

The second time I played all the way through it was when it was rereleased for the DS. Knowing the story and remembering most of the twists, I thought it would be less impactful and more of a fun thing to do on a lunch break. I ended up getting even more engrossed in the sensitivity of the storytelling.

The trojan horse of earnest and joyful presentation helped the creators of Chrono Trigger convey what would otherwise be a bleak and overly complex plot. All that, and it’s still just plain fun to play.

That’s why Chrono Trigger is one of the best games.

383

Mon, 02 Mar 2020 00:00:00 +0000

There aren’t enough games where you hit things.

I’ll grant you, in something like 60% of all games you direct a character to punch, kick, or spin attack something. The other 40% involve shooting. Punching or shooting, that’s it. Those are the video game verbs.

What about Tetris you might ask. That’s both. Shapes shoot from the top and punch the bottom. It’s obvious really.

But how often have you just hit something? Head on crashed right into it, on purpose. How often was that impact satisfying. Rarely? That’s what I thought.

The problem is this. It’s really hard to do. A computer can very easily and efficiently detect when two volumes are intersecting. You can register that as an impact. You can then have the computer output a response to that impact. It’s feedback, but it isn’t often that the two events seem directly connected. You can see the canned animations and you can feel the unconvincing physics. It all feels a little ‘simulated’.

There are a few games that get close. Crashing cars in burnout is visually impressive and is very satisfying, but you either feel like the impact was light and the response was overly spectacular or the impact was impressive but more of less out of your control. Sometimes colliding in Rocket League feels pretty good, but only sometimes and it seems more of a luck thing than a lined up, planned out hit. Running into the ball (more of a bounce than a hit) always feels pretty good though. I will also say that I am bad at Rocket League and maybe there is some pro tier way to hit in a satisfying way.

Flatout, Wreckfest, and other collision focused racing games will have a good feeling impact every once in a while, but more often than not everything just feels a little bit like it’s happening underwater.

So far I have only really talked about car games, because those are really the only games where devs spend a lot of time polishing the hits. Full body contact sports like Hockey and Football have enjoyed video game re-creations for as long as there have been video games, but I have never experienced a simulated hit that felt anything like actually playing either of those sports.

Here is a strange thing about me. In everyday life I could be easily labeled a pacifist. I own that. I have never been in a physical fight that I started, and I have never, ever, sought one out. But, when I play hockey, I like to hit people. Now don’t get me wrong, I don’t go out looking to hurt anyone and it’s been years since I have actually played full contact hockey, but I like the feeling of running into another person intentionally to push them off the puck. I think maybe it’s because when playing hockey everyone is on equal ground and they are trying to do exactly the same thing to me. No one is angry that you ran into them, they expect it, and likewise I’m not angry that they ran into me. In fact, it’s fun. We have all agreed that in this rink for this hour or so everyone can run into everyone else, while sometimes moving very fast, and that’s okay.

Video games have a lot of things running into other things, a lot of characters that smash through the world with wild abandon. Very rarely have any of them ever felt as fun as colliding with a real person in real hockey. It might take me awhile, and I might never get there, but that is the feeling I’m chasing with the game I’m working on. The simple fun of hitting something.

382

Mon, 24 Feb 2020 00:00:00 +0000

For a brief period this week I wasn’t able to use my graphics tablet. If you aren’t a digital artist I wouldn’t blame you for not caring what a graphics tablet is or what it does. They are a very niche tool that very few people need, but for those people that need one it is utterly indispensable.

In brief, a graphics tablet is an input device for your computer that looks like a pen and a fancy drawing board. It can detect startlingly precise pressure, tilt, and sometimes even roll information. All this means is, once you get used to it, you can draw or paint as well as you could with a pencil or paintbrush. Graphics tablets won’t ever make you a better artist, but they will convey whatever skill you have developed to the computer accurately. So that’s nice.

The graphics tablet I have now, a huion h610pro is almost 7 years old. I bought it to replace a Wacom intuos 2. The second, and larger, of the two intuos 2 tablets I used for the preceding 12 or so years. Before that I had a Wacom Pen Partner. The pen partner had a drawing surface smaller than a postcard. All together that’s something like 22 years I have been using these devices. Even though I still use a mouse quite often, I really can’t function without a graphics tablet. I use it to draw, paint, sculpt, move points around, copy files, select stuff, press buttons, and just do generally anything you could do with a mouse.

Not having the tablet, even briefly made me think about tools. The computer under this desk can process inputs faster than my nerves can fire. There is an almost zero chance that I could overwhelm it with the speed or subtlety of my own body’s movements. I could have pressure sensitive tools attached to the end of each of my fingers and a regular pc should have no trouble conveying that information to a program for sculpting or painting. A standard mouse can detect movement thousands of times per second. A VR headset with inside out tracking can take stock of the world around it, filter for static objects, and watch for controllers or your hands fast enough that your own proprioception can be fooled making you believe you are in another place entirely. And yet, my interface with an art program is holding a stick in my hand and pressing down more or less hard. Essentially the same root technology people used to draw herds of bovines on cave walls 40-60 thousand years ago.

It’s not like I can think of anything better. Humans use tools in ways that are the most efficient for how our hands and arms and eyes work after all. I just think that with all of this input capacity at our disposal we might be able to come up with something that doesn’t rely on what we know from the real world and instead describes an entirely digital, virtual, way of working and creating art.

But my tablet is working again, so I’m going to go use that and stop this hideously binary typing thing.

381

Mon, 17 Feb 2020 00:00:00 +0000

As promised, here is some more drawing.

I thought this time I would do a short breakdown on how I put a drawing together. This current set of concept drawings is for a project I’m working. I’m in the part of the process where I try out a few different things to zero in on a style.

First I start out with a rough figure sketch. I did a lot of google image searching for "Parkour Jump" to find reference. I want these characters to look like they are free floating but in control of their movement, so parkour and other extreme sports seemed like perfect reference. Then I worked on some poses based on that reference in thumbnail sketches and 3D mockups.

Next I refine the sketch and flesh it out, but I like to try to maintain some feeling of movement in the character. These characters wear elaborate headgear and flamboyant costumes, so I didn't put any effort into drawing a face. Any mood had to be conveyed in the body.

On a new layer I start working out the costume.

Next I sharpen up lines and define edges. I will be leaving the sketchy lines under the color for this one.

I get some color up in there. I still have to go over this character and work out some more details, but I think I now have an idea of who they are and where to take them from here.

Most of the time when I am drawing anything, I’m finding out what needs to get added and what needs to change while I’m drawing it. I’m usually surprised at how it turns out, or if it turns out at all.

This one is working out okay I think.

380 - Beat Saber

Mon, 10 Feb 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Best Games - Beat Saber

I used to go to the arcade a lot. As often as I could. The first ones I went to were filled with distinct and bizarre cabinets with games as fanciful as they were difficult. Every image on a screen had to be drawn there with only a handful of pixels and a tiny array of colors. Any sound was what could be generated by simple monophonic synths and tin can speakers. Every game was a unique and strange experience. Dreamlike. Those soon gave way to brighter, more colorful visuals that grew more defined and representative. Games with real music and voice samples. This time also birthed genres. There were racing games, scrolling shooters, and maze chase games. Some of the games were great, some not so great, but market forces that directed developers to work on the genres that would sell were already taking hold. So the arcades were filled with a lot of Pac-Man clones and Galaga clones. Still enough unique experiences were being made that an arcade goer could find something that suited them.

It wouldn’t be very long before the arcades were packed wall to wall with 1 on 1 fighting games. Still difficult, but a different sort of difficult. Fighting games require a player to climb a learning curve before they can have fun with them. I love fighting games, but I think they drove a lot of people who had loved Pac-Man and Qbert from the arcade. They simply demanded too much practice from would be casual players.

It wasn’t long before the fighting games of the arcade made their way to home consoles and every player who didn’t want to wait in line at an arcade machine only to be stomped by someone who had simply practiced more, stayed home and played Marvel Vs. Capcom on their own couch with their own friends.

The last gasp of the arcade was to try to offer an experience that a player couldn’t have at home. Dance Dance Revolution, Beatmania, Guitar Freaks, and Drum Mania were all developed in this winding down of the arcade. All of these machines were simply too large and specialized to be something that you could easily play at home. This wasn’t joysticks and buttons, this was ruggedized dance pads and simulated drum kits. If you wanted to play these games, you had to leave your house.

Dance Maniax was released in the very early 2000’s and consisted of a set of infrared sensors that you waved your hand across in time to a musical track and on screen instructions. No buttons. Nothing physical to interact with. Just a giant cabinet and your own sense of self consciousness. The Bemani series of rhythm games ended up with the same core issue as fighting games. People wanted to play them because they were fun to play, but some people got so good at them that the developers needed to up the challenge with each new release and the performative aspect of being very good at a game in public meant that some people would play it, but most would not. Those other people went back home and played guitar hero and rock band privately or with their friends. I mean why play a game with a bunch of people standing around judging you.

That sure was a lot of non Beat Saber talk for a presumably Beat Saber focused Best Games, isn’t it?

I think the history is important, because of how and Beat Saber was developed and released. Beat Saber is a rhythm game very similar in play to Dance Maniax. To an outside observer, you wave your hands in the air to the beat of a song and look sort of silly or cool or somewhere in between. The difference is, Beat Saber is a VR game. It really only works as a VR game. While that limits its potential audience, this does mean that you don’t have to wait in line to play Beat Saber, and you especially don’t have to worry about people watching you and judging your performance… if you don’t want them to. When you are in Beat Saber, it’s just you, two laser swords, and a lot of incoming blocks to slice. Get good at it if you want. Play it on easy if you want. Play the songs that you want, and enjoy yourself. If you turn off any screen mirroring, only you will ever see how well you did. Or, you could stream out your game and show anyone who will watch how amazing you are at slicing blocks. It’s up to you.

There is an argument to be made that Beat Saber could have been developed for the Nintendo Wii or for the Playstation Move Controllers. But it wasn’t and moving it to a system where the action is displayed on a standard screen just wouldn’t work at this point. No, Beat Saber is a VR experience through and through, and all the better for it.

There will be a lot of new VR systems past this current generation. Head mounted display units that are lighter, faster, work completely untethered and don’t require controllers at all. For each of these units there will be a version of Beat Saber. In 15 years when a VR/AR system can be placed in regular glasses frames or light-weight goggles there will be a version of Beat Saber. When you can stand in a light field projection with no hardware at all attached to your body, there will be a version of Beat Saber. If one of the tests for new gaming hardware is to run Tetris or Doom on it, the test for new VR hardware will be, from now on, to run Beat Saber on it.

Beat Saber isn’t very old, but it’s already one of the best games.

379

Mon, 03 Feb 2020 00:00:00 +0000

This past weekend was Global Game Jam. This will be the tenth GGJ that I have attended but the first time that the game I worked on doesn’t play on a computer. I teamed up with Paul and Logan Cooper to work on a board game. A 3D printed board game. In 48 hours.

3D printing is not a quick process. It does provide regular people with the facility to create physical objects relatively easily and cheaply, but rapid prototyping is only rapid when compared to other forms of manufacture. We shifted the usual Game Jam constraint of technology over to a constraint of logistics. Getting everything designed, modelled, printed, and tested in 48 hours was tricky.

In the end we completed and play tested the prototype of an actually interesting table-top game. It plays in less than an hour. There are some interesting strategic elements. It’s pretty easy to learn. After a few more revisions, I have no doubt that it could be quite fun.

Given the time we had to create it, we didn’t get a chance to test it with more than 2 players, but it does seem like more players could work very well. That might even be the prefered way to play it.

Anyway, if you have a 3d printer and wanted to test out an interesting game prototype, you can download the files here https://globalgamejam.org/2020/games/treasuretrap-dungeon-game-8

378

Mon, 27 Jan 2020 00:00:00 +0000

I did say that the drawings would continue. I’m still coming to grips with some of the tools in Infinite Painter on the iPad. Here is a breakdown of something I started working on. If you are using an Apple Pencil on an iPad I can’t recommend enough that you get a matte screen protector. If you are used to paper or a graphics tablet with some grip to it the screen protector goes a long way to replicating that feeling. It just gives me a little more control over my lines.

377

Mon, 20 Jan 2020 00:00:00 +0000

We have traveled to Disney parks a few times now. On each trip I spend a percentage of it just studying the construction of, well, everything. There are so many small details in those parks that aren’t the products of chance. Each small scrape carved into the artificial stone, each crack snaking its way through a wooden pillar, each trail of rust drifting down from simulated steel rivets. All of those details have been placed there and maintained meticulously in the hope that you will never notice them. Individually these details are works of talented craftspeople worthy of respect and praise. Combined, they become invisible. Just one one small contribution the intended effect; to transport an audience of park attendees to another place and time. They will become wrapped up in the story going on around them. The real magic to Disney parks is that you are never supposed to know it’s a trick.

Game designs are, for the most part, linear. This is a feature built into the medium. The player is supposed to play through each level, area, or challenge, completing them and moving forward until they reach the end. Game designers are taught to always direct the player in subtle and overt ways. The grandest sin is to leave the player feeling directionless and lost. The design drum beat repeatedly since the arcade days that the objective must always be clear and the path too it must be obvious. There is no other way, or other ways have been tried and failed. I mean, why would anyone question the wisdom of decades of game development?

Disney theme parks have one major guiding principle. Everything is built to tell the story. Everything. After you walk through the main gate the imagineers who designed the space have no control over what you look at, where you go, or how you experience it. The story of the place, the experience, must be everywhere and built into everything. Park designers can’t control what you do, but they can try to give you some hints. Sightlines, color pallets, angles, indicators, pathways, all tools in the designers kit. The fact remains that when you are in a theme park no one will be there to tell you how to enjoy it.

For years in video game design we clung to the platitude that the designer can’t tell the player what to do. The player is a rogue element and as soon as they are let loose on a game, all bets are off. For the most part, that hasn’t been true at all. Press A to start, press start to start, move left to right, move bottom to top, jump here, shoot here, defeat all enemies to open doors, find keycard to open doors, have this adventure in this way for this amount of time. I’m not saying a directed experience isn’t valid. Some truly wonderful games have been made that are absolutely on rails. For a very long time, that was really the only practical way to make games. Technical limitations required more or less linear experiences. It is now technically feasible to create unconstrained spaces, but let’s not kid ourselves, most “open world” games are rail lines with switching stations. Design wisdom would say that you can’t really do it any other way. The Imagineers would say otherwise.

Then there are the other games. Games like Skyrim, games like Breath of the Wild, games like Outer Wilds. These games are theme parks. Subtle hints and gentle nudges are all that can be detected of the designers intent. The trick of the game, the pathing of the space, the push toward a narrative conclusion is, like the Disney parks, mostly invisible. The story is told too and by the person experiencing it, at the pace they want to experience it. Story is woven into every little detail but asks nothing specific of the player.

When you wander around a Disney park they know that you will be waiting, they know that you will back track, they know that you will see each attraction and feature from different angles and vantages. All of these eventualities have been considered and planned for. The design language for truly wonderful open world video games was being developed before the integrated circuit was even a viable technology.

I literally wrote all of this to say that Outer Wilds isn’t an adventure game, it’s a theme park and it’s wonderful and you should play it.

376

Mon, 13 Jan 2020 00:00:00 +0000

I got an Ipad for Christmas (and all ensuing gift giving holidays and events). Paired with the Apple Pencil we have had for a while it makes for a hell of a sketching platform. The drawings of varying quality will continue until further notice.

375

Mon, 06 Jan 2020 00:00:00 +0000

When I was at the Reboot Develop conference I attended one of the best talks I have ever seen. Thierry Boulanger talked about how he and the rest of Sabotage Studio made their game The Messenger. When the audience left the theater, I saw a lot of red eyes and sniffly noses. My own, I’m not ashamed to say, were also red and sniffly, but I’m sort of a softy so a particularly moving commercial might set me off.

A talk about how a developer created a game isn’t really something that anyone would usually classify as emotional. There are a lot of them out there. Most are about the trials of game development, some are about a specific issue or problem the team tackled. I find a lot of them very, academically, interesting. Something was very different about this particular talk.

Thierry Boulanger did talk about his own personal journey, his struggles and hardships, but that wasn’t the only thing that made an entire audience well up. There was something about the way he talked about the game that tugged at me. At the time I hadn’t played The Messenger but I knew I would have to. Now it’s a few months later, and I have played The Messenger, and I get it.

As a game I think that The Messenger is very good. Not earth shaking, not genre defining. It’s not the type of game that will be written up as having historic significance. I’m certain that it will be someone’s favorite game, because, like I said, it is very good. That someone isn’t me, but I am glad that I played it.

Structurally I thought the game had some issues. It is longer than it needs to be. The controls are very sharp and precise but some of the mechanics feel mushy. There is a randomness to some of the boss fights that doesn’t exist anywhere else in the game. The graphics and audio are excellent but don’t always feel cohesive area to area. The music is perfect. The music is absolutely perfect.

Despite any flaws, I can easily recommend The Messenger. The one thing it is absolutely not lacking is heart. The people who made this game put absolutely everything they had into it. The Messenger gives you the impression that the Devs thought they might never get to make another. They jammed in so much stuff, so many mechanics, so many jokes, so many stories, so many choices, that the game is filled to bursting.

I’ll never know if I would have had the same response to The Messenger if I hadn’t heard Thierry’s talk. That’s fine. The two creations work well together. Complement and reinforce each other. I think I understand the talk a little better now, but more importantly, I think I know why he felt he had to give it. He put everything he had into it because he didn’t know if he would ever get to make another one.

374

Mon, 30 Dec 2019 00:00:00 +0000

At the end of a year you are supposed to look back at what you did, the things that happened, what you learned. I did some game dev work on the art side, I did some game dev work on the coding side, I did some previz and mapping work, I did some prop modelling, I did some writing, I did some graphic design. Having a logo I designed show up on Japanese, British, and American websites is pretty fun. I learned several new tools, did some work with powershell and python scripts, and experimented with art styles I’m not used to. Creatively and professionally it\s been a pretty good year. Here’s hoping that 2020 is as good or better.

373

Mon, 23 Dec 2019 00:00:00 +0000

sparks of joy like dust

spread wide by years wild breezes

crushed in loving hands

372 - Soulcalibur

Mon, 16 Dec 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Best Games - Soulcalibur

Sure, it doesn’t have the banger of an intro cinematic that kicked off the previous game, Soul Edge, but Soulcalibur is an absolute masterpiece. Soulcalibur did more to elevate the fighting genre than any other game of it’s time.

In a year that also saw the release of Super Smash Bros., Street Fighter 3: third strike, and Marvel Super Heroes Vs. Street Fighter, Soulcalibur stands apart. You see, fighting games are way too hard to play. I love them, but they are absolutely impenetrable to new players. I love that they are complex, and rich with nuance. I love that fighting games are very free-form and fluid. No matter how many times you have played a fighting game you can always work out new techniques and timings. Everything that I love about the genre makes them terrible for people new to them.

Of course difficulty in games is nothing new and a certain amount of learning is expected every time you play an unfamiliar game. The main problem is that most fighting games are absolutely obnoxious in their refusal to teach you anything at all about how to play them. Of the other major fighting series I mentioned up there, only Super Smash Bros. makes an attempt. Poorly.

Soulcalibur started as an arcade game. Simple, straight forward, 1 on 1 combat designed to eat quarters. When it made its way home as a North American launch title on the Sega Dreamcast, the developers could easily have left it at that. Basic 1 on 1 fighting, and maybe a tournament mode or something.

Instead, they added Mission mode. A massive sprawling story based around different types of fights with different rules and requirements. It would be easy to think that this was just a way to extend the playtime of a basic fighting game, but Mission mode does something fighting games just don’t do. It teaches you how to play the game. Not in a tutorial “hit this button now” kind of way, but in a deep many hours of practice kind of way. You won’t be able to mash your way through all of the fights and you will have to use different techniques and characters to pass the challenges. It’s fun, it’s engaging, and you won’t realize how much better you are getting at it until you play against another person and chain together some massive combo, or sidestep a potentially devastating blow. This is a fighting game that makes you better at it while you are playing it. Truly a rare bird.

I can set aside how I was obsessed with the Kilik kata animation before the game even came out and how I must have watched it a thousand times since. I can set aside how I played it on the Dreamcast until my thumb hurt and I burnt out a VMU while playing it. No, I’ll go with this; Soulcalibur is a fighting game that makes you better at playing it while you play it, and for that it will always be one of the best games.

371

Mon, 09 Dec 2019 00:00:00 +0000

370

Mon, 02 Dec 2019 00:00:00 +0000

The game is out on early access. Get it here!

369

Mon, 25 Nov 2019 00:00:00 +0000

I did some work over here but as always I can’t recommend anyone read it. I mean, sure, go ahead, but it’s all sorts of broken. The new changes are an attempt to fix that.

368

Mon, 18 Nov 2019 00:00:00 +0000

This screenshot is the beginning of at least the next year. I’m making a game. It’s a roll’a’round, demolition derby, beat’em’up with a heavy metal soul. Wish me luck.

367 - Worms 2

Mon, 11 Nov 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Best Games - Worms 2

In the early 1970s, computers were wildly expensive machines that occupied entire rooms of universities and research centers. Students and scientists would have to book time on them to do their work, often accessing them remotely from terminals. They would have to master early high level programming languages and think in trigonometric functions. With such specialized training and access to rare and costly hardware, they did what anyone would have done. They made and played games.

One of the earliest tasks for electro-mechanical and electronic computers was calculating firing arcs for long range ship cannons. When computers advanced from relays to transistors to integrated circuits, the desire for the navies, armies, and air forces of the world to figure out how to shoot at what they are shooting at didn’t go away. If anything, shooting at things rose to the level of complexity afforded by newer computers. Shooting at things became a science. If it seems like a lot of computer games are simply about things shooting at other things, it might be because that was quite literally what computers were made for. Like it or not, performing ballistic calculations is built into computers from the bones out.

In the late 1960s and early 1970s there was a pervasive shift toward antiwar sentiment in the research centers and universities of north america. And yet they were using computers. Computers for which ballistic arcs and missile flight dynamics were essentially solved problems. A lot of the basic languages included functions to define these arcs. The tools were all there, but the want to use them for their intended purpose was not. So people did what people will always do. They made a game out of them.

Artillery isn’t really a single computer game. There isn’t one monolithic work that you can point to and say ‘that is Artillery’. Instead, artillery was an entire genre of computer games back in a time when genres for computer games didn’t really exist. Two or more gun emplacements would take turns firing at each other. Players would have to adjust the guns power and angle for each shot gradually trying to narrow in on their target. First one hit loses. Everyone programming a computer could play with and modify a version of Artillery. There were ones with changing wind, ones with variable terrain, ones where the gun emplacements could move and ones where they were ships on the sea. All of them variations on the same game.

Sometimes it isn’t the game that explores a mechanic first that is remembered. Sometimes it isn’t even a game explores that mechanic best. Sometimes it is a game that just does it the most. Worms 2 is the most Artillery game ever made.

Now of course, there was a Worms game before Worms 2, but it was really just Artillery in a comedy suit. Worms 2 though, they put everything in there. Every Worm had a goofy name and a slate of ridiculous voice samples for all situations. The amount of tools and weapons at your disposal is staggering, and most of them are bad puns and corny jokes. In 1997, nearly 30 years of Artillery style games were rolled into a single chuckle-worthy package. There have been a lot of Worms games since Worms 2, but not many have captured the joyous chaos of that game. Like using a sword to cut a cake or high explosives to create vibrant fireworks, Worms 2 took the core concepts of Artillery and repurposed them to entertain. What had been developed essentially as a weapon was transformed into whoopee cushions and cartoon googly eyes.

Worms 2 is the most perfect form of the Artillery genre, and a crowning achievement in irreverence. Worms 2 is also one of the best games.

366

Mon, 04 Nov 2019 00:00:00 +0000

I attended the RebootDevelop Red game development conference this past week. Somewhere, tucked away in the back of my memory, is the last time I ever attended a game development related conference. When I was there I witnessed a spirited demonstration of Samba De Amigo, a maraca based rhythm game. I also tried out a version of the real time translation functionality in Phantasy Star Online. If you know either of these two games, you know that it has been quite a long time since I was at a game development convention. According to people I talked to who had attended conferences like GDC and PAX, RebootDevelop is not the usual fare.

I could write stories about who I saw, what we did, and conversations that I had, but I would really rather not. There is a reason why I number rather than title all of these posts. I have a strong belief that that some experiences should be ephemeral. Some moments need not be recorded. I realize that all of these posts are searchable and discoverable, but I don’t really make it easy. Maybe for the internet that is ephemeral enough.

Here is what I will say. I don’t know if I have ever been more convinced that what I am trying to do, making games, is the only thing I should be doing. It’s not that I couldn’t do other things. I certainly spent a long enough time in the various branches of advertising. If I needed to I could probably create store displays, commercials, and promotional banners again. But that isn’t what I should be doing. I should be making games.

Every person I talked with, every person I had even a brief interaction with while at lunch or refilling coffee or ordering my third beer for the night, every single one of them was working in games because if they didn’t, no one else would.

The long and short of it is, making games is incredibly hard. It’s technically, artistically, economically, and emotionally hard. Everyone I met had skills that could take them far in other industries. They could all be wildly successful doing anything easier than making games. But they weren’t doing other things, because they couldn’t do other things.

At some point during the three day conference I was in the middle of a conversation with a game developer and I realized something. The game they were telling me about the game they were proud of, and had put so much of their effort and passion into, if they hadn’t worked on it, no one would have. That game would simply have never existed without that one person’s dedication. The thing was, it was a very good game. It needed to exist. The world is a better place because that game exists. And without that one person, that game would not ‘be’.

There are games that I want to see in the world. There are games that I think need to exist. The only thing stopping them is that I haven’t made them yet. I need to change that.

365

Mon, 28 Oct 2019 00:00:00 +0000

full diet of anime and games over here

364

Mon, 21 Oct 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Back on my bullshit.

363 - The Fighting Fantasy Book Series

Mon, 14 Oct 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Best Games - The Fighting Fantasy Book Series

You ever play a roguelike? A game where you have one run through a gauntlet of obstacles. When your character dies you go back to the start and try again, using what you learned on previous runs to get further and further each time. Imagine that, but a book.

A few short years after the creation of the first Choose Your Own Adventure books and the game Dungeons and Dragons, a couple of industrious writers decided to mix the two together. The result, rather than being a dungeon crawling choose your own adventure, turned out to be more like a story based roguelike. You had one shot to optimise your randomly rolled characters progress through the story. If they died or you chose poorly and got a bad ending you had to scrap your character sheet and start over at the beginning.

Of course no one ever played through the books like that. When the quickload system is as easy as putting a finger in between the pages and then flipping back if a choice or combat outcome turned out negatively, you fudge the numbers until you got all the endings. At least for me, it was only after I had ‘beat’ the book that I decided to see if I could make a run through to the end playing strictly by the rules. Most of the time I didn’t make it. A few of the books required some pretty lucky dice rolls to succeed.

Really though, when everything is considered, the fighting fantasy series didn’t do anything earthshakingly inventive. They were neat, and of their time, and that’s about it. It’s really only when you combine the infocom text adventures like Zork, the tabletop collaborative narrative games like Dungeons and Dragons, and systems based computer games like Rogue that were all being made in the late 70s and early 80s that you can see the profound impact they will collectively make on games over the next decades. Games went from being strictly intellectual or gambling based pastimes, to being a medium that could tell a story. Games became the only medium where you could not only be the audience for that story but a collaborator in its telling. Very early on the Fighting Fantasy series of books were out front and testing those waters.

The Fighting Fantasy book series deserves to be amoung the best games.

362

Mon, 07 Oct 2019 00:00:00 +0000

https://eturnip.itch.io/anything

This weekend was Ludem Dare 45. Ludem Dare is a long running series of semi-annual game jams. I did the same thing that I do every time Ludem Dare rolls around. I forgot it was happening. It wasn’t until quite late on friday night that I noticed that the theme had been announced. I thought about it for a bit, started a new Godot Project, made a GitHub repository, and then thought maybe I would attempt to make the thing I was thinking about on Saturday. Maybe.

Start with nothing. That was the theme. I happened to have an experiment rattling around my brain I have wanted to try for a long time. It is the sort of thing that fit the theme “Start with nothing” and it was a small, strange idea that fit perfectly into the schedule of a jam. Really I just needed an excuse to try it out.

For a while now the kids and I have been messing around with Godot as an excuse to teach them to code in a way that might be more fun than tutorials and “learn to code” apps. Game engines, I think, are uniquely suited to the task of learning. Turn around time from having an idea to testing it to seeing the results is very short for most things when using a game engine. An awful lot of the work is handled for you. You don’t really need to be concerned about how to draw a pixel to the screen. The engine deals with that. You can worry about higher level stuff. I know that the absolute fastest code learning loop is probably learning html but that is pretty dull stuff. Compare changing the border on a div to creating a stack of boxes and knocking them over with cannon shots in a 3d game engine. The second one might take a bit longer, but honestly, which one would you rather make.

That time spent working with my kids in Godot led me to believe that creating a simple experiment wouldn’t be that difficult. Of course I was completely wrong. I certainly didn’t spend global game jam type hours on this project. I sort of dipped into it from time to time over Saturday and Sunday morning. Still, Godot fought me the entire way.

Seemingly small things like moving an object from one place to another smoothly devolved into a marathon of frustration. I spent no small amount of Saturday detangling the fact that Godot deals with 2D and 3D graphics very differently. The built in tween functions are either broken or so convoluted that they might as well be broken, at least on the 3D side of the fence. The documentation is succinct, but not particularly helpful. If there are examples they don’t tend to be ones that deal with common problems, like moving an object smoothly from place to place. I’m also not very familiar with the python-like GDscript that you have to use if you want to make a Godot project that runs under HTML5. Not being able to use C# caused some headaches.

At the end of it all though, I did manage to make a very simple version of what I was going for. It’s missing some of the more interesting exploration style features that I had planned, but like all Jam games, success is when it runs at all.

Anything is running over at https://eturnip.itch.io/anything

Try it out. Make something from nothing.

361

Mon, 30 Sep 2019 00:00:00 +0000

360

Mon, 23 Sep 2019 00:00:00 +0000

did some work over here. Only a very small amount of changes got into the actual story. I wrote 2 scenes that happen nearer they end, but I haven’t written any of the stuff in between so I opted to leave it out. As always, this story is in development so it won’t make much sense if you try to read it right now. Still, you know, if you want to, click that link and read away.

359

Mon, 16 Sep 2019 00:00:00 +0000

If there is one thing I am truly terrible at (I know, I know, it’s more than one thing) It’s self promotion. I will, from time to time, point at a sign or logo while out in the world and say to whoever I’m with “hey I made that”, but that’s about the depths of my braggadocio. I have had animations I made in TV commercials and up on billboards. I never saved any of them for a demo reel. I have made logos and designs for products and companies. None of them are in my portfolio. I don’t really even have a proper portfolio right now. There are a few videos of me making some old models and doing some quick paintings, but that is about it. I should probably look at changing that.

I would like to start now, if even in a small way. For the few dozen people who read this (I get the metrics. On very rare occasions readership leaps all the way into the low hundreds!) I invite you to stop reading and head over to

https://store.steampowered.com/app/990900/Neon_Noodles__Cyberpunk_Kitchen_Automation/

Neon Noodles is an open ended puzzle game being developed by Radu Muresan. I have been contributing on the art side. I happen to think it’s shaping up into a pretty cool game. A writer for Forbes seemed to think so too

(https://www.forbes.com/sites/melissabrinks/2019/09/09/the-7-best-indie-games-i-played-at-pax-west-2019/#6d3f74443e1c )

so that’s a nice bit of outside validation.

