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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

More changes and edits over here again. next week will be a longer post.

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.

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.

If you are in Canada, I hope you are having a good Canada day. If not, well have a good day anyway.

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.

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.

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?

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.