Life of Miko

Personal ramblings of Miko: HoloLens experience designer, indie game developer, a Dr. of Dance Games, writer, retired cosplayer, occasional breakdancer.

[coderomantic]

We will be demoing Code Romantic at Game Devs of Color Expo this week! Stop by to chat about the game, try it out, and browse the beautiful art by @allysonkelleyillustration!

If you aren’t going to the show and you want to know more about learning to code via a romantic visual novel, visit coderomantic.com

[coderomantic]

Chapter 6 of Code Romantic is out on itch.io!

We’re still offering the game for free while it’s in production. Learn to code. Fall in love. Save the world!

[irishiris]

[vaspider]

YES PLEASE AND THANK YOU.

[drarryking]

This is actually info I didn’t know

[marauders4evr]

Seriously folks review my books! Review everyone’s books!

It’s the difference between Amazon giving a damn about you verses pushing your book to the bottom of the food chain. 

[coderomantic]

Uploaded two new chapters to Code Romantic! We’re finally getting into the main story now, with new characters, locations, and puzzles!

Download for free at https://prettysmart.itch.io/code-romantic

[coderomantic]

Comparing the previous sketch with the screenshot in the game. A couple elements still need tweaking but it’s coming together…

[evaliation]

Getting close to final screenshots now for my indie game! So excited that you’ll get to play a bit of it soon!

[coderomantic]

Big news coming soon about the game Code Romantic… we’ll be adding some sneak peaks here for a the next little while!

If you’re interested in learning more, join the mailing list on our website: http://www.coderomantic.com/ or follow the blog!

[evaliation]

hype! :D

[evaliation]

Taking way too many fun photos with Bestme and other apps, think I'll share more or them on tumblr

[coderomantic]

World Building via Business Cards

Last October, we had the opportunity to talk about our game, Code Romantic, at GeekGirlCon. Allyson had a table in the artist alley!

I was excited for the opportunity to share a bit more of our game with friends and potential players, so I decided to make a business card series. Using four designs, I wanted to tease more of the story.

And I was also a little curious which ones people would like most. (I didn’t get much of an answer here… many people tried to take all four!)

With Mina’s card, I wanted to hint at her personality of course, but I also wanted it to not be about falling in love. I think you get that it’s going to be a romantic game (I mean, it’s in the title!) but that’s not everything about her personality. Mina’s close relationship with her mom is a central part of the plot.

The hardest part about Leon’s card was fitting everything I wanted to say about him in the same amount of space! Leon’s character struggles with his public persona and his true identity. I wanted this card to hint at the larger political landscape that he has to face.

When we first brainstormed the idea of the game taking place in a theme park, I worried it might go too far. It’s just weird, right? Then we got way too into designing the rides, the food, the souvenirs. Now it’s hard to imagine the game without it.

In the game, characters are being taught to reconfigure the code of the enemy machines rather than use violence; it’s just not been that effective against the bigger threats. The only weapons they’ll have is a water pistol and a hack slate… more on them later!

Remember you can sign up for our mailing list to get more details on the game and be the first to play! Or ask us a question!

[evaliation]

Posted a new blog post about the cards I made for our indie game! :)

[aphtoncorbin]

Day 27 watch out I’m coming!

[evaliation]

Teach girls bravery, not perfection

We're raising our girls to be perfect, and we're raising our boys to be brave, says Reshma Saujani, the founder of Girls Who Code. Saujani has taken up the charge to socialize young girls to take risks and learn to program -- two skills they need to move society forward. To truly innovate, we cannot leave behind half of our population, she says. "I need each of you to tell every young woman you know to be comfortable with imperfection."

[coderomantic]

First post on the official Code Romantic blog! Code Romantic is an indie game in the middle of development. It’s a computer science puzzle game powered by a sci-fi love story. If you’re a fan of visual novels, interested in learning to program, or have a thing for post-apocalyptic robot wars, you might like it!

We’ll be dropping more art and info here whenever we’re not busily making progress. If you want to be one of the first people to play, head over to www.coderomantic.com and sign up for the mailing list. We don’t send mail often, but when we do we try to add helpful game dev advice and specifics about our game progress!

[evaliation]

The Code Romantic tumblr account has officially launched! Excited!

[kateoplis]

“In the lush jungles of northeastern India, hard against the Bangladesh border, is a tiny village with an unconventional social order. Mawlynnong is where about 500 members of the indigenous Khasi tribe still follow ancient matrilineal traditions. Where succession, money, property, and power pass from mother to daughter. Where girls—literally—rule their roosts.

