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Experimental Gameplay & Style
These guys are on the right track. It's interesting... on the one hand, their primary aim is gameplay. Which is laudable, but I don't feel they really hit the mark. Many of the ideas are worth poking at with a sharp stick, but I don't feel any of them come together to make a game I'd play for more than about 30 seconds. (On the other hand, I had to tear my girlfriend away from Riff to check out some of the other downloads, so perhaps I'm just jaded...)
Base-Jumping into the Uncanny Valley
Just something I need to get off my chest here: the games industry is obsessed with realism, especially realism of characters. And this is a bad, bad thing for three reasons:
- Realism is hard, time-consuming, resource-consuming work, making game development vastly more expensive, and thus risky, and thus forcing other choices to be risk-averse (aka boring) to compensate.
- If you have realistic characters, they tend to 'look funny' if you try to make them do unrealistic actions; this in turn has a knock-on effect on your animation and game design which can be unnecessarily restrictive.
- The more realistic your characters are, the more they freak people out.
TraceKnack 0.52
Just posting a small update to TraceKnack that adds syntax highlighting to the Python code you view in the debugger; I had the code lying around from the software that maintains the Wooji Juice website, so I thought I'd drop it in.
Introducing TraceKnack
The first interesting bit of content is online: TraceKnack, which you can find over in the free stuff section. It's a tool for Python developers working on web applications, to assist in debugging.
Also, if anyone wants to borrow the 80x15 badge I put together for Python (based off of the new logo on the redesigned python.org site), feel free.
Of Discussions
By the way, the blog doesn't yet have comments enabled. I'm still sorting out the technical stuff for this, it should go live soon. Feel free to send encouragements to the usual place...
TTG And Sketching
With newsgroups, it's Nazis. With videogames, it's crates. I have a theory that for blogs, it's Google. Sooner or later, it's bound to happen. So I'm coining TTG as the Time To Google, the time from the inception of a new blog, to Google being the subject of one of the posts.
So, what am I going to do? Jump that shark right at the outset, dammit: Google has BoughtUp SketchUp. This interests me because 3D graphics interest me, and rendering 3D graphics require some 3D data to render, and SketchUp is one of the best ways I've ever encountered for creating that data (at least, for certain kinds of object. Not so much for organic things. But for architecture, product design, that kind of stuff, it's funky).
Introductions
Hi! My name is Matthew, though most of my friends call me Canis, and I'm your host here at Wooji Juice. I'm a programmer, have been since the early 80s, but also have several years of design training. A sizeable chunk of my work has been in the videogame industry. I've also written web apps, traditional GUI applications for Windows and Mac, plugins for Eclipse, and a JVM from scratch. And lots more besides, but that's the stuff from the last year or two.
First Post
Welcome to the new blog. This is the informal area of Wooji Juice: it will include info about updates elsewhere on the site, and ruminations of a variety of topics related to getting software made — primarily programming, but not exclusively. User-interface issues, tools, processes, business realities — it's all good.