Category: IRL

On video game development, or the lack thereof

I’ve obviously not posted any further entries on that “learn to make video games” project that we all knew I would flake on before long. And, I mean, its status is “on hiatus” for now, mostly because of school significantly limiting my time for fun things. I also didn’t work on it at all for a while there because a power outage killed my computer and it was nearly two weeks before I was told how to fix it and then actually implemented that fix. I could provide more excuses if you really need me to.

So, the end of the story is that I fully intend to go back to it once my class is over. Mid-June.

But we’ll see.

Tales from my dumb brain

Last weekend I had a bit of a zany episode: I forgot the PIN for my debit card.

I blame the “tap” technology, for making it so easy to just pay for all things with a wave of the card instead of popping it into the terminal and then punching in my code. But I buy groceries at Wal-Mart every week, and they don’t support the tap, so I absolutely have been using that PIN at least once a week. There’s no reasonable explanation for how I randomly lost that knowledge.

See, what happened is that I was purchasing fuel through the terminal at the pump, where they also don’t have a tap-compatible thingy. I popped in the PIN and then it beeped at me and told me it was wrong. I was a little flustered, since I always put in the PIN by muscle memory more than anything. Stopping to actually think about it, I realized that I didn’t actually “know” my PIN, and now that my fingers had failed me, I was at a loss.

Fortunately, the gas situation was resolved by using the tap terminal in the actual store at the gas station. What didn’t go so well was when I went to Wal-Mart the next day for my weekly grocery run. Not only did I not “recover” the “knowledge” of my PIN, but the third failed attempt locked the card completely, and since I had no alternative or cash on had, I was forced to abandon my bags of groceries and walk away in shame.

The one upside of this whole dilemma is that I learned that we have a terminal to reset debit cards and change PINs right at work! I thought that I’d either have to wait the whole week to get to a branch on Saturday or make a mad dash to the nearest branch on my lunch break. So now every time I screw this up in the future, I can just saunter downstairs and get it cleared up. Neat!

Listen to me whine -or- An essay on video game rentals

I miss Blockbuster and/or Rogers Video.

Why? Isn’t it obvious? I could go there with $6 in hand, and get access to virtually any video game (provided it was in stock) I want, and play it all weekend. Big games, little games, role-playing games, puzzle games. Whatever I wanted. Probably the biggest downside to renting games was that Blockbuster never had anything for handhelds, and Rogers only kept a very limited selection for the Nintendo DS.

But you know what really stings about not being able to rent games? It’s that excitement of getting to try something new every weekend.

There was a nice little period in between the demise of rental stores and the rise of indie developers where you could get top-tier indie games and Virtual Console titles for between five and ten bucks. Those days are gone, however, between indie devs assigning their games higher values and the crappy Canadian dollar driving prices way the frig up (the average AAA game is $60 USD and $90 Canadian).

Now, it’s a matter of forking over at least $20 for those same kinds of indie games. Sure, I get to keep them forever (and a lot of them are worth the extra money, TBH), but a lot of these games I don’t need more than three days with anyhow. And since I really don’t have that much disposable income, I can’t very well buy a $20 game every week. I mean, I could, but then I’d have no money for the bigger games. Maybe I could have survived without Kirby: Star Allies, but I wouldn’t want to live in a world where I don’t have Xenoblade Chronicles 2.

Plus, like 90% of video games don’t even get physical releases anymore, so it’s not like I’d even get access to most of the games I’d actually like to try out. Golf Story, for example, seems like a game I’d get a ton of value from over a weekend, then forget about it forever. But it costs a whopping $28.

One could say that demos are a good place to meet halfway, but really, there are shockingly few demos out there. I think most developers/publishers don’t see that extra work as worth it. It seems like there was a demo for nearly every game back in the 360 days, but the Switch and PS4 really don’t have all that many relative to the size of their game libraries.

So in conclusion, it’s an impossible situation that can only be rectified by going back in time. Suck it up and get with the times, Old Man Ryan.

(Please note that this isn’t a rant about how video games are too expensive. AAA games especially are actually a steal when you consider how much they cost to make these days and that inflation hasn’t really affected game prices over the years. I strongly believe that all game developers have every right to charge what they feel is a fair price for their hard work. This is just a rant about how I miss being able to rent games.)

