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@drunkenalbatross
Applications opened today for the Cards Against Humanity Science Ambassador Scholarship, a full-ride scholarship for women seeking undergraduate degrees in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. The recipient of the award will receive full tuition coverage for up to four years, starting with the 2016 academic year.
APPLY!!!!!!
Deadline is December 1, 2015!
:) :) :) :)
almost 9,000 notes on this? HELL yes
Luchazilla for The Beastcast (By: CosmicBacon)
So awesome.
So a while ago, timlarade finally got a premium membership to Giant Bomb. I just remembered that I started a list of stuff he should go back and watch. This is super late now, but still useful! Let’s see what we have.
Phantasmagoria Part 1 Part 2 - The entirety of the...
Haven't watched all of this, but what I have is awesome.
Chris Hardwick: Are you still bothered at all if people are shitty to you?
Wil Wheaton: Nah. You know what I figured out? A big part of it was getting comfortable with who I am. There was a time in my life when I was super insecure, and I felt like I had stuff to prove. So when a random person was shitty, a part of my brain, that part of my brain where the depression lives, was, like, "Oh, they know. They know for real. Everyone who says you're good? You're fooling them. This guy - JuggaloPoundIt420 - he knows." There came a point, not too long ago honestly, in the last three or four years, where I just ran out of fucks to give. The people who are shitty about that... they're not talking to me the way a human talks to me. They're yelling at an idea. And the people doing that, they don't get that I'm a dad and a husband and a friend and a son and... and a person.
I had a day off this weekend from shooting Supernatural, and I was walking around downtown Vancouver on Saturday, sampling all the artisan coffee I could get my throat around. At one point I saw a pair of guys walking towards me wearing gamer shirts. Black short-sleeved, one Halo and one Call of...
GOTY.
Fantastic!
An Oculus Rift demo where you go to a dentist but they've turned psychotic and they paralyse you and drill until you're screaming and there's naught but blood and you can't move, all you can do is watch them carve and hack. So yeah, that's my pitch.
Yeah... No.
Facebook announced that they bought virtual reality company Oculus today for about $2 billion, although Reddit had the story first:
So no way to confirm this, but my friend works in the same building as Oculus, and he ran into Mark Zuckerberg taking the elevator to Oculus’ floor.
Lots of...
I don't know if I'll still buy the Dev Kit 2. But this is interesting, and as was said here, sad as well. I'm going to be hopeful for now though that it will be ok.
Making a video game - Weeks 3-4
So for the past couple of weeks I have completely sat the code aside. Partially because I decided before I worked too much more on the code I should find a direction and idea for the game, and partially because I have been doing a lot more programming at work, and most days I’d rather come home and play a game then come home and code. So for the past 2 weeks I’ve pretty much just been mulling game ideas over in my head. I’ve been trying to come up with as many as possible. These are the ideas that I think I’d like to try to flesh out further into something real. I have a few more in my head but not enough to even put it here. Obviously, these are just basic outlines of a game concept. They are not full designs, stories or anything else. For a couple of these I have some basic mechanics in mind, and the others I have almost nothing. So here’s the list as it stands:
A game where you control a person just living their life. There’s been quite a few of these recently. You talk to people and go to stores and do shopping. Go to work. Occasionally a dark cloud comes over the world and distorts everything you see and interact with. Everything is threatening. When you speak to other people, when this dark cloud is around, their words will get all twisted before they reach you. Certain things in the environment will trigger and bring on the dark cloud. Bright lights, crowds, stress, etc. will be triggers. Doing other things will make the dark cloud go away faster, or at least partially dissipate. I’m not sure yet what exactly these things would be. The inspiration for this idea comes from speaking to someone with an anxiety disorder who described parts of their life when things get all twisted in head, and that sometimes it’s like there being a dark cloud over everything in the world.
I got inspired by the bit of the game Brain Lord I played at a friend’s place on the SNES. In that game you are a guy exploring with a sword like Legend of Zelda. The part of the game I found really interesting was at some point you got a little imp that follows you around shooting fireballs at enemies. I wanted to make a game entirely around that concept. You’d play a character who finds little creatures who spin around you and help you out. They’d each hopefully have their own personality and their own abilities. Some would help the player by healing or something and some would attack enemies. You’d be able to have a few out at a time. Your character wouldn’t be too powerful on their own so you’d have to use the helpers. Not sure of the exact setting between fantasy and sci-fi, as both have some good possibilities. I envision this being top-down like Brain Lord, but I’m not married to the idea.
