tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-61793232899097386992024-03-13T20:09:23.537-07:00Farming the ApocalypseDesign and documentation journal for my interactive fiction (text games); also reviews and other miscellaneous stuff.Gravelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00762964244520399960noreply@blogger.comBlogger102125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6179323289909738699.post-24448148816476146212012-04-30T08:21:00.001-07:002012-04-30T08:21:12.208-07:00Quick updateI'm not dead. Real life is really really swampy right now, and I'm running on way too little sleep. I'm still working on some boring peripheral planning issues, sort of apathetically, but it's stuff like "how the hell can I make this wibble here without making that stuff wobble" except even more boring, so you don't get updates on that.
Description work is being very difficult - sorting Gravelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00762964244520399960noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6179323289909738699.post-58193531371405576662012-03-01T11:38:00.000-08:002012-03-01T11:38:53.108-08:00I've had farm maps kicking around for awhile now, but I'm trying to finalize it so I can start a serious build of the area, clarify sub-areas, and get cracking on the many actions and meta-actions that require the geography to be less mushy.
For maximum convenience and opportunity, the farm's located at a crux of biomes. To the north and east are rolling climax forests of maple and beech.Gravelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00762964244520399960noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6179323289909738699.post-38193276468855795022011-12-16T08:58:00.000-08:002011-12-16T08:58:51.206-08:00Lesson: Don't Injure Yourself While Your Projects Are Stripped ApartIn late summer, I fell off the curb. It was one of those really simple, stupid things, where I put a foot wrong and just toppled forward onto my hands and knees, but this time physics and anatomy were not working in harmony, and I broke both my wrists.
Only one had to be put into a cast, but typing wavered between being impossible and just being awfully painful. Regular Gravelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00762964244520399960noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6179323289909738699.post-42368244654126527412011-10-06T10:37:00.000-07:002011-10-06T10:37:24.874-07:00IF Comp: How do y'all do it?Judges, I mean. (I don't know how authors do it, either, but whatever.)
38 games? 42 days, several of which are now GONE FOREVER?
I probably won't be playing many during the comp this year - I am temporarily typing impaired, and Real Life is wreaking havoc on my free time, but I salute you all.Gravelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00762964244520399960noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6179323289909738699.post-23743771131533482862011-09-07T13:57:00.000-07:002011-09-07T13:57:07.344-07:00I am going to consider this investigative researchUpdate Haiku
Both wrists "maybe" broke
typing and reading hard - what
else do people do?
Sorry for typos
vicodin makes pain better
everything else worse
Anyone know some
good dictation software?
For Inform or not?Gravelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00762964244520399960noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6179323289909738699.post-43960798175432674782011-09-06T08:37:00.000-07:002011-09-06T08:37:45.058-07:00GDD CalculatorThis weekend I made a neat little widget to help me calculate how many growing degree days different plants have. (The downside of having a devblog is that you can see when you're doing *exactly* the same thing you were doing this time last year.) It's not tuned, but it's not bad, either. Basically, you can enter a planting date, and a number of days from the planting date; it gives Gravelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00762964244520399960noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6179323289909738699.post-83205289087769644492011-08-11T05:26:00.000-07:002011-08-11T05:26:01.732-07:00Fish Waffling
Brown Trout, looking appropriately skeptical. Courtesy New York City Public Library.
So I just finished putting some of my notes into a spreadsheet, felt the glow of a job 10% done, and then the sinking feeling of realizing that you'd done research on a bunch more fish. Like, where's the pike? Any of the trout species? The burbot, which I remember because when you Gravelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00762964244520399960noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6179323289909738699.post-66386869977392316862011-08-08T18:29:00.000-07:002011-08-08T18:29:32.070-07:00In Which I Realize Something Obvious About Inform 7Just now I realized that instead of typing "Every turn when the minutes part of the time of day is 00:" eighteen thousand times, I could just make a set of every hour rules, trigger them once, and then just specify "Every hour: do stuff!"
Makes the code easier to read and write.
Gravelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00762964244520399960noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6179323289909738699.post-51935290811421598552011-08-08T13:27:00.000-07:002011-08-08T13:27:09.944-07:00In Which I Make a RockSo I've been trying for days to make a rock. Who would have thought that a convincing rock is so much harder than a convincing tree?
Why are the background colors weird? I dunno.
It's still not what I would call convincing - there's something non-organic about it, despite the fact that it was more-or-less based on an actual rock. I do like the moss, though. And I Gravelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00762964244520399960noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6179323289909738699.post-2021553960166053382011-08-01T12:35:00.000-07:002011-08-01T12:35:00.905-07:00Crops, Part the FirstCrop plants are an entirely different thing than the wild plants, and require a lot more delicacy. There's kind of a bunch of factors, and I haven't quite sifted out "want to do" from "plausible to do" from "bad idea". A lot of the crop planning that I did was done either before I started programming, or while learning I7; as such, it doesn't really take into account things like "Gravelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00762964244520399960noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6179323289909738699.post-40895656700489622922011-07-29T12:42:00.000-07:002011-07-29T12:42:36.857-07:00Evolution GameSo, yesterday, in the middle of The Blind Watchmaker, I thought to myself: "Self, someone really ought to make an evolution simulator."
Dawkins wrote The Blind Watchmaker in 1986, and there's a chapter where he "evolves" various shapes on the computer. I did something vaguely similar later (not with shapes, but behavior). You can get some pretty shapes from selection and randomGravelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00762964244520399960noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6179323289909738699.post-45994864943165490432011-07-27T00:55:00.000-07:002011-07-27T00:55:00.541-07:00Grass and Fish Right, so exciting visual stuff first. Here's the experiments for the ground in the winter, when grass is dead, but there's no snow on the ground. To make it easier to see, I'm only experimenting with one layer. The back layer of grass is far enough away that there probably won't be many changes. Here's where I started, with some smooth curves - bare ground.
This Gravelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00762964244520399960noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6179323289909738699.post-41242795075957670682011-07-21T07:36:00.000-07:002011-07-21T10:31:45.681-07:00Graphics - Alpha Changes A bunch of people were kind enough to download 30 mb worth of example graphics, look through them, and give feedback. One of the background layers is off by a smidge; I'm having the devil of a time figuring out where the break started. (It's likely to be unnoticeable in-game, but it's irritating me.)
There's some tree placement issues, and I noticed (although no one else Gravelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00762964244520399960noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6179323289909738699.post-64732591575163456272011-07-15T09:34:00.000-07:002011-07-15T09:34:00.744-07:00Design Diary, July 15Materials is a little better, but not totally. I'm trying to nail down the Table of Excessive Properties into just a few useful qualities. Does it burn? Does it break? Does it decompose? Those are the biggies, but plenty of minor issues are coming up. For instance, burning implies that the material feeds the fire. I'm basically doing this by weight - for Gravelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00762964244520399960noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6179323289909738699.post-70191207913461096722011-07-14T06:11:00.000-07:002011-07-14T06:11:57.139-07:00So TemptingI wonder if I have the nerve to name my game Apocalypse Plow.Gravelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00762964244520399960noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6179323289909738699.post-22250610700545490732011-07-11T12:07:00.000-07:002011-07-11T12:07:45.279-07:00A Matter of TimeOkay, first of all: sleep is awesome, y'all. Does everyone know about this? Everyone should know about this. Life is SO much better when there's sleep. The game-related depression isn't entirely gone, but it is much diminished, along with the tick in my right eyelid. And the vestiges of sleep deprivation feel strangely like motivation.
So the issues with the time Gravelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00762964244520399960noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6179323289909738699.post-64771266234200369152011-07-05T08:19:00.000-07:002011-07-05T08:19:40.565-07:00Better Living Through Design DocumentationI'm still feeling off about FTA - frustrated and reluctant to jump back in. I wonder if it might be better as a full-on graphical game, which I think is just a sophisticated attempt by my subconscious to get me to ditch my current code, but I don't know for sure. And looking at my documentation, a lot of it is under-detailed, incomplete, or outright missing. This compounds the Gravelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00762964244520399960noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6179323289909738699.post-72774274108868270992011-06-08T08:11:00.000-07:002011-06-08T08:11:24.042-07:00Graphics Speed Optimizing
Procrastination is dead. Long live procrastination. Yes, that is one of those fluffy flavor graphics I wasn't going to make until everything else totally working. Sue me.
