Brian Crick

Best Behavior

So I mentioned a post or two ago how joining this developers group was kind of out of character for me. And I wanted to dig into that a little bit more.

However, rather than just rehash my unease with formalized groups gathered around a specific interest, I thought I’d write up a list of rules for myself. (And just myself; I’m certainly not trying to dictate protocol here. I like having personal rules.)

Some of these things I don’t really have trouble with anyway, but there are some bad habits I’m afraid of slipping into here.

Get to know everybody. Talk to everyone regularly. Speaking from experience, it’s easy to just find a few people I can connect with, declare myself done with this whole icebreaking thing, and shy away from other members of the group. In many ways, it’s most important to interact with people I can’t connect with at first.
Get involved. Not that I’ve really sensed it in this particular group, but I don’t want to go in with the mindset that there’s this big organizer/participant dichotomy. I’d like to share whatever knowledge I have in workshops and help organize things where I can (not that I have much experience doing that right now).
…but remember there’s a world outside the group. I’ve been obsessing over figuring out how to contribute to the group, but I have to remember that my whole goal of getting something out there while keeping my sanity, marriage and other friendships at a higher priority is still as important to me as ever. Whatever time I spend on preparing workshop materials or helping with/participating in events should come out of my pet project time budget, not anywhere else.
Remember that other people have lives, too. I want to encourage others when there’s something they’re excited about working on, but I don’t want to pressure anybody to work more on their stuff or attend more meetings. I want to express my excitement about my own experiences to people outside the group, but not come off like I’m recruiting or evangelizing anything.
Don’t let things like game jams become an end unto themselves. Sure, the game jam was great fun, but I can’t lose track of my long-term projects, or let frequent busy weekends interfere with my weekdays at work-work. I also don’t want to slip into the habit of producing things at game jams that have any kind of by-developers-for-developers feel. (Which my first game jam entry sort of had; next time I do a jam, I actually think it would be an interesting challenge to decide on a hypothetical target audience while figuring out my approach to the theme.)

Reinventing Wheels

I really dislike most color pickers in games. You’re usually presented with a dizzying grid of color swatches, or some sliders that aren’t the most intuitive things to use, even for someone who spends a lot of time in graphics programs.

So I wanted to design something a little different for the character & costume creation in Tinselfly, something that lets you easily drill down to the color you want and go.

At first, you’ll be presented with a simple menu of things to choose from.

You can click on one of the primary colors, or one of the three shades of grey in the center.

If you click on a primary color, you’ll get some different variations of that color, so the color picker would look like one of the six variations below:

The new colors shown are further categorized by hue, and within each triangle of similarly-hued colors, you can pick a lightness and saturation that you like.

Similarly, if you click on one of the greys, you’ll get some variations that let you refine your color.

And that’s the basic idea.

I think this interface does a reasonable job of looking uncomplicated, even though there are still a couple hundred things to choose from. However, I don’t think it’s obvious how you’re supposed to interact with this thing. Some labels, bevels or general instructional text is probably needed.

Make a Difference

I have high hopes for the game developer’s group I’ve joined. Not just in terms of getting along with the group; sure, I was worried about that, but I’m talking about, like, the group being this positive force or something. I’ve always been hesitant to look for communities of people with similar interests — I’m worried about things getting a bit insular — but I get this feeling like, I’m watching something really wonderful take shape here.

I want to do whatever I can to help this along. To that end, I’ve volunteered to give a talk to the group — maybe with some other people — about music composition.

I don’t know where or when this will take place, but it scares me a bit . Then again, this whole joining-a-developer-group thing has been all about getting out of my comfort zone from the beginning. I’m excited to continue that trend. It’s been a while since I actively looked for things I was uncomfortable with, since I looked for more opportunities to fail and learn from those failures.

* * *

Been stressing out a bit about my Robin character model — and character models in general — for Tinselfly.

To recap, here’s what she looks like:

The odd thing about this is, in my head — if this were live action or something — I’d want the actress playing Robin to be a bit chunky. In my head, that’s how she is. She also has shoulder-length, unmanageable, curly hair, but I wasn’t sure how to model that.

But despite all that, as a stylized character in this stylized world, she’s absurdly elongated and has a simple bob.

I want the characters to look fragile. It just seemed like the right stylistic choice, the way the angular features of the characters in Samurai Jack complement the spare, action-based storytelling, or the way tile-based video game characters are frequently short and square, so the player can more easily tell what tile they’re in.

There are supposed to be elements in Tinselfly about larger-than-life people being all vulnerable, and given the 1920s aesthetic, I wanted my characters to look a little like those elongated, bronze art deco statues you see here and there.

