Tiny update this week. I’ve been modelling more assets for the game. Most of the work is making sure that everything fits into the games grid, and each asset looks like it comes from the same world. Making sure that they work as a set. It’s tricky, but it’s a fun sort of tricky. 

Best Games - Toy Pop Step right up and try your hand. A true test of skill. This contest is not for the weak hearted or soft minded among you fine folks. What on outward presentation may seem to be a mere child’s toy, actually hides a challenge of such intense cranial agility and digital subtlety, that it can cause strong men to weep and women to swoon. You sir. Yes you. You appear hearty. I measure you to be of ample will and temerity. Of course I could be mistaken. Am I? Tell me folks, does this gentleman seem of sufficient fortitude to you? Can he weather a true examination of his mental and physical faculty? Step right up and try your hand at Toy Pop.

I went and got an Ouya. I meant for it to be a replacement for our current media streaming device, a wdtv. I was going to do a writeup on how that went and what I thought of the system. 

Our home has been afflicted with a devastating case of minecraft. It came on quickly and it has persisted longer than anyone expected. The children have been severely affected, but it’s hard to say who suffers most. 

I’m scared of video games. I’m scared of committing 20, 40, 100 hours to a single experience. I’m scared of spending time and energy on repetitive combat loop design. I’m scared of exploring new mechanics only to come up against their limits. I’m scared of an isolating entertainment medium that few of my peers relate to. 

Shader Test I tried to get my interactive shader test to run properly inside this blog post, but that weren’t happening. Instead I put it on its own page. You can click the link at the top or bottom of this post to mess around with it. 

This is what happens when you introduce a 5 year old to minecraft. I played too. Click for larger images

Best Games - Enchanter remembered in twine.

I did some work on the shader. Nothing is optimized yet. By cobbling together the work of some really smart people I have arrived at this. <iframe src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/XbhfYfxz-GE?wmode=opaque" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe> </div> This is the shader graph that makes the shader on all the objects in the video.

There are some things I don’t understand. Can’t understand, and probably won’t understand. I don’t think I have the tools to understand. I hope that I never do. Here is a fun little story that I think makes me look very stupid, but, I think, makes my parents look unquestionably brilliant. We used to watch The Nature Of Things regularly on CBC. I was, as most children are, fascinated with science, technology, robots, spaceships, aliens, volcanoes, and dinosaurs. If there had been a show with robot dinosaurs, piloting a volcano through space meeting aliens along the way, it would have been my favorite show. In fact someone should probably get on that.

Really short update today. I’ve just been doing some more work on creating and setting up models for import into the game. UV unwraps, zeroing out transforms, organizing materials, that sort of thing. I have a couple of longer post and Best Games in various states of construction, but none of them felt done enough to post today. I’ll polish one of them up for next week. 

I recently played The Room. My son is currently obsessed with it. On its face it seems to be a puzzle game, but as I played with it, I realized that it was actually something quite different. It’s a discovery game. 

Real quick one this week. I did some work on the shaders. They were a bit cryptic, with exposed floats for tuning. I cleaned all that up, and got rid of a bunch of prototype nonsense. The render cycle went from 0.4-0.6 milliseconds to 0.2-0.4 milliseconds, so that’s good, I suppose. Looks better too. I still need to profile the changes on mobile hardware, but the results should be similar. 

Best Games - Star Control 2 We sit, perched forward, on wooden kitchen chairs. Moonlight slips between the vertical blinds behind us. Paired with the phosphor glow of my 15 inch monitor, it is just enough light to read by. Shawn has two maps of laid out in front of him. One is printed in bright, rich colour on glossy poster paper. The other is assembled from smaller black and white photocopies, scotch taped across the seams. Side by side, they span a good 3 or 4 feet of dining room table. 

 A few months ago I ordered, by rough estimate, a cup and a half of dice. A few of the standard cube shaped, 6 sided variety, but more importantly, there were 4, 8, 10, 12, and 20 sided dice in there. I know that it’s difficult to imagine a nerd like myself would not already have a hoard of the things. For some reason, while I had gone through life gathering a regal crust of nerdy detritus, half remembered game systems, decades old electronics, comic books, and toys, polyhedral dice never formed part of that concretion. I wasn’t about to let that grim fate befall my children. Their nerdiness is assured. I write this here, so that when the time comes, they will know exactly when and where the blame lies.