Darts, among other distractions

If I was really rich I'd be one of those people with the awesome stereo system that only plays FM radio. I realized this today while perusing a site about darts equipment. We got a dart board a few weeks ago and today, while practicing my triple 20s, I thought to myself, "My trouble is I don't have the best darts."

You see, my darts have a tendency to wobble in the air. In my head I'm sure it's something to do with my release or the fact that I'm not very good, but in my heart I know it's because those cheap plastic shafts, lame aluminum barrels, and shoddy lead points are nothing compared to the tungsten-powered hand missiles of glory I saw on the darts website.

Those things were awesome, and I mean that in the truest sense of the word. They didn't even look like my darts. They were all shiny and colorful, in a manly way, and I just knew if I had those darts I wouldn't have to practice anymore. I could just let them fly to their target on the power of thought.

You see that thing to the left? WTF? And you know what it's called? "SAVAGE". Come on, that's intense for a fucking dart. As soon as I get a job, oh man, you better believe it.

Anyways, that's what I was up to today.

It's a new year, a new desk

Okay the desk isn't new, but it's in a new place. I now have my work desk in a place I can actually work now. That means I can get distracted by a whole new set of things to work on. I have my pads of drawing paper, all my pens & inks, my lino blocks and cutting tools, all manner of balsa and X-acto knives, the whole deal.

Plus it's January, and I can start fresh without guilt on so many projects I can't even begin to imagine. I still want to build my 3D board game, work on a comic, make some block prints, and do some for real drawings. And work on the website to make it not so devoid of content.

Oh man, I love the idea of a new year! They should do this more often.

Like moths to a flame, sometimes

So now I've got the blue floaty boxes attracted to stationary red boxes, like little moths. They don't always go to them, but you can see how their paths of movement are bent when they get close. The next step is going to be, well the next two steps are going to be:

1) Getting the blue boxes to flock together
2) Attaching a red box to a blue box to see...something, I guess, I'm not quite sure.

Oh yeah! To see how well I can combine classes of objects. I'm just happy right now that I can write all the classes and it works. I ended up writing an object manager class to keep track of everything; actually, it was the only way to get the interactions between the objects working, so yeah.

Anyways, I'm pretty happy with it so far, and if you wanna check it out, it's at existence.artsick.com.

OMG, like, two little boxes are flying around the screen!

So I figured out how to convert the random movement script into a Mootools class, so that's pretty good for a Sunday. Basically, if you don't know what a class is, it means I can create tons of them quickly and easily without overwhelming the user's machine. Good times.

Right now it's just two blue boxes floating around an empty space, but hey, you can only go up, right?

Anyways, I've got it at http://existence.artsick.com; the link at the top does nothing for now, but I'm working on it.

It, uh, works in FF3 and IE7. If you don't use one of those, maybe it'll work, maybe not. The world is your oyster.

My Javascript is like school on Sunday

So I've actually sat down and begun working on the ol' game of existence, and the first problem (or "opportunity" if you're a fan of optimistic delusion) I've run into is that of classes.

Now, my vision is of a screen filled with hundreds of objects all interacting with one another and doing all sorts of cool interactive things, so it wouldn't do to have a bunch of duplicate functions all running at the same time. Very bad for the processor. So, of course, were I a for real computer science dude I would have busted out various classes by now.

You know, I do try. I like classes, I mean, a few years ago when I wrote a basic chess program in Flash I had to learn about them and found they were pretty powerful. Sure my knights moved in more of an S fashion than the traditional L, but hey man, they moved.

So now I'm trying to write classes in Javascript, which is for me an exercise in frustration. I mean, I get how to do it, it's just not doing what it's supposed to. This is a fault I have when programming, that I feel computer errors are just that, errors made by the computer. I'm telling you this, why aren't you doing that?!

I should explain that for my first object I'm just trying to get it to fly around the screen randomly, bumping off the screen edges and such. I have a hard-coded version working just fine, so I'm just trying to convert those functions to a class-ified type. I'm very close. So close, and so frustrated, that I'm considering moving all the class stuff to Mootools and working from there.

