v21

Digital images generated with custom convolution code (available in browser at https://v21.io/r_g_b.html). February 2022.

This artwork is an algorithm that explores what I call "iterative convolution" — the process of repeatedly feeding the output of a convolution filter back into that convolution filter. This process is controlled by both myself and the machine: the fine parameters of the algorithm slowly shift by themselves, while I respond, controlling in real time the sharpness and scale of the transformation.

Here's a quote from Holly at Hide and Seek :

Punch the Custard is a game in which two players compete to punch custard. The player who punches the custard the most quickly and accurately - as judged by the computer, which keeps count - is the winner. Successful players might not even get messy hands - because if you punch custard just right, it behaves really weirdly, and bounces your hand back as if it were a hard surface.

Uni-pin fineliner on Fabriano A3 paper, plotted with an Axidraw V3/A3, from SVGs generated by custom Typescript code. Plotted in July 2022.

This series of drawings was inspired by images captured from bubble chambers — a type of physics apparatus that captures traces of exotic particles to understand the patterns behind their behaviour. Bubble chambers, and the way they illuminated the relationship between different particles, were such an important tool that they won their inventor, Donald Glaser, the Nobel Prize. The algorithm I have written to emulate the photographs taken of bubble chambers starts by creating "beams". The beams enter from the right hand side of the page, and curve according to the "charge" assigned to them. They may also randomly undergo fission, forming two new paths each with a proportion of the original charge. Some are not drawn and travel without effort, but the beams that are visible are slowed down by the process, their curves becoming more pronounced as they spiral to a standstill.

I'm still motivated by the same joy that I felt as a child when I would write
10 PRINT FARTS
20 GOTO 10
and the screen would fill with FARTS. It's a short command leading to much larger results. It's a kind of joke, taking a simple premise and extrapolating from it to the absurd. Like custard that goes beep when you punch it.

I multiply these simple elements together to form intricate possibility spaces. Shaping not a particular plotter drawing, concrete poem, tweet or visual, but the shape of all possible outputs. I love making that shape wider and wilder, layering in more details to be discovered. It's a process of discovery as much as it is creation. I make the work to learn if it can be made, and discover what it'll feel like when it does exist. Sometimes this means I have to work quickly: I have to accumulate complexity faster than I can get tired of it.

step 1 is not to start writing a blog post instead. but let’s ignore that part for now.

step 2 is to do nothing. just sit. no, sitting is too active, lie down if you can. close your eyes. do nothing.

step 3 is: that’s boring isn’t it? i find i immediately get agitated. but agitation is one of the things that is the opposite of rest - rest is not exerting yourself either physically, mentally OR emotionally. so

Today, Downpour comes out!

In case you don’t know, Downpour is the game creation tool I have been working on for the past few years. I started it after I left Niantic in October 2022, and I have been working on it ever since then (with breaks for illness and freelance work and going on trips and so on). I am proud of it. I hope people make good things with it! And also, of course, I hope they subscribe and make this retrospectively not a kinda dumb financial decision. But also I very sincerely hope they make good things that they wouldn’t’ve made otherwise.

I am delighted to announce that Downpour, the game making app I’ve been working on for the last few years, is coming out on Android and iOS on March 6th!

So what is Downpour? It’s a tool for making videogames and websites and other kinds of collage-y hypertext-y things. Think Instagram Stories but you can easily link to other stories and they don’t disappear after 24 hours. Or, if you’re coming from indie games, think Twine except it works on your phone and it’s way easier to make images work in.

This is a talk given at the Pervasive Media Studio for their lunchtime talks series. It is therefore written to be read. You can also watch the recording of the talk if you like - it takes the rough form of this post, but I think I landed a joke or two more than are on the page.

Hello, hi, I’m v buckenham, I’m an artist & game designer, and general person who uses the internet and thinks about the internet a lot. I make a lot of software tools that let people make other things, and I think a lot about how people interact online. As a plug for later, I’m currently making a game making tool called Downpour, which is super cool & you can playtest if you stick around for First Fridays later on.

So, last night Elon Musk bought Twitter! Let’s talk a little bit about what I think the future holds.

He bought Twitter for more than it is worth. You can tell this is true because after making a binding commitment to acquire it, he then made a load of excuses and paid a load to lawyers to see if he could find a way to wriggle out of it. A lot of that drop in value is not really to do with Twitter per-se, as it is to do with general economic sentiment and tech companies generally being worth less now than they were a year ago. But still! Bad timing.

I have just released a new tool for generating epicycles.

If you’re wondering what an epicycle is, here’s the short version: it’s a pattern like a Spirograph might make. You know, those toys you might’ve played with as a kid. Where you put a pen tip in a plastic cog and then spin it around inside a larger plastic cog and then it makes a nice shape on the paper.

With the recent news that Twitter is being sold to Elon Musk, lots of people have been setting up or rediscovering Mastodon accounts. Much fewer than have been setting up Discords, but still… a good number.

And with this new influx, I have been seeing lots of discourse about CW warnings, their use, people complaining about people using them wrong, people complaining about people complaining about people using them wrong, etc. 1

Together with Viviane Schwarz, I am releasing a new social network for frogs. It’s called Frog Chorus, and it’s a place where all you can do is ribbit.

The initial seed of the idea and the illustrations came from Viv, and the coding & the rest of the design were done by me.

The site is a social network for frogs. Open it, and you will see yourself sitting as a frog in a pond. You can click to ribbit, and you can hold down to do a really big ribbit. And you can see and hear other frogs ribbiting in the same pond. It’s the smallest satisfying online social space that I can imagine.

I’ve not set this up, but I think it would be a good idea.

You have a NAS or a hard drive in a drawer or a second computer with some storage space. And you do backups, because that’s the sensible thing to do in case your main computer breaks. But you also want to still have your data even if someone steals all your computers or your house burns down or some other calamity happens.

Today I announce a new project! This is the big thing I have been working on since leaving Niantic, and I am very excited about it.

It is a game making tool for phones, called Downpour. Here is what it currently looks like:

The utopian vision for the project is this: making a tool so that anyone, without prior knowledge, can make something interestingly interactive in a spare ten minutes. And without having to have access to a computer. What would you make if making a game was as easy as writing a letter?

This is a crosspost from my Patreon page, but with the bits thanking people for their support removed. However, if you do support me there: thank you. And if you don’t and use Cheap Bots, Done Quick!, please consider doing so. It keeps the servers humming & pays for my time doing this kind of tweaking and fixing.

So, after leaving Niantic, I put a bit of time into rejuvenating and restoring CBDQ. I had neglected it a bit, what with having a full time job and falling mysteriously ill. It was running fine, but the thing about maintenance is that you can keep putting it off and it’ll be fine until one day it’ll just fall over. So it was a good time to go in and update and upgrade things, sand off the barnacles and apply some fresh paint.

Update, 20 Apr 2022: The recording of the talk is now available to watch on the GDC Vault

This is a rough transcript of a talk I gave at GDC 2022, as part of the “Making Room” track. So it’s written in a this-is-for-speaking style, and you should imagine the headings as slide transitions. OK! Let’s go:

Hello, I’m v buckenham, and today I’m going to be talking about chronic illness and what you can do to support any of your employees who have a chronic illness.

I have a new webpage up! It is called r_g_b.html [warning for flashing colours].

This was developed out of my older webpage ▛▚▞▗, using the same technique that I call “iterative convolution”.

As the name “r_g_b” suggests, this version is a lot more colourful. You may notice the three static dots of red, green and blue that continuously seed the pattern - everything else is just the traces of those original colours interacting with each other.

I’m in the mood to chat with people. A thing I value and care about is being part of a interesting creative community, and to repeat a sentiment you have no doubt heard a lot, a pandemic makes it hard to see people in person, do international travel, etc.

Also I quit a job at a large company and now I miss meetings (???)

So, I am copying a concept I have seen others do, and setting up Open Office Hours. The way this works is, you can go to that page, pick a slot, and it will get added to my calendar (and yours!). Then when the time comes, we can meet up online and have a chat.

The other week I saw a tweet by my friend & banging chiptune musician Chipzel, where she was giving a little guided tour through LSDJ, the premiere Gameboy music software.

should probably rehearse this or find someone to edit 😅 pic.twitter.com/ijgKcXDqAw

— ⚡️chipzel 🌊 Brighton (@chipzel) February 18, 2020

It inspired me to download the demo rom, find a Gameboy emulator, and give it a go. I have had some experience with trackers before, so I found it pretty quick to get going with. And fun! It makes the good bleeps and bloops. I was pretty soon at the point where the main limitation on me making nice music is my actual musical ability.

I have been excitedly following the progress of Electric Zine Maker, by Nathalie Lawhead. It’s a goofy, idiosyncratic software application that helps you make 8 page foldable zines. It has a potato tell you how things work. I wanted to try it out.

A few months ago, I was looking through a fan-wiki for some show or another, and I came across the entry for “Apple”. It earnestly explained that an apple was a type of fruit, descibed an apple’s typical appearance, and that various people had eaten one or mentioned one at various times and I was just really struck it. The care that had went into this entry, the seriousness with which the editors had approached an absurd task. What is an apple? Describe it in a single sentence for people who definitely know what one is already. It’s important.

This was one I really wanted to show in this year's Now Play This, but we couldn't find a space for it. I'm generally very excited about Cassie McQuater's work, and it's been great to see this sneaking onto a number of game of the year lists. This game is an unfolding of browser windows, delighting in the tactility of the web, the ways that windows can pile up, get bigger or smaller, can contain fields of content to pick through. It's a collage of recycled sprites, voids to pass through and plains scattered with discarded objects. It can be hard for work that lives in a browser to escape the general scattered attention of everyday life, the pull of the next tab over, but this definitely did for me.

last night i was on a website that writes reviews of obscure retro games, and i decided to poke at it's archives to see if i could find a game that's been itching away at me. it was a golf game i remember playing from a vaguely Christmas-themed shareware CD I spent a lot of time with as a kid. to my surprise, i found it. The Greens, with a course named Scylla and Charybdis (a name that was always evocative, but a reference that completely flew over my head) and a nice pock sound as balls bounced off the walls and into holes.

making tools is a creative act
teaching is a creative act
curating is a creative act
criticism is a creative act
community building is a creative act
manifesto writing is a creative act
making games is a creative act
(there are many more creative acts than this)

the end result of all of these things is a change in the culture we’re making together. no work exists in a vacuum. think about what change you want to make in the cultures you exist in, then make the work that can best make that change.

friend simulator is a videogame about virtual pets. in friend simulator, the simulated pet is not a real pet - it is a stuffed toy instead. it would be easy to recurse into an extended bit about "simulating the simulated" here, but i'm going to resist - it's not really the point of friend simulator.

instead i wanna liken it to how do you Do It? (Nina Freeman, Emmett Butler, Joni Kittaka and Decky Coss), a game about exploring your sexuality as a young child by mashing Ken and Barbie doll crotches together. both games are explicitly about capturing a moment from childhood, recalling a memory common enough it might well be a specific memory of yours. but where HDYDI has a lot of frisson (your mom is coming home! you might not understand what you're doing, but you know enough to know to feel weird about it!), friend simulator has slack. there's no urgency to the setup - no frame that gives a sense of narrative pressure. eg: the game persists state so you can close the browser tab and return later to the same situation. it's just you in there. as the title of this blog post says, "no record is kept of what you say to your friend". this is a space free from judgement.

What did I do last year?

I'm still at Sensible Object! I went part time, which should hopefully allow me to have my cake (a really cool job making cool games) and eat it too (all of the other things I care about and which I was overstretching myself trying to keep up with in my spare time). I have done some cool stuff with this extra time, but I've also struggled to set good routines and habits for myself. Something to work on this year.

Last week, I recorded and put up three new episodes -- I guess they're episodes, I guess this is a podcast, and if it's a podcast then they're episodes. Or maybe I should lean into this machine-minimal aesthetic and just call them recordings? yeah, that makes more sense, who wants a 2 minute podcast, anyway? -- three new recordings of the machine gently stutters ❏❐❑❒.

The first, to ease myself into it, is of Ranjit Bhatnagar's Wolf Proverbs bot. This had been on my list for ages - there's something about the physicality of it, the fact that they're dance steps or physical instructions, something quixotically non-verbal that seemed interesting to translate into spoken word. And that came through - it was interesting trying to put the emotions suggested, the wolf-like nature into the performance. There's questions about the extent to which this is anthropomophization, the extent this is real wolf-feeling and the extent to which it plays into romantic ideas of wolves instead, the place they play in culture. I am thinking of two stories by Saki, especially. It's also worth pointing out this is the second bot by Ranjit I've performed - the first recording was Pentametron, which has a completely dissimilar feeling. This wasn't intentional, they're just really good.