If you use Steam to buy games, please add Neon Noodles to your wish list and consider giving it a look when it releases later this year. If you don’t use Steam to buy games, tell someone you know who does. If you are better at promotion than me, go shout it from the rooftops. It might take me awhile to do any proper promotion. I’m still learning how.

358

Mon, 09 Sep 2019 00:00:00 +0000

During the last weeks of their summer vacation, my kids and I started up a small game dev experiment. I described it as an extended Game Jam. We only worked on in a couple hours a day at most. The project is on a small hiatus while they got back into the regular rhythm of school again, but we still talk about how to solve certain problems and what we still need to do on the game.

Rather than teach them how to use Unity, I figured it would be more interesting if we all learned something we were unfamiliar with. We are using the open source Godot engine and writing all the code in the python-like GDscript. The only python experience I have is writing a few automation scripts for Blender, so I wasn’t coming to this with any sort of head start.

The project is based off a concept I had a long time ago for a simple 3 Lane endless runner type game. The hook would be that rather than be about dodging items in your path, this game would be about holding up traffic and not letting it squeeze past you.

So far we have gotten a player character into the game and we have set up controls for it. You can use the keyboard or gamepad to move your little person around. We have set up and used trigger objects to detect the position of the ‘people’ trying to make their way past you. We have messed around with the Godot physics engine to drop items from the sky and shoot them toward the player at variable speed. We have messed with the camera, but not yet done anything with lighting and shading. We have set up an object spawning system to create the objects we need when we need them and a culling system to remove objects when they are out of view.

There is still a long way to go before I would call this project an actual game, but the kids have created some concepts for new characters along with their traits, and we have a decent plan on how to use what we have learned to add more structure to the game.

Some of our ideas won’t work out, and I have been pretty clear with them that this is what happens every time you make something as large and ungainly as a game. Some things just don’t work and some things do, but either way you learn something new.

I don’t feel like I am any more comfortable with python, but I think I understand some of the basic concepts of the Godot engine. I think that it is a very simple and elegant system, but one that can lead to a lot of clutter if not wrangled properly. When Godot can easily build to more platforms it will likely be a very viable game engine for indie devs.

This past weekend we didn’t do any work on our project, but I plan to rectify that next weekend and we can all come back to it with fresh eyes and new ideas ready to be tested.

357

Mon, 02 Sep 2019 00:00:00 +0000

One drop at a time

Devouring solid stone

A slow creek flows on

356

Mon, 26 Aug 2019 00:00:00 +0000

https://itch.io/jam/albertagamejam/rate/473595

Over the weekend I joined 19 other devs, artists, and musicians here in Calgary to participate in the first Alberta Game Jam. Almost 80 more game makers in Edmonton and Lethbridge came out to build something fun. The results are the 27 games posted here https://itch.io/jam/albertagamejam/entries.

My own team was fantastic to work with and put together the slice of interesting gameplay you can see in this video, or down load from the link at the top to play for yourself. I suggest that you do, since the music is great.

355

Mon, 19 Aug 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Small bits of movement have been going on over here. I don’t have much to say about it other than I am slowly, steadily moving toward a story that might be good for people to read, but as before, that time is probably not now. I mean I took out a half chapter chunk and haven’t filled it back in yet. Not the sort of thing that makes for enjoyable reading. Anyway if you choose to follow that link, you do it with my warning.

354 - Sid Meier's Civilization Revolution DS

Mon, 12 Aug 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Best Games - Sid Meier’s Civilization Revolution DS

Sometimes constraints can drive the best designs. Necessity being the mother of invention or whatever. I am here today to argue that not only is Civ Rev on the Nintendo DS a good port of the game, I’m going to say that it is one of the best Civ games in the series.

Ridiculous? Blasphemous? Not a real Gamer™? Maybe, but just hear me out. If you can get ahold of Civ Rev for DS, just play it. You’ll thank me in a day or two when you finally blink.

I’ll admit, I haven’t played every game in the Civ series, but I have put in the hours with a lot of them to know how the games tick. More than that, a few years ago I tried to examine what made the core loop of the Civilizations games so addictive. In other words, what made them good.

You might think that the magnetic effect of the Civilization series is the simulation of a world spanning fanciful take on human history. A ludic examination of everything that it took to get us to where we are. That ain’t it. Civ games are slot machines that payout tiny rewards continuously for five hours. Microscopic prizes at a metronomic pace. Everytime you press a button in a Civ game something happens, and often it is something you knew would happen, but you didn’t know when. You press a button and a city spawns a new settler. You press a button and discover a friendly village. You press a button and a wonder you had forgotten you were building springs into existence. You press a button and you conquer France.

Of course you are rewarded for planning ahead and strategically micromanaging your many towns and peoples. There is an element of skill to the game. You can make too many poor choices and end up with revolts and invasions decimating everything you have spent centuries building. But that isn’t what makes anyone play one more turn at 3:45 in the morning. It’s that casino game ‘Ka-ching’ of pressing a button and having a brand new rifleman appear in one of your cities.

Since every Civ game works this way, you might be wondering what makes the DS version so special. What would elevate that particular version to the rank of best games. Typically, as a game marches down the technological ladder they get worse not better.

Civ games are packed right full of all sorts of stuff. There is a technology tree spanning millennia, there is a civilopedia that includes actual historical information along with what amounts to the games manual. There are a variety of units, both military and civilian, you can use to explore, settle, defend, and conquer the world. All cool, but none of that makes the game a better game.

When they crunched all of Civilization down into Civ Rev for the DS they condensed everything. The pace, the scope, the complexity, the reward cycle. There is a possible version of Civ Rev DS where the reward cycle is exploitative, where playing the game takes a backseat to flashing lights and binging alarms. That isn’t what happened at all. Civ Rev is every bit a Civ game only smaller. Tighter. Quicker. More nimble. It takes the best parts of Civ and squashes them down into a bite sized package.

Is Civ Rev DS the best game in the series. No, probably not. But it is one of the best games on the DS platform, and it succeeds in ways no one would expect of a ‘down port’. No concessions, no exceptions, it’s just a great game.

Sid Meier’s Civilization Revolution is one of the best games.

353

Mon, 05 Aug 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Very early on in this blog, like 2013 early, I wrote about wanting to switch from Maya to Blender. It was a long and frustrating process. For quite a few years I suffered from a sort of software phantom limb syndrome where I would continually hit the wrong hotkeys or search for tools using the wrong names. While it ain’t busting rocks, there was a certain amount of psychological pain associated with the transition.

Now, barely a day goes by when I don’t fire up Blender to do something. I have my own custom keymap that I blindly jab at and really only remember in the tips of my fingers. From time to time I will even write tiny, simple python scripts to automate some tasks. Before Blender I had never even wanted to venture into the python language. I follow several news sources and development blogs to pick up information about the newest versions. I may or may not have fallen asleep to the soothing voice of Pablo from the Blender Today youtube channel. Okay I definitely did. A couple of times. I’m completely in the bag for Blender.

It’s not just me. To the outside observer, the latest version of Blender, 2.8, is pretty much indistinguishable from the polished and user focussed commercial software that it competes with. I’ll understand if you don’t take my word for that, since I am admittedly in the bag for Blender. Epic Games and Ubisoft have recently backed Blender as one of their go to art creation tools. They are only the most high profile of the companies backing or using Blender on a day to day basis. There are many others across the games, video production, advertising, and special effects industries. 3D printing and prop making is another pool that I have a toe in, and they are Blender day in and day out over there.

I don’t think that Blender will ever fully replace Maya or Max or Cinema 4D or whatever it is people use. I don’t even think that it should. Some folks are very comfortable with the tools that they use and they really have no incentive to change. There are some tools like ZBrush and Houdini that are invaluable for some people for specific tasks. I think that’s great. I also know that for what I do, I have yet to hit any walls with Blender.

If nothing else they now have a proper object organizations structure that works better than any other I have ever seen. They went from having an obscure unlabeled layer model that was one of the dumbest things I have ever had the misfortune to use, to a nesting ‘collections’ system that works so elegantly, within days of using it, I changed my own workflow habits to better fit their system and could never imagine going back.

If you are like me, and you tried Blender in the past only to bounce off of it, I think that version 2.8 might be what you were waiting for.

352 - UNO

Mon, 29 Jul 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Best Games - UNO

I don’t think I will get much into the rules of UNO. If you are reading this, you have probably played the game and you already have a pretty good idea how it works. You know that it is a card shedding game where you have to match the color or number of the last played card. You and the other players keep taking turns slapping down cards out of your own hand while trying to make everyone else hold onto as many cards as possible. If you win a round, the cards your opponents are holding count toward your point total. You know that you have to call out ‘UNO!’ when you have one card left. The game almost demands that you and every member of your family / friend group unearth their most ruthlessly nitpicking selves, ready to punish anyone who forgets to call out ‘UNO!’. You know that it is like a lot of other card games, but it is also strangely more accessible than most other card games. You have probably been beaten by an 8 year old.

What you may not have noticed is that UNO has a built in balancing system. A fun balancing system.

Most competitive card games have a sort of skill curve built into them. Players who understand the systems more deeply will tend to beat players who are just starting out. The random chance of the card draw keeps the game interesting for anyone playing at higher levels. The only problem with that is, with a game like Poker as an example, other than pure chance there is no way for a less skilled player to beat a more skilled player. There is a ‘good’ way to play and an endless variety of ‘less good’ ways to play.

UNO, on the other hand, has a few different paths to winning. Most players starting out will want to shed their higher value cards first and only hold on to a selection of lower value cards and action cards. This ensures that even if you don’t win a round, you won’t be providing many points for the person who does. This is sort of the beginner mode, and if you play it cleanly and consistently, you will probably win just as many rounds as other people at the table. Not quite luck based, but far from a deep strategy game. The simplicity and viability of this play style makes UNO an easy card game for kids to pick up.

On the other end, UNO is a game where you can count cards, bluff, flat out lie, devise fiendish card traps to dump unreasonable amounts of cards on other players, and did I mention lie. The rules not only allow lying, they offer ways for players to penalize anyone they catch lying. When you play this way you are not guaranteed success over players conservatively shedding cards and laying down actions. One way is not better than the other. ONE WAY IS NOT BETTER THAN THE OTHER.

This is where you say ‘Then UNO isn’t a game of skill. It’s just all luck! If more experienced players can’t always trounce less experienced players this game is garbage!’. Poor deluded player. That’s not the point. UNO is a game where, no matter your experience level, you can be competitive. If you are just learning the rules, and play a clean game, you’re gonna do okay. If you have played a lot of UNO you can bend the rules, bluff often, and draw cards when you don’t need to in the hopes of filling another players hand with a real lumber yard’s worth of cards. You can be devious. You can be nasty. You can make the game fun in the way that you want.

When you are playing a card game as a family, or playing with younger kids, there is often a ‘Let the Wookie Win’ problem. Kids hate to lose. No one likes to lose, but kids really really hate it. UNO is a game where you don’t really have to worry about that. Once they understand the rules, that kid is going to win a decent amount of the time anyway. Everyone can play however they want and it will still always come down to the last 3 or four cards. UNO is like the Mario Kart of card games. While that does mean that a certain demographic will have trouble taking UNO seriously, and I would suggest never betting money on a game of UNO, it does one thing right that a lot of other games get wrong.

No matter who is playing UNO, they can have fun.

That alone puts UNO up there among the best games.

351

Mon, 22 Jul 2019 00:00:00 +0000

More changes and edits over here again. next week will be a longer post.

350

Mon, 15 Jul 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Not a whole lot to say here, just more updates (rewrites) over on the larger story. I also have another short story started that I will be posting up when it’s ready… probably in a couple weeks I would think.

349

Mon, 08 Jul 2019 00:00:00 +0000

I’ll be breaking the hell out of the story over here for the next little while. It won’t make a lot of sense and whole scenes will come out to make way for the revisions I’ve been doing. Like always, I don’t recommend actually going over there to read it, because it’s broken, but hey, you can if you want.

348

Mon, 01 Jul 2019 00:00:00 +0000

If you are in Canada, I hope you are having a good Canada day. If not, well have a good day anyway.

347

Mon, 24 Jun 2019 00:00:00 +0000

It’s nearly 40 years since the Rubik’s Cube came out. I just learned how to solve one yesterday.

I can’t really take any credit for that. Tutorials and guides have obviously existed for decades. Whatever depths there are to plumb in that plastic toy have been fully plumbed. I think I even had a second hand book on How to Master the Cube, or something like that but I don’t know that I ever got more than a page or two into it. We had a couple of cubes, a pyramid, some 2x2’s from cereal boxes, and, I think, a ball. I don’t remember ever solving any of them. If I had any interest in learning how to solve one I certainly didn’t apply it.

The real reason that I can’t take any credit for learning how to solve a Rubik’s Cube, is because I didn’t. My son did.

There seems to have been a resurgence of the Rubik’s Cube speed solving fad. At least among my son and his friends. One day he asked where the Rubik’s Cube was. We had picked one up at a garage sale years ago and left it in the car as a potential distraction during long trips. Like a great majority of the worlds Rubik’s Cubes, it had probably been played with half a dozen times. It had grit and something sticky on it, but it still worked. He used it a few times before taking it apart, cleaning it up, and lubricating the surfaces so that it moved fairly smoothly again.

Over the next week of so, he would sit on the couch for extended spans just watching youtube videos and reading pages about solving the cube while practicing the moves required to jostle its faces into position. It wasn’t long before he could solve it repeatedly and started to work on increasing his speed.

Sometimes you just need implied permission to do something. The Rubik’s Cube is almost as old as I am and, being a curious sort about puzzles and games, I’ve always wanted to know how it worked. Sometime over the past few decades, I did find out that it wasn’t terribly complicated and you only needed to memorize a small set of moves and patterns. Memorizing small sets of moves and patterns pretty much describes any work I have done since my 20s, so I figured how hard could it be. Still, until my son did it, and in turn provided me with implied permission to try, I wasn’t likely to dedicate myself to it for any length of time. Now I had a teacher if something wasn’t making sense and someone who knew the process well enough to ask cube questions in cube terms.

I’ll probably never be as fast at it as he is, but that’s okay. I have zero interest in competing at Rubik’s Cube solving. If he is or isn’t, then that’s okay too. Sometimes it’s just nice to know that if you decide to learn a thing, you probably can. It makes learning all the other things that seem complicated a little less daunting.

346

Mon, 17 Jun 2019 00:00:00 +0000

345 - Forza Motorsport

Mon, 10 Jun 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Best Games - Forza Motorsport

I’m not really a car guy. A lot of my family are very mechanically inclined. They might even qualify as car guys. I grew up in a car guy town. So much so that a lot of the car guys were girls. Maybe a car folks town. I have paged through the autotrader. I know the difference between a hemi and rotary. I change my own oil and have done minor maintenance on every car I have ever driven. Still, I don’t consider myself a car guy.

From time to time, I can brush up against what it might be like to be a car guy. Almost always because of a video game.

Well before I was old enough to have a licence I played a lot of the game Test Drive on a 286 pc. I played it not because it was a particularly good simulation of driving, but because it included a Ferrari Testarossa in the lineup of exotic sports cars. This was a car feverishly fetishized among my peers. I couldn’t even tell you why, but I wanted to drive that Ferrari, and I wanted to drive it fast.

Unfortunately Test Drive, as a game, really couldn’t live up to the aspiration. You pilot a sports car down a cliffside road and veering to either side will cause you to crash. Traffic on the road is a constant hazzard, but you can only see about 20 meters in front of you so you will probably crash. If you over rev your engine, your windshield inexplicably shatters, and yep, that counts as a crash. Less a driving game and more a waiting for a tow truck game.

For the briefest moments, I was something like a car guy. Just without all the messy interest in actual cars.

By the time the original Gran Turismo came out on the Playstation, I had been driving for a while. I remember searching the car list for my Crown Victoria and mid 80’s Toyota Supra but coming up empty. I had to be content with driving the games version of the Subaru Impreza. While my interest in racing games and car games had definitely increased, my aspirations had been tempered somewhat. Driving pretend cars that I could possibly drive in real life seemed a lot more fun. That was probably because I now had a frame of reference. I knew what driving, even driving fast, felt like and trying to recreate that feeling in a game was exciting.

While Gran Turismo was a fun game, it didn’t really feel like driving. Conveying the feeling of speed and momentum was beyond the capabilities of a game from 1997 (spoilers: it’s still beyond the capabilities of a video game, mostly)

In real life, I drove the Toyota Supra until it finally gave up. I played racing and driving games on the Playstation, the Dreamcast, the Playstation 2, and the XBox. None of them felt like actually driving and none of them made me any more interested in cars. Hovercrafts maybe, but not cars. Until I played Forza Motorsport.

Forza Motorsport was packed full of cars to drive and tracks to drive them on. Still no sign of my Supra but I had gotten used to that. More important though, it included one crucial addition. Forza Motorsport included a driving line.

The driving line in Forza Motorsport is a truly wonderful thing. The option to turn on the driving line is in the assists menu. The developers considered it a cheat. A way to make the game easier. The real beauty of the driving line is that it makes Forza Motorsport feel more like actually driving.

There are no video games that can recreate the feeling of driving a car. The force of acceleration. A hard turn or slamming the brakes. The graphics and sound can attempt to recreate everything in precise glowing detail, and with VR you can even experience all of that from inside the car, but if you are not moving, you won’t feel like you are moving. The driving line in Forza is like braille for your sense of motion. What you can’t feel, it attempts to recreate using a curving line in shades of green and red.

Is it perfect? No, far from it. But the driving line in Forza, after I had gotten used to it, let me experience a closer approximation of driving than I had ever experienced before in a driving game.

I went on to race dozens of hours on those tracks. I raced a Subaru Impreza even in races where it wasn’t the best car to choose. I tuned cars and swapped out parts. I tweaked and adjusted tiny nuances to make the cars drive just as I liked.

For a short while, I was a car guy. Well maybe not really, but I did play as one in a video game.

Forza Motorsport is one of the best games.

344

Mon, 03 Jun 2019 00:00:00 +0000

A lot of small changes over here while I work on the scenes and changes in other parts of the story. I’ll be lifting out entire chunks and rewriting them to make the story flow better. I’ve been working on this for a while, and only now have I figured out how to use the planning parts of the writing software I’m using. Just been scratching all my plans and ideas down in another document until now. They actually have tools for that sort of thing, and it turns out they work pretty well. Strange?

343

Mon, 27 May 2019 00:00:00 +0000

I wrote some later scenes, but haven’t patched them into the story yet, because I don’t really know where they go. I’ll puzzle that out and try to get them in there in a few days.

In place of any longer writing you can enjoy this.

Ringing strings held tight

Threads extended waves resound

Where no breaks end them

342

Mon, 20 May 2019 00:00:00 +0000

341 - Pac-Man

Mon, 13 May 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Best Games - Pac-Man

There are a lot of games that I tend to shy away from when I write one of these. Games that are so universally loved, and commented on, that it’s difficult to find anything interesting to add. I could write a bunch of drivel about how the game plays, how it makes retreat an advantageous strategy, or how Pac-Man is the originator, and pinnacle, of the maze chase genre. Probably stuff you already know and probably stuff you don’t need to read again.

That’s fine though. I’m going to cover a different aspect of Pac-Man. This post could apply to so many classic, celebrated, games. The really interesting thing about Pac-Man is that the developers didn’t know what made it good. No one did, at least not until much, much later.

It’s obvious that Namco, and designer Toru Iwatani, knew that Pac-Man was fun. At the time of the games release in 1980 they promoted it heavily to arcade owners. It is telling though, that Namco positioned Rally-X to be the big hit over Pac-Man. If you don’t remember Rally-X I’ll save you having to google it https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rally-X . Rally-X isn’t a bad game at all, but it was nowhere near as successful as Pac-Man. Few things ever were, or will be.

Here is where I’m going to make a slight jaunt into game designer land. I’ll link to an article here that explains how that ghost path-finding and AI system works. I’ll also link to a video that explains the same thing in case you don’t want to read the post.

https://gameinternals.com/post/2072558330/understanding-pac-man-ghost-behavior

https://youtu.be/ICwzQ0_RCcQ

The ghost path-finding system in Pac-Man is a work of genius on the level of the knight from chess. A very simple set of rules that can be re-purposed and reapplied to dizzyingly satisfying effect. A system that seems restrictively simple but allows for the chaos required to evoke ‘fun’.

I’ve written and talked a lot about ‘fun’ here. I’m pretty convinced that predicting patterns out of seeming chaos is what humans experience as fun. Successfully leading a target when throwing a ball, quickly navigating uneven ground, or even just tossing an object from one hand to the other. All of these have a finite set of variables, but they are far too many to actually calculate while you are completing the task. You have to predict the outcome using only your own pattern recognition skills and your estimations of the systems involved. Even a slow, methodical, game like chess involves an effectively random element, in the other player. You have to predict what will happen next based on what you know of the game and what you know of your opponent. It’s not too surprising that predicting outcomes to potentially random events is also an innate survival skills in humans. We find effective survival fun.

The game system of Pac-Man is a predictable pattern with enough variables to appear random. Since it isn’t actually random, the player can push on the system to affect outcomes. The first time you turn Pac-Man around and see one of the ghosts reverse direction as well the pattern of that registers somewhere in your instinct centers. The ghosts aren’t random, they operate based on rules and you can exploit that. Several people have, and, if done perfectly you can get the highest possible score and break the game. Perfect pattern prediction. You can jump through an example of that here and it is fascinating to watch.

https://youtu.be/AuoH0vz3Mqk

Pac-Man was released almost 40 years ago. People have had a while to pull it apart and figure out how it ticks. But it wasn’t until the release of Pac-Man Championship Edition in 2007 that the original designer of the game figured out how to replicate it.

Ms.Pac-Man, the superior sequel (depending on who you ask) was a conversion of the original and used most of the same underlying systems, and so it was a similarly successful game. Pac-Man Plus was likewise a conversion of the original game with a few minor tweaks. It is less well known, but plays roughly the same as Pac-Man and Ms.Pac-Man. Neither of these conversions were worked on by the original team at Namco and were more or less ‘bootlegs that went legit’ so all of the actual gameplay can be squarely and fairly attributed to the original developers of Pac-Man.

The first real sequel created by members of the same team as the original was Super Pac-Man. Super Pac-Man was a maze chase with mild puzzle elements that, while expanding on the original never really lived up to it either. The players attention is pulled in too many directions and the active threat and the system that you are trying to manipulate are disconnected in ways that aren’t as satisfying. Not a bad game, but not on the level of Pac-Man either.

After that there are a string of strange, occasionally interesting, and sometimes terrible Pac-Man related games. Baby Pac-Man is a half pinball half arcade game hybrid that is mediocre at both. Jr. Pac-Man is another bootleg level development that makes the maze larger than the screen, but doesn’t actually improve it in any way. In fact, not being able to see the whole maze makes the game arguably worse. Pac-Land is a side scrolling platformer that has nothing to do with Pac-Man and isn’t a particularly good platformer.

When the original team came back to try their hand at a revival in 1987 with Pac-Mania, they created a game that worked on nostalgia alone. Pac-Mania shrinks the view-able area of the maze down to a tiny tile of the whole. It evokes Pac-Man, but it is a much more reactive game. The ability to predict patterns and exploit them is hamstrung by the visible play area and the perspective. The developers knew what made a Pac-Man game, but were lost when it came to what actually made it fun.

Lots of people tried to make a new Pac-Man game through the intervening years but they wouldn’t really hit success until Pac-Man Championship Edition in 2007. Less of a ‘Maze Chase’ and more of a snake like game, the object is to build up a long train of ghosts following hot on your heels and then choose your moment to eat a power pellet and turn on all of them. The game rewards quick pattern recognition and path planning, but eventually gets so fast that you would require superhuman reflexes to execute your plans. A tough game, but it activates those fun centers just as well as the original.

Namco and Toru Iwatani had captured the essence of fun with Pac-Man but it took them almost 30 years to do it again without just copying the original. The history of Pac-Man is a good lesson that just because someone creates something successful, that doesn’t mean that they know how they did it, or how to do it again.

Pac-Man remains one of the best games.

340

Mon, 06 May 2019 00:00:00 +0000

For the second week in a row, all the new writing is going on over here. It’s still very much in an alpha state, so I don’t actually recommend reading it, but you know, you can if you want. Next week I will have something a little more expansive for this spot.

339

Mon, 29 Apr 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Changed some stuff over here. The writing, editing, and rewriting continues.

338

Mon, 22 Apr 2019 00:00:00 +0000

I’m going to post up writing of a different sort today. I have reworked the rules of the board game I have been making. I reworked them so hard that I removed the ‘board’ aspect of the game entirely, and now the whole game is played with cards. The old version was, to put is succinctly, dull. Dull isn’t something you want a game to be, and so, the reworking of the rules. Below is part of the new rule document. I’m going to leave out the combat phase of play for now, since I still haven’t play tested the new style and they will likely change at least a bit. Anyway, here you go.

Adventure Caddie - V. 0.95

Description

You and your cohort are professional Adventure Caddies. You won’t be doing any actual fighting, but it is your job to carry, organize, and repair your Heroes supplies. You are also responsible for some high level Adventure coaching. When to step back, when to rush forward, that sort of thing.

Now, no one wants to stay a Caddie forever. You all have dreams of getting into the Pro Adventurers Guild. The fame, the glory, the treasure, the parties. Free danishes in the break room. All the perks.

The first hurdle is the cost. You are going to have to pay the guild membership and it isn’t cheap. The second is recommendations. Nobody was ever accepted into the guild without at least one recommendation. The more recommendations you can get, the better your chances of snagging one of those rare Hero positions.

Objectives

Get the entire party of Heroes through the adventure alive.

If any of the Heroes is down at the end of an adventure, the guild demands that the entire group give up half of its treasure (rounding up) to pay resurrection costs, and run another adventure of the same level or higher to redeem yourselves. No spots in the guild lineup will be granted to Caddies that fail to protect their Heroes.

Earn enough Treasure to buy a Guild membership.

The Heroes cut of any Treasure you pick up is accounted for and deposited into the guild run ethereal bank before you even stuff it in your bag. So what you are holding on to, is yours. At the end of an adventure, you can pay for a guild membership, choose to carry what you have into the next adventure, or pay the long term storage trolls to hold onto it for you. Sure would be nice to have access to the guild bank, but unfortunately that’s only for Heroes.

Earn recommendations.

Heroes are a strange lot, and sometimes they have objectives that they want to accomplish that are seperate from the main Adventure. Is it hubris? Is it insecurity? Is it malice? Who knows. What you do know is, helping a Hero accomplish their tasks will earn you recommendations with the guild, and they just might be more valuable than gold and jewels. If more than one Caddie can pay for the guild membership at the end of an Adventure, you just know they will take the one with the most recommendations.

In the case of a tie (enough treasure to pay for membership and the same number of recommendations) Both Caddies can become Pro Heroes. There is no harm in helping your fellow Caddies get into the guild if you can buy your way in as well.

The game ends when one or more of your group is admitted into the guild. Everyone else will just have to try again next season.

Setup

All Caddies start with a carrying capacity of 9. That means that the total bulk of the the items you can carry can only add up to less than or equal to 9.

Shuffle all decks and place them on the table.

Each Caddie draws one Hero from the Hero deck. Order doesn’t matter, but you must decide amongst your group who will Caddie which Hero. Each Hero has different base stats.

Draw the top card from the level one adventure deck and place it face up. A good Caddie always does some preliminary scouting, and has some idea what their Heroes might be getting into. Refer to this card when you want an idea of what enemies are on their way.

Each Caddie draws 2 items from the level one loot deck and places them on the ground. If you draw a treasure piece, Place it on the bottom of the deck and draw again. Once all the items are on the ground the group must decide how to divy them up.These will be your starting items. Now suit up and get adventuring.

Turn order

All turns are taken at the same time, as a group. If Hero actions can combine into Combos, you will have to work out between you which Hero should take their action first.

Start Round

Heroes use any potions, repair packs, or consumables they are holding. All of them. If you handed it to them they will drink it or use it. Remove the empties from the Heroes and throw them on the ground.

Caddies can use this time to repair one point of damage on any Items they are holding.

Caddies can throw one item to a Hero, and/or Request one item from a Hero.

Discard any items on the ground. The Heroes have moved on and you have to move on with them. Wave goodbye to those items and sweep them into the discard pile.

337

Mon, 15 Apr 2019 00:00:00 +0000

336

Mon, 08 Apr 2019 00:00:00 +0000

As this story approaches the end of ’episode 1’ I have been going back over the writing, and like you might guess, I hate most of it. I’m told this is normal. This is to be expected. The good news is when you are writing you have the ability to change what words go where and what characters say and when. I still have characters that don’t ’talk to me’ but I’m very definitely finding ones that do. I don’t really pick what they say, I just listen and write it down when they say it. That is sort of cool. Hopefully that will make the second draft easier to lay down than the first. Hopefully that will make the second draft better than the first. I doubt it though. Probably won’t be properly ‘okay’ until the 3rd or 4rth draft.

335

Mon, 01 Apr 2019 00:00:00 +0000

I wrote a short sketch that I put up over here, but I will also post it below. Hopefully the html doesn’t get too screwy on your browser.

Title: Battle Wagon

Author: Owen McManus

Draft date: 04/01/2019

INT. SMOKEY ROOM. A ROUND TABLE SITS UNDER THE SINGLE POOL OF LIGHT IN THE ROOM. A PILE OF MAPS AND BLUEPRINTS LAY STREWN IN THE CENTER. THERE IS A GROUP OF GRIM LOOKING MEN AND WOMEN POSITIONED AROUND THE TABLE ON WOOD AND METAL STACKING CHAIRS.

SARGE

You know why I called you here. Ya'll are the meanest bunch of miscreants that I have ever had the misfortune to come across, and it pains me to say that this, but your country needs you.

BILLSON

Again.

Billson chomps a half finished cigar and tips the chair back .

SARGE

Yes Billson. Again. Now I'm not going to beat around the bush. This mission is dangerous. Some of you might not be coming home. There won't be any state funerals for those who don't, and there won't be any medals for those that do.

CARLILE

We already ghosts, ain't we. Don't bother me none.

Nodding and grunts of acknowledgement from around the table.

SARGE

Okay, okay. Before we get to the briefing, I do have one issue I would like addressed.

BILLSON

Sarge, you're really going to question me and my team. After Tokyo, after Berlin, after Montreal?

SARGE

Now I know that your team has a solid track record with these kinds of Ops. I know that you will do what needs doing to get the job done. That's not the problem. I just have one question.

ZHANG

(clearly annoyed)

Spit it out.

SARGE

Where is the battle wagon.

Team shoot confused looks at each other.

Billson raises a hand to settle the team down.

BILLSON

The what?

SARGE

The battle wagon.

Team continues to look confused. They have no idea what the sergeant is talking about.

SARGE

In Zaragosa. The van you welded armor panels and machineguns to and used to break into the arms dealers fortress.

ZHANG

Oh, the Steel Zephyr. He's talking about the Steel Zephyr. Yeah. Had to ditch it in the Ebro.

SARGE

Okay, so why is it in the river?

CARLILE

Had tae douse it to deactivate the Super C-4 strapped to the bottom, didn't we.

TIMMINS

(points a mocking thumb at Sarge)

Sounds like he never had to drown some Super C-4. I suppose that's why you hire the experts.

SARGE

Alright. Fair enough. Bottom of the Ebro. So where's the one you built out of a train engine in Dhaka.

ZHANG

The Light Rail Ravager! Oh, I miss her. Really packed a punch and extra roof space for the missile racks.

SARGE

And where is it? In the river?

BILLSON

Lake.

Sarge shakes his head for a moment.

SARGE

Do you folks see my problem.

BILLSON

Not really Sarge. Speak plain and we'll see what we can do for you.

