I thought I’d end the week with another snapshot of how things are going. Yes, I’ll have a post detailing the trees and sky and how they were made, but in the meantime here’s some shiny things to distract you.
Link (YouTube) |
Note that I didn’t bunny-hop my way through this demo. If you’re used to Spoiler Warning you may need to shake your monitor up and down to avoid the nausea associated with smooth, non-hopping movement.
My family is home all day. All of us. My wife teaches our kids, so they don’t go to public school. I work from home. She works from home. This is a busy house.
The main hall is lined with paintings and drawings by my wife. This hallway connects the front door, the back door, and the bathroom. All day long we have kids roughhousing, and people slamming the heavy doors as they enter and leave the house. (Not to mention the persistent level of traffic you get around a bathroom in a house of five people. ) Despite this constant vibration, the art manages to stay on the walls.
Last year, my wife took the kids on a trip to visit a friend in another state. They were gone for a few days. The day after they left, one of the paintings randomly fell off the wall. No reason. No provocation. I was sitting in my office like I always do, when I heard a crash from the hall and found the floor glittering with broken glass. I wasn’t even listening to loud music. “Hm. That was random,” I thought.
Yesterday, my wife left with the kids to visit that same friend. It’s now the next morning, and another painting just fell off the wall. (No broken glass this time, thank goodness.)
I am annoyed at how utterly mystifying, inexplicable, and random this is, while at the same time being completely mundane. It’s just a stupid little mystery that I’ll probably never figure out.
Link (YouTube) |
When I went through the game, I didn’t even notice that Mr. House didn’t pay you for a majority of the work that you do. By that point in the game I had lots of chips and I just sort of assumed that each quest turn-in was putting some caps in my pocket.
I believe there are four endings to the game: House, Legion, NCR, and Wild Card. Within those endings, some of them have options, like what to do with the dam and Helios One.
Out of curiosity, which ending(s) did everyone go for? Did anyone do them all?
Link (YouTube) |
I have written a script for you readers. Just read this aloud while watching this episode:
If you’re looking for the casino, you’re going the wrong way, Josh. No, the other way. Ah! You missed it. It was that door. No, now you need to go back upstairs now. You’re still… ARG. STOP. GO LEFT. What are you doing in the basement?!?! YOU’RE GOING IN CIRCLES! YOU JUST PASSED IT FOR THE THIRD TIME! ARE YOU BLIND? ARE YOU DOING THIS ON PURPOSE? What are you, tormenting us!?!?! On purpose! Is my total red-faced rage and frustration your aim, sir?
You know… maybe it is. Maybe it is.
 |
Projects slow down over time. It’s inevitable. Partly it’s because the more you add, the more complex the code becomes, and so the harder it is to make headway. Swapping out a part on a lawnmower is easy. Changing that same part on a fully-loaded 2011 automobile is likely to be an order of magnitude more complex. But mostly it’s because we tend to go for the low-hanging fruit first and tackle the thorny problems later.
I began writing this series of posts a week into the project, and I’ve been gradually catching up. To wit: I’m adding features more slowly than I’m writing posts about features. Now that I’m out of new stuff to show off, these posts are naturally going to become less frequent.
While we’re waiting for the next breakthrough, I thought I’d take a minute and answer a few of the questions I keep seeing again and again…
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Project Frontier #8: FAQ”
Link (YouTube) |
I just watched the episode. I know we were giving Josh a hard time about the incinerator, but now that I can read the screen I see the incinerator is the least of our problems. Josh is still lugging around a missile launcher. Look at that crawl of items as the episode drags on. It’s an endless list of heavy, worthless stuff we all know he will never, ever use.
Can you talk to him for me? He just doesn’t listen to me anymore.
WARNING: This one is tough to explain without spending 5,000 words detailing the most mundane inner workings of the engine. Sorry if it’s confusing. I did what I could to balance information and readability. I tried, I really did.
When I started the project, I had a pretty good idea of how the previous features were going to work. Terrain textures, the topography, the grass, the sky. My design changed as I worked, but I always had a plan.
I don’t have a plan for rivers. This is a shame, since the whole project is pretty much a bust if I can’t solve it.
Here is what the world looks like during my default build:
 |
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Project Frontier #7: River Raid”
This series explores the troubled history of VR and the strange lawsuit between Zenimax publishing and Facebook.
A breakdown of how this game faltered when the franchise was given to a different studio.
I scoured the Steam database to figure out what words were the most commonly used in game titles.
I called 2019 "The Year of corporate Dystopia". Here is a list of the games I thought were interesting or worth talking about that year.
I was trying to make fun of how Silent Hill had lost its way but I ended up making fun of fighting games. Whatever.
For one of the most popular casual games in existence, Match 3 is actually really broken. Until one developer fixed it.
What did web browsers look like 20 years ago, and what kind of crazy features did they have?
I teach myself music composition by imitating the style of various videogame soundtracks. How did it turn out? Listen for yourself.
A music lesson for people who know nothing about music, from someone who barely knows anything about music.
C++ is a wonderful language for making horrible code.
T w e n t y S i d e d