I don't know, though, I have a habit of cycling through solutions and getting them all built up and complex and then just junking them for something simple. But, perhaps, in this case simple is not the answer.

I guess I'll find out soon enough. Ah well, back to work.

How would you even make a game like that?

So I've been spending a lot of time thinking about how to begin making a game which mimics existence. The first thing I realized is that I would have to take the lazy man approach and try to disguise it as genius.

My main idea so far, or the main design so far, is a blank page with the game title and a button labeled "These things I know to exist". Clicking that button would open up a menu of the items you have created/encountered/discovered. From this menu, I think, you would be able to introduce new instances of existing items into your universe.

I think also in the menu you would have a little sandbox where you could pre-combine items to see how they react and decide if they should be included in your universe. Once created, though, you could not remove them yourself, unless other items in existence conspired to have them removed.

So you would need to create a series of creators and destroyers to keep the balance, with other inanimate (so to speak) objects floating around doing their own thing among all the action.

My big goal is to have a working universe which can live on its own, simulate decision-making and, eventually, interact with other user-created universes. But I'm going to start small.

I've got this idea for a game

I've always wanted to build a game that starts with a blank white page that eventually turns into this multi-faceted, complex game system. I know Spore is kinda like that; single-cell organisms that you guide into a civilization, but I'd like it to be more open-ended. Less logic-driven.

How do you logically program something to have no built-in logic? I really don't know. I suppose it would start with a very basic type of "if...then" reasoning, which it could eventually build upon. Or maybe even an automatic response to stimuli which it then evolves into a type of reasoning based on input.

Like you start it all by moving your mouse in a certain direction, and that draws an object on the screen. And that object is all you have or, rather, that object is all you are. And it slowly transforms and learns and replicates and turns into all kinds of cool crap you can interact with.

Maybe you don't have a particular character, you just kind of Populous-style interact with the environment. I don't know, I don't have it all worked out (obviously) but I think there's something to it.

Kingdom of Loathing: Day 16

So I'm still playing, which means I'm likely in the midst of another short-term game addiction. As with Trukz, I have very few bad things to say at the moment, but I can see a point at which I'll get bored and give it on up. Apparently the game designers have made it so that past that point there's new stuff to do, but we'll see.

Basically, the main game runs like a turn-based role-playing quest-type thing. You pick a character type (I'm an Accordion Thief) which each has its own particular special strength, then you go around running mini-quests and picking up items, increasing attributes, etc. It's way more complex than I'm laying it out, but that's the idea.

Honestly I would suggest to anyone looking for an online game to go play it. There are tons of other blogs, forums, strategy sites, etc. out there so I won't go into game mechanics, but it can actually take some thinking/looking stuff up to really get the most out of it. Plus, the writing is very clever and actually worth reading.

I can't really convey how awesome the game is right now, so I'm just going to show a pic of a small selection of my current inventory, maybe that'll help.


And you can combine shit together to make custom stuff. There, that should be enough for now.

Kingdom of Loathing: Yes I'm late to the party

So tonight I signed up for Kingdom of Loathing, which is awesome. It's a browser-based adventure game with very basic graphics and, so far, tons of stuff to do. It's about one step up from Nethack graphics-wise, if you ever played that.

I tend to get hyper-addicted to a game for about two weeks and then give it up completely, whether or not I've made any progress. I don't know why, usually I just find I've figured out what the game is all about and decide it's become more mechanical than fun. That's why I can't get into WoW or the like. I love games of diminishing returns, until the return diminishes past a certain point.

But at least KoL has some fun to it. The writing is snappy, the items are interesting, and so far that's holding my attention. Who knows, maybe I'll get bored with it soon but for now it's pretty slick. I could have felt the same about Nethack except it required you to know about a thousand key commands. That shit might fly in 1983, but no more.

Oh, and KoL is also semi turn-based, which is cool, because you're limited to a set number of actions (adventures) per day (which can be augmented), so even if you get addicted to it, you'll eventually be shut out for a time.

