Face textures for Princess Peach and Princess Daisy from Mario Kart: Double Dash. Due to needing to fit into one of several standard texture resolutions, the eyes and the lips are at different levels of magnification.
Second part to Nat & Friends look at Virtual Reality tech, this time focused on how it can be a creative platform, including Tiltbrush, 360 video and Blocks:
In this video (part 2 of a two-part VR series) I explore VR creativity tools and how artists and creators are using them. I do a Tilt Brush chicken dance, play with brains, and help YouTuber Vanessa Hill make a video about how your mind reacts to VR
[TEN] You did great. Fantastic work. It would have been easier for you to say 228 kelvin than negative-48 degrees Fahrenheit, but we wanted you to independently access a negative number ... we figured that if you accessed something negative, something abstract, it would trip...
You need to check out this story about football in the future.
I streamed making this while watching a Bob Ross video. I like how it turned out! Felt good to dick around in Photoshop for an extended period again. Those trees in the middle-background suck, but Bob would never focus on that. He’d probably say “Each painting is a journey” or something.
Incredible, it’s been hours already and not one mention of the Homestuck update on my dash.
It’s truly become an old fandom. I’ve been reading it for 5 out of the 7 years the comic has been going on for. It expanded my understanding for how convoluted and crazy a story can go; it is truly the “Ulysses” of the Internet. I’ll probably be back with a bit more to say after 4/13, once the comic has concluded.
We’re 1/6th of the way through the year, and yet there have already been some really great games released that I think are worth talking about. I also consider it a tiny taste of what’s to come, because wow, there are some awesome games coming this year, both from big names and indie studios. Here’s the first in what will hopefully be a series of review-type essays on the games I’ve played. Oh, and I’ll keep these reviews spoiler-free too!
Back before my grandparents passed away in mid-2011, my family would travel once or twice a year to their home in Sequim, WA. I always found these trips kind of magical. My family never really traveled outside the state, and Sequim was often the furthest I’d be from home during the year. With such a limited scope of travel experience, it made their home (which they retired to in 1993) feel like a foreign land, albeit only 80 miles away.
My grandfather designed the house himself. He was an architect who studied at UW and spent the majority of his career at architectural firms in Seattle. I probably wouldn’t have felt as close to my grandfather as I do if it weren’t for the fact that he incorporated his unique style into that house. And my grandmother contributed something to their home’s mystique too. She loved to travel. They traveled all around the world, to Greece, Japan, Finland, and South America, and brought back decor that filled their house and made it even more uniquely theirs.
This was a house seemingly built for exploring. With each visit, my brother and I would discover something new. One year we got a glimpse of our grandfather’s basement workroom, filled with antique books, woodworking tools, and a drafting table. Another year we found the secret compartments in a cherry wood cabinet, and we’d leave messages inside them for our future selves to find on our next visit. And another year we found an odd CD-ROM game labeled Myst, popped it into their Gateway PC and found even more mysterious places built for exploring.
So when I appeared on the strange island of The Witness, it felt like I was returning to a familiar world: one where every detail was planned with a purpose, and whose buildings were designed with strange and inviting forms. While you could boil the game down to a series of maze puzzles, that disregards everything that I feel left a greater impression on me.
This is a game that rewards exploration and examination with secrets — not Easter eggs, as those typically break you out of the illusion of the world. These are well-integrated into the island and are as surprising as they are clever. The colorful polygonal art style boils down detailed objects to simplified, minimalist forms, making the game world a joy to look at. And that’s good, because in this game, you’re going to be doing a lot of looking.
If you want to focus on the puzzles, however, The Witness accomplishes the two requirements of a puzzle game very well. First, it teaches you the rules of the puzzles through self-discovery. Not a single word is used to describe the elements of the puzzle: earlier puzzles invite experimentation, and let you earn the satisfaction of figuring it out yourself. And it’s this self-discovery that makes the rules far more memorable than being told “the triangle glyph means this” or “the star shape means that.”
Second, the game challenges you by using the same basic puzzle elements in increasingly novel ways. Once certain qualities of a puzzle element have been explored enough to become understandable, the game moves on by adding something new to the mix, either by combining elements or transforming them. One great example of this is later in the game when you find a puzzle with the maze grid wrapped around a cylinder. Now you can’t see the whole puzzle at once, and you need to rotate around the pillar to move the line through the maze. Nothing unknowable has been added—it just requires a step up in thinking.
I don’t recommend using a walkthrough. These puzzles are hard, but they are also fair. Walkthroughs for fair puzzle games tend to make you feel dumb, while finding the solution yourself makes you feel like a genius. I will say though that I needed a hint on a single puzzle: one that even the head developer Jonathan Blow calls “…one of the hardest individual puzzles in the game.” That said, these puzzles encourage trial-and-error. Be patient with yourself. If you get stuck, try drawing a diagram on paper, explore a different area on the island, or call it a day.
