A Simple Way To Go Faster Than Light That Does Not Work

Today's the final day of Zarf's Kickstarter drive. It hit 300% funding weeks ago, and we're vying to get him over $30,000 (and nearly 400%!) before midnight.

I wrote more about this over on The Gameshelf. Summary: supporting this work isn't just a pledge to help improve the state of modern interactive fiction. It also helps prove that passionate (read: obsessed) game creators really can turn their dreams into reality without starving to death, and in so doing enrich the world with more and better art. Art! That's right, I am dropping the A-bomb here.

Now's the time to help wrench videogames out of the mainstream doldrums of adolescent power fantasies, inspiring independent creators to redefine the medium while the world watches. Even a just couple of bucks will help. Play the (eminently safe-for-work!) teaser, and then check out the Kickstarter page (featuring a video directed and edited by yours truly).

Thanks!

This looks like it might be worth my while to come to and bring some Jmac's Arcades. Anyone wanna come with? I feel antsy that I haven't made any in three months, even though I have the inspiration for the next one; the other pillars just win out in the continual fight over motivation. So this might give it a little boost.

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Speaking of the automated dorkiness implied by the subject line, xach strikes again with another wigflip toy, this one letting you make your own "lolcats"-style images without Photoshop. I started to show my appreciation by taking pictures he's posted of himself and his little son and putting I CAN HAS JUICEBOX or something on it but it didn't feel right, so I'll just talk about it here instead la bla.

Oh, and since it came up in conversation today: you have probably already seen loltrek, which I was amused to discover was by Stephen Grenade and some of the other interactive-fiction people I vaguely know. Good job, guys.

Need an idea for your first Inform 7 game? OK, maybe just for the titles. And Italian shlock-horror pen names.

I saw Touch of Evil last night with daerr. I liked it and recommend it, though can't call it a great movie because the whole Janet Leigh subplot is kind of dopey. (LITERALLY HA HA.) Excellent and stylish piece of noir, though. Try to see the less-bastardized cut that was assembled in 1998; this is what the TiVo grabbed from TCM.

The movie is personally notable since I remembered seeing the beginning of it many many years ago at the home of a friend of my mother's, maybe in Florida. I was bored, and she put in the movie for me, thinking that I'd like a story that begins with a car blowing up. I remember _exactly_ the car blow-up scene, and also the fact that the movie was old, black-and-white, and boring outside of the exploding cars, of which there was only the one. I had forgotten the title, so it was funny to see it was that movie, and of course I liked it much more this time.

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It occurred to me that learning Inform 7 by porting 1999's Calliope to it is not a terrible idea. I have started to do this, and am having a great time.

Looking over my old game is interesting. I remember it as being somewhat embarrassing crap, but it's actually a tight and often clever little exercise. The main problem with it is that its basic premise is somewhat inaccessible, and terribly naive. At the time, I truly thought that everyone would love a game about writing games! with another game inside it!! Also I thought that putting "I wrote this to learn Inform" in the intro text would be a smart move, too.

Well, whatever. It's fun.

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Applied to two more angel groups last night. Hm, there's one left that I can think of, and I'll hit them today or tomorrow. There's a kind of futility in this because an unsolicited funding application is a lot like an unsolicited manuscript submitted to a publisher. They're obliged to look at it, but its chances of getting caught in a first-pass filter is very high, no matter how "good" it is.

Actually, it's a little worse than that. Professional tradition dictates that publishers at least send you a rejection slip, which can sometimes hold helpful advice on it if the editor felt moved to provide some. Capital groups are under no such expectation and usually just ignore everyone they're not interested in having a conversation with.

On the other hand, experience suggests that the capital groups remember previous applications, whether or not the acknowledge them. Since I applied to a bunch last year, I'm taking the opportunity to frame my cover letter as "Remember me?", detailing all that we've done as a company since I last darkened their doorstep. (Which is quite a lot, actually.)

The solution is to go to more networking mixers. Prerequisite to this is business cards. We will have these soon. I hope.

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No lack of other stuff to do in the meantime. Still haven't fleshed out the plan outline at all, and I have a real deadline now, since I'd like to be able to bring it to a meeting with a money dude that's coming up on the 7th. This is the only money-dude meeting on the calendar, and the only thing we've got going for us is that I last year impressed someone else at $MONEY_DUDE_PLACE who is no longer there. I feel both hopeful and not hopeful about this.

