One of the advantages of writing these posts every week is that I have an instantly searchable record of all the dumb things that I thought over the past few years. Maybe that’s a disadvantage. I’m not sure really. Well, what’s done is done.

Double jumping. Simple really. You contract the muscles in your legs, storing energy. You drive as much force as you can muster down into the ground and while raising your center of mass. You lift off, extending your body into a long smooth crescent. As your ascent slows, you pull your legs back up under you, tucking your knees. At the apex of your jump, you spring out again, releasing every last newton of force. You rise again doubling your previous elevation. Maybe three or four times your standing height. Simple.

Yesterday I sat nestled in the back of a classroom designed to accommodate dozens of students with just three other people. Joel Barr, Logan Cooper, Scott Wilson, and myself teamed up to create the game Panel Handlers. Over the 48 (or so) hour duration of the Global Game Jam, we succeeded, failed, and learned in roughly equal amounts, and in every order that you could possibly arrange those words.

I’m not an artist. You might think that someone who spent the better part of the last couple decades making stuff, pictures of stuff, pictures all lined up in a row and played back at 30 per second, and pictures you could convince to move around with a gamepad would be an artist. At the very least they would call themselves an artist. When they ask me what I do, I usually tell people “I make things”. It just feels more comfortable. More honest.

Best Games - Sid Meier’s Pirates! Imagine there was a game made up almost entirely of minigames. Strike one. The minigames are repeated a bewildering number of times. Strike two. The bulk of the remaining part of the game is uneventfully sailing across open ocean. Strike three. For a game called Pirates! you very rarely get to wear a captain’s hat or an eyepatch. Strike four.

I played Bill Budge’s Pinball Construction Set some time in the mid 80’s. I don’t remember exactly when, but I do know that it was on a friends computer, and I do know that it wasn’t a legit version. It was a disc with the name Budge PBCS written on it in sharpie and the manual was photocopied. I later wound up buying a real copy of it for the Atari 800 computer out of a bargain bin. I think it cost $2.99. I also bought The Last V8, but that is a disappointment for another time. The thought of being able to create my own pinball tables was intoxicating. I had so many ideas, and I sketched many mockup pinball tables in lined paper notebooks. I wish that I could say that I created a great table. I wish that I could say that I figured out how to link the various bumpers, spinners, and score lights into something playable. I pieced together a few terrible tables, but nothing that anyone would mistake for fun. Shortly after that I put the disk back in it’s box and never opened it again.

It’s 2016. That’s one whole digit higher than the last time I wrote one of these. The responsibility to do it up right is tremendous. Not really. I figured I would just ramble on about games for a few hundred words like I usually do, only this time I will be writing about the future. Strap on your shiniest scifi outfit, fire up some theremin music, and cuddle up with your robot companion. Here we go.

We went out and saw Star Wars. Don’t worry, if you are, statistically, one of the 6 people on the planet who hasn’t seen the new Star Wars movie, I won’t be spoiling any plot details. After rolling it around my head for a few days, I do have one observation.

speculation time. About 17 years ago a friend and I talked about a conceptual camera that would capture depth as well as light through a system similar to infrared range finders on automatic cameras. I thought that such a thing would change the way visual effects would be created. As it turned out, it made a clunky input device for your xbox 360 so that you could wave your hands at a video game and have it completely fail to react to your movements. A variation on this type of system is, and has been for some time, used in motion and performance capture studios. The systems are massively expensive and not something that will come to the layman’s market any time soon.

The creature scurries ​Electric whine and whistle photons made substance

This is my 3D printer. There are many like it, but this one is mine. I built this unit from a kit. You can buy kits like this online pretty cheaply now, but I think you should know what you are in for here. If you buy one of these units, the first thing you will have to do is assemble it. It’s not very difficult to do, but the instructions aren’t great and it can get a bit fiddly in spots. Still with me? I can imagine not wanting to build a 3D printer, but getting one running well is way more involved. In that respect, building from a kit or buying a machine that is pre-built would be no different. Figuring out how it works best and accounting for all the machines unique quirks and variables takes time, patience, and a certain amount of scientific rigor. Diagnosing problems and then finding solutions for them just so happens to make my particular brain very happy. I can understand that this might not be the case for everyone.

Best Games - Penguin Kun Wars Two tiny, adorable animals face each other grimly across an empty ping pong table. On both sides sit a lineup of brightly coloured balls. These are your weapons. When the whistle blows, the opponents will make a frenzied dash to whip the balls at other side of the table. All balls are in play. If a ball ends up on your side, you can pick it up and send it hurtling back. If one of the animals is struck with a ball, any ball, they will be dazed for a few seconds. If a dazed animal is hit again, the knockdown is extended. When the round timer runs out, and the final buzzer sounds, the player who has managed to end up with the fewest balls on their side, wins. Occasionally an iridescent slinky undulates across the table. That slinky is a dick.

I nearly fell into a classic game development blunder. At least I assume that it’s a classic, I haven’t really made enough games to know the full spectrum of blunders. I figure if I drunkenly stomp my way into a few of them every week or so I’ll eventually get to all of the classics.

All of that talk about interfaces and input schemes last week wasn’t for nothing. I was figuring out a few things and, well, this is some of the results.

I’m looking at this xbox360 gamepad sitting on my desk. There are 6 buttons, two bumpers (which are also buttons), two triggers (squishy analog buttons), two analog thumbsticks (which are buttons if you press down on them), a digital directional pad (4 buttons linked under a single piece of plastic), and a power indicator led (you guessed it, a button). When I pick the thing up I have a minimum of two fingers on each hand not directly hovering over an input. The playstation and wiiu pads are much the same. This standardization is both a boon and a constraint for developers. While you have at least a baseline expectation of the controls your players will be familiar with, you are also restricted to those inputs. To be fair, that is an awful lot of potential inputs, and if you can’t find a way to fit your game into the controls offered in modern gamepads, it might not be the pads that are at fault.