zero players

I reposted Paolo’s Games Without Players piece yesterday because every time I think about how best to situate Thicket, I feel like it would be as a zero player mode simulation, constantly reseeding itself. I don’t think of Thicket as being a particularly healthy space to inhabit, it’s purposely about themes that bother me- predation, hierarchy, violence, manipulation.

bad thought?

Is it bad that I am thinking of starting Thicket over again in something like Clickteam Fusion? I’ve never used Fusion before but it seems like it would be much better suited for this, Unity seems so sluggish for a 2d turn-based game, when a lot of the problems I needed to solve should have been boilerplate. Plus, I’ve overelaborated too early with things like piece movement and post processing layers. This should have started out as a grid with cells that fill with characters like emoji simulator or a roguelike, but I got fixated on trying out hexes because of games like Ogre and Hoplite, and the idea that there would be rooms. Now that I am thinking more and more about Hunt the Wumpus and its squished dodecahedron with 20 nodes I like the idea of linked nodes… that’s the simpler version of what I was trying to accomplish with a hexgrid and filled hexes for walls.

Games Without Players

From Paolo Pedercini-

Throat Notes

From the mighty Felix Colgrave

Fair Play Alliance Framework

[…] Link

have a new year

Cindy Keefer on Jordan Belson, Cosmic Cinema, and the San Francisco Museum of Art

Today’s post is from Cindy Keefer, archivist and curator, Center for Visual Music. She’ll be here this Thursday introducing that evening’s screening, Jordan Belson: Films Sacred and Profane. Jordan Belson is an enigma and a legend of the experimental film world. […] Link

room descriptions

Today I repurposed one of my python random text generators to use as a grotto page generator. Pulling from a corpus made of these dungeon descriptions, this spits out 20 html pages, with hashid filenames and titles from a master color list I’ve compiled (part of which I scraped from Joyce’s Ulysses with another python script). Then I try to detect major color words in those names and assign a background-color to the page body (this is one of those times it would be great to know how to use more advanced machine learning 😒). For not a ton of work, this is creating some pretty cool results! The room descriptions are mushed up rpg-inspired poetry which I like, since this game wouldn’t have any room interactions really, just moving from room to room, looking for/avoiding other people.

egirls-dios

YOUR ONLY OPTION IS TO REVOLUTIONIZE YOUR STREAM THAT LIKE THREE PEOPLE WATCH […] The purpose of this project is to demonstrate an alternative to centralized streaming platforms like Twitch. Instead of a very large, self-contained ecosystem, DIOS is aimed at small, self-governed streaming communities. By design, only one person can stream on a DIOS server at any given time – the inability to scale is a feature that is necessary for any sustainable online community. Link

The Mixed-Up Masters of Early Animation

Anyone who came of age in the latter part of the twentieth century will recall the constant flow of animated cartoons that made up most of children’s programming on TV. In a culture of supposedly short memories, they were an art form that reached right back across time. […] Link