Right now, shipping three people from Boston to Columbus n back 'round Origins-time is $1,200, total. We're gonna wait and see if that gets better over the next few days, but the Andys have made it clear that driving just won't work, so we might just have to take the hit.

On the upside, it does indeed look like all three of us are set on attending Origins. So yay. (Now to deal with the hotel and everything else and bllrghhl.)

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I have been putting off making an Inform 7 post. There's miles to go before I'm done reading the docs, but let me just say that the damn thing is amazing. It makes me want to make a game. Right now.

Even though the language is only part of what makes the system great (much of the rest of it is the fantastic IDE), I want you to look at a lengthy source code example that Mike Gentry posted elsewhere. (It starts with the line '"Anchorhead" by Michael Gentry.')

Please look at the code even if you don't consider yourself a programmer. Just look at it. And start to understand why this language is blowing peoples' minds the way it is.

(It defines the first few rooms and objects of Anchorhead, Gentry's Loftcraftian IF masterpiece from several years ago that he's been porting from I6 to I7.)

Finished Tolti-Aph late last night. Total dedicated play time of six or seven hours. I recommend it. It is an experimental game, and as such falters a bit at certain points, but has more than enough going for it that I was kept enmeshed in it for two solid play-sessions. (Took a break to do work-work and go to a birthday party when I got completely stuck, and when I came back I quickly unstuck myself. This, to me, is a mark of a good adventure game. Or anyway a good relationship with an adventure game.)

I needed no hints to win, but I did not not solve the difficult prologue puzzles in the most elegant fashion -- it is possible to do otherwise due to non-deterministic factors that the game experiments with. Later, due to another unusual feature of the game, I got into a winning state while leaving much of the main map unexplored, and several puzzles not just unsolved but entirely unseen. Since I wasn't clued that a better ending awaited me with more effort, I called it a night. Well, that and it was 3:30 a.m.

While the prologue is damnably hard, I never felt frustrated with it, and looking back I see there's actually a bunch of ways to solve it. I took the most brute-forcey approach, I think. I later figured out a better way, and peeking at a walkthrough I see there's an entirely bloodless approach that I didn't come close to finding.

What I really liked about all this is the way that the prologue is separated from the midgame. You begin the lacking the ability to save (there are perfectly sensible in-game reasons for this), and so everything you do has a sense of impermanence to it. The available map is small and you're quick to slap the restart button as you try different things, dying a lot in the process. Eventually, one way or another, you solve this puzzle and gain the ability to save as well as recover from injury, both of which expand your available exploration range -- one on a meta-game level, and one in-game.

And so it happens that you arrive in the midgame, even though you remain in the same map, and the narrative continuity is seamless; there's no overt chapter-change effects. I'm not sure I've seen this before, and I dig it.

Using a bug tracker with Volity for the first time. It's fun to knock bugs off of it, even if mostly they're ones you posted yourself.

Up until 1:30 coding because it's a feel-good way to procrastinate business stuff! Doh.

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It's IF Comp weekend once again. The games are not yet available as I type this, but they may be by the time you read this. Looks to be around the same number of entrants as last year, maybe a handful more. And about the same number of joke/crazy-person entries, judging by the titles (and authors).

Marked the ocassion with a rare login to ifMUD. Idled for a while and logged out again. Ah, MUDs.

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Almost not worth the effort, but one last Meh for Fever Pitch: Single people are either creepy freaks or closeted homosexuals. Probably another "harmless" romantic-comedy-o-verse assumption. It still ticks me off. Do typical people really think this is true, though?

I should just avoid all romantic comedies, no matter how much Roger Ebert might like them. Clearly the whole genre just gives me the grrr.

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Now you all know what I was talking about with Serenity after I saw its preview draft last May. The movie shook me up as badly as any movie ever has, and I hadn't ever seen the show before.

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I easily spend around $20, and often much more, every day on food (and coffee and snacks and so on). This has got to stop now. Letting go of my salary gives me a great big obvious reason to get back into cooking again. There are a lot of equally excellent other reasons, but they're not enough to drive me into it, apparently.

Of course I've been telling myself this for a week or more and I still haven't made the crucial step of going grocery shopping even once yet. Only a matter of time.