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whatami-doing · 5 months ago

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The Games We Played

Jon joined our friend group in, I think, 1999. Like any established clique it was no small feat to work one’s way into the mix, but Jon shared something that connected each of us: games.

In order to to illustrate how Jon fit in, a bit of context is required. In junior high I was very fortunate to meet Adam. Adam was the recipient of almost constant bullying, and worse bullying than I received (although he always remained defiant in the face of it.) As two loners with a crew of enemies looking to harass us we quickly bonded, and that bond grew even stronger when Adam discovered I played Dungeons & Dragons (albeit only by myself and only with The Classic Dungeons and Dragons Game, a simplified board game-like version of D&D suitable for new comers.) “Come over and play some real D&D with us” he told me, and so our friend group was created by our shared enjoyment of D&D.

By the end of high school our circle of somewhat outcast, nerdy, misfit friends was firmly established, and so it came as a bit of a surprise when one day Adam brought Jon around. In the summer between grades 11 and 12 Adam attended summer school at a different high school than the one we were enrolled in, and there he met Jon. Adam quickly discovered that Jon was also a Dungeons & Dragons player, and so he was invited to the party.

The first game Jon introduced me to was hacky sack. Hacky sack is something that I legitimately would never have tried if it weren’t for Jon. Even in the pre-meme era of the 90s, hacky sack had an almost comical reputation as a game played exclusively by dreadlocked white guys who smelled like patchouli, and being someone who listened to punk rock I was very uninterested in doing anything like that. But Jon would bring his hacky sack to Adam’s house and break it out when we made our way outside to cause mischief in the neighbourhood.

The most ridiculous hacky sack moves were always the ones Jon gravitated towards. He showed me knee-stalls and jesters and flippy dippy moves that I can’t remember the names of, and, drawn in by the bombastic nature of the techniques he championed, I was soon a dedicated hacky sacker. I’ll always remember our awkward attempts at doing “The Scorpion”, a wildly impractical and unnecessary method of serving the hack that involved holding it in between your feet, falling forward into a handstand, and launching it over your head by whipping your legs upwards in a sort of donkey kick that terminated before actually doing a front flip.

Finding those weird, awkward, sub-optimal and impractical methods of playing a game was always Jon’s way. But even with our bizarre selection of maneuvers, hacky sack under a normal set of rules was not quite enough for him. As such, he found a way of pushing the very notion of hacky sack to its logical limits with something he called Super Hack. A game of Super Hack started innocently enough, with the server popping the sack up in the air so they could kick, knee or otherwise bounce it to the other player. But what set Super Sack apart from normal hacky sack was the sheer scale.

The playing field for Super Sack was the street outside Adam’s house, which gave us the space required for such an unusual version of the game. Once the server felt they had a reasonable amount of control over the bouncing sack they would then commence the part of Super Sack that set it apart from a mere mortal’s version of the game: they would boot it as hard as they could 50 feet down the street where the other player, who waited like a football receiver, was supposed to somehow deal with a bean filled bag the size of a golf ball flying through the air like a homerun hit. They would scramble to and fro, attempting to estimate where the tiny sack may land, and try to intercept it with a strike that had just enough force to bounce the hack in a manner that allowed them to keep control of it, but not so much force that it simply launched through the air uncontrollably due to its velocity. At this point, if we were lucky, they would then soccer kick the sack as hard as they could, launching it back down the street. It was highly unusual to get even two rallies in this game, let alone more, and thus the game was considered a success any time the sack made it back to the server at all.

The beginning of our friendship also coincided with the era in which the internet was becoming a mainstay of most households. The internet itself, webpages, forums, search engines, messaging services and so on, weren’t the most important thing to us though. Instead the internet was primarily a vehicle for playing games with each other. This was after all a time when the only way to play games with your friends was to all cram in front of the same TV with four controllers and do your best not to cheat by looking at another player’s part of screen (or maybe just look at it on purpose) so the internet was a literal game changer.

Early on Jon and I played a lot of the original Counterstrike, but in classic Jon style he was not interested in playing the game “correctly.” Instead of buying the standard, and actually effective, weapons and sitting at a corner waiting to ambush someone, he came up with a much more fun and unpopular strategy. We would buy cheap and under-powered weapons as quickly as possible and sprint straight at the enemy spawn point so quickly that we (sometimes) managed to upend entire games with our unexpected aggressiveness. Our chants of “TMP! TMP!” became a signal to the other players on our team that their teammates were about to do something very stupid, and so our bold rushes were not popular, but it didn’t matter because they were very fun. Sometimes it would even work, and the opposing players, expecting everyone to play the first rounds in a conservative manner, would be caught off guard by Jon’s fearless and under-armed onslaught tactic. In these admittedly rare instances we would maraud into the home base of our enemies while they were relaxing and buying miscellaneous gear, and plow through them with abandon, stunning even our teammates with this entirely unique approach.

We played so much on one particular server, run by a clan called Army of Llamas, that we became sort of honourary members, in no small part to the distinctive and recognizable nature of Jon’s bizarre strategies. But, our playstyle was not exactly professional level, so instead of making us full teammates they gave us a special tag to put in front of our names that identified us as sort of clan associates. This designation afforded us limited admin privileges, like the ability to kick unruly or cheating players.

Around the end of our time at university Jon got the opportunity to go to Japan to teach English (sort of). He posted on the Army of Llamas forum that he would be leaving the server because he wouldn’t be able to play Counterstrike from the other side of the planet. There was an outpouring of well-wishes from all the members, but one particular member (I believe he had the very-online name of Plunki perhaps?) stood out in his kind words for Jon. Unbeknownst to me, Jon played quite often with Plunki. In his farewell post, Plunki explained that Jon had been there for him during some very hard times, playing Counterstrike late into the night and helping to distract Plunki from his problems in life. This was always Jon: a friend and supporter, even if only online, when someone needed it most.

