August 2012 – Brian Crick

Mail Order Epiphany

Barely two days after it started, my service as a juror for Cuyahoga County has ended. And by ‘service’ I mean working from the juror waiting room and watching juror selection, having not actually been on a case.

I’m relieved that this will make it that much easier to get back to my usual routine — I could use any help I can get — but I’m also bummed I didn’t get to participate in the system for real. I’m dying to know what it’s like. What real attorneys are like, how an expert witness engages with their audiences, how the one particularly casual judge I met would have handled the proceedings.

For me, just being who I am, with my general shyness and poor verbal comprehension skills, it would have been monumentally difficult to listen to days of testimony and process it and then feel comfortable discussing it with a bunch of people I’d never met.

I was looking forward to that challenge. I felt like that was a challenge I needed to overcome.

But if this needs to happen, it needs to happen, and there are, of course, many ways of getting challenges to come my way that don’t involve waiting two years for another summons to appear in my mailbox.

A Jury of Your Peers

As I write this, I’m sitting in a waiting room in the Cuyahoga County Justice Center, waiting for my name to be called, to serve on a jury. I’ve never done this before. I’m pretty excited, though from the sound of things there’s a good chance my service will just consist of coming to sit in this waiting room for a few days, and then getting sent home.

For some reason, I find myself thinking of this kerfuffle involving a movie star accused of shoplifting, and the prosecutor said of the defendant,

I find [her] to be very nice. This was never about her character, only her conduct.

That quote really stuck with me.

* * *

Last weekend I participated in a 48 hour game jam. I thought it was over, but in many ways it’s just starting.

I didn’t realize this going in, but apparently after you finish your game, there’s a three-week voting period where people play your game and you play other people’s games and rate them. I was assuming there would be some small, pre-selected panel rating things… not the actual programmers doing the ratings.

I have mixed feelings about this. I like the idea of everybody who participated in the contest being a judge and developing this sense community… but I don’t see myself as particularly impartial judge of games, and rating these things feels like this heavy, serious responsibility.

I’d also specifically want the opinions of non-programmers for my own stuff. Not that I’m sure how you’d get such people on board. This contest is structured in such a way that if you want feedback, you have to rate other people’s stuff. There’s a lot of motivation to go out there and rate things and comment on them.

It’s silly, but now I’m imagining this multi-disiplinary jam where game programmers rate 48-hour novellas, the novella writers rate 48-hour symphonies, and the composers rate the games. 😉

* * *

I have occasionally had people comment on how non-judgmental I am. And while I’ll take those sort of statements as the compliments they’re generally intended to be, it also gives me pause.

Like all things, tracing the source of a problem to a specific person is a skill. It is a skill I would not necessarily say I possess.

If there’s some work or social event I’m helping manage and something blows up, I think it’s fair to say I’m not quick to assign blame — both because I choose not to be too judgmental and because I couldn’t accurately pinpoint a culprit if I wanted to.

This lack of perception has been a problem occasionally, and there is, I hate to admit, value in knowing if the blame for a problem really does lie with a specific person. Having this information can only help you and your team or your friends or whatever make things better. You don’t have to be accusatory or mean about it; I think it important to remember that whole conduct vs. character thing — but I’m all for finding new ways to make things better.

Terribly Overdue Scopa Updates

Got a new Scopa card (mostly; just noticed the missing icons, number & title on the bottom). I thought I’d try doing this character from the back just because I thought the bun & chopsticks would look neat that way.

There’s a back-view baseball pitcher coming up too, hopefully.

So actually the top image has been sitting on my computer for like months now. Didn’t add it to my gallery, didn’t send it to the client, didn’t have any motivation whatsoever to move this project along.

I’m not sure what the deal is. I want this project out of the way so I can concentrate on other things. This is, as far as I can tell, a fun, interesting project. I’m happy with my output. It’s for free of course, but the client has reacted positively to the drawings I’ve sent.

I should, all things considered, be highly motivated to get this done.

So in an effort to get back on track, here’s a guess about my lack of motivation: it’s surprisingly tedious.

My first image for this project took like forty five minutes to an hour to complete. Each image thereafter has taken two or three hours.