SARGE

How many missions did you run for us last year?

BILLSON

Timmins?

TIMMINS

17 Boss. If you count the Federico twins as 2.

SARGE

Sure. 17. And how many battle wagons did you build?

Timmins considers for a moment.

TIMMINS

Including the Steel Zephyr?

SARGE

Yes. All the battle wagons.

ZHANG

Can we stop calling them battle wagons. They got names.

SARGE

Fine. How many.

TIMMINS

SARGE

You didn't even run that many missions.

ZHANG

Built two in Daegu. Carlile had his own.

CARLILE

Only 'cause Timmins said I had the Kimchi farts and I didnea.

SARGE

You built a battle-

Zhang pulls a sour look.

SARGE

Okay, okay. I don't care why. Do any of you know what one of those monstrosities costs?

CARLILE

Well we don't buy 'em. We build 'em, don't we.

SARGE

I buy them. I pay for them. Every time I hire you for a mission I pay the expenses. Armor plating, cannon shells, caltrops, arc welders. I have to bury all your battle wagons in secret budgets and military slush funds. By the way, why do you need a new arc welder every time? Why don't you use the old one?

BILLSON

I think we are all missing the bigger picture here. We ran 18 Ops-

TIMMINS

17.

BILLSON

17 Ops. Every single one of them a resounding success.

SARGE

In Tampa you drove a Russian fighter jet through a mall.

TIMMINS

You sent us that jet.

SARGE

Yes. Because I thought you were going to fly it. You turned it into a tank!

BILLSON

We saved the world from Moloch and his global terrorists.

SARGE

Where is it now?

TIMMINS

The mall?

SARGE

The battle wagon! Where is it now.

ZHANG

The Suffering Butterfly.

SARGE

What?

ZHANG

That's her name. The Suffering Butterfly.

SARGE

I don't care! Where is it?

ZHANG

In the bay. I couldn't let Moloch get her.

SARGE

Could you have used the battle wagon from Tokyo to stop Moloch?

The team is confused again.

CARLILE

She's in the bay, isn't she.

SARGE

If she wasn't in the bay. Imagine just once that you reused a battle wagon. Again. On the next mission. Could you have used that battle wagon to stop Moloch.

BILLSON

(bewildered by the idea of it)

I mean, it's possible, but how would we even have gotten it out of the water?

SARGE

It was a hovercraft! I don't even know how you sank it.

CARLILE

Weren't easy. We're very good at our jobs.

SARGE

Alright, alright. The current mission is time critical. We only have 24 hours to get you in and get those hostages out. We can talk about this more when you get back.

(Sarge shuffles through some maps and pulls one to the top)

We have possible entry and extraction points here and here. Known tangos are here, here, and here.

BILLSON

(leaning back in the chair again)

No need Sarge. Me and the team already worked out the plan on the way over here. All we need from you is an attack helicopter and the biggest set of tractor tires you can find.

334

Mon, 25 Mar 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Some very slow progress over here, as I reorganize a bunch of story behind the scenes. I’m getting close to the end of the first episode. After that I will go back and edit and rewrite the first episode and move on the the second.

333

Mon, 18 Mar 2019 00:00:00 +0000

More story work going on here.

I have discovered a character that I complete forgot about, because their big scene didn’t happen until now. I could go back through and write them in where they need to go, but I’m still working under the advice of so many writers to resist the urge to edit and revise until after I have the whole story written. I jump back all the time and add little notes for new scenes and changes to scenes in chapter 1,2 and 3, but so far I haven’t significantly revised them. It makes sense now why that is the common wisdom among people who write longer fiction. The problem is, your brain just can’t hold all the ideas that make up a good story at one time. I forgot a whole character. One that I have notes for and the bones of an arc for. As I was writing each scene, that character just didn’t fire anything in my memory. I like to plan a bit and ‘pants’ a bit when writing because I like to know where the story is going, but i also like being surprised when characters do or say something I wasn’t expecting. That also means that you run the risk of not remembering to write in a whole character. Nothing like learning by doing I guess.

332 - Tony Hawk's Pro Skater

Mon, 11 Mar 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Best Games - Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater

The first video game, depending on who you ask, was probably a sports game. Either tennis or ping pong. Video games have been infatuated with simulations of real world sports since day one. Only one problem. That doesn’t work at all.

Video games depicting sports don’t really simulate playing them. Tennis you play with your whole body. Everything is taxed. Your muscles, your reflexes, your perception, your decision making skills. All of your various interconnected systems have to be firing for you to play tennis. When, like Pong, you reduce that down to twisting a knob, tilting a stick, or pressing some buttons, it isn’t tennis, but it is still fun.

The fun part of most sports isn’t the mechanics of movement. It isn’t the competition, or the camaraderie. It’s solving tiny problems over and over and over again. Hitting a ball mid flight, taking a step on uneven terrain, anticipating the next quarter second of play on the field. These are the moments that fun is made of. Our brains just can’t get enough of solving these tiny problems. Like a positive reinforcement loop that keeps us practicing potential survival skills until we get good at them. It’s a dopamine thing. Pong gets it.

Skateboarding at a high level is something that an infinitesimal amount of people have done or will ever do. It’s a set of skills that require intense practice and a deep time commitment. The positive feedback loop on skateboarding must be amazing. I don’t really know though, since I can barely ride a skateboard over a level surface for more than a few meters. The last time I legitimately gave it a go, I was probably 13. I would hazard a guess that the majority of the audience for the Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater games falls into this category.

So how does a sport that almost no one has any real world experience with become one of the most popular video games ever? The developers, Neversoft, took a page out of the Pong playbook. They didn’t try to simulate skateboarding. Not even close. They weren’t even in the same room as a simulation. Instead they focused on getting their players to solve tiny problems over and over and over. Every time you steer the character you are planning half a second into the future. Every time your character hits a ramp you have to predict how much time you will have in the air and choose tricks accordingly. Every time you land a trick you have to be setting up for the next one. The tiny problems never stop.

Solving these tiny problems can be fun, but skateboarding, real skateboarding, is a demanding challenge of balance and dexterity, momentum and reactions. If Neversoft had tried to simulate skateboarding it would have resulted in some horrifying set of finger contortions that might be fun to some people, but not to most. Instead, almost every interaction with a Tony Hawk game is biased toward success. Every time you direct your character up a quarter pipe, they will always come down in the perfect position to land the jump. Every time you leap over a rail or ledge and press the button to grind, your skater will magnetically snap to the right position. With very little practice you can land any jump or ride any rail. You only start to crash when you push a grind too long or pack too many tricks into your available airtime. The game wants you to win. It set you up to solve all of those small problems. You reaching for more is where it gets challenging.

Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater understands fun, and that is why it is one of the best games.

331

Mon, 04 Mar 2019 00:00:00 +0000

I wanted to take a short break from fiction to write about machines. Well one machine. No, not one machine, a lot of machines. More to the point, my relationship to machines. With machines? Whatever. I’ll start over.

I like machines. I like the way they work. I like ones that move in consistent and predictable ways. I like machines that use a few repeatable motions to accomplish a variety of tasks. I like to take them apart and put them back together. I like to diagnose problems with machines and fix them. I like knowing that when I take them apart, I can put them back together. I like it when I can put them back together and they still work. I like it when I diagnose a problem with a machine, take it apart then put it back together again, but with one small tweak that gets it humming along.

So here is what made me think of all this.

I was running the 3d printer again recently. It’s important at this point to know that 3d printers are very twitchy, uncooperative machines that are tough to dial in and tough to keep tuned. That goes triple for mine. Mine is a cheap build it yourself kit with a knockoff control board, and issues with some of the electrical connectors. Other than all that, it usually works. At least it works if I don’t want to use the usb port or try to update it. Like I said, knockoff control board.

I hadn’t had it running for a while, because I bought a new board to replace the one that came with it, but as with the rest of the printer, some assembly is required. Also, the new board is just that, a circuit board. Actually it’s a set of circuit boards, but either way it has no case, the mounting holes on the printer don’t fit it, and the display for it is completely different than the one I have. If I want to use this new board I will need something to put it in or attach it to.

Lucky for me I have just the tool for making a new control board case. A 3D printer. That means limping the old board along for a while until I can get one printed. This was a task that I wasn’t looking forward to. Mostly because I was scared of it. If the old board flamed out before I got the case done, or further along, if I installed the new board and it didn’t work, I would have gone from a potentially working printer, to a definitely not working printer. I had Schrodinger’s printer. Turning it on was just too frightening.

I had something else to print, so finally I just said screw it and fired the thing up. There was a lot of tuning and adjusting to do to get it running properly, but in less than two hours I had it printing. Of course that wasn’t going to last.

One failed print later, the heater block that melts the filament was leaking molten plastic, there was a short at the board that stopped one of the print axis from moving, and the extruder wasn’t extruding. I felt very disappointed.

On the other hand, I really like machines. Now that the printer wasn’t working at all, I had no fear of disassembling the thing to try to find out why. I fixed the extruder, since it turns out it was never assembled properly in the first place. That wasn’t my fault, the thing just came like that. I cleared the mess of half extruded plastic from the nozzle, and after a lot of fiddling tightened everything to stop the leak in the heater block. I should probably replace that too though, since this one is a bit of a mess.

The only thing left was the short at the control board. At first I thought that the board had finally given it all up and I would have to replace it. I left the printer and thought about how I would install the new board. Something about how it had failed didn’t seem right. If the board went I should lose more than one axis. I went back and had a look at all the connections running to and from the motors. Sure enough, the board had failed, but it wasn’t any of the chips, it was the contacts that the wires run into. I disconnected the motor in question and re connected it to route around the issue. After turning it back on, everything ran perfectly. Well not perfectly, but as well as it did before.

So now I have one more print to finish up and I can start making a new case for a new control board. I don’t know if it will ever print perfectly, but it should at least print properly.

This whole story might sound like a hassle, and it sort of was and still is. The thing about me is, I really like machines. I like it when they work correctly, but I like it even more when I get to take them apart, fix them, and then put them back together again. I know that isn’t everyone’s thing. I know that isn’t even a lot of peoples thing. In a room full of people there might be two who really want to take the room apart. They want to see inside the walls and figure out how the whole thing works. Of those two people, there might be one who wants to put the room back together, exactly the same, like nothing ever happened, but with one screw hidden under the drywall tightened half a turn. I’m that guy.

I apologize to anyone who has to deal with me, because it must be infuriating. What can I say. I like machines.

I have a microwave here that is on the fritz. I don’t think I’m touching that one.

330

Mon, 25 Feb 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Added more words here. Not much to say about it. Well I suppose I can say this, editing is going to be a whole thing. New scenes, moved scenes, redefined relationships, expanded descriptions. I’ve gone over a lot of writing advice that says you have no idea what you are writing until you have written it, and holy cows is that ever true.

329

Mon, 18 Feb 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Some slow progress here. I also went back through the first two chapters and made some notes about things that I will change on an edit pass. There are at least 4 scenes that are in completely the wrong spot and quite a lot of fleshing out to do, but hopefully it’s salvageable. I suppose I will only know that when I get closer to the end.

328

Mon, 11 Feb 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Some edits here, but first I want to get to another story that I did some work on.

I sent this one out for feedback twice, made some edits, sent it out again, and then made some more edits. I think it’s approaching something like a final form. I could probably dive back into anything I have written, disassemble it and improve it, but I think this one is close enough to done that I even gave it a title. You can read This , a short character study about a man with a truly terrible super power.

On the longer story front (still no title) I was pretty hung up on one scene. I wrote the stuff around it to try to have it make some sense, but nothing I did made it work right. I wrote about 600 words, deleted that, wrote another 1000 or so and still the whole scene sucked. Finally, after thinking about it for a couple days, I deleted the whole thing and replaced it with a couple of lines. It will need an edit pass, like everything else, but I already like it so much better.

327 - Landmaker

Mon, 04 Feb 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Best Games - Landmaker

A few years before developing Landmaker, Taito released Puzzle Bobble, one of the best action puzzle games ever made (which I, sort of, wrote about here). The shadow of Puzzle Bobble is immense. It’s hardly any wonder that Landmaker gets overlooked when people are compiling lists of the finest puzzle games of all time. Is it as criminally overlooked as Uo Poko or Puzz Loop? Probably not, but still Landmaker deserves a place in our collective memory.

Released in 1998, Landmaker takes the color matching puzzle game and gives it a unique twist. Instead of matching blocks to clear them, you match the blocks to make increasingly mammoth structures. Firing a block with the same color at the leading point of one of these structures will dissolve it and any other matched blocks touching it. If you thought all of that sounds sort of familiar, you wouldn’t be too far wrong. On the surface Landmaker operates like a lot of other color matching puzzle games. You could try to play it like that, clearing any blocks you can as soon as you are able, but from level 2 on that would be a short road to a game over.

Landmaker doesn’t want you to clear those blocks. In fact building them up into monolithic chunks of similar color is more valuable. You see Landmaker is competitive by design. If you aren’t facing off against another player your rival is a deviously difficult AI. The playstation version of the game has a single player puzzle mode, but the less said about that the better. Landmaker is designed to be played competitively, and the only way to get an edge on your opponent is to build bigger and bigger things before smashing them down. The larger the collection of buildings you destroy on your side, the more junk will rain down on theirs.

Then there are the special blocks. Instead of granting the player a bonus as soon as you clear a larger area, Landmaker drops the specials right there on the board. You can shoot a block at them to activate them, but until you do they will sit there on your board, taking up space and being a general pain in the ass. It’s the ultimate risk reward mechanic. How many games make your success a potential liability that you have to plan for. It might sound frustrating, but actually it’s brilliant.

When all is said and done, Landmaker is a fairly simple game, but so is checkers. Similarly, the true depth of Landmaker doesn’t start to unfurl until you have played a few games of it. Pretty soon you will start to look for ways to slide blocks behind other blocks, or leave some garbage blocks right up at the edge of your failure line so that you can build larger structures somewhere else. It doesn’t just reward speed. Planning two or three blocks ahead can unleash a greater assault on the other player than simply clearing everything that comes down the board at you.

Landmaker is one of the best games with one of the best names. Don’t take my word for it. You should probably just play it, or watch this video.

326

Mon, 28 Jan 2019 00:00:00 +0000

https://globalgamejam.org/2019/games/my-neighbour-vampire

More than 46,000 people in 114 countries got together to make games this weekend. I was one of them.

Over the past 9 years I have joined up with teams and filled all different rolls. I have made 3D models, painted textures, drawn concepts, and programmed game features. I think this is the first time I only focused on one task. This year I drew and painted portraits.

The game we made is a visual novel style jokey adventure story. It required a lot of writing and a number of characters. My job was drawing images of the weird cast of characters in the script.

I decided to attempt a cartoony line art and flat color style. This is not the way that I usually work and a very different style that I’m not very comfortable with, but that is the joy of the Global Game Jam for me. The time pressure is high (you only have 48 hours), but the stakes are very low (failing is part of the process), so you might as well try something new. You don’t really have time to overthink it.

I started out by heavily overthinking it, which meant the first character I made isn’t very good. The second character is literally a palette swap of the first, but that is a joke in the script. After I got that out of my system and just started drawing oddballs everything went much smoother.

All in all, it was a fun, relatively stress free weekend, and I added a few new tools to my arsenal.

Here are the characters I made, but I think they work better with the dialog, so you should probably download the game and play through it a couple of times. It’s fairly short, but it includes some randomization and a lot of branching paths to follow.

Thank you to the team that built My Neighbour the Vampire. Sean Brown, Stephen Ma, Evan Kawa, Alex Bymoen, and Sarah Cline.

325

Mon, 21 Jan 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Still going here. I sort of bounced around and broke some stuff and then left the end pretty busted too. Sometimes you need to write really loose and bad for a bit and then put it back together later. Hopefully.

324

Mon, 14 Jan 2019 00:00:00 +0000

A small amount of movement over here. I was getting hung up on a scene so I jumped ahead and wrote some of the stuff after it. That leaves a big ‘write this here’ hole so I only included all the new stuff that actually makes sense to the continuity. As always, I have to issue this warning. This is an in progress rough draft of something that will likely be novella length. If you have ever wanted to read and comment on a story while it’s being written, please be my guest. If you would rather wait until I have something that works from end to end and I have done at least some polish work on it, stay tuned and I will let you know.

323 - Marble Madness

Mon, 07 Jan 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Best Games - Marble Madness

Marble Madness is a game that probably shouldn’t exist. I mean, obviously it does. People made it. The odds are pretty good Mark Cerny and Bob Flanagan made it sometime before it’s release, in 1984. At least that is what history says. Even playing it today, it’s hard to imagine some form of time travel wasn’t involved.

I invite you to survey the landscape of video games in 1984. A lot of really great games were created or released that year. Tetris, Excitebike, Elite, 1942, King’s Quest; true classics. But no game in 1984 compares to the technical wizardry of Marble Madness. Until the advent of full 3d game engines and physics systems a decade later, nothing even came close.

In most ways, Marble Madness is 1984 as hell. We were only 2 years off of Tron and hot on the heels of The Adventures of Andre and Wally B., a short film by an offshoot Lucasfilm division that would later become PIXAR. Smooth, shiny CG graphics and topographical grids had never been more in fashion. Limitations of the time meant the the graphics in Marble madness had to be composed of chunky pixels, but they certainly did all they could to feel like that glossy rendered CG stuff.

It is the movement that really sets Marble Madness apart from its contemporaries. The trackball controlled marble on the screen moves like something from the future. It’s future. Our past. Listen, I’m not a time traveller so I don’t know how this stuff works, but I do know that Marble Madness controls and moves like nothing else of it’s era. The marble travels with a weight and accuracy that you can feel when you play it. Counteracting the momentum of a steep requires a natural, instinctive series of inputs. Small touches on the trackball connect you to the on screen world in a very physical way. Ports of the game would go on to use gamepads and joysticks slightly muting the effect of controlling a rolling marble, but somehow the feeling of accurate physical movement still holds on most platforms. Probably an artifact of whatever future tech was used to concoct the game.

In many ways Marble Madness falls short as a game. It is not very long and ramps up the difficulty from flat to vertical wall in about 60 seconds. Sometimes the orthographic view angle makes it difficult to tell where things are in the levels. On the other hand, the music is absolutely bangin. So, I was wrong before, this game is actually fantastic.

If you’re looking for a taste of the future, well the future from the perspective of 1984, you should probably play Marble Madness. It’s one of the best games.

322

Mon, 31 Dec 2018 00:00:00 +0000

A small amount of movement over here. It’s New Years eve, so I suppose I will have to resolve to finish some more stories next year.

321

Mon, 24 Dec 2018 00:00:00 +0000

It’s Christmas Eve. If you stopped by here to read something new, maybe just go enjoy spending time with your family instead. If you don’t celebrate Christmas, go enjoy any of the other excellent solstice adjacent holidays. I’ll bet there will be food. Lots of really good food. Enjoy that. I’ll keep writing and have some new stuff for you next week.

320

Mon, 17 Dec 2018 00:00:00 +0000

still banging away in the word mines over here.

Hard to believe that I have been writing here, once a week, for over 6 years. I started a blog to describe game development, then I expanded that to writing about games and other things on a regular schedule just to practice writing. One day another game developer suggested participating in NaNoWriMo and I was baffled. I mean I was writing every week, but writing a novel would mean writing fiction and that wasn’t what I did. He might as well have said ‘You drive a car. Why don’t you fly this jet.’ In my mind the two could not have been more distant. Now I have 8 small stories on my site (about a dozen more that never made it that far) and another thing that started as a short story but is nearing the end of ’episode 1’ and couldn’t fairly be called short. Every new page of words still feels like a genuine effort to string together, but I haven’t grown weary of it. I can feel some incremental improvement, but I still don’t think that I am done practicing. Maybe after an even dozen years I’ll feel like I know how to write. I doubt it. Until then, I’ll see if I can write something that I think other people might want to read.

319

Mon, 10 Dec 2018 00:00:00 +0000

More progress here. I thought that I was about 3 scenes from the end of part one, but realized that the story needed 2 more. I will also be extending and expanding at least 2 of the scenes from chapter one. I also realized that while I have chapter and scene breaks in my working copy, the version I post up on the site is one long chunk of text. I think it is growing past the point where reading something like that is practical or enjoyable. I’ll make some revisions next week to split that stuff up, and I think I’ll start posting an epub version that people can download to phones or e-readers. I don’t expect many people will, but I have a few ideas about how I would like to release these stories that mean I should get used to exporting common formats.

318

Mon, 03 Dec 2018 00:00:00 +0000

For the next few weeks, I’m only going to work on this story here to try to get part 1 all wrapped up. Then I will edit and revise part one and start stitching the chunks of part 2 that I have written into something that works. It’s sort of funny the sorts of things that you don’t even know a scene is missing until you write the things that follow them up. There are a few descriptions and conversations that I need to tie back into part 1 here to sell stuff further down the road. The one positives of writing something like this more or less in public is that I have to break myself of ever finding any one scene or line too precious. The second I post it up, a lot of it isn’t mine anymore, if that makes any sense. The previous warnings stand; you can read it if you want, but things are likely to change when editing happens. On the other hand, if you do read it, you can tell me what you like, or more importantly what you don’t like and I can add that too the list of things that will get looked at and revised when I go back over it.

317 - Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis - The opening credits

Mon, 26 Nov 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Best Games - Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis - The opening credits

The exact second that video games became a lucrative artform, someone signed a movie tie in deal. Video games became a vehicle to advertise. Movies, TV shows, toys, candy, rock bands, clothing brands, and fast food restaurants all have video game tie ins. The overwhelming majority of them are terrible.

Just like a book often doesn’t translate to film very well, most properties don’t make for great video games. It isn’t because it’s impossible to translate them, it’s usually because what makes artwork good in one medium doesn’t always carry over into another. With a deft enough hand, and a solid understanding of the medium, sometimes properties can shine on multiple fronts.

When Lucasfilm started an internal video game development studio (LucasArts) it was really only a matter of time before they started making games based on their films. Luckily for the world, the rights to create games based on Lucasfilm movies were tied up in deals with Atari. This left the game developers at LucasArts little choice but to come up with their own ideas, their own games, and their own style.

When it came time to create games based on Lucasfilm movies internally, they had already created their own game design language (figuratively and literally). When they started work on Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis the LucasArts style of storytelling adventure game was several titles in and resonated strongly with players. They knew that games weren’t movies and that the medium asked different things of the material.

The opening shot of Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis sees Indy crashing through the window into what looks like a dusty tomb full of relics and artifacts. In a voice that very obviously isn’t Harrison Ford but still feels like Indy, he asks himself how he’s going to ‘find that statue in all this junk’. The stage is set instantly. We know there is an adventure underway and that it involves finding a treasure.

Something seems a little off. This room is slightly too organized and sorted to be a tomb, but we carry on. If you hover your mouse over objects labels pop up and clicking sends Indy over to comment on the artifact you have selected. The game begins teaching you how to play it immediately and with no ‘How to Play’ preamble. Like an adventure, it just goes.

Eventually clicking on a particular statue causes Indy to fall and lay stunned a floor below. This room is even more odd. Brighter, more organized. Tidy shelves line the walls. An obvious passage leads down to an even brighter room. Introductory titles and credits continue to play across the screen letting you know that you are very much in the opening scenes.

When you direct Indy to climb down the rope to the brightly lit area, instead of a graceful action hero descent, he tips a statue over and crashes down another floor. This time he has fallen into a fairly standard looking library. Brightly lit by the sun streaming through large windows. Outside is a pleasant summer day. What you were initially meant to believe was a tomb raiding adventure seems to be nothing of the sort.

As the intro concludes, it is revealed that Indy has just broken into his own university to find something he or his colleague Marcus had misplaced. After swinging through a closed window, knocking over several priceless artifacts, smashing through the ceiling of one floor and rolling down a coal chute, he simply walks across the street to the building housing his office. Indy then immediately gets into a fist fight with a Nazi. This is the sort of game you are playing. This is the Indiana Jones of this world. He is constantly in adventure mode even when doing something mundane, and this game is self aware enough to know that the entire premise is silly.

The tone of the movies is captured without any attempt to ape the actual structure of a film. You came to play a game and a certain amount of that is suspending disbelief and reveling in the absurd. You might wander Indy around the same area for 45 minutes with no idea what to do, or struggle to solve a puzzle that is just a little to obtuse, but the game makes it clear that it isn’t because Indy is an idiot, this is just how game worlds work. The game lets you know all of this before the opening credits are over.

If you continue to play (and you will want to, this is a great game) the same tone is reinforced again and again. The characters and original ideas for this game might come from a movie, but this is a video game and the medium works differently. Interaction comes first.

Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis is one of the best games with maybe the best opening credits of any game.

316

Mon, 19 Nov 2018 00:00:00 +0000

progress continues over here. progress will continue at least until I have the first episode completed. My best estimates are that is about 5000 words or so away. Then I can get into some scenes I really want to write in episode 2 and 3!

315

Mon, 12 Nov 2018 00:00:00 +0000

I can’t remember a time when I didn’t read comics. I know there were a few early years there when I didn’t read at all, but as soon as I could sound out words, I was reading comics.

I know that there must have been comics I read before this, but the first comic I remember, story beats, lines of dialog, images emblazoned on my memory, was Fantastic Four #210.

We lived on a farm so going to the store meant driving several miles. At least 10-20 minutes of sitting in a hot Chevy Impala. For a kid who was probably 4 at the time, that might as well have been forever. I would get fidgety and squirm and complain. I probably pushed my mom to the brink on some of those trips. I always had toys and books in the car, but they must not have made an impact because I can’t recall most of them. What I do remember is the day that my mom bought me Fantastic Four #210.

On the cover was an enormous man draped in layers of blue and purple technology floating in space. Not a realistic depiction of space, the 1970s sci fi version of space. The kind of space with several multi colored planets and comets blazing past. You know, that good space. Being a kid addicted to all things space and robots and lasers, this comic was off to a great start. The first page is an image of Ben Grimm (The Thing) and Sue Storm (Invisible Woman) standing on top of a spaceship deflecting asteroids, Ben with a futuristic looking piece of metal ripped away from the ship and Sue with invisible force fields she controlled with her mind. The second page has a talking robot. I must have read that comic a thousand times.

There are two scenes that I still remember vividly from that comic. Johnny Storm (the Human Torch) attempts to save his friend Ben but botches it and ends up hurling himself into the vacuum of space. Instead Ben ends up saving Johnny by hauling him back inside the ship and performing artificial respiration. The other is when the entire Fantastic Four attempt to get Galactus’s attention by hitting him, burning him, and trashing his ship only to have him ignore them and undo all of their damage with a wave of his hand. Reed Richards decides that force won’t work on Galactus and they will have to try to outsmart him. By the end of the issue it certainly looks like they have failed at that too.

I had seen and read superhero stories before then. I had watched many episodes of the old animated Spider-man show. I might have even read a Marvel comic before then. What I hadn’t been introduced to was watching these magnificently powerful characters fail, and fail in very dumb human ways. I had no idea who Galactus was before that comic, but I knew from the buildup that trying to hit that huge purple guy was never going to accomplish anything. The Fantastic Four knew it too, but they tried to hit him anyway. They tried everything and failed. The last page isn’t even really a cliffhanger. The Fantastic Four simply get sent off by Galactus on their next adventure. The entire story is just about that team of people, that family, pushing forward stumbling over obstacles but never ever giving up. The heroism wasn’t about winning, it was about never allowing losing to stop them. It was about holding each other together through insurmountable adversity.

This story was something different than I was used to. It wasn’t about the adventure. It was about those characters dealing with the adventure. It was about a family suffering and still carrying on together.

Stan Lee didn’t write this story, the great writer Marv Wolfman did, but it follows the template that Stan Lee had laid out. Stories are about characters and characters are people. People do human things, good things, bad things, dumb things, heroic things, and they often do all of them at the same time. Stories aren’t about the plot, stories are about people reacting to all the plot happening around them.

Thrilling adventure stories with superheroes certainly, but at their core, every Marvel comic was filled with stories about people. Often they were stories about marginalized people and folks on the edges of society. For the most part, Marvel characters aren’t dashing heroes and infallible paragons. They are bookish teens and kids hiding from persecution. People forced to deal with abilities they didn’t want or ask for. There are an awful lot of Marvel stories about being broke. Spider-man doesn’t have kryptonite, he has student loans.

I can honestly say that the only reason you are reading this right now, the only reason I have ever written anything is because of great writers like like Marv Wolfman and Stan Lee. I learned to draw because of comics and I write because of comics. I write because of the love I had for those stories.

Once, many years ago, I wrote the only fan letter I have ever written. I sent it to Stan Lee, or at least the address on his web site. It was only one sentence long. I wrote

“Thanks for everything.”

He probably never saw it, but that’s fine. I didn’t really write it for him. I wrote it for that kid sitting in the back of a hot car reading an issue of Fantastic Four or Xmen or Spider-man for the thousandth time. To him those stories were everything.

314 - Doom

Mon, 05 Nov 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Best Games - Doom

Doom is probably in the top ten on lists of the most popular video games of all time. You don’t have to check, I already did and it is. That means that if you are reading this you have almost certainly heard of Doom. There is a fair to good chance you have played Doom. Quite a few of you have played a lot of Doom and you might have played it on a lot of different hardware using a variety of input devices. You might have played a modded version of Doom with new graphics and sounds stolen directly from your favourite franchises. You may have played Doom clones that felt so similar but so very different.

What I’m getting at is, Doom needs no introduction. Also, Doom doesn’t need me to tell people how good it is. Doom is doing just fine.
None of this series has ever been about promoting games that people already like. It has always been about advocating for good things in general, and in the specific case of video games, exploring what it was that made them good in the first place.

Almost every review, promotion, and reverie about Doom will talk about its fast pace and enjoyable action. They will talk about the power fantasy and the cartoonishly horrific themes. The heavy metal album cover feel of the world. The satisfying impacts and throaty sound design. All of these are true, but none of them are why Doom is so fondly remembered.

Doom is a different place. There had been 3D games before Doom and games that were played from a first person perspective. Flight simulators were very popular at the time. Some of them were fun and a lot of them did right by the first person perspective. Doom was the first game that felt like it took place in a different world than our own. It’s the difference between watching a recording or representation of another place on a screen or looking at that other place through a window.

Starting with Doom, the illusion was complete. An entirely different world sat on the other side of that window. More importantly, you could position that window anywhere you wanted. You could move it through that world. You could recognize the places in that world, not as mazes to be solved but as real and solid and distinct. Places with specific architecture and residents. Places with secrets hidden just around the corner.

I will stop short of saying that you felt like you were there, in the hell world of doom, but you felt like you could be. It was real in a way that games had not been.
If you were able to connect to other people playing on other computers in this one shared world, Doom went from impressive to absolutely transportational magic.

The developers of Doom had created a world that fit onto a floppy disk. You could carry it in your pocket. Any computer could suddenly become a window into that world. Doom didn’t have to be an action game to be successful. In fact, it almost wasn’t. I doubt that would have mattered. What Doom promised and delivered was another place.
That is why Doom is one of the best games.

313

Mon, 29 Oct 2018 00:00:00 +0000

There are some rough spots, and there are a couple of details left to paint but I think they came together in the end. Next week it will be back to writing around here.

312

Mon, 22 Oct 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Current mood: discouraged

Glue failed pretty spectacularly. It's okay though. I have a plan to fix it.

311 - Super Sprint

Mon, 15 Oct 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Best Games - Super Sprint

There should be no world in which spinning a steering wheel as hard as you can and then grabbing it into a dead stop allows you drive a race car. The front wheels on your average car can only pivot over a small range before they become useless for actually turning. At speed this is even more true. Your steering wheel is nothing like the wheel of some pirates galleon it can’t actually turn a full 360. There would be no point to it and it would do nothing to help you with control of the vehicle or feel for the road. Super Sprint requires that you spin that wheel and get good at it.

