So I Decided To Give This A Title

rtf — Thu, 28 May 2009 10:37:44 GMT

Lost my job the other week. Company wasn't getting new projects. I figure it'll be more fun and worthwhile to work on some flash games right now, so that's what I'm doing. I can already see that the one I'm working on right now is getting scope creep, but it really needs some additional work to be as fun as I'm envisioning and also look/sound/feel acceptably polished. I planned it to ship in two weeks, but I guess it will actually be at least three. That would still be a solid low-risk attempt, and I could either do another two/three-week sequel or a new thing after that. I have a budget that, after including the offset of unemployment benefits, is at least six months. In six months, I could surely do at least six games.

If I throw enough things at the wall one of them's gotta stick, right?

I started a project for StepMania simfile collaboration. I encourage you all to check it out, tell your friends, etc.

I also encourage you to read this magnificent 600-page tome. Free online thing, it offers a convincing explanation of Most Things Wrong With the World.

rtf — Sun, 19 Apr 2009 05:12:56 GMT

Mostly boring stuff going on around here. Work on existing projects continues apace; but new projects have not been coming despite all hopes otherwise. So once these are out the door - and they are scheduled to do so in about a month or two - we have nothing.

At home, I've been taking care of a few boring household things. Did taxes, ordered some stuff to make my room cleaner and more organized. In particular I got these shelves(which are quite big and sturdy), a canister vacuum, and on Monday I should get a Roomba as well. I hate cleaning, but the big motivating factor was that this house tends to get fleas and clothesmoths, and the owner, the well-meaning immigrant mother of a co-worker, only does sweeping when she cleans. I've tried just washing my clothes a lot, but it's not a complete solution for either pest.

Fortunately they're both pretty harmless. The moths only want to go after my socks, and the fleas seem to prefer the floor to my bed so I don't even notice them until I get up. So I got the vacuum today, fired it up, and made a pass. I need to do another one for some crevices and covered areas, and also wash my clothes again. When the Roomba comes I'll run it regularly and see if there's an improvement.

My diet has wavered a few times. My main problem with eating nutritiously is calories. It's easy to get calories from sugar, but those are hard to use effectively - they make my energy levels peak and crash really quickly. Protein sources like meat, milk, cheese, peanut butter, supplements etc. are difficult to consume in enough quantity for a meal. Same problem holds with nuts, walnuts have lots of calories but they can't contribute a huge amount. I've been having oatmeal because it blends really well with protein powder, but I suspect that I get some of the same problems with it that I do from sugars. My blood pressure still sometimes gets high by the end of the workday, but not as dramatically as it used to, and I think it would be entirely countered if I took a 20-minute cardio break around lunchtime. I should start doing that. There is a huge impact in diet on my workout performance and I think I need some mix of fats/carbs/protein to be optimal. This past week I didn't have many fats(walnut supply ran out at work, didn't get any milk) and it basically made me not want to exercise at all. But eating two greasy slices of pepperoni pizza fixed my motivation and didn't exact any obvious penalty. Kind of funny.

I decided that I am going to remake a game I did in Game Maker years ago - "Deep Sea Descent" - submarine 2d shooter. So I'm building out some stuff for a Flash version. I plan to target a 10mb download as that is the max most Flash sites will take. Things being done with the project include:

-fast environment collision(no object-to-object broadphase yet)
-a compact bitmap-animation/data-integration pipeline.
-plans to use 3d model renders to do all the ships and environments as that is easier/faster/better for this sort of game. Am learning Blender to do it.
-plans for FSM-driven AI with possibly some pathfinding.
-plans for yet another stab at a component-based entity system. I never feel like I get this completely right; I've done it like four or five times.

Maybe it'll be done by the summer. Maybe I'll still be employed then!

rtf — Sun, 15 Mar 2009 21:06:24 GMT

Work is quite boring at the moment. Life was considerably more exciting when I was unemployed. I took a 20% cut and pay is coming in way late now because the publisher is a bunch of fuckups and don't know what they want in their game, so they've basically made both projects we're doing with them trainwrecks that are many weeks behind schedule. It doesn't help that we have a certain strict licensor and are contractually not allowed to directly communicate with them, instead we have to go through the publisher.

Fortunately, I've managed to get to the point where the workload isn't crushing me and some end is in sight, at least on one of the projects. The other one needs a complete retuning of AIs because a bug was causing the player to update twice a frame and thus fight way faster, and I did the first pass not knowing this. So the game is really, really hard at the moment. But at least the layouts aren't doing too badly. The procedural generation approach I took made that go so much smoother.

The directors are pinning all their hopes on GDC getting them new gigs. We acquired the license to Chronotron and are going to try to get a publisher to fund a console version of that(probably NDS). From there we might actually have a shot at self-publishing some downloadable ports. It's quite exciting and the game's author is a Real Person who is obviously quite into time-travel concepts and gave us a lot of ideas to work off of to expand the game. Totally different from the typical developer-publisher experience. We had to come up with pitch concepts for a Michael Phelps game the other day. To give you an idea of how painful this was:

http://www.swimroom.com/phelps
Personal Description :
Interests:
Favorite Quotes: Actions speak louder than words
Organizations: Boys and Girls Club
Honors and Awards: 8 medals in the 2004 Olympics
Favorite music: The Fray, Rap music
Famous Swimmers I'd Like To Meet:
Hero(s): Michael Jordan, my mom
Favorite Books: Taking Down the House
Personal Website: www.swimroom.com/phelps
Favorite Websites: www.swimwiththestars.com

This is one blank slate of a man. There is no game hook other than "he swims really fast and takes bong hits in the evening." Which, if they actually let us make an absurd game where half of the time he's stoned, would be awesome and a lot of fun and people would want to play it. But that will probably not happen. So it will be just "he swims really fast."

In more personal matters, my diet now looks approximately like this:

Morning: An Odwalla, maybe, or more likely oatmeal with wnuts and dried fruits.
Lunch: Noodles(not ramen) or possibly eat out
Evening: Black beans, chicken, salad. Or a shredded chicken burrito. Sugary stuff to be avoided.
Snacks: Mixed unsalted nuts, milk, tea

When I can, I'm getting organic stuff as well. There is substantial evidence pointing to the stuff I'm eating(natural/whole/organic foods in general) being more nutritious than what's processed and refined. I pay more for it, and a lot of it tastes quite plain, but I'm mostly paying attention to how I feel after the meal. If I feel nothing at all(no hunger, no tummy-aches, no sleepiness), I consider it a success.

I also started getting on the stationary bike with armrests at the gym and playing DS while on it for 30 minutes+. That works really well, I'm usually wanting to play longer when my time is up, where without the games I'm just bored.

I've been focusing a lot on a personal project to fill my spare time. It's titled Ludamix and I've basically been developing the concepts - games, open-source, amateur development, developer communities - as I go. Gradually I've honed in on specific things to work on, and am coming to realize that the best thing I can do to build the community I want is to make an awesome game that the community can build off of. I expect it to be playable/fun sometime around the summer months, probably. Maybe earlier. We shall see.

And I'm listening to a lot of Tangerine Dream again.