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.

I don’t think that writers block (or artists / designers / creators block) is a fear of the blank page or canvas. I think a creator gets “blocked” because they haven’t adequately defined the problem they are trying to solve.

First off, Thank you to anyone who has been reading this blog. I have enjoyed writing it. But. I have some good news and some bad news. First the bad news. I ending the blog and all other game creation activities. It’s been a long time, most of my life really, but I have lost all interest in games. I am going to stop writing about them, playing them, and making them. But there is a good reason for it. 

Games are enjoying a golden age. The first generation that never knew a world without video games is well into bringing up the first generation that will never know a world without the internet. Games and gameplay are not only ubiquitous, they are shared and shareable experiences. The media that promotes, comments on, and criticizes games is in the midst of an overhaul and only a small handful of “enthusiast press” seem to be ready, or willing to keep pace. Maybe it’s time to be done with the game review.

My Neighbour Totoro is one of my favorite movies. It’s probably in my top five, if I cared to order the movies I love in that way. I don’t. There are just too many. Do I rank them by times watched? First by genre, then by quality? By what they make me feel? Nah. I like a lot of movies for a lot of different reasons and any sort of ranking system would pivot on some other criteria. What movies top the list would depend greatly upon that other criteria. I love My Neighbour Totoro because it is quiet. 

This week I was cleaning up some models, making a couple new models, and doing a UV unwrap on this character. 

I wanted to create a small sample scene of actual assets from Adventure Caddie. I’m only now coming to grips with the rigging and animation systems in blender, so I opted instead to use a bunch of primitives and some character models culled from the Unity asset store. I think the test still gets the look across. Here’s four minutes of me twiddling knobs.

Best Games - Encounter! I played Encounter on an Atari 800 computer. I played it a lot. It would be 10 years before Id software would recapture,with Wolfenstein 3D and Doom, the fluid control, speed and heart pounding tension of Encounter. 

Blender The first 3D animation program I learned to use was Truespace 3D in the mid 90’s. I would later go on to use, autocad, power animator, maya, and 3DSMax. The list of peripheral modellers, raster art programs, vector art programs, video editors, video compositors, design programs, cad/cam programs, and programming languages I’ve used sits about nipple deep. This is just stuff I’ve used to do work, mind you. The junk I get up to for fun is an equally goofy pile. Software tools in equine choking quantities. 

There are a lot of examples of morality systems in games. Games where there is a light or dark, good or bad choice. Often the choices are explicitly highlighted for you, and you will receive rewards based on how good or bad the game thinks you are acting. 

A few years ago, when I made signs, I created a complicated measuring tool that could take the place of 7 or 8 other, large, unwieldy tools. It was cut out of one, fairly light piece of aluminum, and looked sort of like something a klingon Pope would carry lashed to a stick. No one outside of our shop ever saw that thing, and it’s likely that few people ever will. I was happy with the result, not because it looked cool, I would argue that it did, but because it solved a problem. It was as clear an example of form following function as I’ve ever come up with.

Global Game Jam 2013 Over this past weekend I had the honor of working with this talented and dedicated team of people. From the looks of this picture we are all well hydrated. 

Best Games - Joust rhythmic flap of wings one press to cheat gravity van art in motion