A few weeks back, Emilie Reed ran the Visual Essay Jam. This was inspired by John Berger's Ways of Seeing, and tried to encourage people to express thoughts on games in a new format. It was an exciting thing, and of course I didn't do anything in time for the official end of it. But now I have:

Yes yes, it's February already, I know. But still! Here's what I did last year.

Shipped Beasts of Balance. You can buy it in shops! And a year ago... a year ago, we were running our Kickstarter. This was an enormous amount of work, and I think we did good. I want to thank everyone I worked on this with at Sensible Object, but I want to especially thank Jonathan Brodsky, who was there with me during the dark crunchy times just before pushing the digital side out the door.

videogames are presented as consequence-free sandboxes. you can try things, you can run over the pedestrians, you can do a genocide run with no real world impact. i hear lack of real world consequence is a fundamental condition of play?

which makes it unsurprising that online spaces related to videogames are so bad. you add other people to the sandbox - and of course you continue on the same habits. you do things that push other people's boundaries, to see how they react, same as you did with NPCs. but of course - that's a bad way to be. there is now consequence, there is now a community that can be harmed. i mean, actually play always has some consequence - just because it happens in the real world (as everything does) between real people. play communities are powerful and dangerous things - just ask Bernie DeKoven.

Gosh, it's been a long year. I hope I'm not missing anything great from January, but I probably am.

Kentucky Route Zero continued to be made, and I continued to play it. It's so good it feels unfair to compare other games to it, so I won't.

Ladykiller In A Bind. Here is a list of it's virtues:

• it's really hot
• which feels like it shouldn't say much, but the bar is so low for erotic videogames (this game does not care about those low standards. It sets it's own high standards, and then meets those instead)
• it's more informative on the appeal of kink than anything else I've come across
• it's really funny
• it has characters that feel like real people
• it's political, both in a personal-is-political kind of way and in an actually political kind of way
• it's got neat innovations in narrative design - and they feel really natural and must have been a right pain to write, but totally work
• like, some of the dialogue options involve being cruel to people in the kind of way that me and my friends are sometimes cruel to each other
• I said it before, but it's really hot

Some people I know can be pretty negative about VR! And I can understand their reasoning. But - personally, I'm at least cautiously optimisitic. Here are my reasons why:

• I'm excited for a future of computing where you can do high-focus work standing up and moving around, rather than slumped in an office chair.
• Violence is disturbing again. It feels icky to shoot people when it's this real. Maybe we'll all get over it, but right now there's actual commercial pressures not to just make games about killing people.
• Everyone up and down the software-hardware stack suddenly gives a shit about latency. Latency is a painful thing, because it accumulates, so if anyone drops the ball it goes. And there's a step change in the quality of an experience when it gets to a low enough latency (which is why we pushed so hard for this in Beasts of Balance). Stuff just starts to feel real, and tangible, in a way it didn't before.
• The idea of strapping a box to my face and having interesting patterns of light shone into my eyes (and sounds pumped into my ears) sounds amazing. Just… yeah. Perfect.
• I was being genuine about that last point. Ilinx! A sensory overload. A post-rock gig.
• GDC is now Games and VR Developers Conference (at least for now). This might take a little zooming out to explain. I think of videogames as a continuous part of a larger space of… "interactive art", maybe. "Interactive entertainment". In previous eras, the division between games and other software wasn't so rigid, and there were some interesting, beautiful things that existed between them (I'm thinking of Kate Compton's work on tools for casual creators, among other things). Maybe VR will blur those boundaries again.
• When I was a kid, my most vivid dreams were of flying. VR seems like a good way to simulate that experience. Maybe?
• Creating 3D stuff in a 2D interface is weird and painful (no matter how used to it we've gotten). VR allows us to use a 2.5D interface, and intuitive look controls (ie, moving your head). Humans will always be a bit shonky at thinking in 3D, but this will help.
• Money. VR means there are tech companies scrabbling to build the platform that will own this particular future (this part is depressing, okay). But to do that, they're spending large sums of money on small teams with interesting ideas. This is great! I hope all my friends get paid well to make interesting things for a bit.
• Because this stuff will be interesting, because old design conventions don't work. We get to do new things! We get to rethink UIs from the ground up. We get to make games without much violence, where you can walk (but only in a small area). The idea of framing everything within a rectangle is gone. Wildly new constraints. We'll have to work quite hard not to make new things, given all that.
• Although it's maybe still unfashionable to say so, a thing I like is immersion. I like feeling like I am in another place, another situation. I don't know I care so much for the fictional place as for the disorienting sensation of transitioning, the flicker as the holodeck fades in (the sensation of suddenly being in a hallway in Battersea Arts Center when nipping out of a Coney production for a piss). VR is great at this. What do you do when you're there? idk. I imagine someone will figure that out.
• Small teams can, for a while, compete with bigger teams. Large games companies don't really know VR better than anyone else. And they're locked into business models that don't make sense for VR. I hope the small teams that become big this time round are nice people. I also hope pushes for diversity start to get locked in a little, and a few more of them are not white men.
• "What if we weren't too late with game culture, what if weirdos had a seat at the table from the beginning? What if we didn't let capitalism shit the bed so badly? What if artists and theorists were there, from its early days, to help guide popular understanding of it? " - Robert Yang
• What I guess I'm reaching for is the idea that maybe games aren't what VR is for. Maybe it's a new thing. I like new things. Let's try to make this new thing good.

A while back, I became interested in the design problem of making games that would help you fall asleep. It's slightly unlikely - a common model for games is for high-intensity and high-engagement, the addictive pull of just one more turn that keeps you up too late. But there are many other charms that games can have - stories, comforting repetition, good sights and sounds, for example - and they're not incompatible with drifting off to sleep.

After the wonderful and inspiring Bot Summit last weekend and Art of Bots this weekend, it feels like there's a critical mass of botmakers and associated folks in London. So: we should start meeting up in person every once in a while, rather than just talking on the Internet.

To that end, I propose the first Robot Picnic, to happen from 3pm on Sunday the 8th of May, in Victoria Park (near the West Boating Lake, about here). Bring food and/or drink if you want to eat and/or drink it. And if it's raining or otherwise awful we'll go the People's Park Tavern instead.

I've been reading other people's year-in-reviews, and I thought maybe I should do one, before it's quite too late for that to make sense as a thing to do. Here's the things that made up my 2015:

I started dating Sheila. We've been seeing each other for coming up to a year now, and it's really lovely.

Fabulous Beasts turned from a vague idea, to a team, to a prototype, to a prototype people cooed over, to an opportunity, to a company, to a much better (but reasonably different) game, to a draft Kickstarter page and source of nervous tension. It's been a wild ride. Onwards!

I released Cheap Bots, Done Quick!, a website that hosts Twitter bots for people. It did better than I dared hope - we're at over 400 bots made by this point. And (okay okay, I did it in 2016) I just added hashtag support and the ability to generate images via generating SVG files. Mainly I feel happy to have joined the friendly and welcoming #botALLY community, and to have enabled others to do stuff that seems very fulfilling for them.

Panoramical came out! It feels weird, because I did most of the work on my scene so long ago, and it's only now that people are playing it. But I've had some lovely feedback, and I feel really proud of what me and Jukio did there. (And it's a privilege to be part of Panoramical itself, which since I started writing this post got 3 IGF nominations).

I put together a totally credible bid for The Space to make a Tamagotchi-like game-toy thing. We were shortlisted, and waited, and waited... and then didn't get it. Ah well. It's good knowing that putting a application like that together is something I'm capable of. Thanks to Mink (who I applied with), and everyone else who helped.

Mutazione won some money from the EU Narrative Games fund... and I had to drop out of the project, due to Fabulous Beasts taking off. Still sorry about how this worked out, and I wish them all the best with finishing that game, and making it everything I hope it can be.

I Digitally Curated, and also generally helped on the first ever Now Play This, a weekend of games and play at Somerset House. I feel very proud of what we accomplished - it was a great selection of interesting (and varied!) things, presented beautifully. And much love to everyone I worked with on this - Holly, Jo, Sophie and Louie especially.

We put on another Wild Rumpus party, and a Mild Rumpus forest at GDC in March. We got them to transport a giant metal leaf up some escalators! We put on Qrion's first ever US gig!

I've started doing visuals for live music! I did visuals at Screenshake (with Fernando <3), at our Wild Rumpus party (apologies Alice), and for the Hyperwave chiptune night (cheers Mikey!).

And as a kind of spin off from that and kind of as a continuation of the work that led to my Panoramical scene, I've been messing around with some convolution noise generators. Fun little toys, which I'm still tinkering with.

I made a game for the Wellcome Late - Shadow Photocopier. A fun little experiment, in the classic Sandpit style.

With Hannah Nicklin, won a bid to make an interesting narrative thing about the Sweets Way community. In progress!

I went to Zoo Machines, and helped make a game about feeding a monster in an extra-dimensional portal. Hard to document, as the experience hinged on making your hand feel strange and alien with time delay on the visual feedback you get. Shoutout to my team there, and for Zoo Machines for inviting me over.

Did a bit of electronics for the Oubliette Escape Rooms and Adventure Shop. Though I mainly mention this here to encourage you to go visit them. They're open! It's a great experience.

Embed With came out, and I saw lovely words about me in a published book. Still feel very lucky to have been included in this project.

Hannah Nicklin did a talk about me in her wonderful Psychogeography of Games series. I feel that a number of my strands of thought were tied together much more convincingly than I would have been able to do on my own.

I gave talks at:

• Bees In A Tin
• Screenshake
• Amaze (for 45 seconds - thanks to Lorenzo and the Klondike crew for letting me crash their microtalk)
• GDCE
• Videobrains (twice)
• Zoo Machines

Whoo! That's a lot of stuff. I didn't realize how productive a year it had been until compiling this list.

I remember reading about how the advent of computers into math had changed what it meant to prove a theorem. If you could reduce a problem down to a mere few billion possible cases, then you could just have a machine check all of them, and bing: there’s your answer. They all pass, or you’ve found your counterexample. No need for tiresome decomposing of a problem down to a tractable human scale. (One response: “Well, that just proves it wasn’t an interesting problem after all”)

I thought about how easily I thought about other people. I thought about my relationship. I thought about the morning. I thought about being in. I suppose I thought about the afternoon. I thought about that statement. I thought about the books. I thought about my visit. I thought about her and. I thought about leaving her. I thought about things like I thought about the guy. I thought about other people. I thought about the hours. I thought about a girl.

I thought about it calmly.

I thought about going home.

I thought about this girl.

It feels like any three consecutive sentences of this evoke a wonderful fragment of story. Sometimes this will continue on, sometimes even to the limit of semantic satiation, but then it bursts, and you're released.

I mean, I love this, but I'd love to read the v2 that's only a page long. Or the poem.
"Matthew 25:30", by Nick Montfort http://nickm.com/poems/matthew.pdf

“Playing-cards, chessboards, a nice hardback copy of the Grettir Saga,
a classy cerulean gym suit that is new this season,
a classy ash gray stovepipe that is available with free shipping,
a contemporary silver bluebonnet that is available with free shipping,
subtle cerise outerwear that is available with free shipping,
a fashionable steel gray two-piece suit that is on sale today only,
a rustic dapple-grey greengrocery that is now 10% off,
a fashionable ochre gaberdine that is new this season,
a modern sage green kerchief that is now 10% off,
an understated snuff-color ice machine that is significantly reduced in price,

I like jokes. I like the joke that this novel tells. I like it in part because I like jokes where the punchline is delivered through an absence.

And this joke is enhanced by me having read the source only just before, and having appreached the text like a NanoGenMo entry - that is to say, my eyes are skipping over the text already, looking for repetition and structure before I look for words.
Phone It In, by hugovk https://github.com/dariusk/NaNoGenMo-2015/issues/173

- An with big A space entry space for space National with big N space Novel with upper case N space Generation with capital G space Month with upper case M space starting round bracket, NaNoGenMo close parenthesis, with upper case N, N, G and M, space two oh one five dot and then a new line.
- Mhmm.
- The with capital T space plot colon space someone space needs space a space computer space program space but space the space network single quote s space down comma then a new line.
- Say that again.
- The with capital T space plot colon space someone space needs space a space computer space program space but space the space network single quote s space down comma then a new line.
- Keep going.
- So space a space second space person space has space to space tediously space read space it space out space over space the space telephone fullstop and then a new line.
- Sorry, missed that bit.
- It went: So space a space second space person space has space to space tediously space read space it space out space over space the space telephone fullstop and then a new line.
- Carry on.
- Hilarity with capital H space ensues fullstop and then a new line.
- Say that again.
- Hilarity with capital H space ensues fullstop and then a new line.
- Can you repeat that?
- I said: Hilarity with capital H space ensues fullstop and then a new line.
- Keep going.
- quote

I was totally prepared to not care about this joke, but I do. I think I like this novel only when it achieves a certain level of psychological realism, when it hits the same combination of grey polyester cubicle apathy with Beckettian doggedness that My New Filing Technique Is Unstoppable hit. The rest of the novel is still funny, but this part hits those heights even better because you feel for the characters so much more when they are so close to understanding the terrible joke they are trapped within.