I admire the game’s attempt to explore profound topics of science, spirituality, and atheism through audio logs and videos. It has some important messages that I think would benefit those who hear them. The game does get dangerously close to being preachy though, and I think some would argue it is.
I have a few personal qualms with the game. One was how the game closes automatically when you complete it, which I felt was jarring and unceremonious. A game like Undertale uses this method to make you feel like you were kicked out of the game. I bet the decision to use it in The Witness was probably a minimalist one, but I couldn’t help but interpret it negatively.
Another issue is that because the game explores a wide variety of puzzle mechanics, the game utilizes color and sound in a way that will make it very difficult to complete if you are colorblind or deaf. The puzzles that use color and sound are interesting, but unfortunately make it less enjoyable to those who are sensory-impaired. If you’re a game developer and are interested in making your games accessible to as wide an audience as possible, this is something to keep in mind.
Finally, I want to address an often-voiced complaint about how the puzzles don’t feel rewarding. It’s true that the majority of puzzles have no fanfare upon completion. I think the complaints that arise from this reflect the diversity of feelings towards puzzle games and maybe puzzles in general. If puzzle games are your favorite type of game, I’m willing to bet you don’t feel there needs to be a reward when completing the puzzle — finishing the puzzle is a reward in and of itself. However, if puzzle games are lower on your list of favorite game genres, you may view the puzzles more as a means to an end.
I think this is a worthwhile subject to examine on its own. Would making more explicit rewards for puzzles help boost the maximum appeal to players? What constitutes a good reward?
The way I see it, the world of The Witness is a work of art to be explored — a package of joy and awe to be opened. It reminds me of everything I loved about the trips to my grandparents’. It reminds me of everything I love about games like Myst. That’s what I got out of it, and maybe you will too.
I just had coffee and I’m feeling super motivated on this lovely Thursday. I’ve been wanting to reblog things more recently but, because I wanted this Tumblr to be just original content I held back. So I’m making a reblog Tumblr to serve that specific purpose. Follow it at parmesanreblogs.tumblr.com!
Be prepared to see more stuff on this blog too. I’ve been doing a lot of writing and it’s time I started to share it with you!
Also holy crap, you’re still following me? Wow, maybe it’s time you did some housekeeping yourself, though please consider omitting me from your Tumblrge (Tumblr-purge)!
A little late, but here’s my Halloween costume: Mark Watney from The Martian! All together, it took three weeks of papier mache, hunting for stuff at Goodwill, and painting a lot in the garage at night.
Totally forgot to put the gloves on in those last two pics. Oops. The last one also features a non-canonical space gun.
I also posted a full-body picture on Reddit.
These photos were taken by the awesomely talented Elisa Huerta-Enochian. Check out her work!
We weren’t allowed to take pics during the tour but the lobby was public so I snagged some fun ones with my bud Kyle parmesanforever
Fun fact their part of the building was 6 floors (out of a probably 30-floor skyscraper)
College students are increasingly demanding protection from words and ideas they don’t like. Here’s why that’s disastrous for education.
According to the most-basic tenets of psychology, the very idea of helping people with anxiety disorders avoid the things they fear is misguided.
[...]
Students who call for trigger warnings may be correct that some of their peers are harboring memories of trauma that could be reactivated by course readings. But they are wrong to try to prevent such reactivations. Students with PTSD should of course get treatment, but they should not try to avoid normal life, with its many opportunities for habituation. Classroom discussions are safe places to be exposed to incidental reminders of trauma (such as the word violate). A discussion of violence is unlikely to be followed by actual violence, so it is a good way to help students change the associations that are causing them discomfort. And they’d better get their habituation done in college, because the world beyond college will be far less willing to accommodate requests for trigger warnings and opt-outs.
This puts into words a lot of the thoughts I’ve been having about trigger warnings, and the overall prevalence of sensitivity in our culture. From personal experience, I know avoiding one’s fears does more harm than good. Exposing myself to what I fear makes me a stronger person.
If you have the time and interest, I suggest you skim this article. It’s a good read, and it’s co-written by Jonathan Haidt, who wrote a pretty awesome book I read a few years back.
i’m sure that everyone has noticed by now that the homestuck game is very, very late. boy, do i have a fun reason why!
you may remember that what pumpkin announced that the game studio “the odd gentlemen” was originally attached to develop the game, and you may also remember that they quietly moved to in house development in 2014. what they didn’t tell you: the reason they did this was that odd gentlemen stole kickstarter money and spent it on king’s quest.
areudirty
germansingergirl
snowghoul
gummygunk
yousharknotpass
