Brian Crick

Makeup

 

Got one new Scopa card done last night, and revised another.

So here’s a new Jack (though maybe it should be Knight?) of Coins.

jack-coins-28-january-2013

Going with the business attire the other coins had, I thought I’d go with a polo shirt here. It’s awfully plain; no pinstripes or layers to add interest. I’m not sure if that’s a good or bad thing.

I sent this Queen of Coins to the client last month, and he commented that she looked a bit too androgynous.

queen-coins-27-december-2012

While I’d prefer not to have exaggerated sexual dimorphism in my stuff, I can kind of see where he’s coming from there.

I was reminded a bit of this children’s RPG that made a point of having dignified, non-sexualized female characters, and people complained that the characters weren’t recognizably female.

A tangent: when I was a kid, I thought girls’ nails naturally grew pointy, and boys’ nails came out square. And I met a girl with square nails, and got very confused.

Yes, there are of course physical differences between genders, but a great many of the things we think of as ‘feminine’, especially with regards to people’s faces, take conscious effort to produce: styled hair, makeup, shaped eyebrows, more saturated colors on glasses and clothing.

I’d love it if we lived in a world with less gender-specific grooming, but we don’t live in that world, so let’s be practical about it: a character who doesn’t follow at least some of these conventions is likely to cause confusion. I get that.

I don’t like it, but I get it.

I’d also love it if we lived in a world where most people didn’t care whether or not another person’s gender was obvious from their grooming, but again, we don’t live in that world.

So I went ahead and lengthened the hair, enlarged the earrings, made the eyebrows arched and the glasses brighter.

queen-coins-28-january-2013

But I didn’t add makeup.

Makeup is gross.

Assembly Language Cooking

There are days I find nothing more soul-crushing than cooking. It’s tedious. It’s overhead. A fulfilling life, I think to myself, is one with as little overhead as possible.

But I’ve been enjoying cooking more lately. I realized a few years ago that, when faced with tedious drudgery that’s never ever going to go away, the best thing yo can do for your own sanity is to devote more mental energy to it: to learn to do said tedious drudgery more efficiently, and with more panache that you can be proud of.

So I can manage my time more efficiently now, have more pots going at the same time, pick dishes that have a high work-to-tastiness ratio, and generally have a better time of it than I used to.

The latest part of this process has been trying to work with raw ingredients more. While it’s convenient to work with pre-packaged tortillas, pie crusts, pizza dough, dips or suaces, I suspect, in the end, it will be more convenient to keep a constant supply of flour, butter, cream, eggs and yeast around, most of which I’d have around anyway. In theory, there would be fewer staples to manage, more things I could do with said staples, and less stressing out about, say, having a pre-made pie crust in the freezer if I decide on a whim I want to make quiche.

It will get worse before it gets better though.

Tried my first from-scratch pie crust last night, and it was frustrating and time consuming and didn’t turn out that great. There will be a lot of waste here. I haven’t had to outright pitch too many meals or parts of meals, but it’s certainly happened, and that’s never fun.

Some days you break the hollandaise. Some days the hollandaise breaks you.

If I do this, I have to accept that what I’m doing is not simply incremental learning; it’s making things noticeably worse for myself, so I can eventually make things better. I think I just starting doing this, without really accepting that I should expect this to be fairly frustrating for a while.

But if I can get through this here hump, I think I’ll find cooking just a little more rewarding.

Bread and Butter

Been thinking about web site development a lot lately.

I used to be a freelance web site designer, which I have mixed feelings about. I liked meeting new clients, and building a rapport with them, and whipping up site designs in Illustrator and Photoshop. I liked being able to say I was a freelancer, just like I like being able to say ‘I make software for kids with autism’ now… it feels good to say that. Worthwhile.

But the actual process of turning those ideas into web sites always annoyed me.

So I’ve been thinking about that, and about game development, and how, even though I don’t find the idea of developing games to be particularly noble, I honestly enjoy the most of the tedium of game development. And I’m wondering if I might do well to treat game development like freelancing.

There are web site clients I picked up because I thought I’d love working with the client, and there are clients I picked up because they could help me pay my bills.

With game development, I’m only working on things I love to make. There aren’t any bread & butter, pay-the-bills games.

And maybe there should be.

Working on web sites I didn’t care about on a personal level was a little soul crushing. But I could work on a game that’s more than a little derivative and have lots of fun doing it, if I only let myself do so. I like playing casual games. I like playing cookie-cutter rehashes of old tropes. It’s only an overdeveloped urge to Change the World that has me working exclusively on things I find unique. And as someone who can do all the programming, graphics, and music for a game project on my own, I stand a good chance of making decent games with very little overhead.

Which is not to say that I could just flip a switch and break into the industry by doing this. It just might be worth trying.

Find a Reason

Sometimes, there is work you need to do, whose value you understand, and this understanding motivates you to do the work.

And sometimes, you do things for no reason at all, in the hopes that you’ll find something valuable in them.

I think the One Game a Month Thing is leaning towards the latter.

So in the day since my last One Game a Month post, already commited to making one game a month, I’ve thought of new reasons to do so:

I need practice talking about programming

I’m not real comfortable talking about programming, but it’s becoming more and more important that I can do so for my regular job — I can’t just work on my own and describe my progress in high-level, metaphorical terms anymore, because my co-workers and my boss now actually care about the technical details of what I do.