- Hilarity with capital H space ensues fullstop and then a new line.

The Tao is ever his work.
The more he gives to the left of the world.
The person who is not full of his body.
The more it could be a beginning of life and fame or a state of the world.
I do not know its name.
It is the beginning of all things.
It is because they are able to be self-more and some are strong.
This is called the source of the world.
It is the beginning of the master of all under Heaven.
The man of the sage acts as the source of the world.
The wise man is like the state of death.
The world is forgotten, and the people will be beneficial.
The people will be taught and strong.
It is because they are able to act as a carriage of the world.
To know the constant is the mother of all things.
It is the foundation of the state with the subtle essence of the same and weak and weak are hungry.
It is because they are skillful and weak.
The world is forever and so deep and some are forguted.
It is because they are able to be able to be strong.

The world will be self-assertive.
The more he gives to the left of the world.

Therefore, the sage produces them.
It is the beginning of the store.
The state of the world.

Char-RNNs are magical! Look at how wonderfully it captures both low-level and high-level structure! Human-like pacing and rhythmic variation, with repeated refrains and longer detail sentences. And (though the internal workings shouldn't matter to the evaluation of the output), it doesn't even operate on the word level, but can even synthesize new words entirely - look at that "forguted" in the quote there. Plausible English word, in a plausible context. Char-RNNs are magical.
Alphabetical Order, by Leonard Richardson http://www.crummy.com/writing/NaNoGenMo/2015/

-------- ----- ------ ---------|---+---+---|---+---+---|---+---+---| ---------- ---------- ---------- ---------- ---------- ---------- ---------- ---------- ---------- ---------- , ---------------- , -------- ----------- ----------- ------------ ------------ ------------- | ------------- ------------- ------------- ------------- ------------- --------------- ------------- ---------------------- ----------------------- ------------- --------------- ----------------- ------------------- --------------- --- ----- --- ----- --------------- ------------------------ -------------------------- ------------------- ------------------- ------------------- ------------------- ------------------- --------------------- ----------------- ----------------------------| | | | | | | + ------------------------------------------------- | | ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- -------------------------------------------------------------------------- ------------------------------------------------------------------------- ------------------------------------------------------------------------ ----------------------------------------------------------------------- ----------------------------------------------------------------------

Let me quote the accompanying text, too, though:

This book was generated by searching 47,000 plain-text public domain works for lines that contained no alphanumeric characters. The lines were then deduped and sorted. The complete source code for this book is:

find . -name "*.txt" | xargs grep -vh "[[:alnum:]]" | grep -v "^[[:space:]]*$" | sort | uniq

According to the wc command, Alphabetical Order is about 110,000 words long.

This is beautiful.

This was my bot of the day for Nov 20th 2015. I wrote: "a testament to the manual effort underlying any large dataset". This is a collection of chisel marks left on the Pyramids.

I've realized recently that I seem to have made a lot of games have both digital and physical components. And having realized this, I felt I should have learnt something and have some kind of generalizable lessons about making them to share. So it is that I present this list of universal, always-applicable and entirely transferable principles for the design of games with both a physical and a digital component. Ready? Okay, here we go:

This weekend I ran two workshops of botmaking at the always fantastic Feral Vector (this time, tucked away in a gorgeous valley in Yorkshire). This is the reason I made Cheap Bots, Done Quick, so it was a treat to see so many people take the tool and run with it in so many different directions.

Here are the bots that people made:

• @DeepSpaceProbe
• @ShitBandReviews
• @algorithmbot
• @MilleniumFalbot
• @friendlybeating
• @tildesofthesea
• @hipstercocktail
• @yr_face_is
• @flowerscatalog
• @aerithcanlive
• @weirdLilPeople
• @what_hastings
• @MumAndDead
• @mynameiskcuhc

I have just released a tool for making Twitterbots, called Cheap Bots, Done Quick. I feel pretty pleased with it, and it provides a good context for talking about my approach for making tools for novices (a disclaimer - most of the heavy lifting was done by Kate Compton, in developing the Tracery syntax and library. I don't speak for her, though). First up, I should say that this doesn't apply to all tools, but I do think it's useful if you're making a tool that aims to democratize some aspect of creation. Please don't remake Unity along these principles.

• @gamejobsbot
• @knocknockbot
• @dungeon_bot
• @tiny_star_field
• @tiny_astro_naut
• @tinyshootinstar
• @FFD8FFDB
• @rom_txt
• @MinecraftSigns
• imgshredder/status/564068350490595328
• @imgconvos
• @godtributes
• @suxting
• @wikisext
• @babel_librarian
• @fantasy_florist
• @poem_exe
• @everyword
• HarryGiles/lists/everyword-orgy

• @everybird_
• @feelings_js
• @PYRAMID_CEO
• @PowerVocabTweet
• @deepquestionbot

Many moons ago, I ran a workshop at Screenshake called Tying Stories Together With Twine. The plan for the workshop was to explore various ways that narrative could be structured within a game/hypertext fiction/Twine, and how that interacts with the writing and form of a story. I think we succeeded in that goal! I didn't mention this to the participants, but this was my first time running a workshop, so it was as much a learning experience for me as it was for them. I am going to move "running a workshop" from "things I'm probably able to do" to "things I consider myself able to do".

Hullo! This is a dump of links for people doing my workshop at Screenshake! If that is you, welcome. If not, then this may lack some context.

Here is where to download the Twine editor: http://twinery.org/ - you want the older version, 1.4.2 (in the post-it in the top right hand corner). Or one of these direct links : Windows or OS X

Here are some games to play:

• Queers In Love At The End Of The World by Anna Anthropy
• A Kiss by Dan Waber (note the little "The Map" link on the left hand side)
• Skulljhabit by Porpentine
• MASTABA SNOOPY by goddesses17
• Magical Makeover by S Woodson (I especially liked Em Short's post on this)
• Small Child in Woods: You Will Select a Decision, No. 1 by Brendan Patrick Hennessy

You can view the source of any of the above Twine files by :

1. Opening the game in your browser
2. Right clicking "Save Page As..."/"Save As..." and saving to somewhere on your local machine
3. Opening Twine
4. Creating a new story (File/New Story)
5. Importing in the HTML file (File/Import/Compiled HTML File..., then find the html file you just saved
6. And click "OK" when it asks you if you want to overwrite existing passages (such as "Start", "StoryAuthor" and "StoryTitle")
7. And your screen should now fill up with little nodes and links connecting them! This process is not entirely reliable - I have found a couple of links have got mangled, and you lose the layout of nodes that the original author used (which can make the resulting nodemap difficult to untangle).

• start slow. At the beginning of the game, your characters are likely to be nervous and awkward. Let them warm up as you warm up as storytellers.
• no-one owns a character. If you feel like you are more invested with one character than another, then feel free to say so out loud, and stop making any decisions about that character for a while.
• the meat of the emotional arc is in the interplay between the backstory and the current story. What secrets are they hiding? Are they revealed over the course of playing Monogamy? How does playing this game change their relationship?
• there are three general tones this game could take, all of which are valid:
  • comedic. Monogamy sounds awful, and like it could be played by awful people. That's fine. If it's going that way, then just go for it. Feel free to turn this into a Tom Sharpe farce. This is totes valid.
  • sexy. You are describing fictional people maybe doing it with each other while with someone you maybe do it with. You could get actually turned on. That's fine. Feel free to keep playing with fewer clothes on. Or get distracted entirely...
  • emotional. You are talking about people uncovering emotional truths with their partners while in the company of a lover. This is fine. If, as they say after TV programmes, you are affected by an issue raised by this game, then decompression afterwards is the most important thing. When you are done, talk about your characters, talk about who they reminded you of, talk about what your hopes for them were. Care for each other.

• It has a flavour and a colour gradient!
• Depending on how you drink it, it becomes more or less dry -- and as you do so, it turns from a slush to a solid "sandy" substance, with this kind of weathering on the corners that's really great.
• It's a really warm day today, and it's made of ice.
• It has a straw with a spoon on the end!
• You can totally play with it, get bored, and then wait a bit and it melts and then it changes form again.
• It is totally made of sugar.
• There is nothing healthy about it, it is just purely to be had because you enjoy it.
• I got it from the bagel shop, and I am predisposed to like bagel shops.
• It makes me feel like a small child, but I am pretty sure I never had multicoloured slush as a child. But I would have been excited then, and I'm excited now.
• Some residual sense of exoticism from it being an American thing, but here in Britain. This is very weak nowadays, but you can still feel it under the layer of nostalgia and despair around Mr Wimpys.
• One of the flavours is clearly just "blue". Blue! I love blue flavoured stuff. I have no idea what that is.
• Also "red" and "yellow".
• Which are also all bright great colours.
• That form a gradient! Look at it!

David O'Reilly's Basic Animation Aesthetics : Discover the secret to making your games not look, or sound, or feel like crap. I really think that this is the easiest way to make something beautiful.

Terry Gilliam teaches animation : This embodies the spirit of indie, for me. Here's the meat of it (but the rest it completely worth watching too) : "I think if you’re going to learn about animation, you’ve got to learn about cutout animation. The whole point of animation to me is to tell a story, make a joke, express an idea. The technique itself doesn’t really matter: whatever works is the thing to use. And that’s why I use cutout - it’s the quickest, easiest form of animation that I know"

Anna Anthropy on the first screen of Super Mario Bros (and the rest of the design tag on her blog) : Anna teaches (by example) the most important thing about level design : teaching the player (by example) how to play.

Jonathan Whiting runs a course on level design on Tigsource : And this is worth reading, too, on that. Where Anna breaks down a masterpiece into component parts, Jonathan builds up from the raw materials.

"Let's Play: the first room of Anomalous Materials in Half-Life 1" by Robert Yang : And here's the equivalent of Anna's piece, but for 3D. This has more of an emphasis on architecture than on teaching, which I think is broadly a difference between 2D and 3D games.

(Honorable mention to the developer commentary in 30 Flights Of Loving)

Michael Brough's blog : Just the whole blog. Not so much for particular insights, but more: this is what high-level design insight looks like. (This is the same point as most of these, to be honest. Robert Yang talking for 10 minutes isn't going to teach you 3D level design - but he can show you what that looks like, and then you can use your own wit to operate on that level yourself)

Robert Penner's Easing Equations : A good part of being a game designer is having a understanding for feel. I now know how long .3 of a second is. Familiarity with these easing equations is not necessary, but a very common part of that.

Juice it or lose it - a talk by Martin Jonasson & Petri Purho : Similarly, here's a walk through the full range of juice you can pump into a game. But I disagree with some of their rhetoric -- where they start is not necessarily worse than where the end up. It depends on the effect you want to convey.

Vehicles: Experiments in Synthetic Psychology by Valentino Braitenberg (cheeky pdf link) : A brilliant book. It's not about games, but it is about how simple rules can lead to engrossing entities that people will attribute emotion and intent to.

Nordic Larp by Jaakko Stenros and Markus Montola (direct pdf link) : So much variety here! And so much depth, too. I found this book an inspiration.

The Well Played Game by Bernie DeKoven : This is a book about communities, about why play is valuable, about competition, about our responisbilites when making or playing games.

The sentence “The experience starts when you first hear about it and only ends when you stop thinking and talking about it.” (Tassos Stevens, Coney) : Just that sentence, I think that sentence is really important.

The Manual (or, How To Have A Number One The Easy Way) by The KLF : A lot of people have a distate for marketing. I don't. I think this book might be why.

How To Explain Your Game To An Asshole by Tom Francis : I would also add that I think that having a game that sounds good under these conditions is one of the most important factors to success.

Kieron Gillen's How To Use And Abuse The Gaming Press And How The Gaming Press Wants To Use and Abuse You : Despite being advice that's approaching a decade old, it's still relevant and right.

This one is cheeky, but : my own previous post, Rules for making games covered a lot of this ground, and I think holds up well.)

• A long, 4AM conversation about the nature of games, the trajectories of our careers and our current plans and state of mind, between @lauraehall, @minkette, @edclef, @nachimir (until he fell asleep) and me.

• Discovering H & T had started seeing each other, and them both being the absolutely most adorable about it.

• Discovering, as I bounded up the stairs to go program the config for Mega-A͈L͈P͈H͈A͈B͈E͈T͈ while doing the tech setup for That Party, that I both really enjoy, and am actually quite good at doing tech for our events.

