Minimalism

Minimalism doesn’t mean giving up everything you own. It means measuring the utility and acknowledging the opportunity cost of owning those things. I recently went on a trip where all I had with me was a few days’ change of clothing, my phone, a few books, a notebook, and a laptop. It was glorious. No stuff in the way. No stuff not in the way to think about. Everything I needed and nothing more....

January 6, 2019

Choose Your Own Adventure

Re: Black Mirror Bandersnatch: If this is a test, I’m pretty sure I failed. Watched 12/30/18. I settled in for a 50ish minute chill out. (I don’t do much passive TV watching. Always building something or reading something or feeling like I should be. But I was tired. I expected to watch and go to bed.) Turns out this is an interactive episode, which is incredibly engaging. I tried as many of the forks as I could, and took almost 2 hours....

January 1, 2019

Outrageously Ambitious 2019 Goals

Docs Trello Board Google Sheets Writing Calendar Google Docs notepad Game Journal Games Buy no new games (this is going to be a hard one, but I probably spent more in 2018 on games alone than in any other year, between our new Switch, PS4 sales, Humble Bundles, and Steam sales). Play entire collection of unplayed Steam games (at least one session each, finishing them is not required)....

January 1, 2019

Installing Linux on a Flash Drive

Linux in my pocket I have a Windows 10 laptop that I can’t install Linux on. It’s a decent laptop with a nice form factor. It weighs half what my workhorse laptop does, and I want to take it on a trip where I’ll need to do many Linuxy things. (WSL has too many unknowns and potential blockers for me to be OK relying on). Short version: install the installer to a small flash drive, then boot into that and select the other flash drive as ext4 to install to....

December 7, 2018

Katamari Knockoff - Working Title

Weird Stretchy Problem on Instantiate > SetParent with Prefabs https://answers.unity.com/questions/868484/why-is-instantiated-objects-scale-changing.html Super weird stretchy problem when objects were made using Instantiate/SetParent. It turns out this is a change in unity 5.5 where a bool is needed with SetParent. problem 1 instance.transform.SetParent(transform); no problem 1 instance.transform.SetParent(transform, false); Moving things to the player once they’ve stuck Random.onUnitSphere doesn’t do what I want This makes things crazy. Physics....

December 6, 2018

Graveyard Keeper Buried My Free Time But I Have No Regrets

Corpse feng shui This is the first time in my life where corpse quality is my #1 priority. Graveyard Keeper was a good experience overall. It hooked me in all of the right ways and the trickles of progress were enough of a dopamine hit to make me lose sleep and cause my family undue stress with my general unavailability. SPOILERS AHEAD Real moral ambiguity without any real consequence Harvest corpse meat....

November 10, 2018

Math in 3D Space and Other Travails

A capsule with silly eyes What happens when you ignore rotation because your game object is perfectly symmetrical and then you add eyes to it? This! From 2D to 3D I’ve had a few challenges converting my village sim from 2D to 3D. The main difference has been switching from translation-based movement to physics-based movement. To give an object physical properties, you attach a Rigidbody. This has settings for drag and gravity forces....

November 5, 2018

Progress Update May 2018

Works in Progress Please see my portfolio for videos and published demos. I focus mainly on the core logic of the game engine, since that’s my primary area of interest/experience. These are my works in progress. I would consider Centipede feature complete, but there are open issues (both enhancements and bugs) that I plan to continue to work on. Resource Quest in Unity is nearly feature complete, and needs polish, but you can view the source code from the link on my portfolio....

May 27, 2018

It's Full of Flies!

Impatience waiting for a creature to come eat my ship led to a new crazy game mode! If you can survive 8 or so waves it gets easier, since the sheer amount of mushrooms makes the processing time longer than the interval timer, so everything slows way down. It’s a feature! And here’s the finished leaderboard implementation

April 7, 2018

Leaderboards!

Step 1: Bask in the glory

April 6, 2018