Brian Crick

Assembly Language Cooking

There are days I find nothing more soul-crushing than cooking. It’s tedious. It’s overhead. A fulfilling life, I think to myself, is one with as little overhead as possible.

But I’ve been enjoying cooking more lately. I realized a few years ago that, when faced with tedious drudgery that’s never ever going to go away, the best thing yo can do for your own sanity is to devote more mental energy to it: to learn to do said tedious drudgery more efficiently, and with more panache that you can be proud of.

So I can manage my time more efficiently now, have more pots going at the same time, pick dishes that have a high work-to-tastiness ratio, and generally have a better time of it than I used to.

The latest part of this process has been trying to work with raw ingredients more. While it’s convenient to work with pre-packaged tortillas, pie crusts, pizza dough, dips or suaces, I suspect, in the end, it will be more convenient to keep a constant supply of flour, butter, cream, eggs and yeast around, most of which I’d have around anyway. In theory, there would be fewer staples to manage, more things I could do with said staples, and less stressing out about, say, having a pre-made pie crust in the freezer if I decide on a whim I want to make quiche.

It will get worse before it gets better though.

Tried my first from-scratch pie crust last night, and it was frustrating and time consuming and didn’t turn out that great. There will be a lot of waste here. I haven’t had to outright pitch too many meals or parts of meals, but it’s certainly happened, and that’s never fun.

Some days you break the hollandaise. Some days the hollandaise breaks you.

If I do this, I have to accept that what I’m doing is not simply incremental learning; it’s making things noticeably worse for myself, so I can eventually make things better. I think I just starting doing this, without really accepting that I should expect this to be fairly frustrating for a while.

But if I can get through this here hump, I think I’ll find cooking just a little more rewarding.

Bread and Butter

Been thinking about web site development a lot lately.

I used to be a freelance web site designer, which I have mixed feelings about. I liked meeting new clients, and building a rapport with them, and whipping up site designs in Illustrator and Photoshop. I liked being able to say I was a freelancer, just like I like being able to say ‘I make software for kids with autism’ now… it feels good to say that. Worthwhile.

But the actual process of turning those ideas into web sites always annoyed me.

So I’ve been thinking about that, and about game development, and how, even though I don’t find the idea of developing games to be particularly noble, I honestly enjoy the most of the tedium of game development. And I’m wondering if I might do well to treat game development like freelancing.

There are web site clients I picked up because I thought I’d love working with the client, and there are clients I picked up because they could help me pay my bills.

With game development, I’m only working on things I love to make. There aren’t any bread & butter, pay-the-bills games.

And maybe there should be.

Working on web sites I didn’t care about on a personal level was a little soul crushing. But I could work on a game that’s more than a little derivative and have lots of fun doing it, if I only let myself do so. I like playing casual games. I like playing cookie-cutter rehashes of old tropes. It’s only an overdeveloped urge to Change the World that has me working exclusively on things I find unique. And as someone who can do all the programming, graphics, and music for a game project on my own, I stand a good chance of making decent games with very little overhead.

Which is not to say that I could just flip a switch and break into the industry by doing this. It just might be worth trying.

Find a Reason

Sometimes, there is work you need to do, whose value you understand, and this understanding motivates you to do the work.

And sometimes, you do things for no reason at all, in the hopes that you’ll find something valuable in them.

I think the One Game a Month Thing is leaning towards the latter.

So in the day since my last One Game a Month post, already commited to making one game a month, I’ve thought of new reasons to do so:

I need practice talking about programming

I’m not real comfortable talking about programming, but it’s becoming more and more important that I can do so for my regular job — I can’t just work on my own and describe my progress in high-level, metaphorical terms anymore, because my co-workers and my boss now actually care about the technical details of what I do.

My regular projects like Tinselfly and Operetta are in tedious, heads-down places where they’re not real interesting to talk about, but having a new project a month will give me plenty of technical things to mull over in my journal.

It can be a family thing

I’ve occasionally made noises to my wife and brother about teaching them programming stuff, but sadly I never got around to prioritizing it. This is a good excuse to do that.

I can make game-like things that aren’t games in the technical sense

Specifically, I’m talking about that Celestial Stick People tablet app I’ve been threatening to make. It would be nice to get that done, and while I’m at it, revise the book since The Game Crafter now prints nice card-sized books for you.

Process of Elimination

Been on a bit of a purging/cleaning binge lately. What I want, more than anything right now, is less.

Fewer tchotchkes, fewer clothes, fewer kinds of spices in my kitchen, fewer board games in my dining room.

Less clutter.

