you · can't · see · inside · something · unless · it's · broken

Dear world,

Please disregard all the various stupid things I have done and said today. It has been a very stupid day.

Tomorrow will be better.

Thanks,

Brian.

reasie tried out for the local football team on saturday. It was kind of hard to tell what was going on sometimes, but I think she did pretty well on the linebacker type stuff. Go Reasie! I really really really hope she gets in.

I learned a lot about football from watching the tryouts. I find your average football game kind of overwhelming a lot of the time, and it helped to see the game broken up into easily understood pieces. Some people have to throw balls. Others have to turn around and catch balls that were thrown behind them. Linebackers need to be able to move sideways quickly. Runningbacks need to be able to change directions quickly, which is somewhat different.

No one player has to be able to do all of these things.

So the tryouts distilled all the various skills you need to play football into lots of simple, short tests. One test was just throwing the ball as far as you could. In another, you stood with your back to one of the coaches, and when somebody blew a whistle, the coach would throw a ball and you were allowed to turn around and try to catch it. It was usually really easy to understand what the coaches were looking for in each of these.

* * *

Before the tryouts, I was at another random board game get together. I may babble about it more later, but one thing I noticed was the difference between having good graphic design and having good illustrations. In the first game we played, I loved the design but not the art. With the second game, I loved the art but not the design. It's an interesting distinction that I hadn't paid much attention to before.

* * *

I'm feeling a little frazzled because of the variety -- not the volume -- of work I've been doing lately.

I'm still working on writing the text for my Celestial Stick People book. Writing is something I haven't really done since college (I don't consider blogging writing in the same way, in that being careful about word choice and clarity and structure and whatnot sort of way).

This also requires page layout, which I haven't done since high school.

I'm doing coding in Torque for the Jennifer Ann game, which is very different from the coding I'm doing in Flex for my paint program.

I'm reviewing other indie games (in a the skimming over meaning of the word, not the judging meaning), which you'd think would be fun, but it takes a lot of effort and can be kinda draining.

I'm doing a little bit of illustration for Positronic Toster promotional materials, and also scratching my head over when to schedule sales for my font and what sorts of sales to have, which is all business type stuff.

This is all pretty exhausting.

From rianwyn ...

1. You didn't specifically ask for questions, but you commented anyway. Would you like to answer five four questions? (Ha ha, if you choose... your real 1st question: what do you think about silly internet/lj memes?)

Mostly, I try to avoid memey things, especialy ask-me-questions stuff. I actually like challenging personal questions to think about, but I don't want to come off as self-absorbed. And I'm pertrified of coming up with questions for other people that might yield insightful results without being intrusive.

But if I'm asked a question, I feel compelled to answer it, no matter what it is. So here I go. :)

2. Will you please give a few lines about the balance between you and your wife having separate hobbies but still doing things together as well?

Ultimately, I think what it comes down to is that we both have more fun together if we're both feeling successful with our hobbies.

I used to go with Marie to fighting events, but we can't really spend much time together at those events, and while I was doing that regularly, I sort of lost my own identity as a person, being just another one of the fighters' spouses hanging out on the sidelines. And Marie used to play board games more often, but she hates the entire concept of spending time to play board games, and resented getting taken away from other things. So trying to share our interests wasn't working.

So then we got into this horrible cycle where we'd both go off and do our own things without each other, and then I'd be all, crap, I haven't done anything with Marie in forever! And I'd feel all insecure about never ever spending time with Marie again and I'd get us to go on these spur-of-the-moment emergency dates which weren't very much fun, which made us more stressy because it took away from our productivity, and made me want to spend even more time trying (and failing) to relax with Marie.

So we started scheduling our dates, and that made things a lot better. So we can work on hobby stuff feeling secure that some 'us' time is coming, and have that lingering sense of anticipation and excitement about it, which in and of itself made the relationship better. So when we do spend time together now, we're more relaxed and things are more intimate because hopefully, we've both hit good stopping points on our work in preparation for it. And the quality of our time spent together improved greatly, when I had originally thought quantity was the issue.

