Game Jam

I made a game last weekend!  It's stupidly hard (and just plain stupid) but I'm a certain fashion of proud of it.

It began with an email I skimmed and ignored last week.  Itch (an indie-friendly gaming site and distribution platform, think Steam but with no real entry barriers) frequently hosts game jams, which are week- or weekend-long (and other durations I'm sure) events where a genre is chosen and game makers are encouraged to quickly build a new game, optionally around some given theme(s).  One-mechanic games were on the docket this time.  I generally don't have time to participate in these jams, so I paid it no mind.

Then a work buddy of mine had a case of beer on which the word "Escape" was written, split by the seam in the cardboard.  He jokingly said we needed to make a game about an ape escaping.  We had some fun chatting about that.  There could be fruits or something to collect, but you would be scolded for doing so.  "Why would you waste time collecting stuff when you should have been escaping?"  Each level could just be the displayed image, with a corresponding bit map of which pixels are grab-able.  With the one-mechanic idea freshly ignored in my brain, the ape could constantly swing his arms, and you could swap which hand he was gripping with using one key or button.  ...This could almost work out.

It's Kim's busy season (beginning of the year, accounting) so she was going to be working Saturday.  That left me plenty of time, should I choose to spend it not sleeping.

Well that was that.  Surely I'm a quick enough programmer to make a one-button game about Esc the Ape escaping!  The event kicked off, and the themes announced were "water", "capitalism", and "man versus machine".  ...Well, that was fine, those themes are optional anyway.

Kim to the rescue, as usual.  I talked to her about this ridiculous plan, and without even knowing the themes, she had a suggestion. "The ape could be collecting anything, even coins.  What does an ape need with a gold coin?"  And there it was.  I could even slap a mild capitalism theme onto this thing.

Anyway, I had already developed some rudimentary code to help turn my scribbles into animations and games.  So I made some scribbles...

...and, with a day-plus of programming, turned them into this game!  Enjoy!


https://itch.io/jam/omgjam3/rate/223986


[ afterward... ]
I got some great feedback.  Fellow indie developers are a great audience, and willing to find good nuggets even in rushed, sloppy work like this.  :^)

[ even more afterward... ]
The people who ran the game jam streamed themselves playing all of the entries.  Couldn't make it past my first level, but I have to credit them for trying.  :^)
https://www.twitch.tv/videos/228848222?t=00h51m03s

KBtris

Some day, I will stop thinking of ways to ruin Tetris. But it is not this day.

A little while ago my brain finally realized that two very familiar sets of numbers match up.  Ten main keys on a computer keyboard's homerow, four main rows of ten keys each.  Ten columns in a Tetris playing field, four orientations for Tetris pieces.  And that was that.  From that moment, I had no choice.

A version of Tetris requiring most of the keyboard had to exist.  If it already did, I couldn't find it.  So now the world has one more Tetris clone.

http://kbtris.penduin.net

KBtris has a steep learning curve, which is something I would normally shy away from in a game.  But the idea is too compelling.  Traditionally, when a Tetris piece appears, even if you are a master player you still have to get your fingers or thumbs to input something like:

left-left-left-left-rotate-drop

Now, you can do the same thing with:

q

One keystroke will both rotate your piece to the desired orientation and move it to the desired column.  This of course means you need to _have_ a desired orientation and column, and then hit the correct key out of forty.  It's efficient, but you need all your fingers and your wits about you to get started.  From there, it's not completely unlike learning the piano.

I've played a lot of Tetris in my life; I consider it one of the purest gaming experiences imaginable.  My first goal now that KBtris exists is to get as good and as fast as I can at it.  I'm curious whether I'll be able to keep up with friends who are faster typists.

Beyond that, I want to see someone get really good.  Way beyond my abilities.  I want to see a KBtris Olympian and be shamed.

Maybe _then_ I'll stop thinking up ways to ruin Tetris.

Tong on Wii

Well here's another fine mess I've gotten myself into: Tong can now be played on Wii!

