Tag: DIY

Designer Diary: De-making King’s Quest: Where to Start?

Not De-made

I’ve wanted to make a video game for, well, I don’t know how long it has been. Pretty long I’m sure. I can remember (just like everyone else can) drawing out dozens and dozens of level designs for my game. What type of game was it? It was a racing/platformer hybrid where racers in these pods would race through tubes that had a number of hazards. It was either going to be really stupid or stupidly hard. I never got anywhere on working on that game. I’ve never got very far on any of the games I’ve ever worked on. The problem always being have to learn a programming or scripting language. I’m not very good at it…

I still want to make a game though. So, what am I to do? Use Inform 7! Inform 7 is a  programming language for making Interactive Fiction (IF) that uses natural language. What does that mean? It means that if I type in as a line of code:

The Castle is a room. “You stand before a majestic castle it’s walls are imposing.” To the east is the Moat. To the west is an Empty Field.

The compiler takes these sentences and from it knows that the Castle is a room and when you are there will display the quoted text. The compiler also knows that to the east is another room,  Moat and to the west is a room called Empty Field. While you can do much more than create rooms with Inform 7 all of the coding is done in complete understandable English sentences like the ones above.

I figured the best way to learn Inform 7 was to start creating a game right away. But, I didn’t have any ideas for a IF game and I didn’t want to hate own of my own good ideas after implementing it so poorly on my first attempt at using the language. This is where Roberta William’s King’s Quest I comes in. King’s Quest wasn’t the first adventure game to have graphics (that was Roberta’s Mystery House) but the graphics were line drawings and static. KQ1 was the first to have a moveable avatar and detailed (for the time) visuals of your character’s surroundings. The player still has to type in commands at a prompt in order to interact with the game and there is still a lot of text to go through. Why not take that text and that premise for my own first attempt at game making? So, that is what I decided to do. I’ll just jettison the graphics and re-make the game in Inform 7. It shouldn’t be that hard should it?

Next time: Drawing Maps, designing a world

 

How my Garden Grows: Summer 2011 part ?

Jungle-like density

Since last I chronicled the progress of the garden the pole beans have overgrown the fence and have proceeded to begin colonization of the front yard, I’ve lost an overgrown zucchini plant that spilled out of the box and then broke underneath its own weight, and some sort of animal has begun poaching all of my tomatoes! We’ve also been eating a lot of cucumbers (the regular and lemon varieties), zucchini, and green beans. We’ve been collecting so many of them in fact that almost every meal that is prepared now has one, or more of those three things in it. Bread salad is always a popular choice (seeing as it requires fresh basil and we have plenty of that as well)

The beans migrate into my neighbors yard...
Pole beans and cucumbers scale the growth screen and the fence...

That first picture is of the beans growing over one of the support ties for the tomato plants. The beans infiltrated into the tomato plants and then co-opted their supports. Next time I’m just going to plant bush beans. I can get the same, if not higher, yield, and not have to worry about the plants overcoming everything else in the garden. The second picture shows both beans and cucumber plants growing up their growth screen and over the wall.  One of the bushes in the front yard, planted to screen view of the electric meter and the fence has already been reached by a bean creeper and, I’m sure, will soon succumb to the pole beans. The funny thing is people said the soil in the garden was spent and nothing would grow! We’ve had a higher yield this year and more robust plants!

A cucumber blossom
Bean blossom
A cuke!

No picture of the harvest today. We’ve been going over the garden every day or so and so we pick a little produce everyday as opposed to a large pile of it on the weekends… This way we can incorporate the fruit into food throughout the week and have it at its freshest!

 

You can see previous entries in this series here, here, and here.

Preparing to Create instead of Creating

Sometimes procrastinating isn't as obvious as this

I’ve recently fallen prey to such “productivity” sites as: Lifehacker, Zen Habits and 43 Folders. These sites all offer useful types and links to a variety of content (soft and hard) that is supposed to streamline the and facilitate the creative process and act. These sites do a good job of finding content, that exists to help people create, across the internet and providing it to their readers in short blurbs and easy links. Lifehacker is full of information on websites, programs, apps, etc. that will help those who use them “create.”  Except they don’t. Instead you get caught up in getting ready to create. The focus of these sites, even when they tell you to stop reading and create, is not for you to create but to keep getting ready to create with the help of this app or that program.

I’ve been diligently reading all three recently and I want to show you some things:

It might be a little hard to see but go ahead and click on the two pictures above. The folders circled in red are productivity software, they’re there to help me create better digital images, better code, better digital audio, better notes for future projects, better computer management, better command line interface, easier scripting, etc… etc… My computer is full of the stuff. My cell phone is clogged with it as well. Now I’m going to show you my ‘documents’ folder where all the now easy to do creative works are stored:

Not much to show here...

That’s the entirety of my creative output for the year of 2011. Nine 200 word book reviews, one 500 word writing challenge, and two incomplete book reviews. I haven’t taken any pictures, let alone manipulate them. I haven’t written any code. I haven’t recorded or edited any audio. The extent of my idea capturing notes? Two entries; links to websites I wouldn’t to further explore later.  What does this mean? It means the idea of greater productivity has effectively made me non-productive. I’ve spent all this time optimizing, optimizing, optimizing for when I’ll have the perfect creativity system. That’s great, I suppose, when do I sit down and create though?

All this pursuit of productivity is great for Lifehacker and friends they’re getting millions of eyeballs on their webpage, millions of clicks to their adds, and making millions of dollars. It isn’t helping me, or you, create anything though! For the creators and makers all this productivity is just another excuse, another form of procrastination. It’s one more thing we can do to keep us from the difficult task of creation.

So, close your browser. Set down the cue card system. Pick up your pen, pencil, camera, keyboard, etc. and let’s start going about the hard work of creating. If you lose a few minutes, or hours, because however you create isn’t optimized, who cares? Worry about that after the creating is done!

How My Garden Grows: Summer 2011

To be honest it's kind of out of control

Despite the unusually moderate weather summer is in full swing and as you can see from the picture above so is the garden! The wall of greenery you see in the background are my cucumbers scaling the 6 foot yard fence. Everything is beginning to produce with the zucchinis and tomatoes being harvested daily. D and I are looking into canning and pickling recipes to handle all of them.

A zucchini blossom
Eggplant blossoms

Eggplants are the only thing we haven’t harvested yet. The poor plants have had to fight with giant tomato plants on one side and aggressive beans on the other and haven’t done as well as I’d hoped.

Eggplants are starting to show up, though

Despite how aggressively the beans are growing they aren’t producing very meany beans though. Only a handful every other day or so. Not enough to do anything with but throw in salads or eat as a snack.

These blooms better be beans soon
Cucumbers and beans climbing up the trellis
A tiny cucumber and blossom
Fried green tomatoes, anyone?
This was the complete haul for last Saturday

The harvest for last Saturday was 11 tomatoes, seven bean pods, two zucchinis, and a cucumber. The cucumber, tomatoes, and zucchinis we all be going into a bread salad that I’ll be enjoying tonight!

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