You’d think it would go faster, the more images I produced, but in many ways, trying to get new images to match the existing ones is harder than coming up with things from scratch. I suppose that’s a skill I need to work on. My workflow could clearly be more efficient, for this and any other project that involves hand-drawn illustrations. Which is most of them.

What I’m doing right now is, I’ve got a basic character template printed out. I’ll trace that with real pencil and paper for new characters, take a picture of my new drawing, then trace that in Illustrator.

There are many parts of this process that are a bit janky, most notably the duplication of effort with the traditional drawing and the Illustrator tracing. But I think the big issue right now is just getting my pencil & paper drawing into the computer. Right now the process looks like this:

Find a nice bright spot to place my drawing.
Take a picture with my phone.
Realize that the light wasn’t bright enough for the picture to come out.
Futz with camera settings, relocate random lamps from around the house and try again.
Email the picture to myself.
Download the email attachment on my laptop.

This is, of course, less than ideal. My scanner broke years ago, and my new phone blows up if you try using it as a USB drive, hence the icky multi-step process.

Ideally, I’d hold up my drawing in front of my web camera and just skip the external scanning/photo taking devices entirely. I have no idea if that would work, but it’s a thought. 😉

In the absence of that though, some sort of photo-taking setup with a bright light right in my office might be helpful. A desk lamp pointing at a clipboard on the wall (desk space is really tight), or maybe an improvised light box taking advantage of the fact that my desk is made of glass. Something like that. Anything to make this more frictionless.

I should see if I can cobble something together from random stuff in the house.

Postmortem: Ludum Dare 24

All done with my first Ludum Dare. You can see my game here.

So have some ruminations.

theme

I really could not have been less enthused about the theme. It was ‘evolution’, and while that’s frequently used as a synonym for ‘growth’, when I hear that word, I think of the strictly biological definition of evolution: groups of genetically dissimilar organisms dying off, and leaving the survivors to pass on their genes, slowly changing the genetic makeup of a species over time, not because the individuals themselves are changing but because the selection of individuals is changing. Growing up in an area where there was a lot of uninformed anti-evolution sentiment, I’m very particular about how I use that word; it’s impossible to have a rational discussion about evolution as a theory if you’re not precise about your terms (theory being another word that doesn’t mean to regular people what it means to science grr).

Anyway. From that point of view, evolution is an inherently impersonal concept. You’re stuck with the genes you’re born with, and you either breed or you don’t.

Which is icky since I’d set myself the goal of making something with a relatable story.

However, after much head scratching, I decided that instead of making the individual — the player — change over time, I’d make the level design evolve based on the player’s choices.

Conceptually, that seemed pretty cool, and a great solution to the problem at hand… but it needed a lot more fleshing out, as I’ll get into later.

scope

The first thing they tell you at the game jams I’ve been to is to be careful to limit your scope.

The level breeding mechanic I had was pretty limited in scope: you wandered down a skinny path with various pits and obstacles and were presented with a fork; each path on the fork would be a variation of the path just traveled. So if you hit a fork and the path on the left had lots of pits and the fork on the right had lots of trees, and you picked the left path, the next fork would present you with options with lots of pits.

From a technical point of view, this was simple enough. I had my branching, evolving paths by the middle of the first day.

The problem was, I wanted to use this to tell a love story kindasorta related to The Road not Taken.

You’d be presented with diverging paths, and while you could not ordinarily ‘travel both / and be one traveler’, as the poem goes, you could find a traveling companion. Then, you would travel together, but you could also travel separately, and share your experiences of two paths, because companionship isn’t always about being together; sometimes, it’s about your experiences apart, because, fundamentally, the only way we can experience everything is to share our limited experiences with others…

…in many ways the scope of this story is massive. Not because it’s epic or generation-spanning or has lots of locations, but because of the emotional complexity of what’s supposed to be going on. Communicating my themes verbally is hard enough; communicating them just through visuals and mechanics would be a truly herculean undertaking.

Getting this to work, I realized very late in the jam, would rely on a couple of difficult-to-express intangibles:

The player has to have a longing to go back and take the paths they missed before.
Once the player and their companion are on separate paths, the player has to have a richer experience because of it; the sort of thing that is richer than the sum of its parts.

