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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.