3. Maybe it's strange to write about it on the internet, but you smell good (and so did that t-shirt that you gave me!). What is your clothes-cleaning regimen? Brands of detergent/etc. would be most helpful.

Hee. I'm very very very picky about the smell of my laundry products. :)

I used Method (they're supposed to be all eco-friendly and stuff) liquid laundry soap, the kind in the blue bottle. I forget the name. Sadly, looking at their web site, I don't see it. Maybe they stopped making it. I'm using the Sweet Water stuff in the green bottle now, but that t-shirt was wahsed in the blue I think. My favorite was actually powdered Surf in the big orange box, which the blue Method was similar to. But the've got all these new fragrances now, and I'm not sure if one of those is like the original orange-box one.

I also use gobs of Snuggle, the blue kind.

4. What is your favorite food to cook? Why? Will you make some for me since you're close? (Or, I guess... if not, can I have a recipe?)

Without question, chicken piccata (sauteed chicken with lemon & capers). I think it was the first thing I learned to cook that felt, for lack of a better term, fanciful, even though it was relatively simple. I leaned about pan sauces and keeping things warm and lots of neat stuff just from cooking that one dish.

(I stress out about cooking for you and Nathan, and should really get over that. Want some next game night? Or some other time? Have I made it for you before?)

5. What is your favorite movie for -plot-? What is your favorite movie for -mood-? What is your favorite movie for -pretty-? What is your favorite movie for 'sound'? And: in case any of those are Disney's 'Robin Hood,' you're welcome to borrow it b/c I got it for Christmas last year.

Oof, this is tough deciding...

Plot -- Pleasantville. The story is simple and straighforward; it's not bogged down in subplots, and the plot revolves around the use of color in the movie, so it's tailor-made for this medium. Many plots feel like they aren't and that makes me sad.

Mood -- Hm... Dark City? I'm a big sucker for things that are dark, gothy or anachronistic. I love Alex Proyas in general, in terms of setting a mood.

Pretty -- The Chronicles of Riddick. They prefectly captured this over the top, pulpy, airbrushed, pulpy sci-fi book cover thing here. I loved it.

Sound -- This is really hard. I don't think I've ever walked out of a movie and thought, hey, that was a really great sound mix! It's just sort of a background thing. I love the first few seconds of the latest Star Trek, and a lot of Wall-E had great sound (Same sounddesigner, I think)... I love the music in Moulin Rouge!... dunno.

Game #17: Aqualux.


Does anybody remember Pipe Dream? This reminds me of that.

It's funny how you can instantly spot a casual game: cartoony graphics, bright colors, novelty fonts, swapping items in a well-defined grid.

...not that that's a bad thing; I generally prefer the look of most casual games to most indie or commercial games.

This seems to have that sort of simple, yet mind-boggling and addictive gameplay that most casual games have, that causes my head to explode.

* * *

Speaking of casual games, Square Enix teamed up with PopCap to bring you Gyromancer, a sort of Puzzle Quest clone. I played the demo, and while it was kind of interesting, I think I like Puzzle Quest better. Puzzle Quest has that... casual look, which I prefer to the epic RPG with soulless fonts thing Gyromancer has got going.

One thing I found interesting, though, was the way these two games present their maps. Puzzle Quest has a pretty standard looking map with a bunch of nodes and paths and monsters blocking your way. There are mountains and lakes and whatnot:



Gyromancer has the nodes and the paths and the monsters as well, but dispenses with the representationalism of the map as a whole.



Instead, there's an abstract path overlaid on a picture of the environment as seen by a character in it.

I was babbling the other day about defining your problem really precisely when it comes to designing anything, you'll get more creative solutions if you have more interesting problems. And what you leave out of your problem description is just as important as what you put in.