That I like. Spreads out the enjoyment and the discovery. I'm know I haven't scratched the surface of what's available to do, and I like how the initial structure sets you up to have to wait to find out each new bit.

So I'll keep playing for a while to see what's up, but so far so good.

Sorry, Life and all that Balderdash

I was playing the board game Sorry! the other night and realized, after a few beers, that the game is a lot like life.

You have this board you share with all these other people, and you all have what appears to be a pretty straightforward path from where you start to where you need to be. You pick up your card, you move your little dudes around and everybody goes home happy, right? No! This is life, man, and it's never what it seems.

For one thing, it takes forever to even get started. It always seems like everybody else is so far ahead of you before you even get one foot out the door. And then as soon as you're on your way, boom!, "Sorry!" you get sent right back where you started from.

This is the "childhood" stage of the game, where certain people have enormous advantages over others for no particular reason, just the luck of the draw.

After this comes the "young adult" stage where eventually someone begins to look like they're doing really well, setting themselves apart, and what happens? Everyone else goes out of their way, even to their own detriment, to hold that other person back. Anybody who's different gets their ass handed to them.

While it is the most outright brutal stage of the game, it is also the most exciting. This is the part you talk about when the game is over.

This building up and knocking down from all sides goes on for a bit and results in "middle age", the longest stage of the game, where everyone ends up fairly even experience-wise, trudging along repeatedly down the same paths, playing the same cards, until by luck or guile they are able to send a few pieces Home to some kind of safety.

There's no real ganging-up in middle age, you just kind of dislike everyone and more and more work for your own safety over gleefully sending others willy-nilly back to Start. This is also where the most shit-talking takes place as you try to make your case to the other players for why it should be somebody, anybody, else, and not you, who should be punished.

But this gets tiring after a while and, upon seeing how everybody else who you started with is beginning to slow down, you too begin looking for that final push home. But boy, is that end game frustrating.

There you are on the threshold of ending it all, just one more piece three steps from relief, and you have to wait until that perfect, exact card comes up. Could be one turn, could be ten, and you never know when it'll happen. Oh! There goes ol' Joe, he's all out. All of his pieces are in a better place, I guess. But it doesn't end there for you, not in Sorry!, no, and not in life.

Everybody has to grind out their own ending, alone, cut off from the other players. There's no more switching places, sending others back. Nothing.

Sometimes you see that one person who still has a piece out. It's running around like some lost child; stopping, starting, sliding and basically making a fool of itself. So sad at that age. But you can't help them now; you're only hoping with each turn of the deck that your number is finally up.

New Telephone Game

Everybody knows the telephone game; you know, a group of people sit in a circle, one person whispers a phrase into someone's ear, the next person whispers into the ear of the next person and so on. When it comes back to the originator you compare what was said first to the final version, which has been distorted through mishearing along the way. Then they all laugh and laugh because somehow "I like bananas" has turned into "Stalin wasn't such a bad guy nacho hat".

Anyways, long story short, I had my laptop passed around to a roomful of people at work today. I was giving a presentation, sans projector, and had to show everybody what I'd been working on the old fashioned way. Like back in the time before projectors, yet somehow after laptops.

This got me to thinking, why not make a laptop telephone game? It goes like this:

1. First person browses to a popular/semi-popular website and passes the laptop to the next person

2. Next person clicks a link (internal or external) on the website

3. Continue passing and clicking until the laptop is returned to the owner

4. Owner attempts to guess the original website or, more likely, attempts to clear out all the porn links

In any event, it sounds like a pretty fun way to burn some time at work before a meeting, during a meeting, or even in some strange world where meetings don't exist.

Monster in a (Dev) Box

For the past 9 months I've been working on creating an online game. No, not a souped-up 3D world full of paladins, wizards and thinly-veiled xenophobic metaphors, but a text-based kingdom builder built on statistics. No I know, why am I not already being hounded by Apple to create a version for the iPhone? I wonder that myself.

