My house has moved on. We were a Minecraft house. Minecraft for breakfast, Minecraft to tuck you in at night, Minecraft in your dreams. On the time scale of a 7 year old, we stopped playing that decades ago. In reality it has been weeks. The obsession with Minecraft has been superseded by Terraria.

There are some very hostile and ugly things going on in some dark corners of video gaming. You can read about it here if you like, http://www.vox.com/2014/9/6/6111065/gamergate-explained-everybody-fighting . If you read a lot of media focused on the industry it may seem as though there is a full scale assault on indie developers, studio developers, journalists, bloggers, critics, reviewers, and on and on. There is not. The overwhelming majority of people who play games, make games, buy games, sell games, probably have no clue that anything of note is going on. They don’t know or care that a small group of angry, distasteful people have been organising to attack and harass specific developers and writers. They don’t know that these same people spawned and bolstered multiple, apparently pro-consumer, activist movements as a smokescreen to distance themselves from borderline illegal, and actually illegal, activity. There is no reason for most people to know any of this, because it doesn’t affect them. It doesn’t affect me. Not really. Not immediately. Not in a, fear for my career or life, sort of way. Not in the way that it does Zoe Quinn, Anita Sarkeesian, Jenn Frank, or a long list of other devs, writers, or critics. A list composed primarily of women. Women who make, play, and love games. I lied before. It does affect me, if you play games, it affects you. It affects the entire medium, top to bottom.

I steal from the past. There are literally thousands of games floating around out there. Games, books, limericks, bathroom graffiti, and the stunning industrial design of cotton swabs are all created by people influenced by previous works. You could go ahead and act like a turd heap by saying that your ideas are wholly original. Somehow, among the great miasma of human output, you managed it. You did something that no one else had ever considered. Just reach back there and give yourself the old patty pat.

This weekend I took part in Ludum Dare 30. Ludum Dare is a game jam that takes place over a weekend, either 48 or 72 hours, depending on how you want to participate. You can develop a game alone or in a group, choose to compete or not. Really it’s just a good excuse for game developers, and aspiring game developers, to take a break from whatever they are currently working on and intensely focus on creating something brand new for one weekend. It’s the game developer equivalent of dealing with writers block.

If you have read any of these posts before, you know that I have a serious love/hate relationship with Blender. For all it’s advances and additions over the years Blender still remains one of the more inscrutable tools I have ever used. That list includes the gloriously impenetrable ZBrush and some proprietary sign manufacturing software designed by moderately intelligent squirrels. I have used Blender to rig characters before, but had you interrogated me afterward, I would have conceded that I may have been aided by wizards. Mind you, I’m not new to character rigging. I have written code for custom rigs in Maya and Max, so even at a base level, character rigging is a concept I’m familiar with.

The procedural future is coming. There have always been video games with procedurally generated elements. That is, parts of the videogames you play are created on the fly, usually following some predetermined set of rules. These elements aren’t meticulously constructed by an artist or designer. They are built by the computer, following a blueprint or set of rules laid out by the game designer. Sometimes the blueprint is explicit, recreating the exact same assets every time the game is run. Other times there is a random, or pseudo-random element to how that part of the game is created. Games use procedural generation for level design, enemy AI, sounds, music, graphic details, even game mechanics.

You never want to be “that guy”. I know I have been “that guy”. I narrowly avoided being “that guy” a couple of days ago. My family went out to see Guardians of the Galaxy over the weekend. Super fun movie, by the way, but that’s not really what I’m writing about… but yeah, go see it, like really, go see it. Anyway, we went out, saw the movie, everyone had fun. As we were leaving the theater there were two guys talking excitedly just ahead of us. They had obviously enjoyed what they had just watched and were eager to go over the finer points of Marvel movies, Infinity Guantletry in particular. How do I describe these guys? Here, I’ll attempt to paint you a word picture. Let me just say here that these guys looked as though they had probably seen the inside of a comic shop on more than one occasion. I would suspect deck building games occupied a fair bit of their time. I gathered from their appearance and, unfortunately odor, that they had darkened the door of a Games Workshop or two. They were geeks okay. They were the kind of guys that you would expect to be fascinated by the minutia of genre films and comic lore.

This is a video of some shader tests I was doing today. I am using actual assets from Adventure Caddie, so this is a lot closer to the final look of the game than any of the previous screenshots and videos. The terrain and environment are tile based, so that new levels can be created on the fly by the game. getting there.

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.

You know that show thing that I was working on, the one where I try to gather a sketch group together to draw, paint, sculpt, animate, or whatever, all while jawing about the stuff that populates our heads. Yeah that thing. Well we are still doing it, and we have done more than 10 of them. I have been reluctant to invite many guests on to the show, since actually recording it and putting it together is more involved than a lot of people would be willing to deal with. I’m in the process of fixing that, and as you can see, we probably have room for one or two more at the table. Until I have it fully ironed out, here you go, you can enjoy this one below, and ten more like it over here . I am also setting up an audio only version, if you prefer to imagine what we are creating while we talk directly into your ear holes. Whatever, that’s your business.

Best Games - Last Blade and Last Blade 2 There are many beautiful games. Some are beautiful to look at. Some sound beautiful. Some are beautiful standing still, and some are beautiful in motion. A few games play beautifully. A very small handful of games are beautiful from every angle, in every measurable aspect.

You told me how to get the Night’s Edge sword in Terraria as we walked to school this morning. I listened as you and your brother went over strategies for the later levels of Epoch 2. I love you both. Have a happy birthday!

I’ve been watching a fair bit of E3 stuff this past week. During Sony’s swing at the stage, the image of a sheepish looking Tim Schafer provided one of the only moments of light, but legitimate comedy. The crowd was filled with game industry veterans and industry press. As is the custom at public events, the joke was explained by a grinning Adam Boyes. If I had to guess, I would say that there was a pretty large group in that crowd, and an even larger group at home that didn’t recognize Tim Schafer’s face and actually did need the joke explained.

Best Games - Artillery Artillery is one of the most basic physics equations given new form as a game. Artillery is one of the oldest computer games and new games based on the model of Artillery are released at a metronomic rate. Scorched Earth, Gunbound, Worms, Angry Birds. They are all descendants of Artillery.