There are of course, other solutions to the problem of clutter, solutions that don’t involve garbage bags and and boxes of stuff to give to charity. You can organize things better. Buy more bookshelves. Be more careful about what you do buy.

But the purging, the solving of a problem by simply getting rid of stuff — is oddly satisfying. And it’s always the first solution I think of when my house is getting too cluttered for my tastes.

Which brings me to the subject of violence in video games.

* * *

There’s been a lot of talk lately on the subject of violence in video games, and with this One Game a Month thing starting up, I wanted to talk about that a little.

I think about the issue, such as it is, in term of film. A great film can transform you. A mediocre film can still transform you, if you happen to watch it in a particularly vulnerable emotional state.

I feel that fiction would be kind of pointless if it didn’t change us.

And hopefully, the fiction out there will change us for the better, but I’d also say that there’s a lot out there that can make us worse. You can say that fiction can be transformative without going into anybody’s subjective definition of what sorts of transformations are desirable.

Similarly, I believe games can be transformative. I wouldn’t be trying to make games if I didn’t believe that playing my games might somehow make the player grow as a person.

Can playing a game make you a worse person? Probably. But I think the mechanics of that transformation are more subtle than the ‘playing shooting games makes you want to go out and shoot things’ kind of logic floating around there.

If I have any problem with violent games, it is that I don’t find violence a terribly interesting solution to problems. Don’t get me wrong, I like your typical outer space scrolling shooter game. It’s mindless and fun. But everything’s external to you. If only these hordes of space invaders were gone, life would be better. Everything is all their fault.

Externalizing everything and casting yourself as the righteous hero is kind of a terrible way to deal with problems.

Eliminating something in your way is just one way to deal with it. You can sneak around threats. You could make changes to your character that make obstacles easy to deal with. You could be tasked with turning obstacles into assets.

And lots of games focus on these kinds of solutions to problems. For my part, while I’m not nixing violence, I’d like my One Game a Month entries to have fewer threat-elimination scenarios, and more interesting ways of dealing with the threats the player is presented with. Because I think that will lead to better experiences, that encourage the player to think about problems in interesting ways.

Twelve

Hello 2013! I’m not much for resolutions, but I kindasorta decided to join this One Game a Month thing. It’s basically what it says on the tin: A bunch of developers are pledging to make one game, every month.

This may end up being a very bad idea, or it may be just what I need.

The rules are pretty loose, so I’m reading ‘make’ as ‘finish’, not ‘start and finish’ a game every month. With that in mind, I’ll be including my existing projects in this endeavor, and using this as motivation to get those finished and out there.

I’ve got four game projects currently in development:

Tinselfly, a character-driven action/adventure hybrid;
Operetta, a 4x / shooter hybrid;
Blind Tigers, a co-op board game; and
an untitled cyberpunk-themed board game.

In addition, I could tack on some things I started years ago but never completed:

Gemslinger, an arcadey Facebook game; and
Mika’s Tavern, a turn-based strategy game with no actual violence.

And that’s six projects right there.

* * *

What I’d like to do for the rest is just relax and make things I’d want to play, since I have so much trouble finding things I want to play. Nothing terribly innovative or demanding. Lunchbreak-sized games.

What games I do start for this will be small, 48-hour game jam sized things so they don’t take up too much of my time.

I’d like to make an attractive dungeon crawl. A simple RTS that’s so small in scope it doesn’t even require scrolling or a minimap. A completely derivative platformer with cutesy characters.

The only way I’m every going to work on stuff like this is within the context of a larger endeavor filled with projects I see as more worthwhile, and I think it might be good for me, to force myself to work on things that are known quantities.

* * *

Scheduling will be tricky here. I want to keep Tinselfly moving, so I’m probably going to be working on two things simultaneously all the time — Tinselfly plus another project. The existing board games and Operetta are bigger than your typical 48-hour gam jam stuff, so I want to get those out of the way first.

* * *

To kick this off, I’m starting with something to gamify the process of learning volume control and multiple-hand playing on a keyboard. I could really use something like this; my skills in these areas are terrible.

If I still had a pen tablet, I might have started with something to gamify the process of learning pressure and angle control, things I never really learned. Oh well.

Twelve Not So Angry People

Finished up outlines for my speakeasy board game characters last night.

Working as fast as I possibly could, I’d say each outline took 15 minutes. Working at a more leisurely pace (as I did last night) I’d put each outline at around 25.

You’d think it would take less time than that.