Designer Diary: Episode 3: The Shootening

I took last week off of working on my GameMaker project because of the way that a lot of other events lined up. This isn’t to say that I was too busy to do any work on it, but rather that I made the decision to put it off in favour of other ways to pass my evenings.

This may have been a huge mistake. I’m not sure how to explain it, but it’s like, taking that one week off set a precedent for me ignoring the project, and now that I’ve broken the chain, so I don’t have to feel that obligation for follow-through. And on week three! Look how quickly I’ve fallen off the wagon! Sad face.

But I hopped back on this week and sat down to absorb tutorial #3: giving my guy a gun. So now he can run and jump and shoot in every direction. There was even a little extra bit on the end to give the gun a little recoil animation. It doesn’t really make sense because I drew my gun as a stereotypical cartoon raygun, but there’s recoil!

This particular tutorial was a fun learning exercise, but the fact of the matter is that I don’t want to make a shooting game, so it’s only somewhat relevant. Even if I did, I would never use mouse aiming. Obviously there may end up being some way in which I incorporate some of what I learned into other things, but the guy’s not going to have a gun in the end. At least not for the game I have in my head. Though at this point I’ve actually been entertaining the idea of making a shoot-em-up, just because it would be a moderately simpler project. Way fewer animation frames necessary :p

You know, now that I think about it, I’m like halfway to the point where I could create my own ripoff of Deep Space Waifu. That certainly would be a thing! I think next week’s lesson is on making enemies, so that’s pretty much all I would need to know. That, power-ups, and menus.

Remembrances

I randomly clicked into the oldest archived posts on Nintendo World Report yesterday, only to find… Silly little bloggy-type posts. Just like you’ll find if you go back to the beginning of my own archive. I mean, yeah, I’ll still post something silly and irrelevant every once in a while, but it definitely hit me in the nostalgia for blogging all those many years ago.

And… I actually really miss the old “Page of Death” look, with all its poor design decisions, gaudy article backgrounds, and text of every colour on a single page. Actually I think a lot of it is that I miss designing everything from the ground up. Whether it looked good or not was irrelevant; I put thought into every aspect it! Now it’s just mash text into a box and hit the “schedule” button.

Well that went in a completely different direction than I’d intended… Oh well. Happy Wednesday!

Now I’m an animator (but not really)

I continued through Chapter 2 of my video game making odyssey last night, wherein I learned the basics of animating a player sprite. So really, I spent most of the time drawing out a crappy little sprite seventeen times for all his jumping and running frames. But hey! Progress! It seems again like I really did very little in the two hours or so that I spent working on this project, and I keep having to remind myself that this is a massive thing I’m trying to do and it’s always only going to move forward in baby steps.

This time I also took a screenshot of my project in GameMaker Studio. You know, to prove that I’m actually doing this. Future Ryan will be filled with so much sorrow when he looks back at this post and remembers giving up on this dream.

From consumer to creator

I have a long history of enjoying video games about making video game levels (Super Mario Maker, Chicken Wiggle, etc.), and have dabbled in a couple of programs that make it easy to put together more complex stages (like Super Mario Bros X). Back in high school, I even took a class on basic programming where I learned to cobble together crappy little tic-tac-toe and mastermind games.

Last night, however, I took a major leap forward and began the process of learning how to create an actual video game.

I have now downloaded and started futzing around with GameMaker Studio 2, and got absolutely lost in the process. I was so involved in learning about the program and how to use it that I completely forgot to make myself dinner. That never happens! More importantly is that I actually feel fairly confident about diving headfirst into what amounts to a completely overwhelming project. Usually as soon as anything shows even minor resistance I give up immediately.

Progress made last night started with installing GameMaker and clicking around, and realizing that this was not a good way to go about it. So I looked up some tutorials on creating a basic platformer. Two-and-a-half hours and one (of six) YouTube tutorial video later, I had assembled my very own little box of platforms in which a cube could run and jump around freely. Even though it amounts to less than the Visual Basic tic-tac-toe game I made sixteen years ago, I’m still really proud of my creation. I feel like I accomplished a lot last night, and I am very anxious to get back and start learning more.

