I typically try to refrain from just talking up tools on here. The thinking goes, why would I go to the trouble of writing something without having some sort of thesis in mind. If I’m just writing to talk up some program, then I’m not really offering anything worth reading. Well stuff that nonsense, I’m gonna sing the praises of my favorite image creation and editing program for a bit. 

This past weekend I was helping a friend out with his comic expo booth. He had a few old cartridges, NES and ATARI, that he had decalled up to look like games that never existed. The ATARI cart was done up to look like a Predator game and the NES cart had a Walking Dead decal. While it was entirely possible that a deal for a Predator game on the ATARI 2600 was in the works, it never materialized on that system. The Walking Dead, of course, is a more recent development and would never have existed on either system. 

I know almost nothing about the intricacies of graphics programming. I don’t know how to swizzle a matrix or whatever it is graphics programmers do. I know that swizzling is a real thing, and I think I may have even done it once or twice, but I’m not sure I could tell you exactly how or why. I don’t have the words.

forty years gone by playing games more than thirty silly to stop now 

Best Games - Caverns of Khafka (for Atari computers) Caverns of Khafka feels like a game that could shake apart at any moment. Is it possible to glitch your character clean through the floor of the level and crash the game? Probably. Can you get your character up into the scoreboard area of the screen and run around on top of the numbers? Absolutely. It seems like maybe this game shouldn’t work at all. It seems like the game was slapped together with very little thought.

I hate rendering. Can’t stand it. I would be positively elated to never have to render anything ever again. That leads to the obvious question. What is rendering, and why do you hate it so much? Since a lot of my past work has been in 3D graphics and animation, the context from which I invoke the word “rendering” is probably important. Rendering is when you, as a digital artist, ask the computer to please take all of the 3D models, texture maps, particle effects, and lighting trickery, and pass the whole mess through some sort of prettying sieve. The pixels extruded out the other side of this process should be in the order that you expected, or at least arranged nicely. Depending on the renderer you are using and what you tell it to do, you can get all sorts of different looks, anywhere from photorealistic, to pre playstation 1 era polygon soup. Every computer generated image had to pass through a renderer of some description. Some just light up the screen pixels you suggest to the rendering software might need lighting up. Others read the geometry in the scene and calculate the way that light bounces around the objects turning each impacted surface into a new light source, with it’s own colour and scatter parameters. The thing calculates the movement of light. No matter how efficient the calculations are, that’s a job that is going to take some time. 

There are a lot of great digital tools available now that let creators work in rapid, iterative ways. We owe a lot of the progress made in the last 40 years to the humble “undo” command.

This video presented here without comment.

I watched An American Werewolf in London on a CED when I was a kid. You could go and ask your grandpa what a CED is, but for the sake of this story, I’ll fill you in. 

I’ve been doing some 3D modelling recently. It’s something I have been doing with varying degrees of success for almost 20 years. You would think that I would have it down by now. You would think that I would just do the job with no issues or stress. You would think that I would have worked out strategies for dozens of potential problems. You would think that I would fly through a project and rarely have to backtrack or repair blunders. You would think that I would have confidence in my own experience and abilities.

Best Games - The Last Starfighter I used to play a ton of games on an Atari 800 computer. I’m fairly certain that only a few of the games were legally purchased. I’m certain of that, because the most of the games had labels hand written on generic floppy disks in marker. Legit manufacturers tend to use printed labels and usually limit the games to one per disk.

At this years Global Game Jam I had the opportunity to try out the Oculus Rift DK2 (development kit version 2). I had tested out the original Oculus dev kit last year, and while the experience was striking, a few minutes was about my limit. 

At this years global game jam I did something I haven’t done in way, way too long. I animated. Sure I only animated a hand, and sure it really wasn’t very detailed, nuanced, or “good”, but when you only have a couple days to create an entire game, you do what you can. 

The following video is a full play through of this years Global Game Jam entry SpaceShip SuperStar Maintenance Ltd. created by Evan Kawa, Christine Howell, and myself. You can download and play the game here. This video contains spoilers. You have been warned.