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Started a new game, featuring a kitty cat punk band :)

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Blue Meat Blues. Or: I wrote a novel.

You can buy it. Maybe you should buy it. It’s available right now. Click here.

Here's a semi-related anecdote for you.

Mid-November last year I decided to stop eating meat. So I've been... "not eating meat" for... near to 3 months. Call it 3 months.

And when it inevitably comes up - "Why aren't you eating this or that?" I say "I don't eat meat".

"Oh you're vegetarian?"

Dot dot dot.

I don't know. Yes. No. Three months is not a long tenure. I'm hesitant to call myself a vegetarian. I'm not really qualified to talk about it. At least - I don't feel like I'm qualified to talk about it.

And so here we are. Here's the tie-in.

I wrote a book. A novel, I guess you'd call it. A 60,000-ish work of fiction. It's on Amazon. You can buy it. You can get a real-like-meat copy made of paper and you can hold it in your hands. You can read it.

But somehow - saying that; feels like I'm saying more than that. Like I'm making a bold claim.

"I'm a novelist." Or... "I'm a writer."

That's a big statement! It's a big claim.

I've got the commitment. It's not a laissez faire activity. I wrote it. I re-wrote it. I printed it out and read it and edited it and edited it.

But somehow... it feels like there's some... magical flagfall that occurs and I can suddenly, confidently say: "I wrote this book. That's what I do. Because I'm a writer."

Know-what-I'm-saying?

Imposter syndrome. I'm 99% sure that's the name of it. I had the same experience as an early game developer. You make a game. You release a game. But are you a game developer?

Who is fit to answer this question?

Ah, I think we know the answer. It's just a psychological thing.

Long lead up, huh? So let's start clean.

I wrote a book. It's called "Blue Meat Blues".

I started writing it in.... 2014. I was in Los Angeles. I'm now in Denmark, it's 2017. I've got a well-broken proof copy of the book on my shelf. It's real.

Let's talk about the story. Why not. The juice. The meat.

Blue Meat Blues.

It’s post-apocalyptic. Of course. Because... that’s my bag, I guess. It's a story about the end of the world. Or more... about after the end of the world.

But in a broader sense, it's not really about the end of the world. It's about the end of needs. A free world. A world without hunger. Without structure. Without overt purpose.

And in this world... where corrosive tar falls from the sky... where Death is no longer a constant... we find our protagonist.

A hateful individual. A being of pure self-interest. A misanthrope.

A man who hated society and the structure of humanity with such a passion that they are happy that it has died. The post-apocalyptic city is his playground - and he in turn is filled with joy.

It's me. More than likely. Some twisted version of me. I mean... that's the way it works, right? We create what we know. Or... what we think we know.

Consciously or unconsciously.

And the kicker. The ... complication - comes in the form of a man called Jesus. A man trying to bring... peace and justice and structure back to the world. The concepts that our hero despises most.

It's something. It's certainly something. I think there's some flavor in there. There are some points that I think... people may get a kick out of reading. It's violent. It's a bit hateful. It's kind of intense, in parts. There's a definite thread of ... romanticizing-the-sociopath.

But overall?

I think I'm pretty happy with it.

It's hard. The writing process is long. By the time you finish one editing pass, you're a slightly better writer. You could rewrite and make it better. And so on, and so on, until the sun dies out, and your book is still ... unfinished. But here we are. I call the book "Finished". I'm working on a sequel. I'm thinking of releasing it in installments. Mini-boss styled chunks. That'll keep the pace up-up-up.

And that's the end!

Blue Meat Blues.

Available now on Amazon. You can get it on Kindle. You can get it as a tangible object.

Who knows - maybe you'll even enjoy it.

And ... I'd say you'd definitely, though tangentially, come to know me a little better.

Though that is not exactly a solid selling point.

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Wildfire with paintbrush filter, using the Unity engine... as always... just raw pixels on texture.

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Tree structures and ‘puff painting’ on a raw texture in the Unity engine.

Like a virus. Like humanity.

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A few more dry-brushed generative patterns.

