Project 2: The Ogre Manager : Update

You may have noticed that the second project I started, The Ogre Manager, has gone unmentioned for a very long time. There are three main reasons for this, the fact that I fell behind doing everything with the blog is the first, the second is that I didn't give myself a deadline to finish by and the third (and most interesting) is that I don't know that I really want the Ogre Manager in the way I outlined it in the first post.

As I mentioned in the first post is that the origin of the Ogre Manager was a sketch pad which I kept track of all my unit levels on and I did the math using my old high-school Casio calculator. I really enjoyed the "meditative" nature and the hand-made nature of doing it this way. I always felt like I was losing that when I used the spreadsheet and that the Ogre Manager was also going to be a little to "technical".

So, I'm re-organizing the project and introducing The Paper Ogre Manager. 

I decided to make this as nice as possible, so I started by getting a set of large moleskine cahier with ruled squares. I'm going to include 4 graphs which outline the average level for each unit, the average front-attack (or best-attack) power for each unit, the average alignment, and the accumulated experience (or possibly percentage of calculated experience). I will also track these in a table as well.

It's still probably a month or so before it really feels like Ogre Battle time to me (I think I may be a type of reverse plant I can only play Ogre Battle once I'm not getting enough light), but now that I have this set up I'll be ready. I may still tackle the software version at some point, mostly for the programming practice

Blog: Favorite YouTube Videos (Volume 11)

Welcome to the eleventh volume of my favorite YouTube videos. This week our musical journey is interrupted by the arrival of a new species of video, the vlog. *Play ominous music now* At least we'll start with a vlogger rapping to make our transition.

• The first video of the volume is yet another song by the perennially appearing Brentalfloss. Rather than his usual video game fair, this one is an awesome moment of thanks for a teacher.
• The second video is another video song from Pomplamoose. As with "If you think you need some lovin" this is one of their earlier original pieces. Always fun to see the exuberance vs the cool chick.
• The next three videos are the arival of the vlogbrothers into my favorites list. For the uninitatied the vlogbrothers are brothers (surprise) Hank and John Green, who started out with a project many years ago called brotherhood2.0. In brotherhood2.0, they set out to spend a year without communicating with each other textually. This morphed over time into the vlogbrothers and the community surrounding them nerdfightaria. One of the nicest aspects of their videos (aside from the fact that they're awesome) is that most of them are under 4 minutes in length.
  These three come from three different time periods in vlogbrother history. I think the first one comes just after I started watching, although that seems far too recent (after I started watching the vlogbrothers I went back and watch all their videos through (at least twice) so my sense of time is a little mushed where when their videos actually happened). The first video is Hank's wootstock rap and pretty much explains itself (but it starts with a reason for me to use the wheaton fawning tag) The second is further back, but deals with the important concept of braincrack (and gigantic blue penises) and the third is from brotherhood 2.0 days and is one of the first book club videos (and a demonstration of how slow John used to talk). As I've said before the vloggers are coming and this is their vanguard.

Blog : Cool Things on September 14, 2012

I'm starting a new series of posts on the blog side where I'm going to mention some of the cool things I've run across. I hope this is roughly weekly, but the blog schedule has to flex to the actually being a student schedule.

This first edition is mostly things from youtube, where I'm a little better oganized about keeping track of cool things (and you don't have to worry there's at least a year's worth of favorite YouTube videos before I have to do anything there). In the future I will hopefully be keeping track of all the cool things.

Videos

Let's start then with the inimitable Dodger, who has started a let's play series of the game They Bleed Pixels. The style of the game is pretty cool, I especially like the character's pose as she jumps, and how reactive the game looks. It looks like it can become incredibly frustrating so I'm just as happy to let someone else play. Dodger's Let's Play style is enjoyable, she's actually good at games, and makes for great back ground listening. I also appreciate how she goes back at the end of the prologue video to pick up the collectables she missed. Check out the following episodes too, unfortunately there isn't a playlist of them yet.

