I have long wanted to afford copies of the amazing game magazine “Kill Screen” but now I have found its sister site with articles that are online. If you are working on a game, there is not a lot that can cheer you up about the process. Kill screen cheered me up to roughly 1000% of my normal level. I want to make a killer game. Grarrr
Somehow I bumped in to this Wikipedia entry about “Geo-fencing”. This is something that is at the core of Localio - understanding what it means to be somewhere involves defining how big that place is. Originally, I had this idea about making players walk around the perimeter of a place to define it. It’s not likely going to be all that necessary.
I’ve been on the fence for a long time about which new phone I should get. If I go Android, then I know for sure that I’ll end up using Processing to publish - despite the fact that i know nothing about Eclipse. If I go iOS, then i’ll for sure make myself buy a developer license and learn a thing or two in Objective-C. Since i’m really familiar with the former, I thought I’d have a peek at how tricky the latter is these days. After all, someone at a meetup said to me once “think about how many dumb apps there are on the app store. most of them look like they were made by kids. so it can’t actually be that hard” Point noted, sir.
Development on Localio slowed down a ton. Life most definitely got in the way. Weather got crummy.. but i’m going to try to pick it up again soon. I’d love to have a working alpha to play around with which would motivate me to do more and more and more.
Whoa. So I do this thing that I think lots of people do. It’s sort of like distracting yourself on purpose so that when you get focused again it feels real? I want to call it “popping my brain” the same way people pop their knuckles. Anyway, I was doing that, and I accidentally found this thing called localwiki and it’s amazing.
click the button that says “find a project near you” and bam, you’re part of this wild west of a community where you can modify places that are right under your feet. whooo! That’s so cool.
I’m from Raleigh, NC, so these are all going to be raleigh links.
Where to find Vetetarian restaurants!
Where to find Animal Shelters!
Durham’s Tobacco Trail Greenway
It feels unique because the content is hand-pieced together just from people in your area - not the whole wide weird world, it’s all creative commons - yes I’m an information hippie, and i like that it supports not just points but also lines and polygons. Maybe if they have an API then I could use localWikis to plot out free wifi spots (would be helpful, and a free API i’ve been having trouble finding) or greenways to get from one location to another (can you say serendipitous directions?) I’m hopeful. It’s maybe still to young to leverage just yet, but it’s still a cool project all by itself, and worth talking about.
I have abused cookies, and it was wrong. I’m sorry. But maybe, just maybe, one day it will be handy for someone else…
http://www.pasteall.org/30113/javascript
…NO. Just don’t. it disgusts me that something so simple would require jQuery in order to work. Cookies have officially gone the way of the t-rex, and I’m excited to be rid of them in favor of localStorage, and not just because I’m a bleeding-edge bleeding heart new webbo technology wackadoo. It’s one of the first things that was wideley adopted in all browsers, including mobile browsers, and it’s safe to use, and just plain easy.
In case you’re curious what it looks like open the console in Chrome, type in localStorage, and check out its __proto__ functions (quicker than looking things up on the internet! neat eh?)
So what’s this mean for players? It means that I’m using localStorage for your save file. Yep. Nothing really super technical about it — i’m using local storage, suckers, and I’m happy to not have to deal with escaping queries, building an API, handshaking with OAuth, or integrating your newfangled freindster so you can log in and share your progress. It’s a game. You’ll probably play it on your own devices. Maybe one day in the future I’ll realize the error of my ways, but for right now it’s going to make my life way simpler to just think about the game itself. Deal? Cool. Thanks.
Less is more. So when I say Leaflet is less than Google Maps, I mean that in a good way. Their API impressed me last night at a meetup, and I’m now tempted to use Leaflet in the few spots where a true map is necessary. The reasoning is that it is a lot lighter weight and therefore less likely to make a mobile browser cry in the fetal position.
We’re inside of Sprint 4 right now, and one of my tasks is to “build a simple web-based test” - one of many to follow. So.. hey - why not - maybe i’ll give Leaflet a spin for funsies.
Those brave volunteers who are on the writing crew are interviewing people for interesting stories that might fit in to our script. Now that I’ve seen some of the Oscar-winning films this week, it’s fueled a lot of motivation to write good story. The best of luck to my two gracious volunteers, Bill & Kendra. Yay for group writing!
The writing crew added one person this week: Kendra Fortmeyer. It’s a good time to write, be writing, be a writer, and write about all those things…right? Right.
I just found out that an old friend from high school is also making a game, and trying to discover what it takes to be a writer, a game designer, a musician, and so on and so forth. This adventurous man’s name is Aaron Eason, and it’s clear that he’s taking charge of matters that are intimidating. I wish you well, Aaron!
One of his blog posts is about “25 Things Writers Should Stop Doing” Articles like that I find are generally toxic. I don’t need to look for answers on how to do, I just need TO DO. You know what I’m saying? Right. Well, i hesitantly clicked the link, and skimmed it. Yes it’s worth looking over. So, thanks for that, Aaron, in an inadvertent sort of way.
I’m going to write today. Write write write write write until my fingers are tired, and then i’ll write some more.