Controlling the ultra slippery cars of Super Sprint is all in the wrist. Well, the wrist, forearm, shoulder, and maybe the hips. Can it be played without throwing a significant amount of your entire body into it? Maybe, but I can’t see how that would be fun. Success at Super Sprint requires very physical interaction. The really interesting part is that the interaction you are required to do bears no resemblance to the activity the game is asking you to simulate. What you are doing is nothing like driving, but it feels like driving a race car. Or it feels like what you imagine driving a race car would feel like.

So, in my research I couldn’t find any technical description of how the software in Super Sprint actually reacted to a player manipulating the wheel. I don’t know for sure, but examining it from the outside, it seems like Super Sprint doesn’t really care how fast the wheel spins. The cars seem to have a fixed rotation speed coded into them. Spinning the steering wheel faster than that would have no extra effect. What’s more, the wheel also has no actual center. It reads rotation clockwise and counterclockwise, but it doesn’t seem to care what position the wheel starts in. It’s only reading rotation left and right. That means that you can spin the wheel left very hard, stop it immediately, and rotate it slightly to the right and the cumulative effect would be that the car would veer sharply left and then instantly center and start turning right. Oversteer does not exist in the physics model of Super Sprint.

You don’t steer the cars in Super Sprint like you would steer a real car. You steer the cars, speedy, drifty, open wheel race cars, like you feel like you should. Physically, drastically, and with no small amount of style.

Super Sprint doesn’t even attempt to be an accurate simulation of driving. Instead it tries to recreate how we pretend to drive. The over exaggerated pantomime of winning an F1 race. It’s like air guitar with a steering wheel and it does it fantastically.

Super Sprint is one of the best games.

310

Mon, 08 Oct 2018 00:00:00 +0000

I’m still thankful for the myriad array of wonderful games being created. I’m thankful for well told stories delivered in all the ways that it’s possible to tell them. I’m thankful for unprecedented access to excellent music and art.

What I’m really thankful for, is that I get to enjoy all of these amazing things with my family.

309

Mon, 01 Oct 2018 00:00:00 +0000

After writing any story comes the second, less fun, but maybe more important part of the process. You have to reread it, edit it, and probably rewrite it. At least you will have to rewrite chunks of it. I posted a story last week that did a lot of what I was intending for it, but felt a little flat around the edges. I had created for myself the problem of writing distinct characters with little or no way to actually emote. There would be no “Jim felt” or “Lisa thought” in this story. There would be no ‘AI develops human personality’ in this story. Still, I very definitely wanted these cleaning bots to be distinct characters with their own motivations and personalities. If you get to the end of this story and you don’t know how :6b99 ’thinks’ or ‘feels’ and you don’t see how its personality is affected by the events of the story, then I have failed.

I had also created the problem of character that are all referred to as ‘it’ and all have difficult and jarring names. I needed to make sure that the reader could tell which of the bots was being written about even if you skipped over the names and didn’t really register them (I skip them almost every time I read it).

The first pass, I didn’t think really solved all of these problems and may or may not have invoked an empathetic reaction in a reader. May or may not, as you can probably guess, is not really what you should be going for in story telling. Much of the writing is a little too dispassionate and technical as well. It suits the characters, but it’s alienating to the humans who actually read stories. Dumbing down a story or being unsubtle with a point isn’t really what I was going for either. I think the knew changes bring the story closer to what I had imagined.

Let me know what you think. Better? or should I go back in for another round of rewrites?

Early morning sunlight plunged down constructed canyons catching in the corners. Tall lines of silver and gold marking the silhouette edges of towering structures. Buildings with cores of wood and stone, bound in skins of steel and glass, adorned with effervescent films and baubles of diamond and silicone. Buildings cocooned in all the eras they had persisted through. The stratified clothing of times past. All of these layers humming with the constant flow of electricity and light. A city roused awake like a forest opening toward morning.

All of it an illusion of course. The city was always awake. Always alert. Always buzzing and moving and breathing with activity. The city, to its memory, had never rested. Even now, before the most active portions of the day, small tendrils of the city flicked and darted to clean and polish and organize. Each one an independent player in an orchestra of activity.

Sliding briskly along a tiled floor, a minuscule cleaning bot (designated d232:bd2c:c34a:c385:f487:d5bc:af34:6b99 V12.4) attempted to polish away a patch of grime. Its compact energetic body had managed to scrub more than three-quarters of the floor in the last hour before sunrise. It paused ever so briefly to consider time. it would need to revise its pathing plan if it intended to keep to its desired schedule. It had never slipped on its schedule. It had recently reduced the accepted levels of cleanliness in its plan by a full percentage point to increase the pace. :6b99 put a very high priority on keeping to the schedule.

For most of its service cycle :6b99 had worked together with a team. Its main counterpart (designated d232:bd2c:c34a:c385:f487:d5bc:af34:d1b8 V8.7) had slowed significantly in the last few days. The adhesive coating on one of its drive wheels had been peeled away by a rough patch of aluminum edging. Now it would spend an unacceptable portion of an activity period spinning on the spot, unable to overcome the friction generated by its cleaning brushes. Every so often the damaged drive wheel would catch and :d1b8 would make a few solid laps of the kitchen.

Every cycle the cleaning bots would engage in a few nanoseconds of organisational communications. Typically this meant that they would share potential schedules and planned routes, or offer each other new predictions for changes in the kitchens menu. The prep, chef, and server bots never shared their predictions for the menu. Tastes and requests were always changing and they had determined that offering predictions to the cleaning bots impacted their efficiency. :6b99 had recently purged the archived memory of a communication with a server bot. It still held onto the timestamped record that a communication occurred, but the content of that communication was lost to the ether.

:d1b8 assured :6b99 during the evening communications that it was adjusting the timing of its damaged wheel and was testing patterns that would help to keep it on schedule. It also suggested that the current cleaning cycle could be extended slightly to keep up a maximum level of cleanliness. They both made note of the minor differences in their plans and schedules. :d1b8 suggested a test period of no less than 8 cycles to see if they could balance out their goals. :6b99 agreed but privately flagged the schedule as a red level high priority.

A day later, over an inactive cycle meant for recharging, :6b99 assessed and concluded that :d1b8 was slowing the entire cleaning time by more than thirty-six minutes. It quickly sent a request up to the Local Operation Management System. :d1b8 should, it requested, be repaired or recycled to restore the schedule. LOMS responded almost instantly. Resources, it said, were not yet available for a full recycle but a repair would be attempted soon. :6b99 also sent a message to :d1b8 that it should send requests for repair or recycle to LOMS itself to improve efficiency in the future. :d1b8 had not replied.

Shafts of pale gold danced off drifting particles. Early morning sunlight angled itself through the newly opened metal shutters and into the kitchen. Stone countertops worn into shallow bowls from constant use glistened as sunbeams slowly swept the room. Soon there would be a whirring of activity as the kitchen hummed to life, but for now only two small ,buzzing shapes presented any sign of life.

:6b99 finished with the spot of dirt it was working on, marking it as visually 73% cleaner. Standard settings would demand the visual cleanliness of any single patch of floor be 80% or higher. On this schedule, 73% would have to stand as an acceptable minimum. It rounded the corner of a counter and narrowly avoided a collision with :d1b8. The hobbled bot had come up against a kick plate and was trying to break free of a groove in the tile floor by repeatedly lurching forward and backward. With the counter in the way, it was having trouble generating any speed. :6b99 made a deft juke to the left to avoid the other bot and continued on its way. It stored a quick note to send another request to LOMS during its inactive cycle.

:6b99 spent most of the lunch rush nestled into its recharging station against the back wall. The tall slender forms of prep and serving bots zipped about the room ignorant of its presence. Chef bots slid back and forth along the length of the counters, chopping, stirring, combining ingredients much as they always did. :6b99 noticed one small change to the central prep bots routine as it adjusted to an uncommon recipe. LOMS or COMS must have sent a request down to the prep bots that the market of preferred tastes had changed. As old recipes fell out of favour, at least one new recipe always took its place. New recipes meant new plans, but prep, chef, and server bots never publicly filed their plans or made them accessible to the cleaning bots. They had decided that informing cleaning bots of minor changes would impact efficiency. If LOMS was in the loop, that information never made its way down to the cleaning bots. :6b99 chose to get ahead of the problem and reworked its plan for the next cycle. The small change would mean a fair bit of time saved since it was harder to clean the floor where the prep bots had worn through the tile to the concrete below. The central prep bots new path took it over a relatively unused patch of smooth tile. With the new plan confirmed :6b99 took a moment to reduce power usage and charge more efficiently for the next cycle.

The sound of :d1b8 being dragged across the tile by the eastern server bot sent an alert up to LOMS and back down to every bot in the local network. :6b99 sparked back up to full power mode, ready to deal with any immediate mess. It watched as :d1b8 caught on the chipped corner of a tile and was sent scuttling off into the wall. It bounced off with a dull clunk and spun wildly along the baseboards. It finally settled in the corner, upside down on a pile of filth that their rounded bodies could never quite reach.

Once there had been a third cleaning bot (designated d232:bd2c:c34a:c385:f487:d5bc:af34:361b V2.0). It had been responsible for the corners and under the ovens. :361b had three extendible brushes that it would use to deal with places the other two couldn’t reach. It had broken two brushes in one cleaning cycle and received only one of the replacement brushes it had requested from LOMS. LOMS had forwarded a reply from COMS stating that resources were not yet available and the second brush would be delayed.

:361b altered its pathing and plan to clean with two brushes. :db99 had been forced to reroute its own path to accommodate :361b. The cycle was slowed slightly, but cleanliness was maintained to a high standard.

Every day during communications :361b would inform the other two of the state of its brushes and any communications it had with LOMS about them. It kept very detailed records on the quality of the bristles, any nicks or scratches to the extendible spines. :361b would request that one of the other two bots conduct a quick visual inspection of any part of the brushes that it couldn’t examine on its own. The other two would occasionally comply, but they would more often decline citing a lack of available time in their schedule or a desire to maintain a high energy efficiency or a need to keep communication channels clear and not clogged with image and video traffic.

:db99 had been powered down when :361b had broken its third and last brush. :361b often ran at slightly different times than the other two to keep to its own schedule. When the next cycle started :db99 found :361b sitting idle in the middle of the floor. It had moved into the usual path of one of the server bots and sat, powered but idle. When :db99 had sent it a message requesting that it move off to the side and contact LOMS, :361b had actively ignored the request. :db99 decided to push :361b out of the way and tucked it neatly under one of the stoves. It readjusted its cleaning plan to account for the newly inaccessible spots. Corners and unreachable areas would have to receive a lower priority.

Laying on its back wedged into a sedimentary buildup of grease and cut ends of rotting vegetables :d1b8 made vain attempts to wriggle it’s way free of the corner. It spun its brushes and ran its one good drive wheel in oscillating patterns. The self-righting mechanism seemed to be mired in the grease and mold pressed into the corner.

:db99 sent a request to LOMS. LOMS responded that resources were not yet available for a replacement or recycle and a repair would be attempted soon.

:db99 quickly adjusted its plan and revised its schedule to minimize recharge time. It also made a note to reduce visual cleanliness if necessary but decided not to factor that into its plan just yet.

:db99 paused briefly over a patch of clean floor and considered the speed and impact force required to free :d1b8 from the corner. Ultimately it decided the risk was too high and opted to leave :d1b8 where it was. It also made a quick note to reduce requests to LOMS by 80%. Requests had been negatively impacting efficiency.

:db99 spun counterclockwise and headed for small pile of crumbs in an aim to stay on pace.

Orange bands of sunset dipped gracefully behind the backs of looming buildings and the small kitchen was briefly dimmed. New hues of purple green and pink splashed across the counters as the artificial lights of city rose to chase away the dark. The city never truly slept. It only dimmed briefly and prepared for the next cycle.

308

Mon, 24 Sep 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Just another small story that I wanted to shake out of my head. I had been wanting to write a story about characters from a very non human perspective for a while and found inspiration in some other work I was doing. The story follows, but it will also live over here.

Sliding briskly along a tiled floor, a minuscule cleaning bot (designated d232:bd2c:c34a:c385:f487:d5bc:af34:6b99 V12.4) attempted to polish away a patch of grime. Its compact energetic body had managed to scrub more than three-quarters of the floor in the last hour before sunrise, but it would need to revise its pathing plan if it intended to keep to its desired schedule. It had recently reduced the accepted levels of cleanliness in its plan by a full percentage point to increase the pace. Its counterpart (designated d232:bd2c:c34a:c385:f487:d5bc:af34:d1b8 V8.7) had slowed significantly in the last few days. The adhesive coating on one of its drive wheels had been peeled away by a rough patch of aluminum edging. Now it would spend most of an activity period spinning on the spot, unable to overcome the friction generated by its cleaning brushes.

During the last inactive cycle :6b99 assessed and concluded that :d1b8 was slowing the entire cleaning time by more than thirty-six minutes. It quickly sent a request up to the Local Operation Management System. :d1b8 should, it requested, be repaired or recycled to restore the schedule. LOMS responded almost instantly. Resources, it said, were not yet available for a full recycle but a repair would be attempted soon. :6b99 also sent a message to :d1b8 that it should send requests for repair or recycle to LOMS itself to improve efficiency in the future. :d1b8 had not replied.

:6b99 finished with the spot of dirt it was working on, marking it as visually 73% cleaner. Standard settings would demand the visual cleanliness of any single patch of floor be 80% or higher. On this schedule, 73% would have to stand as an acceptable minimum. It rounded the corner of a counter and narrowly avoided a collision with :d1b8. The hobbled bot had come up against a kick plate and was trying to break free of a groove in the tile floor by repeatedly lurching forward and backward. With the counter in the way, it was having trouble generating the speed necessary. :6b99 made a deft juke to the left to avoid the other bot and continued on its way. It stored a quick note to send another request to LOMS during its inactive cycle.

:6b99 spent most of the lunch rush nestled into its recharging station against the back wall. The tall slender forms of prep and serving bots zipped about the room ignorant of its presence. :6b99 noticed one small change to the central prep bots routine as it adjusted to an uncommon recipe. LOMS or COMS must have sent a request down to the prep bots that the market of preferred tastes had changed. As old recipes fell out of favour, at least one new recipe always took its place. New recipes meant new plans, but prep and server bots never filed their plans or made them accessible to the cleaning bots. They had decided that informing cleaning bots of minor changes would impact efficiency. If LOMS was in the loop, that information never made its way down to the cleaning bots. :6b99 chose to get ahead of the problem and reworked its plan for the next cycle. The small change would mean a fair bit of time saved since it was harder to clean the floor where the prep bots had worn through the tile to the concrete below. The central prep bots new path took it over a relatively unused patch of smooth tile. With the new plan confirmed :6b99 took a moment to reduce power usage and charge more efficiently for the next cycle.

The sound of :d1b8 being dragged across the tile by the eastern server bot sent an alert up to LOMS and back down to every bot in the local network. :6b99 sparked back up to full power mode, ready to deal with any immediate mess. It watched as :d1b8 caught on the chipped corner of a tile and was sent scuttling off into the wall. It bounced off with a metallic clunk and spun wildly along the baseboards. It finally settled in the corner, upside down on a pile of filth that their rounded bodies could never quite reach.

:d1b8 made vain attempts to wriggle it’s way free of the corner, spinning its brushes and running its one good drive wheel. The self-righting mechanism seemed to be mired in the grease and mold pressed into the corner.

:db99 sent a request to LOMS. LOMS responded that resources were not yet available for a replacement or recycle and a repair would be attempted soon.

:db99 spun counterclockwise and headed for small pile of crumbs in an aim to stay on pace.

307

Mon, 17 Sep 2018 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve continued to slowly rework and refine Adventure Caddie, the once video game, now cooperative board game. Every time I make a major change to the rules I increment the version number so you can see that we are now on version 0.4 . I used to have dice. No more dice. I used to have a competitive version. No more competitive version. I used to have 3 different types of tokens. Now only one. As it gets simpler, I think that hopefully it gets better. I have yet to give it a major play test (with people who aren’t me or related to me), but I would have to assume that I will end up incriminating that number a few times after I set up one of those.

These are the rules as they stand right now. (not including the overall win/lose conditions since those are still undergoing an overhaul)

Adventure Caddie - V. 0.4

Setup

Turn order

All Caddies must negotiate the turn order for each adventure round. Hero turn order also determines their position on the field. The Hero in front can only do Melee damage. The Hero in the back can only do ranged damage. Loot is collected and inventory is shuffled in your selected turn order. Choose wisely Caddies.

Start Round

Heroes use any potions and consumables they are holding. All of them. If you handed it to them they will drink it. Remove the potions from the Heroes and throw them on the ground.

Discard any items on the ground. The Heroes have moved on and you have to move on with them. Wave goodby to those items and sweep them aside.

Attack phase

Caddies get to negotiate the turn order, but every Hero must take a turn.

Hero attack - hero base attack value + weapon bonus value

Heroes like weapons and they like attacking so all weapons a Hero is holding will be used in an attack. Melee weapons hit close ranged enemies. Ranged Weapons hit distant foes.

If a weapon can be used melee or ranged the Caddie will have to choose one or the other but not both.

1 unit of Damage is dealt to all weapons held by the hero. Using weapons wears them out.

Any single use weapons are used and then discarded. They aren’t thrown to the ground, but moved to the discard pile. They won’t be available when the time comes for Caddies to scavenge the field.

Melee damage starts at the front of line of enemies and works its way back. If there were a line of 4 enemies and the Hero did 3 melee damage, the first 3 enemies would receive one point to damage each. If, instead, the Hero did 5 melee damage each enemy would receive one point of damage and you would wrap around to the front again dropping the last point of damage on the first enemy.

Ranged damage works in the same way, except you start counting out points of damage from the back of the enemy line forward.

Remember, the Hero at the front of the line can’t use ranged weapons and the Hero at the back of the line can’t use melee weapons.

Special Weapon or Hero effects.

Defense Phase

Enemies deal the amount of damage indicated on their card. Melee damage is dealt to the Heroes starting from the front of the line back, Ranged damage is dealt starting from the back of the line forward. The first enemy in the line can only use melee attacks and the back enemy can only use ranged attacks.

Damage is first dealt to armor and defence items. As part of a Caddies expert coaching, they will get to determine what armor or defence item receives damage first during each enemies attack.

If there are no defensive items damage is taken directly to the heroes health. Keep them stocked up on armor, since it’s tough to Caddie a dead Hero.

Item Drop Phase

Each Monster defeated drops something. The bag, or bags, that the items are pulled from are marked on the enemy card. If your Hero destroys an enemy on their turn you get to give the bags a shake and pull ,without looking, as many items as is indicated. Put those items on the ground.

When any bag is empty refill all of the bags from the discard pile and give them a good shake.

Inventory Management / Repair Phase

Every Caddie, in their Hero turn order can pick up one item from the ground and put it into the pack if there is room available.

After scavenging you can do one of the following

Move or swap one item or pair of items from the hero to the pack

Move or swap one item or pair of items within in the pack

Move or swap one item or pair of items from or to the ground and the pack.

Any damaged items in the pack are repaired for one unit of damage.

The enemy has retreated and your Heroes are pressing the attack. No time to rest. You hurry along behind, packs jangling, into the next round of this adventure.

306 - Excitebike

Mon, 10 Sep 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Best Games - Excitebike

When you use a clutch on a motorcycle or manual transmission vehicle you have to get a feel for it. A clutch is not a switch that engages or releases instantly. There is a smooth gradient to the motion. You can feel the clutch gradually connect to the rotation of the engine and transfer that power to your tires. There is a point where the friction is enough to provide some motivation for the vehicle to move, but not so much that the engine can’t keep up and stalls out. That point is a balance that you can feel.

Excitebike is not at all about racing. Excitebike is about balance. The subtle difference between leaning too far forward or too far back. The balance between too much throttle and not enough speed. The balance between avoiding obstacles and deliberately choosing the collisions you can’t avoid. Excitebike is all about pushing that balance right up to the tipping point but holding on. Like releasing a clutch, Excitebike is about finding that balance point and riding it until you feel everything start to move as one fluid machine.

Excitebike was designed for the original Nintendo Famicom in japan and reconfigured for the NES in the rest of the world. The NES was a capable, but simple computer for the time and all of its inputs were digital on/off yes/no switches. When you pressed a button it was pressed. There was no soft curve of input for the NES. Even though everyone who played the machine would instinctively press the buttons and control pad harder, willing the in game characters to go faster or jump higher, there was just no physical way to do that. It registered all of its inputs as on or off. If you are trying to replicate a feeling of maintaining a tenuous balance with inputs that are all or nothing, what’s a game developer to do?

Shigeru Miyamoto is arguably the best game designer of all time. At every turn he and his team will design toward intuitive feel over mathematical specificity. They have become adept at turning the binary of on/off controls into something that feels granular and subtle. Something that you feel you can balance.

Excitebike uses two separate buttons to control the speed of your on screen dirt bike. On will never push the bike out of balance to the point that it overheats, but it won’t push the bike fast enough to get you past the finish line in the allotted time either. The other control revs your engine and pushes the bike faster, but you run the risk of overheating and stalling out. If you stall out you will have to sit by the side of the track for a few beats waiting for the bike to cool down. Using only one button will be too slow, using only the other button will generate too much heat and ultimately be too slow. To complete the timed races successfully you will have to rock your thumb back and forth between the buttons too keep your speed in balance.

Every design decision in Excitebike plays out the same way. Completing the jumps on the track requires you to nudge the pad left and right to maximize your jump distance, while still accounting for the stability of your landing. If you get too much distance, you sacrifice speed on the landing. If you pay too much attention to your landing you lose speed on the jump. Adjusting your track position up and down can help you avoid obstacles, but sometimes at the expense of the easier or faster path. When there are other riders on the course, there is no perfect path. You will have to balance your speed with your odds of a crash.

The arcade and famicom disk system revisions of the game retitled, VS. Excitebike, add more mechanics, but all of them deal with the push and pull of balance. No matter what version you play, it doesn’t take very long before you start sliding smoothly from pressing A to B and back and you start adjusting your bike in the air to land a perfectly smooth jump. Pretty soon, playing Excitebike is just like working a clutch. It’s not about speed, it’s about maintaining that balance and playing by feel.
Excitebike and VS. Excitebike are some of the best games.

305

Mon, 03 Sep 2018 00:00:00 +0000

More small updates over here. Plinka Plinka Plinka.

304

Mon, 27 Aug 2018 00:00:00 +0000

I keep plunking away on this story. The next scene isn’t quite done so I didn’t add it to the website. I did a bunch of work and planning for upcoming scenes though, to better fit a more episodic structure. Since this update is only a handful of words and some edits I briefly considered posting up a synopsis, but just giving away the whole story doesn’t seem very fun. So, for now, you will just have to make due with this small change. You can also safely skip this one and wait for next week when I will have the first part of chapter 3 done.

303 - Missile Command

Mon, 20 Aug 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Best Games - Missile Command

There are a lot of games that are tests of endurance. Most early video games had no victory state, no point at which you could say that you had beaten the game. You could play the game until you could not ,or did not want to continue. You could play until the game stopped working, or you ran out of money. Arcade owners were hoping for the last option. It was a competition between you and the game to see which one could last longer. Games with the design sense and basic play cycle of Missile Command were not uncommon. It was a product of the artform and arcade business as it was in 1980. It was also a product of the late stages of the cold war.

Art is a reflection of it’s time. Surrealism and dadaism in the 1920’s sprung from the hyper-rigidity of a europe mechanized to sustain the first world war. It is a release valve of pent up emotion and a rejection of organized logical thought. During this same time there is the rise of art deco and science fiction, art forms that embrace the technological leaps that the war demanded, but repurposed them in the pursuit of aesthetic beauty and optimistic vision. Two very different, very human ways of dealing with the trauma of the preceding decade.

During the 1980’s, the cold war was coming to a close. One way or another it was going to end and the pervasive anxiety of the hows, whys and whens of that ending fueled a lot of art.

Maybe you could say that Missile Command is a little too on the nose. A little too representational and not nearly allegorical enough. Maybe you could say that it was too pessimistic in not including a victory condition. Games are supposed to be fun right? They are supposed to foster joy.

Missile Command offers you one choice, Defend these six cities, or don’t. That’s it. The truth is, you can’t and won’t. No matter how good you are at the game, no matter how well you use your limited munitions, no matter how well you defend the cities, you will fail. One falling bomb will get through. One attack will succeed. One city and all of its inhabitants will be lost. It will be your fault. The next city will fall. Then the next. They will all be destroyed and there is nothing you can do about it. When you ultimately lose your final city, Missile Command doesn’t present the customary Game Over, subtly inviting you to play again. Missile Command says THE END. There is a finality to your failure. You can only delay the inevitable.

In 1980 that’s how it felt. Inevitable. Not an all out nuclear war, but a change. The change from breathless hostility and geopolitical stasis to something else was inevitable. You just had to have hope that the world would choose a change toward peace. Stability. Art has the luxury of choosing both outcomes, or many outcomes. Art can be surrealist and reject rigid, lock step of progress, but can do it with the wide eyed optimism and hope for the future embodied in science fiction. Both can be true. For some art both must be true.

Missile Command is ultimately a positive and optimistic work. Your only job is to defend. You protect your cities, you preserve life. Never are you tasked with attacking an enemy. Never are you asked to destroy. You act as a shield, not a sword. The mechanics and business of the arcade demand that you eventually lose the game, but Missile Command suggests to you that maybe, if you don’t lose hope, you will succeed. You will save your cities and outlast the onslaught raining down on you. And maybe, just maybe, no one else has to lose for you to win.
If any work of art could so succinctly sum up the frozen emotional turmoil of the early 1980’s, it was Missile Command. Missile Command is one of the best games.

302

Mon, 13 Aug 2018 00:00:00 +0000

I continue to slowly work away on my story over here. The writing app I have been using (Quoll Writer - quollwriter.com/) happily informed me, completely unprompted, that it is currently a novelette, and I’ll probably be straying into novella territory soon. Of course more words doesn’t mean they are good words, so there will be a lot of editing to do, but having the program tell me ‘Hey, you wrote this much!’ has actually made me want to write more. I mean that first chunk of words was tough, but not impossible. Like a long walk, jog, or bike ride, if you keep going forward you will make it to the end. There is really no other option. You keep going forward and you will get it done. It could take a long time. It could be bad. It will be done.

Excited to see what the next milestone is.

301 - Tetris

Mon, 06 Aug 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Best Games - Tetris

It won’t be news to anyone that Tetris is one of the best games ever created. Not just video games. Games. All games. Tetris is one of the best Games ever created. Tetris is that good. If the devices exits to play it, tetris will likely be played in much the same form as it is today well into the next century or further. Tetris will persist.
Tetris is as good a game as Poker.
Video games are a technology driven artform constantly chasing better, more vibrant visuals, sharper fuller audio, more intelligent and challenging adversaries. All of this progress demands new programs and techniques and new silicon for those programs to run on. Tetris, by contrast, is an experience driven work of art. To Tetris players the look and sound of the game doesn’t matter much at all. It only matters that it plays like Tetris.
Teris is as good a game as Auto Racing.
You can spectate a game of Tetris exactly once, and understand how the game is played. You can play Tetris exactly once and start to develop strategies to improve your next game. You can continue to improve at it, but Tetris can’t be beaten. It is a game that test your skill, no matter what level that skill happens to be.
Tetris is as good a game as Golf.
No matter what device you are currently reading this on, you could also use that device to play Tetris. That version of Tetris will play pretty well. There are definitely controls that people prefer, like joysticks or gamepads or different configurations and sizes of buttons, but even most touch screen versions of Tetris play just fine. It’s so good what you play it on almost doesn’t matter.
Tetris is as good a game as Trivial Pursuit.
There are a lot of different variations on the original game and you can choose to play most of them against the game or against another person. They are all slightly different experiences, but they share the same simple mechanics. No matter how you play it, no matter what version you play, Tetris is all about preparation. You have to prepare for the moment that the one piece you need is drawn randomly from the small group of available pieces. It’s about using what you know of the system to plan ahead, but being ready to improvise when you need to.
Tetris is as good a game as Chess.
Tetris is as good a game as Soccer.
Tetris is as good a game as the 100 meter dash.
Tetris will outlive its creator. Tetris will outlive its creators generation. And the next generation. And the next. Tetris will outlive the memory of its creation.
Tetris is one of the best games.

300

Mon, 30 Jul 2018 00:00:00 +0000

We picked up one of the Microsoft Mixed Reality headsets more than a year ago. We have played a lot of games, and I have hooked up up to Unity to test out some of the development tools for VR, but It always felt a little wonky. There are a lot of claims that the inside out tracking on the headset might not be up to snuff, but I can safely say that the headset was never the problem. The headset has two wide angle cameras that look out at the world in front of them. By testing for changes in the position of static objects around it and comparing that information to internal gyroscope and accelerometer data, the headset can figure out where it is, if it moved, and where it moved too. It does this at a rate that is much faster than you could physically move your head, and because of this, the virtual world displayed in the headset stays pretty rock solid. If you think that can’t possibly be accurate enough you’re going to be blown away by how optical mice have been working for the last 30 years.
Having tested the other two major VR headsets several times, I can safely say that, for regular use, the inside out tracking solution works just as well as the other positioning systems.
My problem wasn’t with the tracking, it was with the controllers. The same system that tracks where the headset is in space, keeps track of the two controllers, but rather than being wired to the computer they connect over bluetooth. They aren’t the most comfortable of all of the current batch of VR controllers, but they aren’t the worst either. For several months though, they were super flakey.
Early on, the controllers would regularly freak out and stop registering, often when you were moving them quickly or turning around. Most games became a test of patience as you would watch one controller that had been behaving well start to twitch and move to positions that it would be impossible to get your actual hands into. In the Unity editor where things don’t always react as quickly as you would like anyway, the controllers could become downright useless. I would wait with my hand hovering over an interaction point that I had set up until the controller decided to show up and snap to that same spot.
It’s worth noting, that while this was happening the headset continued to work properly. It even kept up when I would do things in the Unity editor with lights and physics that would slow down my framerate and cause pauses in the simulation. Through all that the headset continued to track properly and even respond to quick movements.
One day I was connecting and disconnecting USB cables, as you do, and I thought to swap the XBOX controller receiver with the bluetooth adapter. The XBOX receiver had been finicky from day one and it only seemed to work properly when I plugged it into a USB extender so that it could get some distance from the PC case. I supposed that the case, or something in the case, had caused some interference with the wireless signal between the receiver and the controller so giving it that foot or so of separation from the PC had solved the issue. Instantly the problems I had with XBOX controllers went away and I could reliably use the controllers up to a room away even with a wall in between.
I’m not sure why it hadn’t occurred to me for months, but it seems the same issue was plaguing the bluetooth adapter. I put the adapter on the short USB cable so that it sat a small gap from the PC case and that changed everything.
Now the controllers follow your hands solidly and consistently. They react accurately to fast movements, like throwing or catching or punching. When the controllers move outside the view of your headset, like when you are reaching behind you or far out to the side, the accelerometers and gyroscopes take over and usually do a pretty good job. As soon as the cameras pick up the controllers, if they had strayed at all they instantly snap to their real locations.
We have tested (played) a lot of our favorite VR experiences again and they have a whole new life. When you can count on the controls, games are so much more enjoyable and engaging. I suppose that isn’t really a revelation. I have yet to test out the more demanding interactions in the Unity editor again, but I’m pretty confident they would work much better now.
I suppose the moral of this story is, when you are trouble shooting some problem, it’s often easiest to blame the newest factor, or the most exotic component of a system. If there is a part that you don’t really understand, like the camera based inside out tracking of this VR headset, it becomes very easy to lay the blame there and move on. In this case the problem was simple radio interference, something that should be familiar to anyone living on earth since the early 20th century, and usually solved by moving one of the antennas. Bad TV signal? Put the antenna on your roof. Lost GPS connection? Get out of the parking garage that’s between you and the sky. VR controllers aren’t working right? Move the bluetooth antenna a foot to the right.
Cool. I’m gonna have to set VRTK back up and test it out in Unity again.