So here, the problem seems to be:

• Display a node & path map for the player.
• Clearly display the obstacles in the players way, and the friendly places they can go.
• Make sure that each location on the map has a unique, memorable sense of place and atmosphere.

Nowhere in this problem description is it said that the sense of place needs to involve large scale geography like the shapes of lakes or mountain ranges. So the solution here deals with the first two bullet points independently of the third.

While I still prefer the bright, casual aesthetics of the Puzzle Quest map, I much prefer the Gyromancer map conceptually. A natural point-of-view shot of an environment is going to draw me into the world much more than an impersonal, if attractive, overhead map.

Positronic Toaster is now available for sale at MyFonts, for significantly less than what Veer was charging. I hate to compete with myself or with Veer here, and I think the prices of most fonts don't really reflect the work that went into them... but I never saw this as a $45 font. So the price point over at MyFonts more accurately reflects what I think the value of my font is, given the prices people have come to expect for this sort of thing.

* * *

I saw The Shining for the first time last night.

I love scary movies. I love that feeling of being trapped in your seat while it all plays out, like being on a roller coaster car crawling up the first hill, and it's too late to change your mind about boarding this thing. I love a good scary movie more than any sci-fi adventure, more than any tearjerker. But I find that good scares are hard to come by.

Here, I thought the imagery was interesting, and I liked the use of color, but I didn't find the movie scary at all. I already knew some of what was going to happen, and it was so glacially paced that I could completely calm down between scary moments; there wasn't that sense of dread for me. It was unsettling, sure. But not so scary.

I actually don't like Stanley Kubrick's stuff at all, and had I known this was one of his films, I probably wouldn't have rented it.

* * *

Which brings me to a tangent: classics. I despise the idea of classic movies or classic books or whatever. Part of the beauty -- part of the effectiveness -- of a good movie or book is not knowing where it's going, and letting the author serve you the movie on their own terms. It's hard to just experience a movie with an open mind when you already know some of what's going to happen, or when the people with you already know some of the details of the movie. So when a movie enters 'classic' status and it gets talked about in school and there are homages made to it and it gets parodied on The Simpsons, we all lose the ability to experience it the way it was meant to be experienced. We may learn to appreciate these things, but they will never really connect with us they way they're supposed to.

Like many things I babble about, it's like food. If you've got a fresh meal prepared for you, you can't preserve it for later, microwave it, and expect it to taste as good as it should have when it was made; you can't keep the food around and eat it again; you can't, years later, go back and learn more about the food you were tasting and retroactively like a past meal more. You have to eat it immediately, and then it's gone forever, and you either liked it or you didn't. You can't change how it tasted for you.

But the good thing is, there will always be new, fresh meals to eat.

Game #13: Amnesia.




I don't see a demo or anything, but I love the atmosphere in the video. It's grungy without being monochromatic; dark without feeling flat. I especially like the sunbeams.

I also like how, when you pick up an object, you don't have hands or anything -- the object just floats in front of you. In some ways, that's how you perceive the real world anyway. Your own body just fades away, and it's just about you directly manipulating your environment.

* * *

Game #14: Another Small Favor.

This is a pretty standard point & click adventure, where you collect random stuff, and give it to wacky people in exchange for other random stuff. The graphics and music are nice enough, given that this is just a short Flash game (I think I got about halfway through in like 20 minutes).

There's some sort of game mechanic involving collecting 'favors' from other people that you can call in, but I didn't get far enough to see those in action. I suspect they're just like using inventory items.

* * *

Game #15: Antipole.

All I've got here is a screenshot and a description. It's some sort of platformer where you can reverse the flow of gravity to solve puzzles.

I'm pretty sure I saw a video of a game with a similar concept a month or two ago, but I can't remember what it was. Oh well.

So on to...

* * *

Game #16: Animoto.

It's an RTS with FPS elements. I'm not real sure what that means, as there's no demo or video. The screenshots look pretty polished and bleak, though.

Here's what I've got so far for Jennifer Ann...