If anyone finds this useful, I've made a small python script for converting Twine .tws files into Twee .tw files (without using the Twine GUI)

Download from here

(You will need a working copy of Python)

This was made as an incidental part of writing our dialogue system for Mutazione. Exciting, huh? I will no doubt talk about all the intricacies of how we're doing that soon enough.

Disunion - The guillotine simulator from André Berlemont on Vimeo.

Make games for objects like you make games for consoles. Make games to be played on the spoon, the chair, the door.

— Ian Snyder (@whatisian) April 6, 2013

@aliendovecote @seebeewhitman @radiatoryang @mcclure111 @smestorp @benthorizon LET'S DO A GAMES FOR OBJECTS TWITTER JAM. LET'S DO IT.

— Ian Snyder (@whatisian) May 4, 2013

Here’s a design pattern I use a lot in Unity when sketching out or testing behaviours:

public bool bangFollow;

void Update () {
	if (bangFollow)
	{
		bangFollow = false;
		FollowSpline();
	}
}

As I use it a bunch, I’m not sure how clear the intent here is to other people. The idea is that you want to test a bit of behaviour before you’ve necessarily got the hooks in place to call it at the right time (or you want to test a bit of behaviour in isolation). It’d be great to be able to just type into an interpreter “testCreature.FollowSpline();”, but we don’t have an interpreter handy (and if we did, we would have to get the reference to the GameObject first, when it’s right there in the Inspector…). So instead we make a boolean visible in the Inspector, and use it entirely for communicating to the script that it should run a function. And then to prevent it from happening more than the once, we set it false.

Valve used to emply 12 people to look after (I'm not entirely clear) Steam, or submissions to Steam. There were far more submissions than they could manage. So they introduced Greenlight. They didn't employ more people, despite Steam obviously bringing in enough revenue to pay for them. They did this because they prioritize increasing their productivity-per-worker. Some of these causal links are stereotyped, or guessed -- I'm sure they also find hiring people a slow and painful process, I'm sure they also are concerned by their role as a single gatekeeper to the money hose.

Meanwhile, there's in increasing way of seeing Facebook and other sites as being built off user labour. The act of uploading photos, tagging, friending, liking pages all creates valuable data, and that's what the value of the companies is built off. Most large internet corporations are built off this principle -- Amazon escapes this a little, because they also sell things. To the point that there is a proposed French tax, that, rather smartly, would tax data collection. Because value is being created in France when French users use the Internet, but it's being taxed in tax havens. Like I said, smart! And radical.

As an potential maker of a game that will go on Steam, I can feel the effects here directly. The old system was not much work, if incredibly capricious. Send an email to the relevant people, beg friends for contacts, pray. Now you have a Greenlight page to manage, you have to harness your fans to vote for you, do press outreach work (which, sure you'd be doing anyway, but there's an additional load). You feel the extra labour, and you feel the impact of the labour you're asking fans to do on your behalf to vote for you. No-one likes to pester people. And my day is already getting sort of full of doing shit I don't get paid for on the Internet.

An important point here is -- the extra work that Greenlight has created is far larger than the extra work that 12 extra (twice the capacity!) full-time people would do. And it's not renumerated (unless you win access to the money hose for your game, of course). This is great for Valve, but a bit evil. Pretty much routine for this day and age, but still -- a bit evil.

The thing is, Valve give the impression of being a fairly moral, fairly not-evil company. (Sidenote: I am very curious as to what they do with all the money they/Gabe Newell makes. Does anyone know?). So I hope they're thinking along these lines, and find a way to funnel some of that value back to users in the next iteration of Steam. They're talking about curated storefronts, with commision for the people who run it them -- there's reasons to be hopeful.

This is an incomplete list -- email me at vtwentyone@gmail.com, or tweet at @v21 to suggest more or to argue that entries should be removed.

Original list:

• Songs of Travel by increpare
• You Have To Burn The Rope by Mazapan
• Envirobear 2000 by Justin Smith
• QWOP by Bennett Foddy
• YOU HAVE FORGOTTEN HOW TO USE A PEN by Wanderlands
• Surgeon Simulator 2013 by Tom Jackson, James Broadley, Jack Good, Luke Williams
• Let There Be Smite! by Pippin Barr
• ZORBA by Pippin Barr
• All's Well That Ends Well by Pippin Barr
• Let's Play: Ancient Greek Punihsment by Pippin Barr
• PONGS by Pippin Barr (errr... not all of PONGS. But some of PONGS)
• Hot Coffee by Pippin Barr
• Ludwig Von Beatdown by Pippin Barr
(note: I think I'm being quite arbitrary with which Pippin Barr games I'm putting on this list. Here's the full list: make your mind up yourself)
• Steamshovel Harry by Allen Henderson
• Hell Tetris by banthar (and Randall Munroe)
• Linear RPG by Sophie Houlden
• Desert Bus from Penn & Teller's Smoke and Mirrors
• Cow Clicker by Ian Bogost

• Futilitris by Twinbeard (thanks @mcc)
• Tea time with Luap Sere - Make the World Right by CROS, KniteBlargh & Clic (thanks Ashley Gwinnell)
• The Illogical Journey of the Zambonis by Noyb (how the hell did I forget this?)
• Dark Room Sex Game by the Copenhagen Game Collective (this might only work when shown at conferences?)
• Pung by Squidlarkin (thanks Squidlarkin)
• Cod of Duty by Ryan Evans (thanks John Brindle)
• Squidlarkin again: You Lose Some Points, Incomprehensible Baking Hero, Queazytron, FormVaders.
• GT EffBee: Trampoelephant, Vector's Block Ball and Extreme Digital Tennis Friends
• So long, Oregon by Justin Smith (thanks Porpentine)
• Terra Tam by Leon Arnott (thanks Porpentine)
• Also Tiny Sorceress by Leon Arnott (and thanks again, Porpentine)
• Shitsnake by Draknek (thanks Sam Crisp)
• pOnd by peanutDre (thanks Mat Jones)

Buyer Beware - This is not a game, there is no goal, no story, nothing

Just wanted to say, before you buy this please be advised, this is not a game, there is no goal, no story, no gameplay, nothing. You just walk on a randomly generated island loaded with 1999 sprites.

It's interesting for about 10 minutes, but after that you've seen mostly what the games has to offer and it just becomes boring because there's literally nothing to do in it.

It's an interesting little project that someone would do in 48 hours in a weekend game jam, but in no way worth 10$. The Steam store makes it look like something it isn't, that's why I wanted to warn people about it

Quick critique.

Proteus is a pretentious game for hipsters, piggybacking on the success of other 'games' like Journey. This is not a game, it's just a program. It is not a fun program. People who want to believe they are intellectuals might describe this extra minimalist adventure as "compelling" and "deep" when more appropriate adjectives would be "lazy" and "boring". The creation and undeserving popularity of these shoddy products needs to stop. How this non-game weaseled its way into Steam is totally beyond me. Do not buy this. Do not support this kind of product. Talk with your wallet, and demand better.

Is it really a "Game"?

So is this a "game" in the same way Dear Esther was a "game"? Is there any goal or is it purely exploration. Don't get me wrong, i don't mind "interactive entertainment" but i just think they'er a different thing then what would qualify as a "game" and by calling it a game in the description seems misguided to me, unless it actually is a game.

(Later comment in this thread: "I think semantics are important when money trade is involved. It's the same reason Dear Esther got so much flak, it called itself a game and people felt cheated by that fact alone.")

[...] To me, this title is a good example of something I wish I would have thought of when I was in art school. A different way to use computers and games to engage an audience and share an experience. However, it's *not* a game. I feel like this has to be stressed. I don't feel like this is worth the $8.99/$9.99 they're asking for. There's not a lot of replay value unless you're among that small subset of people that just really get off on this art/music style and want to veg out. May be awesome if you're a stoner, too, I'm not sure. In my opinion, not for the average gamer, though...a lot of people on Steam are going to feel ripped at this price point. I'd feel better about it if it were in the $2.99 - $4.99 price range. [...]

My point here is : the question as to whether something is a game or not has more than academic consequences. It doesn't even matter if Proteus is a game or not. It doesn't even matter whether these people are just plain wrong, or philistines, or Internet commenters. There's a direction connection being repeatly drawn here between not-game and not being of monetary value. Which insane to me: adding a goal to something makes it worth more?

The main practical consequence of insisting on rigid boundaries is that people making game-like objects have a harder time selling them to gamers.

• If you have some control over it, and it affects the player's experience, you should either design it, or think very hard about why you're not going to.
• Relatedly: "A play begins when you first hear about it, and ends when you stop thinking about it" -- Tassos Stevens
• Making a game is easy. Finishing a game is difficult. Selling a game is almost impossible.
• Tell people about your stuff - you owe it to the work.
• Which future of games is correct? All of them. No platform/genre/style/whatever ever really goes away, it just gets more niche.
• It can be useful to start with an interesting problem, then try to solve it as well as possible.
• Relatedly: It's important to know what problem you're trying to solve.
• Relatedly: Don't import conventions without examining them carefully.
• If you start by building an engine, you'll never make a game.
• Try the stupid/simple solution first.
• The easiest way to be beautiful is to be consistent.
• It doesn't matter if what you're making stops being a "game" halfway through. Or even if it never starts as one at all.
• Sometimes you need to slog through it. But you're basically useless at design when you're slogging. So take a break!
• What you make matters more than how well you make it / Your life is finite.
• Try to work in a way that's sustainable. Do you want to be doing this in ten years time?
• Don't talk all the excitement out of a project, save some of it for actually building the thing.
• Trying to find ways to break definitions is a good way to innovate.
• If you rip off unexpected things, people will call you original.
• It's never the player's fault.
• Be generous.

I liked writing this because I hate prescriptive rules about game making. Also because it's such an incredible act of hubris.

I'm posting it because I'm curious how well they'll stand up.

I’ve been thinking about making tools for game creation recently.

Partly I like the challenge. Designing something that anyone can use, that’s hard. Designing something that can cope with creativity you’ve not anticipated, that’s hard. But also – also I like making engine tools, I like making code. I find them fun rabbitholes of tech to chase down, somehow more satisfying that all the other design and polish and making it work and making it accessible that’s needed far more for the games I make. Ha. Maybe that tendency is one this project shouldn’t indulge. So. I like the challenge.

Tonight I played Pierrec’s game Sister’s Little Helper as a bedtime story. I wanted something calm to relax me before going to bed. I was tired, and knew it was time to sleep, but I’ve been staying up too late recently, so I wanted to waste a bit more time.

It fulfilled that role excellently – it’s a really charming little game. Every night, a young girl rolls herself a joint and tells herself a story before going to bed. My favorite story was all the ones about The Story That Can Only Be Told Once. It’s maybe not a game (not that I care), but a way to tell those stories, and more importantly, tell the story of the girl. It’s not about you, I guess I’m saying.

One thing that’s useful to bear in mind is you’re developing for the iOS App Store is that Apple doesn’t care too much about making money from it. A very quick Google shows that the profit per iPhone is in the $300-350 range. Over a two year contract, you’d need to be spending over $10 a month to match that number. And that doesn’t account for Apple only taking a 30% cut – to match that, users would have to be spending over $30 a month. On average.

Another game made at the recent Tigjam. Some footage of it is available here: 

The rules:

•  Make a wall of dice. Stack them overlapping like bricks. Make the top layer a different colour.
•  Each player gets yet another colour of dice. And a spoon.
•  First round!
  • Try to insert your dice into the wall. You're only allowed to touch the dice with your spoon, and you're only allowed to touch the spoon with a single finger.
  • The round ends when all the top, differently coloured dice are touching the table.
• Rebuilding phase!
  • Any dice touching the table with nothing on top (that is from the wall originally) are piled up on top of other dice. You can score points this way. Take it in turns to place a dice.
• Repeat first round!

It's pretty simple and stupid to play. But it's maybe a bit unstructured. Appropriate dice can be found on Witzigs.

Let me know if you play it!

A jam game involving cards or bits of paper for 3 or more players.

Write at least (3 x numbers of players) words describing a person onto the back of cards of bits of paper.

Shuffle them, and deal them out face down three to each player. Each player picks one, and discards the rest.

Now the group decides on a person to share stories of, and commemorate their life. This is a wake. Raise a toast to dear departed Jimmy!

So last Saturday I was at Rezzed. Amongst playing games at the show and going to the pub, I spent an hour making a card game, then was abruptly yanked on stage to show it to hundreds of people. Which was a bit terrifying, it turns out.

So here how the game is played:

There are three types of cards : attack, defence and surprise cards. Each player is dealt 2 Attack cards, 2 Defence cards and 1 Surprise card. Each player also has 10 tokens.

So a few weeks ago I made a game!

It's pretty good, if I say so myself. 