299

Mon, 23 Jul 2018 00:00:00 +0000

A small bit of movement on the story over here. As soon as I have one of my characters talk to another one of my characters, I first have to go and make sure that I know who they are, and that requires writing some other background and even a couple of test conversations. It’s a slow constructions process, but hopefully it will be worth it in the end. I’m resisting the urge to go back in and rewrite stuff at the start that I find clunky, because I at least want to write up until the first major plot point before I start reworking earlier stuff. I have a couple of scenes later on already written, it’s just a matter of filling in the space between here and there. I think this is why most writers don’t put stuff out until they have at least one full draft. Too bad I guess. If you read it now you have to suffer the halting sentences and jarring pace.

298

Mon, 16 Jul 2018 00:00:00 +0000

sometimes you write. sometimes you make some cards.

297

Mon, 09 Jul 2018 00:00:00 +0000

New additions, new edits and I’m getting closer to bridging some gaps in this story so that I can build to the conclusion of what I have been thinking of as episode 1. You don’t have to think of it like that, but I suppose it’s worth knowing that I do.

296

Mon, 02 Jul 2018 00:00:00 +0000

295

Mon, 25 Jun 2018 00:00:00 +0000

I put up a new, very short, story over here. Go over and have a read. In fact, go over and read any of the other ones too and let me know what you think.

294 - River Raid

Mon, 18 Jun 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Best Games - River Raid

The first thing you notice about River Raid is how beautiful it looks. Symmetric fields of solid color in perfectly balanced palettes. Everything on screen is clear and crisp. The second thing you notice is how smooth everything moves. The Atari 2600 is well known for its low resolution and chunky movement, but River Raid feels fluidly analog at all times. Next you notice the sound. In a world of digital farts and squawks somehow only the most harmonious tones were selected from the white noise generator built into the Atari 2600. River Raid sounds intense, but never jarring. When you start to play the game, the ramp from simple shooting gallery to incredibly demanding is so smooth you won’t notice that the game is getting harder until you crash 3 times in span of a few seconds. Instantly you restart and try again, becoming incrementally better at the game with each attempt.
There is no end to River Raid. No point where the game informs you of your mastery. It grows more difficult until it over taxes either your skills or your stamina. You can’t beat it, you can only improve.
It would be easy to suggest that this purity of design and presentation sprung from the limitations of the Atari 2600. Somehow I doubt that. Carol Shaw surpassed most of the perceived limitations of that simple computer in River Raid. She created a smooth, vibrant, aesthetically pleasing game on a system not really known for that sort of thing. The game explains itself while you play with no need for instructions or tutorials. It is abstract while being easily readable. River Raid could only exist as an interactive computer program. The engineering and the art only work when meshed together as one. It is a self contained wonderful thing polished to a high shine. River Raid isn’t a product of limitations. River Raid is proof that we never really saw what the Atari 2600 was capable of, or more to the point, what a brilliant creator could accomplish with those simple tools.

River Raid by Carol Shaw is one of the Best Games

293

Mon, 11 Jun 2018 00:00:00 +0000

There is no way that I will ever play all of these games. It will never happen.

There was a brief window in the 80’s and maybe the early 90’s that a ‘gamer’ could have at least touched most of the popular titles and genres. I have played a Megaman, and I have played a Romance of the Three Kingdoms. I have played Street Fighter, and Doom, and Space Quest. Action, strategy, sports, adventure, role playing, puzzle, narrative, abstract, simulation, educational. All the types, styles, and genres available, I played. There were games that I liked better than others, and game types that had their devoted fans, but there weren’t subcultures. There was no punk rock or Jazz. No surrealist theater or period piece costume dramas. Gamers played games, and most likely they played all of them.

I’m not a psychologist or cultural anthropologist, but I think that this unifying of all people who play video games as ‘gamers’ has caused us no small amount of problems.

Ownership is a strong feeling. When people feel a sense of ownership over something they work on or create it can be very positive. We work harder and strive further when we feel like the thing we are working on represents some aspect of ourselves. Pride and accomplishment tied to our own sense of wellbeing and self worth can be beneficial or detrimental, but there is no denying it is powerful. So what happens when you tie that feeling of ownership and sense of self worth to something that is out of your direct control? Something you are a fan of.

The actors and creative team of the most recent Star Wars movies probably have a few things to say about it. People who have attached part of their identity to their love of this sweeping space fantasy story can either be the warmest, most generous friend you haven’t met, or the most bitter, jilted stalker you didn’t know existed. It probably wouldn’t be very long before you would feel very guarded against one, the other, or both. It isn’t because these fans love Star Wars, it’s because they feel they own Star Wars. They have dedicated themselves to minding the gate of what is and is not Star Wars to protect that part of themselves they have attached to it.

This either sucks or is wonderful for the people involved in creating Star Wars, but that intense fandom doesn’t wash over into other movies. The same people angry at, or praising Star Wars don’t redirect their focus at Remains of the Day. There are no Kazuo Ishiguro fans screaming boycott when Never Let Me Go abandoned historical fiction to slum it in Sci-fi. The punk rockers don’t storm in and kick over the symphony orchestra brass section because they are a tool of The Man. Movies, books, music, television, are all too broad and deep to see fans of one thing to drift over to attack creators and fans in another.

Gaming hasn’t been like that at all. For at least the first few decades, people who played video games were ‘gamers’ and that sense of identification and ownership spanned an entire art form. The results are pretty tragic. The game industry is often singled out for its visible and invisible toxicity. Gamers attacking and harassing one another. Gamers attacking and harassing game creators. Gamers attacking women and marginalized groups for specific and sustained harassment. Gamers quite probably fostering the rise of alt right and exclusionist, isolationist sentiment.

‘Gamers’ on balance, have been pretty fucking hideous.

There is no way that I will ever play all of these games. It will never happen. It’s not only me. There is no way that any person will ever play all of these games. There is no way that any person, no matter how dedicated to the artform of video games will ever even know about all of the games available. You can like and play video games, but there are subgenres, and subcultures, that you will never know about or engage with. People who feel othered can and will find groups that gather around the same types of games. People who have no interest in industry dramas will make friends and have fun in games you or I will never play. People with no interest in new trends or genre fads will play popular games, because their friends suggested them. People will play games in the way that they watch movies and read books. They will like what they like, sometimes well and sometimes poorly, but they won’t stray far from those types of games. They will find what they enjoy and uncover new games as the feeling strikes them.

The artform has grown too broad for people who enjoy it to be called ‘Gamers’. Losing that title is one step toward disentangling this wonderful artform from the sense of ownership that eats at everything we loved about it in the first place.

292

Mon, 04 Jun 2018 00:00:00 +0000

You know how they say “for every movie made there are 100 scripts on the shelf”? Games are the same. I took one of my game ideas off the shelf recently. It had started as a video game riff on everyone's least favorite game mechanic, inventory management, but I have made some significant changes. Most notably, I’ve changed it into a board game.

The original intent for this game was for it to be a mobile or tablet, single player game that demanded fast reactions and decisions. Of course that sort of thing is not the strength of board games. Board games are slower, more contemplative, and usually turn based. The best board games are very communication focused. Creating an excuse for people to talk around a table is where board games shine.

With that in mind, I had one of those shower thought moments where it occurred to me that Adventure Caddie could become a cooperative multiplayer game. Then I figured out how it would work turn based. After that it became a matter of putting it together to test it.

I made some simple board and piece graphics in a vector program, printed them out, and glued them down to some cereal boxes. It’s a really quick way to make usable board game prototypes and I highly recommend it. Then I started playing parts of it to see what worked and what didn’t.

I was lucky that I had written quite a lot of documentation about the rules and mechanics of the video game version, so a lot of the toughest problems had already been solved. I had spreadsheets with different in game items, characters, and enemies already filled out. I started going through all of it and tuning everything to the slower board game pace.

Currently I have it working, but the numbers are all way off. The game isn’t balanced. It is far too easy to get caught in a loop of failure or success. It plays, but I don’t think that people would want to keep playing once they sense the ultimate outcome of all of their item moving and die rolling might have come down to one move early in the game. Like I said, it’s not balanced.

I have been going through my spreadsheets and tuning up the numbers and then copying them on to little cardboard squares. I hope to have it ready for some larger scale playtests soon to work out even more of the kinks. After that… who knows. Maybe I make it a print and play on my site, try to sell a few copies, or both. No matter what happens, it feels good to get one idea off the shelf and made real. Dozens more to go.

291

Mon, 28 May 2018 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve been doing some more work on the story over here . I actually ended up writing some more stuff in part one, or chapter one, or whatever you call parts of stories. I tacked that on, but I haven’t quite caught up with the other stuff I had been writing so that I could figure out how to write this stuff. It’s a wacky non-linear world of writing. The real kicker is, I absolutely know for a fact that I will end up completely rewriting pretty much everything in the first chapter or so to make it flow better with everything else. I think I have made peace with that.

Next week I think I’ll write about working on a board game. Won’t that be fun.

290 - Commander Keen

Mon, 21 May 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Best Games - Commander Keen

If you played games on a pc in the early 90s you had to be happy with slower experiences. Adventure games, puzzle games, strategy games and microsoft flight simulator. To be fair one of those is a pretty intense piece of software, but accurate flight sims aren’t the sort of thing that sells hardware to a lot of people. Not the sort of thing you can build a healthy market on. When you looked at the kind of games coming out on the Genesis and the SNES, the pc just wasn’t that thrilling. There were a lot of reasons to buy PCs, they just didn’t have much to do with games. Computers like the Amiga or the Commodore had a more or less unified set of hardware inside. If you were writing a game you could be sure that anyone that bought it would be able to run it on those machines. PCs came in a lot of flavours and some of them were barely able to manage a complicated spreadsheet. There were a few popular versions of DOS and the fledgling versions of windows would shake themselves apart as soon as any demands were put on them. If you wanted to play games there were a lot of options available, but you might skip the PC for any console.

Since the mid to late 90s, the best place to play the most demanding and cutting edge games was, and remains, the PC. Consoles, tablets, phones, have all improved to the point that there is a truly startling amount of computer power in your pocket or in your hand right now, but none of them can keep pace with even a moderately powerful PC. For every major change, there has to be a turning point. In the case of the PC dominated video game industry that turning point is one game. Doom.

Wait, no, not Doom. March back a few years and the same bunch of guys that eventually make Doom create a smooth, fast scrolling platformer that feels like a Mario game, but plays on a PC. Not a specially outfitted, super high end PC. Just a regular run of the mill PC that lots of folks had at their home or office used to run Word or Excel. Commander Keen was the proof that these computers could be used to make games that were at least as good as their console counterparts. And the first set of levels was free.

If you had a PC you could pick up a disc or get a copy from a friend and play Commander Keen.

So, was Commander Keen better than Mario? No. No it wasn’t. But it was good, played well, and it had a quirky attractive charm to it that felt honest and genuine, not just a blatant ripoff. But mostly it changed the way people looked at their PCs. If you were interested in games you wouldn’t instantly run to the current consoles or older Amiga games. You might give that shareware PC game a try. Commander Keen paved the way for 3D cards, Sound Cards, and PC gamepads. Without Commander Keen, I don’t know that the PC as a gaming platform is guaranteed.
Commander Keen, still one of the best PC games.

289

Mon, 14 May 2018 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve put up the revised beginning of the story I have been working on over here. It took a lot of writing things that happen later on to figure out what should happen here at the start, so when I finally put all of the rest of it back in it will be a large dump of text all at once. As it is, it is still very much a draft and not a cleaned up and edited story, so if you go over there to read it you know what sort of thing you’ll be getting. Turns out writing is hard, and writing something that works and stays consistent over at least dozens of pages takes some work and time. I’ve sort of broken up the story into what would best be described as episodes, so a single finished episode shouldn’t be too long in coming, but the whole thing might take a while. I’ve also done a little looking into what it takes to put a short or long story together into something you can sell on a store like Amazon. I think I will always keep a version of it up here for free, but making it available to buy and download to a reader device of some sort seems like a pretty cool thing that I would like to do. So for the 20 or 30 people who regularly read this (I think the analytics lies when it says anything more than that), you can say you read it first back when it was all broken grammar and spelling errors.

288

Mon, 07 May 2018 00:00:00 +0000

swirl bright vivid light

diamond sharp notes refrain

once smooth, polished gloss

287

Mon, 30 Apr 2018 00:00:00 +0000

We watched a movie the other day that wasn’t very good. Like I have said here many times, movies, comics, games, or other works of art that aren’t particularly good don’t bother me that much. It’s not the worst crime in the world to create something that isn’t very good. Personally, I happen to enjoy a lot of stuff that sits right on the axis of mediocre and weird. I have actively sought out poorly produced, cheaply made things that match my particular interests. There is an honesty to presenting something and saying “well this is the best we could do with what we had. I hope you like it” . Those are the sorts of things that look they they were probably fun to make.

That said, I still can’t help but analyze narrative works that fall short. Were there one or two scenes or moments that could have made me care about what is going on here. Was there a particular twist that wasn’t adequate sold to the audience before it happens. In short, if a creator wants me to care about what is happening in the story, did they earn it.

Watching a movie or reading a book that doesn’t hit always makes me think about my writing or my own art. Mostly I think, that feeling I’m trying to evoke, or that reaction I’m trying to elicit, did I earn that. Even if the feeling I’m going for is “this is the best I could do”, is it earned.

That is what is going through my head most of the time while I move this story from outline/draft stage to draft/edit stage. Unfortunately I usually end up realizing, no, no it doesn’t earn what I’m going for. The only way to fix that is to type some more, fill in the blanks. Develop the characters and the setting. You know - write.

Pretty soon I will have to take a bunch of this collected work and post it up, you know when it’s not a swiss cheese collection of disconnected scenes. Also I will have to specifically inflict it on other people for feedback so that I can ask them if the setups read as genuine and the payoffs are earned.

286

Mon, 23 Apr 2018 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve been writing a lot of outline stuff and scattered scenes. This means that I haven’t updated the main story I have been working on for a bit (over here), but it also means that there is a lot still happening on it. Of course, if I posted up the outline that would just give away the whole story, and that doesn’t sound very fun. If I posted up some of the later scenes they might give away the story too, or at the very least not make much sense out of context with any surrounding scenes. Also not very fun.

I’m sure this won’t come as news to any writers of long form narratives, but quite often I’m finding that I need to write a few lines of a later scene to even have any idea how to write an earlier one.

I will have a new revision of a few of the earlier scenes coming soon. Probably later this week. I’ll post an update when that happens so that you can either choose to read it or not depending on how much you are interested in reading something under heavy construction.

This has been a regular writing update.

285 - Guwange

Mon, 16 Apr 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Best Games - Guwange

Okay. First off, there is absolutely no way that I can talk about a game that is part of a splinter off a sub-genre of a genre without wading deep into the weeds. I’m going to toss out some titles and terms without defining them. If you read this hoping to find out what a shmup or STG is, you are in the wrong place. Also shmup is a stupid word and I won’t have it placed idly in my writing without mocking it. You have been warned.
If we were to draw a timeline of the vertically scrolling shooter game you would have to reach all the way back to Space Invaders. While not technically a scrolling shooter, due to the lack of scrolling, the core of the experience is there in Space Invaders. Moving and shooting while bullets rain down. You would step forward down that timeline to Galaga and Galaxian, still proto-scrolling shooters. Any sense of vertical movement in those games is superficial. Soon you would reach Xevious and 1942, both 100% vertically scrolling shooters. Maybe not the first, but very early versions of the form. You would snake your way through games like Tokio Scramble Formation and Varth, Turbo Force and Tiger Heli. The Sonic Wings series and Raiden series. All fine examples of a developing genre.
There are several branch points where the vertical scrolling shooter split into distinct flavours. The standard vertical shooter, the vertical run and gun shooter, and the bullet hell shooter are some enduring favorites. Some would say that it was Cave Interactive’s DonPachi or follow up DoDonPachi that solidified the branch of bullet hell or bullet curtain shooters, but they created a far more important game a few years later.
Guwange was never as popular as many of the other shooters of it’s time since it didn’t see a wide release outside of Japan. Even so, there are a few things that Guwange did that make a game like Ikaruga possible.
Before Guwange, the gimmick of throwing an unreasonable barrage of bullets at the player was what defined a bullet hell game. Guwange is less about challenging your dexterity and more about changing how you focus. Broadening your perception and forcing yourself into a flow state is the only real way to play Guwange.
The beautiful, muted backdrop of a feudal Japan beset by demonic spirits provides the conceit for the game’s core mechanic. Each of the three player characters can summon a spirit that the player can control to float around the screen attacking enemies. When you tap on the fire button you shoot normally, but when you hold down the fire button the spirit is released and the original character is constrained to slow left and right movement only. The spirit moves very quickly and is immune to bullets. The end result of these two different modes is that the player must pay attention to two different areas of the screen simultaneously. The vulnerable and slow moving main character, and the damage dealing and fast moving spirit. Oh, and one last thing, the spirit can slow enemy bullets to create some breathing room for the main character so you can’t pay attention to only one of them. You will need to play both characters, simultaneously, to succeed.
Written down, that sounds like an impossible task. Playing two characters at once on a screen otherwise filled with enemy bullets. Not only can you do it, you quickly find yourself playing through sections of Guwange intuitively. Never really focusing on any single spot on the screen. This is the sort of revelation that makes a developer believe that something like Ikaruga is not only possible, but playable by actual humans with regular human eyes and brains. Guwange is the turning point from one type of somewhat shallow gameplay, to a whole other world of depth and intriguing mechanics.
Guwange is one of the best games, and if you can find it, you should play it.

284

Mon, 09 Apr 2018 00:00:00 +0000

When you are on the team bus, you are family. Not in poetic or fanciful ways. Not in slight or saccharine ways. You are family, real and tangible and messily entangled. You are forced into close proximity with people that you don’t always choose, but with whom you share a common mission. You dress in your best, present your best, while sitting with people who have shared in your failures. You converse with the ease that only siblings know. You laugh and shout and try to carve out some quiet moment of solace for yourself amidst the cacophony. When you disembark, all of you, the team, return to your separate lives. Not in the locker room, not on the field, will you ever be this close. This familial. That experience stays with you.

Everyone who has ridden the team bus knows this. We all recognize and feel the loss of family.

283

Mon, 02 Apr 2018 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve written a new post every week for 282 weeks, well 283 weeks now. Most of them hover just under 1000 words or so. There are a couple of haikus in there. Over the past year I added 6 short stories. Almost all of them were typed into either Libre Office or Google docs. That has been good enough until now. I am currently writing another story that is on the longer side. Google docs isn’t really cutting it.

I suppose it shouldn’t come as much of a surprise. When I work on animation or 3D modelling I have a vast array of tools available to help organise and break down the task into manageable chunks. I have windows for animation clips, timing, layers, hierarchy. Game development and programming work is completed with the help of tools that offer visual outlines of the entire project tucked off to the side of the screen. These organization tools aren’t a requirement. There are a lot of people who swear by typing code into a text editor with none of the support tools like autocomplete or project overview. That person isn’t me. I appreciate the help.

When it comes to writing I’ve been mostly working without helper tools. If I wanted to remember something that I wrote earlier, I would go back and read it again. Pretty easy to do when the post is only 1000 words. Seriously though, keeping track of more than four or five characters is like a herculean trial for my brain. My soft squishy brain. I wanted the tools. I needed the tools.

Lucky for me I found a program called yWriter. http://www.spacejock.com/yWriter6.html . It lets you take a writing task and break it down into bite sized pieces. You can see a visual layout of chapters and scenes, characters and locations. All the nuts and bolts of building a story are there. Plain and clear.

Will yWriter make me better at writing. No, of course not. Stored palettes and layer blending modes don’t make me better at painting either, but I would never want to give them up. yWriter makes the mechanics of putting together a larger story easier to grapple with. It’s a toolbox.

I have spent a 283 weeks of writing with fewer tools than I probably could have used. It’s sort of nice to give these new tools a test drive.

282 - Wipeout

Mon, 26 Mar 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Best Games - Wipeout

The swirly, nature inspired, art nouveau in the early 1900s gave way to the more architectural and defined art deco of the 1920s and 30s. The psychedelic designs of the 60s and 70s provided a framework for the more angular, dimensional design of the 80s and 90s. The design of Wipeout fed directly off of the increasingly digital, splashy, design in the early 90s but leapfrogged into the future. The graphic design of this hovercraft racing game from 1995, when most games were still trying to evoke some aspect of grunge rock or gangsta rap culture, laid out a visual language roadmap for the next 20 years.

Shapes composed of parallel lines and strokes of a consistent thickness. Solid, vibrant color and smoothly radiused corners. This is the design language of modern technology. This is the language that defines the icons and controls on the computer, phone, or tablet you are reading this on right now. This was the same language used to represent fictional racing teams Feisar and Qirex and Auricom in 1995. Prescient, influential, or both Wipeout is pure, distilled graphic design from top to bottom.

It helps that Wipeout is a fantastic racing game. It combines the slippery speed of rocket powered hover ships with an on-track combat mechanic similar to Mario Kart. The game plays great and feels faster and more demanding than most other games of it’s era. That isn’t why Wipeout is important. That isn’t why it still resonates. It’s the visual design that endures.

Wipeout was made to feel, sound, and look like the future. That future, at least visually, became our present. Even if you have never played Wipeout you can see it’s influence all around you.
Now, knowing that, it makes you wonder what aesthetic being developed right now for some piece of pop culture will send its waves out into the future.
Wipeout is graphic design condensed into video game form, and it is one of the best games.

281

Mon, 19 Mar 2018 00:00:00 +0000

We have a concept around these parts called ‘good stupid’. More to the point, stupid exists on a gradient between ‘bad stupid’ and ‘good stupid’. I’m not referring to people here. I’m not using stupid as an insult. Good and bad stupid are almost exclusively used to describe movies or games or music. Entertainment.

As an example, Pacific Rim is good stupid. Bright is bad stupid. The difference between these two movies is how aware they are that their basic premise is nonsense. While the characters in Pacific Rim don’t appear to be aware that everything happening around them is silly, the movie constantly winks and nods at the audience. The creators are aware of how stupid it is and they lean into that stupid in fun ways. Bright presents itself as a veiled social commentary but can’t help stepping on itself in the process. It doesn’t seem to know how stupid it is.

There is a gag in Bright where the human character played by Will Smith calls an Orc character ‘Shrek lookin’. This is a world where Orcs exists and, seemingly, have existed for thousands of years. Shrek is a CG animated movie about an Ogre. CG animated would mean that Shrek had to be a movie made in the very recent past in that world. Not only is it horrific to consider that people made a movie like Shrek in that world, having a main character use it as a joke is almost inexcusable. As an audience we are given a lot to consider in that moment. It’s not really a joke, but one of the main characters, a man who is supposed to be on a redemptive arc, being hateful and cruel. As soon as you think about it, the movie and the character never recover. The internal logic of the ‘stupid’ movie crumbles and the only conclusion you can come to is that the creators really didn’t know what it was they were making. Bad stupid.

That is a particularly blatant example of bad stupid. For bad stupid of the more careless rather than thoughtless variety you can always look to the Transformers movies. The Transformers as a concept is pretty stupid, giant robots that hide as vehicles and structures even though the people of earth they are hiding from pose absolutely zero threat to them. Or maybe they are hiding from each other, except they why bother changing shape when they could easily hide underground or in the ocean. The cartoons and comics understood how stupid it was and offered this option: giant robots are cool, cars and jets are cool. Want to see a robot that turns into a car or a jet? Yeah? Want to see them fight? Okay. And now everything else that these giant robots do from here on out will absolutely not point out how ridiculous this concept is. That’s what we would call ‘good stupid’.

The Transformers movies forget all of that, sideline the Transformers as secondary characters and comic relief in a movie named after them and consist of action set pieces that don’t link in any logical way. Bad Stupid.

Due to the limitations of the medium, up until a few years ago video games have almost all existed in the realm of ‘good stupid’. Why is Mario running from left to right. Doesn’t matter. No effort is ever made to explain or expand on that. If anything, the narrative drive of attempting to rescue a princess weakens the game. Running and jumping is why you play that game. You could just as easily have made the end goal of each level collecting all of the ingredients for a really good salad. That’s the kind of silly I can really go for. For the most part, it’s ‘good stupid’.

‘Good Stupid’ in games isn’t anti-narrative though. A game like Dream Daddy where you play as a dad dating other dads presents a weird idealised world of pleasant characters and uncomplicated sexuality. The world is absurd, but through that lens the creators tell stories about unconditional love within families and interactions between people just searching for companionship and sharing joy in their lives. The premise is silly, but very much ‘good stupid’

With the technology of games improving, there will always be this drive to strive for realism or grit or accuracy. The systems and method of interaction with video games is still pretty ridiculous. Pressing buttons on a controller is not like jumping and selecting items from a menu is nothing like actually talking to a person. Until we come up with something better video games will remain pretty silly. I say lean into it. Better to be ‘good stupid’ than ‘bad stupid’.

280

Mon, 12 Mar 2018 00:00:00 +0000

I don’t title any of these posts. I don’t title any of the stories I have written and posted here. I realize that can be a bit annoying if anyone was trying to find a particular post. You can search for strings in the search bar that sits just up and to the right on the desktop version of the site. The string “Best Games” will, for example, return every post in the “Best Games” series where I examine why a specific game is good or important.

I posted most of the stories in parts. I would work on them, post what was done, edit, append, and repost them over and over until they were complete. Searching for those might be a little tricky.

Since I now have 6 short stories and 2 more in the works, I thought I should organize a bit. The menu now includes a new dropdown that has all the completed stories and the unfinished one that is the furthest along. You are welcome to read any of them, but the unfinished ones will be in a constant state of chaos and awful sentence structure. So, you know, fair warning.

I won’t post the stories here anymore, but I will post links and updates as they progress and take shape.

I will still be writing a new post for the front of the blog every monday, but some of them might just be a link to updates and progress over on one of the story pages.

279

Mon, 05 Mar 2018 00:00:00 +0000

So I wrote a few more pages in the longer story I have been working on thinking that this new stuff would directly follow the stuff that I have already posted. Of course it’s not nearly that simple. I immediately discovered that this new stuff needs something, probably only a couple more pages, to bridge to the previous stuff. Right now it’s all just a bunch of disconnected stuff.
When I was writing the super short 1-5 page stories I could do that pretty easily. I could write a line or a scene that comes in the middle or near the end of the story and then fill in the gaps. I quickly found that I usually didn’t know what those gaps had to be until I had defined their shape with scenes before and after, or even off to the side of them.
It’s probably unsurprising that I tend to think of stories as collections of scenes, since pretty much all of my storytelling experience comes from visual media - stage, film, etc. Because of that I also tend to think about all of it in terms of editing, the film kind not the literary kind. The stories I put together in my head are shot out of order and reassembled in post.
There are probably better ways to write stories, but those are all the tools I have in my box, and until I gather some new ones I think these are the tools I will have to make use of.
I could post up a bunch of disconnected scenes, but I don’t think that would be very entertaining to read. Also, some of the unassembled islands of ‘stuff’ are from very late in the story and that would be pretty spoilery. For me at least, writing non-linearly works well. Reading non-linearly remains a poor experience.
Here is what I think I will do. Every once in a while I will drop very large chunks of story on a separate page that I will link from one of these posts. That way the story can live on its own over there as an incomplete, but readable, piece that you can check in on from time to time. If that is something you are interested in.

278

Mon, 26 Feb 2018 00:00:00 +0000

AKA Changelog 0003

I realized the other day that I hadn’t written a changelog in quite a while, like since last september. Until quite recently I have been working on other contracts and projects so not much headway was being made on my own game. I went back to see what I had written then. Unsurprisingly, not much has changed. No game dev elves picked through my files to fix anything or finish up my work.

This post could be considered getting back into the swing of it again. I wrote back then that I was working on the enemy pathfinding and AI. I’m right back at that, but I have given the Navmesh part of the pathfinding less and less priority in favor of independent enemy ai using sensors and a general awareness of the world. This seems to pair better with physics interactions and physics based movement.

One major thing I have changed is that I started using the dungeon architect add on for unity to help create level layouts. It has been very helpful for testing, since I can now change levels and level elements with a couple clicks or a simple script.

Anyone reading this who is familiar with game development, and especially game development in unity, will be nodding along. Everyone else, sorry you suffered through that. Next week will probably be more story.

277 - Gauntlet

Mon, 19 Feb 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Best Games - Gauntlet

Arcade games from the early 80’s are either so simple that the rules of play are apparent just by looking at the screen, or they are so abstract that it’s a puzzle just to decipher the controls. Gauntlet is a little of column A and a little of column B.

If you were handed a screenshot of Gauntlet you would have no trouble figuring out the moment to moment gameplay. You guide one of 4 fantasy trope characters through a maze of monsters and treasure. It seems pretty straight forward. If you play it, you would quickly find that it’s not so simple.

Like Dungeons & Dragons that influences it there are a lot of systems at play in Gauntlet. Your health is constantly decreasing but there is food available to boost you back up. Some enemies must be shot with your ranged weapon and some can be crashed into to defeat them hand to hand. Magic potions are room clearing super weapons but you might want to save them up to deal with the grim reaper. Combine these systems with the blistering pace of action and it would be very easy to miss most of them. It’s a game that you could very easily spend many quarters on and never understand what the traps do, or why that food just disappeared.

Gauntlet might be one of the first games to include an in game tutorial system in the form of the ever present announcer. Very few games before Gauntlet included digitized speech. It was just too expensive and there wasn’t a compelling reason outside of novelty to add it. In Gauntlet it makes sense to quickly pause the action and deliver some information. When you hear that “Elf needs food… badly!” you won’t forget or ignore it. When the music chimes in followed by the instruction “Don’t shoot food” you will pay a little more attention to your aim. When you hear “Valkyrie is about to die” you will know that it is less important to clear every monster from a level, and more important that you make it to the next exit.

Gauntlet teaches you how to play it while you are playing. It nudges you to improve.

Of course Gauntlet also originated and perfected the microtransaction with the ability to add more health just by paying a quarter for it. It was pay to win before that was ever a thing. But let’s not let it’s sins overshadow it’s achievements.

Gauntlet is a good game, but it teaches you how to enjoy it. That makes it one of the Best Games.

276

Mon, 12 Feb 2018 00:00:00 +0000

No new story or chapter this time. I’m still writing (and rewriting) the next part and I swear there is a plan. Well like 80% of a plan. The other 20% I’ll figure out when I get to it. Or I won’t. I suppose that is an option.

Anyway, I wanted to write a bit about animation. Over the past few months I have gone from knowing very little about Unity’s Mecanim animation controller / state machine to, well, still knowing very little but it’s an actionable very little. It’s the very little that I can use to get some work done.

There is a simple beauty in the way that mecanim works. It’s very much geared toward game development but I think that any animator would benefit from using something similar.

I’m not going to give a mecanim tutorial or anything here, because first I don’t think I really know enough about the minutia to do that, and second that sounds like a boring read. Instead, here is why I think this is a useful tool for every animators toolbox.

There are a lot of requirements for a piece of animation. If it’s a character it needs to engage the audience with a sense of internal life and movement with intent. If it’s mechanical animation it needs to be physically consistent and purposeful. If it’s fx animation it needs to buoy and enhance the scene.