I really like Lovecraft and many Lovecraft inspired things. I’ve been wanting to do something Lovecraft-y for a while. I had been thinking of writing a short story or novella, but I think doing a game would be really interesting to do. Play as an investigator of some kind who is looking into strange goings-on in a town. Obviously not the most original of premises, but I think it’d be fun to create. I think it’d be fun to blend some almost-horror strangeness with some old-school mechanics. Explore a small town, hide from monsters, attack others. I’m not sure of all the mechanics or perspective et, but I don’t see it as a game that takes itself too seriously, but that could change depending how the writing goes. This could also turn itself into an adventure game because that also sounds interesting.
I enjoy beat’em ups. I think it’d be fun to make a really pixellated beat’em up, Maybe purely 2D in one plane, or in multiple planes, or maybe both. I don’t have a lot for this idea yet, other that it could be fun to make. I think to make it interesting I’d have to add something to the basics of the genre. Whether it’s loot, a levelling mechanic, change-able loadout of skills or a mixture of these and more. Without something else to add it might get boring fast. But if it’s a short game that might be ok, so it might be something to think about as the process goes along.
I haven’t decided yet which of these games I want to make yet, but so far I’m leaning towards number three. The first game is something I know I want to make, but I’m going to really take my time with it as it’s something that’s really close to my heart. I think number three will be fun because it’s something that would be challenging but also allow me to research and write what I’ve been thinking about for a while. So those are my ideas. Next time I will hopefully have a bit of art to go with whatever idea I decide to fully go with.
A 3 star (60% Metacrappy) for Nintendo's Yoshi's New Island. I've not played the game and your review looks to reflect the average score. I would like to ask that you and others think about the work that goes into creating a game. It's your current job to be a critic and your 800 word or so review might just be equivalent to the code that works out a life counter in that game. Are your 800 words worth more than the 12 months and thousand of lines of code used to create the game ? just thought
I can’t think about that. I can’t worry about that. I can only worry about the fact that Nintendo is asking someone to spend $40 to purchase a copy of Yoshi’s New Island. $40 is nothing to sneeze at. My allegiance is with the player, and informing them on whether Yoshi’s New Island is any good.
Yeah, that's not how critiquing something works. Sure it sucks when lots of people put lots of hard work into making something and people don't think it's amazing. But that part of it isn't what the critic needs to think about.
Adventures in making a game. Weeks 1-3?
I’m probably going about making a video game in the entirely wrong way. I’m probably going about this whole learning process the wrong way. Instead of writing a design document, sketching out all the parts of my game, and then starting work slowly, I’m jumping into figuring out how to make different systems work (like getting the box to move around the screen). Instead of starting with Pong (a game a lot of developers apparently start by making) I’m starting with making something that doesn’t have a specific template. I’m also not doing this full-time. I have a mortgage and I like food, so I’m keeping my day job and doing this in the evenings and on weekends when I have time (it helps that I love my day job, so I’m not exactly itching to quit). This sounds very much unlike what a lot of other indie developers do, from the bits I’ve read on the internets. I’m trying to get all the parts about how I’m approaching this wrong out of the way upfront. I might change my methods in the future, but right now this is fun, and it’s working for me (mostly).
I’m not looking to necessarily move into game development full-time, I just want to make something. But I also want to learn new things. I didn’t want to do everything from scratch, so when I thought about making the game I started the search through the different tools I could use. At first I thought about GameMaker Studio, a tool for making 2-dimensional (2D) games that has been through many iterations. It seemed easy to use and many games have been made in it (Gunpoint, the first pixel-y Spelunky among them). But I didn’t get very far into investigating GameMaker before I came across Unity. Lots of indie developers are using that engine right now, and best of all, it’s free if you aren’t going to make a bunch of money or target much past the PC. But if I do want to target other platforms I have an easy-ish way forward. I wanted something that didn’t need everything to be done in code, but would allow me to get in there and monkey with that if I wanted to. And I wanted to be able to use a language that I already knew (preferably C#, but I also know Python and a bit of Javascript). Unity falls nicely in there too, as it uses either C# or Javascript (among others). And, to top it all off, Unity just released their 2D tools in the 4.3 release. So that pretty much sealed it for me.
So now I’d chosen Unity; it was time to start playing around in the engine. I found a couple of sites that had some tutorials (http://learnunity2d.com being a really great one), and Youtube became my best friend. After watching and reading some tutorials on Unity2D I started the process of making my own game. I didn’t have a specific game in mind, but more of a general “I think top-down something or other” feeling. That gave me enough of a way forward to start work.
I created a little red box and started to figure out how to move him around the screen. I started by moving it around directly using the WASD keyboard keys. This introduced me to the term Lerp, which is apparently used here to be linearly finding a point between two other points. Might not make a ton of sense to everyone, but in essence you want this because it should give a smoother sense to the movement around the screen. Instead of warping from point to point, when those points could be far apart, you are moving to points in between. Makes sense, right? I got that working, and then quickly got rotation to work as well. Now the little box will turn to face the mouse, wherever it is on the screen. That was fun, but then I thought maybe I wanted the character to actually move to where the mouse clicks. This was super informative because I was introduced to the difference between the world of the game, and the screen, in terms of what a point in each is. The world is the entirety of the level in Unity (a scene) but the screen is what the actual user sees, so you have to have some way of taking where the player clicks, and finding that same point in the “world” of the game.
