| Zomg! |
[05 Jul 2012|05:24pm] |
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Wow, that one previous post got more responses than I think my Tumblr has gotten the entire time it's existed. :P That's my one complaint about Tumblr: it would be so much nicer if it had a more functional comment system attached, or indeed any kind of system at all. That reblog stuff just ain't cutting it.
So anyway I guess people do still read this LJ through one avenue or another! That makes me smile. I'll try to post here a little more often from now on. That being said, the indie game programming I'm doing will continue to be updated over at my Mayfly Studio Tumblr. I post there reasonably often and I do even have one or two things there for download, including a six-level demo of Neon Galaxy. No lie!
To answer the most common question, by the way: No news I can mention on Afterlife Blues at the moment, though it's a perfectly reasonable thing to ask about. The earliest anything could happen would probably be later this summer or early fall, after Otakon.
On a completely unrelated note, if you're playing Dragon's Dogma on the PS3 please feel free to hire my pawn, Miang (check the username "ksleet"). She likes long walks on the beach, pointing out that the tail has been severed, and calling down an apocalyptic storm of huge meteors to kill the last half-dead hobgoblin remaining in a fight.
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| Is there anybody in there? Just nod if you can hear me. |
[04 Jul 2012|01:51am] |
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I'm just curious if there's still anyone reading this LJ, or if Livejournal's audience has completely dwindled to its eternal core of slash fiction reviewers, Russian political activists, skeevy soft-core pornographers, and Avatar: The Last Airbender fans who are still angry about the movie. Speak up, don't be shy!
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| So. |
[29 Mar 2011|04:13pm] |
I've always found it frustrating when people I read just randomly drop out of sight so I figured I at least owed folks this much of an update.
There is a lot of personal stuff going on which I'm not sure I'm up to talking about in public, just at the moment, but it has squeezed out most of my activities that I usually talk about here. I am putting up the odd post on my gamedev blog at http://mayflystudio.tumblr.com/. Other than that, though, things are likely to be quiet around the LJ for a while.
That's all for now.
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| Afterlife Blues update. |
[21 Jan 2011|12:51am] |
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We're such teases.
I have now bought Seasons 3 and 4 of Stargate: SG-1 off eBay. #4 I sniped at the last possible minute -- it was totally by accident, I swear. But now I'm impatiently waiting for them to arrive because I WANT IT NOWWWWWW.
In other news, by which I mean I'm still playing SpaceChem: I've finally figured out how to avoid the problem of pipeline stalls. You have to forward all the molecules needed for a product through every intermediate reactor they arrive in, never waiting for molecules of a particular type, and only pause to assemble them in the very last one. That way, you never get the situation where the final reactor has all of Product B it can hold and is waiting for Product A, but the intermediate reactor is stalled because the pipeline where it was pushing out B is full and it can't move on to look for newly arriving A. Alternatively, if there's a recycler in the level you can just have the intermediate reactor throw away incoming atoms it doesn't want just at the moment so that the final reactor is guaranteed to receive what it needs in the order it needs it, but that does lead to a slower solution.
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| One week ago I couldn't even spell nuclear physicist and now I are one! |
[19 Jan 2011|01:20am] |
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One of the neat things that SpaceChem does is track your efficiency -- how many instructions you used to solve a puzzle and how many cycles it took to complete -- and then show you a bar graph that compares it against how many symbols and cycles other players took, letting you know the average time taken as well as the outliers in both directions. Often this graph is dispiriting, as I've managed to put together some hideously slow production lines on the more difficult stages. But nonetheless it's a fun challenge to try to build research reactors that are as fast and efficient as possible, finding weird techniques to squeeze out every last cycle.
Here's a few of the tricks I've come up with when optimizing the simplest reactors:
( ...behind this cut.Collapse )
All this is very nice and I've managed to create some very small and fast solutions to research problems. But, those tiny little bars at the far left of the chart, to the left of my best times and symbol counts, still taunt me. Someone completed "Double Bonds" using only seven symbols, better than my nine. Someone has a trick that let them do "A Complete History of SpaceChem" in less than 70 cycles, compared to my 107! It's driving me crazy. I must figure it out.
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| Afterlife Blues update. |
[18 Jan 2011|03:13am] |
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"With all due respect, sir, you're a giant doodyhead!"
Man I love that show. Perhaps this is too fanboyish of me to say, but watching SG-1, it really just feels like this was more than another job for everyone involved. The writers, the actors, the producers, set builders, effects people, costumers, they put their all into it, and it comes through in the overall quality and cohesiveness of the end product.
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| Afterlife Blues update. |
[15 Jan 2011|02:29am] |
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It is a page. You can probably tell from how sloppy the inside of the car is rendered that I really am tired of drawing that thing. That being said, I'm very pleased with Panel 3 for some reason (the station wagon pulling into the garage next to an armored embassy limo.) It's a more "high concept" panel than I usually try to draw, but I feel that it worked. At least a bit. COME ON JUST LET ME HAVE THIS.
In other (brief) news, a visiting co-worker wanted to see Neon Galaxy, so I actually spent a half hour slapping together a real test level instead of just the big pile of test levels I'd had up until now. And, you know... it's actually fun. The game genuinely works! That's pretty cool, not to mention a bit of a relief. Hopefully I can record a video of a level playthrough sooner rather than later and share it with y'alls.
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| Afterlife Blues update. |
[12 Jan 2011|02:28am] |
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It is a brand new page just packed to the gills with subtle implications about the global political order in the looming future! Please enjoy it, assuming you can wade through the snowdrifts to reach your mouse and click on the link.
I like that phrase, "looming future." I'm pretty sure I first saw it in a Don Simpson comic.