It's not much, and I wanted to post a video just to show what this looks like, barely even started.

So little placeholder gems will spawn near you, and when you run into them, you collect them and they swirl around you. This was mind-boggling simple in Torque. It's really good at manipulating and animating objects. I just tell the gems to attach themselves to an invisible spinning thing connected to you, and they fall into place.

The background is just something I yoinked from a previous Torque project. And the rest of the art was just slapped together.

I'm getting this sense of claustraphobia on the main view. I thought having it fade into the UI would help, but I think it's actually contributing to that sense of tunnel vision.

Before I get to today's round of catching up, I wanted to say a little bit about sampling these things in general. If there are playable versions of these, I'm trying to give them at least fifteen minutes of my time. Which is not a lot, and you could rightly say that it's unfair to these indie developers.

But the truth is, fifteen minutes is plenty in terms of getting a sense of how profesionally made something is, and how much care was taken with the interface. You might not get a sense of the core gameplay for many of the more complicated titles, but sometimes, the appearance of professionalism lends more to a feeling of 'fun' than new and unique ideas.

When I was little, our local grocery store had a video rental section. I'd hang out there and pick out movies while my parents shopped. We rented a lot of truly awful movies at first, but I got reasonably good at looking at the box art for everything and finding the big-budget, theatrical titles in a sea of direct-to-video ones. And by the time the first scene of any movie was over, I pretty much knew if I was going to like the movie in general. You don't know the story at that point, but you know what the production values are like and how good the actors are. And usually, there's a pretty strong correlation between those things and a good final product. Polish and professionalism are important. So is box art.

I certainly expect the same sort of treatment for my own stuff. I expect people to judge the visual appeal of my screenshots after a fraction of a second, and I expect that players of any demo I release will bail after only a couple minutes if they're bored.

So, on to the games...

* * *

Game #10: Air Attack.


This is free to play if you've got Java installed. There's not much to it, really; it has this old arcade feel where you're this little guy running around a single screen shooting planes, and you try to last as long as you can.

I played 10 waves' worth of it, and it didn't really seem to go anywhere interesting.

* * *

Game #11: Algodoo.


I guess this isn't a game really; it's some sort of teaching tool. The video is pretty amazing. Algodoo seems to sport a jaw droppingly simple interface and a great physics engine -- I honestly didn't know you could get simulated fluids like that on regular computers these days.

From an educational standpoint, I find this incredibly exciting. Certainly more exciting than any of the more game-ish games I've seen so far here.

If I were a teeny kid with access to this, I'm sure I'd love it. As an adult, I'm sure I'd love it. And either way, I'd probably learn a lot, too.

* * *

Game #12: Altitude.


This is another free, Java-based arcade game; this time, you're a plane of some sort shooting other planes. I'm not sure there's anything hugely innovative about it, but it's quite fun.

I find the graphics appealing, but they seem a bit inconsistent. The logo has this RPG sourcebook look about it, the vehicles are happy and cartoony, and the backgrounds are strangely geometric.

Still, this is a pretty addictive little game. In addition to the regular flying, shooting, and collecting power ups, you have to worry about your plane stalling if you're going to slow. Which I did a lot. It's an interesting touch that makes moving around more interesting, and the world, such as it is, more immersive.

Game #7: Achron.

An RTS involving time travel.




This makes my head hurt.

I don't entirely understand the time-traveling mechanics, but it looks like you can go back to any point in the game already played and mess with your timeline from there, and your opponent can do the same thing.

When I read the description, I assumed that the time traveling was just some sort of abstraction; that it wouldn't actually record everything and let you really go back and change things. But watching the videos, it's pretty clear that this game is delivering on its core premise.

* * *

Game #8: Afflux.

This does not make my head hurt. :)

It's playable right in your web browser, and I got through the tutorial and a few real levels. Kind of reminds me of Lemmings and The Incredible Machine. The whole thing revolves around dandelion seeds floating around, and use use fans and walls and whatnot to direct the flow of the air so the seeds make it to this little pot somewhere on each level.