If you too are interested in writing something for Localio, hit me up — especially if you have my phone number.
Yo yo yo blog post whaaaaat
I had a sudden realization this morning: Some of the parts of Localio are going to need sound. In fact, sound is pretty crucial to the atmosphere I’m hoping to build.
All of the game needs location, but some of the mini games in Localio will work better on mobile devices that can use 3G to get quickly-updated locations, speed, bearing, et cetera, namely for bike races with NPCs.
The two came together in my head this morning, and I got so excited that it made me jump out of bed! “The bike races can be completely sound based! You can just wear headphones and hear what’s going on” But the idea came with a price, a $99 price to be exact. In order to have Safari on iPhone to have multi-channel sound, you have to use an App. So, I figured I was going to run in to this problem eventually since I really wanted to write lots of cool music for the game. Now I can. It just means that now I’m making an app… which feels a little weird.
Thankfully I had already been following impact.js and it’s developer who was also really disappointed with Apple’s neglect on HTML5’s <audio> tag. That lead me to appMobi, and a few hours of research, I think I’ve found a solution to three or four potential problems. Whew! Annnd I don’t have to learn objective-C. Yay. And you could still play the game without running the app at all. Yay!
Oh boy. So, writing story for a game is confusing! There’s conversation trees, and items, and conditions, and and and…
We came up with a clever(?) mechanic for writing conversation trees using bullets.
Cool right? Hopefully that will make it easier for all the participating writers. Bill, my roommate and first volunteer writer who hosts an amazing blog written solely on his typewriter, is being given an additional two weeks to add anything he might want to add. The extra allotted time is because he has to be the first to write; and being first makes things harder. Right now they’re hard for me too. This sprint likely will suffer the worst writers block out of all of them because so many ideas are still forming.
The script isn’t planned to be done until April. Since 70% of the game is story, I figure it better be good.
This might not look like much, but it’s the result of a five hour evening of story planning, and game mechanic talks I had with my childhood friend Corwin Emory, currently attending classes for game design at Full Sail. It’s not exactly a board game like I thought it would be. Oh well. Good enough for one evening. As January comes to a close, I’m very pleased with how many decisions have been pinned down. I won’t say that we’ve actually made “progress” because there’s hardly been any story or code written yet. Well, there’s been a little… More on that in the next post.
This is an excellent video that points out the difference between “a stat” and “an achievement”. All the cool achievements that were in Golden Eye 64 come to mind. You can’t just get one immediately. They’re the result of a lot of actions over a span of time, and to receive them you have to behave a certain way, and maintain that behavior consistently. Food for thought as we continue Sprint 2, where we are starting to figure out game mechanics that are actually fun — not game mechanics that poor designers only think would be fun, but are actually tedious and meaningless.
Sprint 1 was all about consolidating all of the code from the last year and a half. Most of these little tests are sort of cool, but don’t do very much. The image above is one of the last tests I did. The browser finds your current location, determines the accuracy of that reading, visualizes both of them in a Google Map. Then it determines if your location is considered to be within a region I specified earlier.
Really, I was just trying to get at the heart of one problem: when you get data back with that “accuracy” variable, just how big is that circle? In the city, or anywhere else Skyhook has passed by and recorded your location+IP, it’s roughly the width of one city block. In a neighborhood in middle-class suburbia, it’s roughly two houses apart. In an apartment complex, .. it’s trickier!
These tests were not very interactive, or useful to the laymen. I’m looking forward to the next two weeks worth of story writing, code, experiments, and play.
Coming up this weekend, Localio: the board game prototype!
I want to say something about piracy, and the market, and censorship, and copyright, and open source, and staying competitive, and money.
Part of what makes me feel like I’m alive is when I make things. The more an idea feels like my own, the more legitimate I feel. That’s why I’m such an off-beat person. I’m trying really hard to go against the grain. For that sentiment, some have called me a hipster.
Well, hipster culture, DIY culture, and makers, and indie culture have one thing in common: we don’t want to be owned by someone big. Staying out of the interference of ideas that are firmly under the attempt at control by a body as large as Viacom, or Time Warner (to make a quick example) helps us feel better about ourselves. It certainly helps me.
So, in a way, I’m not afraid in the slightest. This project of mine has nothing to hide from a snoopy lawyer trying to make a quota. Everything we’re making is completely original - never before seen by human eyes, never before heard by human ears, never before felt by human skin, never before absorbed by human mind.
There is something I’m afraid of though: I owe a lot of my skill as an artist to piracy. I admire graffiti artists / street artists for the same reasons I admire software crackers, and the fearless people at The Pirate Bay and other such “information wants to be free” activists. They’re all out to help the little guy. More specifically, a kid with no money going to public school.
Then again, I’m not afraid. I’ve never been the type to not go for an idea just because I thought I would get in trouble. Tell that to Aristotle, or Benjamin Franklin, or Banksy.
As long as the system never becomes so efficient that it is successful in making it impossible for innocent possibly rebellious youngsters, or poor creative types to find their way to expensive professional software without getting caught in the name of creating better art, for the sakes of expressing themselves, so that they’re better at it when the times comes to find a job… then I think we’ll all be okay. I know I am.
