60 FPS

Well. It looks like it’s been a year minus 13 days since I last posted to this blog. That may get an explanation blog later if necessary. In the meantime, 1 game a month long since completed (the first year), I am starting a new project! This one will take longer to complete. Significantly longer. If the pattern holds, five times longer. It’s probably going to write quite the story eventually. But, before I can tell you that story, I have to tell you this story...

A group of friends and I are hanging out after D&D. Well, half of the day was D&D, the other half is a partial conversion of the Pokemon Tabletop Adventures system into the Mystery Dungeon Universe, but it’s all dark and gritty and there are slavers and murder and surprising amounts of romance. Anyway, someone forgot their bag when they left early so we’re bringing it to them, and we end up standing around for ten minutes talking about nothing important. Halfway through a guy asks us if we know somewhere he can go to smoke pot, and we don’t know because we’re as square and clean-cut as Antichamber. Someone says something about something about First Person Shooters, and being of the videogamesman persuasion, I light up and say “Ooh, I should make an FPS!” [note: At this point it is 1:00AM, I am very tired and not thinking reasonably.] In response, someone [note to future self, if you are wondering who got you into this mire, it was Conor.] wisecracks “Wait, just one FPS? Wouldn’t that be super slow?” Ah ha ha. Very funny. First Person Shooter = Frame(s) Per Second. He knew what I meant, but just to be funny, he took a big bite out of my jugular vein! But he’s right, in a way. Making just one FPS would be super slow, because if I tell myself to make a first person shooter by ..eventually, I will probably not make a first person shooter. That is why I’m taking him up on it. Full, modern framerate (as of 2014). Sixty. I am going to make 60 First Person Shooter games. Do you doubt? Just watch me.

Just for quality of life, I’m going to say that anything I work on counts, even if I don’t make it all myself, so I don’t spend a year working on something knowing in the back of my mind that it won’t count. A lot of games are going to count, because I now have to make a lot of games. To that end, I am going to need a lot of ideas. If you have any you’re willing to share, please do so at your earliest convenience. I’ve already got ten in the list, of which six are any good, of which two are probably actually any good. I will endeavor to post them here, and probably on Itch.io or Playdot or something, or maybe I’ll get a real website one of these days, and maybe some of them will be commercial ventures. I will make them in Ludum Dares and 7DFPSes, I will make them in whatever framework seems like a good idea at the time, whether for convenience of familiarity or for personal education. I will likely Stream some of the development. Er, Stream some of the development. Er, Stream some of the development. There we go.

I wonder if I’m going to remember this moment when I’m, say, sixty. Will I have had the dedication to keep churning these out? All of these things in the same genre, even?Probably not. Here’s hoping, though. (60×10-word-post).

Paddles and ball release!

A game made in 35 minutes during the zero hour game jam. download it here. Easy mode can be played with the mouse – hard mode is played with WASD, the arrow keys, or a controller’s left stick.

Dear Asymmetric release!

And here’s a thing. I made this in response to Jick of Kingdom of loathing saying repeatedly on their podcast/radio show that he wished someone would implement a text-to-speech engine in Unity so that he could make a game in the vein of Dear Estaban – { a game like Dear Esther but comedic }, but randomized. This uses an implementation of the Windows Text-To-Speech engine by Unity forum member ZJP, and for which I wrote a Regular-expression-based system for “word buckets”, allowing pretty much any kind of randomized structure to be produced. The game takes the form of a letter to the Asymmetric team, navigated as an FPS character, à la Dear Est(her/aban).

September week, uh, 4?

Oh hey guys it’s, wait, oh crap, did I seriously miss two weeks in a row? Wow. I was just worrying about last Thursday, but dang. It may have helped that there are not that many distinct events to report on, but still. I should be ashamed.

Okay, news. I ordered and had arrive some fighting sticks, and while they serve their purpose, they’re loud as heck, and the stick is rather clicky (and reports only three bits worth of data), suggesting I got what I paid for in terms of quality (2 for $55). If I can find a place to buy some buttons and a new joystick, I will finally do some controller modding.

I moved in to college, which is probably what took up the blogging time. I was packing last blogday, so I was basically busy the whole day. In the preceding days I was crushed with the terror of a huge change, which generally resulted in restless paralysis. I will say that I’m glad its over. I knew even then that it would be fine with the passage of time, I just wished time would hurry up and pass already.