It's very happy and sorta relaxing. I like the hand-drawn appearance of the artwork, and I especially like the way you've got instructions scrawled on the screen in the tutorials.

* * *

Game #9: AI War.



This is supposed to be some sort of innovative take-over-the-universe strategy thing, but I really don't know enough about those kind of games to understand what makes this unique. I couldn't really tell what was happening in the video. Except that there are a lot of spaceships on screen. The site says you can get tens of thousands, so you can't (and shouldn't) micromanage anything.

That's sorta interesting, I suppose.

It looks reasonably polished, I guess. If a bit overwhelming at first glance.

Incidentally, for you board game fans out there, reasie informs me that there's a new shop called Underhill's in the Richmond Mall. :)

All things considered, this weekend was fairly boring and stupid.

The highlight was an all-too brief stop in a Caribou Coffee with reasie; I'm starting to love coffee shops in general, and Caribou is now putting gobs of real melted chocolate in the cocoa and mochas and whatnot. Mmmm chocolate.

* * *

Saw 2012 and A Serious Man. I can't say I particularly liked either, but in a weird sort of way, I had more respect for what 2012 was trying to accomplish. A Serious Man is one of those postmodern things where nothing gets resolved at the end. They go to a lot of trouble to set things up so that nothing is resolved, and while I can appreciate the craftsmanship that went into the movie, I just despise that sort of approach to storytelling. Because... it doesn't really end, and something that doesn't end, in my opinion, does not really qualify as a story.

* * *

Work on the paint program is not going well. It's being done in Flex, and to my great surprise, my Torque prototyping is going much better.

For the game proper, this is going to end up being an iterative process. I'm not real comfortable with that, but I think that's the best solution here since I don't know how well any of this is going to work, and Torque, with all its freeforminess, is well suited to that kind of approach.

Yesterday night, reasie and I did something we've never done before, in our almost fourteen years of being together: we bought silverware.

We love shopping for silverware. We love going to department stores and looking at the plates and the cups and the different handles on the forks, and discussing what we might buy, if we ever needed to buy this stuff.

For the first couple years of our relationship, I was in college. No dishes needed.

One of Marie's first apartments came with a whole box of dishes and silverware that the previous occupant had left behind. These are the dishes we still use, plus some stuff my family had when I was growing up in Tulsa.

So we never actually picked any of this out, and while we frequently ask ourselves what sort of fork handles define us as a couple, we never had to commit to a decision. This made me very sad.

Anyway, yesterday, we bought a set of six spoons from Target. As spoons go, they're pretty ordinary spoons. Still, I found it kind of exciting.

* * *

We had this lamp -- actually, it was exilejedi 's lamp -- that we've had since our apartment in Little Italy in like 1997. It has been sitting in our living room, failing to produce light for the last year or so. You could give it new bulbs, you could move it to a new outlet, and it was still a completely lightless lamp. And our living room looked kind of sad because of it. Well, honestly, our living room looked kind of dark and sad when the lamp still worked. So while at Target, we got a new one.

I love it. Our living room is bright and happier now. You can sit on the couch and, like, read something, since the lamp has this nifty reading thing attached to it.

We can go through cleaning sprees, we can rearrange the furniture, but I think what the room needed the most was more light. It's amazing how much that adds.

* * *

We would like new couches. The couch in our living room is the one I had growing up. It's been re-upholstered once. The cats have clawed the crap out of it.

The living room simply isn't conducive to relaxing and talking to friends, and we'd like to fix this.

I really haven't a clue what to look for in a couch.

* * *

We looked at Wiis. We did not buy one. The whole idea of owning a game console still weirds me out, just like owning a tv. A computer is obstensibly a productivity tool. I'll spend money on that. I have a lot of trouble wrapping my head about buying anything over like $50 for entertainment purposes.

Except, like, vacations. :)

So I guess Dollhouse has been canceled.

