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progBroker than I thought I was. Suddenly unable to pay bills, prior to this check that came in the mail yesterday. I shall toddle down to the bank after I finish writing this. Check is fairly fat, so it'll last for a little while, but fun spendy-spendy time is over for me until my next period of full-time consulting.
I did manage to do my taxes, finally, and I've started to track Appleseed's finances by starting a new file with plain-old Quicken. Now that I use Freshbooks to track my time and invoicing, Quicken does a fine job handling the bank accounts, including tying certain transactions to tax forms.
Hm, I think these events are connected. Suddenly having over $9,000 vanish out of one's bank accounts is liable to cause some distress.
Picked up "Dogs in the Vineyard" last week, on the grounds that it might make a nice setting for a text adventure game. I didn't know before this that all the PCs are explicitly ~20 years old, and virgins. The notion of roving gangs of indoctrinated, armed youth with little life experience, but a license to carry out God's judgement as they see it, strikes me as terrifying, like roleplaying the Chinese Red Guard. Wondering why I haven't seen anyone else take up this angle.
I haven't actually played the game, and there's much to love about the rules and setting elsewise. I would absolutely be willing to give it a try and see what came of it, but I dunno if that will actually happen, since I am not much of a role-player. I remain interested in checking out indie RPGs that have small scopes and "gamey" rulesets, like "Agon" or "Prime Time Adventures".
Was disappointed by the XNA user group meeting I attended at Microsoft's Waltham offices yesterday. It was really more of a class, with an MSFT employee behind a lectern, stepping through code for one of the XNA example games (a simple RPG). On top of that, it was a continuation of the same topic from the prior meeting. I lost interest quickly and slipped out after less than an hour.
There were no women in attendance, and I may have been the youngest person there. Two other attendees looked under 40, after which there were a dozen more guys ranging up into deep greybeard territory. This is cool, but the lack of younger folk surprised me, since to my mind the typical person who wants to make an XBox game would be significantly younger. I wonder if the idea of offline user group meetings is becoming increasingly alien to anyone under 30.
(I muttered about this on Twitter, since little else was accessible from my phone during the class. One person responded that younger folk just call user group meetings "meetups" now. I would have liked to go to an XNA meetup; in fact, I think I was rather hoping for one. This was not that.)
I may sacrifice a weekend to prototype that game scheduler idea. I've made one already, for Volity, and it would give me an excuse to learn Catalyst much better. Catalyst is what one can rudely-but-correctly call Ruby on Rails for Perl, and it's what my larger client makes use of. I like it a lot, but I don't think I'll really grasp it fore-and-aft until I build a Catalyst solution from scratch, for myself. So.
We have GO on rationalization for latest cockamamie project idea, sir.
I did manage to do my taxes, finally, and I've started to track Appleseed's finances by starting a new file with plain-old Quicken. Now that I use Freshbooks to track my time and invoicing, Quicken does a fine job handling the bank accounts, including tying certain transactions to tax forms.
Hm, I think these events are connected. Suddenly having over $9,000 vanish out of one's bank accounts is liable to cause some distress.
Picked up "Dogs in the Vineyard" last week, on the grounds that it might make a nice setting for a text adventure game. I didn't know before this that all the PCs are explicitly ~20 years old, and virgins. The notion of roving gangs of indoctrinated, armed youth with little life experience, but a license to carry out God's judgement as they see it, strikes me as terrifying, like roleplaying the Chinese Red Guard. Wondering why I haven't seen anyone else take up this angle.
I haven't actually played the game, and there's much to love about the rules and setting elsewise. I would absolutely be willing to give it a try and see what came of it, but I dunno if that will actually happen, since I am not much of a role-player. I remain interested in checking out indie RPGs that have small scopes and "gamey" rulesets, like "Agon" or "Prime Time Adventures".
Was disappointed by the XNA user group meeting I attended at Microsoft's Waltham offices yesterday. It was really more of a class, with an MSFT employee behind a lectern, stepping through code for one of the XNA example games (a simple RPG). On top of that, it was a continuation of the same topic from the prior meeting. I lost interest quickly and slipped out after less than an hour.
There were no women in attendance, and I may have been the youngest person there. Two other attendees looked under 40, after which there were a dozen more guys ranging up into deep greybeard territory. This is cool, but the lack of younger folk surprised me, since to my mind the typical person who wants to make an XBox game would be significantly younger. I wonder if the idea of offline user group meetings is becoming increasingly alien to anyone under 30.
(I muttered about this on Twitter, since little else was accessible from my phone during the class. One person responded that younger folk just call user group meetings "meetups" now. I would have liked to go to an XNA meetup; in fact, I think I was rather hoping for one. This was not that.)
I may sacrifice a weekend to prototype that game scheduler idea. I've made one already, for Volity, and it would give me an excuse to learn Catalyst much better. Catalyst is what one can rudely-but-correctly call Ruby on Rails for Perl, and it's what my larger client makes use of. I like it a lot, but I don't think I'll really grasp it fore-and-aft until I build a Catalyst solution from scratch, for myself. So.
We have GO on rationalization for latest cockamamie project idea, sir.
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Don't Give Up On XNA
Date: 2008-08-28 03:49 pm (UTC)Trust me, there's lots of people who want to learn XNA; it's just a matter of finding the right tutorials or the money for classes :D
Re: Don't Give Up On XNA
Date: 2008-08-28 03:59 pm (UTC)I was just disappointed that a self-described user group meeting turned out to be a class, which is not something I need right now.
no subject
Date: 2008-08-28 03:57 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-08-28 04:10 pm (UTC)AGON, of course, is a thing of tactical and narrative beauty.
ot
Date: 2008-08-28 04:12 pm (UTC)Re: ot
Date: 2008-08-28 04:24 pm (UTC)Imposed limits
Date: 2008-08-28 05:43 pm (UTC)I like the one-dimensional (in a geometric sense) combat, too.
no subject
Date: 2008-08-28 05:33 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-08-28 05:40 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-08-28 05:52 pm (UTC)As for players who escalate everything to the shooty... that might be related to the author's rhetorical goals for the game as well, albeit in a more emergent fashion.
I strongly recommend Primetime Adventures, although in some ways it is very much a power tool - that is, you have to learn enough about it to make it work for you over time, rather than being able to just have an optimal experience out of the box. If you like fighty RPGs, though, I haven't heard of many games of Agon that went south.
no subject
Date: 2008-08-28 06:04 pm (UTC)I would expect this, but odd way that the rulebook was written made me uncertain. The designer's explicit voice frequently pops in, speaking in first person to talk about why certain rules are weird but cool, or tell stories about playtesting sessions. I was waiting for him to use one of these opportunities to say a little about his motivations for crafting the particular theme, but he never quite does.
It's interesting.
no subject
Date: 2008-08-28 06:17 pm (UTC)Once again I ruin it for everyone