It's fitting. Back in ... 1997? Some friends and I came up with the idea, and imagined it as a multiplayer game on Nintendo64, the party machine of choice at the time. That didn't happen, of course, but years later I did finish a single-player PC version. Years after that, I ported it to the GP2X/Wiz handhelds. Now, it's come all the way to a home console, and a Nintendo one at that.

...Plus, the line-breaking sound effect is me saying "Wheeee!"

Now before you go off to the Wii Shop Channel looking for Tong, let me save you some time. Nintendo doesn't endorse this kind of open/free homebrew, but unlike some manufacturers, they don't fight it either. Read up on the Homebrew Channel, then visit this site and use its handy packager to get homebrew running on your Wii (they've made it very easy, you won't break anything!) Once you have the Homebrew Channel, you can grab Tong for Wii here; just unzip it to your SD card.

My favorite bit of feedback about Tong has always been that it's a "bad idea well implemented". Nowhere is that clearer than on Wii, with tilt-controlled paddles. I've gotten pretty good at it, but it's probably the hardest and most insane version yet. Why I would be happy about that is a bit of a mystery.

For anyone interested in the technical details, "devkitPro" and "devkitPPC" are what you're after. Cross-compiling to Wii is mostly painless, and I only ran into a few snags. First, libfat needs to be initialized before doing any file access. That isn't the first thing that occurs to those of us who normally build stuff for OSes instead of raw hardware. Second, the guys who ported SDL to Wii did a pretty good job, but when it came to SDL_mixer, I think they got it working for their own stuff and then moved on. The easiest workaround is to resample your sound data to 32000Hz, which struck me as very odd considering how common 41000 and 20500 are. Also, simultaneously playing a Mix_Music and a Mix_Chunk causes some fascinating interference if they're both using tremor (ogg vorbis decoder). In my case that meant saving the short Mix_Chunk sound effects as raw .wav data instead. Finally, as much as I love to use my own simple-as-possible Makefiles, I had a much easier time working from devkitPro's examples. They're very flexible and general-purpose, I'll give 'em that. Everything's checked in; have at the CVS repository if you're curious.

To non-geeks who waded through all that, I should reward you with something clever and witty. ...Too bad. Play Tong for a few minutes; your brain will forget all about such small-scale confusion. :^)

Picross

Shameless plug ahead...

I've made a Picross game for webOS devices. (TouchPad, Pre, Pixi, Veer...) It also runs happily in a modern web browser, including those on iBerry and BlackDroid and AnPhone and whatnot.
web demo:
http://penduin.net/bits/picross/
webOS app:
https://developer.palm.com/appredirect/?packageid=net.penduin.picross

The idea behind the game is that the process of solving a puzzle, using numerical clues, creates a pixel-art picture. I didn't invent Picross; someone much more clever did. But, I turned the idea into an HTML5 toy, and spent many insomniac hours thinking up 8x8 pictures, then testing and re-testing them to guess at their difficulty and make sure the clues weren't ambiguous. I recruited some help too; my wife contributed a handful of puzzles, as did a coworker and an enthusiastic early adopter.

Like all my little pet projects, it's open (GPL3) and you're encouraged to peek inside and learn from or build on it. I do sell the 99-cent webOS app with all of the (384, but who's counting) puzzles and the builder tool enabled, but when I say it's open I mean it - it's not hard to enable that stuff anyway if you're broke/cheap/webOS-less. :^) For BlackBerry PlayBook users, I'll probably release the game and demo in the BlackBerry store too at some point, but for now the web version runs very nicely.

Happy Puzzling!

Fortune Cookie

Gee Wiz

A while ago (a year? I don't know) I bought a GP2X Wiz. It's a little Gameboy-like device which, unlike most others, is designed to be open for all developers. My first reaction to reading about it was, "hey, I could get TONG to run on that!"

...If that was gibberish to you, TONG is a game I wrote ages ago in which you are tasked with playing Tetris and Pong on the same screen at the same time. It's very hard, and I apologize to anyone who has gone insane while playing it.

Anyway, so I bought a Wiz, with the primary purpose of porting TONG to it. But I got busy, and it became a lower priority, and then it just kind of sat there neglected and forgotten for a long while.