It turned out that Jon’s trip to Japan would have a lot less teaching of English and way more Counterstrike playing than he initially estimated. One of his professors encouraged him to go to Japan under the pretense that there was almost definitely a teaching gig available, but “almost definitely” was perhaps a bit optimistic. When Jon arrived there was no teaching job available, but he was offered a small room in an apartment with another English teacher. Though his English teaching job had evaporated, Jon somehow managed to land a job working as a web designer, a vocation for which Jon had little to no experience, although no one at the company seemed to mind. I distinctly remember Jon talking with me online during this period, explaining that he was putting crappy pictures of airplanes on a website that he didn’t actually understand the purpose of, but it didn’t matter because they seemed to be perfectly happy with his work.

Landing this gig was fortuitous for Jon, not just because he needed a job, but because his host had started asking him to leave for the entire day so he could bring what I will call “guests” home. Not having a lease, Jon didn’t have much choice but to acquiesce, and not having anywhere else to go, Jon started to spend his nights sleeping in the office of the web design firm. He would then leave first thing in the morning to walk around the block and return when the office officially opened, so as to not raise suspicion that he was sleeping at his desk.

This may sound like a rough situation, which it may have been, but there was an upside. You see, Jon, being in an empty office all night, had access to a computer and internet, and was able to log onto Counterstrike after work when all his coworkers had left. I would stay up very late into the morning, as the time difference required, and we would both head to the Army of Llamas server to play together. The latency Jon had in this situation was noticeable, and the technical issues sometimes rendered the game unplayable for him, but high performance wasn’t really the point. Somehow we managed to connect, and somehow Jon managed to find time for me even on the other side of the planet, all while dealing with some truly unusual living arrangements.

Another game Jon got me into was ultimate frisbee, at least on a very casual level, through his sister Liz. Liz would organize very well-attended games of Ultimate Frisbee on the fields of the commons, and Jon invited me along. Frisbee, like hacky sack, was something I almost definitely never would have played if it weren’t for Jon. Some of the attendees were quite good at Ultimate, as they called it, but I can’t say the same for us. But of course, in typical Jon fashion, the point wasn’t to be good, but to be ridiculous. Unnecessary under-the-leg throws, overhand tosses that made the frisbee zip through the air like a tomahawk, and ludicrous Hail Mary attempts from across the field were the norm. Jon’s wild approach of distorting the game by pushing it to its limits made its way into every game, even offbeat and unusual ones like Ultimate. After all, why play normal when you can play ridiculous? It was the Jon way.

None of us had cars in our teens and university years, and me and Jon both lived at the edge of the city proper, so getting downtown to play frisbee was a trek. As such we walked almost everywheres. I remember walking from our neighbourhood all the way downtown to play Ultimate, which according to google maps is something like 8kms, or around a 2 hour walk. We would then play Ultimate for a few hours, then walk all the way back when we were done. Part of the reason for these absurdly long outings was our youthful energy, combined with a lack of vehicular transportation, but it was also just Jon’s way. Many times after a night out with friends we ended up taking impractically long walks back home, because why not? Most people would balk at the notion of such a choice and decide instead to take a cab or bus or anything else, but Jon didn’t tend to think of things in such a manner. If it was possible, you just did it, so forget about letting your doubts and worries about what might happen get in the way. Just walk home. After all, why walk normal when you can walk ridiculous?

Even Jon’s choices of outfit during these walking treks seemed to push the boundaries of what most might deem normal given the weather conditions. I distinctly remember walking to a bar one night to meet some friends, a foot or two of fresh snow on the ground, with Jon wearing shorts and sandals. Again, why walk normal when you can walk ridiculous? Shorts and sandals in the snow worked perfectly fine, it turned out.

As is evident by his infectious enthusiasm for hacky sack and frisbee, Jon introduced me to a lot of things. I distinctly remember working at HMV in the 2000s when Jon dropped by to lend me a fantasy book. This was a period in my life when I was trying to move on from most nerdy interests, having had enough of the sort of undeservedly egotistical people that such activities attract, so I took the book but never read it. Jon asked a couple of times about whether I had read it and I could only tell him I hadn’t gotten around to it yet. I trusted Jon’s recommendations, but could not bring myself to stomach any more sword and sorcery stuff.

The title of that book? Game of Thrones. Well before the wildly popular phenomenon of the GoT TV show, Jon had given me the opportunity to be one of those people who could say “Oh yeah I’ve already read all those books” when the first episode was released. I was too busy trying to be cool, or at least avoid being nerdy, to see what was clearly a cool recommendation from Jon. Years later we would get into the GoT boardgame, organized by our friend Ben, and had the experience of being on the other side of some ridiculous boundary-pushing gameplay, coordinated by someone other than Jon, when two of Ben’s friends decided to team up and “co-win” the game. Ben was adamant that such a thing was completely impossible given the rules. Jon thought it was a fairly funny way to end the game, and a relatively tame way at that, given our experience playing table top games with some of the most ruthless nerds you can imagine. Why win normal when you can win ridiculous? Game recognizes game, as they say.

Like many 20ish year olds in the 2000s, we also got pretty heavily into Guitar Hero and Rock Band. Being 20 year olds, we also liked to get together with our friends for drinks. Sometimes we even combined the two. It was on one of these fateful nights that Jon orchestrated an incredible vocal performance of the Rock Band version of The Beastie Boys’ song Sabotage, with the rest of us accompanying him on the guitar and drums. A great Rock Band vocal performance is somewhat impressive, especially one executed on a few (too many) drinks, but the game’s mere ranking of Jon’s singing was not what made it special.

