Blog: Games of March 2019

I was pretty steadily busy in March and still holding out on getting to invested in playing anything while I had work to do. I didn't play anything particularly of note, although I probably did get deeper into Xenonauts than I'd planned. I also very briefly started trying to play a version of Simon's Cat branded Snood on the phone, but that has the standard addictive gameplay and pay-to-keep-playing model so I ditched that pretty quickly.

My top five games (by play time) for March were:

1. Breath of Fire II - I'm struggling to get through this a bit. Some of this game is really well done and some of it isn't. The translation is obviously awful, and it has a very SNES RPG habit of sending you to do something ... somewhere, so I've had to resort to a guide (well, several guides) to find a decent way to play. On the other hand, something does keep me playing and I enjoy the overall feel of the game.
   
   
   
   via GIPHY


2. Xenonauts - I got listening to a Podcast where they were talking about XCOM (the real one from '94). So I figured I'd fire up Xenonauts until I got frustrated and quit. So far that hasn't happened and I've been enjoying Xenonauts quite a bit.
   
   

   

   Nothing to worry about.

   
   


3. Animal Crossing: Amiibo Festival - As (pretty much) always.
   
   

   

   Brother and Sister

   
   


4. Pokémon Go  - Also as (pretty much) always.
   
   

   

   I take it back. I'm slightly worried.

   
   


5. Mario Kart 8 - I needed something more tactile to play and this was really up my alley.
   
   
   
   via GIPHY

Here's my total play time chart for March:

And here's a chart of how much I've played over the month:

Project 1 & Project 11: Write More

With my PhD winding down, I've been thinking about how I want to organize my time for the next while. I'll write about my thoughts in general in a bit, but at this point I think where ever I go I want to improve my communication, especially in writing.

via GIPHY

So to address that I'm (re)setting up to projects for myself, both to write more.

Project 1 is my already existing project for the blog, but I would like to increase my blog-as-blog output to at least 4000 words a month. I'm still working out exactly how I want to use those 4000 words, but the idea is to think about, write, edit and revise some non-fiction writing each month.

Project 11 is my already existing project to write a fantasy novel. At the moment I think I would like to try to put 4000 words a month there too. The core concept has been floating around in my head forever, and it seems like time to at least produce a trunk novel out of it. I also reserve the right to divert these words into some other fiction project, possibly some more short stories, but I'll cross that bridge when I come to it. Job one is to actually write stuff consistently.

I'll put out a monthly update at least until August 1, 2019 and we'll see how it goes.

Blog: Games of February 2019

February was a bit rough in terms of mindful gaming. It was also the last month I'll spend fully immersed in my thesis, so I guess I'll take what I can. I stress gamed more than I wanted to and didn't give myself a lot of time to play stuff I really enjoyed in a relaxed way. As such my February post feels a bit more critical than usual.

My top five games (by play time) for February were:

1. Into The Breach - I like this game. As I've said before the puzzle structure of the tactics gameplay makes me feel much smarter than some games where I don't have the time to sit and think stuff through. The more I play the better I get with the different mechanics and that's been a nice feeling.
   
   

   

   Grid.



2. Civilization VI - I dunno. The game is fun, but I always struggle with the one-more-turn problem. I should probably have left this one closed on steam, but it also feels like an easy game to play when I have a few minutes. Something I want to think about going forward is finding some good bite-sized games.
   
   

   

   Coastal.



3. Breath of Fire II - This game is confusing. It's certainly a strong response to the first game in the series, but it's still weaker than most JRPGs of the era. The translation also kinda rips the heart out of the game.
   
   

   

   Would you believe the W stands for Whale?



4. Fire Emblem: Awakening - As I've said here a lot, I'm bad at tactics games. I'm bad at this game. I think I managed in my one play through a awhile ago to grind myself into a state where I couldn't win. I restarted and seemed to be a bit more balanced, but never got myself to a point where I felt happy with how my play through was going. I should probably seek out someone who is actually good at the game on YouTube.
   