I call the upper-most cell “Joker” - for the... white/black/green/purple palette.

Pretty rough, pretty... real, huh?

Again, raw pixels on texture in the Unity engine.

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Dry-brushed, recursive subdivision.

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Extending out from the last “brush stroke” post; here’s a few variants of my favorite test texture: The couch scene from ‘The Simpsons’.

In this case, clockwise from upper left, we’ve got....

A large brush, random angles, sampling at random intervals over the texture.

A small brush, likewise. Many more brush strokes.

A mid-sized brush with long strokes but little “paint” - like a ... dry brush.

A tiny tiny brush, random sampling, random angles.

And that’s.... the paintbrush algorithm.

It’s OK. It gets toward a kind of natural look, pending settings.

And then, that very last “bonus” image there... a paintover of an architectural concept I randomly found here.

The sky, particularly - came out nicely with the strokes.

And that is that.

Again - a plain texture in the Unity engine, dumping pixels on the canvas. No plugins, no fanciness. Just... raw algorithm?

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I had been doing a bit of algorithmic... “art”, I guess you could say - in a rudimentary way. You know.. the tree structures, the ‘dry brush’ effect, etc etc

I was trying to concoct a way that I could visually treat the end result to make it more... organic and lively, still algorithmic, but maybe something that more closely emulates classical art.

So - again using Unity and a plain ol’ Texture with pixels - I put together this “Brush Stroke” algorithm.

The images you see above are like... a few thousand short brushstrokes of a single color at random angles.

The brush strokes have variance (each is rooted at a slightly different variant of the base color), and within each stroke, they have... substrokes? The individual lines the stroke is made of. These, too - have variance - to give the illusion of... brush bristles.

Overall - not a bad effect. Difficult to optimize for one reason or another, but a worthwhile piece of effort.

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Casting our respective memories backward in time by two posts; to the “flood-fill / greedy-cube” algorithm I’ve been toying with.

Here is the same algorithm, flattened, with each cube color sampling the couch scene from “The Simpsons”.

The former - coarse-grained, the latter, fine-grained.

Got to love that pink, man. 

And that blue carpet!

Classic nostalgia.

Again, using the Unity engine. This time no texture use, just... a whole bunch of unlit colors on a whole bunch of cubes.

And there you have it - a semi-pleasing tangent use for an algorithm designed for generating procedural floor-plans.

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3 Million and 5 Million steps on a random walk, respectively.

Again, pixels on a texture in the Unity engine.

A super easy one today.

It’s... 

From a given pixel... take step randomly, up, down, left or right.

Repeat.

There’s also some alpha work in there - in that each visit to a cell darkens the color slightly (I think it’s normalized across the entire canvas, but I can’t quite remember).

Allegedly - a random walk is supposed to emulate brownian motion at a certain point.

But I don’t know what I can or will do with that information.

Monday morning, 06:48, can’t hide from the fact that I’m a contributing member of the economy for much longer. 

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Take three, this time. From memory, I call this the “dry brush” algorithm.

Once more - an algorithm using the Unity engine, straight pixels onto a straight texture. 

And here is how it works:

The texture is primed with a series of pixels with an “amount” of paint assigned to each. So... r,g,b,a and... amount.

Then, a ‘dry brush’ is run over the texture at a given angle.

The rules for this brush are:

Pick up a proportion of the amount of paint on your current pixel. Mix it with whatever paint you are currently carrying. Place a proportion of your current paint onto the current pixel, mixing with whatever color is already there (e.g: the canvas color). Decrease the amount of paint you are currently carrying. If you’ve got no paint left - stop.

In the first image - the edges of the canvas are primed with black paint, and then the brush is sent horizontally and vertically a whole bunch of times.

In the second image - the base and left of the canvas are primed with black paint, and the brush is sent horizontally and upward - the latter taking on a slightly rotated, random angle.

In the final image - the canvas is randomly spattered with black primer, and random-angle, random-origin brushstrokes are applied alllll over it.

And that’s about the sum of it.