In classic Jon style, he decided to have some fun with the game, poking and prodding at how the song was supposed to be performed. He replaced an actual word with some nonsense here, added an expletive there, and generally tweaked the lyrics for his, and our, enjoyment. Before long Jon had totally rearranged the classic rap-rock song into a Monty Python-esque ballad of absurdity. Not only that, but he realized during this process that his “mistakes” were actually not making much of any difference to his score. Emboldened by this fact he went all in on the schtick, saying absolutely anything at all with a roughly Sabotage-like rhythm, spewing total jibberish while the points racked up.

It was absolutely hilarious to experience, made all the more amazing by his final score: a perfect 100%. In an incredible turn of fate someone captured this absurd feat on video, immortalizing it forever. Even without the video though, it became a tale told and retold in awed tones in our friend group, a borderline mythical achievement of ridiculous showmanship and creativity that none us could ever forget or replicate.

Jon also introduced me to a computer game called Chivalry. Chivalry was an online multiplayer FPS, or First Person Slasher, which is to say it was a game in which you ran around with swords chopping each others’ heads off. While this may sound like a serious sort of affair I am here to say that it absolutely was not. Chivalry was deeply silly, funny, and un-serious. One of the most hilarious features of it was the ability to press a button and make your medieval sword guy say a line out loud, so that other players nearby could hear it. It was not uncommon to see burly armor men running around yelling “Arghhhhh!” or “Sorry!” at each other. The game was also visually ridiculous, having made the strange choice to represent a character looking up or down by having them tilt their entire torso at the hip backwards or forwards, resulting in a ludicrous looking drinking-bird-toy sort of wobble when you looked at the sky or ground.

These two unusual features, combined with Jon’s ability to bend any game into his own unique interpretation, resulted in one of the most memorable experiences I’ve ever had in gaming. We were playing together on what is called a free-for-all server, where it is every player for themselves, so even Jon and I would have to fight if we encountered one another. After fending off multiple opponents Jon fled into a small room to recuperate, only to find another player kitty-corner to him with the same plan. They stared each other down for a moment or two, then exchanged a few whiffed swings, managing to avoid damaging one another, but also losing their chance to recover their stamina. Seeing that they were at a stalemate, they reached a truce by bowing to each other with exaggerated flops backwards and forwards, each of them slowly looking up and down to roughly simulate a real-life bow, only far more ridiculous looking.

It was at this point that Jon made a fateful decision. He would make his big, burly knight, wearing full plate armor and carrying a huge sledgehammer, look straight upwards, bending at his waist so his upper body faced straight up towards the ceiling, then press the button that made his knight exclaim “Sorry!” to his would-be opponent. His opponent, understanding perfectly this obvious sign of comradery, did the same, wobbling his body to and fro while blurting a gruff sorry.

It was at this point that I walked in with my knight, having heard the series of sorries. I immediately recognized what was happening and chimed in with my own body wobbling “sorry!” And so there we were, three battle-hardened knights, our upper bodies flopping around wildly yelling “sorry!” as often as the game would allow.

This alone would have been worthy of memory, a silly and friendly exchange in an otherwise antagonistic and aggressive game. But what came next is what made Jon’s singular way of playing games most memorable. You see, other players, also hearing the cacophony of sorries that our combatants bellowed, wandered in to the room, and in a form of communication that can only be likened to something like a bird’s dance of romance, immediately began imitating us. Before long the entire server, all 24 players, were stuffed into the little room, yelling apologies at no one and everyone, whipping their torsos around violently with not a drop of blood shed. It seemed obvious at this point that we should take the show on the road, and so everyone spilled out of the room in a messy single file, whipping their bodies forward and back, exclaiming to the world that they were sorry.

It was utterly ridiculous, but also oddly beautiful. Two dozen strangers, in a game about chopping everyone’s limbs off, winding their way through the game map in an absurd procession of apologies and upper-body gymnastics. Because of Jon, and in total defiance of the game’s seeming rules, we all banded together to both mock and honour it. A joyful expression of actual enjoyment in spite of how things are supposed to be done. This was why I, and many others, so enjoyed played games with Jon.

In the last few years Jon introduced me to Apex Legends, an online free-to-play game. I was deeply skeptical of free-to-play games, but during a visit to my place he gave me the chance to try it out, and I enjoyed it enough to go out and buy a used Playstation so I could join in. Apex was what they call a Battle Royale, involving 60 players, which brought with it the frustrations of dealing with antagonistic strangers online, but also allowed us to play with other friends. Just like in the old Counterstrike days we managed to become members of an existing community of players, some of whom we knew in real life, but some of whom were online-only acquaintances, where we were welcomed once again due to Jon’s distinctive and unmistakable playing philosophy.

I also had two children in this period, but, despite the fact that children often result in lapsed friendships, Jon always managed to find a way to meet me online. In between shifts of his work, and during my children’s naps, we logged on to Apex to distract ourselves with yet another in a long line of dumb videogames while we chatted and kept up on each other’s lives. Having two young children was extremely trying, but once again Jon was there, against all the odds, to be a friend in tough times.

Apex was our mainstay for a few years, but like any game it began to grow stale after a while, and so we were lucky that Helldivers 2 was released. Jon and I had played a bit of the first game in the series and enjoyed it, but the second game was a massive leap in quality. We had an immense amount of fun with it, but, unlike Apex, it was a small scale cooperative game. No unpredictable strangers required, no server full of miscellaneous players. It was just Jon and I, hanging out online, talking about our day, blasting aliens and robots into oblivion, laughing as our over-enthusiastic space troopers got launched through the air by explosions, enjoying some time where we didn’t have to think about whatever difficulties we were having in our day to day.