I can't say I'm hugely shocked; while it had some great moments, it seemed to get very unapproachable to new viewers very fast. Sort of clique-ish. Which is something I could say about a lot of Joss Whedon's stuff.

And on a more personal level, I was always uncomfortable with the way it objectified its characters while claiming to comment on objectification. There was something really squickworthy about that.

* * *

I'm starting to get *gasp* comfortable with Torque. I still don't like it, but I'm getting better at navigating it.

Right now, I'm wondering what to do about displaying the gems you've collected. I was going to have a pane off to the side with all of them, completely separated from the main view. But I think it might be better to have them stay in the main view, circling your character or something like that. So you don't have to take your eyes off your character to see what's going on, and you'll get this sense of magical stuff swirling around you and growing in power as you collect stuff.

I generally don't like informational graphics overlaid on top of the game world; it sort of breaks me out of the environment my character is suppposed to be in. But if I can make this look attractive, unintrusive, and clear, I'm ok with that.

Which brings me to a larger question, which is deciding if I want informational panes at all. It's generally accepted that having your view of the world fill the screen, with as few informational graphics as possible, is best for drawing people into your world. You don't want your players feeling like they're looking at your game world through a little window. That's normally the justification for HUD-like overlays, but I find those more distracting than big clunky window panes. I realize I am in the minority here.

There's not much more information that needs to be conveyed to the player, and much of it could be offloaded to the main game window.

• Your health, which could be conveyed by the speed of the gems swirling around you.
• A mini-map, which I wouldn't consider immensely important; I hope to be able to design the world in such a way that you always have a sense of absolute position based on a parallaxxy constellation-filled background and the layout of your surroundings.
• Some reminder of your current quest. You could have your character verbally remind you of it if there's a lull.

But despite all that, I want your view to be circular. Not screen-shaped; not 4:3 or 16:9 rectangles; that just doesn't make sense to me. I want you to be in the center of a circular window at all times, so you're seeing the same distance in all directions.

The question, then, is what to do with all the space around your circular viewport.

Made some dinner for daemon82 and towerboy last night. It's nice to have excuses to cook. :)

It didn't come out as well as I would have liked; I was trying to make mushroom gravy stuff again, and the mushroom juice mostly evaporated, and I randomly decided to use wood ear mushrooms, which were kind of strange. I'm guessing wood ears won't produce as much juice as portobellos or porcinis, which I'm used to. But I think it went ok, and we had much fun watching Isaac do silly things.

* * *

After dinner and hanging out, I worked more on Torque. You now have a mouse/keyboard/gamepad controlled stickman who produced things that will eventually be gems around him. And there's the beginnings of a GUI on top of the scene.

I think a big part of what I'm not liking about Torque is this idea of just going with whatever works. So for example, when you run over gems, they're removed from the scene.

Deleting the objects using this delete() function caused Torque to crash. Removing the objects with removeFromScene() caused Torque to crash.

There's another function, safeDelete(), which is working. So I'm sticking with that.

I picked these functions because they sounded right; I can't find any documentation on a canonical, 'proper' way to do that. I don't just want a function reference from my docs; I want some best practices to follow. Which I don't seem to have here. That makes me really uncomfortable.

But it's something I'll have to get used to I guess.

Spent pretty much all of last night cleaning, with a short break to eat dinner and another break to send off a contract to MyFonts so I can sell Positronic Toaster there.

So I'm just going to babble randomly.

Thinking about Aquaria. The soundtrack is getting released on Saturday, and I seem to remember liking the music in-game. Just about every game has an original score, but this is the only game I can think of with an original song, you know, something with vocals. That was pretty cool.

I don't expect to write an original song for my Jennifer Ann thing. But it might be fun. The voice actress I've been talking to has a nice singing voice. I bought her CD. It would totally be doable...