   

   

   from GameFAQs user Master_Bass



5. Invisible Inc. - I've really come around on this game and really enjoyed it in February. I like the stealth based tactics, and now that I've embraced them better, I've gotten a lot better. I'm now curious to see, if I lean into the rogue-light elements and let my team get better, how the game will evolve.
   
   

   

   Spy.

Here's my total play time chart for February:

And here's a chart of how much I've played over the month:

Project 18 - Video Game Play Tracker - Update 2 (v0.2.0)

I actually finished up v0.2.0 of my game tracker months ago, but I finally got some free time so I thought I’d write up what I have. I have probably forgotten a lot of the details at this point, but I’ll just soldier on. In this update I finished up adding in aggregation and filtering of play sessions to the display system (and did a little bug fixing). 

Filtering

I wanted to be able to filter play sessions into specific time periods. Right now I start a new spreadsheet every year to keep track of the data in a manageable way, and I start a new set of tabs within each spreadsheet to track data for each month. I wanted to be able to replicate this in an ad hoc way, which would allow me to build a more informative and flexible way to look at the data.

A small view of my tracking spreadsheet.

Additionally it’s nice to be able to include or exclude games or groups of games from the list. For example, how much time have I spent playing all the games in the Zelda franchise? I have no idea right now but filtering would make that a question I can ask easily.

As such, I added two types of filters for play sessions, one for games and one for dates. The filters work by finding all the play sessions that match and then showing only data from those sessions. 

The game filter works by matching the (whole) name of a game. Multiple games can be added to the filter which then allows multiple games. So far, I don’t have any structure like a series or a genre, so I don’t have filters working for that, but that’s something to work on in the future. The filter provides a list of all play sessions that match the set of game names.

The two basic filters.

The date filtering works by using date windows. Each window has a beginning and an end date and the filter allows through all play sessions that are between the two ends. If either of the two dates is unset then the filter allows all sessions to the beginning or end of time.

It took a little fiddling to make them work, in particular to make an empty filter allow everything (which is backwards to how the filters are designed, but extremely unintuitive to work with).

Aggregation

In my spreadsheet I keep a log of all games played for the year (including the date, the game name and the amount of time played). Then for each month I break out one pivot table that includes the total amount of time each game has been played for the month and a second table that breaks out the games played for each day so that I can produce the stacked bar-chart of the games. I needed the aggregation system to allow me to basically do that in the stand alone system.

January's games played chart. (See a better view in my January 2019 post).

Aggregation was interesting because I wanted to make it as abstract as possible, but still needed to make it concrete enough to work in the command-line interface. I think I may need to take a second swing at it to make it really work smoothly. 

The way it’s currently constructed aggregators take a set of play sessions (raw or filtered) and extracts a aggregate, which is a map organized by game name, the type of aggregate and the value (as a double). Aggregates can be merged to put together different stats about a set of play sessions. 

The aggregated games in my test file (mostly from early 2018).

As I said the system is a little messy and I think having now let some time pass I could do a better build solution.

Project Update

Compared to the first update, I did a better job of using the git workflow and breaking down my work into smaller chunks and updating regularly. This was helpful in the work I needed to do to finish my thesis project. I also tried to start teaching the workflow to my students this semester and I think generally the “do small things well” mantra has done me (and them?) well.

The current state of the Game Tracker

It’s also been months and months since I finished the actual main work for this update. I did break some tests which ended up taking me a while to fix. Since then I’ve mostly been working on my PhD so I’ve had to backburner the whole thing.

The two big directions I’d like to take the project in next, are to produce a GUI version using JavaFX and to integrate a Google Doc back end storage. The first step I think is going to be the hook up Google sheets and then go on to the JavaFX front end.

My plan, as it stands, is to finish the next update including the Google Sheets connection (and some various fixes / reorganization) by June 1, 2019.