* * *

Whatever I do, I don’t just want to make good products. I want to make good projects that feature made-up worlds that are the sort of egalitarian place I want the real world to be. That’s why Celestial Stick People has some male Lovers.

Getting some strong, layered female characters out there in the video game world is a major force driving the development of Tinselfly. I won’t argue that I don’t have an agenda here.

However, if I want that agenda to succeed, it’s imperative that I’m not preachy about it. Otherwise, the people I want to reach the most — the people who aren’t so obsessed with this whole egalitarianism thing — will simply tune me out.

* * *

So back to the skinniness.

Body image is also a hot topic in feminist discussions, and for good reason. And while I’m trying to move forward on the empowered-female-character thing, I’m kind of moving backward on the whole healthy-body-image thing.

For the most part, however, I’m comfortable with this design decision. Now, I may be completely wrong, but here’s how I’m currently rationalizing it:

It makes sense for the story, as mentioned above. If 100% of my design decisions are based on my agenda, I’m afraid I’m getting into preaching territory. I’d still argue that there’s nothing intrinsically wrong with super-skinny stylized characters in a work of fiction; it’s when it’s ubiquitous that it becomes an issue. If my next project has super-skinny characters and thee’s no real point to it, then I’ve got a problem.
Everyone and everything — men and women, dogs, cats, spaceships — will be just as long and skinny as Robin here. There’s not going to be a lot in the way of gender dimorphism, either, and I think that that will drive home the idea that this is a stylistic choice, not a normative statement on women in particular. (Sure, Barbie is scary looking. But compare her to the average Ken doll, and you’ll see how the dimorphism makes her so much creepier. In contrast, I like how male and female Bratz characters are similarly oddly proportioned.)
This isn’t targeted at adolescents. I’d love to produce something fun and positive for my 10 year old sister in law; I’d love to live in a world where there were lots of products with strong, positive, non disney-princess characters that adolescents could look up to… but this just isn’t one of those products. If I were targeting that sort of age range, I’d be way more particular about what I’m including and what I’m unintentionally saying about things.

Like I said, I’m open to the idea that I’m making the wrong call here. We’ll see how this universe feels when it’s more fully fleshed out, I guess.

Lost and Found

I have, at long last, rearranged my web site a bit so that this blog is no longer on the front page. Sure, writing here helps me sort out my thoughts, and people seem to like this sometimes, but I really want the first thing you see here to be my stuff, not my random babbling. The blog was never supposed to be on the homepage… that was just the WordPress default.

The new menu could certainly use some cleanup, if not an overhaul, but I’m glad to have taken this step.

* * *

While I was at it, I made a proper project page for the Jennifer Ann project, complete with screenshots and music samples. While I generally regard the project as an embarrassingly incomplete failure as a game and as a story, I forgot how much I liked the overall look. And while it could use a whole lot of smoothing out, the music isn’t half bad, considering that those were some of the first things I composed, ever.

I’m lucky I still had the original project files that I could dig through to make that page. I have a really bad habit of immediately deleting things as soon as I’m done with them. I ran into an issue making the thumbnails on the new home page, where I didn’t have the original files for my favorite web site design; I lost them years ago.

I like having this stuff around, because I frequently forget what I’ve done in the past. And I forget what I’m capable of, and what I still need to work on.

Postmortem: Global Game Jam

Last weekend, I went ahead and attended that Game Jam thing I mentioned a few posts ago. The idea was you have 48 hours to make a game based on a certain theme. I’d never been to anything like this before, and I can’t wait to do it again. So here are some random observations & things I learned.

the most good

I had every intention of going to this thing and not programming; I wanted to do music or illustration instead.

So at the start of the event, we were given the theme, and started exploring approaches to it. I started talking with some random people and came up with a unique idea for a game mechanic that I thought would fit the theme well… but of all the people in my newly found team, I thought I was the most likely to be able to implement the mechanic as originally conceived.

So I went ahead and filled the role of programmer in my newly found team because that’s what the project needed. Those of you who know me might be a little surprised by that. I’m generally happy to put visuals and other aesthetic considerations above mechanics, and for the most part, I enjoy creative endeavors more than programming.

I think — but I’m not absolutely certain — that was the right call; the mechanic seemed to be well received.

right the first time

Unfortunately, while I eventually did get the game engine doing what it was supposed to do, it took longer than expected and my code was never as stable or maintainable as it needed to be. What I usually do is, I’ll quickly try to get something basically working, and then do multiple passes at making the code better and better; writing something perfect the first time just isn’t something I do. It’s not about planning for me. The process of iterating over the code and refining it makes it good, makes me comfortable with it, makes me able to really quickly make changes to it later on. I’m breaking it in. Getting code that happens to work is the beginning of the process, not the end.