Karolin Klüppel wanted to see this inverted world for herself. So for nine months spanning two years, the Berlin-based photographer lived with different Khasi families in the “unbelievably clean, calm, and peaceful” village. What she found was a culture in which youngest daughters (called khadduh) inherit wealth and property, husbands move into their wives’ homes, and children take their mother’s surname.”

“After that they attend college or return to Mawlynnong, where they care for their parents. They may marry whomever they choose; there is no stigma attached to divorce or opting to stay single.”

Photographing in the Kingdom of Girls | Karolin Klüppel

[evaliation]

The Hakkone Pirate Ship! We rode almost every type of transportation in the area that day: cable cars, ropeways, trains, buses... no way were we missing this!

[evaliation]

My favorite train, the one that goes through the mountains in Hakkone! During the switchbacks, the conductor walks to the other side of the train at every turn! And I loved getting on at these little mountainside stations too!

[evaliation]

Lake sculpture in Hakkone. We fed the koi, of course!

[mx-delta-juliette]

Today in Computer Scientists You Haven’t Heard Of: Margaret Hamilton

This is Margaret Hamilton, standing next to one of her earlier projects: The Apollo Guidance Computer’s main operating program.

I’m going to let that sink in for a moment. Look at your image of NASA in the Apollo days. Look at miss Hamilton.

Now, I’m sure you’ve heard the story about how the computer crashed on Neil and Mike on their descent, leaving Neil to make the landing by hand. This story has only the barest grounding in reality.

During the descent, a checklist error left the rendezvous radar - normally used for keeping track of the Command Module in orbit - turned on. Radar is a computationally hungry beast, and the computer unhappily told Neil and Mike that it was being overtasked. It kept right on going, even though it was being overworked. It kept the truly important numbers - altitude, descent rate, fuel consumption - up to date perfectly as they descended, which allowed Neil to fly safely above the lunar surface to find a landing site.

So, here you have a computer, easily the most powerful computer for its size ever made as of 1969, controlling a flying machine above the lunar surface, and correctly juggling multiple real-time processing tasks by priority. This is something that modern computers, fifty years later, still struggle with. Margaret built it and got it right at the very dawn of the multi-tasking operating system. It was something done by Serious Computers - fridge-sized monsters with names like PDP-8 and System/360… and a series of tiny boxes that flew to the moon and back.

And then she went on and did other things. Ever heard the term “Software Engineering”? Margaret’s invention. More technically speaking, she’s responsible for parallel and asynchronous computing (which now is key to every supercomputer and major website), priority scheduling, end-to-end testing, and a huge chunk of human-computer interface theory.

She’s still active in software engineering today.

[johnskylar]

This is what a space wizard looks like.

[hellomynameisgeek-blog-deactiva]

In her own words:

“Due to an error in the checklist manual, the rendezvous radar switch was placed in the wrong position. This caused it to send erroneous signals to the computer. The result was that the computer was being asked to perform all of its normal functions for landing while receiving an extra load of spurious data which used up 15% of its time. The computer (or rather the software in it) was smart enough to recognize that it was being asked to perform more tasks than it should be performing. It then sent out an alarm, which meant to the astronaut, I’m overloaded with more tasks than I should be doing at this time and I’m going to keep only the more important tasks; i.e., the ones needed for landing … Actually, the computer was programmed to do more than recognize error conditions. A complete set of recovery programs was incorporated into the software. The software’s action, in this case, was to eliminate lower priority tasks and re-establish the more important ones … If the computer hadn’t recognized this problem and taken recovery action, I doubt if Apollo 11 would have been the successful moon landing it was.”

This woman programmed a computer smart enough to prioritize tasks and make sure essential functions were carried out first even if other tasks were going on - she’s the one who made the moon landing possible, more than anyone else. If her programming hadn’t been able to prioritize, the mission would’ve been aborted. 

She’s also published a ton of papers and basically I’m so tired of people never hearing about all the brilliant coding women. Like, when it was first getting off the ground computer programming was a woman’s field - like they specifically looked for and hired women. There were also a ton of female mathematics BS and PhD candidates in the 30s-50s. 

And for the record: all the programmers who created the first general-use computer were women. Wanna know why? The men thought actually building the computer -as in, the design of the machine itself - was more important than programming the computer - as in, actually making it work and telling it how to run, y’know, enabling it to actually be useful.

Men didn’t think programming was important so they relegated it to women, and once they realized programming was the MOST important part of computers they yanked those jobs away, made it a boy thing, and failed to highlight the huge role women played in pioneering the computer age.

[evaliation]

Panaroma time! Going to try and be better about posting my photos. This is part of a series of photos we took while on vacation in Japan!