I'm feeling good about the project again, which is awfully nice. I'm sketching out the speed boost for the graphics, which mostly consists of doing something about the *cough*mumble* hundred tree Gravelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00762964244520399960noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6179323289909738699.post-62272782934274547062011-06-03T09:17:00.000-07:002011-06-03T09:23:15.548-07:00FTA: Cooking
Mushroom cloud-shaped cake. I worry about people sometimes.
One of the first IF games I wanted to write was a Iron Chef style competition. Your PC would have access to a kitchen and supplies, and would have to fricassee, blend, saute, and garnish her way to victory. At the end of a game, the judges would give ridiculous reviews of your hideously complicated dish, and you'd winGravelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00762964244520399960noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6179323289909738699.post-5608609437322912962011-05-25T09:10:00.000-07:002011-05-25T09:10:48.521-07:00CyclesI'm going through a bit of a slump at the moment. One of those "all my ideas are terrible, and I'll never be able to implement them, and even if I do, it'll be *boring*" slumps. They happen regularly, and I've learned to wait them out, resisting the urge to, say, chuck all my code and start from scratch, or chuck all my code and design a new game, or chuck all my code and give up gameGravelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00762964244520399960noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6179323289909738699.post-41114010589036588552011-05-05T09:06:00.000-07:002011-05-05T09:06:41.493-07:00Better Design Practice: Scene Start/End Conditions in Inform 7One of the things that's really been hammered home to me lately is that is a terrible, terrible idea to have single-fire scene starters. There are numerous, hideous ways they can go wrong, unless the game starts and stays very simple and constant in design, and rooting out the bugs can be incredibly irritating.
Consider the difference between Scene A, which starts when the time of day is 9Gravelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00762964244520399960noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6179323289909738699.post-84036840771783360442011-05-02T22:42:00.000-07:002011-04-29T14:27:31.508-07:00I will pet it and keep it and call it GeorgeIt's terribly gauche to be too proud of one's own work. "This old thing?" I say, holding up my new, kickass, sparkly graphics frame. "Why, this is just something I knocked together in a few spare weekends. It's nothing, really."
But hot damn if the thing doesn't mostly work, and it looks *good*. I'm not even going to put in a disclaimer here, like "it looks good to me" orGravelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00762964244520399960noreply@blogger.com7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6179323289909738699.post-26411539188616970662011-04-25T12:30:00.000-07:002011-04-25T12:30:05.699-07:00Design Diary, April 25Spent a good chunk of the weekend with a friend in the hospital, but hanging out in the hospital gave me some nice reading time. (He was in for non-emergency reasons, so it's not like I was reading about mushrooms while he bled out or anything.) Read about mushrooms and bogs. Turns out bogs are cool, and contain some useful stuff, but aren't productive enough to sustain life on Gravelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00762964244520399960noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6179323289909738699.post-38139729597765336872011-04-22T13:13:00.000-07:002011-04-22T13:13:08.195-07:00Main weapons: Fear, surprise, and unflinching determination to get doneFinished sunsets! I even solved the mysterious bug where occasionally the sky would turn bright white for a couple turns. Or an hour. (It turns out that my algorithms for color work very well within parameters, but trying to blend 147% of one color with another borks it proper.) I also weeded out testing comments that hadn't gotten taken out before. By all means, addGravelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00762964244520399960noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6179323289909738699.post-47492291819174993792011-04-13T11:01:00.000-07:002011-04-13T11:01:55.736-07:00Moar Graphics Stuff (Grassland/Weather)
Picture courtesy of sgt fun from flickr (well, I didn't ask, but pic is under creative commons license)
Grassland graphics have been going poorly. Trees work well as discrete objects - flowers and grass, not so much. The impression of grass is much more important than actual individual grasses, and I keep missing stuff as I experiment. The picture above is a good reference; Gravelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00762964244520399960noreply@blogger.com1