There was a lot of pressure to just get something that worked and move on, and things probably would have moved faster if I didn’t cave in to it, strangely enough.

I suppose you could say this was a learning experience about the importance of planning then, but I’m still happy with my hands-on, slow-at-first, fast-later-on approach, thankyouverymuch. There are certainly many things I could improve about the way I do things, but I suspect that changing my habits in response to some blunders during a weekend jam would be overreacting. Though next time, if I’m working with other programmers, even as an artist, I’d like to discuss the programming approach being taken before diving in.

part of the team

Sadly, being heads down with the code the whole time, I felt kind of separated from my team. And culturally, I wasn’t a great fit, so I was content to let the other people handle every aspect of the theme, presentation and story.

But… in some ways that was kind of cool, not knowing what my teammates were going to come up with. And it’s not like I was unprepared for the possibility that I would be in a team where I wasn’t a perfect fit.

I sort of thought that, as one of the few self-identified creatives at the event, I’d simply be auctioned off to a random team without much in the way of personal input. So I didn’t give it much thought. Next time I’d like to put more effort into evaluating my compatibility with prospective teammates before committing to being part of a team. Splitting into groups is, after all, part of this process.

next time

So who wants to do this with/near me at Notacon in April? 😉

Variations on a Theme

Well, that was a nearly perfect weekend. They’re so much better when I actually follow my own rules for managing them. 🙂

In addition to visiting the wonderful new Greater Cleveland Aquarium , visiting friends, exercising and going out with Marie, I managed to get through a full cycle and a half of pet-project work. There are six things on my plate at the moment; here are the weekend’s highlights.

* * *

Made a King of Swords for the Scopa deck. I was really happy with the medal salad going on there, though it got lost when I applied all my Photoshop filters. I’ll have to up the contrast on that a bit.

* * *

Am continuing work on my generic procedural NPC costume thing for Tinselfly. So what you’re seeing below is my test character, wearing a pair of boots whose thickness and length can be set to arbitrary values by the game at runtime.

It’s a bit sluggish, but you can watch this stuff animate in the game. It’s kinda spiffy. Need to work on adding procedural seams and details to things next.

* * *

My new font is starting to look like ya know, a font family. Whee! I’m really happy with how this is turning out.

Heart of Neutrality

I attended my second Cleveland Game Developers meetup last night, and (gasp!) I had a lot of fun. It’s a pretty diverse group, with as many artists as programmers, so my fears of being surrounded by other technical types were largely unfounded.

I even got to offer advice on music software to someone there. It’s a great feeling, to be in a position to be helpful to someone you don’t know personally.

I kinda like networking events. I know they’re the bane of many people’s existences, but there’s a time and place for the sort of neutral, casual conversation you get at things like this. Sure, being overly friendly at a networking event can be awkward, and if you’re having networking-type discussions with friends, that’s just depressing… but I feel a strange sort of calm talking to people I’ve never met before, who I may never meet again. It’s kind of liberating.

* * *

They’re pushing this Game Jam thing where you’re given a theme for a game, split into teams, and have 48 hours to come up with something interesting. I’m not really interested in doing a 48-hour programming challenge… I just don’t think I’ll find such a thing particularly fun or relevant to the specific programming skills I need to work on right now. However, if I attended as an illustrator or a fledgling musician, assigned to a random programmer, I think that would be an interesting experience. I could use the practice thinking quickly and doing those sorts of creative pursuits under absurdly tight deadlines.

As I understand it, they’re short on illustrators and musicians anyway… need to confirm that, though.

* * *

Watched Apocalypse Now for the first time last night. It may not sound like it, but that’s kind of a big deal. As someone with a dad who’s a Vietnam war veteran, Vietnam war movies simply didn’t exist in my chilldhood — or young-adulthood. The war itself was never spoken of, and I only know details of my dad’s involvement in the war secondhand.

Sure, I’ve seen Good Morning Vietnam and Heaven and Earth but those aren’t focused on combat so much.

So anyway, I watched it, and failed to find it particularly disturbing, or horrifying, though my impression is that it wanted to be those things, and succeeds for most people. I sorta wonder if there’s something wrong with me there. I’ve found maybe one or two movies in my life disturbing.

Then again, going back to the whole war-veteran thing… of course, I’ve never seen real warfare, but I’m pretty sure that no movie is ever, ever going to come close to capturing even the secondhand account of this event in my head, cobbled together from a couple decades of whispers and worried looks.