I really like this one. It’s super simple but has a dry, organic feel to it.

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Another generative algorithm - using a straight-up texture in Unity. Again... just... dumping pixels without a care in the world.

The rules? Another tree that can’t cross itself, with a maximum of 2 branches per node. But - with a sort of... more organic coloring strategy.

The background is colored by a random distribution of semi-transparent, circular ‘dots’ (like... 15 pixels in radius). That’s the black area.

The tree itself is drawn in regular and strangely-chosen pink, and then, for each node, a random circular ‘dot’ of semi-transparent pink is added.

So you get this kind of.... puffy, wild look. Something semi... space-y?

Space-y.

It’s Friday morning, 6:53am here in Denmark. 

My perception of time stretches days into their following mornings.

So: Thursday extends to ~09:00 Friday morning.

So when I say to myself “I’ll blog daily”, I’ve still got that grace period on the next morning.

The challenge, this week... is to attempt to remember what I wanted to do with my life. The enormous “perk” of living in Denmark is the short working hours and cultural aversion to overtime. I’ve got... time again.

So now I’m digging through longterm memory and Trello - trying to figure out where this crazy train is going.

Something will happen. I can tell you that much.

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Another tree. This time... with a maximum branches-per-node of like... 10, maybe. Again, just... pixels splattered onto a raw texture in Unity. Again, unable to cross itself. 1000 branches.

Or as my ultra-descriptive file-naming convention renders it:

“Virus_1000_WB_Even_2″

WB? Impossible to say.

Most knowledge is contextual.

Or... relative.

Let’s talk about relativity.

We’ll call it... moral relativity. Or... political relativity. Or... relativity of the gut.

I spent the first... 28-odd years of my life in Australia. Call it... the... lazy socialist fry-pan of the world. Limited division between rich and poor. A heaping helping of systemic racism ... but a helping that pales in comparison to America.

Socialized medicine. Socialized schooling. Welfare.

I hated it. Lazy people with... myopic, traditionalist worldviews, working together in a mass, poorly-dressed effort to pull everybody into the middle.

And so I left. And I moved to LA.

I left Australia as a... 

I don’t know what you’d call it. Economic conservative / Social Liberal.

I read “Atlas Shrugged”... and I liked it.

And then I lived in LA. With... no socialized medicine. Devastating gap between rich and poor. Under-40s crippled with education debt. At-Will employment contracts. The atmosphere of... constant fear of homelessness. Long-term safety anxiety.

But I loved it, too. At the expense of all of these bad things. The amazing domestic market. The service industry. The fact that... owing to the lack of labor laws or proper wages, everything was cheap and available and entirely at the whim of the disgusting consumer (me).

A 20-minute Uber ride for $4.80USD.

That’s insane.

And for one reason or another; I left LA for Denmark - as a pure socialist. 

I had seen what the ultimate outcomes of this economic conservatism were. Or... whatever you want to call it. 

People can’t be free - not in the libertarian sense of the word. They don’t pursue a common good. They don’t even pursue an uncommon good. They pursue... what’s good for them in context. The relative good.

They don’t band together to achieve beautiful works.

The pyramids weren’t built by consensus.

And now I am in Denmark.

Which is... effectively... Scandinavian Australia.

Socialized medicine. Socialized education.

I’ll leave the deeper social commentary until I’ve got more of a tenure to make the claim but...

I think the rest will apply.... The irresistible pull toward the middle.

Stores close here. At reasonable hours. People are well paid. Going out for dinner is expensive. Drinking at a bar? Expensive. There’s ... barely any domestic market. There’s nothing really to... do, in the “throw money at some entertainment” sense.

And it’s... because people aren’t cheap. They’re... valued.

And you know what?

I think you do.

I miss LA. The... capitalist dystopia - where today’s joy is predicated near-entirely upon generations of subtle, class-defining, society-dividing suffering.

And it’s for the most moral-relativist reason of all:

I came to LA pre-educated from a socialist system. I came... with limited debt, and relative economic freedom. I was... in the middle class. Man, maybe I was in the upper-middle class. I was (and am) more-or-less anglo-saxon, male...