Well, two reasons. One, it sounds exceptionally boring. And two, it's nowhere near complete. Turns out it takes a lot work to build even the most basic of complicated games. The funny part is it's not even the complicated stuff that takes time. I wrote the equations for running and balancing a stock market in about three hours.

No, it's the little crap. The little crap that people like me hate to do. Without going into too many specifics, I'll just say error handling. If you don't know what that is, it's what you have to write when you don't have confidence in your abilities as a developer. (I'm not talking about server-side error handling where there could be an actual issue, I'm talking about JavaScript and such)

Try? Catch? No thanks. I prefer to live on the edge.

But anyways, back to the non-technical stuff. Here's the logo:

Yes, it's called "One Eye Filled with night", after a line from a Leonard Cohen song. Maybe that's cheesy, but I think it works alright.

The idea of the game is that here you are with this kingdom to run and, to start out, you have one city and one military unit. You run the show and lead everything. Eventually though you'll want to get governors and generals and more units, more cities, all that good stuff.

Keep in mind this is all displayed in a straightforward, non-mappy way. List of cities with stats, list of units with stats, all that. I mean, it looks pretty enough, I didn't totally slack-ass it, but it is not what you might call "graphics-laden".

Though I am particularly proud of the image I worked up for an inbox message:

Ahhh yeah, would you take a look at that? You can almost see yourself opening it and going, "My what a tiny yet well-rendered message this is."

So once you have your little kingdom up and running you can start interacting with other users: buying and selling items on a stock exchange, exchanging messages, and conducting war. This is the part of the game I really want to get to, but I can't until I do the little crap. And that's what slows me down.

One week I'll put in maybe 15 hours or so on it, the next (ie, this current one) I won't do anything. It's hard to want to sometimes because you see all these other totally rockin' games out there and think, "Well what's the point? Who's going to play this? Even if I did finish it, where would it even go?"

Obviously people still play Trukz, but that game doesn't really require much of a time investment. I'm trying to build that into my game, where you can just come on for a few minutes, re-arrange some stuff, and get on with your day. I think my approach so far kinda does that, which is good.

I don't know, we'll see where it goes. I really just wanted to post this to start myself off on writing about it, to keep track of progress along the way. If anything changes, oh in the next week or so, I'm sure there'll be an update.

Battle for Wesnoth

So I started up with a new game this past weekend, the somewhat cheesily titled Battle for Wesnoth, which is much better than its name implies. The gameplay is based on these two Sega games I'm not familiar with, Master of Monsters and Warsong, but it heavily reminds me of the Sega CD game Dark Wizard, which I suppose is probably also based on those two previous games.

In any event, it's like this: you have a main character you control who must raise an army and fight battles. That's basically it. You start out with nothing and slowly build up your army over the course of a campaign, gaining experience and advancing both your soldiers and the plot by completing each scenario.

The site claims each scenario can take anywhere from 30 minutes to 2 hours and, with maybe 10 scenarios per campaign, you could easily spend the better part of a day on just one campaign. So far I've only completed the tutorial, and that took about an hour and a half or so. It was a grand affair of elves versus orcs & wolf-riders and I, eventually, came out on top: my awesome elven archers ripping them all to shreds. Fun stuff.

The graphics are good, as is the music, though I'm probably the worst person to ask about either of those. I'll admit I am completely out of touch when it comes to gaming. The most recently purchased console in the house is a Super Nintendo we got from a thrift store about seven years ago.

To me, Donkey Kong Country is the pinnacle of video game artistry, aside from the few times I played Grand Theft Auto III on a friend's PS2 6 years ago. No, I did try out Mario and Sonic: Olympic Games on a DS Lite at Wal*Mart while waiting for a prescription two months ago. That was my last and most recent modern console gaming experience. And, oh yes, I won the gold.

That kinda made me feel like I hadn't missed much, you know? If I can step out of playing the new generation of console games and then jump right in and totally rock one of them, have I really missed anything? Now, admittedly, Mario and Sonic isn't quite the same level of difficulty as your average Metal Gear Solid but, even then, those types of third-person action/adventure games are so similar that once you've played one, you can transfer those skills to the rest.