Go play/download it here 

If you're interested, here's the updates I made as it happened

Let's tell the story of it's creation first. Back when #7dfps was being discussed on Twitter, I had the idea. As I do when I get an idea for a game, I put it down on a Google Doc called "Terrible Game Ideas". Someday I should write a blog post about how great having such a list is. The idea sprang pretty much fully formed into my head back then. Let's see what I wrote, hey?

Sometimes tutorial sections are necessary. If it's an explicitly multiplayer competitive game, then you might ultimately need or want a singleplayer section just to teach you the fucking thing before you waste your friend's time. Fighting game practice rooms. The "training" mode in Pole Riders. But if all these are are explicitly tutorials (not just mainly), then they almost certainly suck, and you should do better. For instance, Pole Riders has you vaulting double decker buses. Trials Evolution's Licence sections are hard, as well as explicitly teaching you how to perform things you're going to need to know.

Walls of text telling you what to do are probably not great design. But they can be. The joy of poring over a manual, of reading the Minecraft wiki, or hell, visual novels or a blurb telling you how to use the parser in IF, these can be good things. I hate being prescriptive. There are always exceptions. Just go look at the "Instructions" menu item in Fez to see how best to do this. (although I seem to recall that was only inserted at Microsoft's insistence. It's certainly unnecessary. But delightful and charming and effective, etc. The game pretty much explains itself - I could hand my brother the controls deep into it, tell him what the buttons did and he got it entirely.)

Organically building teaching into your game is clearly better than having a rigid tutorial section. A lot of the joy in games comes in learning and mastering systems. See James Paul Gee for reference on this. So you're teaching the whole time, but this section is the special teaching section... It's game structure basics : teach people the mechanics one by one, let them explore and then see their powers in combination with other powers (again : I hate being prescriptive, but this is a good technique that is used everywhere). A lot of games are dead once you've understood the system and the mechanics. In Portal, once you've solved the puzzles (ie worked out the implications of the portal gun in fullness) the game is over bar the robotic lady singing.

So one thing I did love was the opening to Portal 2. It told you how to operate an FPS. How mouselook worked. That "E" was the use key. I love Valve for that. I didn't need it, but it's clearly going to have taught lots of people how to use a mouselook FPS. Which is a nice thing to do for them, a good business decision, and excellent for the industry. It wasn't a separate tutorial section, but it served that function pretty heavily. It also went heavy on the humor and the spectacle to keep those who didn't need it engaged. Because most people who played didn't need it, to be honest.

Which is the most important thing -- the reason tutorials suck is because they do the teaching thing games do so well, but because they're focused on that they fail to be fun. Or if not fun, to evoke the affect intended. If they did that well, then they magically become not a tutorial section any more. Just "the first bit", or "some nice level design", or "Licence challenges" or "The bit at the start where you get woken out of suspended animation". Suddenly we're all happy.

"You play a babysitter, you turn up and the baby is made of cardboard. Would you stay? I want games to start asking more ethical questions"

-- https://twitter.com/#!/petermolydeux/status/143052751784525824

This is a game me and Alan Hazelden just sketched up at Molyjam London. I was trying to bully him into making a game, and we clicked througha few at random til we came across this, which seemed so very ripe for making as a kind of theatrical piece. So we went and found some cardboard, and made the game:

And now I find myself playing Mother 3 again. I've just finished the first chapter, and it was as powerful as the first time I played it (I never finished it the first time, to my shame). And Mother 3 is a game overflowing with mechanics that aren't used to their fullest potential, code put in especially for single cases.

To take a few examples I've hit in the last minute or two of play: locked in a jail cell, you try the door. "The lock is rusty" the text tells you. But you can't do anything. But after a while, your son comes in. "I got you an apple", he says. "Make sure you eat the core, though it might be very hard". So you pick it up, and biting in find a file. I've not played through the rest, but I'm willing to bet that you never again need to use a file to open a door in the game. But it's such a compelling emotional moment, I could never consider it inefficient. 

or : If you find nuts, wandering around, you can take them to a neighbours house, and they'll make Nut Bread and Nut Cookies. These heal only a small amount of health, but knowing that I'm carrying around something made with kindness by a neighbour -- that makes me feel so much more part of the community. Again, I don't think I'll come across any other baking parts, or mini-currencies like this later in the game. It's a generosity that makes the game so much more. And ultimately, generosity is the most important thing you can put into your games.

And that's without getting into the amazing things that Earthbound did with one-off game mechanics and moments. There's a reason the logo for The Best Game Design is Ness riding his bicycle through a swamp. And, of course, the "Pray" move. I'm going to stop now before I spoiler anything, or just gush about how good they are for 2 pages. But they are so good!

(You shoot automatically after each movement, the controls remap each time you press them, and the winner is the player who shoots the other player first)

There are at least three places you'll want to put your attention for play -- the 3D view, which shows whether there are barriers in front of you, the current controls for your dude, and the keyboard (to find the keys). Normally the keyboard wouldn't be a source of attention, as you know where the keys are, but when you're suddenly sharing a keyboard, then you can't let your fingers rest in the normal positions. So you need to pay attention there, and suddenly go hunt and peck again. In your head you need to keep track of what key you're about to press - it's a sensible thing to do to say it out loud as you play - "Y!", "SEVEN!", "O OR ZERO!" (I should change the font). This just puts it more easily in the phonological loop of memory, since there's a new key to recall approximately every 0.7 seconds. And then there are extra optional places to put attention -- the minimap, if your enemy isn't immediately in sight, or you just want an overview of the battle. But that doesn't show blockers, so you can't just focus there and ignore the 3D view. And then there's your opponent's 3D view, which can sometimes tell you if they've just fired, which could save you in tense spots. And then the keys they're shouting out -- it would be totally possible to pay attention to those and see what they're about to do, if you were superhuman. And of course, you need to pay attention to them shoving you, to getting their fingers out of the way of yours to press a button, to the fact that they're trying to press your button and make you lose.

So yeah, lots of places to put attention. But all of the locations you need to focus on you can attend to serially, which is what makes it a fun process rather than a terrible one. 

For contrast, take a terrible game I made, SPHERES. You've got to dodge the cubes and shoot the spheres. But when you're shooting, you're not attending to the cubes, and then one come out and whomps you and it feels unfair. Or you focus on dodging the cubes, and ignore the spheres -- and now you get a terrible score, and would be having more fun playing CUBES again. There's no easy way to attend to all the things serially, and it feels really bad.

(In CUBES you only have to attend to one thing, containing multiple things -- the optic flow of the cubes is enough for you to track their positions and velocities. Your focus is always on the center of the screen, more or less -- which is why the timer is there.)

To serially attend, you need to know where next to put your attention at all times (or most of the time). That moment of "the fuck should I be looking?" -- it's powerful confusion, and should be used very sparingly, if at all. In A Bastard, you attend : view of battle, keys bindings, keyboard, repeat, with interruptions from your opponent's elbows. Get the rhythm down to below .7 seconds, and you're killing it. In the movement phase, you have time to assess your position on the field of battle. There's a rhythm to where you attend. In SPHERES, there's no rhythm, just multiple things demanding attention at once.

There's a lot of arguing about story in games recently. There was this, then this, and then this. Each one kicks up a bit of argument, and then later someone come back with another tack. So here's me, butting in.

So as I see it, there are two basic ways stories and games can happen together.

• Games can be used to tell stories.
• You can tell stories about games.

The two can happen at the same time, and they can be blended, so it's not always easy to tell them apart, but they're clearly not the same thing. This isn't going to be a exhaustive study of either one, because either could be a lifetimes work.

Some people have asked me for advice on how to get started making videogames, usually in the context of the gamejam I'm organizing. (which makes me so happy -- one of the main reasons I'm organizing them is to get people who haven't made games making games). This is my opinion and not gospel, so if you find something else works better for you, do that instead! You should also check out youcanmakevideogames.com, as it's a fantastic resource, and more comprehensive than this blog post. And also the big list of game making resources.

I largely agree with Miguel's arguments against proceedurality. I think that playing through another's experience is ultimately constraining, and can't be as exciting as being a full, equal active participant in a game can be. But nevertheless, within this contrained space there's room for a galaxy of brilliant, enjoyable games.

But proceedurality provides something quite useful, from the creator's perspective. It gives a model of how to make a "meaningful game". Broadly, it goes: - Have a theme, a thing you wish to convey with your game - Develop mechanics which reflect your theme. Have them in some way embody it. - Make aesthetics which support those mechanics, and allow them to be properly comprehended. - Test it, to be sure that players get the mechanics, and ideally also the theme.

Do all that, and do it well, and do all the other things you need to do well to make a worthwhile game, and you've succeeded. 

If these games are suddenly not so good any more(1), if we've all got to jump to focusing on each individual player's interaction with the game(2), if that's where the action is -- well, us game designers are buggered(3). What good is that for us?(4) If before our point was to convey meaning through a game(5), and suddenly that meaning can only arise separately within each play session(6), well, we either have to be the player or the game to convey that meaning(7), and that's a hard thing to sell to a mass market.(8)

But then again: maybe this is just fear of the new and un-fleshed-out. If Passage is the poster child of proceedurality, J.S. Joust is the poster child of the new approach.(9) It's creation provides a model for making games according to this new school - provide a minimal set of rules, enough to bring people together to play. Let most of the rules remain fluid, and instead allow them to be negotiated and enforced by the players or the play community. 

It's also worth pointing that this isn't uncharted territory we're entering. This is the the way things are normally approached, outside of digital videogames. Bernie DeKoven has consistently stressed that the rules are there to serve the players, that the peak experience is the well-played game. The LARP concept of the "first-person audience". These people are making games, and finding their point elsewhere - so if we're going to see digital games this way, we should look to them for how to do it. 

More to come, I think...

(1) I am aware this is not true. (2) I am aware this is not true. And besides, we can still see that players behave in ways with similarities to each other, so it's not as bad a crisis anyway.  (3) Metaphorically speaking. (4) If we were Doing It Wrong, it would be better to know than to ignore it. (5) Was that our point? Honestly, was it, I haven't read enough literature to know if anyone had claimed that. I still think explosions are enough reason for a game to exist, just on their own. (6) This is how I understand Miguel's argument to go. I apologize for butchering it so. (7) The classic example of this in videogames is Sleep Is Death. But more generally, we end up at LARPing, and roleplaying, and other games where people are trying to play to fun, rather than playing to win. (8) This being the only other point of making games. (9) Not that it's new. Also, sorry Doug.

So here's one way : you provide elements that, when played, provide experiences that provide a meaning and a point when considered against the real world. To caricature: Tell someone to roleplay being homeless and give them a doorway in which to sleep. They do, fully internalizing it. It sucks. Afterwards, they think about how there are homeless people out there, right now, and how that really sucks for them.

The key thing here is that they were free to enjoy being homeless, if they chose. The message could fail to get through. The roleplaying could go in a different direction. There's a larger rant here about broken games that I am still brewing - but - choice.

I've even experienced this, within my own games. I made and ran Clandestine Candy, and my main goal when running it was to see how it would be played by players. I was reasonably sure I had an interesting frame for people to play within, but I was desperate to see how people played. For the record, people did not disappoint me. This is maybe slightly different - the scenario above had the designer present the player a question, in the hope that they'd hit upon the obvious answer themse;lves. In this, I just presented a question. It's odd to note that despite designing and running the game three times, reflecting many times on how it went and talking for literally hours about it, I'd still absolutely love to play it. I know I won't know what it's like to play until I do. And even then, only what it's like to play, the way I played, that one time.

I guess this is called "second order design", like the title says. "Designing for emergence". But maybe it's more specialized than that - we're not just designing mechanics, the interaction of which produces effects. We're allowing that interaction to be unbounded, to be more powerful than we can entirely anticipate. It's in shaping that blossoming that the player exercises real choice. If it's a bounded choice, you end up with -- a tightly designed puzzle game. Two mechanics interact most beautifully - but there's still only one solution, and the game designer knows what you're thinking as you solve it better than you do.

Another example : Train by Brenda Brathwaite.  A  message, reflected in mechanic, beautifully supported in aesthetic. But the interesting part is once the penny drops. Do you play? Do you not play? Do you obstruct others? Do you walk away? You're still in the play space (unless you choose to leave - you can always choose to leave). That's the interesting part, not how beautifully the mechanics encourage you to cram lots of little people-tokens in the trains, like the Nazis did.

Or, hell, what about this:

"This is the super lazy man’s approach to design: rather than designing an intricate object, I tend to think of it in terms of marketing… the more academic way of putting it, I would say deputizing the player rather than designing for the player. So you’re deputizing the player’s to design their own gameplay, so to speak.

And obviously it’s a mix. You are designing, of course you’re designing. I think sometimes as a game designer—especially when you’re designing party games—it can be useful to think beyond this verb of design and more to: how am I going to sell the player on this attitude of approaching things?"