Haven’t really met any game dev nerds yet. Many gamers, of both video and Pen-and-paper varieties, but not so much programmers. One guy who wants to start a video game company, but I think he’s a buisness major or something. I will have to make him expound on his interest.

I’ve picked up speed running, against my better judgement. I’m one of the few people who runs Electronic Super Joy, which is optimally a 30-or-so minute game, but which takes me that+1/2, so there is definitely still room for improvement. Upon learning that we both played the game, my roommate and I started casually racing SA2B, but that’s a two-day-old endeavor, so we’ll see if it persists.

Speaking of my roommate, he also plays LoL, as a support, so he wants to train me to be a decent ADC. We’ll see where that goes as well.

You’ll note I haven’t mentioned much actual programming happening. That floundered along with the rest of me in the days leading up to the move, but I have something to publish this month. I should be settled in enough by next month to be able to give you something new.

Oh yeah, I said last post I would update you on the quality of Electronic Super Joy, right? Well, I have explored the game rather thoroughly and am pleased to report that it is GOOD. Seriously, go buy it. It is very difficult (occasionally in the style of SMB, occasionally in the style of Super Crate Box, and occasionally in its own special terrible way), so be warned, but very good. I speedrun this game I like it so much. Go buy it. Get the soundtrack, too.

Anything else? If you make games and go to the University of Washington, we should hang out. See y’all.

The PAX 2013 blog

Hello all. PAX just happened, which was eventful. I’ll get straight to it:

I saw and played the demo of Life Goes On, a game that, as a designer, inspired the “why didn’t I think of that?” reflex because of its seeming elementality. If the process of idea creation is compared to archaeology – that these things are unearthed rather than constructed, then this game is the result of digging about a foot down in the right spot and pulling out a buried city from which dirt rolls like water. It is surprising to me that it has not been done before, but I’m glad that it is now. To those who don’t want to click links: it is a puzzle-platformer in which respawning is instant but corpses are persistent and interact with the level’s physics – you solve puzzles by dying in the right places and ways.

Crypt of the Necrodancer: the idea smells familiar, somehow. I wonder why. Huh. I’m completely certain that they conceived of their game without my influence, but it is a funny coincidence. They executed it much better then we did, though, and I’m mostly just glad their game exists, because it is fun. You should all play it and buy it when it comes out.

Electronic Super Joy looked cool enough (and was buyable enough) to buy. More analysis in the future once I play it.

Wildstar: Not an indie Megabooth game! weird. Spent saturday hanging out with a guy already excited about this game, and ended up going to a panel about it. Western in space plus skill-based combat and customizability with a really interesting funding system – probably. From what I understand, one month of paid subscription will be able to be crystallized into a single “cred” which can be bought and sold in the player economy. The way in which it is similar to the monetization of KOL is exciting, because KOL’s pay/free economy is far more appealing than that of any other MMO that I have seen thus far, If I could ask the devs two questions, one would be for curiosity and the other could make the deal on me playing their game. The first is whether KOL influenced their decision-making process at all, and the second is whether they made an intentional choice to try to stay off of Repair Her Armor. You can guess which is which.

I attended all four days of PAX, which was thoroughly tiring. I would have been fine, and was ready to account for at least one concert’s loss of sleep (we went to the Hideo/Doubleclicks/MC Frontalot concert. For most of it I was up front in the mosh pit, standing next to the guy who yelled “Freebird”. MC Frontalot is much better when you can actually hear his lyrics, which is completely possible on album versions, but the music was funky enough and the performers were enthusiastic enough that we didn’t really care.) Wow, am I at this point still gramatically allowed to start with “but then on sunday…”? Weird. So but then on sunday night, instead of going home in time to sleep, we went to the Late Night Dub Fight, which was fun, and would have been tolerable, but then on the way out of that building we were called over to play Johann Sebastian Joust, which was the kind of fun that still rings through at 23:00 and six hours of sleep. Anyways, we got out at midnight again, and I went to sleep at two for the second night in a row, so monday was spent far more tired than would have been ideal. I had fun anyway, but probably won’t go a fourth day next year. Actually, I may go far fewer days next year, because I feel like I might rather go to PAX DEV or UNITE instead. I would probably still choose to go at least one day, to see internet celebrities (who were plentiful) and to carry on newly born traditions with friends. I can take comfort, though, in the fact that I am changing schools (and moving to Seattle!), and will thus no longer be the route through which slightly less than a dozen friends get to the event, both ticket-wise and physically. (seriously. I provided tickets for ten people and myself to get there, and drove eight of them in carpools.) Given that we no longer share a school, it cannot be my responsibility to get people there, so I will not take that burden on again.