The games came and went, but Jon was always there. In the last years we met online most days, but it wasn’t unusual for one of us to be absent for whatever reason that any adult has to sacrifice time with their friends, and so I wasn’t particularly surprised when one day he wasn’t online. Finding out later that day that he had passed was devastating. I’ll always miss him.

Love you and miss you, Jon. Here’s to all the games we played.

#Jon #videogames

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whatami-doing · 7 years ago

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TRAVEL TOMES, CHINA - ANCIENT SORCERIES by ALGERNON BLACKWOOD

SEPTEMBER 14th to 29th

Our trip to China was an intense 2 week whirlwind. Every day we were up at 7AM to see everything that our excellent guides could possibly show us. Tiananmen Square, Yellow Mountain, the Forbidden City, and the Terracotta Warriors are some of the more recognizable sites, but there were just as many unexpected experiences too. Dinner with a local kung fu instructor (who taught Jet Li!), conversation with an 80 year old man learning English, awkward photos with locals amazed at red hair. Sometimes we’d travel by bus to see two or more sights in one day. Constant noise, ever-present crowds, ceaseless surprises.

With such an overwhelming rush of new experiences to process, you'd think a book with familiar stories would be the wisest accompaniment. Instead, Algernon Blackwood’s Ancient Sorceries, a compilation of weird short stories about extraordinary and incomprehensible forces, was a surprisingly comforting fit.

Algernon, an adventurous and intrepid world traveler, wrote semi-autobiographical tales of adventure in unfamiliar lands. These adventures inevitably take harrowing turns when esoteric mythical beings set their focus on the unwitting characters. The result is a series of stories that mirror the sensory overload of absorbing an enormous amount of novel stimulus in an exciting and at times seemingly contradictory place. Algernon's stories are a traveler's comfort, a commiserating voice depicting baffling experiences in unfamiliar lands, while also serving as a fantastical diversion from the unceasing flow of new experiences that traveling through a dense country like China offers.

The Wendigo, a tale of weird horror based on the ancient Algonquian myth of the titular winter elemental, was the one that struck me most. Its depiction of a team of hardened and skeptical outdoorsman slowly realizing that their expedition through a Canadian forest has brought them in contact with a strange corrupting force is highly effective.

The Man Who Loves The Trees was the most emotionally impactful of the stories, telling the tale of an elderly former traveler who develops a bizarre fascination with the woods surrounding his home while his pious and worried wife looks on in futility.

#travel #books #traveltomes #review

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whatami-doing · 7 years ago

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LOVE2D Build Scripting

I recently participated in the Ludum Dare 41 game jam and released a small battle-royale/arcade-high-score mashup game called The Royale We. Even though it got completely buried among all the competition I’m pretty happy with what I accomplished.

It’s a quick game and there’s not a ton to it, but it helped me solidify some of the roadblocks in my game design process in LOVE2D. I’ve been slowly building up a code base so that I can quickly develop and release games, but had been getting a bit bogged down with coding experiments that weren’t really going anywhere. Doing Ludum Dare forced me to focus on more relevant issues. One of those was the LOVE2D’s build process.

BACKGROUND

If you’d like to skip straight to seeing the script, check it out on GitHub.

LOVE2D is a great engine for 2D games but it lacks some of the more slick release features of GameMaker or Unity. In order to build a game on Windows you have to package your code into a zip file, change its extension from .zip to .love, run a command that turns that archive into an exe, put the exe in a folder with a bunch of dll files, then zip THAT package for distribution on a site like itch.io.

None of this is particularly difficult, but it can all be time consuming and frustrating when you’re trying to quickly iterate on a design and put out an update, so I decided I would finally dive into some scripting that could get the job done for me.

There’s already a few good solutions to this issue, but they all seemed to have the problem that they might take more work and frustration to get running than simply doing the build manually. When you’re in the process of jamming you don’t have the time or patience to mess with dependencies and install issues and so on, and I personally find that sometimes getting other coders’ software running, even very good software, can be more of a pain than simply making my own solution.

So I dug into Windows command scripting, and I’m quite happy with the results.

THE SCRIPT

The first step in the process was to find out how to zip files with the command line in Windows. Turns out you need an up to date version of Powershell so you can run .Net functions. Most Windows 7 or higher computers SHOULD have Powershell installed already, but mine was in a weird folder and didn’t work. I ended up having to install Windows Management Framework 4.0, whatever that is. So ironically my solution that wasn’t supposed to have any weird dependency issues had one right off the bat, but I think it was worth it to fix because my command line had been complaining to me about how Powershell was out of date for a long time, and now that it’s updated I can make use of all its features for future scripting.

The rest of the commands are all standard command line stuff that doesn’t require Powershell.

SET GAMENAME=gamename SET LOVEDIR="E:\Documents\Game Design\LOVE" SET "PROJECTSDIR=E:\Documents\Game Design\LOVE Projects\" mkdir %GAMENAME% copy /b %LOVEDIR%\love.dll %GAMENAME%\love.dll copy /b %LOVEDIR%\lua51.dll %GAMENAME%\lua51.dll copy /b %LOVEDIR%\mpg123.dll %GAMENAME%\mpg123.dll copy /b %LOVEDIR%\msvcp120.dll %GAMENAME%\msvcp120.dll copy /b %LOVEDIR%\msvcr120.dll %GAMENAME%\msvcr120.dll copy /b %LOVEDIR%\OpenAL32.dll %GAMENAME%\OpenAL32.dll copy /b %LOVEDIR%\SDL2.dll %GAMENAME%\SDL2.dll powershell.exe -nologo -noprofile -command "& { Add-Type -A 'System.IO.Compression.FileSystem'; [IO.Compression.ZipFile]::CreateFromDirectory($env:PROJECTSDIR + $env:GAMENAME, $env:GAMENAME + '\' + $env:GAMENAME + '.love'); }" copy /b %LOVEDIR%\love.exe+%GAMENAME%\%GAMENAME%.love %GAMENAME%\%GAMENAME%.exe del %GAMENAME%\%GAMENAME%.love powershell.exe -nologo -noprofile -command "& { Add-Type -A 'System.IO.Compression.FileSystem'; [IO.Compression.ZipFile]::CreateFromDirectory($env:GAMENAME, $env:GAMENAME + '.zip', 'Optimal', 'true'); }"

First we set a few variables. GAMENAME is the name of the folder where your LOVE2D and Lua code for the game are, as well as the name that will be given to the zip folder created by the script.