I'm still not done, I don't think. More changes of mind to come...

(1) Disclaimer : most everything I know about LARP I know from Nordic Larp. I want to know more, though!

So I seem to have got into a situation where I have a very large number of things which need only a bit more a push to get them done. So : let's get them done!

Not now, to be clear. The next few weeks are pretty busy with doing Christmassy drinking things. But during Christmas, during the times one is traditionally supposed to spend avoiding family, I want to:

So first off, people seemed to enjoy it! Hurrah, and woo! There were loads of kids running around, and maybe the largest proportion of my players were under ten. And they totally dug it! I had kids who came back to play it time and time again. A lot of them played against siblings, or played against other kids, or played against their parents (who had very variable levels of gaming literacy). Ultimately it is a game where you press a button and pretty colours appear, so I guess I shouldn't be too surprised. I hadn't thought about how it would go down with kids, but it turns out : well. I'm probably being unfair on the kids to suggest that it's just "the press button, make pretty" appear that appealed. I guess the "fuck you buddy" mechanic has a good appeal - the kids far prefered playing as The Fireworks than as Mr Bubble. (I totally ended up playing under tens and swearing when they hit me. I apologized once, and the kid reassured me that he swore all the time. I guess I deserved that.) They'd be happy to play through when it was their turn, but often they'd be like - no, no, you have this controller! when players swapped. Fair enough, I guess. Who'd not rather be powerful than powerless? 

Opposing this, I also got the comment once or twice (but I give it undue weight because I share it, sometimes) that it was better to be Mr Bubble. Far more relaxing to just operate at the lizard level of dodging and viewing the field, than to start building up layers of strategy. What enemy has unlocked? Where's Mr Bubble? What enemies will this one place? How much charging to do? How are they playing? What pattern goes with this pattern? etc etc. These ae the questions I hope to have people dealing with anyway. I'll admit that they probably aren't all necessary thoughts currently. Certianly, the kids delight (and success) at being The Fireworks shows they're not necessary for playing. Hopefully they give an advantage - but it's dreadful slim over random chance fucking Mr Bubble.

And of course this lack of effort, lack of beautiful contruction by The Fireworks affects Mr Bubbles experience - it's not joyous unless it's hard, you need to be put into the right position between challenge and slack to get into the zone, as the literature says. Which was often the case on Friday - as I guess it always would be, with novice players with varying levels of skill rocking up to a brand new game. But that sense of skill progression for The Fireworks - that wasn't there either. You learn the mechanics, and there's a few wrinkles there, and then you can try out various strategies, but the later strategies aren't much more complex than your earlier ones. As I think I ranted to someone out on the floor, games is all about learning. That sense of "achieving mastery", that's something like a synonym for learning. And that's kind of missing from being The Fireworks.

Later, I was talking to Ricky Haggett, and he was suggesting ways to deepen the experience for The Fireworks. I, entirely fairly, summarised his suggestions as "farming" and "crafting". So "farming" was : The Fireworks collects bullets that he's fired. And can use those bullets to unlock new enemy types. He's building a more complex structure, as he has these parallel goals, killing and pinning Mr Bubble, and sowing for his own upgrades. "Crafting" involved creating a tech tree - instead of the current random ordering of enemy unlocks, there'd be a tech tree of unlocks, and your choices down it would be decided by what you placed. Deliberately develop your playstyle to get particular enenmy unlocks. I was sceptical, as I always am of other people's ideas. But thinking it over now, it seems like the random order timed unlock system, while a real improvement over what was before in terms of pacing the game and introducing things slowly (and mixing up the rounds, and leaving new things to discover on rounds 2 and 3) isn't good enough. The randomness seems unfair, as the enemies are not (and may never be) balanced carefully enough. And it's not delivering in terms of forcing differing strategies. But I think I kind of reject Ricky's other ideas - they involve simulating learning and progression with ingame rewards, whereas what would be much better would be real learning and real depth going on. Not just in terms of an artifical layer over, but in terms of how to be an effective terror for Mr Bubble. I might be just making things difficult for myself here. And I think Ricky's suggestions were more in aid of leaving more room in the system to explore. More interactions to deal with, more to see at the 30 minute mark and the 1hr30 mark and the 5hr mark - not just in providing rich systems to gain mastery of.

Ultimately, without overthinking it too much, the problem comes down to the enemies. They kill others not of the same type too readily. This means an effective strategy will generally be a monoculture. Fill the screen with Zoomers and Zoomer-bullets, and they'll be pinned and eventually die. Trust to random flak from the Sprinklers, eventually. Or keep them shuffling along between some Strafers, and then maybe put something in to bisect that area, and hope they die escaping. There's good odds, there. Or just use Snipers, because they're a menace. Or spam Splodeys as fast as you can and trust in quantity. The enemies are reasonably balanced, but it's always the monocultures that are the dominant points. What's needed is enemy types with rich interaction between each other. But how, without breaking down the "but enemy bullets kill each other"? What if --- what if enemies could only kill their own types? That'd allow all these strategies to work at once, which'd be bollocks for Mr Bubble, but sweet for the Fireworks. What if you could choose colours for your enemies, but only different colours killed each other? They'd have to be some gating on the amount of one colour you could spawn. A mini-economy? A new incentive for diversity? Designing something subtle enough, something homeostatic enough which keeping it comprehensible in a sentence or two to a five year old... that's a fun task to sleep on.

But hiding richness in the interactions is where the joy comes from, where the dev time goes to. Phil Fish says half of Fez is hidden, behind the scenes content. Dark worlds, subtle, to be unlocked. Stuff to delight over discovering.

Right, that's a whole bunch of core mechanic work that's there to be worked on - man, is it ever hard stepping back from a project with some polish on and making dramatic changes. It's a bit easier earlier on, but just recasting the whole thing is sometimes the absolute best thing. Switching from a tail cam to a static isometric camera. "The Fireworks try to kill Mr Bubble, but the fireworks kill each other, so there's some strategy" to "You're got to try to make fireworks that can kill Mr Bubble, details unknown". But the good thing is I can make these changes, and the game is still pretty. I know the code, I can work pretty quickly on it, it's probably the cleanest code I've ever worked on, it's warm and at the top of my head. This is a healthy patient to be performing surgery on.

And it's pretty! It's pretty already! David Hayward said "Wow, this looks a lot prettier than the build you submitted to Eurograme Indie Expo". And it's totally true. Everything is nicely animated when it lives and when it dies, bullets fizzle out, the enemies and the player glow, and are alive, the speckles float by underneath, the whole thing has a look of it's own (someone said "Hey, is that Conway's Game Of Life?", yes, that was totally on my mind when I made the bullets. Although their pattern is reminiscent of the blobs that stay in one spot, oscillating back and forth, rather than the blobs that crawl...). Looking at it, it looks different. It looks austere. It glows, but it is not a giving thing, it has a charcoal background and things move across it. This being achieved by my innate tendency for subtlety, for wearingly getting gaming effects from a sfumato approach. Laying one layer down nice and thin, and then going back and doing another when it's not strong enough. And another, and another. And if you don't lose patience, then a marvellous result can be achieved. Eventually. I've pointed out to many people that the speckles cluster around the fireworks' cursor, and avoid Mr Bubble. I'll be surprised and overjoyed if anyone ever points it out to me. But the culmination of these details matter. And, more importantly : when I was writing that code, I was working on this project for my own delight at making. And it was great fun working out how to do that effect cheaply. It had a worth of itself.

Am I not now working for my own delight in making? No, not really. I'm showing the game off, I'm thinking about getting press and attention for it, I'm putting it into conferences and scheduling time working on it based on deadlines for them. But it's a good thing, already. And the stress is still fun, and the project itself is still fun. If writing this State Of The Project doesn't fizz me up for it (and it seems to be) maybe I'll give it time to breathe.

======

As I write these kind of things, I find my attention sparking onto new things to write about. So as to not become a terrible octopus of a train of thought, I make notes below the cursor, and when I run out of steam, I write one of them up. The last one I tried "this was made in flash?!", but we barely scraped into that topic, so let's go at it again.

So - yes - lots of people asked me what this was running in, and a fair few were surprised when they were told it was done in Flash. (because it was so pretty! <3 *warm fuzzies, sense of delayed reward*) I wasn't aware it had achieved particularly high heights for Flash, but maybe it has. Maybe it's also the expectations of marketing that technologies create. Flash is for 15 minute browser games, it's for Armor Games and Newgrounds. It's not for fullscreen austere things (even if they're also less than 15 minutes long). Not for Serious Games Shown At Things. But yet, here it is. (Here's a nice article with Ricky about their dev process, prototyping everything in Flash) I guess also the 360 pads make people not think Flash.

Which reminds me! The way I got the joypads for GameCity working was the quick and simple hack of plugging in JoyToKey with mappings from Xbox 360 controller to The Beast's mappings. So it emulates it. But this means we're using analogue inputs to make digital inputs, which are smoothed to an analogue response (actually, not in the case of The Fireworks - but "movement speed" has just been added to the upcoming topics). So that's kind of sucky. If I'm showing this again using pads, if that is becoming a proper platform for showing it off, I should really look into actually talking properly to the pads and getting the analogue input. Mr Bubble will become a lot more controllable, and placing fireworks will be able to get a lot more precise, quick and accurate. Generally all round improvements. The triggers should cycle weapons, or maybe fire - I don't actually play enough XBox games to know what the default affordances are. The triggers suggest charging to me, but having two shoulder buttons also suggests cycling/rotating through things - like (la la la, I played this today) Fez. It's cheap to try the variations and see what's natural, so that should probably be what I do. Certainly thinking of what buttons can be pressed on a pad vs The Beast leads to more verbs. If I'm redoing selecting enemies, why not have only 4, and each face button picks one? Or use the natural mapping of colour to good effect there?

Which talk of controls leads to one early thing I noticed (before my brain fried entirely), that I found wonderfully strange. People laugh more playing it on the arcade machine. It's different, sat down on a comfy chair, arms at ease. It's less funny. I felt this. It's still a neat game, but it's less directly competitive. You separate your games. Obviously, it being the bullets-fired-from-the-thing-you-placed rather than the bullets-you-fired clearly leads to more separation, but it's a wonderful idea that this feeling is affected by physical proximity of the players. That ergonomics affects humour is a lovely thought. And the game is different when not designed for The Beast. For that mater, the mode I usually play while developing is Fireworks-as-mouse, Mr Bubbles-as-WASD. And a mouse can't wrap (Flash won't let you grab the cursor and do funky things to it), but it can move at approaching-infinite speeds. So the Fireworks have an advantage when placing. The Beast's movement for The Fireworks is a cheap copy of that. But it's worth looking at afresh. Games should fit devices properly, not be bad ports. But how do you justifying making a really good port when the machine is too small to be worth developing solely on? That this project-for-two-machines suffers the bad port cancer of the game industry is a amusing thought. It'd be more amusing if it wasn't my fault. (The actual answer for how you do it comes from the section up above, on the joy of making things for making things.) Similarly, the treaclish handling of Mr Bubbles works (I think) excellently on The Beast, but poorly on a pad. If you're hanging off the stick, making movements a few inches across to yank him about, then making him a object requiring yanking is ace. But if you're making a precise thumb-twitch... you want a precise tight result in response.

It's odd that I've neglected this side of stuff so much, as I am usually all about tweaking the curves and the handling of stuff. At work at the moment, we're having endless fun tweaking a curve a fraction this way or that and trying to evaluate the change. But all we have here is a simple iterative lerp, and nada more. Worrying sudden thought - that iterative lerp isn't framerate independent. Fuck. How embarassing.

But yes, thinking about radical surgery, and challenging accepted layers of the game - let's talk movement speeds and handling. Should Mr Bubble be able to outrun bullets? (yes) Should he be faster than The Fireworks? How large should the cancellable charge radius be? Should I finally put in the constant dead-zone of charging around The Fireworks? (yes, why the hell haven't I yet?) How should Mr Bubble move? How precise? How nimbly? How best to let him dance? How best to give The Fireworks control? How best to let him ignore his physciality? To abstract his presence down to sheer tactical intent, under constant time pressure? Is that even an aim? I should talk to Aubrey. He loves this shit.