A week or so ago I came upon it and decided to charge it up again, and load it with some games from the internet. Time to see what people who hadn't forgotten about it had accomplished. As I was browsing and downloading various free games, what did I find but TONG! Some crazy person out there had found my game, played it, enjoyed it (at least enough to want a portable version), then dug into the source code and data, made some modifications, cross-compiled it for the device, then shared the resulting package with the Wiz community. That blew my mind a bit.


Anyway I'm very pleased. It's a bit of a quick and dirty port, using a slightly older version of TONG and the music was missing, but it runs great! I'm distributing a version of it myself now, with some new features, all the music intact and using the latest code.

Has anyone seen TONG spring up anywhere else? I was hoping to get it running on the Wii at some point, has somebody done that already? :^)

Election Fun

This morning, when my wife and I went to vote, we came across a campaign sign, right there on the public school grounds of our polling place. Across the street on someone's private property, I'd be fine with, but no. Not at the polling location. Not cool. I wasn't about to stand for that. So I knocked it over.

After voting, on our way back to the car, I swiped it.

During the morning meeting at work, my coworkers and I sliced it up and made it better. So, I hereby present our improved campaign signs:













Rodders asked, after we'd had our way with the sign, whether I'd taken a "before" picture. I hadn't, so we pieced it back together as best we could. So in case you're wondering what started this little adventure, here's the sign more or less as we saw it, inappropriately standing outside the polls:


Best of luck to your opponents, Mike. Your supporters have no class.

Anyway, everyone who hasn't already: Get out and vote! Even if it's for this goon. Vote! Do it now!

eStuff, iThings...

In the '90s, it was eStuff. eBooks, eMachines, eBay, "E" was the little letter to stick on your brand. Then, it was on to the next vowel.

In the '00s, it was iThings. iPods, iMacs, iPhones... Heck, the world's best-selling video game console is nothing more than a "W" with two little "i"s tacked on.

I've got the next one. Vowels are on the way out. I mean, who wants to be seen in public with an oFace or look up their contacts on a uWho? Obviously, the next big trend in naming is ...

π (yes, "pi".)

I've already begun work on the πPod, which obviously will be used to play MP3.14159 files. (You may have already read about that compression algorithm.)

Have fun with your internets

This is a dumb story. But I'm overworked, sleep-deprived, and need a break. Some coworkers and I have been writing a new web-based setup for M+ Guardian. (As in, you buy a Guardian appliance from Messaging Architects, plug it in, hit it with a browser the way you configure your router, and set up the system.) Its implementation is quite slick, and we've spent some really long nights on it. Once everything is set up, the appliance will start up its services and begin dutifully making your corporate email safe and unspammy.

But that last screen, nobody gave me any text for what should be said there. The current placeholder is something like "M+ Guardian is set up, you may now do XYZ". Not great. And in our quickie meeting today, nobody gave me anything better, except Thane who jokingly suggested "Have fun with your internets". After the meeting, I scribbled our new internal M+ slogan and an accompanying drawing on the whiteboard.


...And now, on the other side of the picture, the other side of the story. The dude in the scribble is the Shmoe, who apparently doesn't even deserve a "c" in his name. He first appeared in some high school notebooks, in French class. He was meant to be the guy on the hissy, stretched-out cassette tape telling us to listen and repeat... In any case, he's surfaced around the office lately in various situations. This time he's using his beer belly as a table, and looking up what appear to be either boobies or eyeballs on his super-modern computer.

The Best Wurst

That title's a Red Green-ism, by the way. Credit where credit is due. Anyhow, this post is mostly a pointless anecdote, but can also serve as a series of tips for any bratwurst-grilling newbie. :^)

We went to an Independence Day party last night, and I was charged with bringing and preparing the brats. This is a responsibility which I gladly accept anytime, and which I take quite seriously. After all, I'm representing Wisconsin out here. We cheeseheads are a proud, brat-grilling people. We have a rich tailgating culture. Here in Utah, though, there would be no beer dulling the senses of these Latter-Day Saints. Their taste buds would tell no lies. My brats had to stand on their own.