My regular projects like Tinselfly and Operetta are in tedious, heads-down places where they’re not real interesting to talk about, but having a new project a month will give me plenty of technical things to mull over in my journal.

It can be a family thing

I’ve occasionally made noises to my wife and brother about teaching them programming stuff, but sadly I never got around to prioritizing it. This is a good excuse to do that.

I can make game-like things that aren’t games in the technical sense

Specifically, I’m talking about that Celestial Stick People tablet app I’ve been threatening to make. It would be nice to get that done, and while I’m at it, revise the book since The Game Crafter now prints nice card-sized books for you.

Process of Elimination

Been on a bit of a purging/cleaning binge lately. What I want, more than anything right now, is less.

Fewer tchotchkes, fewer clothes, fewer kinds of spices in my kitchen, fewer board games in my dining room.

Less clutter.

There are of course, other solutions to the problem of clutter, solutions that don’t involve garbage bags and and boxes of stuff to give to charity. You can organize things better. Buy more bookshelves. Be more careful about what you do buy.

But the purging, the solving of a problem by simply getting rid of stuff — is oddly satisfying. And it’s always the first solution I think of when my house is getting too cluttered for my tastes.

Which brings me to the subject of violence in video games.

* * *

There’s been a lot of talk lately on the subject of violence in video games, and with this One Game a Month thing starting up, I wanted to talk about that a little.

I think about the issue, such as it is, in term of film. A great film can transform you. A mediocre film can still transform you, if you happen to watch it in a particularly vulnerable emotional state.

I feel that fiction would be kind of pointless if it didn’t change us.

And hopefully, the fiction out there will change us for the better, but I’d also say that there’s a lot out there that can make us worse. You can say that fiction can be transformative without going into anybody’s subjective definition of what sorts of transformations are desirable.

Similarly, I believe games can be transformative. I wouldn’t be trying to make games if I didn’t believe that playing my games might somehow make the player grow as a person.

Can playing a game make you a worse person? Probably. But I think the mechanics of that transformation are more subtle than the ‘playing shooting games makes you want to go out and shoot things’ kind of logic floating around there.

If I have any problem with violent games, it is that I don’t find violence a terribly interesting solution to problems. Don’t get me wrong, I like your typical outer space scrolling shooter game. It’s mindless and fun. But everything’s external to you. If only these hordes of space invaders were gone, life would be better. Everything is all their fault.

Externalizing everything and casting yourself as the righteous hero is kind of a terrible way to deal with problems.

Eliminating something in your way is just one way to deal with it. You can sneak around threats. You could make changes to your character that make obstacles easy to deal with. You could be tasked with turning obstacles into assets.

And lots of games focus on these kinds of solutions to problems. For my part, while I’m not nixing violence, I’d like my One Game a Month entries to have fewer threat-elimination scenarios, and more interesting ways of dealing with the threats the player is presented with. Because I think that will lead to better experiences, that encourage the player to think about problems in interesting ways.

Twelve

Hello 2013! I’m not much for resolutions, but I kindasorta decided to join this One Game a Month thing. It’s basically what it says on the tin: A bunch of developers are pledging to make one game, every month.

This may end up being a very bad idea, or it may be just what I need.

The rules are pretty loose, so I’m reading ‘make’ as ‘finish’, not ‘start and finish’ a game every month. With that in mind, I’ll be including my existing projects in this endeavor, and using this as motivation to get those finished and out there.

I’ve got four game projects currently in development:

  • Tinselfly, a character-driven action/adventure hybrid;
  • Operetta, a 4x / shooter hybrid;
  • Blind Tigers, a co-op board game; and
  • an untitled cyberpunk-themed board game.

In addition, I could tack on some things I started years ago but never completed:

  • Gemslinger, an arcadey Facebook game; and
  • Mika’s Tavern, a turn-based strategy game with no actual violence.

And that’s six projects right there.

* * *

What I’d like to do for the rest is just relax and make things I’d want to play, since I have so much trouble finding things I want to play. Nothing terribly innovative or demanding. Lunchbreak-sized games.

What games I do start for this will be small, 48-hour game jam sized things so they don’t take up too much of my time.

I’d like to make an attractive dungeon crawl. A simple RTS that’s so small in scope it doesn’t even require scrolling or a minimap. A completely derivative platformer with cutesy characters.

The only way I’m every going to work on stuff like this is within the context of a larger endeavor filled with projects I see as more worthwhile, and I think it might be good for me, to force myself to work on things that are known quantities.

* * *

Scheduling will be tricky here. I want to keep Tinselfly moving, so I’m probably going to be working on two things simultaneously all the time — Tinselfly plus another project. The existing board games and Operetta are bigger than your typical 48-hour gam jam stuff, so I want to get those out of the way first.

* * *

To kick this off, I’m starting with something to gamify the process of learning volume control and multiple-hand playing on a keyboard. I could really use something like this; my skills in these areas are terrible.

If I still had a pen tablet, I might have started with something to gamify the process of learning pressure and angle control, things I never really learned. Oh well.

 

 

Copyright © 2017 Brian Crick.