I barely touched any of this. My one nod to the themes I was going for is the night/day transition on the zig-zag at the beginning and the end; as you’re going down the zig-zag the first time, you’re supposed to learn that, on the upcoming fork, you’re picking day or night. And while you’ll learn that you’re stuck with that choice no matter what direction you take on subsequent forks, at the end, you get a chance to pick again with your new companion and that’s supposed to be kind of rewarding.

In terms of communicating something to the player purely through the physical shape of the level, I’m actually pretty proud of this, if only as a first step. It needs many more more mechanical, visual and aural supports — a sun & moon, changing music, scenery, obstacles, etc. to work properly.

visuals & music

I’m generally happy with the look of this. The pastel wooden blocks are playful and go with the music; the shattering path effect was a big hit with everyone else at the jam.

I also finally managed to implement a simple version of the crossfading & random music structure I wanted for my Jennifer Ann contest submission years ago. Normally the music has this wood-block sound, but when you get close to a potential companion, some chimes fade in. The music is structured in such a way that when the wood blocks are playing whole notes, the chimes are playing faster notes, and vice versa. So the companion, musically, completes you. 🙂

mechanics

I’ve only done two game jams and the one Jennifer Ann contest, but I noticed something after this jam was over: when thinking of ideas after learning of the themes, I tend not to start with existing game genres at all. Like, I don’t think about how the theme could be applied to a platformer or an RTS or an arena shooter. I think about the theme, and think about what you can do with a game engine and a keyboard and a mouse that fits the theme.

I try to reinvent mechanics from whole cloth.

While this may lead to more original ideas, this sort of thing takes a lot of time and is not necessarily appropriate for a jam. There are things in platformers and shooters that are just known to work, and perhaps more importantly, known to be fun. So even if your story doesn’t work and your approach to theme doesn’t work, well, you could still have a workable game if you start with an existing genre.

Further more, people can just look at something and know how to play it if it fits into established genres. This whole building-a-path-to-your-companion thing I was trying for just wasn’t terribly obvious or communicated very well.

I may have to try starting with a standard genre next time.

Or not. Maybe I just like high-risk experimental stuff.

technical stuff

From a technical point of view, this went extraordinarily well. I barely had to look at the Unity documentation, and only referred to code I’d written for other projects once, for a shader that didn’t even make it into the final product.

There were only two technical hurdles really.

First, I didn’t know how to get your companion to wander down a different path from you once they followed you to a fork.

The second issue was state management. There’s this whole sequence of things you have to do, to win:

Create a solid path to your companion.
Get close enough to a companion to get them to start following you.
Keep the companion from falling while they follow you.
Cross a fork while you have a companion.

And basically, the game had no centralized idea where you were in the process. If a companion started following you, new companions would still appear on new paths. If your companion fell, the game wouldn’t know something bad had happened. There was all this stuff going on, but none of it meant anything to the game. Which made it really hard to debug.

summing up

Generally, I consider the game, as a game, a failure; it’s just not clear enough what’s going on and the story just isn’t communicated to the player, at all.

However, as with most of these things, I learned a lot, had fun, and and glad I did it.

Looking forward to the next jam.

Getting Ready for Another Game Jam…

Been really out of it lately, hence the lack of posts. Not much in the way of pet projects of deep thoughts to post about.

However, I’m attending another one of those Game Jam things this weekend, and I’m hoping that will sort of jolt me back into normalcy. (That, or I’ll just get even more loopy because Marie is on vacation, I’ll be around a lot of people I don’t know too well, and I’ll descend into one of those forgetting-who-I-am episodes. We’ll see… )

For those of you who don’t know, a Game Jam is where you’re given a specific theme to work on, and have a couple days to crank out a game that fits the theme.

The jam doesn’t start for a few hours, so here are some disconnected tips for myself going into this. It isn’t so much unlike the mental prep work I used to do before TypeCons, I suppose.

Keep my other pet projects at a trickle during the jam.

