Mr. Phil Games’ Blog

Game design through animation?

I’m experimented with using animation as a design tool.  Trying to get my ideas organized and out of my head.  Tiktok seems like a good place for these sort of “in progress” posts, almost like one of those Star Trek personal/ship’s logs.

Tiktok: https://vm.tiktok.com/TTPdB6DefS/

If only we liked Compromise

The problem with Democracy is that no one gets their "Correct" view encoded into law.  Everything is a compromise; every coalition has a faultline. But it’s hard to get elected on a Campaign slogans of:

Mostly what we want! 

Nothing that would upsets those Assholes over there!

Yay! Compromise!

Go assholes! I love they are getting stuff they want too!!

Game design through animation?

I’m experimenting with using animation as a design tool.  Trying to get my ideas organized and out of my head.  Tiktok seems like a good place for these sort of in progress posts, almost like one of those Star Trek personal/ship’s logs.


Game Design Concept https://vm.tiktok.com/TTPdB6DefS/

The Road Not Taken

By Robert Frost


Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,

And sorry I could not travel both

And be one traveler, long I stood

And looked down one as far as I could

To where it bent in the undergrowth;


Then took the other, as just as fair,

And having perhaps the better claim,

Because it was grassy and wanted wear;

Though as for that the passing there

Had worn them really about the same,


And both that morning equally lay

In leaves no step had trodden black.

Oh, I kept the first for another day!

Yet knowing how way leads on to way,

I doubted if I should ever come back.


I shall be telling this with a sigh

Somewhere ages and ages hence:

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—

I took the one less traveled by,

And that has made all the difference.


- Mountain Interval, 1916

Jai close to Beta!

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Last night, Abner announced on his Twitch stream that Jai is close to beta release. He showed a list of items that Jon Blow and the Jia Team have agreed need to be completed and then they will release the beta. No date or timeline was specified but based on the visible todo list, it is my opinion, this will happen before the end of the year.

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I'm pretty excited for this to happen. I think I'll enjoy programming in the language and believe it will be very productive to use. Not to mention all the useful game-related libraries the Jai Team has built.

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Day 1

Today is a special day for me. It is Day 1 of my Indie adventure! I’m pretty excited and a bit scared!



I'll be blogging about my experience, and I think I'll do some streaming as well.  I haven't made any solid decisions at this point and this was intentional.  I'm a bit burned out from my day job and I need some time to rest and rejuvenate.  I don't want to make any decisions until those stressors have passed because the context of these new decisions is completely different than the mental space of having an energy consuming day job at a large corporation.

I can share that the decision that's been most on my mind lately is, "What technology to use?"  If you look at my gamejam history you'll see I've tried a lot of different technologies but never settled into any one in particular.

I wish Jai, Jonathan Blow's C-style language, was released because I'd probably just jump into that and see what it was like. I quit using C/C++ back in 1999 because I hated how insane things were getting with std, macro hell, DCOM, COM/+, Apartments, BSTR and the whole UTF-guess-the-number game etc.  Jai seems to be a solution to all that craziness and even adds some really powerful features like compile-time execution. My gut instinct is it will fit my natural workflow and how I think about problems.

I've been using Unity for the last 5 year professionally and so that seems like a natural choice, but I've never had a gamejam go well with Unity.  I think this is because of just how complex Unity has grown.  It works well for medium to large teams, but as a solo indie, I worry that complexity undermines workflow and productivity.  It also doesn't respect Data-Oriented Design and often hides data from you.  And even though they are "cross-platform" you still run into native compiling features that aren't supported like android's multi-dex to get around the 64K method count limit. I love what Unity has done for the industry by opening game development to way more people but they often fall into the trap of fixing the easy problems, not the hard ones.  I'm also worried that complexity is ramping up instead of down now that the film industry has become a target.

I'm sure I'll expand on all of this later.  Thanks for listening!

 

Ludum Dare 13: Iron Roads

I went on a old hard drive adventure this evening. My quest was to recover my code and executable from Ludum Dare 13 - Roads, from way back in December of 2008! It wasn't easy but I was successful. I've posted the code to github: https://github.com/MrPhil/LudumDare13_IronRoads and the executable to itch.io: https://mrphilgames.itch.io/ld13-iron-roads This entry was incomplete, but it had a lot of great comments and words of encouragement from the reviewers. You can see all the old posts and judging results on the legacy Ludum Dare site: http://ludumdare.com/compo/category/ld13/?author_name=mrphil

The art below was made by Francis Andrew Acupan a few years later.