Anyways, so it was suggested that I make it my goal to make enough money to go to PAX DEV next year, the silent part of which is “after paying tuition”, but I like the idea. I will hopefully get a job of some kind at or near UW, preferably in the (as I recently discovered, higher-paying) tech field. If anyone is in Seattle and looking for a computer-savvy college student to employ, here’s my number. You may not wish to have a phone call in the next few days, however, because I find myself under the spell of the not-swine-flu-this-time-but-something-always-goes-around PAX Pox, so my voice box and brain are not operating at full capacity (they graciously donated their resources to my nose, which is acting like some kind of simile that I can’t formulate right now but is on overdrive and unpleasant to those around it. A lawn-mower with exposed blades? A hummer with a brick on the gas pedal? The American economy circa 1880? Something like that. My nose is making my life unpleasant.

I was going to write other stuff here, probably touching on gender politics and something else that I can’t remember right now, but the fact that I can’t remember it suggests I should let it be until I am better rested and less infected, and therefore more coherent. G’night.

August week 4

So, Ludum Dare happened. That was cool again, I’m just remembering that I need to play some other people’s games to make sure ours gets rated. Short version blog today because I’m in a mood that does not lend itself well to yammering about yourself, but I should probably give you guys the news.

So Ludum Dare happened. On the third day, at times, I found myself not knowing what to do with my time – this is due to a number of factors, I think. In previous years the process of game creation has gone less efficiently. More smoothly, or so it seemed, but problems took longer to be worked out. A recurring event when working in unity is that the solution to a problem will be the removal or simplification of code, rather than the creation of new code, so it’s more of a surprise when problems evaporate. Fearing scope creep, we came up with our scope-unspecific idea at first, and then boiled almost all of the complexity out of it. When it went better than expected, the functional version of that game was done the second day, and given that my partner had religion and work going on, he wasn’t nearby for us to come up with a further direction to take it, so I felt like I could only polish the already sufficiently-shiny product. I’m an extrovert. Maybe at college a friend that I can end up being roommates with will be a working partner so that I don’t get the whole lonely-directionless thing going on.

So my interest in Ogmo returned for long enough to look into .net’s System.IO namespace enough to figure out that File.ReadAllLines() is pretty much exactly what I need to parse Ogmo in Unity. Unfortunately I am not right now producing anything that would be particularly Ogmo-friendly, so the only direction I could take this would be a generalized Unity Ogmo interpreter, which would probably be pretty useful for not just me, so I should probably just make it, but I don’t necessarily have the right amount of enthusiasm right now to do that work for no forseen benefit. If anyone would be interested in that thing being made, you should tell me somehow, so I know that the work will be worth doing. Until then, I will just be aware that should I ever find the need to make levels for a 2D grid-based game, that’s within my repertoire. Basically, I think, the one thing I am strongly aware of and really don’t have a handle on yet in Unity is Networking. I need to figure that out someday.

Also, I had another pretty good idea for a game the other day – an RPG with a distinctive experience system that seems like it would be pretty fun to play with, but whose broad-story-meaning ramifications are super depressing. Experience is earned as experiences – moments of time that fill up an hourglass that is the person’s history. You have more hourglasses than characters to manage, so if you want to you can pour the sand from one glass into another, super-powering a single character, but all progress is modular and transferrable, a la Dark Cloud’s weapons. Interesting story possibilities come out of the fact that character’s ages would change based on how filled their hourglass is at the moment, so the wizard would have to be old to be respected in the small village, the princess would be romantically interested in the rogue only if he was around her age, people would get weirded out if you aged abnormally in their presence. The depressing implications would come from the fact that those hourglasses would eventually inevitably fill up, e.g. characters would grow old and die, unless there were an infinite number of empty vessels to be found in the world, in which case they would remain immortal at the cost of losing memories, experiences, development. Basically time and mortality would be a looming, depressing factor. So we’ll see where that goes.