LOVEDIR is where love.exe and all the necessary dll files are installed.

PROJECTSDIR is the folder where your LOVE projects are. There should be a folder called GAMENAME in here that contains your game’s Lua/LOVE2D code.

You might notice that some of these variable declarations have different quotation schemes. Some have the whole declaration quoted, others just have the value quoted. This was one of the weirdest parts of batch scripting, and I admit I don’t fully understand why it had to be this way. Basically different quotation schemes are interpreted differently by the script, and interact in different ways when passed to Powershell.

Next we make a directory with mkdir. This directory is made in whatever folder the script is run. I prefer to keep the script on my desktop so that everything the script creates is right on my desktop, quick and easy to access.

Next we copy all the necessary dll files from the LOVE install directory into the game directory we just created. These dlls must be included with your game’s exe in order for it to run on other people’s machines.

Next we get into the meat of the script, zipping everything up into packages. We have to take all the game’s Lua code in the projects folder and compress it into an archive so that LOVE can do its build process on it. This requires the CreateFromDirectory function in the IO.Compression.FileSystem .Net library, which requires Powershell to run on command line.

There’s a lot going on here, but the most important parts are 1) The archive created from the game’s code must have a .love extension, not a .zip extensions, and 2) You can’t reference the variables we declared earlier in the script in Powershell the same way you normally would. Instead of surrounding the variable name with % characters, we have to access the command line environment that Powershell is running in, using $env: followed by the variable name.

Next we build an exe for the game from the .love archive and put it in the folder we created at the beginning of the script, where we put all the dlls earlier. This command is always used when building with LOVE2D, and is covered by LOVE2D distribution tutorial.

Finally we delete the .love archive, since it is no longer necessary, and zip the whole folder up into a zip archive for distribution on a site like itch.io! The only big difference between this and our earlier archive command you might notice is that it has ‘Optimal’ and ‘true’ at the end of it. The ‘true’ boolean is just telling the archiver to put all the contents in a folder in the archive, rather than putting the contents straight into the archive, and the ‘Optimal’ is the compression level, which just has to be input before the folder boolean.

And that’s pretty much it! I’m really happy with how this turned out. It might not be the best solution for everyone, since it makes some assumptions about folder structure and organization, but it’s a tiny file, simple for me to use, and I have full control over the process. I learned a bunch about scripting and I’m looking forward to doing more scripting and automation in the future.

#game design #videogames #ludum dare #game jam #coding #programming #love2d

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whatami-doing · 8 years ago

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ONE OF A KIND nanogenmo entry

I just finished my nanogenmo entry for this year and decided I’d write a bit about it. It’s called ONE OF A KIND, and it’s a super exclusive generated novel where each user gets to enter their own character names, but each user only gets ONE book.

If you’d just like to skip straight to getting an extremely exclusive one of a kind book, give me a shout on twitter and I’ll set you up with an account. The site is here, but you’ll need to get in contact with me to set up an account.

This was my first time making a project for nanogenmo. I wanted to take a bit of a break from doing game design/programming, and a month long jam that I could take my time with was ideal. Also it gave me an excuse to mess around with Lua in a command line environment for the first time, and I love Lua because it’s the best programming language.

THE CONCEPT

Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about how anything could possibly be unique and personal in the current age of mass communication and social media. A few decades ago when media was limited by its physical format, finding a song or book or videogame that resonated with you was a bit of a remarkable event, a serendipitous joining of a person with something they didn’t even realize they needed in their life. Even in the early days of the internet finding things was a hunt, searching through the weird corners of warez sites and peer-to-peer programs for that game you played one time that you can’t remember the name of.

Now with the massive proliferation of the internet and digital content, pretty much any product you can imagine exists right at your fingertips. This is arguably a good thing; the democratization of media distribution has helped artists and creators who never would have reached anyone without the aid of a big publisher. But that hasn’t stopped me from maligning the near extinction of personal discovery.

This phenomenon of super-availability is taken to its extreme when we consider generated content. With automation of content creation not only are products highly available, but the possibility of uniqueness becomes in principal almost impossible. When the cost of creating new content is essentially reduced to zero, products cease to be unique and start to be just another drop in the ocean of more of the same-but-kind-of-different copies. The past problem of “how do I get that unique thing I want?” has been turned on its head, and now we have the problem of “how can we have anything unique when digital copies and automatic generation make content ubiquitous?”

So I came up with the idea of making unique, personalized content that is accessible by only one person. Rather than make an on-demand book generator that spits out books constantly, I decided to make a book generator that requires a unique username and password, and can only generate ONE book per user. The user gets to customize their book by entering their own character names, but they don’t get any second chances. The character names they choose and the randomly generated book they end up with is the only one they get.

THE PROJECT

The project is web-based, housed on a site that is password protected. Only users with a username and password can access the site. The user has to enter names for a protagonist and antagonist, and a unique .txt file is generated. Once the user generates a book their username can’t be used to generate another book, they are just redirected back to the book they originally created.

The actual book generation is done by a Lua script. Years ago in school I studied some philosophy of language and a big deal was made out of how human languages are recursive. That is to say, a sentence can in principal go on forever, meaning there are an infinite number of possible sentences that can be made.