Another cool video I found this week is Karen Kavett's video on how she created a Doctor Who Guess Who set. She's pretty inspirational on the getting excited and making things front and she makes some pretty cool things. The video features the music from Chameleon Circuit.

The last video this week is the 1000th video from the vlogbrothers (well, technically the 1001st). It's pretty cool all the things that have come together over the last five years. DFTBA.

Games

This week I've also been playing (a bit to my chagrin) Final Fantasy: Crystal Chronicles: My Life as a Dark Lord, a downloadable title by Square-Enix on the Wii. This game is a pretty cheesy tower defense game (in which you have to defend your tower ... rather than use the tower for defense). The concept is a little weird/j-rpg the mechanics are a bit simple (and sometimes frustrating) but for some reason this is a hell of a lot of fun.

Yeah, that's what it looks like ... (via GameFAQs) 

Podcasts

I've recently run across the not-at-all new Film Sack from the Frog Pants Network. In which Scott Johnson, Brian Dunaway, Randy Jordan and Brian Ibbot discuss a movie each week, usually a B from a while ago and see how it feels, if it holds up and whether people should actually be interested. Despite not being much of a movie buff myself listening to these four guys talk about films is really fun and the kind of thing you can put on in the background while getting things done. I've started listening both to the oldest episode and going forward and the newest one going backward and we'll see what happens when the film sack trains collide.

On a related note, Film Sack's cousin podcast Autopilot is preparing for it's second season. This podcast (put together by Scott Johnson and Tom Merritt) takes a look at the pilots of television shows and is informative and entertaining. They released the first season earlier this year, and decided to fun the second season through Kickstarter (rather than through sponsorships). I enjoyed the first season enough to get on board to give them a kick.

Wrap-up

I'd like to thank my friend Daley for his bump to the blog earlier this week. He runs his blog at lingwhatics.ca and keeps a good eye on the world both there and on his twitter.

And finally, although I'm sure everyone's had enough gangnam style, here's the crew of Weekend Confirmed getting overwhelmed by the spirit of ... dance ...

Project 4 : Snake : Update

The deadline for the first phase of the Snake project was September 1, 2012. By that point I had hoped to have a basic version of the game up and running. Unfortunately, I wasn't quite able to finish all that I'd hoped to do in the given time period.

Snake. Version 0.1 - it's almost a game.

What I did manage to get done was all the basic parts of the game except for the actual snake. I have a dot that goes around the world and can hit another dot that gives the player a point. This is mostly the point of snake, but right now my snake can't grow a tail.

Building the game in Processing.org was interesting. Processing is designed for non-expert programmers to be able to develop animations and interactions. It based on Java, but has a limited set of  the java utility libraries (although it does allow for other libraries to be added). The java basis is convenient because that's the language I've done most of my development in so far, however not having things such as queues makes things (such as the tail of the snake) harder to implement.

Even though I haven't finished the tail of the snake, it's interesting to note that the game already has the feeling of snake. The controls have a slight delay (because the movement of the snake is not linked to key presses) which feels very similar to most of the other implementations I've played in the past. I actually find this somewhat frustrating, since it causes you to have less control than you might. In the implementation I finished a while ago (and then deleted somehow) I implemented the control differently (I think I had the snake move on the key press regardless of its speed) and this made the game much more controllable and less frustrating.

Since I didn't get everything done in the last phase, I'm going to start my next phase by finishing getting the snake's tail running. I also want to implement the move-on-key-press control system and a way to switch between the two so there are traditional and "comfortable" modes. I also want to put in some of the "game" functionality, including a start screen, a pause screen and an on screen score / level system.

It's come back into the semester and sadly I still have one class left to complete in my PhD, so this can't be a high priority for the next few months. I don't think it will take a lot of time to finish but I want to do a good job so I can have it in a state where other folks can play it, so the balance of all that I'll end this phase on October 14, 2012.