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| I cede the balance of my time to the instrumental bit from Freebird. |
[10 Jan 2011|12:32am] |
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So today I reviewed the list of enemies in my Neon Galaxy design doc and was rather shocked to see that after today (when I added burst fire capability, actions taken upon receiving damage or dying, and the ability to pick up items) I've implemented, at least on a basic level, all the AI features I need for every single enemy on the list. That's crazy! How could I have gotten so much done??
This is at least an appropriate moment to consider the whole Mayfly Studio Tumblr thing I've been doing for the past several weeks. Now, on the one hand, I really like using Tumblr. It's so convenient to just toss a screenshot into the hopper, type a few words, and off it goes, that I have to restrain myself from putting in an update whenever I implement every little thing. And it's also nice to review it and see all the NG updates in one convenient place; it reminds me of how much progress I've been making on the thing. But on the other hand, I get orders of magnitude less feedback on the Tumblr than I used to do when I posted the big updates here on Livejournal. I guess it's part due to the friction in asking people to head over to another site to read something, and part due to Disqus being pretty terrible for writing comments in (and don't get me wrong, I'm not trolling for comments here!) but either way that's still too bad.
Realistically, I suppose I should just stick with the Tumblr and work towards getting the game in a state where I'm comfortable announcing it in a larger forum, such as TIGsource; no doubt that'll get more people reading about it, and at that point I'll be glad to have a focused blog for the game.
On an unrelated note, holy cow the new OMD album. I can't stop listening to "History of Modern Pt. 1" over and over again.
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| Afterlife Blues update. |
[07 Jan 2011|02:17am] |
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Aaaaaaaaaaaaaand scene.
So one thing I thought was important about this bit is that despite her breezy attitude Faith got kind of beaten up and had to flee the scene leaving vital clues behind. This is a good thing. Not because I want to see Faith getting beaten up in and of itself, but because it's important for the heroes to be genuinely impeded. I've read too many lousy stories, fanfiction especially, where the protagonists win every single fight, each villain is killed off the scene after they appear, and the only time anything happens to interrupt their unbroken series of victories is the equivalent of a cutscene in a video game, where due to some absurd contrivance the bad guys get to kill some minor characters and burn down Good Guy HQ or whatever to add a bit of pathos before it's back to the unbroken triumphs. Having a bad guy who can cause legitimate grief is a part of avoiding Cutscene Syndrome.
Ya know, I've meant to write a little essay about that topic for years. I think I basically failed just now, but oh well, at least it's out in the open.
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| And me still writing 1911 on all my checks, too. |
[02 Jan 2011|12:57am] |
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2011, huh? Well, a year with a name like that -- seriously, the only more cyberpunk year than 2011 will be 2019 and possibly 2017 -- had just better bring some really futuristic stuff. Like, I dunno, self-driving cars. Or discovering Earth-sized planets around other suns. Or the bad guys' doomsday weapon program being crippled by a weaponized computer virus. Something wild like that. YOU CAN DO IT, 2011, DON'T LET ME DOWN.
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| Afterlife Blues update. |
[31 Dec 2010|12:16am] |
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Just about done with this bit here. As mentioned, the next update will be Friday the 7th of January in the distant future year 2011.
Status update on Neon Galaxy at the Tumblr. Short summary: No, there won't be an alpha out by the end of the year after all, but nonetheless I am extremely pleased with the progress I've been making on the game. Cautiously optimistic that it will actually join the very short list of things I've managed to complete in my life. I have to start thinking of some ways to get a bit more attention for it.
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| Put your helmet on, we'll be reaching speeds of three! |
[29 Dec 2010|01:59pm] |
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Wrote an article over on the ol' Tumblr about optimization in Neon Galaxy. So if you like the more techie sorta things I post here on occasion, you might want to check it out.
(I'm sometimes a little hesitant to share detailed information on how and what I code, for fear of revealing hideous naïvete on my part, but eh, what the hell.)
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| HEY PROGRAM WHERE'S YOUR DISK |
[26 Dec 2010|06:44pm] |
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So I braved the foul weather to see Tron: Legacy today. (At the movie theater literally across the street, so don't go assuming it was too much hardship.) The executive summary is that it's not bad. My thoughts, in no particular order:
( Read more...Collapse )
In completely unrelated news, there are new posts over on the ol' Tumblr with more chatter about Neon Galaxy work. I got the entire between-level shop working, and it'll even kick you back into another level when you're done shopping, which is a nice accomplishment. Getting pretty close to having all the basic pieces of a game here.
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| Afterlife Blues update. |
[25 Dec 2010|12:39am] |
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It's a Christmas miracle!
Hmm, was there anything I actually wanted to mention here? Well, as I said, fight scenes are really fun to draw. I'd never realized that before. Man, imagine all the time I've spent drawing comics where people talk to each other and work out their problems when instead they could have been throwing punches and exchanging gunfire!
Oh, and speaking of people talking to each other and exchanging gunfire, I finished playing through all the Mass Effect 2 DLC yesterday. Started with Firewalker, then did Kasumi's Stolen Memory, then Overlord, and finally Lair of the Shadow Broker... and that was the right choice, as it was pretty much a straight line of increasing awesomeness from beginning to end. Shadow Broker in particular is a magnificent addition to the game; if you buy only one DLC, get this one. The aforementioned Lair is easily the most spectacular environment in all of ME2, there's lots of fun fighting and conversations, and it solidly wraps up the Liara plotline which was kind of sitting on the floor at the end of the original game (in fact, it did an amazing thing by actually getting me to like Liara, at least a little bit.) You even unlock what I can only describe as a cheat room at the end. But oddly enough, my favorite part of Shadow Broker is a little epilogue scene after the main story ends. I'll put in a spoiler...
( Read more...Collapse )
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