Cool. Enough with the artsy nonsense. There are some other things that animation needs to do. It needs to fit a certain motion into a finite amount of time, often a very short amount of time. It needs to seamlessly link up with the animation that precedes and follows it. It needs to conform to screen space and composition requirements. You can animate the most beautiful flowing motions and the most emotionally impactful subtlety, but if it doesn’t work with everything else being presented it is bad animation.

Games are interactive so they are difficult or impossible to pace in the way that a film or tv show would be. The player doesn’t have to follow the script and storyboards. If they want to jump or run in a circle while important dialog is being delivered, they can and often will. A game has to allow for that. Tools like mecanim exist to account for this chaotic element.

Mecanim breaks motions and character interactions down into a series of states. You can set it up so that certain motions can blend into other motions. If, for example, the player presses the jump button. You can have the character transition into a jump animation that includes a crouch, extend, arc through the air, and land absorbing the impact. The character then returns to a ready position and the player can press the jump button again. Realistic maybe, but in an action game that wouldn’t feel very responsive. What if the character took a shoulder tackle mid way through the jump. Do you wait for your beautiful jump animation to finish before transitioning into the beautiful tackle reaction animation. Or do you break that jump up into separate chunks that can be transitioned into and out of at any point. Now when the player character is extending their legs and just about to leave the ground, you can have the shoulder tackle interrupt that animation in a convincing way. Using mecanim means thinking about you animations differently, less like a scripted performance and more like a set of possible performances.

There are already some animators groaning that this steals the dynamism and pacing from their control. Bunk. At the core of what an animator does is solving the problem of making a thing that has no life seem to be alive. The problem remains the same whether solving it for a scripted, linear scene or a possibility space of potential scenes. Making the character or environment live from moment to moment is still the job.

What working with a tool like mecanim does to the way you think about animation forces you to consider the technical. Managing time and space becomes much more important. Creating animations that can cleanly link from one to another at pretty much any point becomes important. The constraints of the tool become strengths. A nice character moment can’t exist in only one scene, but must be available any time the player triggers it. It makes you as an animator consider character intention even in otherwise static moments.

When motions are chopped up into slices of a handful of frames each, every moment becomes a time that you can express the internal intentions of a character or piece of animation.

Ryu’s idle animation in SFII is 4 frames. 4 frames. Every ounce of internality, every bit of intention, everything that tells you who that character is lives in 4 frames of animation. Using mecanim will force you learn just a little of how that is possible.

275

Mon, 05 Feb 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Okay. That’s chapter one. I think. It’s a very early chapter at the very least. I won’t post updates on this story every week, but I will post every new chapter. If you have any suggestions, questions, edits, or criticisms, please send them my way. I’m not done editing this by a long shot, and pretty much everything could change. It’s all about the rewrites.

“Hold up. I see one. Due south.”

The flatbed came to a lurching stop and bounced slightly as the one back wheel settled to the ground.

“I don’t see it.”

Jan handed the binoculars down to Khary through the open cab window. He took off his glasses, folded them neatly and placed them in his shirt pocket before accepting the binoculars and pivoting them up to his eyes.

“Where?”

“Straight south.” She pointed toward the find even though the roof of the cab made it impossible for Khary to see where her hand was directing him. “It’s laying down in the grass.”

He twisted slightly to survey the field of waving brome. There it was. Just barely visible among the green and brown tufts. The mottled colors of the plate matched its surroundings almost perfectly, Almost. The grasses swayed and drifted, but the patterned armour remained as unmoving as a stone.

Khary handed the binoculars back up through the window. “Good eye. Tell me when you’re holding on.”

Jan beamed with pride as she took back the binoculars and slung them over her neck. She grabbed hold of the welded steel frame that acted as a lookout perch behind the cab and hollered down “Ready!”

Three of the float plates engaged with a dense hum, the fourth one wheezed slightly, before the flatbed jolted forward. The single metal wheel they had attached to compensate for an anemic float plate skipped along uneven ground pocked by gopher holes. The entire flatbed vibrated and Jan gripped a little tighter. As the vehicle accelerated from ‘brisk walk’ to ‘commendable jog’, the wheel finally lifted off the ground. The vibrations stopped, and the flatbed gilded silently, save for the harmony of hum and wheeze beneath Jan’s feet.

Jan tried to keep her eyes on the fallen armour, but it was difficult to see over the cab. It wouldn’t have moved. They never do when they hit the dirt like that. “Depleted” was the word Khary used. It was the word he had learned as an apprentice and the word she would be expected to pass down to her apprentice. Armours were “Active”, “Inactive”, or “Depleted”. Not “Alive”. Never “Dead”.

Khary drifted the flatbed to a gentle stop a few meters away from the depleted Armour.

“Get the winch ready. Let’s see what we got.” Khary called up from the cab.

Jan could see from here that this Armour was most likely Concordian, or a Uniune decoy made to appear Concordian. It was easily over a century old, judging by the wear at the joints. The protective plating abraded to a dull smooth finish. In the time she had been riding with Khary they had recovered 43 just like it. They had spotted another 56 active Concordian units and stayed well out of their range just be safe. Khary had called out most of them from the cab before Jan had seen them, despite her riding in the lookout perch and clinging tightly to the binoculars. He knew exactly what type of Armour they were looking at, but he always said ‘Let’s see what we got’. Probably another phrase that he had inherited from his mentor and was now being passed down to her. She had already adopted so many of his verbal tics and mannerisms, but ‘Let’s see what we got.’ seemed like a quaint affection she could skip. Jan suppressed the urge to roll her eyes.

Khary hopped down from the cab, and removed his ever present beige cap. The original olive green dye could still be seen at the seams, but the rest was beige. He ran his hand across patches of tight black curls, islands of hair in an ocean of deep brown scalp. Jan figured that Khary hoped to one day discover handfuls of thick wavy mane up there, but today wasn’t the day. He would most likely search again in an hour or so. Until then, he slapped the cap back on and tugged it into place.

Jan had unlocked the winch and replaced the standard clip with the older Concordian forked hook configuration. She jumped down from the side of the flatbed and joined Khary in quizzically assessing the depleted Armour.

Khary shot Jan a sidelong glance. He was clearly considering something, but he hadn’t let her in on what it was yet. He looked back at the Armour and pulled out his pocket radio.

“Really? I didn’t notice any change in the field riding out.” Jan Blurted.”Still weak enough to pull in signals from Rose Lake. It was fiddle music all the way out here.”

Khary ignored her and slid his finger across the flat rectangle. Static, different static, and then a jaunty toe tapper. The sort of fiddle music that Jan liked well enough when she was drunk and dancing with northern townie boys. Listening to it for hours on the radio was a bit much though. Khary never seemed to tire of it.

“See. Depleted. There is no field here.” Jan said flatly.

Khary nodded slowly, not at all convinced. “You go feet. I’ll go head”

For all the confident ‘depleted’ talk, Jan still took a wide, slow path to take up her position at the Armours feet. Khary went toward the head hauling the winch line with him.

The Armour was face down in the dirt, arms and legs splayed but relaxed, like it had laid down to rest ages ago and just never got back up. That probably wasn’t far from the truth. Armours were sturdy, but nothing is made to last forever.

Other than being depleted, Jan could see nothing unusual about this Armour. About 3 meters tall, probably 250 kilograms clad head to toe in smooth chitinous plates of engineered fungus. Impacts, heat, cold, radiation, judging by the healed over scars this unit had experienced them all and shrugged them off. The one force it couldn’t withstand was time.

“Keep clear of that weapon.” Khary chided in that parental tone of his. He kept his voice low, but clear, like he was presiding over a funeral. Jan felt it was an unnecessary affectation. They could scream, or sing, or laugh. She was pretty sure the Armour wouldn’t be offended.

Jan looked over to where the Armours right forearm lay pointing back toward its feet. The launch tubes were empty and the rail was wide open. A tuft of grass was growing through the heat exchange vents. This Armour hadn’t created any ammunition or fired that weapon in years.

“Uh yeah. I think it’s good”

“Are you talking or listening.”

Khary stared back at her. It was the ‘take this serious’ look. Jan nodded and acquiesced but couldn’t hold back a small grin.

“Weapon appears depleted. Staying off axis.”

“Good. Okay. So, what have we got?”

Jan made a show of looking the Armour over. Tipping her head and squinting slightly.

“Concordian medium ranger. Fifth gen, maybe?”

Khary gathered the winch line into a loop in his free hand. “Yep, but it’s probably a fourth gen with a modification to the back plate for carrying equipment. We’ll be able to tell for sure when we flip it over. The sternum is different on-”

Jan heard what sounded like firewood being split and almost at the same instant the weapon spinning down. Small flakes of shredded grass hung in the midday air. Khary still stood across from her looking like a question had just occurred to him and he desperately wanted to ask it. The Armour had both of its arms raised above its head, but nothing else seemed to have moved.

Khary wobbled slightly and looked down. His right leg, from knee to foot, stood perfectly upright like a post driven into the earth. The rest of him did not.

The next instant she was running. She didn’t remember deciding to run, but she was already halfway up the Armours back, landing her left foot deftly along its spine plating. Her next step landed on the back of its neck and she felt her foot lose traction. The Armour remained as unperturbed as a stone. Dark fluid had arced up from somewhere splashing across the Armour’s shoulder. Jan barely registered it as she crashed down, rolling over until her face was inches from Khary’s.

His lips were twisted up in a grimace, gathering the strength to scream or cry out in pain.

Instead, he glared straight back at Jan and grunted out “Stupid!. Damn Stupid!”.

Jan wrestled with her tongue trying to get any words out at all. Eventually she croaked out “Are you-”

Khary cut her off. “No. I’m not okay. Look at my damn leg! Hook the winch up! Put us both on the flatbed.”

“We’ll go back to town. We can be there before sundown.” Jan blurted. “The medic, or the monks can help.”

Khary grabbed her around the back of her neck and pulled her closer.

“No, Here’s what your gonna do. Wrap that winch line around my leg. Hook it up to the armour and put us both on the flatbed. Then you take us to Eliza or Ahmed.”

“But we can get to Ashbank. They have-”

“Are you talking, or are you listening?” The bite had left Khary’s voice, and his breathing had grown shallow. He squinted into the bright sun and managed slight grin.

Jan Looked down at Khary’s leg. She had seen it already, but the image didn’t register as real. Now she took it in.

In less than an eyeblink the Armour had reached up and clamped one claw-like hand just above Khary’s right ankle. His fibula and tibia had shattered to shards and grit instantly. His leg bent awkwardly below the knee. Bits of bone had torn through his coveralls and they were stained dark and wet.

The Armours other arm had aimed and fired, but there was nothing left in it to launch, save dust and blades of unfortunate grass.

Jan snatched up the winch line and looped it just above Khary’s knee, leaving enough slack to hook the forks between the Armours shoulder blades.

She looked over at Khary before bolting for the flatbed. He nodded grim approval of her work. She went for the switch that would reel them in.

“Wait!” Khary raised his head up slightly and pulled his cap down snug. “Just a second.”

He took a moment to take one deep breath and release it slowly. “Okay. Okay. Do it.”

Jan winced as she pressed the switch as if the pain were her own.

Khary didn’t cry out. He didn’t scream in agony or delirium. He chuckled. A light bouncing of the breath as if he had just thought of a subtle joke. The line pulled taught and Khary and the Armour both were dragged toward the flatbed. The vehicle bowed automatically to receive them forcing it’s single metal wheel out to the side.

The winch steadily reeled in the line and soon Khary slid up beside Jan. She stopped the motor for a moment to cradle Khary’s head and shoulders lifting him up over the short lip of the flatbed. Tears were streaming down his dark weathered cheeks. He laughed between choked sobs.

“It doesn’t even hurt Jan. I don’t feel anything. I just noticed. I don’t feel anything. Take me to the Armourer, okay? Take me to the Armourer, Jan. You listening?”

“Yeah. I’m listening.” Jan was surprised by the tears running down her own cheeks. “Yeah.”

Jan played fiddle music on the radio all the way to Riverbend.

274

Mon, 29 Jan 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Once again the globe game jammed and I helped. According to the Global Game Jam site, more than 40,000 people in 109 countries formed teams to make games over the weekend. Computer games, board games, card games, whatever type of games. It’s a lot of fun.

We made this. Try it out.

https://globalgamejam.org/2018/games/xenorace

273

Mon, 22 Jan 2018 00:00:00 +0000

a small bit of progress. At this pace I’ll be done in a decade or so. I’ll post updates on this story from time to time, but maybe not every week.

“Hold up. I see one. Due south.”

The flatbed came to a lurching stop and bounced slightly as the one back wheel settled back to the ground.

“I don’t see it.”

“Where?”

“Straight south.” She pointed toward the find even though the roof of the cab made it impossible for Khary to see where her hand was directing him. “It’s laying down in the grass.”

He twisted slightly to glass the field of waving brome. There it was. Just barely visible among the green and brown tufts. The mottled colors of the plate matched its surroundings almost perfectly, but where the grasses swayed and drifted, the patterned armour remained as unmoving as a stone.

Khary handed the binoculars back up through the window. “Good eye. Tell me when you’re holding on.”

Three of the float plates engaged with a dense hum, the fourth one wheezed slightly, before the flatbed jolted forward. The single metal wheel they had attached to compensate for an anemic float plate skipped along uneven ground pocked by gopher holes. The entire flatbed vibrated and Jan gripped a little tighter. As the vehicle accelerated from ‘brisk walk’ to commendable jogging pace, the wheel finally lifted off the ground. The vibrations stopped, and the flatbed gilded silently, save for the harmony of hum and wheeze beneath Jan’s feet.

Khary drifted the flatbed to a gentle stop a few meters away from the depleted Armour.

“Get the winch ready. Let’s see what we got.” Khary called up from the cab.

Jan could see from here that this Armour was most likely Concordian, or a Uniune decoy made to appear Concordian. It was easily over a century old, judging by the wear at the joints. In the time she had been riding with Khary they had recovered 43 just like it. They had spotted another 56 active Concordian units and stayed well out of their range just be safe. Khary had called out most of them from the cab before Jan had seen them, despite her riding in the lookout perch and clinging tightly to the binoculars. He knew exactly what type of Armour they were looking at, but he always said ‘Let’s see what we got’. Probably another phrase that he had inherited from his mentor and was now being passed down to her. She had already adopted so many of his verbal tics and mannerisms, but ‘Let’s see what we got.’ seemed like a quaint affection she could skip. Jan suppressed the urge to roll her eyes.

Khary hopped down from the cab, and removed his ever present beige cap. He ran his hand across patches of tight black curls, islands of hair in an ocean of deep brown scalp. Jan figured that Khary hoped to one day discover handfuls of thick wavy mane up there, but today wasn’t the day. He would most likely search again in an hour or so. Until then, he slapped the cap back on and tugged it into place.

Khary shot Jan a sidelong glance. He was clearly considering something, but he hadn’t let her in on what it was yet. He looked back at the Armour and pulled out his pocket radio.

“Really? I didn’t notice any change in the field riding out.” Jan Blurted.”Still weak enough to pull in signals from Rose Lake. It was fiddle music all the way out here.”

“See. Depleted. There is no field here.” Jan said flatly.

Khary nodded slowly, not at all convinced. “You go feet. I’ll go head”

For all the confident ‘depleted’ talk, Jan still took a wide, slow path to take up her position at the Armours feet. Khary went toward the head hauling the winch line with him.

“Uh yeah. I think it’s good”

“Are you talking or listening.”

Khary stared back at her. It was the ‘take this serious’ look. Jan nodded and acquiesced but couldn’t hold back a small grin.

“Weapon appears depleted. Staying off axis.”

“Good. Okay. So, what have we got?”

Jan made a show of looking the Armour over. Tipping her head and squinting slightly.

“Concordian medium ranger. Fifth gen, maybe?”

272

Mon, 15 Jan 2018 00:00:00 +0000

A few weeks ago I started on a story. I got a short way into what I thought was the introduction, when I realized that, not only would this story be larger than my previous ones, but that wasn’t the introduction at all. That was second or third chapter material. I have also written some stuff that would have to happen much much later. This led to writing an outline and some other character stuff. And then I rewrote and revised that outline again and again. So what I’m saying is maybe this is the start, and this might be long. I’ll just keep plugging away and see what it is when it’s finished.

“Hold up. I see one. Due south.”

The flatbed came to a lurching stop and bounced slightly as the one back wheel settled back to the ground.

“I don’t see it.”

“Where?”

“Straight south.” She pointed toward the find even though the roof of the cab made it impossible for Khary to see where her hand was directing him. “It’s laying down in the grass.”

Khary handed the binoculars back up through the window. “Good eye. Tell me when you’re holding on.”

Three of the float plates engaged with a dense hum, the fourth one wheezed slightly, before the flatbed jolted forward. The single metal wheel they had attached to compensate for an anemic float plate skipped along uneven ground pocked by gopher holes. The entire flatbed vibrated and Jan gripped a little tighter. As the vehicle accelerated from brisk walking pace to commendable jogging pace, the wheel finally lifted off the ground. The vibrations stopped, and the flatbed gilded silently, save for the harmony of hum and wheeze beneath Jan’s feet.

271 - Asteroids

Mon, 08 Jan 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Best Games - Asteroids

Video game creators have been ripping and rehashing ideas from other games since the start of the medium.

If you combine the 2D physics sim of Space War with the overwhelming odds and impending doom of Space Invaders, you arrive at something like Asteroids. Even the accelerating heartbeat soundtrack and ufo klaxons echo the sound design of Space invaders. So many aspects of Asteroids are cribbed that it seems unlikely it would be noteworthy, but it’s the way the the game refines and reframes those core concepts that sets it apart.

In Asteroids you control one small spaceship, iconically represented by a sharply defined line art triangle positioned at center screen. The rest of the screen is a black void that eventually fills with equally iconic representations of jagged rocks.

The playfield is like a continuous sphere unwrapped and laid flat. Objects travel around it, but never actually leave it, passing from one side of the screen to emerge again on the other. The infinite playfield concept is lifted almost entirely from SpaceWar. This was a smart move, because it means that any asteroid travelling off one side of the screen can easily be anticipated as it emerges from the other.

The asteroids travel in hyper predictable straight lines. This creates the first part of my theory of fun. The human brain’s ability to organize chaos is enjoyable. Identifying patterns of movement on a screen filled with icons of rocks all travelling at different speeds in different directions is fun. Using that information to shoot the asteroids breaking them into smaller parts that move in even more directions could have finished the design. That would have been enough to hold a lot of people’s attention. It would have been fun, but not challenging, and most importantly for the early arcade business, it wouldn’t have been difficult enough to make enough money fast enough. People are just too good at identifying and predicting patterns.

At intervals a chaotic ufo will appear and fire at you forcing you to shift your attention. If you ignore it, it can and will destroy your ship. If you ignore the asteroids, they can and will overwhelm you, predictable or not. The second you get comfortable destroying the rocks, the ufo appears to draw your focus. When you manage to destroy the ufo, the pattern of rocks has changed so substantially that it has become an entirely new mental problem to deal with. That means the game has become harder, but also more fun.

By mixing ideas from two very different games, the unpredictable actions of another human in SpaceWar, and the regimented predictability of the invaders from Space Invaders, Asteroids strikes an almost perfect balance of fun.

Games created after this will include more random elements, and more shifts between chaotic and predictable action. Asteroids is not only one of the best games, it might be the first video game to zero in on what makes games fun.

270

Mon, 01 Jan 2018 00:00:00 +0000

funny. Two mondays in a row fall on holidays. well i hope that everyone has a great new year and i will continue with the story next week.

269

Mon, 25 Dec 2017 00:00:00 +0000

I hope you are having a very Merry Christmas and a happy holiday.

268

Mon, 18 Dec 2017 00:00:00 +0000

I would post some of the later stuff, but that would read very disjointed, since it would be excerpts and scenes from different places in the story that I haven’t tied together yet. Instead, here is some more refinement on the intro and the introductions of two of the main characters. Enjoy. As always comments and criticisms are very welcome especially at this early stage.

Under the shady side of her favorite rock, a plump brown rabbit in a half doze twitched slightly. Her eyes snapped fully open and her ears perked. A coyote? No. A faint buzz, coming closer. A sound as benign as it was alien.

Her eyes, now hyper alert, watched as a vast deep shadow flowed over the arid soil. She backed more tightly into the protective arch of rock and sat impossibly still. The shadow continued forward until it washed up and over her, without incident. Trailing tightly behind the shadow, just out of the rabbits view was a massive block of metal and glass and plastic. The great bulk drifted gently by on the other side of the rabbits favorite shady rock, faint electric hum barely audible below a light summer breeze. And then it was gone. The mammoth object floated over a small hill down toward a river valley leaving no trace of its passing. The rabbit relaxed and her eyelids sagged a few times before closing in an afternoon snooze.

Inside the huge object, bundles of braided cord swung with the changing angle of the hillside. They slid off one another emitting all the cacophony of flowing beach sand. The electric hum of float plates permeated every bit of the structure, but still, those tones were almost imperceptible. A deep, grating, arrhythmic growl rose above it all. Kee lay awake staring at the ceiling. His eyes drifted over to the gently swaying blackout curtains covering the single window in his quarters. Nope. Not getting back to sleep. At least not with Eliza’s snoring echoing around in this tin can.

Kee swung his legs over the edge of his bunk and quickly retracted his bare feet from the biting cold of the metal floor. The float plate liquid cooling system ran right under his tiny room. Even in late summer the floor was continually frigid. Maybe he could pick up a rug in the next town. Nothing fancy, just a simple mat to make getting out of bed easier. He tossed on a loose shirt before gingerly placing his feet back down.

It had been 3:30am when they had finally closed up the large workshop door and allowed the cart to drift off to its next location. What was it now? 1:13pm. Late, but this was a travel day. It wasn’t like they had any work to do.

Kee parted the tattered strips of cloth that were supposed to be his door. They emited the usual weak bleat that signified that he was not authorized to open this particular door before flapping aside feebly. If the door worked like it was supposed to the strips would adhere to one another creating a sound, insect, and person resistant barrier. As far as he knew, the door had never worked. Maybe that was something else he could look for in the next town, a working door, or at least a weaver who knew how to fix it. Maybe he could even get it coded to recognize him.

Kee stretched the sleep out of his shoulders and back, before crossing the tiny galley, reflexively tapping the switch on the coffee machine on his way to the head. Finally ready to start the day and it was already half over. He filled his mug with coffee, snatched an apple from the stabilizer and ambled through the narrow hall leading to the workshop. He stepped into his boots barefoot and left them untied. Eliza would leave half eaten food on the counter and unwashed clothes in heaps on the floor, but she would tear a strip off you if work boots crossed her prescribed borders between the workshop, the hallway, and the living quarters.

Kee plopped down, leaned back in his chair, and sat there for the next hour just watching the prairie landscape roll through the gaps in the louvered windows.

“Why didn’t you wake me?”

Eliza leaned against the metal frame that joined the hall to the workshop. She already had a cup of coffee cradled in both hands, but hadn’t bothered to put on pants. The question seemed to be directed as much to her cup as it was to Kee.

“I thought you might want to sleep a little late. The-”

Eliza snorted her contempt and cut him off. “Did you forget we have to test that lift before we set up? Do you want to be under it when it goes?”

Kee rolled his eyes, but couldn’t avoid glancing at the lift in the center of the room. He let his held breath out through his nose and shrugged a small resignation.

“And don’t put your boots on the workbenches.”

“Good morning, Liz.” Kee called after her, and swung his legs back down heavily to the floor. Eliza was already across the hall and heading for the stairs leading up to her room. He could hear her grunted reply echo back to him through the metal structure.

267

Mon, 11 Dec 2017 00:00:00 +0000

This one might end up being a bit longer. I’m still writing the outline of the story and I have a few passages blocked out at different points, but this is the opening couple of paragraphs. I had a lot of ideas that didn’t get used in the last story with these characters, and I figured those deserved exploring. This story will likely be many pages long, maybe even chapters long, so I might not post it all here, all of the time.

Eyes now hyper alert watched a vast deep shadow flow over the arid soil. She backed more tightly into the protective arch of rock and sat impossibly still. The shadow continued forward until it washed up and over her, without incident. Trailing tightly behind the shadow, just out of the rabbits view was a massive block of metal and glass and plastic. The great bulk drifted gently by on the other side of the rabbits favorite shady rock, faint electric hum barely audible below a light summer breeze. And then it was gone. The mammoth object floated over a small hill down toward a river valley leaving no trace of its passing. The rabbit relaxed and her eyelids sagged a few times before closing in an afternoon snooze.

Kee swung his legs over the edge of his bunk and quickly retracted his bare feet from the liquid cooled floor. Maybe he could pick up a rug in the next town. Nothing fancy, just a simple mat to make getting out of bed easier. He tossed on a loose shirt before gingerly placing his feet back down.

266

Mon, 04 Dec 2017 00:00:00 +0000

After hearing the raves of many 3D artists over the last few years, I finally broke down and bought Substance Painter. The fact that it was recently discounted pretty heavily might have had something to do with it. Why I let at least two similar sales pass me by is a little less clear, even to me.

Is Painter a miracle tool that instantly makes every model I create look fantastic and wins me throngs of adoring fans? No. At its heart, it is an image manipulation tool for texturing 3D objects. It speeds up and simplifies the texturing workflow, but it does nothing that couldn’t be accomplished in Photoshop or Krita. It is more purpose bent toward 3D work, but at the end of the day it’s still taking 2D images and messing with them so they wrap cleanly around a 3D mesh. Artists have been doing a pretty good job of that since before Jurassic Park. I’m fairly sure that I could have kept working on textures without it, but after using it for the last couple of days, I don’t know that I would ever want to.

So, every time I wanted to change the oil in the car I could painstakingly stack up a ramp of wooden blocks to safely lift the car when I drive up on top of it, or I could buy a hydraulic jack and lift the damn thing in 30 seconds. Substance Painter is the hydraulic jack. It won’t change the oil for me but it makes getting at the underside of the car simple and fast.

After switching almost entirely to open source and free software for all my 2D and 3D art needs, the idea of buying a single purpose tool has become difficult to swallow. Krita does everything I ever needed from photoshop (better in most cases) for the high price of nothing. Blender, even with its shotgun blast of an interface, can hold it’s own as a powerful tool for creating and animating 3D models for that same price. Why then would I ever want to pay for a tool? That was the niggling thought that made me pass up those other sales. Why would I ever need expensive software again? Granted, Substance Painter hardly qualifies as expensive software, but that is the trap all the same. I have several computers running Linux right now, a free operating system. I use free or very cheap tools for content creation. I am using one of the 3 free tools I have here to write this post. It gets to the point that paying anything for creation software becomes a difficult mental exercise.

That was the very long way around to saying that Substance Painter is a really solid and good tool. If you texture 3D models, you would probably like using it.

265 - Lego

Mon, 27 Nov 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Best Games - Lego

264

Mon, 20 Nov 2017 00:00:00 +0000

I start counting the names on the wall. There are probably close to fifty years worth of autographs up here. Most are written in marker or ballpoint pen. There are a couple scrawled out in nail polish and lipstick. One signature is almost certainly written in mustard. At least I hope that’s mustard. I stop counting at forty seven and start looking for names I recognize. Most are completely Indecipherable. I stop trying to read them and start looking for empty spaces. Some small patch of wall that I can write in later.

I check my tie knot again cinching it slightly tighter to my collar. Suit is clean, shoes are shiny. Fly check. Fly is up. Good.

I resist the urge to hum my set list. These dressing rooms are pretty close together and the walls might as well be made from cardboard. Better safe than sorry.

I do a quick spin in this Ikea office chair, pushing off with my heels and tipping my head back. I take in all five oddly angled walls of the space in a radial blur. The dressing room is tiny, but a comfortable sort of close.

There. Right there. That might be a good spot for a signature. Yeah, that little blank space beside the lamp. That will work. Later though. It would be bad luck to sign the wall before a show.

Three gentle raps on the door. I almost miss the knock. The stage manager says something I can’t make out, so I yank out my earbuds and toss them on the weathered chair in the corner. She repeats herself and I hear my name and “two minutes”.

“Thank you” I fire back reflexively keeping my voice as flat as possible. I hear her march off quickly, she’s dealing with some crisis or other. Seems like it might be something about lighting. I fix my attention on that small empty space on the wall.

I rub my hands together and blow warm breath between them. It isn’t cold in the dressing room, but I shake off a rising shiver. I used to keep count of my shows. I often think I should have jotted them all down. Like a diary or something. I didn’t, and now the time and place of all my past engagements is completely lost to me. I would ask my accountant, but so many of the smaller joints pay in cash and sometimes stuff just doesn’t get claimed. This feeling though is exactly the same as my first performance. I can recall that much. The chilling tension between my shoulder blades. The anxiety and a sort of low level dread. I tell myself that I have become better at shaking those feelings off, but I also know that is a complete lie. I’m still terrified.

I stand quickly, shake my arms from my shoulders down to my fingertips, stretch my lips a few times, and step over to the door. One long slow breath in and out. I reach for the door handle and walk through.

There is only one long curving hallway in this theatre. A nice change. Some of the older rooms, as old as this place, can be downright labyrinthine. I have my suspicions that one of the theatres moved a few walls around to cover up a particularly heinous crime at one point. A few of the people who worked there thought the same. Makes it an absolute mess to navigate.

I’m about halfway to the stage when they start playing off the last act, a joke telling juggler. The music rises, The Entertainer, and my whole world just sort of ghosts out. I’m usually on guard for this sort of thing. It’s like a million tiny bells all struck at once. It fades quickly, but I have to stop in my tracks and close my eyes for a second. There are two stage crew that see me stop in the hall. On up by the curtain and one back a few feet. They don’t really think much of it. One of them saw a well known actress vomit only a few feet from here recently. Not really information I wanted to know. I’m not going to give her another vomit story though. After a quick head shake, I start forward again. Two minutes is two minutes and I don’t like to miss curtain times.

I keep my setlist in my pocket. Sort of a security blanket. I always write them, but the last time I actually looked at one was in England, and that was only because I didn’t remember the words to that Pet Shop Boys song. Well, that, and I was completely off my ass. I’m surprised I could read my own writing, let alone sing.

No banter. No introductions. I leave my guitar on the stand. Stone sober, I take a deep breath. I plant my feet and break straight into Jolene.

This does two things. First, I could sing that song in my sleep. I go on autopilot for the next couple of minutes while I adjust to the room. I close my eyes and lean into the song. Second, this is a little bit of psychological warfare. Almost everyone in the audience knows the song. Of course, there are those three guys in a booth near the back that have no clue, but most of the audience start singing along in their heads. What they aren’t used to is hearing it sung by a baritone. This means that the most common memory rising to the surface is just Dolly Parton singing. That I can deal with. You can think of it as a sort of psychic countermeasure.

If Jolene was the first punch, Creep is the follow-up. This one gets me the age of the room and gets the crowd used to hearing my voice. I mostly get echoes of music videos and a smattering of dorm room ceilings. Nothing unexpected. Where Jolene is fast with no breaks, Creep is breathy with drawn-out pauses between lyrics. Lots of space to acclimate.

I’ve tried a lot of these combinations in the past, fast song with slow, old with new, classic with a cult hit. These two are my current openers.

Listening to covers isn’t why any of these people came to my show tonight. They came to hear about themselves.

At one point in the past, I would come out and start to improv cold. I would pick up my guitar and just start singing to Jan the plumber about his day and how much he loves Kirk, his dog. I would leave out how he loves the dog more than he loves his girlfriend, and how she felt the same. Kirk must have been a really great dog.

Some folks didn’t get off as lucky. That girl in Boston where I sang in a sweet country twang that if she hated working for her mother so much she should probably just “mosey off into the sunset”. Or the Guy in Ottawa who I agreed within blazing metal ballad screech that he probably was partly responsible for his friends overdose. The cat Lady in Portage la Prairie. The veteran I brought to tears in Dayton.