But anyway, have some random notes:

one game a month

So there’s this One Game a Month challenge coming up. And it occurs to me that I’ve already got four things in the pipeline — two board games, two computer games. I was already hoping to get most of those things done sometime in 2013. So, I figure, this speakeasy thing and the three other things in development — Tinselfly, a cyberpunky boardgame (big, big breakthrough last night!) and Operetta can get lumped in there. Ok, well, who knows what decade Tinselfly is coming out… but let’s not give up hope. A lot could happen between now and the very last month of One Game a Month.

But more on that whole endeavor later.

heels

OMG high heels are awkward.

I’ve never drawn a person wearing those before, but much to my surprise, it seems that most women in my 1920s fashion books are wearing high heeled shoes. So I figured I had to have at least one character in heels.

I couldn’t draw the feet on that character on the bottom, walking her fish, without thinking about how strange the position of the feet were and how uncomfortable that looked.

I’m glad that I’ve decided that, in the Tinselfly universe, everyone wears flats.

back view

The character on the lower left is supposed to be facing away from you. I’m not sure that’s entirely clear, or how to make that more clear.

Maybe, when there’s color, I can have some shading indicating that that’s the small of her back you’re seeing, through a relatively tame dress with a low back (again, based on real period stuff I saw).

hard edges

Here and there, I tried to make things a little too geometric to give things this art deco look.

I think I could have done more of that, but I was kind of rushing to get these done.

Stupid Photoshop Tricks: Corrosion

Recently, I made a logo for someone’s upcoming RPG.

They wanted something kind of corroded looking; if you view the image full size, you can see how the letters look a bit icky and old.

So I wanted to talk a little bit about how I did that. It’s mostly Photoshop tricks and very little hand-drawing.

First, I started with some boring grey letters in their own layer.

Then I added a stock bevel and drop shadow — just standard Photoshop effects. You can click on the fx bottom on the layers palette to add these.

I made a generic sort of streaky rusty copper texture like this:

It may look complicated, but it’s mostly stock filters.

On the image above, you can see the results of a Filter->Render->Clouds on top. In the middle, I’ve done Filter->Stylize->Find Edges. And on the bottom, I’ve done a Filter->Stylize->Emboss. And with that, you’re most of the way there.

So I made this great big copper texture and pasted in into my document, and used a clipping mask to make it look like a texture on my beveled letter. You can do that by selecting the texture layer and going to the little arrow menu on the Layers palette and selecting Create Clipping Mask, and what that does is, it uses the opacity of the layer under the selected layer as the opacity of the selected layer itself. But the effects, like the bevel, are still visible.

So at this point there’s a nice color texture, but it needs to look kinda bumpy and worn.

Sadly, I forget how I made this one. 🙁

But it was also pasted into my document, and had Clipping Mask turned on, and I set the Blending Mode on the Layers palette to Hard Light. That makes it so that the colors of the layer underneath are preserved, but you’re sort of adding shading to it. So you can see below how the letter’s still blue-green, but the highlights and shadows in the pitted texture above are coming through.

There’s this sorta lumpy, pitted texture now, but the edges of the letter are still perfectly smooth — it doesn’t look quite right. So I took little bites out of the letter with the Eraser tool, just near the edges, to make it look more like this texture was a three-dimensional thing. This effect is most visible where all the strokes come together in the middle of the letter.

Next, I wanted to add some mineral deposits. Rather than make a custom pattern, I just used this yellowy, lumpy rock pattern that comes with Photoshop.

What I did was, I made a new, empty layer and added a Pattern Fill using that fx menu, and a Color Fill too, to tone down the yellowness a little. And then I just started drawing blobs over my letter.

Part of the goal here was also to hide the flat appearance of the bottom-right part of the K; sometimes, Photoshop’s automatic bevels look a little funny.

That ended up being a little hard to see,and not nearly nasty-looking enough, so I also added a bevel to the mineral layer itself. So it kinda looks like there’s this buildup on the letter.

And finally, I added some more pits, again near the intersection of all the strokes for the letter.

This is a little strange. What you’re seeing below is some beveled dots, but the dots themselves aren’t visible — you can do that by lowering the Fill on your layer in the Layers palette. And what you’ve got then, is the bevel effect applied to the layers underneath the dots.

And there you have it… a lovingly crafted, nasty looking K. 🙂

Fun with Insanity

So I was explaining the weird history of my Tinselfly mechanics to someone at last night’s game developers get-together, and something just sorta clicked.