I finally got the chance to play TowerFall, which was awesome. Seriously that is a good game. The fact that it is in the PAX 10 means that Matt Thorson might could be hanging around, and he is a dude I would like to meet, although I still haven’t figured out how to present as a normal human to people I haven’t met but admire. Oh well. I think I talked to Kyle Pulver last year before I really knew who he was, so probably just disassociating with the idea of “fan”, -boy or otherwise, is the way to go.

Speaking of which, I’m going to PAX! Which is, like, tomorrow, so that’s cool. This year’s schedule and the trajectory of the expo hall the last few years has made me slightly less optimistic about the experience, but I will A. probably enjoy myself anyway and B. rant about it next week or something. It kinda makes me unhappy, actually, that PAX DEV, Unite, and GDC are all at least ten times the ticket price of PAX or Comicon. I guess the deal is that people are at consumer conferences to advertise, so are willing to fund it themselves, but cons actually designed to aid the people going have to be supported in full by the people going? That sucks. Basically, it sucks having income an order of magnitude lower than that of your oncoming cost. College is going to cost at least forty times the amount of money I have now, so I can’t very well go around blowing what I do have on two or three days of hopefully-relevant experience.

I’ve been archive bingeing on Sinfest, which is a worthwhile endeavor for anybody. Including you. You there, reading this blog post, go read Sinfest. The reason for the mood at the beginning of this post was because of that binge, and noticing that the dude on the cloud seems to be the only one who can unconditionally enjoy stuff. Also, as I get closer to modern day, the political commentary hits home quite a bit harder than the decade-old stuff.

Oh, and I got new glasses. I’m not used to them yet, so I still have unfamiliarity to gripe about, but I can see in more detail at distances, which is nice. Now I’ma go gas up my car to drive to Seattle and back four times. See y’all.

To War! release

Skirmish strategy game that rewards quick decision-making, made in less than 72 hours for the Ludum Dare 27 Jam, in which the theme was “ten seconds”. Downloadable through its Ludum Dare entry page.

August week 3

Oh, hey guys, what day is it? You say it’s what? A day after blogday and I forgot? No, I didn’t forget, I was just exhausted for the first half of it and asleep the second half, because I’m trying to rotate my sleep schedule back to normalcy, and it wasn’t terribly pleasant.

Anyways. Games? Yeah, Ludum Dare starts in 13 minutes, which is cool and which I will be doing, and streaming here.

Oh yeah and I created a file in the swimming game called “FishScript”, whose contents are currently “//Darwinian Braitenburg’s Vehicles”, which is exciting. I read that book this last week.

OkayI’mamakeagamenowbye.

August Week 2

So! I will be participating in Ludum Dare 26. Probably the Jam, in cahoots with Gidaio. So That will be this month’s game, which takes some pressure off – after a week and a half with nothing really to show for it, I was getting a little bit worried. So there’s that.

Onto NEWS! I got myself an Ouya, and it arrived yesterday, so it’s been on my mind a little bit. As a result of just a little bit of willpower, I made it all the way through the ODK setup process, to the point where I was playing a game on my console whose code I could read and modify. This was exciting enough that people downstairs could hear me making noises. and it inspired me to take another crack at getting Unity to compile to Android. I continued to have the same problem as before, which it turns out was a kind of versioning issue as expected- a suggestion on the forum fixed the problem, which amounted to another injection of excitement, which basically lasted most of the rest of the night. The Unity Ouya plugin that Mr. Timothy Graupmann has put so much work into is not functioning completely yet (“R.Java could not be found”, which is supposedly fixed by placing the actually-existing R file in the place that the software expects it, but I don’t know where that is yet.), but I can compile to an APK, and Unity’s controller input system does actually work with Android despite not being system-specified, so I can totally play Acceleration on the OUYA. THAT IS A REALLY COOL THING. I AM VERY EXCITED ABOUT THIS. I’m going to check over various OUYA Dev resources to see if there’s anything else specific that I need to put into a game (aside from general quality) to get it onto the marketplace, but I can make runnable software already, which (I’m guessing) is a pretty important first step.

August week 1

Progress was more breadthward than depthward this week, which is fine, as long as it doesn’t continue for too long. Getting together with friends resulted in the conception of two games, one of which is in contuing preproduction via rambling emails back and forth, but I’m not sure how able my partner in that project will be to work on it in the foreseeable future (a timespan on the scale of years, so putting it off for a month or two isn’t the solution), so whether that game will see the light of day or not is still in question.