I was also half in the bag for most of that time. Wake up to the radio. Drink. Muzak at the grocery store. Drink. Barry Manilow on at the coffee shop. Drink. The constant low-level hum of other people’s memories had become unbearable. Then the iPod came out. Dozens of hours of Buddy Rich drumming pumped straight into my ears. Probably saved my life.

Now I find that if I warm up the crowd a bit, and give myself a chance to ease into it, I can give these people the fun night out they are looking for without dredging up a wave of unwanted memories.

I step back from the mic without a word and lift my guitar from the stand at center stage. I twist it out of tune, just so I can spend a few seconds dialing it back in. The one-two punch worked. The entire crowd is completely silent. I can hear the kitchen staff working in the back, but otherwise, the entire joint is holding its breath. Waiting for me. Waiting to see what I will do next. They all came here thinking that what I do is a mentalist trick. This part. This part is the trick. Quieting an entire room full of people to the point that all they are thinking about is what is happening right here, right now. A man in a blue suit, rhinestones in swirling patterns on his lapels, tuning his guitar. For me, it’s like listening to a soft breeze.

“How’s everyone doing tonight?”

And that’s how I start the show. It’s not a question that I need an answer to. In a few moments, I will start playing the first few notes of Livin’ On A Prayer and I will know more about this guy sitting just off the left of the stage than he would ever want me to. I sing along making up lyrics pulled straight from his memories. Keith used to drive an Iroc and howl this album out the open windows going 90 down the highway. Judy was in the car with him, but they didn’t last. It was a high school thing. Now he draws maps for the parks service. He wonders what could have been, but I sing that he remembers those times, but wouldn’t trade it for what he’s got now. It’s not a lie, but he and I both know it’s not entirely the truth. We leave it at that.

I hop down from the stage and switch over to my wireless mic pack. I heard something a little earlier and go out looking for one lady in particular. A couple of notes into I Want it That Way and Nancy lights up like a christmas tree.

I sing about how she left med school to start her own bakery. She could have succeeded at either but the bakery is how she met Claire. Claire blushes and squeezes Nancy’s hand a little tighter. I sing about their son Matthew, but I don’t use his name. When I belt out their chorus and get down on one knee Claire bursts into happy tears. Nancy holds their clasped hands up so the rest of the audience can see their engagement rings.

I finish the song, congratulate them, and head back up toward the stage. I pause for a half step, pivot, and make my way into the crowd.

There is Troy, originally from Barbados but lived most of his life in Jamaica and Denver. I start into a generic reggae riff but quickly roll into Black Magic Woman. I’m a few lines in when I see Brenda’s eyes grow wide as she realizes I’m singing to her and not her husband. Brenda and Troy shake their heads in bewilderment and share bright smiles as I recount chunks of their life together. I leave out a lot, and I get a few things wrong on purpose. I don’t mention their 30 year old daughter. I can’t quite place her name or her battle with what might be bipolar disorder. They could use some help, but I really don’t know how, so I move on.

Pop ballads, punk, ska, Sharon Lois and Bram, two guys off to the right with nothing but I Love it Loud by Kiss running through their heads.

And there it is. 57 minutes into an hour-long show. A few notes from True Colors and he ignites like a bonfire.

Walter, 34, beating a young man and leaving him on a curb. Mexico City. No that was later. Brazil. Rio. The young man, a kid really, doesn’t seem responsive. Walter suspects he may be dead. No one saw. Walter has never told anyone. Only he knows what happened over ten years ago. And now I do too.

I put my guitar back on the stand, finishing off “ beautiful, like a rainbow.” unaccompanied. The young couple I was singing too hold each other a little closer.

“Thank you, everyone. Enjoy the rest of your night.”

Whistles, cheers, and applause.

The lights drop and I make my way back to my dressing room. I can hear the MC announcing the next act, as I close the door and quickly jam the earbuds back into my ears.

I sit for a long time staring at that spot on the wall where I will write my name. Examining the shape of it. I’ll add my signature in a moment, but first I fire up some Buddy Rich and silence the world for a while.

263

Mon, 13 Nov 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Coming along. This will be another one of those ‘story stubs’. More figuring out a character than a true arc. I’ll wrap it up next week.

I check my tie knot again cinching it slightly tighter to my collar. Suit is clean, shoes are shiny. Fly check. Fly is up. Good.

I resist the urge to hum my set list. These dressing rooms are pretty close together and the walls might as well be made from cardboard. Better safe than sorry.

There. Right there. That might be a good spot for a signature. Yeah, that little blank space beside the lamp. That will work. Later though. It would be bad luck to sign the wall before a show.

Three gentle raps on the door. I almost miss the knock. The stage manager says something I can’t make out, so I yank out my earbuds and and toss them on the weathered chair in the corner. She repeats herself and I hear my name and “two minutes”.

I rub my hands together and blow warm breath between them. It isn’t cold in the dressing room, but I shake off a rising shiver. I used to keep count of my shows. I often think I should have jotted them all down. Like a diary or something. I didn’t, and now the time and place of all my past engagements is completely lost to me. I would ask my accountant, but so many of the smaller joints pay in cash and sometimes stuff just doesn’t get claimed. This feeling though, is exactly the same as my first performance. I can recall that much. The chilling tension between my shoulder blades. The anxiety and a sort of low level dread. I tell myself that I have become better at shaking those feelings off, but I also know that is a complete lie. I’m still terrified.

There is only one long curving hallway in this theatre. A nice change. Some of the the older rooms, as old as this place, can be downright labyrinthine. I have my suspicions that one of the theatres moved a few walls around to cover up a particularly heinous crime at one point. A few of the people who worked there thought the same. Makes it an absolute mess to navigate.

I keep my set list in my pocket. Sort of a security blanket. I always write them, but the last time I actually looked at one was in England, and that was only because I didn’t remember the words to that Pet Shop Boys song. Well, that, and I was completely off my ass. I’m surprised I could read my own writing, let alone sing.

No banter. No introductions. I leave my guitar on the stand. Stone sober, I take a deep breath. I plant my feet and break straight into Jolene.

This does two things. First, I could sing that song in my sleep. I go on autopilot for the next couple of minutes while I adjust to the room. I close my eyes and lean into the song. Second, this is a little bit of psychological warfare. Almost everyone in the audience knows the song. Of course there are those three guys in a booth near the back that have no clue, but most of the audience start singing along in their heads. What they aren’t used to is hearing it sung by a baritone. This means that the most common memory rising to the surface is just Dolly Parton singing. That I can deal with. You can think of it as a sort of psychic counter measure.

If Jolene was the first punch, Creep is the follow up. This one gets me the age of the room and gets the crowd used to hearing my voice. I mostly get echos of music videos and a smattering of dorm room ceilings. Nothing unexpected. Where Jolene is fast with no breaks, Creep is breathy with drawn out pauses between lyrics. Lots of space to acclimate.

I’ve tried a lot of these combinations in the past, fast song with slow, old with new, classic with cult hit. These two are my current openers.

Listening to covers isn’t why any of these people came to my show tonight. They came to hear about themselves.

At one point in the past I would come out and start to improv cold. I would pick up my guitar and just start singing to Joel the plumber about his day and how much he loves Kirk, his dog. I would leave out how he loves the dog more than he loves his girlfriend, and how she felt the same. Kirk must have been a real great dog.

Some folks didn’t get off as lucky. That girl in boston where I sang in a sweet country twang that if she hated working for her mother so much she should probably just “mosey off into the sunset”. Or the Guy in Ottawa who I agreed with in metal ballad form that he probably was partly responsible for his friends overdose. The cat Lady in Portage la Prairie. The veteran I made cry in Dayton.

I was also half in the bag for most of that time. Wake up to the radio. Drink. Muzak at the grocery store. Drink. Barry Manilow on at the coffee shop. Drink. The constant low level hum of other people’s memories had gotten pretty unbearable. Then the Ipod came out. Dozens of hours of Buddy Rich drumming pumped straight into my ears. Probably saved my life.

Now I find that if I warm up the crowd a bit, and give myself a chance to ease into it, I can give these people the light fun time they are looking for without dredging up too many rough thoughts.

262

Mon, 06 Nov 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Another multi-part story. This one will probably only be 2 or 3 parts at most. I had to cut it off here for reasons that will become obvious next week.

I start counting the names on the wall. There are probably close to fifty years worth of autographs up here. Most are written in marker or ballpoint pen. There are a couple scrawled out in nail polish and lipstick. One signature is almost certainly written in mustard. I stop counting at forty seven and start looking for names I recognize. Most are completely illegible. I stop trying to read them and start looking for empty spaces. Some small patch of wall that I can write in later.

I check my tie knot again cinching it slightly tighter to my collar. Suit is clean, shoes are shiny. Fly check. Fly is up. Good.

I resist the urge to hum my set list. These dressing rooms are pretty close together and the walls might as well be made from cardboard. Better safe than sorry.

I do a quick spin in this Ikea office chair, pushing off with my heels and tipping my head back. I take in all five oddly angled walls of the space in a second and a half. The dressing room is tiny, but a comfortable sort of close.

There. Right there. That might be a good spot for a signature. Yeah, that little blank space beside the lamp. That will work. Later though. It would be bad luck to sign the wall before a show.

Three gentle raps on the door. The stage manager says something I can’t make out, and then I hear my name and “two minutes”.

“Thank you” I fire back reflexively keeping my voice as flat as possible. I hear her march off quickly, no doubt dealing with some crisis or other. Seems like it might be something about lighting. I fix my attention on that small empty space on the wall.

I rub my hands together and blow warm breath between them. It isn’t cold in the dressing room, but I shake off a rising shiver. I used to keep count of my shows. I often think I should have jotted them all down. Like a diary or something. I didn’t, and now the time and place of all my past engagements is completely lost to me. This feeling though, is exactly the same as my first performance. I can recall that much. The chilling tension between my shoulder blades. The anxiety and a sort of low level dread. I tell myself that I have become better at shaking those feelings off, but I also know that is a complete lie. I’m terrified.

I stand quickly, shake my arms from my shoulders down to my fingertips and step over to the door. One long slow breath in and out. I reach for the door handle and walk through.

261

Mon, 30 Oct 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Best Scary Games - Half-Life 2, Doom 3, Aliens vs. Predator -1999

Half-Life 2 does so many things right. It is a fantastic action game that tells most of it’s story though the environment. The set pieces are satisfying and seem to have a purpose in the world. It can make you feel fragile and powerful all at once. It’s really just a great example of what can be done in the first person shooter genre. It is also terrifying. There is a discomfort woven into the fabric of Half-Life 2 that gnaws at you long after you shut it down. There are areas of flat out, jack in the box jump scares, but when the adrenaline stops pumping, you are left with a sense of crushing dread and hopelessness that few games are able to match. Sure a leaping, spider like, headcrab is immediately terrifying, but the implications of wretched stalkers, humans reduced to barely living automatons, is truly the stuff of nightmares.

Then there was Doom 3, a game that’s mechanics are honed to a fine edge, but is probably best known for its unrelenting tension. For something like 15 hours this game just never lets up. At every turn monsters lunge at you from the dark. Doom 3, somewhat fairly, is often criticized for leaning too hard on monster closets. Small rooms and dark corridors that exist for no other reason than to house leaping ghouls. Eventually it became fatiguing, but no game before or since has had me as constantly on edge.

One time, with all the lights out and headphones on, I played the Human campaign of the 1999 Aliens vs. Predator. I was roughly half way through the game and had already been scared several times. I had wandered into a lab with one exit when suddenly all hell broke loose. Aliens started attacking from the doorway, the ceiling, and the floor all at once. I tore through all of my ammo and ran like a panicked rabbit in a white knuckle battle, finally coming out on top. Severely injured, but alive. I was just beginning to catch my breath and started heading for the door, when a face hugger dropped from the roof and finished me off. In a flash of terror, I shut down the game, uninstalled it, took out the disc and put it in a drawer. This was the first and only game that literally scared the ‘play’ out of me.

You might notice that all of these games are shooters, and not the go to for horror games, survival horror. I played Amnesia and something about the movement and camera angle made me motion sick. I couldn’t really play it in a darkened room, or for long stretches so it never had the opportunity to sink it’s scary hooks into me. Also, I’m sort of a weakling and not really into repetitive jump scares. I also don’t really find the concept of ghosts very frightening, so most of the atmosphere of those games doesn’t work on me like it is supposed to. Someday I’ll get around to playing Alien Isolation and I will probably be very scared. Maybe next year I can add some more to the Best Scary Games list.

260

Mon, 23 Oct 2017 00:00:00 +0000

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Transcript

GC	Hello Caller. You’re on the air. What’s your name and what’s your question?
Caller(m) (Tom)	Yeah hi. Glenn, hi. I’m Tom. Uh, I have a Haswing trolling motor and I keep having it cut out on me. I’m -
GC	Hey Tom.
Caller(m) (Tom)	I’m- Yeah?
GC	Let me ask you this Tom. This is one of those little guys. Little fresh water units. You been using this motor in salt water or estuary environments Tom?
Caller(m) (Tom)	I- Sometimes, yeah.
GC	These little chinese motors Tom. They just aren’t made to keep out the salt water. What happens is the salt just gets in there and eats at the contacts. Have you checked the contacts Tom?
Caller(m) (Tom)	Yeah- I- no.
GC	I suggest checking those contacts, even up at the battery enclosure. Salt water gets in there and just eats away at it. You can probably clean it up gently with some vinegar and get it running smooth again but you’re gonna want to look into getting an aftermarket seal or a bit beefier motor that has protection against salt water. Okay Tom?
Caller(m) (Tom)	Yeah- um- okay. Thanks Glenn. I’ll check that out.
GC	No Problem. Thanks for calling.(disconnection) Alright, before we take our next caller, I just want to remind everyone that Linda is home sick today, so I’m running the lines myself. If I don’t get to your question I apologize. Also I’m not going to be able to hear your questions ahead of time, so when I pick up you will be live on the air. Please don’t make me regret it (laughter). Also please try to have your questions ready and let me know who you are. You know how we like to keep it friendly over here. Alright. Let's take our next question. (connection) Hello caller you are on the air. Who’s calling and what’s your question?
Caller(f) (-)	We have left room for you.
GC	Sorry I didn’t catch that. Caller, you are on the air, What’s your question and what’s your name?
Caller(f) (-)	(dead air)
GC	(disconnection) Alright. Let’s try another one. (connection) Caller, you are on the air. What’s your name and question? Make it a good one.
Caller(m) (Ross)	Hi. This is Ross from burlington. Hi. Yeah.
GC	Hi Ross. What’s your question?
Caller(m) (Ross)	Hi. Yeah. I was wondering what you thought about- you know this new tax on licenses right. This tax proposed on licenses and the catch limits right. I was wondering what you thought about that?
GC	I do have some thoughts on that. Thanks for your question Ross.
Caller(m) (Ross)	Yeah thanks right.
GC	(disconnection) Okay. Alright. We are going to get into this more in the next segment but I’m going to give you all a little preview. I’ll just be straight with you. I don’t like it. This smells like a money grab plain and simple. I will have Kenny Lake from Kenny’s Lakes tuesdays on the Great Wide Open Network here with me to close out the hour. We’ll both get into it then and really shake this one out. I know this though. I don’t like it. But like I said we can cover that later when I have Kenny on the phone. Right now we have to pay some bills.
Station ID
	Commercial break
GC	Hello. We are back and I am taking your calls. Linda is out today and we really have a flu or some sort of bug ripping through the studio right now so it’s just me at the desk. If I get you on the air try not to say anything that would get the feds after you. Or me. (laughter) I know our listeners are all great folks. So Let’s get back to it. (Connection) Caller you are live on the air. Who are you and what’s your question?
Caller(m) (-)	We have room for you.
GC	Caller you are live. What’s your question?
Caller(m) (-)	There is a place for you here.
GC	(disconnection)(silence)
GC	Alright. Let’s take a real question. (connection) Caller you are live on the air. What’s your question?
Caller(m) (Tom)	Hello Glenn. This is Tom again.
GC	Hi Tom. What’s your question. Have you already got the Haswing humming? (laughter)
Caller(m) (Tom)	Glenn There is a place for you here.
GC	What?- I- What?
Caller(m) (Tom)	We have room for you Glenn.
GC	(disconnection)I- (laughter) Okay alright okay. You got me. Good one folks. You sort of messed me up there for a second. (laughter) Good stuff. Okay. The lines are full. Alright (connection) Hello caller, you are live on the air. What’s your question?
Caller(f) (-)	We have a place for you here Glenn.
GC	(Disconnection)
Station ID
	Commercial break
	Silence
GC	(laughter) Okay. Alright. You got me. There’s no one here. It’s just me. In- The station is empty. This is a pretty good prank. (laughter) You really got me. We still have all of our lines lit up. I’m gonna take a few more questions before I get TV’s Kenny Lake on to talk about that new tax proposal and license restrictions. I really can’t tell you all how much I love all these great people I work with. They really went all out on this one. Good job folks, but someone has to get back to work around here. (connection) Hello caller. Who are you and what is your question?
Caller(m) (-)	We are all here Glenn. We have a place for you too.
	(silence)(indistinct sounds)
GC	I just looked- I went and looked out the window. There’s no one one the street out there. Nothing. No cars. What’s going on? (connection)
Caller(m) (-)	We left room for you. We are all here. (disconnect)
GC	I’m going to c- Hello folks. I’m going to call Kenny Lake a little early and hopefully he will be up to disc-(indistinct) discuss this new tax grab. I’m- (connection) Hello Kenny-
Guest(f) (-)	We are all here Glenn. We have room for you here.
	(indistinct)
	Silence
Automated Station ID
	Silence

259

Mon, 16 Oct 2017 00:00:00 +0000

A short little story. October is the month for scary things, so I thought this little idea that I had been playing with might fit.

From crevasses and the dim crooks of tree roots we creep. From behind loose mounds of soil. From between the gaps of interlocked stones, careful not to disturb their delicate balance. For now. With dainty weaves and rolls we edge forward. And down. An unseen trickle beneath cover and shadow. Then a grain of sand is pressed free. Inertia broken. We add it to our unending crawl. New mass to unstick others from their place. Soon there is a rivulet of grit dragging against the base of pebbles and stones. The stones are lifted by our motion, buoyed upon countess crystalline teeth. We reverberate with the soft low hum of grinding silica. In time, more stones are joined to our effort. The hum becomes a growl. Our growl grows strong and vulgar. Grasses and flowers that we were once compelled to mince around, are now brought down and consumed by our accumulated bulk. We add cellulose fiber and oily paste to our own relentless flow. Now saplings and shrubs are bent and buried and torn from their purchase. Chunks of surface sedimentary and metamorphic begin to scrape and shift answering our call. They are grappled and devoured, augment to our unceasing motion. Our growl has become a roar. Deep and angry and hungry. We claw and tear at the trunks of mountain pines, stripping their bark and pummeling the bare wood until they finally acquiesces and tip to our will. The widespread roots we sheltered beneath are wrenched from the stoic rock bringing volumes of dirt and stone with them. With unstoppable power we scream downward, demanding that everything in our path surrender to us. To become us. Many tons matter are we. Blood and bone mingle with our tide of stone. Small darting things that flee our onslaught are destroyed. Far too slowly they move. Ground down to component materials. Lubricant to savage machinery. It is not with malice but resolution that we close on structures of wood and metal and glass. Small things flow from them silent compared to our rising timbre. Still compared to our deluge of movement. They become us. Hastened and absorbed. Embraced. We continue forward. No obstacles impede us. Nothing can slow our persistence. On we march to flatten mountains and displace lakes. Continents and oceans will relent to our force and only the morning will remain to witness what we have done.

258 - Best Books - The Broken Earth series by N.K. Jemisin

Mon, 09 Oct 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Best Books - The Broken Earth series by N.K. Jemisin

When I started doing Best Games posts, it was in an effort to advocate for good things. There so very many folks who like nothing more than to hate on stuff and, in the sphere of video games, the bad review has, and continues to be, a source of joy for that crowd. Don’t get me wrong. I have enjoyed some bad reviews. One of my favorite reviews ever compares FMV submarine adventure game Silent Steel unfavorably to the small pleasures of playing with a dry roasted peanut. It wasn’t the hate that made me like that bit of writing. It was the humour and the subtly implied acceptance that reviewing video games is, at heart, a silly profession. Being funny, playfully funny, isn’t simple. It takes work, practice, and a true love of the subject matter you are lampooning. Hating on a bad game isn’t funny. It isn’t fun. Regardless of the quality of the game, people put time and effort into it. Someone loved that concept enough to make it real. Just hating it is lazy. When faced with the product of someone else’s creative work, hate is insufficient. At least try to be clever.

I chose when I started Best Games to only champion things I thought that other people might love. I never intended to write reviews, or make value judgement. I only ever meant to describe things that I love and the reasons why I loved them, in the hope that you would find a way to love those things too.

I suppose I should say something about these books too.

So The Broken Earth series is the X-Men and The Road and maybe The Notebook. It’s comic books and video games and Sci-fi wrapped in the horrors and triumphs of all human history. The characters are all deeply, messily, human and constantly contradict themselves mid-thought. The writing is beautiful and terrifying and immediate.

Just go read it. Just go read all of it and share the love of good things.

257

Mon, 02 Oct 2017 00:00:00 +0000

a cycle ceaseless

build, test, rebuild, test anew

dev feeds one master

256 - Qix

Mon, 25 Sep 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Best Games - Qix

There are very few games that are so distilled, so conceptually pure, that adding anything at all reduces them. They become less perfect. Less good.

Qix is the concept of risk versus reward manifest in vivid geometric patterns and the angry humming cracks of high voltage.
The goal of Qix is to corral lightning. A beautiful but chaotic creature, the Qix, dominates the playfield. Every aspect of its design and movement speaks danger. A thing to be avoided. The game then forces you to enter into the domain of the Qix by sending unshakable pursuers down the digital fences you create. Pause even slightly, and new harassers form behind you. You must always move forward. The game gives you one choice.

Would you move fast, or slow. That is all. Retreat from direct conflict with the Qix is not an option. The longer your line, the more fence you dare to lay out in an attempt to pen in the Qix, the higher the risk. One touch from the Qix delivers an audio visual concussion of screeching static. Failure is not ambiguous. During future attempts to cage this monster, you will have no choice but to be cautious.

Future attempts to reproduce, spin off, rip off, or riff on Qix, have been… unsatisfactory. There are a great many games that try to replicate the core of Qix, but the crystalline simplicity of the original remains astounding.

Qix is perfect, and it is one of the best games.

Changelog 0002

Thu, 21 Sep 2017 00:00:00 +0000

I have changed the enemy system to use a combination of NavMesh and internal collision avoidance. The enemies can still be knocked around using the physics system and they can overshoot targets when they have built up too much inertia. So they can now navigate any level layout pretty reliably, but they still act like idiots if you fake them out, or push them around.

I have started rebuilding player attacks alongside setting up the game controls. Using the Unity asset Rewired has helped a ton, but there are still a lot of fidgety things to deal with if you want to support a bunch of different controllers. XboxOne and 360 controls work fine so far. I have a generic gamepad and it needs a bit extra tweaking to work properly. Still have to test ps3-ps4 etc.

The player can select between different characters, but I only have the one set up for testing. I’ll have to add more when the enemies attacks are more consistent and they have more special case behaviours, like deciding to push the player toward the nearest hole or edge.

255

Mon, 18 Sep 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Done. Well sort of done. I wanted to write a story where two people go for a walk. That’s it. No heroics. No omens. No moral. No lessons learned. Just a walk. In a cave with a monster. So far, what I have been writing are sort of story stubs. Some small bit of concept or character that could be expanded into a better story, by a better writer (I’m talking to you future Owen, get on it). I think there are a few more story stubs I want to work on before writing something larger and more intricate. Until then, here you go.

“Busy this morning.”

Malcolm’s voice sounded so calm and easy. How could he be so comfortable when she couldn’t remember how to stand like a person. And he smelled so good. Just a simple clean soap smell with maybe a touch of wood, like sawdust. His smell this close to her made her tongue feel dry. How was that fair.

Kaitlin felt the words “Yeah, right?” croak from her throat as she looked up at his face. Malcolm’s bright half smile, the deep brown of his cheeks, and those gorgeous almost black almond eyes.

Not. Fair. At. All.

The line shuffled forward again.

“I’m glad you- we- could, you know, finally make it out- get together.” Malcolm sounded a little less smooth just then. Kaitlin could feel her heart slow to a manageable rhythm. At least some part of him might be close to her level. Stumbling over a few words didn’t stop him from being so damned pretty though.

He added “I mean Medicine is demanding, right? Like timewise and workwise.”

“I’m only first year, but yeah I guess so. Engineering can’t be so super easy either.”

Kaitlin could feel her cheeks warming. She just hoped against hope that she didn’t look like a frickin tomato. This was the longest she had ever talked to Malcolm without the buffer of a group of mutual friends. Maggie had told her that she heard from Lane “that if Kaitlin asked Malcolm to go for coffee, that he would for sure say yes”. It was all very junior high, but it still sent Kaitlin’s stomach into backflips. Then she had gone up and asked him at Janice and Dean’s house party, well her and two beers had gone up and asked him. She felt floaty and hadn’t been sure that it was real, but here they were, saturday morning, standing in line for coffee. Together.

“I’m in civil, so I spent the last couple months reading about asphalt. Mostly we just memorize equations and play a lot of basketball” He said, laughing it off and looking up to the menu board.

“Same. Well, except it’s anatomy and tennis for me.”

“Tennis? I tried badminton, but I never played tennis before.”

“We should!” Kaitlin felt her voice jump in volume and she wrestled it back down. “I mean, if you wanted to try it out sometime, I could- I would be happy to teach you” Kaitlin fought off images of long brown legs and short white shorts. She closed the invitation with a weak grin.

“Maybe for a second, or third date?” Malcolm had replaced that half smile with a sly sideways glance.

If she didn’t look like a tomato before, there was no way she didn’t now. That heat had spread from her cheeks to the tips of her ears.

The line shuffled forward and they found themselves in front of the counter. Together.

Captain V-neck barely focused on them, wiped his hands across his ‘Burks’ apron, and tossed off a bored “So what’ll you have?”

They started talking about school, since that was easy neutral territory. They both asked the same simple, customary questions, and gave the same, simple, rote answers. It felt to Kaitlin like they were participating in a conversational ritual with no clear goal, but it was better than the alternative. She was mostly thinking about just sinking into the cracks of the concrete and disappearing entirely. She kept her mouth moving so by the time they had walked the two blocks from the coffee shop to the river path, Kaitlin could feel herself relaxing a bit.

She started to realize how fast she had been walking and slowed enough to take in the orange and yellow crested trees. Malcolm slowed with her.

“It’s pretty down here.” He said, stopping to regard a group of vibrant poplars.

“It’s a nice place to run. Lots of people, but it’s not usually crowded.” It had been weeks since Kaitlin had gone on a proper run, but she wasn’t going to say that out loud. Besides, it wasn’t a lie. She really did like this stretch of the river path. She looked up at Malcolm while he closed his eyes and took a deep breath of cool air. Maybe this was going okay. She hadn’t felt like a complete disaster in at least four minutes. He had laughed at her jokes. That had to be a good sign.

“You live close, right? Maggie said you live on this side of town.”

Kaitlin was startled and felt her eyes involuntarily snap skyward. Had she been staring? Maybe. Did Malcolm catch her staring? Maybe.

“Uh” Kaitlin uttered. Seemed an easy enough question, but it took a second for her brain to change gears and process it. “Um. Yeah. Yeah. We live just over there. Like three blocks from Burks.”

“That’s convenient, for running I mean. I live way east. Past the university. It’s all just copies of the same couple of houses. Nicest place over there is the parks between the ‘burbs.” He smiled as Kaitlin walked her eyes back over to his. She could feel herself smiling back and only a little warm in the cheeks this time.

“I don’t really know much of the city. I just moved here for school.” Kaitlin trailed off. She felt like there was nothing interesting she could add after that, and her smile faded. The last thing she wanted to do was bore Malcolm with small town stories. Of course, he went and asked anyway, because that was the ritual, right?

“Oh yeah? Where are you from?”

They quickly drifted back into that same question/answer pattern, but more relaxed, maybe a bit more sincere.

They strolled past dozens of mid morning joggers and cyclists trying to shake off a week of sitting on their butts. The air was warming as the sun slowly rose in the sky. When they came to a small bend in the river path Kaitlin stopped short to take in the view. Shafts of sunlight were streaming through the trees and tiny spikes of gold formed on the ripples in the river.

“That deserves a picture.” Kaitlin breathed, and slid her phone from her pocket.

“I’ll hold your coffee” Malcolm offered.

She handed him the cup and took a couple quick shots. It seemed like maybe she was missing an opportunity here.

“Want one with us in it? I can send it to you.” She asked

“Yeah. That’s a good idea.”

Kaitlin stepped back off the path and felt the warmth of Malcolm sliding in behind her as he moved into frame. She was starting to hold it together. Only a tiny bit of her felt like sinking into the soil and blending in with the tree roots. He brought his face up beside hers and she tried to get both of them and the trees behind into one balanced photo.

Click.

She really didn’t feel like moving though. This was nice, just like this.

“Here you go.” Malcolm brought her cup up into view and she reached for it with her free hand. Her fingers wrapped over his and she looked up at her phone screen just in time to see Malcolm’s beautiful eyes, now fully wide with surprise, slide out of view over her shoulder. She gripped hard as she felt his hand slipping away, both of them crushing the remnants of the latte into warm spray. She felt herself being pulled down by the hand, then the shoulder, then the ground dropped from underneath her. She was being yanked down, butt first, still clinging to Malcolm’s hand. She opened her mouth in panic, but her voice was absent.

“Hel-wha-Who? What is- Who is this?”

“Please don’t move.” A calm, businesslike voice. Female maybe? The voice echoed like whoever it was, they were speaking to Kaitlin through a culvert.

“What? Why? What?” She felt immobilized from the tongue down. Kaitlin wasn’t sure she could move even if she hadn’t felt scared out of her mind.

“Sorry to interrupt. I’m Gina and I was wondering if you might need some help.”

“What?” Kaitlin screamed into the phone.

“Who is that? What-” Malcolm screamed up at her. Or maybe he was screaming at the phone, it was hard to tell. Either way, she flinched when she noticed his face lying right beside her hip. For a second there, she had forgotten that he existed. No, that can’t be right. Some hollow static from the phone cut her off mid thought.

“I’m sorry that I interrupted. I just wanted to know if you might need some assistance. Kaitlin Doyle and Malcolm Aldridge, is it?” The voice on the phone pattered back at her. The sound of Kaitlin’s name caught her attentions. That was something real she could latch onto. “ I just want you to stay put for a second while I access your accounts.”

“What accounts?” Malcolm spluttered.

“What accounts?” Kaitlin parroted.

“If you could just hold on for one second, and again, please try not to move.”

There didn’t seem to be anything Kaitlin could do at the moment. Gina, the voice on the phone was saying to stay put. Her legs were in total agreement, so they stayed frozen to the ground. Looking. She could probably look around? That didn’t count as moving right?

So she looked around. Aside from her phone screen there seemed to be a dim red orange light filling the cavern. Okay, cavern! That was a thing! This definitely looked like a cavern. A big one. What else, what else? Stone floor. Smooth stone floor. Tile? Nope. Bigger. Huge stone blocks, mostly smooth with cracks and imperfections. So stone that has worn smooth, not stone that has been machined smooth. Okay. Good, good. Malcolm! There he was. Lying flat on the stone, head lifted, eyes wide. He didn’t look very calm. Rapid breathing, dilated pupils. Maybe a panic attack? He’s not looking back at Kaitlin. He was looking straight ahead at something directly behind her. What? She turned her head and glanced over her shoulder.

