So there are a couple new consoles coming out in a few months. I think I’ll buy a new video card instead. I was never really much of a console gamer. That statement typically stirs up visions of PC gaming snobbery. Bearded dudes bragging about dual SLI rigs that push frame rates in the hundreds, while they play era accurate flight sims and grognard only, hex based, strategy wargames. That’s not me at all. I was the kid who desperately wanted to play any and every game, on every platform. It just happened that the platforms I had were computers. Usually strange ones that few people had heard of. Every time I would go over to some kids place, and they had a NES sitting under the tv collecting dust because they had grown bored with, I don’t know, magical wonder and awe I suppose, it would make my soul hurt. It might as well have been a puppy, and their whole family was making a conscious effort to ignore it. I would make trips to stores specifically to play the display model of whatever machine they currently had running. Multiple times a day. 

Just a video today. I sketched up a helmet concept for the game and then modelled it. It took just under an hour. I call the helmet “the goonicron”

Because, video games. That’s the answer I give to my kids when they ask me how any of these weird, inconsistent events could have just occurred on the screen in front of them. Why does this thing start on fire and this thing not? Why did that character just warp through the geometry of the floor? Why can I fly in this game but not in this other one? 

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.