From there I decided to have the camera have the ability to follow the character around. I found a piece of code (a script) at http://wiki.unity3d.com/index.php/Scripts which showed me a bit, and I looked at the script in the 2D tutorial put out by the Unity team for even more information. With those two I was able to get the camera script working. Now wherever the little box moves, the camera will follow.
Also, I had a heck of a time thinking about pathfinding through obstacles. I had to make sure that if the user clicked on the other side of a bunch of obstacles the little box would show some sort of smarts and find its way through them. Instead of trying to think of a way of doing it myself, I downloaded A* pathfinding, which has a free version of their pathfinding package available (http://arongranberg.com/astar/). With the assistance of their tutorials and demo in the package I got the box to move around the screen around a bunch of obstacles.
I tried getting grid movement to work (where the character will always snap to a grid position, like he’s on a chess board), but I couldn’t get it to look quite right, so I decided to move away from that, and mouse movement altogether, and go back to direct control. Not a complete waste of time though, because if/when I want to implement other non-player characters I can put the pathfinding to use there. Moving back to direct control, with obstacles meant I found something else out. Colliders, the things that let objects in the game hit and bounce off each other, in Unity only collide when you’re using physics to move the character around the screen, at least if you want the built-in physics to do the work for you. So from there I started working on using physics (math and science!) to move the box around the screen, instead of giving it specific points to move to.
Physics taught me something else about Unity. This is getting very much into coding territory, but I found it interesting. There is a big difference between FixedUpdate and Update. I had no idea at first what the difference was, but basically Update is called every frame, and FixedUpdate is only called a specific number of times in a given amount of time. I can’t remember the specifics, but let’s say your game is running at 30 frames per second; Update is called 30 times, and FixedUpdate might only be called 15. FixedUpdate is better for physics, so I moved to that. This caused serious jittering whenever my character moved. I thought I had done something wrong in the movement. But no, that wasn’t the case. Apparently having the camera move itself in Update while the character has stuff happen to him in FixedUpdate is bad. It goes to show, there can be a lot to learn on the technical side when you’re going to try to adapt stuff you found on the internet.
Ok, now I have a character (box) who can move around the world, hitting obstacles using physics and spins around to follow the mouse. Now I wanted some basic interaction with other objects. I looked at the text object in Unity, called GUI Text, and how to get them set to only appear when you are close to an object and press a button. This taught be a bit about trigger colliders (those things I mentioned previously, except they don’t actually stop a character) and that when you have GUI Text it is tied to the screen, not the world. This might not seem like a major revelation, but when I first thought I’d be tying text to objects I thought I could just put the text object by them in the level and that's where it'd appear. No, that doesn’t work. You put the text in the screen, and then it appears there when it’s enabled. The text moves with the camera, in essence. It isn't static in the world. So now I just have the object set the text value and enable it when the player clicks a button and is close to the object.
So, at the end of this part I have a moving character, some physics and some really basic interaction with objects in the world. I was hoping I’d be further along, but maybe that’s just what happens when you are tired from working all day and you don’t always want to program. I also tend to pick up new programming concepts slowly, it takes me a long time to absorb any of it. Probably comes from me really just starting to program on a regular basis. And sometimes I just want to play video games.
That was a long post. I didn’t think I’d have that much to say, but obviously there was more there than I thought. I tried to keep it non-technical, but sometimes that’s just how my mind works, so that’s where it ended up going. Future posts probably won’t be as long, and I’m hoping to have both some technical and non-technical content as well. I’ve never made a game before, and all the creative projects I’ve started before this have fizzled into nothing as I either lost interest or got distracted by other things. Hopefully by starting this blog, and trying to dig deep and find the drive I can get this much further.
Maybe next blog I’ll have an actual game idea.
ask them something you’d like to hear the answer to
you know those people that can literally carry on a conversation with anyone are amazing like wow how do you do that
I had a dream that Dave Lang from Iron Galaxy would yell Carl Sagan’s Pale Blue Dot. Today my dream came true.
Good to know that the people of Chicago are remaining productive in the freezing cold.
This is so awesome.
Own your shit, Tumblr users. I occasionally click through to the people that like or comment on posts and I see a lot of “here’s my shitty drawings” or “I made this awful music” and so on. Stop it. You made that shit, you’re probably into that shit, be into that shit. Don’t downplay the fact that...
I think that a lot of people could take something good from this.
ROBOTS OR DINOSAURS?
Dinosaurs