Idea two of the five floating around right now is also just an idea, conceived with a different group of friends, but it’s unclear whether its scope is manageable. The scope-creep alarm in my brain was rung a few times as the conversation progressed, and it was voiced as often as it was supressed by the “shush, we’re having fun and you haven’t committed to anything” mallet. The initial idea was to remake “Blockube”, that, like the other games we played a lot in elementary and middle school, probably nobody has ever heard of. If you have, in fact, played Blockube, ROPW, or Scaler (slightly more mainstream but more specific to myself than my group), then you and I should hang out some time, because I have reason to believe that you are probably a pretty cool person. Blockube was a multiplayer game we enjoyed in middle school that was an RTS whose games would last between thirty seconds and five minutes. The idea evolved from there in multiple, increasingly complex directions (Minecraft, Mechwarrior, and Tremulous were all thrown into the mix before the conversation was over), but I was able to shrug off most of the nebulousness and complexity because my first step was to figure out Unity’s networking system, which I should probably eventually figure out anyway.

Idea three was proposed as a joke, and was going to be pursued in spite of its comedic beginnings for a while because it seemed like it had the easiest next steps, but the next steps turned out to be hardcore algorithm analysis and design, which I think I’ll save for a day when that actually sounds appealing. Those days occur occasionally, but I’m not currently in the right place for that, so we’ll check back in, say, a month and see how I feel.

Idea four is an engine that I made a while ago, but is basically just a recreation of the SNES game “Pocky and Rocky”. The first thought was to turn it into a fanArtGame for the Game Grumps, whose playthrough inspired the game’s initial creation, but other things got in the way of pursuing it. Upon discovery of the Ogmo editor, I was inspired to make it into a multiplayer arena game similar to Bomberman or Frobot, but Gamemaker did not make it easy to load and read a file, so the current plan is to port it to Unity first, but you can guess how excited I am to do new work for no immediate benefit, so who knows when or whether it will happen.

Idea number five is brand new, and up until recently was “prototype I threw together because it was four in the morning and I couldn’t sleep” number five, and just today got a spark of ideaness that just might make it worth doing. It also requires learning Unity’s networking, so we’ll see how that goes.

Idea six of five is just “Make a text-heavy game so you can tell a bunch of jokes”, so I’ll use Twine, maybe? That or Inform? Who knows.

Recently played video games: Super Mario Sunshine (again, for like the third time, because it’s still super fun), Planetside 2 (Yup, being a soldier is confusing, especially when nobody’s strategizing or giving orders) Poker Night 2 (which I wasn’t so certain would be worth playing as a game, but the first few minutes of the game are filled with enough fangirl-squee-able moments that its purchase was not regretted. Telltale are still pretty dang good at their jobs.), Castle Crashers (best played multiplayer from the same couch, but nonetheless very well played there or elsewhere), No Time To Explain, which would not run smoothly on my computer, unfortunately, Rogue Legacy, which is bloody good and which you should totally buy, Sonic Adventure DX (because while I’m reminiscing, why not?), a little bit of Shank, some Civ V,

and the Skullgirls Steam Beta, which has enough to be said about it that I’m going to make a new paragraph in the middle of the list, and which a friend and I decided we were going to get into the fighting game scene through. It was a fighting game designed by a fighting game enthusiast (I first heard about it on the Destructoid podcast, where apparently Jim Sterling recieved a mis-adressed drunken email in which the failures of an IGN review of a fighting game to comprehend its full detail were outlined. Even if that sentence is a grammatical wet house of cards, I have faith in someone who cares so much about others’ games to care enough about their own to make it good.) At the moment I still suck, but I do at least know enough that I am attempting to execute moves when I press buttons, not just pressing them and hoping that moves happen. I am currently at the stage where I try to choose a team to use and to get good with, but who that team should be changed from Filia/Double/Parasoul to Painwheel/Peacock/Squigly after actually learning the moves of each character, and is still clouded in doubt. Further marked with doubt is whether I should spend time learning that skill at all, if I could also spend the hours spent practicing on programming or sleeping or something else more productive. My hope was and is that the ranked online matches put you on a ladder, so I can fight some people at my skill level and perhaps start winning some games against some other humans.

Oh yeah and more Monaco. Monaco’s a really good game. And now it’s an hour further into the time that I should be asleep than it was when I started writing this, so goodnight.