It’s going to be a long, long road. I have huge plans for the game that I ultimately want to make, though I know that it’s not going to all come together right away. I’ve obviously scaled way, way down for the time being, just focusing on learning how GameMaker works and how to code. If I come up with something halfway playable as I learn, great! But all the design documents that I’ve been drawing up are for a project far too large in scope for someone with just slightly more than “zero” knowledge of programming.

So, I think I’m going about this all right. Following tutorial videos. Learning the basics first. Taking pride in each baby step. Understanding the concept of scope. All that’s left is to wait and see if I actually follow through on any of this, or if I get bored after a week and never think about it again. Exciting stuff!

Office excitement

Sir Ben Kingsley visited my office today. Yep. It’s a thing that happened. And honestly, the way people around here reacted was like one notch short of how the characters on TV’s The Office would have acted if a celebrity had visited their workplace. Pandemonium all day. Personally, I tried to play it cool, but I got infected by everyone else’s excitement. I’m a little ashamed. At the very least, I did my best to stay out of the crew’s way.

As the story goes, he was shooting a short additional scene for the upcoming film Nomis. Just a 30-second snippet. He was in and out in ten minutes, but I think that maybe the more impressive thing was the crew’s set-up and take-down. We had about 20 people on the film crew milling about for about two hours, setting up and preparing for the shot. Once it was over, they were gone in under five minutes. It’s kind of fascinating how much more quickly they were able to tear down the operation.

It’s also important to note that in their hustle and bustle, the film crew made a significant mess on our freshly-cleaned carpets and dinged up a bunch of walls. And the office was just renovated last summer. Le sigh.

Anyway, if you care, you can watch that movie to see the Winnipeg skyline outside the window I almost never look out of. It’s got Mr. Kingsley talking on a phone or something in front of a window. I don’t know if I’ll care enough to actually watch the film right away just to spot the scene. I think it’s more likely that I’ll be looking through old blog posts a few years from now, and stumble onto this one, which will inspire me to finally check it out.

Self-improvingment

My New Year’s resolution for 2018 is not a glamorous one. In fact, it’s something that really shouldn’t have to be a resolution. It is quite simply that I want to make a habit of flossing my teeth.

Don’t get me wrong, I am otherwise on top of my dental hygiene. I brush my teeth every day, sometimes twice, and use mouthwash more often than not. It’s just the flossing that’s a big hurdle for me. For some reason, I could just never be bothered.

Now we’re almost through January and honestly, I still haven’t been doing great. I just look at that little dental floss container most nights and think “It’s already really late, that’s another two minutes, I’ll start tomorrow.” However, I am definitely flossing better than usual, as I had a dentist appointment this morning, and my dental hygienist told me that my gums are looking significantly better than last time. So hurray!

Also I had no cavities this time so it’s really quite a big win for me. That’s how you know that I’m the most boring fella on the face of the Earth (I’m okay with that).

Migraine Watch – January 17, 2018

It’s been quite some time since my last migraine, in fact I don’t even remember it. Which kind of makes yesterday a sad day. I was hoping deep in my heart that they would just be gone forever, even though I knew it would be too good to be true. Bad things happen to mediocre people.

Let’s start at the start: perfectly normal day at work, I was actually feeling slightly less exhausted than usual, so maybe I got a decent sleep the previous night? Then, at around a quarter to four, I notice that words and numbers are getting hard to read. I’m still functional, but it’s taking a lot of effort to read anything on either paper or screen.

I immediately poured myself a glass of water and popped two ibuprofen. Twenty minutes later, my vision is restored. However, I do notice a mild pain on the right side of my head. I pray that I was swift enough and that it will not get worse. It does, but not anywhere near as bad as my migraines usually get. It persisted through the evening, though at the less intense level, I remained perfectly functional and went about my daily business as usual.

Weird thing: I actually had some “aura” after the headache part started. On the bus ride home and lasting even about an hour after that, I had a mild numbness along the left side of my body. I worried briefly that my supposed migraine might actually be a stroke, but I don’t think I ever actually believed it could be true.

As far as probable causes, this was my third consecutive day caffeine-free. Normally if I go a day without coffee, I get a pounding headache by around 2PM, but I hadn’t had any issues at all up until this point. So I don’t know if it was just my physical dependence catching up with me or an unfortunate coincidence, but we’re going to blame this one on the lack of coffee. I have also been sleeping worse than usual for the last two weeks, so that may have something to do with it, but there’s no way to be sure.