I wanted to capture this recursive nature of language, so the Lua script I wrote uses a series of recursive functions that first make a book, then chapters, then paragraphs, then sentences until the book is complete.

The individual sentences are the main building block of the books, and are also created recursively. The method I used chooses sentence-parts, like verb, adverb, noun, etc. and inserts them into the sentence. Each sentence-part has a group of simple rules it must follow which tell it what sentence-parts can follow it. As sentence-parts are inserted, they determine what sentence-parts can be chosen next until a conclusion is chosen. When a sentence is concluded, each sentence-part is replaced with a random word of that sentence-part-type, so for example a noun could be replaced with “car” or “dog.”

While this method may not make the most natural sounding sentences, I found it much preferable to the mad-libs approach of making predefined sentence-types and plugging in words. This recursive method makes the sentences feel like they have a life of their own, and creates a unique style that pushes the recursive aspect of language very hard. The result vary from weird and alien sounding to surprisingly poetic.

The rest of the code is web stuff connecting the user to the Lua script. If anyone is interested in reading more about it I can elaborate on it. I learned a lot about web programming in the process, but I imagine it’s also not the most exciting thing to read about.

The only parts of the project I used that weren’t created by me were LIP.lua, a library used to load words from .ini files, and Desi Quintans’ noun list, which I didn’t get a chance to edit, so it sometimes gives some weird nouns.

LIMITATIONS AND FUTURE PLANS

Right now there isn’t much structure to the chapters and paragraphs, their length is only dictated by randomly generated counts. In the future I’d like to make chapters and paragraphs conclude not merely when they reach a certain length, but when they’ve reached some sort of logical plot-based conclusion.

The characters also don’t have any inherent meaning right now, and are just inserted when proper noun sentence-parts are chosen. Having the characters interact with the paragraphs and chapters to link into the plot would make the books much more interesting.

These chapter and paragraph creation methods would also work recursively, working away until they reach a logical conclusion.

The sentences themselves also tend to be random to the point mushing into a bit of that sameyness I mentioned earlier, that makes them feel not so unique or meaningful.

Finally I’d really like to get .pdf generation working, so the user doesn’t get a simple .txt file, but a nicely formatted e-book. I toyed around with Luahpdf for a bit but fully implementing it wasn’t in the scope of the project this year.

If there’s any interest in this project I’ll develop it more for next year’s nanogenmo.

Thanks for reading!

#procedural #generation #nanogenmo #novel #writing

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whatami-doing · 8 years ago

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1000 Voices

Recently @moshboy completed his 1000 Voices thread, an enormous tweet chain shedding light on mostly obscure gamemakers who create small, weird, personal games. The majority of them are individual creations, peculiar labours of love that are a direct reflection of the person who made them. They are indie games, but are almost never made for profit. Instead, they are works of personal expression that don't fit easily into the dominant industry narrative of highly polished and successful indie games that manage to break into financial success. I was honoured to be included in the list with my Pico-8 game Tiny Parkour, a game that scratched an itch I've wanted to see in videogames since I was in grade 4. I was also lucky to have had a (tiny) bit of exposure already, having released Spacetank 9000 for Pico-8 Jam #2, which was well-received and had a bit of press coverage.

So, my inclusion in the 1000 Voices thread was encouraging and exciting, but not my first experience with exposure. Despite this, moshboy’s curation was one of the most encouraging things to happen in my short game development career. In the spirit of the 1000 Voices thread, I'd like to talk a bit about moshboy's more obscure work and what it means.

I was first exposed to moshboy's small games curation when he posted my first completed game, L'appel du Vide, on his blog called Oddities. I remember being struck by the description of Oddities and the games it curated, which was something like "the digital trash can." I made L'appel du Vide for Ruin Jam at a time when the game industry was facing the ugliest results of its pandering consumerism. Ruin Jam was a rebuke of the entitled and malicious demands of a campaign of self-identifying gamers who marched under a mish-mash of contradictory causes. Intertwined within these mostly sexist and racist causes was the notion that gamemakers should be held responsible for their "bad" games, and that "gamers" should organize and punish these gamemakers and the journalists who covered them. Ruin Jam was a protest of this movement, an act of defiance by gamemakers who asserted their right to make unconventional, weird, "bad" games. So L'appel du Vide, along with most of the games in Ruin Jam, was an act of protest. It's a game with low-res graphics, lo-fi sfx, no score, no skill required, no winning, no losing, no right or wrong way to play, and no explicit narrative. It's everything that the coalition of angry gamers would consider trash, an unforgivable sin in the game industry. It was also a learning experience for me that helped reinforce my opposition to the ugly gamer movement. I had worked on coding small games before, but had never truly finished and released anything. Even this small, seemingly simple game was a serious challenge to complete, and gave me an appreciation for anyone who can muster up the conviction to release a game. While no game is above well-considered criticism, calling developers "lazy" when they work tirelessly to release a game against all odds is the most insipid and ill-informed criticism possible, and completing a game was the best education of that.

But besides being a protest, L'appel du Vide was also a very personal game, an attempt to capture the sensation of my recurring dreams of falling deep into the ocean and never coming back up. Releasing such a personal experience that very few people could relate to or even recognize wasn't a direct criticism of a movement like many of the games in Ruin Jam, but an attempt to recreate an entirely subjective experience in the hopes that it would evoke a fraction of the emotion that I felt in my dreams. L'appel du Vide went completely unnoticed at the end of Ruin Jam, passed over for games that made more explicit criticisms of the "gamer" movement or whose creators were higher profile than I. This was the outcome I expected. I was aware that a developer's first release almost always goes unnoticed, and had fully prepared myself for that result. Nonetheless, there is always a sense of melancholy that accompanies a deeply personal creation being relegated to complete obscurity, regardless of what medium it's created in. Even with my extremely low expectations, it was still difficult to reconcile the profound feeling of connection I had to my creation with the completely ambivalent reaction of the rest of the world. So when moshboy discovered L'appel du Vide well after its release, there was a sense that the game had served it's purpose. Someone out there had seen at least a glimpse of the emotion I hoped to evoke, and it made enough of an impact that they felt it had a place somewhere other than the digital trash heap where the vast majority of meaningful creations are left.

