My Story Now post was linked to by Dev Purkayastha, owner of a "tumblelog" (I'm guessing that's a blog made of links with minor commentary) I discovered by way of his discovering mine: 10 by 10 room. I've been reading it and there's some great stuff on there! The latest D&D Communism in D&D post is, I think, my favorite ( Read more... )

I will soon (sometime after next week) be off for a whole week of housecleaning, basking in sunlight, and not programming video games. I'm sorely tempted to work on my Roguelike, but that might just push me into Morlock territory. My eyes are already two-hundred percent larger, my ears have atrophied some, and my cavefish pallor is coming along ( Read more... )

Reading Mike's entry on two anime series, I was struck by what turns me off of so much anime. Namely, the substitution of story happening at that moment with either a) mysterious backstory or b) mysterious current events, both handed out in small doses over many, many hours. My favorite anime (among them Paranoia Agent, Tokyo Godfathers and Totoro ( Read more... )

... because of what they offer. I decided to change from D I G I T A L L Y - I M P O R T E D's Goa Trance channel to DAS Darkwave und Gothic Radio. I'm totally digging the screams of "TOT!!!", accented English and the occasional Finnish trill.

Bands I've enjoyed far too much to retain any sense of modern-era credibility:

• Anubiz
• Esplendor Geometrico
• ( Read more... )

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Not that it was a great board game, but the premise was that I was at a cheezy space lounge, gambling next to Han Solo (who was very good at this game), and he was surreptitiously teaching me how to play against a pair of aliens. So yeah, there's that.
( It's a pretty long description, so click to expand )

I was looking for an algorithm I remember from the original QuakeC sourcecode (does that date me as a programmer?), and found this awesome conjunction of ad garbage: QuakeC.com.

There's something unbelievably awesome about those juxtapositions. I got a puppy on my first view of that page. What did you see?

Screenshots released on the game:

Screenshots at IGN
Screenshots at Gamespot

If you're at all curious, I'm programming all of the AI for this thing. That's something like 30-odd sidescroller enemies and every enemy sailing ship. Yeah, I'm a little exhausted.

Here it is. It's not much, and the GBA screenshot doesn't show off how awesome I think our game looks, but there you go.

Using "story" to override the rules is a shortcut around the fact that you don't agree with the game you're playingOr put another way, when you ignore the rules for "story", "role playing", "mood" and so on, you've incorporated an additional rule that states, "our unspecified whims override any explicit rules." This is why you must not only must ( Read more... )