I fully intend to use some of the weekend doing non-game jam coding and illustration and design and whatnot. Besides my already burning desire to get this stuff moving again, it wil probably help whatever I’m doing for the jam, to take frequent breaks.

Speaking of which:

Pick an approach to the theme that will help me sort out issues with my existing stuff.

If I find myself writing something at the jam that’s about cool mechanics for their own sake or has too-realistic physics simulations, I’m doing something wrong. Ideally, I’ll be able to pick an approach that has a little bit of story, a little bit of that commenting-on-the-the-real-world-through-the-lens-of-abstract-mechanics I want in my other stuff.

Check in with other jammers.

I could easily just hole up and work on my own stuff, and I want to make sure I don’t do that. Unlike my last game jam, I won’t be part of a team, but this is still, in many ways, a social event after all.

Sleep.

Not something I normally have trouble with. 😉 But if I do hit a point where I’m so super excited about what I’m working on that I feel the need to stay up late working, I have to remember that I wrote this: staying up late never, ever helps in the long run.

Alternate skill sets.

I’d like to try forcing myself to stick to a rigid rotation of coding, playtesting, illustration, and music composition — say, a half hour each session — throughout the weekend and see how that goes. My gut feeling is that if I can do that, it will help greatly with my productivity.

This is how you click a button.

I spent much of Saturday night teaching an unmedicated schizophrenic how to use a new computer she’d just bought.

This was, in many ways, the high point of my day. I like teaching. Teaching is especially nice if you have every reason not to like the person you’re dealing with, or just can’t connect with them on any kind of personal level. All of that fades away into a comfortingly neutral set of canned interactions.

I also like teaching because the less your student knows, the more open you are to looking at a skill or an experience from a fresh point of view.

And this was a person who didn’t know how to click, or what a blinking text caret was, so my mind was pretty empty just a few minutes into this. It was a unique opportunity to look at the typical conventions of computer UIs — scrolling, push buttons, tabs, file trees — and ask yourself how much sense these things really make.

We had no common experience of computers at all. In fact, it’s probably safe to say our experiences of reality don’t overlap that much either. And while it can be immensely frustrating talking to a person with problems like that, it kinda gets you thinking, about the way you think about things.

* * *

Earlier in that day, we went shopping for said computer, and the first question we had was, tablet or laptop?

The computer was going to be used mostly for email, web browsing, music and movie watching. The obvious choice was a tablet.

I’ll admit, I’m a bit biased. I do not like tablets. Or more precisely, I do not like the idea of tablets. From what I’ve seen, they’re mostly geared at consuming things… and, if that’s true, I’d rather see people get a machine that at least has the potential to allow them to create interesting things.

I don’t want everyone on earth to be a computer nerd. We all have different skills, different interests. However, the cheapest laptops at the store we went to cost the same as the tablets. So I figured, why not go with the laptop? I’d like to believe that anybody could get a lot out of this, if they so desired. Even an unmedicated shizophrenic.

I don’t want to underestimate anyone. It doesn’t matter whether I like or dislike them; it doesn’t matter how functional I think they’ll ever be; I don’t want to start off by thinking of someone as beneath me.

I’m not convinced the tablet would have been easier to user for someone totally new to computers anyway, and it all comes down to one thing: affordances. Affordances are visual cues that tell you how you can interact with an object or user interface. Most tablet user interfaces I’ve seen are utterly lacking in these. If you want to scroll, you can flick along the screen, but there are no scrollbars telling you you can do this. There are no hover states on buttons because the tablet can’t detect a hover.

Don’t get me wrong, some tablet interfaces are beautiful and elegant and there’s certainly potential here. But I would hesitate to throw a technology so young at a new user.

* * *

Several days later, I’m still repeating many basic computer concepts. That’s ok. It will take a while for everything to sink in. Overall, I’m surprised by how much actually is sticking.

Being around the mentally ill is s funny thing. You could just think to yourself, gosh, I’m glad I’m sane.

But I prefer to look at it this way: if I weren’t sane, I wouldn’t know. We could all have an over-developed sense of how rational we are, and we wouldn’t know.

I’m just lucky that I can make the choice to try to improve how rational a being I am.