It may be a cliche to say it, but all it takes is one person finding value in your creation to make it feel like it has some value in the world. For me, and as many as 1000 other game makers, moshboy is that person. Videogames still inhabit a precarious place in culture and society, even years after the hateful movement that spawned out of them, dredging up uncomfortable realities about the industry and its relationship with its consumers. The culture at large is no closer to coming to any meaningful idea of how to conceive of video games as anything other than a narrow but profitable sliver of the entertainment industry. They are still viewed mainly as products to be churned out, consumed, rated based on how much of our time they were able to dominate, and finally discarded.

I would argue that if we're to ever move beyond this paradigm it won't be academic discussion of valid games criticism or analysis of interactivity that will get us there (even though these are important forms of engagement with games in their own right) but people like moshboy who see and feel the personal in games and make connections with them that amount to more than just a relationship of consumption. Without the personal, videogames are nothing more than software, and without advocates and curators like moshboy, personal games will go unappreciated in the trash heap of the internet.

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whatami-doing · 12 years ago

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WHAT AM I PLAYING: ULTIMA 7

Recently I have been playing the old classic Ultima 7. You can buy it on GoG.com for pretty cheap, that's where I got it, and it's on sale right now. It's an RPG from the days when RPG didn't mean Grand Theft Auto with swords. It's been interesting playing a game from a time when all the tropes and cliches of modern RPGs hadn't yet been established, and even though the combat is a nearly uncontrollable whirlwind of chaos, the animation is extremely rudimentary, there's too much dialogue, and the difficulty of encounters only varies between the binary states of academically easy and logically impossible to defeat, it's charming and fun, and it's been interesting to see how RPGs have changed over the years. Here's a few things I've noticed:

1) THERE ARE NO QUESTS

Well, strictly speaking this isn't true. Characters will tell you that they need you to do something, and you can say yes or no, but there's no real quest mechanic built in at all. The characters really only tell you about things to do so that you know where to go to find an adventure.

There's no checklist of quests, no diary telling you what you need to do next, no "get 12 bolts of rare Illuvian spider silk by massacring hordes of arachnids" fetch tasks, no penalty for not doing a "quest", and usually no direct reward for doing them either.

For example, one encounter in the game has you dealing with a group of gladiators on the isle of Jhelom who think that a weakling restaurant owner named Sprellic has stolen their flag standard. They want to duel and kill the Sprellic, and you can either forge a new flag for the gladiators or kill them in a duel. Whichever way you do it doesn't seem to matter, and if I remember correctly all you get is 100 gold coins, and that's BEFORE you even finish the quest. If you wanted you could take Sprellic's gold and just never help him.

So why do quests in Ultima 7 at all? Well, because you're The Avatar. That's what you do, you help people. Quests in Ultima 7 exist to build a story about the very rich world of Brittania, make you feel attached to it and to the characters, and give the game real substance. This is pretty different than modern RPGs, in which quests are nothing more than laborious means to reach the end of getting more experience and gold.

The result is that you actually care about the things that happen in the game. Rather than simply grinding through quests to get the carrot at the end, ignoring the pointless stand-in NPCs blathering about infestations of giant beetles that have to be killed, you actually pay attention to what is going on. Because you chose to do the quest for the sake of seeing what happens, not just for its utility, you become invested in the story. The quest's lack of utility is its strength.

Or you don't do any of the quests at all and just run around dungeons killing monsters, it's up to you.

Just my main man carrying a cannon as a weapon, don't even worry about it

2) EVERY NPC IS A REAL CHARACTER

Okay, there a few guards that are just carbon copies of each other, but for the most part every single character in the game has a story to tell, a family, a place to live and work and drink, and a life of their own.

The baker will wake up in the morning and go to the bakery, make bread all day, then head to the pub before going home for the night. You can talk to every person and learn about everything they do and think and want, and while the dialogue can get tedious, it makes the NPCs feel real. Every shopkeeper is a real person with things to do, not just an item dispensary for the player's convenience, and everyone you run into has some sort of story to tell. Modern games still seem to struggle with achieving this, but Ultima 7 did it decades ago.

Like with the quests, the result of this way of handling NPCs is that you actually care about the world. The NPCs aren't put there just for you to benefit from, they're put their for the sake of the world. They make it feel like you're saving something that actually matters, and to make you as the Avatar actually feel like you have a reason to do good, to help all the little people you've become attached to and care about. Once again, because they don't serve any straightforward purpose, the player has nothing to focus on but their actual character, their stories and contributions to the world of Brittania.

3) NOTHING IS EASY

This might be partly because the interface is a bit old and clunky, but Ultima 7 seems to be intentionally designed in such a way that you can't simply rely on the game to make things streamlined and easy for you. Want to make your character better? You have to gain experience from killing monsters and whatnot, but if you actually want to increase your stats you have to go to a trainer who trains the specific stat you want to increase, pay them gold, and use a training point gained from experience.

Want to learn a new spell? You have to go buy a spell scroll from one of the far-flung wizards of the world, put it into your spell book, and increase your intelligence to the point that you can actually use it.

Want to make a loaf of bread? You have to find flour, put water in a bucket, find a table to combine the ingredients on, and then find a stove to put it all into.

Want to find that island where adventure lies? You have to pick up a map from within the game, determine its coordinates and translate the name from Brittanian to English.