Luckily, I was not without help. A week or two ago, a work buddy introduced me to a local family-owned sausage shop, Colosimo's. A quick drive up towards Salt Lake scored us three packs of high-quality bratwurst. Not to knock the big-name brands; you can get a decent brat anywhere, but these small places survive by being the tastiest, not the most cost-effective and well-distributed. Not surprisingly, mom-and-pop sausage shops are a bit harder to come by in Utah than in Wisconsin.

Now, to someone like me, it's pretty non-controversial that in order to grill the best wurst, one ought to soak them in beer and onions at some point(s) during their preparation. Pre-boiling is common practice, for good reason. I didn't dare go that route though, as I didn't know if the various Mormons I'd be feeding would be comfortable with it. As it turned out, nobody objected to their brat having a good soak in some appropriately-patriotic Samuel Adams lager.

Cutting up an onion was murder on my eyes, but that was good - it meant the little bugger was potent enough to quickly impart its flavors to the hot brats swimming around in the pan. Surface area's the name of the game, the more thin slices the better. Tears of joy, right? :^)

I also made sure to capitalize on my tendency to micro-manage the grill. Rather than turning once or twice, I made sure every brat got plenty of rotation, including being balanced sideways. (You can actually see that going on in Proby's picture up there.) A curved brat can't be cooked perfectly evenly, but it's pretty easy to do better than two charred sides and pink everywhere else.

Using cheese as a brat condiment is a very Wisconsin-y touch. If you ask me, get plenty of colby-jack melted between the bun and the sausage, and there's no need for mustard or sauerkraut or anything else. Cheddar was more popular yesterday, and I won't argue with cheddar. That would be folly. Point is, cheese and brats go together like ... actually, I can't think of much else that goes together that well. Beer and brats, maybe. Or beer and cheese. Oh, got it. Cheese and bratwurst go together like fireworks and the 4th of July.

I received a whole bunch of compliments on the brats, so I must have done something right. We got to digest while watching lots of pretty fireworks go off, both amateur and professional. Celebrating the nation's birthday with grilled meat and explosions, who could ask for more? :^)

Wii!

As of 8:05 yesterday, I'm a proud owner of a shiny new Nintendo Wii.

Along with two friends (and some 40+ strangers) I actually camped in a line outside a local Target to get my hands on this thing. Even as a gamer, I've never camped out for high-demand stuff before. It's a completely insane thing to do, but my justification for it was this:

The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess. I've always been a sucker for Zelda games, and this one may well be the best yet. I've played enough already to have myself convinced that waiting out in the cold all night was worth it. The controls are both natural and precise, the story's progression is surprisingly powerful, and the art direction is like nothing I've ever seen before. But I didn't expect that I would also be playing a lot of this:The included-for-free Wii Sports, tennis in this case. Turns out, my wife can't get enough of this game. And there are good reasons. It's ridiculously simple to play - just use the Wii remote as you would a tennis racket. We got to create and play as little caricature versions of ourselves, which are pretty amusing even when they're not doing anything. So when an instant replay flashes in showing a little plastic me (Mii, actually) jumping and swinging wildly at the ball only to land hard on its exaggerated face, and my wife's avatar stepping in to save the day with a scoring lob, laughter ensues. Very simple elements, but very rewarding gameplay.

I'm not posting to make any point really. I just had to shout out, "Wiiii!" :^)

Soon we'll know everything

My wife came across this little gem while changing channels. For childish reasons still unclear to us, we felt it necessary to photograph it.

Just a silly little "anic"dote. Oof, sorry.

My Tetrises bring all the girls to the yard

Nintendo made magic happen with the DS. Not the 3D graphics, not the wireless networking, and not the 10-hour battery life. After lunch, my work buddies and I can whip out these little shiny devices and get all competitive, spouting off enough random banter to occasionally make my eyes water.

Today was less of a Tetris contest than a competition of who could say the most random and off-the-wall things during play.
"I just did something totally retarded"
"I'm offended by the word 'retarded'"
"I'm offended by the word 'water'"
"My ancestors came here across water"
"Mine didn't, my ancestors hovered"
"They must have had very advanced technology"
"My ancestors were from the future"

This has been a test of the emergency blog posting system. Had it been an actual emergency, this nearly-inactive blog would be the last place any reasonable person would expect to find warning.