I’ve been hesitant to start level design, even though everything’s finally in place for me to do so, in part because I’m unsure about the fitness of my core mechanics in this project. My rationale goes something like this:

My current mechanic was designed from beginning to end to be a fun combat system.
Tinselfly will include very little combat.
Therefore, I should pick should a mechanic more appropriate for Tinselfly and use my combat mechanic in a game set in a universe with random combat encounters or something. Both Tinselfly and said combat-based game would be more fun because I did this.

However, I think this is a logical fallacy. The mechanics suitability for a combat-based game does not necessarily make it unsuitable for Tinselfly.

Instead, I could be thinking this way:

My current mechanic was designed from beginning to end to be a fun combat system.
Compared to combat-based games, non-violent games can often be lacking in that hard-to-describe fun factor.
Therefore, I should adapt my mechanic to Tinselfly, since I’m already confident it’s will be fun, and I because non-violent games deserve that same fun factor too.

The story for Tinselfly is pretty bleak in parts. And while there are certainly games out there — great games — that you feel compelled to play even though they’re not what you’d call ‘fun’ at all times, I don’t ever want the players of this game to see the moment-to-moment gameplay as a drag.

* * *

Part of the problem with adapting this mechanic is the inherent absurdity in many combat-based games, absurdities that have to be there to make the game sustainable.

Take dungeon crawls. Where did all those monsters come from? More to the point, why do the keep coming back after you slaughter them by the hundreds? What do they eat? Why does everyone’s discarded armor fit you, regardless of species or body type?

If I’m going to have constant, fun challenges for the player, I might do well to think a little less about where those challenges are coming from. There should be an inexplicably inexhaustible supply of people to help. An absurdly dangerous trek to the grocery store. Bureaucracies that are puzzle-like, not just in terms of paperwork, but in the layouts of civic buildings.

The Tinselfly universe, the version sitting in my head, is very real to me. It is nuanced and detailed and believable.

That could be a problem.

I can’t just gamify the player’s path through a naturalistic universe or the player’s perception of a naturalistic universe.

I have to gamify the universe itself.

Jam is a Sometimes Food

So there was another game jam this weekend, and I didn’t participate this time around. And there’s a jam coming up in January, and I’m not sure I’m going to go.

It’s not that I don’t enjoy game jams; they’re fun and intense and I learn things I’m not expecting to learn, which is the best kind of learning… but it’s a little like, I dunno, binging on chocolate. Sure, I love chocolate, but if you really love chocolate, you won’t allow yourself to be in a situation where you’ve eaten so much of it that you kind of want to throw up and never see chocolate again.

You know, like there’s a PSA in my head saying PLEASE EAT CHOCOLATE RESPONSIBLY.

Anyway. I guess I’m just not real into the jam kind of environment where you’re plugging away at one thing, to the exclusion of all else. I’d much rather, ya know, spend any given weekend with Marie or friends or whatever, and do game dev stuff when I’m home alone.

However, there’s this other thing coming up called One Game a Month, and that sounds more to my liking. I could work at my own pace, on my own terms, without having to block off a whole weekend.

* * *

You need a Twitter account to sign up for One Game a Month. I had one for a while, but kinda hated the whole Twitter experience — I think it’s fair to say I just didn’t ‘get’ it — so I killed my account entirely.

But I went ahead and signed up again. Guess it’s worth another shot.

The Faintest Ink

A while ago, Marie told me an old proverb: the faintest ink is better than the best memory.

I’m usually not much for proverbs. Most quotes that stick with me are from mediocre movies. But this one really stuck with me, and I’ve trying to integrate this thought into my life more, whether it’s taking notes at meetings or making maps of video games.

With that in mind, I’ve started a little wiki of sorts for Tinselfly (massive spoilers will eventually make their way there, if anyone cares). I’ve still got a long way to go, but the idea is to write down every decision I’ve made about the characters and story and whatnot, because there’s really a lot just sitting in my head that’s never been written down, anywhere.

I probably have more discarded, forgotten ideas related to this project than I could possibly write down. And while it’s important to cut and change things, I would like a record of what’s been changed and why. Might be good to have.

* * *

One of my biggest concerns with anything project like this is being precious about it. While this project is, of course, important to me, I don’t ever want to find myself in a situation where I’m so enamored of a particular idea that I’m unwilling to step back and evaluate its fitness for inclusion in my final product.

You’d think that getting all this stuff out of my head and into a more permanent, public location would cement these ideas in my head, and it would become harder to fight that preciousness, but the reverse has happened. Seeing these ideas written down, and re-reading them helps me with that evaluation process.

Like my approach to my journal in general, sometimes you have to write something down so you can realize how stupid it is. It’s so much easier to be precious about an idea when you haven’t actually had to explain it to anybody.