And while it may be a bit of overkill in the tedious work department, once again this approach helps immerse you in the world. By forcing you to do tasks that involve interacting with the world itself, be they traveling on foot to a spellcaster's house or mucking around with a bunch of bread ingredients on a table, Ultima 7 makes you feel like you're actually part of the world you're in. There's no crafting menus or progress bars or fast travel to take you out of the moment here, just you and the world.

While Ultima 7 might not be perfect and lacks some of the streamlining of today's games, it is interesting to look back on how things were before CRPGs became entrenched in their current boring rut of conventions, and I think it's worth playing to see where the genre could have and can still go.

#what am i playing #videogames #ultima 7 #gog

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whatami-doing · 12 years ago

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Hey, just found your post about starseed pilgrim randomly. If you want a game that doesn't hold your hand try Antichamber! On steam.

Oh man, I have had that on my steam wishlist for such a long time! And I just missed the sale on it too, hoping to pick it up when it goes on sale again.

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whatami-doing · 12 years ago

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WHAT AM I PLAYING: THE SWAPPER

The Swapper is a very clever puzzle game recently released on Steam. The basic premise is that you can make clones of yourself and transfer your consciousness into one of those clones and control them directly. The level design is impeccable, the puzzles are smart, challenging and unique, and the atmosphere is absolutely beautiful, from the claymation graphics to the lonely space-station environments with their beautiful lighting, to the haunting and sad music. For lack of better word the game feels cinematic, despite it's almost total lack of cinematic sequences.

It's also a pretty good example of an approach to game design, which I talked about in an earlier blog post, that involves not holding the player's hand. Early on in the game you are given instructions on the basic controls, but from then on it's up to you to figure out what is possible with the controls and the swapping mechanic. Rather than telling you "you need to do this move to solve this puzzle" The Swapper instead puts you in a puzzle that only has one way out, and through clever visual and level design clues, guides you towards the discovery of new uses for your swapping device.

But what I really want to talk about is The Swapper's use of philosophy.

The Swapper's philosophical influences run pretty deep. At least two of the characters you interact with through memory files are based directly on real philosophers: Chalmers is clearly a reference to David Chalmers, and Dennett a reference to Daniel Dennet, both significant figures in the philosophy of mind. And at the core of The Swapper is the difficult idea of the essence of consciousness, a significant issue in the philosophy of mind.

The concept of consciousness is problematic for philosophy. The question of what it is to be conscious is one that has divided philosophers of the mind for centuries. Whether consciousness can be isolated to a physical component of living creatures or whether it is something beyond the realm of the physical is an endlessly debated question, but answers have remained elusive.

Part of the reason answers have remained so elusive is that there isn't any way to isolate and study consciousness as such. We can say "that person (as far as we can tell) is conscious" but where is the consciousness? What is their consciousness like? Can we experience that person's consciousness? Without being able to say "this is a consciousness and this is what it's like," we simply can't know the most crucial thing about conscious existence: what it is like to be someone we aren't.

We don't know this, but philosophers have tried to gain some sort of illumination on the topic through the use of thought experiments. One popular thought experiment asks: what would the consequences be if it were possible to clone a person exactly, so that they have the exact same physical composure, down to every neuron in their brain, as the original being? Would the clone have the same consciousness as the original, or would it be a new consciousness? Does it have the same memories and feelings and thoughts and rights as the original, and thus the same experiences? Is it ethical to destroy that clone and reform the original with the new memories gained by the clone, or is that murder? Would the clone be conscious at all?

Rather than think really hard about consciousness, Facepalm Games made a game about it. Normally this mechanic would be presented as just that: a mechanic. You would transfer from body to body and what that actually means would be taken for granted. But The Swapper does something very interesting that many games do not: it explores the consequences of its main mechanic through that mechanic. By making the main mechanic of the game the transferring of control and consciousness from one cloned body to another, you essentially get to play the problem of consciousness.

The result is an honest exploration of the topic that may be informative in totally different ways than the traditional philosophical route.

Is it wrong to kill a clone just because your consciousness has been transferred to a new body? The countless bodies crunching and crumbling at the bottom of deep pits as you use them to solve puzzles may not provide an answer, but the slow realization that they are exactly like your main character, exactly like you, may result in the development of sympathy and sadness for them. Then that sympathy and sadness will most likely fade as the rote destruction of your hapless clones becomes routine. The realization that it becomes easy to dispose of your clones if there is utility in doing so, even if they may be worthy of consideration as individuals with rights and feelings and lives, is illuminating. It may not give us answers to the problem of consciousness, but it does perhaps give us an approximation of how we would behave if cloned consciousness was possible, which may be more important than the question of the nature of consciousness in the first place.

Can consciousness be isolated, or even moved into other objects? If so, is it possible for inanimate objects to have consciousness? If not, if we can't find consciousness or isolate it in some way, then does it even exist? Again, The Swapper doesn't answer these questions, or even attempt to, but in interacting with the apparently conscious Watchers, space rocks that seem to communicate discrete ideas to the player, we start to form a relationship with them. Whether or not they are conscious, or simply purveyors of information, we start to empathize with them. Perhaps we even realize that our interactions with the other human character in the game aren't that much different than our interactions with the possibly-conscious rocks: exchanges of information in which we are never really sure what is going on inside the mind of the other, if anything.

This exploration of ideas through game mechanics is one way that I think videogames can, and should, differentiate themselves from other forms of media. No other media can explore ideas in the same mechanical way that games can. A movie can show you ideas, a book can tell you ideas, but only a game run you through ideas, make you experience them first hand. That is what makes videogames art, and a unique art-form at that. And while the videogames as art debate seems to be a bit out of popularity at the moment, I think games can and still should be art, as The Swapper is.

#what am i playing #videogames #the swapper

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