The most common suggestion I've heard is "there should be some way for Mr Bubble to get back at The Fireworks". Every time I hear it, I push back at it (though I do love feedback! Please send it my way. But I might politely ignore it for a little while, and then adopt it and claim it as my own.) I like his limits. But still, I said earlier that most people prefer being The Fireworks, because they can do more THINGS. And as you increase Mr Bubble's options for pushbacks, you add complications for The Fireworks. But I do so love the lizard level of Mr Bubble... So there are two ideas that came up (read: were suggested to me, ignored for a while, and now adopted and claimed as my own) that I'm going to explore. Firstly, making the charge on The Fireworks larger, and hence more poppable (also, always present on the stage - less possibility for leaving mines in the path of Mr Bubble, and fucking him that way). This makes The Fireworks more corporeal, which maybe is a sensible thing to do. Certainly his non-corporeality is tied into the mouse's approaching-infinite speed... I have expanded on this above. The second is to remove (maybe) the inconsistency between how the Snipers behave and the rest. In the game currently, the Snipers die if they get too close to Mr Bubble - maybe everything should be like this? It'd give Mr Bubble some more options for pushback, add another level of intermediation for The Fireworks to contend with... These are subtle expansions, the sfumato approach again. Any other ideas?

One thing I added for the GameCity build were little contextual bits of text. While this may well have still been misfiring, I found they were not noticably effective. Maybe it's just I pre-empted them by explaining them a few seconds before*, maybe it's just that utter unwillingness to read that everyone has, maybe it's just that if they did work, they did so silently, and it's harder to notice a lack. I'm happy with their look, so I'm not going to rip them out. But maybe I need another layer...

Such as something on the title screen? That too was new, and seemed pretty handsome. It was joked I should have an elaborate and melodramatic backstory for Mr Bubble, which actually would be pretty funny. I got some compliments on the tone of the copy, as minimal as it is. It's an area I am super unsure and unconfident about. I am not a practised or confident writer, and I take the same approach as with I do with art - minimize the amount I do, try to keep it consistent, and hope I scrape through. But both got praised, so maybe I'm doing okay. I do wonder if the enemies themselves should have better diegetic names. The Swizzler, the Woosher, the Crawler, something something, proper firework names. But then, not naming them, letting the text remain so very minimal - that's lovely too, and I guess I should keep it. I do feel nicely retarded explaining mechanics and making reference to how they're named in the code.

The main focus of my work on the game the past few weeks has been just adding more clarity to systems. Smoothing in the introductions, adding flashy background things to explain the music, the text, sound effects -- all are there to communicate the core to the player. And now I guess I'm getting to go back and hack on the core. That's fun! But then you have to go back and do the same again, making the new stuff clearer. When it works well, you don't even percieve it as communication - things just appear, complete with significance. These signifiers - some visible, some not, some completely primal, some cultural, some vidiogame specific, some that only makes sense within the context of this game. Mr Bubble is white, all the fireworks are not. UI and The Fireworks have transparency, c'uz they're not real, but once an enemy starts spawning, that's got a colour. The point isn't that you notice it, that you necessarily have the deep literacy to dissect this stuff, the point is that it works in bringing the significance along.

What else to report? Technical issues! I ended up launching the game in a web browser because that made it faster. Why? I don't know! I was bashing my head against this previously. Maybe plausibly it's my graphics card conking out - I have been having some issues with Windows not redrawing parts of the screen sometimes, but then I seem to have a problem with Explorer as well. And before I installed a new CPU fan controller thingy it was getting super hot. Maybe I crisped it? Maybe Flash is just weird. See my previous post for more ranting on this. But, anyway, I arrived, plugged the big monitor's resolution into the appropriate bits of code, fullscreened a browser window in the right monitor and ... ah fuck. No way to reset the game, save for unfullscreening, refreshing the page and refullscreening. Not smooth! So I coded in the button "R" to send the Javascript command for "reload page". Copying the code from the net on my mobile phone, a few minutes before opening... I like living on the edge. That kinda worked, but it did need me to mouse-click to start the game (give Flash focus) which clicked through the start screen and into the game proper. Ah well. And then after a few hours of that the game started running slower and slower. So I restart Chrome, and it's fine... So I just did that every so often. But this mystery is still mysterious... And getting it running fast in fullscreen would be absolutely lovely. I don't know exactly what to do about the framerate - I've been reasonably cautious the whole time, and it's generally not in Flashpunk's "update" that most time is spent. There were slowdowns when spawning lots of bullets the first time, which I can save by creating a pool at the start, and the floating background clouds aren't in it anymore for stupid memory usage, but... More work needed. And coding around technical limitations like this just slows you down and constrains you, makes you make features less awesome than they should be. But the game working, running at a decent framerate at a decent res... What have you got without that?

So what have I got left in my list of things to talk on? The big question - "How far do I want to take this?". I don't think I'm ready to answer that yet. What platforms? After this weekend, I'm more convinced this can work as a thing people buy, though it still seems optimized for public settings. But then, so is Street Fighter, and that does okay. These choices feed into... well, actaully they mainly feed into choices based around controllers. iPad means touching the screen, and how that could work. You can't see through hands, would that scupper it? Or stupid onscreen sticks? For two players? One each end, holding the iPad between you like a tug of war? (that'd be intimate enough to raise laughs) For two iPads, networking locally? I guess it can survive some latency, as the two are just disconnected enough... Do I want to grind on on this forever? I have so many other things I want to make! Old projects to be resumed! Hm. There are things to ponder on...

(* I try to adhere to a strict code, when testing my games, of not explaining things. But in this space, I felt it was only fair to provide a little context. Generally I told them their respective goals, and then sometimes hinted options like charging shots, and switching enemies if they hadn't noticed themselves.)

Here are the notes from me trying to get Mr Bubble to run in full-screen mode at a native resolution, in preparation for GameCity on Friday:

native res = 1280 * 800

1024 * 768 | full screen | no scale = 14 FPS
1024 * 768 | full screen | show all = 43 FPS
1024 * 768 | full screen | exact fit = 45 FPS 

1024 * 768 | windowed | no scale = 40 FPS
1024 * 768 | windowed | show all = 40 FPS
1024 * 768 | windowed | exact fit = 41 FPS
 
1280 * 800 | full screen | no scale = 10 FPS
1280 * 800 | full screen | show all = 13 FPS
1280 * 800 | full screen | exact fit = 13 FPS
 
1280 * 800 | windowed | no scale = ?? FPS -- the FPS counter is cut off. but it feels smooth. I would assume 30 FPS
1280 * 800 | windowed | show all = 30 FPS
1280 * 800 | windowed | exact fit = 30 FPS

Alan Hazleden just reminded me I never wrote this up. Here are the rules for Clandestine Candy, a game I ran at Hide&Seek's Sandpit this summer (at the Royal Festival Hall!)

Clandestine Candy

(for around 15 players, in this version)

Take everyone's names, and randomly (but fairly evenly) assign them roles. They are either :

- a Sugar Addict - these desperate creatures want to get their hands on sweets, as many as they can. They start the game with a fistful of monopoly money (the same amount each time)

So the first day of TIGJAM, one theme was "Fight or Flight". I decided to make a game with playing cards. The game turned out okay, so here are the rules:

"Fight or Flee"

Each player takes a wodge of cards (3 or more, I guess) from the top of a shuffled deck of cards.

They both give the other player 1 or more cards. These exchanges happen simulataneously. If you want to get a good atmosphere going, try saying "Fuck you" as you give them cards.

I read Emma Mulqueeny's post on the point of hackdays this morning, and have A Response:

No, it's even better than that. I've attended game jams where you have to pay to cover costs. Ones held in cafes. There's no sponsor hoping you'll look at thier APIs. Half of the developers are starving students. It's always worth going - just to get together with your peers and make things. I make games for a living, and it's never as much fun as a jam. There's often no presentation at the end, no formal series of pitches to define the teams and end results. To some degree, people just sit down and start making. And similar things hold - you need to 10 to get a buzz, and 20 to make it really good. And if we pay for pizza ourselves, or if we go out to the cafe down the road, it's still as good (though, y'know, not that I'd turn down free pizza). And there's still the rush of "gotta get this done, gotta code this bit up" and there's still the glorious praying that this bit isn't full of bugs. And sometimes you get stuck on this obvious bit, arg, why are my collisions failing! and fail to complete. It's okay, it wouldn't be as good if there was a risk of failure. Sometimes too, people get even more hardcore, and have three-hour mini-jams within the main jam, and then the rush is even better (though the games are worse). And sometimes there's no theme, or there's a choice of theme, or the themes are picked at random out of a hat of suggestions. Still, you work hard to make something good to show your friends and your peers. And sure, who you meet is good, but if I went home from a jam having made no useful contacts, I could still consider it a success. And it can be a good time to learn new tools, sure (picture someone trying a new library coincidentally sat next to the author of that library), but it's also a good time to be using tools that you know inside and out (and discovering that - hey, I really can code this stuff!). And it's good to code without time to fuck around refactoring it and tidying it, and worrying about maintainability, because it just has to last til the end of the weekend, and then done! And it's not about the game you take away, though many fine games have their roots in game jams. You make a prototype, and "hey, this gameplay is fun!", and that might keep you going on it after, or it might not. It's a gift if it happens, and if it doesn't, that's fine. (I wrote this in preference to working on a port of a game I first made at a game jam.) And I'm not a fan of prizes because who doesn't deserve one?

A Unity which doesn't normally do version control is one where you don't whack that useful little script up on Github. That script that smooths out that common niggle? That port of that handy library? Maybe someone will have written them up. Go look on the forum. Or on the scripts wiki. Copy and paste the code into the right four files, and it'll work (hopefully). But if you find a bug, or extend it usefully, or touch up the interface, you're not likely to share it back. Not if it means copying and pasting five times, or contacting the author with an updated version, and hoping he bothers to update his post. Maybe you will, but neither of these mechanisms can be said to scale. They lead to the problems that version control, and bug trackers were designed to fix. This isn't even touching on documentation. Let's not touch on documentation.

(A slightly tangential point: Unity provides a mechanism for packaging up a library/utility/subsystem for reuse. You can export a set of objects as a .unitypackage, and easily reimport them. But these import/exports happen statically - if you fix a bug in a system reused in multiple places, you'll have to go replacing it in all of those places. Control over your updates is a great thing of course - but speaking as somone who tries to make as many assets in a reusable form as possible, it makes me sad to have to do this administrative bullshit before I can actually use it. And it slows iteration down to a crawl. And bloats repositiory sizes to have things in mulitple places. *sigh* (yes, I have tried symlinks))

So the lack of version control makes me sad. It means I work in an ecosystem that is a pain to navigate, and not as rich as it might be. Luckily, Unity saw that this lack of sharing hurt people. If your editors shining feature is to let you drag and drop objects, it shines best when there's a ready supply of objects to be dragged and dropped. So they created the Unity Asset Store. It's a wonderful land, full of excellent tools (ones I've eyed up: Pixexix, UniSky) - but most of them require you to pay. Now, I have no objection to people profiting from their work - I make things in Unity and recieve a wage for doing so, and long may that continue - but making things paid for leads to other consequences. It leads to sources being wrapped up, and hidden from prying eyes. It leads to excellent code being in fewer hands. It leads to duplication of effort. It adds a hidden cost to being productive in Unity, to hidden secrets that an eager teenager will blame their failures upon not having access to. It makes me a little sad, when most of the other things I code in give me these things for free, and reward me for looking at them, and improving them. If I use Path, and get curious as to how it works, and fire up ILSpy, I'm in breach of contract. If I make a website in Django, and get curious as to how the urlresolver works... well, there's this. Oh, and what's worse - if I work in Unity, and I use UniSky (for example!) - I can't opensource that game (in it's entirety). It's contaminated, and any contributor will have to buy a license of UniSky. GPL is infectious, but so is closed-source.

But then - maybe this is game-dev specific. I know most of these criticisms are irrelevant for the majority of things in the Asset Store. Only code gets put in version control, typically. There's no good merge tools for .psds, more's the shame. Before there was an Asset store, common utilities were owned by particular people. It's AngryAnt's Path, it's Stramit and Texel's Strumpy Shader Editor. They were free, and freely shared, but only in the sense of beer. Strumpy Shader Editor comes compiled[factcheck] - if you want to peer under the hood you have to use a Reflection tool. And not much was in Github, even then. Sure, there are others fighting the good fight, but I don't feel they're winning. I saw Rob Fearon give a talk where he begged developers to put their assets out there. To let others reuse them, to make our tools easy for complete beginners to use, to point them at ways that let them get a toehold into The Making Of Games. I know increpare/Stephen Lavelle provides source code with his games.
But maybe all this is balanced out by the amount of code and tools and assets which are now sold due to the profit motive. There was a lack, and Unity moved to fill it. I'm not going to accuse them of taking a worse course purely for the profit (they get 30% of revenues for things sold in the Asset Store) - I think they made these choices honestly, and to supplant the sharing of necessary libraries in old forum posts. Which just sucked. It's a bit more of a tricky issue when it comes to version control - they sell a Asset Server themselves, which by some accounts is the way to go for team collaboration in Unity, though I've not tried it. The motivation for adding External Version Control was enterprise - huge shops hesitating over buying thousands of seats because they all use Perforce. With that context, Pro only makes sense.