Anyway, we saw Whip It the other day, and many of the reviews praised the movie for presenting its almost entirely female, rollerblading cast in a completely nonexploitative, non-male point of view. I agree with those reviews, and the movie was pretty refreshing because of that. Sure, you had a bunch of people in skimpy outfits beating the crap out of each other, and this could get really oversexualized really fast. Thankfuly, the movie never went there. It never got close. The women were presented as boring, ordinary people; they were not overly fit, particularly athletic, or limber in that oh-so-cheesecakey sort of way that many female action heroes get.

So I'm wondering to what extent Naija, the female lead character in Aquaria is being seen from a male point of view. The game is by no means exploitative, but there were some small things that bothered me: Naija's costume, the tone of her voiceovers, or a mildly dehumanizing effect coming from Naija being some sort of mer-whatever (though I'm grateful she had legs instead of a tail).

And, of course, I stress out about avoiding a distinctly male point of view in my own stuff like the Jennifer Ann remake.

But if all I'm thinking about is avoiding the dreaded Male Gaze, I'm kind of missing the point. This is not just an issue of picking a male or female point of view. My job is to present my character from her own point of view.

So my lead character's defining characteristic (at least in the beginning of the story) is that she is pretty insecure. Now, I would not describe myself as insecure at all, and chances are, only some of the players of this game wouldn't describe themselves that way. But it's important that I'm not presenting this insecure character from the point of view of someone who is fairly confident. That is, players must not see the character as endearingly or comically sheepish; she must not be someone for the player to take care of; I must not trivialize the concerns of people who place what I would call undue importance on the opinions of others.

What I want to avoid is having my players think a lot about the 'otherness' of the character they're playing. What I want is for the players to get immersed in the mindset of a character who is not necessarily like them.

And in the end, that's what makes the whole Male Gaze thing so creepy. It's not about gender equality, necesarily; this is one aspect of a much larger issue in storytelling. It's about being able to get in the heads of the characters of the stories you read or watch or play, and see them as complex people. You can't do that if you're seeing those characters filtered through somebody else's personality.

Game #6: About a Blob.

There's no demo that I can find, nor a video. But uh, the screen shot looks cute. So does this other one.

Guess that's all I can say.

* * *

Saw The Men Who Stare at Goats today. I quite liked it. I thought it was funny and tender and wacky, and, for the sci-fi fans out there, there are lots of amusing moments involving Ewan McGregor's character and references to Star Wars.

A lot of reviewers have complained that it was too happy and that everything was too neatly tied up in the end, but I didn't mind. I think, by the time you get to the opening credits, you shouldn't be expecting anything dark and edgy.

I hear the book the movie is based on isn't so heartwarming as this movie, but as far as I'm concerned, that doesn't really matter. I think it's important, when seeing any movie, to forget about the source material and forget about any marketing materials you might have seen. It's the job of the first few scenes of a movie to let the audience know what they're in for, and you have to be open to what those first few minutes of film are telling you. Here, they make it abundantly clear that you're going to be seeing something fluffy and happy, with a happy narrator and a happy ending.

Anyway, I thought this was one of the more enjoyable movies I'd seen in a while. Just don't expect some sort of dark satire here.

Game #5: AaaaaAAaaaAAAaaAAAAaAAAAA!!! -- A Reckless Disregard for Gravity.


Yes, it's actually called that.

I love that title.

And this is a pretty fun game. It revolves around base-jumping off of buildings in a far-future city, just to impress people while doing it. You have to avoid obstacles on your way down, but you also have to hug the sides of buildings so you look more daring. You have to wave at your fans, and flip off protesters on your way down. And, of course, you have to land safely, without breaking any bones.

It's very stylish and fun. There's this testosterone-poisoned, Mtn Dew chugging, X-treme sports vibe to the whole thing that works well for what it is. While I wish the graphics were a little less Tron-like so it looked like a real city of some sort, the visuals work okay, and the sound works hard to sell the realism and tension of the experience. I love the ambulance noises you get when you crash.