Upper-middle class quasi-Anglo Saxon male?

Capitalist dystopia is built for that target market.

Disgusting, shameful, consumerist joy.

So where does that leave out politics?

And that’s where relativity comes in. This was a Pulp Fiction entry.

“All knowledge is contextual”.

Political opinions, likewise.

There is a greater right. There is a greater wrong. But they’re eclipsed on the smaller scale by the contextual, individual right - the relative, in-the-moment wrong.

“I’m bored - I can’t get a cheap beer and hotdog at 2am. Vote conservative.”

So I remain a socialist. And it’s purely by force of will. Because the gut wants what it can get - now - to the detriment of logic and the goodwill of all men.

The gut is an economic conservative / social liberal.

Did you like that?

Did you like how I somehow took a pretty basic generative tree-structure algorithm and talked about ... I guess you’d call them ‘politics’?

And some pretty heavy social commentary, I guess.

I mean... in retrospect, Australia got it pretty bad - there, but...

Relatively - that was pretty restrained. I’ve got 28-odd years of blogging to write about every tiny little contextual, relative thing I despise about that beautiful country.

Stop by some time.

Oh... and as a bit of a postscript...

“Socialist”... is a pretty heavy word. I said it in an Uber once and got a fair angry response from the driver.... call it Irony - socialism would have made his life much better.

But I obviously mean “Socialist” in the Danish way. The... “Let’s take ~52% of your salary and make sure everybody is well-fed, healthy, educated and such, and then you can live in a society with all of those things as given.”

I mean... if you’ve got a problem with that...

You’re that target market I referenced above.

The tree never crosses itself.

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It’s the latter half of 2016. Between now and my last entry, I’ve moved from Los Angeles to Denmark. 

And for some reason, during the early Denmark Days, staying temporarily in a Bed+Breakfast in a sub-10,000 population town, I thought I might invest some of my free time in messing with some quasi-’generative’ algorithms.

So prepare your eyes. Daily; In rough chronological order from my “Backup-from-the-laptop” folder.

This is.... 10,000 ‘branches’ on a tree. The rule is... each node can only branch up to 3 times, no branch can overlap another, and that’s... it.

And it’s inexplicably red.

Created in Unity, just... dumping pixels onto a texture.

My phone will remind me to say words similar to this; every day... for like ~60 days. 

And somewhere in there, I’m hoping I’ll just sort of magically be propelled back into the habit of blogging and... thinking about productive things.

It’s habit, not divine inspiration, I guess.

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We’ve started work on a new game idea! I put together this little voxel scene to get a feel for how the game will look. 

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There’s something really satisfying about meticulously setting up a scene... and then just completely destroying it.

I got the trial of ProBuilder to check it out, and I liked it so much I bought the Pro version. It’s a really solid tool, and for someone like me with very little 3D modelling experience, it’s very easy to learn and use. 

-Jessica  @thedopplerduck

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So, after my experiments earlier this week, I’ve moved back to creating organic drawings based on structures. Rather than using individual elements such as stairs for the basis, like I did last week, I’ve based my drawings on existing buildings. I’ve done two so far, and I’ve tried to base them on iconic and architectural distinct buildings.

I started with the Taj Mahal, it has such beautiful forms and is easy to break into parts to reproduce in an organic style. I’m pretty happy with how it turned out. I think if I did it again, I would make the leaf shapes on the domes larger and maybe more detailed. 

Also, my cat likes to drink from the tap in the bath, where her paws and fur get wet. She also likes to sit on whatever I’m working on, so that’s why there are big blue smudge marks on this picture - from her little wet paws :P

The next one I did is based on the Chrysler Building, but I only did the top section, so it isn’t really recognisable as a high rise building - it looks more like a layer cake (Yum. Now I want cake!)

The idea behind doing this was to get an idea of how to break buildings/structures into sections that we could apply different treatments to. Eventually we want to be able to procedurally create buildings, where we have assigned different treatments for the various parts that make up a building.