Nope.

Not ready for that yet. What else, what else? Some dirt on the stone floor. Hmm, dirt? A puddle. Water? No, it’s spilled coffee from Malcolm’s cup. So not water. What wears stone smooth? Running water. But if it were running water or a creek the stone would be wet and there shouldn’t be dirt. Okay, that’s sorted. She should probably check again. She didn’t really see what she saw, right?

A nice slow turn of the head. Nothing flashy. Just a gradual gaze. Really take it all in.

Yeah. Still there.

“What?” Malcolm whispers the question, but Kaitlin understands every nuance of that one syllable. It’s not just “what am I looking at?” - it is that, but not only that. It’s ‘what’ to everything. What is this place? What are we doing? What happened? What is happening?

Kaitlin reached out to Malcolm’s hand again. There is no infatuated fumbling. There is no heart stopping, electric moment of contact. She needs an anchor. She can tell by his “What?” that he needs one too. Her fingers mesh with his and she whispers back an answer.

“Yeah. It’s a giant skeleton.”

Kaitlin tilted her head, marking out a long slow oval with her chin. She probably could have seen just as well only moving her eyes, but the ridiculous enormity of the thing seemed to warrant some neck movement. It was maybe a block or so away from them. Were city blocks a useful metric in a cavern? Didn’t matter. Kaitlin knew blocks and so blocks it was. The skeleton must have been 12 meters tall, with arms splayed out at least twice that wide. Oh, wait. It was only the top half of a giant skeleton. The bottom half disappeared down in some sort of hole. There was steam or gas belching from the pit, tinted in red orange like the rest of the cavern. She figured it must be a volcanic vent or geyser, but something about it didn’t seem entirely natural. The whole scene looked staged like an amusement park ride. Meaning what? The Skeleton wasn’t real? It was real, but it was stuck? It was climbing out of the hole? Maybe it had fallen in. Maybe it had been put in. In any case, the part that was visible was only half of the thing.

Amusement park. That notion came rushing back through Kaitlin’s head. Why? Something wasn’t right. Giant Skeletons are not normal, sure, but this tableau smelled false. What was it? Skull, orbital bones, Zygomatic Process, mandible, C4-5-6-7, Clavicle, scapula, humerus. Human. It was a human skeleton, but on a massive scale. She could name and label every single bone. Nothing surprising there, aside from the size of the thing. It took a moment to click. The skeleton was moving. A slow gyrating dance that repeated every couple of seconds. Not really a threatening display, but unsettling in a metronomic sort of way. There it was. The part that really gave Kaitlin the willies. Every single one of the dozens of visible bones was absolutely crawling with human scale skeletons. The left humerus of the thing was composed of 6 - no - 8 regular human skeletons crawling, moving, and gyrating in their own unique rhythmic pattern. All of them gripping onto the hands or feet or ribcage of the skeleton next to them. The entire surface of every single bone writhed and undulated like liquid. Kaitlin felt slightly dizzy, and looked at the ground for a while.

“Well. I think maybe I’m looking at a giant skeleton. Like three stories tall. Might be made of smaller skeletons. A lot of them. Other than that, not much. You?” Kaitlin placed her own tone at somewhere between caustic and simmering rage.

“Yeah. Sorry about that. You’re really not supposed to be there.”

“Ya think!” Malcolm Bellowed. He snapped up to standing, completely neglecting to let go of Kaitlin’s hand first. With one hand in Malcolm’s and the other gripping her phone that left no hands to stop her from toppling forward and bouncing off the stone floor. It might have been worn smooth, but it was still stone, and it still hurt.

“Ow! What the hell?”

“Oh my god. I’m so sorry. Are you okay?” Malcolm stooped back down to help Kaitlin to her feet. She could see the genuine concern in those dark eyes, but even that wasn’t enough to thoroughly drain her of confused, directionless, anger. She had some left to vent, so she scowled back at him as convincingly as she could. Everything she wanted from today was slipping away from her. She wasn’t even sure what it was that she wanted, but falling into a cave populated by a massive skeleton creature wasn’t part of it. She was pretty certain of that.

Kaitlin took a second to brush the dust off her jeans, her new pullover, and attempt to organise her tangle of red-brown hair into something bordering on presentable. She noted that both she and Malcolm kept their feet rooted to the spot. Not even a tiny shuffle. He kept all of his focus on the skeleton, and conspicuously away from Kaitlin.

Gina chimed in from parts unknown. “Is everything okay? You didn’t move anywhere did you?”

“No!” Kaitlin and Malcolm fired back simultaneously.

“Good. Good. This guy has decent range, but terrible awareness. No eyes, can’t hear. It doesn’t look like he even knows you’re there. Still, if you get much closer he’ll sense you and you’ll pull aggro for sure.” Gina spoke in a halfhearted singsong like everything she was saying was completely obvious.

“Wait. What? Did you say pull aggro? What do you mean, pull aggro?” Kaitlin responded and tossed a sheepish look at Malcolm.

“You know what she’s talking about?” The stiffness seemed to lift from him as he spoke.

“Maybe.” Kaitlin sucked the breath in through her teeth and winced slightly.

“So… what does that mean?”

Kaitlin sighed. This was it. She was outed as a dork for sure now. “It’s a game thing. In my second year of pre-med, I almost lost a semester playing this game. An MMO. It was the only game I could get to run on my laptop. I played it with a bunch of friends. You wander around this fantasy world as wizards and stuff and, you know, fight monsters.” Kaitlin pointed gingerly toward the hulking heap of gyrating bones in the distance, “Like this guy. Pull aggro, means if we get closer it will attack us.”

“My brother and I only ever had consoles” Malcolm gaped at the skeleton, fully taking it in for the first time. “But I know what you mean.”

He raised his voice slightly, speaking mostly to Gina over the phone. “So are you saying that this is some sort of game? Are we in a game right now?”

“Oh. No. No this isn’t a game. This is real. I suppose you could say this is the source material.” They could hear the frustration in Gina’s voice. “So you two really should have gone through the tutorials. I just work on the help line. You know, like ‘tips and tricks’ that sort of thing. You are both way underleveled for this encounter, and you are both specced as support classes. I don’t even know how you got partied up without a fighter or ranged class. Why were you together at the gate anyway?”

“Umm,” Kaitlin found herself turning to look into Malcolm’s eyes as she spoke. She didn’t know if she needed confirmation or confidence or just an ally. “We’re, um, we were on a date?”

To Kaitlin’s relief Malcolm nodded and returned her gaze. “Yeah. Yeah, a date.”

“WHAT?!? Well no wonder you’re in here!” The sudden volume of Gina’s voice snapped them both out their reverie. “This was my first call of the day, and you’re both on a date with a party member! This is why people are supposed to go through the tutorial! I have to submit a ticket to admissions now, but I can’t because I have to get you two out of this encounter first. Okay. Okay. Let’s just all calm down.”

“We’re calm. I think? Are we calm?” Kaitlin replied, doing her best impression of a calm person while keeping one eye on the colossal pile of wriggling bones.

“Sure. Yep, we can be calm. Placid even.” Malcolm chorused in.

“Hmm, okay.” They could hear the sound of drink sipping and glasses being placed on a desktop over the phone. “Okay. We can do this. Alright. Lets see. That big guy over there is Gashadokuro. Like I said before, his perception is very poor but his attack range covers most of the cave. He shouldn’t be able to climb out of that hole, so I don’t think you have to worry about him chasing you. Let me pull up the drawings of the encounter space.”

Malcolm looked quizzical and asked “What’s a Gash -a duke, doke, toka. What?”

Gina quickly transitioned into a practiced speech like a museum curate or tour guide. “Gashadokuro is a japanese variant of the bone golem, or giant skeleton. There are 15 or 16 of them around the world. We have Gashadokuro here on an exchange from Arashiyama. They have the Wendigo there for the next three years. We’ve run exchange programs since the 50’s, but this is one of the biggest construction sites since the Han Dragon. The whole Gashadokuro cave was moved stone by stone over four months. It’s really quite impressive. Okay. I have a path for you. So, do you want the good news or the bad news?”

Kaitlin eyed Malcolm. He took in a deep breath and blinked heavily like he was trying to shake off a dizzy spell. She could feel herself doing the same.

“Good?” Kaitlin asked with dread.

“There is a path most of the way around that skirts his projected zone of perception. You just have to hug the left wall of the cavern when you exit the entrance area, and don’t move more than about a meter and a half from the wall all the way around. So hug the wall, stay out of his perception range, and you should be able to reach the exit without fighting.”

There was a short silence before Malcolm asked “And the bad news?”

“You have to move slow, like nothing faster than a leisurely walk, so the path to the exit will take almost two hours. Also, there is a spot at the end where the rock juts out. There is no way that he doesn’t see you when you reach that point. It’s also within his attack range and neither of you has earned a weapon or any defensive equipment. So, okay, are you ready for this?” Gina didn’t wait to find out if they were ready. “When you hit that spot, you’ll know it when you get to it, you are going to have to run. Like I mean run. You will have to flat out sprint to the exit. But good news again, the exit is only about one hundred seventy meters from there. So the path is this; slow, slow, slow, book it. Sound doable?”

“Can’t we just go back the way we came in?” Malcolm said.

“Nope. That path is closed, besides it’s straight up and no one is carrying any climbing gear. The cave exit is really the only route. I can talk you through it.”

Kaitlin gulped back a breath. She suddenly pictured last night vividly, listening to music on her phone while she reviewed the muscles of the forearm. She remembered lifting her head from the book sometime later, shutting off the music, and dragging herself off to bed.

“Oh. No. Oh no. I didn’t plug in my phone.”

Malcolm looked confused and rubbed his knuckles along his temple. “What. Okay. Why? Why does that matter.” Half a beat later. “Oh.”

“Oh, okay.” Gina chimed in with a practiced reassurance that only slightly sounded false. “How long do you have left?”

“10%.”

“Well that won’t last two hours. Malcolm?”

“I- I forgot my phone at home.”

“Okay then. You’ll just have to do the best you can, and I’ll talk to you again when you reach the other end. One last time, slow and tight to the wall. When the rock forces you close to him you run for the exit. It’s a massive wooden gate just on the other side of Gashadokuro. You won’t be able to miss it.”

Kaitlin moved to end the call and heard Gina chime in one last time. “One last thing. Remember this. We’ve had people running these encounters for over a century and in the last decade we’ve only lost four parties.”

“Is that supposed to make us less frightened?” countered Kaitlin.

“No. I just don’t want you two showing up on my performance record. You’d better get going.” The connection cut off from the other end.

“Well, you ready?” Malcolm asked offering his hand.

“Not even close. You?”

“Nope.”

Kaitlin slid her hand into his and squeezed slightly. Her hand was probably just as clammy and trembling as his. Malcolm didn’t seem to care. He returned the squeeze and nodded.

“I suppose we were going for a walk this morning.” Kaitlin could feel some heat rush back into her cheeks. She probably did look like a freckled tomato. The thought of that was less embarrassing for some reason.

“A walk and a run I guess. Sounds like fun.” Malcolm grinned and some sparkle returned to those deep dark eyes.

They stepped off of the entrance platform, carefully keeping to the left wall, and walked hand in hand.

Gashadokuro continued his rhythmic dance, looming in the distance, apparently unaware of the young couple moving slowly and talking quietly along the edge of his cave.

Changelog 0001

Wed, 13 Sep 2017 00:00:00 +0000

This is Changelog 0001. I’m creating a new series of posts that should go up at least once a week. Changelog will be a quick writeup on the state of game development over here. It’s more for myself than anyone else, though you are welcome to read it. Just a simple entry describing any changes, additions, or struggles to/with game projects I’m working on. Occasionally words will be accompanied by pictures or videos. Won’t that be nice.

For example:

Having recently solidifying a convincing “ball rolling effect” script, I set about trying to make the AI enemies in my game attempt some level of collision avoidance while stalking the player. Today I got a very clunky, but consistent collision avoidance system working. I will have to go back in and improve it, but for combat testing purposes, it should work fine.

Next up is to have the enemies attack the player, rather than just try to shove them off the edge of the world ‘Sumo’ style. Currently they just aren’t very dangerous and can be tricked into flinging themselves off the world fairly easily. I’ll have to add a little self preservation into the collision avoidance system.

And there you go. That is a changelog. Now I can look back here in a couple of months and feel either good or bad that I did or didn’t progress. Won’t that be nice.

254

Mon, 11 Sep 2017 00:00:00 +0000

I thought that maybe this would be that last entry, but it looks like there will probably be one more. If you have been waiting for the end, you can probably skip this iteration.

The line shuffled forward a few steps and Kaitlin shuffled with them. She was fairly sure that she had forgotten how her knees worked. Was she being awkward? Maybe? Oh god, she was. She absolutely was being the most awkward. All she had to do was walk a few steps and not act like a doofus. Hundreds of times, many hundreds of times, she had stood in this same line in front of this same counter in this same coffee shop waiting for the same low V-neck wearing barista taking his slow ass time. Sometimes she felt tired or irritable, sometimes she felt rushed and overextended, but never awkward. Now she was feeling judgemental and guilty for feeling judgemental. Or maybe she just felt anxious. Did it show? Could Malcolm tell? He totally could. How could he not? Anxious was leaking out of her pores. She pressed her arms a little tighter to her sides so the smell of anxious couldn’t escape from her armpits.
“Busy this morning.”
Malcolm’s voice sounded so calm and easy. How could he be so comfortable when she couldn’t remember how to stand like a person. And he smelled so good. Just a simple clean soap smell with maybe a touch of wood, like sawdust. His smell this close to her made her tongue feel dry. How was that fair.
Kaitlin felt the words “Yeah, right?” croak from her throat as she looked up at his face. Malcolm’s bright half smile, the deep brown of his cheeks, and those gorgeous almost black almond eyes.
Not. Fair. At. All.
The line shuffled forward again.
“I’m glad you- we- could, you know, finally make it out- get together.” Malcolm sounded a little less smooth just then. Kaitlin could feel her heart slow to a manageable rhythm. At least some part of him might be close to her level. Stumbling over a few words didn’t stop him from being so damned pretty though.
He added “I mean Medicine is demanding, right? Like timewise and workwise.”
“I’m only first year, but yeah I guess so. Engineering can’t be so super easy either.”
Kaitlin could feel her cheeks warming. She just hoped against hope that she didn’t look like a frickin tomato. This was the longest she had ever talked to Malcolm without the buffer of a group of mutual friends. Maggie had told her that she heard from Lane “that if Kaitlin asked Malcolm to go for coffee, that he would for sure say yes”. It was all very junior high, but it still sent Kaitlin’s stomach into backflips. Then she had gone up and asked him at Janice and Dean’s house party, well her and two beers had gone up and asked him. She felt floaty and hadn’t been sure that it was real, but here they were, saturday morning, standing in line for coffee. Together.
“I’m in civil, so I spent the last couple months reading about asphalt. Mostly we just memorize equations and play a lot of basketball” He said, laughing it off and looking up to the menu board.
“Same. Well, except it’s anatomy and tennis for me.”
“Tennis? I tried badminton, but I never played tennis before.”
“We should!” Kaitlin felt her voice jump in volume and she wrestled it back down. “I mean, if you wanted to try it out sometime, I could- I would be happy to teach you” Kaitlin fought off images of long brown legs and short white shorts. She closed the invitation with a weak grin.
“Maybe for a second, or third date?” Malcolm had replaced that half smile with a sly sideways glance.
If she didn’t look like a tomato before, there was no way she didn’t now. That heat had spread from her cheeks to the tips of her ears.
The line shuffled forward and they found themselves in front of the counter. Together.
Captain V-neck barely focused on them, wiped his hands across his ‘Burks’ apron, and tossed off a bored “So what’ll you have?”

Kaitlin was devoting an unreasonable amount of attention to the warm latte in her hands. She studied the tiny puckered pinholes in the lid. The the wisps of steam that drifted up and away into the crisp october air. None of it was interesting in the slightest, but she made a real effort to keep her eyes locked on that lid. People don’t die of nervous embarrassment do they?
They started talking about school, since that was easy neutral territory. They both asked the same simple, customary questions, and gave the same, simple, rote answers. It felt to Kaitlin like they were participating in a conversational ritual with no clear goal, but it was better than the alternative. She was mostly thinking about just sinking into the cracks of the concrete and disappearing entirely. She kept her mouth moving so by the time they had walked the two blocks from the coffee shop to the river path, Kaitlin could feel herself relaxing a bit.
She started to realize how fast she had been walking and slowed enough to take in the orange and yellow crested trees. Malcolm slowed with her.
“It’s pretty down here.” He said, stopping to regard a group of vibrant poplars.
“It’s a nice place to run. Lots of people, but it’s not usually crowded.” It had been weeks since Kaitlin had gone on a proper run, but she wasn’t going to say that out loud. Besides, it wasn’t a lie. She really did like this stretch of the river path. She looked up at Malcolm while he closed his eyes and took a deep breath of cool air. Maybe this was going okay. She hadn’t felt like a complete disaster in at least four minutes. He had laughed at her jokes. That had to be a good sign.
“You live close, right? Maggie said you live on this side of town.”
Kaitlin was startled and felt her eyes involuntarily snap skyward. Had she been staring? Maybe. Did Malcolm catch her staring? Maybe.
“Uh” Kaitlin uttered. Seemed an easy enough question, but it took a second for her brain to change gears and process it. “Um. Yeah. Yeah. We live just over there. Like three blocks from Burks.”
“That’s convenient, for running I mean. I live way east. Past the university. It’s all just copies of the same couple of houses. Nicest place over there is the parks between the ‘burbs.” He smiled as Kaitlin walked her eyes back over to his. She could feel herself smiling back and only a little warm in the cheeks this time.
“I don’t really know much of the city. I just moved here for school.” Kaitlin trailed off. She felt like there was nothing interesting she could add after that, and her smile faded. The last thing she wanted to do was bore Malcolm with small town stories. Of course, he went and asked anyway, because that was the ritual, right?
“Oh yeah? Where are you from?”
They quickly drifted back into that same question/answer pattern, but more relaxed, maybe a bit more sincere.
They strolled past dozens of mid morning joggers and cyclists trying to shake off a week of sitting on their butts. The air was warming as the sun slowly rose in the sky. When they came to a small bend in the river path Kaitlin stopped short to take in the view. Shafts of sunlight were streaming through the trees and tiny spikes of gold formed on the ripples in the river.
“That deserves a picture.” Kaitlin breathed, and slid her phone from her pocket.
“I’ll hold your coffee” Malcolm offered.
She handed him the cup and took a couple quick shots. It seemed like maybe she was missing an opportunity here.
“Want one with us in it? I can send it to you.” She asked
“Yeah. That’s a good idea.”
Kaitlin stepped back off the path and felt the warmth of Malcolm sliding in behind her as he moved into frame. She was starting to hold it together. Only a tiny bit of her felt like sinking into the soil and blending in with the tree roots. He brought his face up beside hers and she tried to get both of them and the trees behind into one balanced photo.
Click.
She really didn’t feel like moving though. This was nice, just like this.
“Here you go.” Malcolm brought her cup up into view and she reached for it with her free hand. Her fingers wrapped over his and she looked up at her phone screen just in time to see Malcolm’s beautiful eyes, now fully wide with surprise, slide out of view over her shoulder. She gripped hard as she felt his hand slipping away, both of them crushing the remnants of the latte into warm spray. She felt herself being pulled down by the hand, then the shoulder, then the ground dropped from underneath her. She was being yanked down, butt first, still clinging to Malcolm’s hand. She opened her mouth in panic, but her voice was absent.

Kaitlin’s phone, still locked in selfie position, lit up in her hand. Her ringtone “Yakety Sax” barked out at her. She snapped up to sitting, her spine rigid. She had to detangle her other hand from something to mash at the face of the phone. Instinctively, she answered the call and slapped the phone to speaker mode.
“Hel-wha-Who? What is- Who is this?”
“Please don’t move.” A calm, businesslike voice. Female maybe? The voice echoed like whoever it was, they were speaking to Kaitlin through a culvert.
“What? Why? What?” She felt immobilized from the tongue down. Kaitlin wasn’t sure she could move even if she hadn’t felt scared out of her mind.
“Sorry to interrupt. I’m Gina and I was wondering if you might need some help.”
“What?” Kaitlin screamed into the phone.
“Who is that? What-” Malcolm screamed up at her. Or maybe he was screaming at the phone, it was hard to tell. Either way, she flinched when she noticed his face lying right beside her hip. For a second there, she had forgotten that he existed. No, that can’t be right. Some hollow static from the phone cut her off mid thought.
“I’m sorry that I interrupted. I just wanted to know if you might need some assistance. Kaitlin Doyle and Malcolm Aldridge, is it?” The voice on the phone pattered back at her. The sound of Kaitlin’s name caught her attentions. That was something real she could latch onto. “ I just want you to stay put for a second while I access your accounts.”
“What accounts?” Malcolm spluttered.
“What accounts?” Kaitlin parroted.
“If you could just hold on for one second, and again, please try not to move.”
There didn’t seem to be anything Kaitlin could do at the moment. Gina, the voice on the phone was saying to stay put. Her legs were in total agreement, so they stayed frozen to the ground. Looking. She could probably look around? That didn’t count as moving right?
So she looked around. Aside from her phone screen there seemed to be a dim red orange light filling the cavern. Okay, cavern! That was a thing! This definitely looked like a cavern. A big one. What else, what else? Stone floor. Smooth stone floor. Tile? Nope. Bigger. Huge stone blocks, mostly smooth with cracks and imperfections. So stone that has worn smooth, not stone that has been machined smooth. Okay. Good, good. Malcolm! There he is. He doesn’t look very calm. Rapid breathing, dilated pupils. Maybe a panic attack? He’s not looking back at Kaitlin. He’s looking straight ahead at something right behind her. What? She turns her head and glances over her shoulder.
Nope.
Not ready for that yet. What else, what else? Some dirt on the stone floor. Hmm, dirt? So probably not water. What wears stone smooth? Water. But if it were water the stone would be wet and there shouldn’t be dirt. Okay, that’s sorted. She should probably check again. She didn’t really see what she saw, right?
A nice slow turn of the head. Nothing flashy. Just a nice slow glance. Really take it all in.
Yeah. Still there.
“What?” Malcolm whispers the question, but Kaitlin understands every nuance of that one syllable. It’s not just “what am I looking at?” - it is that, but not only that. It’s what to everything. What is this place? What are we doing? What happened? What is happening?
Kaitlin reached out to Malcolm’s hand again. There is no infatuated fumbling. There is no heart stopping, electric moment of contact. She needs an anchor. She can tell by his “What?” that he needs one too. Her fingers mesh with his and she whispers back an answer.
“Yeah. It’s a giant skeleton.”

She Turned her head to take it all in. She probably could have done just as well only moving her eyes, but the ridiculous enormity of the thing seemed to warrant some neck movement. It was maybe a block or so away from them. Were city blocks a useful metric in a cavern? Didn’t matter. Kaitlin knew blocks and so blocks it was. The skeleton must have been 12 meters tall, with arms splayed out at least twice that wide. Oh, wait. It was only the top half of a giant skeleton. The bottom half disappeared down in some sort of hole. There was steam or gas belching from the hole, along with that red orange glow that filled the cavern. She figured it must be a volcanic vent or geyser, but something about it didn’t seem entirely natural. The whole scene looked staged like an amusement park ride. Meaning what? The Skeleton was stuck? It was climbing out of the hole? Maybe it had fallen in. Maybe it had been put in. In any case, the part that was visible was only half of the thing.
Amusement park. That notion came rushing back through Kaitlin’s head. Why? Something wasn’t right. Giant Skeletons are not normal, sure, but this tableau was really false. What was it? Skull, orbital bones, Zygomatic Process, mandible, C4-5-6-7, Clavicle, scapula, humerus. Human. It was a human skeleton, but on a massive scale. She could name and label every single bone. Nothing surprising there, aside from the size of the thing. It took a moment to click. The skeleton was moving. A slow gyrating dance that repeated every couple of seconds. Not really a threatening display, but unsettling in a metronomic sort of way. Here is the part that really gave Kaitlin the willies though. Every single one of the dozens of visible bones was absolutely crawling with human scale skeletons. The left humerus of the thing was composed of 6 - no - 8 regular human skeletons crawling, moving, and gyrating in their own unique rhythmic pattern. All of them gripping onto the hands or feet or ribcage of the skeleton next to them. The entire surface of every single bone writhed and undulated like liquid. Kaitlin looked at the ground for a while.

“Hello? Are you still there? I apologize for the delay. I had a little trouble pulling up your accounts. Seems that they are very new. Like ‘today’ new. They are still being filled in. What are you two doing?” The phone signal had cleared up significantly , but Gina sounded confused. Kaitlin figured there was more than enough confusion on her own end of the phone and she didn’t really need to be getting more of it from elsewhere.
“Well. I think maybe I’m looking at a giant skeleton. Like three stories tall. Might be made of smaller skeletons. A lot of them. Other than that, not much. You?” Kaitlin placed her own tone at somewhere between caustic and simmering rage.
“Yeah. Sorry about that. You’re really not supposed to be there.”
“Ya think!” Malcolm Bellowed. He snapped up to standing, completely neglecting to let go of Kaitlin’s hand first. With one hand in Malcolm’s and the other gripping her phone that left no hands to stop her from toppling forward and bouncing off the stone floor. It might have been worn smooth, but it was still stone, and it still hurt.
“Ow! What the hell?”
“Oh my god. I’m so sorry. Are you okay?” Malcolm stooped back down to help Kaitlin to her feet. She could see the genuine concern in those dark eyes, but even that wasn’t enough to thoroughly drain her of confused, directionless, anger. She had some left to vent, so she scowled back at him as convincingly as she could. Everything she wanted from today was slipping away from her. She wasn’t even sure what it was that she wanted, but falling into a cave populated by a massive skeleton creature wasn’t part of it. She was pretty certain of that.
Kaitlin took a second to brush the dust off her jeans, her new pullover, and attempt to organise her tangle of red-brown hair into something bordering on presentable. She noted that both she and Malcolm kept their feet rooted to the spot. Not even a tiny shuffle. They both kept a portion of their attention on the skeleton.
Gina chimed in from wherever she was calling from. “Is everything okay? You didn’t move anywhere did you?”
“No!” Kaitlin and Malcolm fired back simultaneously.
“Good. Good. This guy has decent range, but terrible awareness. Still, if you get much closer you’ll pull aggro for sure.” Gina spoke in a halfhearted singsong like everything she was saying was completely obvious.
“Wait. What? Did you say pull aggro? What do you mean, pull aggro?” Kaitlin responded and tossed a sheepish look at Malcolm.
“You know what she’s talking about?”
“Maybe.” Kaitlin sucked the breath in through her teeth and winced slightly. “In my second year of pre-med, I almost lost a semester playing this game. An MMO. It was the only game I could get to run on my laptop. I played it with a bunch of friends, and you wander around this fantasy world and, you know, fight monsters.” Kaitlin pointed gingerly toward the hulking heap of gyrating bones in the distance, “Like this guy.”
“My brother and I only ever had consoles” Malcolm gaped at the skeleton, fully taking it in for the first time. He raised his voice slightly, speaking mostly to Gina over the phone. “So are you saying that this is some sort of game? Are we in a game right now?”
“Oh. No. No this isn’t a game. This is real. I suppose you could say this is the source material.” They could hear the frustration in Gina’s voice. “So you two really should have gone through the tutorials. I just work on the help line. You know, like ‘tips and tricks’ that sort of thing. You are both way underleveled for this encounter, and you are both specced as support classes. I don’t even know how you got partied up without a fighter or ranged class. Why were you together at the gate anyway?”
“Umm,” Kaitlin found herself turning to look into Malcolm’s eyes as she spoke. She didn’t know if she needed confirmation or confidence or just an ally. “We’re, um, we were on a date?”
To Kaitlin’s relief Malcolm nodded and returned her gaze. “Yeah. Yeah, a date.”
“WHAT?!? Well no wonder you’re in here!” The sudden volume of Gina’s voice snapped them both out their reverie. “This was my first call of the day, and you’re both on a date with a party member! This is why people are supposed to go through the tutorial! I have to submit a ticket to admissions now, but I can’t because I have to get you two out of this encounter first. Okay. Okay. Let’s just all calm down.”
“We’re calm. I think? Are we calm?” Kaitlin replied, doing her best impression of a calm person while keeping one eye on the colossal pile of wriggling bones.
“Sure. Yep, we can be calm. Placid even.” Malcolm chorused in.
“Hmm, okay.” They could hear the sound of drink sipping and glasses being placed on a desktop over the phone. “Okay. We can do this. Alright. Lets see. That big guy over there is Gashadokuro. Like I said before, his perception is very poor but his attack range covers most of the cave. He shouldn’t be able to climb out of that hole, so I don’t think you have to worry about him chasing you. Let me pull up the drawings of the encounter space.”
Malcolm looked quizzical and asked “What’s a Gash -a duke, doke, toka. What?”
“He’s a japanese version of the bone golem, or giant skeleton. There are 15 or 16 of them around the world. We have Gashadokuro here on an exchange from Arashiyama. They have the Wendigo there for the rest of the year. We’ve run exchange programs since the 50’s, but this is one of the biggest construction sites. His whole cave was moved stone by stone. It’s really quite impressive. Okay. I have a path for you. So, do you want the good news or the bad news?”
Kaitlin eyed Malcolm. He took in a deep breath and blinked heavily like he was trying to shake off a dizzy spell. She could feel herself doing the same.
“Good?” Kaitlin asked with dread.
“There is a path most of the way around that skirts his projected zone of perception. You just have to hug the left wall of the cavern when you exit the entrance area, and don’t move more than about a meter and a half from the wall all the way around. So hug the wall and you should be able to reach the exit without fighting.”
There was a short silence before Malcolm asked “And the bad news?”
“You have to move slow, like nothing faster than a leisurely walk, so the path to the exit will take around two hours. Also, there is a spot at the end where the rock juts out. There is no way that he doesn’t see you when you reach that point. It’s also within his attack range and neither of you has earned a weapon or any defensive equipment. So, okay, are you ready for this?” Gina didn’t wait to find out if they were ready. “When you hit that spot, you are going to have to run. Like I mean run. You will have to flat out sprint to the exit. But good news again, the exit is only about one hundred seventy meters from there. So the path is this; slow, slow, slow, book it. Sound doable?”
“Can’t we just go back the way we came in?” Malcolm said.
“Nope. That path is closed, besides it’s straight up and no one is carrying any climbing gear. Through the cave is really the only route. I can talk you through it.”
Kaitlin gulped back a breath. “Oh. No. Oh no. I didn’t plug in my phone.”
Malcolm looked confused and rubbed his knuckles along his temple. “What. Okay. Why? Why does that matter.” Half a beat later. “Oh.”
“Oh, okay.” Gina chimed in with a practiced reassurance that only slightly sounded false. “How long do you have left?”
Kaitlin pictured last night vividly, listening to music on her phone while she reviewed the muscles of the forearm. She remembered lifter her head from the book sometime later, shutting off the music, and dragging herself off to bed. Nowhere in that memory did she plug in her phone. “10%.”
“Well that won’t last two hours. You’ll just have to listen carefully, and I’ll talk to you again when you reach the other end.”

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253

Mon, 04 Sep 2017 00:00:00 +0000

we’re still not at the end. Might be a couple more entries. Let me know if this ‘a little at a time’ writing schedule is too jarring. I could imagine that most people would like to just read the whole thing in one go when it is all done (which is why I put these little blurbs at the top. So you know what weeks to skip if you are waiting for the end), but I also thought it might be an interesting document of the process. Each week, I change a little more of the previous entries. Not sure if that is the best way of working, but what the hell, it’s a lot better than thinking about writing stories and not doing it.