You want to flesh that out in a 2 or 3 hour ‘epic’? Please. I may just laugh at you.

Fun with Font Blending

Now that I’ve cleaned up my untitled square sportsy font a bit, I thought I’d mess it up again. 🙂

I had this critiqued by some experts in the industry a few years ago, and they suggested that it might work well as the widest variation of a whole family of fonts. I’ve never tried that before, but I’ve decided to give it a shot.

What I’m hoping to end up with is a 15 font family: you’d be able to pick any combination of one of five weights and 3 widths. Above, you can see what the 5 different weights might look like for the widest available width.

Luckily, I don’t have to make all 15 sets of letters from scratch; the way it seems to work is, you just define the extremes, and let your font-editing software blend between them. In the end, I’ll need to draw each character 4 times: narrow/light, narrow/extra-bold, wide/light and wide/extra-bold. What you see above is the two wide extremes blending together.

So it’s arguably 4 times as much work, but you get 15 times as much product, a more versatile product that hopefully will appeal to people with big, complex typesetting jobs.

But the ratio of work-to-product isn’t really what I find appealing about this. What I like about it right now is that working at these extremes is pretty unforgiving. The thinner the strokes, the easier it’s going to be to tell when they’re inconsistent. And with the extra bold characters, it’s been a bit of a challenge to cram everything in without having things look too crowded or muddy. And, I’m sure that the narrow versions of these will have their own unique problems to deal with.

It’s like you’re exaggerating the problems already present in the design. If I can figure these issues on the edges of my family, I’m sure the middle will be much better for it.

Autosave

For no particular reason, I worked a little on an old font today.

The changes are pretty minor. I’ve made the curves on letters like O and B more smooth (while still trying to retain the squarish look of everything), and slimmed down the strokes on the X, B and W so they match the other letters better.

You kind of have to squint a bit to see the changes. However, I think this is a bit more professional and clean looking now.

* * *

One of the nice things about working on fonts is, you can let something sit for a few years and pick it back up, and you don’t have to spend a whole lot of time re-familiarizing yourself with what’s going on. This font was last edited in 2009 I think.

Contrast that with my Dart board game project, which was a bit baffling to sort out today, after having gone unedited for a couple months.

* * *

It occurs to me that this whole saving-journal-post-drafts-in-Wordpress thing is backfiring.

See, I used to post everything directly to LiveJournal, which seemed incapable of reliably saving drafts. So if I wanted to write something, I had to do it all it one sitting, or at least have my post-editing page open all the time, beckoning me to come back to it. With WordPress, I can save a draft, leave the WordPress interface entirely, and completely forget that I was writing something.

There are any number of saved drafts on my site here, waiting to get edited. Chances are, I won’t get back to them. And that’s part of why there haven’t been many posts here lately.

As with most things, I think my posts are better when they’re just a little bit rushed. Everything’s more focused that way.

So I think I’ll go back to just trying to throw things together all at once here.

Reflection

As Marie and prepare for a short New Years’ vacation that I’m looking at with equal amounts of excitement and worry, I find myself thinking a bit about identity. So have some random thoughts (which may be a little navel gazey, but hopefully not too much).

* * *

Part of tech support is calming people down. I did a little bit of this for a while, and from what I hear, I was fairly good at working with cranky customers.

Not that I had any training, mind you; I just made people calmer by virtue of being me. There’s nothing particularly amazing about that; we all, just by virtue of being who we are, make the people around us behave a little differently.

So I think of humanity in general as calm and reasonable. Because whenever I see people, I see my own calm reflected in them.

I kind of wonder about people who make people around them cranky. I’ve certainly met those people, and in all likelihood they don’t realize they make the people around then cranky; in all likelihood they don’t realize people, in general, are more noble than their own point of view would suggest.

* * *

I haven’t been in a few years, but part of why I like going to TypeCon is, I like the person I am when I’m at TypeCon. I’m a little more outgoing, a little more excitable.

I’d like Marie to meet this person, but getting that to happen would be problematic. When I’m around Marie I tend to let myself fade into the background, though I’m working on that.

* * *

Going to a meeting of the Cleveland Game Developers tonight for the first time, and I’m a bit nervous about that. Historically, I tend to become easily confused when I’m around other programmers — strangely enough, I see most I’ve met as somewhat alien and difficult to connect to.

But I like the idea of being accountable to a group of other game developers — apparently part of every meeting is project updates from the members.

I’m very curious what the group is like, and how I’m going to come across to them.