And it's maybe unfair to blame this on technical reasons. Ultimately, this is a social problem. Other areas of programming are far more open - open source gaming does not have a long and glorious history. FreeCiv, Teeworlds and Nethack are the only ones that come to mind (although for libraries - Box2D is bloody amazing and everyone uses it, there's Flixel, Flex is open even if Flash Player ain't. etc. etc.). Projects are structured differently - people play games for limited periods of time before moving on, and that does not for good OSS development make (look at the exceptions I listed again - all games people get fixated on for long periods of time.) Maybe it could never have taken off, and the Asset Store is just an acceptance of this fact.

Anyway. I'm not going to change things. I'm okay going with the flow on this one. After all, if I'm so shit hot, why can't I be the one profiting? I'm going to launch my own handy editor utility soon[1], and I'm going to put it on the Asset Store and I'm going to charge money for it. And I'm going to have a big long think, and maybe I'll also put it on Github, and accept patches. I hope I do.

[1] Terrible marketing to bury this in a footnote, but it's an awesome tool. Add a [Bang] attribute to a method on an object, and it provides a button to call that method. Testing a spawning function? Not quite sure how you'll trigger it, and just want to get it working first? Just add [Bang] and you can test to your heart's content. At the moment I'm working on letting you specify parameters, which is a huge pain in the arse. But it'll come, and your life will be better for it.

23andMe to me : "Your DNA sample has arrived at the lab"

fridgehead tom wyatt :

@v21 now this is interesting.. ready to produce some top-trump cards based off the stats?

Sure, you could do that.[1]

Or.... you could play with the full set of SNPs.

Imagine playing Top Trumps, only instead of 1-10, you only have the base pairs, ACGT to choose. Be simple and say that alphabetical order decides it - Adenine beats Cytosine beats Guanine beats Thiosine[2]. So each person starts with a full whack of identical cards representing themselves and has to choose a base pair to compare. If they win, they win a point, and so on til you run out of cards.

Boring, and impossible.

(I think I'm getting 600,000 base pairs back. That won't fit on a card.)

But then apply bioinformatics techniques to it. Instead of playing, develop an AI to play.

I mean, you can see corpuses for each of these base pairs - you know if you've got a good chance or not.

(Make it more interesting - restrict each person to picking each base pair only once. So there are > 600,000 moves)

So far so - compare your cards against the likelihood of winning, slowly work down that sorted list.

But then consider - each of these base pairs will be correlated with other base pairs. So you can start to take the correlation data into account.

(But of course, the game actually becomes very boring past where you see the other's card - at that point you share in the hidden knowledge, and that's all the fun of this game. Which is why we can't play with the others cards, or even see them. Past what has been revealed through play. In fact, maybe it would be more interesting if you can't see your card details either.)

And maybe you could start getting real crazy - start taking real world data and medical histories and use that as input to the game. Oh, your dad got cancer? Then let's see your pair #908709 - I've got G.

There you are - a game loosely based on Top Trumps that is actually a bioinformatics project.

Let's never make this.

[1] We should do this, it's a far better idea than I outline here.

[2] I am fucking astounded I remembered what the bases in DNA are, and how to spell them.

When I was a lad, some of my favourite games were Caesar 3 and Puzzle Bobble. Both of these games had progressive start and end points to be achieved - I enjoyed playing through these, though I'm not sure how far I got in both cases. But where I truly derived my joy, when I enjoyed sitting for hours, was balanced between the competing pressures of those games. In Caesar 3, for example, I would be happy to play on free play, start up a city, and gradually expand it. Keeping that city on that successful cusp between over and under employment, getting trade running smoothly enough to forgo taxation, a point where I had mastered all the systems the game made you trade off between. Except the military part, because that wasn't very good or fun.

Similarly, in Puzzle Bobble, my favorite thing to do would be to play an endless game of 2 player. The "rain" mechanic was fully understood, and I knew you could fit the bubble between a gap wide enough for a single bubble if you shot it directly upwards. I've reached scores of over 100. And equally, I'd develop a visceral, as well as intellectual, mastery - I would get into a comfortable groove of firing and strategizing that left the part of my brain that handles speaking entirely unmolested. Which meant I was free to babble distracting trash talk to all those who hadn't reached the same level as me.

Fuckin' bliss. These experiences are one of the marker points for what I want to create when I make games. A interesting enough balance that one can just balance there in a state of supreme contentment. Something like that Zone state everyone goes on about.

(But then! This aspect/approach was neglected then, and maybe has a new emphasis on it nowadays. And maybe that goes along with Tadhg's larger point. But really I just wanted a rant.)

I just read iamdanw's retrospective on his pachube internet of things hackday project, DisplayCabinet. It's a beautiful bit of work - a simple projected circle, which when an object is placed within, shows information.

But here's the biggest limitation, as I see it. You have to have a little lump of wood representing the fridge to show the information from the fridge. You have to have a little lump representating _____ to show data about --- well, not quite ______. It's not literal, despite the presence of atoms - each object represents a sphere of information. Keys, for instance, represent the entire home. But what if you want to know what state the locks are in or if the alarm is set? The 'keys' mapping means something else already. You place the Dad maquette in the circle to see his tweets - what if you want to check your @s? What shape a lump of wood to represent that? Or "the girl I met last night"'s tweets? Sure, there's no reason this one interface should show everything, but expanding it's scope is such an enormous effort, I can't help but think you wouldn't.

No.

I mean, a win conditon ends the game. You strive for it. It is imposed from without.

But it does just as well by giving us a framework in which we (I want to say inevitably) form our own win conditions. My boss spent the day constructing a temple with an entrance shaped like an enormous cock. The game didn't tell him to do that, and nothing happened once it was complete. Other than him showing me. But he had a task and he set to it, against obstacles. He died but persevered against obstacles. He learnt from the process. All that gamey stuff, that happened.

I've been trying to write here more often, because it does me good and because I enjoy arguing, but to be honest, it's hard. With the exception of the worklogs, which are written to myself, my blog posts are arguments. I try to make what they're about important, because the world has enough arguing about dickwolves[1] already. But there are two universal rules that trip me up:

- it's simpler than you think.
- it's more complex than you think.

So I have made some incremental progress, in between all the ignoring this project I've been busy with.

Where were we last? I confess I have no idea, as I am typing this offline for later pasting up. Note to self: go to the pub, alone, with a laptop and no internet connection - you'll get hella shit done.

So recently I have made a proper helmet for all my electronics junk to fit within. I spraypainted the visor black (though it's coming off worryingly easily when it gets scraped), I put headphones in the ear protectors ( although they're a little too nice for such a role, and the left is in the right, and vice versa. thus leading to this), and I put all the wiring duct taped to the top inside of the helmet. I taped the vibration motors in place, and - voila - a lack of sensation on the sides. Evidently my head is the wrong shape. After much fannying, I gave up and went home.

Right, so at the end of the last work log, there was a list of tasks. Let's go through them, and see what I have achieved.

"slaying": if you click on a nasty red cylinder (or "Gorgon"), then they make a sound much like "euagh!" and have their health decremented. Click enough times and they vanish, making a sound like "Eaugughuh". I need to record some sound effects that aren't just me groaning into Audacity. But yeah! This bit works fine, and took like 5 minutes and worked first time, and I felt very smug and went downstairs and played some Scott Pilgrim and drank some vodka. I wish that was typical game-dev.

"dying" : This I just finished off - when the Gorgon gets too close, you get hit and make a suspiciously Gorgon-like "Euagh" sound (told you I needed to record more sound effects). And you health decreases. You don't actually die yet, but whatever. This was a pain in the arse to trigger, a pain I suspect I've not seen the last of. To do things properly, I am using a sphere trigger collider on the Gorgons, which intercepts the Player object and sends a OnTriggerStay(Collider c). But then it wasn;t sending due to a CharacterController not being a Rigidbody? And then I tried it again and it did work. And to get the proximity based-homing I talked about above, I'm totally going to have to make another sphere trigger collider, and then disambiguate the two, or set one to be in an appropriate layer? It's heading to a messy place, but I think I might get this done before the mess takes over. It's really a race against technical debt, I guess.

"maiden" : This I haven't done any coding for, but I totally have exciting progress on it. My friend Claire (who London Philharmonic Choir) has agreed to record some singing for me, to guide the hero to fair lady. I have totally blabbered on to her all kinda of somewhat unhelpful and contradictory requirements, and she has suggested she sing maybe something like this. 

"And the game feeling vaugely okay." : haha, not yet. But with sounds and variable vibrations I have hope this can happen. My headband has lost a vibration motor (the one at the front, as it's currently configured), so it's difficult to test. But I've faith!

Todo summary: maiden, make a level, and the game feeling vaguely okay. And fix the headset!

And all this possibly by 1pm on Saturday...

In fact, thinking on it, Project Titan is something of a departure for Facebook. Here's a big new tool, and it's aimed at communicating with ... people not on Facebook. I can't think of a time they've done that before. I wonder how it'll feel.

At some point in the week, I killed the maze I was happily getting stuck in. There's a lesson here about saving your work. But it's okay, I wasn't going to use it.

So - I have a featureless plain. You can wander with WASD and turn with the mouse (no looking up or down, I've decided). There are many cylinders, and a couple of cubes ( cylinders are better than cubes, I've decided, as the edges aren't as sharp. Sharp edges are hard to interpret.). One of the cubes plays "The Hangover Song" from Midsummer (a play with songs)*. If you have to listen to something repeatedly, it ought to be pleasurable in and of itself. You can wander this desolate videogame plain and try to find the musical cube, if you like. You can try to avoid the cylinders (though you'll eventually slide past if you walk into them long enough - another advantage). There's no failure and no success programmed in, but it's still a weird and engaging experience.

Once again, a worklog from the nightbus home from the Hackspace.

Lots of progress today, far too much for the little work I put in. Reducing the timeout on the reads from 500 ms to 10 ms has made the whole thing more responsive - still takes a few seconds to start up, but it only hung once in a day of hacking. The problems I was facing controlling the analog PWM stuff was due to having the wrong software on the Arduino - stupid stuff, but thrilling to have it fall so easily today. I wrote some stupid simple wrapper stuff for the serial stuff, which now lets you merely say VibrationScript.SetVibrate( int motor, float vibration). Hook it up to turn on on when hoping click and ah! I never get bored of physical actions being performed by a computer. A click = a buzz! How delightfully arbitrary.

"Why is it hard to do cool things?"

It's a good moan to have. It means you're trying, and you feel pain.

Some people told me that if it was easy, everyone would do it, and the coolness would be spread like margarine spread by a stingy person. You'd have to retreat to harder things to get a decent share. I can see the logic.

But I'm not sure that's all. When you build a computer in minecraft, that's cool, and the coolness doesn't depend on the tools. If this serial connection on the headband thing I'm working on had worked first time, the project would have been no worse. In fact, it would be better, because the damn thing still doesnt work properly. Jonty took the internet by storm with something he made, insomniac and irritated this morning. I don't see why coolness has to be zero-sum, anyway.

...is jwz.

Why? Because he quit programming to go do something way cooler. Because his writing about code mainly consists of him bemoaning the state of libraries and platforms that seemed entirely sensible choices at the start. Which is largely my experience too.

He cares about things just working, and being sane, and it seems to physically pain him how much shit you have to wade through sometimes.

I'm just saying I can empathize currently.

So! Progress has been made! I didn't expect this, but here we are.

The COM11 thing is resolved - Device Manager turns out to be remarkably intuitive and powerful, and let me reassign whatever-the-fuck it was on COM5 to COM11, and COM5 has now been set to be my Arduino board. So that's happy, even if it is a gotcha for running on any other machine. But fuck it, there's only one headband, how much can portability matter? (I fully expect to eat these words)

So tonight I went to London Hackspace, and as well as drinking beer and chatting, and suchlike, I worked on this headband project. You know, one of the two that I promised myself I'd finish, but the one that doesn't yet grind painfully at my soul.

The plan of attack is to get Unity talking to the Arduino board. The sensor reading isn't going to be used, so all I have to do is set some pins to output PWM (and no maxbotic setup logic to worry about!). As it happens, the bodged together protocol I wrote lets you read but not yet write. But anyway it's shonky, and standards are awesome, so lets rip it out and replace it. So now the Arduino board is running Firmata. Firmata has it's own protocol that I'm not particularly enthusiastic about writing, so I found Firmata.NET, a class for talking it in .NET.

Sophie Houlden felt like being controversial today, and sent some tweets, like so:

> I feel like being controversial again today; anyone who thinks selling pre-owned games shouldn't happen is a big fat poop head

> dont want people making money off something you have done (and already made money off)? then sell licences to play instead.

> making people who cant afford to pay the ridiculous cost of a new release feel bad makes you (as previously stated) a big fat poop head