I'm about halfway through the demo, and I think this may be worth picking up for real. :)

* * *

I have keyboard and joystick support working for my Jennifer Ann remake in Torque. Sure, I'm still frustrated by Torques docs, and you're just moving a stupid stick figure around right now. But I love that feeling of forgetting there's a controller in my hands; of feeling like I've got this direct mental interface with the game. And there's a great sense of accomplishment in having that control in something I myself wrote.

I'm still waffling on the whole side view / isometric / top down issue for the Jennifer Ann remake.

Right now, I'm strongly leaning towards an outer space theme with little populated asteroids about a quarter to several times the size of your screen. They'd have recognizable buildings and vegetation on them. You could fly around at will, from asteroid to asteroid, and maybe land on them so you can have platformy type stuff sometimes.

So... imagine the dance where our heroine meets her jerkwad boyfriend. You'd have a little asteroid with buffet stuff set up on it, a larger one with a band encircling it, and a great big one with tables and party decorations. And between them, you'd have people flying around, dancing, spinning around, with stars behind them...

I think it would be cool and unique, if I can pull it off, and you'd get the 2d freedom of movement + characters viewed from the side + buildings & trees & other scenery that I want so much.

But I worry that it would alienate many casual players with it's weirdness. What do you all think?

* * *

Game #4: A Slow Year.

There's no playable version of this available right now, and no video... so all I've got to go on is the rather arty description from their web site.

This is supposed to be the video game equivalent of a poem, but other than that, I'm not real sure what they're trying to get at here. I don't find the description particularly approachable or inviting.

Not sure what else to say about this.

* * *

I know I'm only 1% through this... but I was expecting 306 complete products with as much depth and polish as Braid or Aquaria...

Game #3: A New Zero.




It's some sort of combat-based flight sim.

Everything is procedurally generated -- no texture files, no models, no canned music. This makes the download very small. Just under one megabyte, which is pretty impressive for what this is.

I kind of like the simplicity of the graphics. I find the blocky models and abstract environment sort of quaint and comforting, like an old blanket. Kind of reminds me of Darwinia that way.

I got to play a little of this one, though really sluggish on my computer even at the lowest resolution. I died a lot. I'm not real good at flight sims.

Still, it's an interesting idea.

When exporting mp3s of my Mixcraft projects, some of my notes from Symphonic Choir instruments are dropping out. This really worries me. I'm ok with having performance issues when playing and recording this stuff in realtime, but when rendering? That's pretty frightening.

Right now, it's the first and last notes in one of my tracks. I wonder if padding will help.

* * *

Anyway, I was thinking about having a unique 'voice' when it comes to composing.

When I'm drawing or modeling, I want simple, geometric forms that are simple at first look, but that reveal interesting textures upon closer inspection.

When I'm writing, I use a middle schooler vocabulary and am very particular about word choice. I try to express complex ideas through rhythm and repetition and contradiction, rather than directly saying anything.

For game mechanics, I want things that are simple and transparent abstractions of real world systems.

So there's a trend here: in all of these pursuits, I want to make something that's simple, where you can see all the parts that make it up, rather than having me hide them away. Like a glass elevator where you can see all these wheels and cables and girders. I think that sort of thing is beautiful. I don't want it covered up. I want to draw attention to the words and mechanics and lines that my stuff is made of.

In terms of translating this sort of approach to music, I'm getting pretty confused. I wonder if what I need to do here is think of music as an abstraction of the ambient sound that might be present in your environment. So... instead of having ambient sound effects, have it all wrapped up in the score.

I did this a little with my first Jennifer Ann piece, where there was this dripping water and rain vibe, complete with a real thunder sound effect.

I'm not sure how to apply this to other settings, though. Suppose you're in a forest wailing on monsters. There might be leaves rustling, growls, sounds of things galloping or bounding around, wings flapping...

...as far as translating this into instruments and melodies, nothing is coming to mind immediately, but maybe I'l think of something later. Hm.