Or maybe not, I never play them. I'm just going by the reviews I read of games which I have no intention of buying. It seems to me to be a total crapshoot, though, which makes me glad I don't drop money on them. As far as I can tell, the only guaranteed good games are from the Grand Theft Auto and Metal Gear series'. And Star Control, that seems to be popular as well.

I'll tell you, the only game I'm looking forward to these days is Spore, for the PC. I'm a bit more up on PC games than those for consoles, but still my knowledge is limited to those that don't require me to purchase a new graphics card. I mean, I'm by no means a gamer, but I'm not a non-gamer either. I would like to play more games, but usually when I start playing I think "Boy, I sure am spending too much time on this. I could be doing something creative. Life is short! Your 31st birthday is Sunday; you'll be dead soon!"

It just kinda spirals out of control like that. Which leads me back to Battle for Wesnoth, which, with a set of nicely delineated scenarios within each campaign, you can slowly work your way through a storyline without the whole process turning into some sort of soul-wrenching digital hourglass spilling out the pixel grains of your own mortality. That's right, I said "pixel grains".

On a long and lonesome highway, east of Omaha...

Lately, between not posting and thinking about what I should do about that I've started playing this new game I found off of (Total)Fark: Trukz. It's basically a semi(ha!)-real-time truck driving simulation. That's right, a game based on hauling loads.

It's actually pretty cool if you like mostly text-based, stats-driven games. This post is pretty cool as well if you like hyphenated words.

You pick a city to start in, buy a truck, pick a destination and off you go. The driving part of the game mainly consists of you clicking through the legs of your journey until your driver is too tired to continue. You then have to wait to play again (in real time) until yer dude is okay to go.

He's right, you know.

You can push him, of course, as I did on my first trip (had to get those mobile homes to St Louis!), which ended up with him falling asleep at the wheel and wrecking. A man's got to know his limitations.

When you've finished your trip you get paid, then you pick a new destination, a new load and it all starts over.

I've glossed over some stuff of course; you have to keep track of fuel, you can upgrade your truck (like with a CB radio which allows in-game chat), join a company, buy stock, etc. It seems they update the features fairly regularly, so I guess it's somewhat new.

I don't know, I might get tired of it eventually, but it's something you don't have to devote hours of your day to. In fact, if you time it right, yer driver can go to bed when you do and you can send him on his way before you go to work.

It's like having a new friend that'll get all of your Black Dog references.

Kicking the kicks

I tell ya what, I can really get wrapped up in things for short periods of time. I wouldn't say I have ADD or anything, even though I have insurance, but every so often I get intensely interested in a particular subject, usually an old game.

Earlier this month it was chess; couldn't get enough of it. I was reading about openings on Wikipedia, going through all my old chess books, all that stuff. And half of that information is fairly useless to me because I can't picture a board in my head and make all the moves they describe.

I prefer the strategy books, where long move lists are kept to a minimum. The same with books about computer games.


After chess I got into the original Railroad Tycoon, which I got from abandonia.com. If you've not been there before and you like old DOS games, you should check it out. But not if you're looking for the real popular ones, because the copyright owners cracked down on them.

Apparently Maniac Mansion is a still a big money-maker.

But yeah, as with Civilization, World Soccer Winning 11, Stronghold: Crusader, Zork, Ancient Domains of Mystery and many others, I get wholly sidetracked from doing things i would honestly rather be doing.

It's just a good thing there's nobody around me now who really wants to play some Hero Quest.


I actually feel happy when I know I'm about to be done with a game. And it's not that I beat the game or anything, I just feel like I've figured out what it's about and, given enough time, I could beat it.

The best is when I get really into doing more creative things. Last month was good for that; wrote a lot and actually updated the site regularly. I'm hoping the end of this month and on into July will be more like that.

So there it is. Ooo...but Dune 2 was pretty awesome, though.