This is an index dump from a class assignment in 2021. I’d like to replace this with an auto-index that connects to my personal knowledge management system and an equipment spreadsheet.
(These are entries from my notes file that are currently relevant to my practice.)
They cursed him (Bergmann) that through him they were greatly reduced in wealth and health, and many died; "the word Texas is a certain doom for Czechoslovaks, just as the Temešský Banát in Hungary" (Ar USA 33/6, p. 81, archive of the Náprstek Museum in Prague).
(Eckertová)
click for a new word
The show I just wrapped was kind of conceptually overloaded, but it was useful as a kind of high-level survey of the stuff I’m wrangling right now, and the goal was to find new ways to connect the tile art I’ve been doing, which is of the Dungeon Mode, to dungeons-as-mines, which was an underdeveloped chunk of my thesis writing that just kept blowing up as I would find more and more readings and more weird kismets piled up in my life related to it.
Last Saturday of the show was very nice, I had a lovely long walkthrough talk with Kristen Lucas. I had a nice chat with an old friend about the Geomancy Sketch that pops up in my main piece for the show, which was something I was fiddling with while I was in a SFPC class. I also think my typical fretting during the installation and opening overshadowed the really nice interactions I was having in the space on the first two nights. I had a great long talk with my super talented studio neighbor Scott Gelber and I got to meet and talk to Lauren Gardner from Babycastles/SFPC.
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Names like ‘games’ or ‘art’ aren’t actual discrete categories of work, they’re lenses for talking about something that carry with them a set of expectations. With expectations you can talk about a thing critically in a context of other things.
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uh oh, I was able to parse branching text in the .ink format inside one of my p5 sketches. It’s going to be hard to resist adding a czech textovka-style text adventure to the sketches before the show…
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oh my god, fuck the stupid TRIAC dimmer I have been trying to use for this lamp. It’s haunted, I’m done with it. I’m going to try with a relay instead which should presumably be much simpler. If it works as soon as I get it there’s still a chance I’ll be able to make a fully integrated lamp with a geiger counter that flashes the lamp at its own rad counts. The backup plan is just to have the counter next to the lamp. I like the idea that this visible assurance of safety implies just the opposite. How does a casual viewer know how many ticks are normal and how many are dangerous? The lamp, lit up with an additional stage blacklight nearby looks great on the blue velvet of the table.
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This week worked a lot on trying to get a thyristor dimmer working with an arduino and geiger counter.
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I feel pretty good today because while i pulled the roguelike game from the build (1.0b) that I will project, it is actually working great and looking good on the launcher now, which means it will be fine inside the space. I also made an electron version of the Tumblr bot I made a while back that posted pages from the Archon book with generated names, and that was really simple and I think will work well in the launcher. I am also getting permission to include some modern games by other artists that fit, since I am already including games from the past on vintage equipment.
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Pulling the roguelike game from the electron app. It seemed fine yesterday but today I had issues:
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I cobbled together some writing to go with the installation that suggests games by other artists that could fit in a collection inside the space. I’ve got a Spectrum next… which is pretty novel… and a Mac classic, both with some games that could fit, and i could scare up a pc with a launcher and a few games. I’ve also got a three channel video piece with synced subtitles that Batsly helped with that will fit nicely.
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There’s a date for a show at MoHA- the 29th of next month. I am anxious because the thing that is eating up the most time is this Roguelike game that I have packaged up in an electron app with a bunch of processing sketches. It’s the thing I’m always posting about, and it would be nice to show off in some form but I think I have to make a hard decision to cut it right now. As always! The thing I worked the hardest on needs to go… Because it’s a new game it’s the most brittle and buggy part. I’m sinking more and more time into working on it, but I feel like it’s shit-or-get-off-the-pot-time and I should take it out of what I’m showing, or at the very least, remove it from the stack of processing sketches that I plan on projecting, since it’s a point of failure. It has a zero player mode that was turned on for this projection version and it isn’t very clever, gets stuck a lot, etc. Was it really conceptually that important to this show? Or was it just a thing I worked on a lot and have sunk cost in? If it isn’t that conceptually important, is it fun enough that it would be a draw to the space? Or does it just look cool in screenshots? Can I do something else with it? What if I took a fuckton of screenshots of it generating levels and played them really fast with some narration? That would still be putting it to use and communicating what was hard to do in the experiment without leaving it as this raw point of failure due to lack of testing and debugging.
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Spring break has given me more time to sit and play with projects. No big breakthroughs. I rewired the doorknob plinth from Doors and now the action on all the knobs and doorknob is much nicer than in the show. Unfortunately there’s still communication issues with the blinkm rgb light that lights up the keyhole. It’s possible that I rewired it wrong, but maybe more likely that it’s an OSC issue. It’ll take a little work to remember how it was meant to work and do some troubleshooting, since it was the last feature I added before the show and probably the least documented part of the project.
Do I even want to get this working again though? I can see it being part of a show with more grotto-related stuff, but part of me thinks it’s probably better to concentrate on other stuff.
Content Warning: War, Murder
This week's class prototyping theme is "I Spy". A number of the students either wanted to make prototypes of suspect lineups or of some manner of Sniper scope game. In my mind I was thinking about old games like Spy Vs. Spy or Elevator Action, but the student projects made me start thinking about first person telescopic views instead.
It’s funny looking back at this blog for the last year or so and finding only really terse notes about school projects and the aftermath of school projects when there is obviously so much going on in the world. The violence and darkness that surrounds us can make us feel small and disempowered, but everyone is part of history, and we all move it together. A better world is, as they say, possible. There’s so much in my research that connects history to this present moment, but it’s also a path that seems to be taking me further and further from the actual act of making games. That’s fine, but the path i’ve been going feels like it would have benefitted from a different degree than a practice degree (I will admit that the Information Science class I took was really compelling). Right now I want to make things that connect me to people rather than isolate me further, and to do that I need to keep refining and experimenting in a game making practice.
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Happy New Year.
Not sure what to tag today’s log, I’m still working with the tileset from Grotto, but it’s moving into other areas, like the cellular automata I started working with a few months ago. I’m starting to take all of the small javascript projects that use the tiles and bring them together into a single repository with a separate node.js app that would hypothetically get input from switches or other devices and then switch between/effect the small projects.
I haven’t been posting work notes while the world crumbles, but I’ve been keeping them locally. There’s been a few updates to the unnamed roguelike that are worth mentioning, the first is I’ve been experimenting with a creeping plant class, working off the idea that once the player dies the game keeps going, and plant growth would be nice. Other than that, lots of little tweaks, like refactored item and entity classes, arrows that can spread fire, fire destroying things, and I experimented with multiple player instances, which just worked on the first try.
While it’s not as attractive or ‘in-world’ as a mazelike tilemap representation would be, I’ve made an auto minimap for grotto using D3. D3 is a library to procedurally draw SVG in a browser, and it’s commonly used for interactive data visualizations. I used it here because it has the ability to create force directed node maps. This means nodes are repelled from one another in a game-physics like simulation, so rather than needing to figure out how to place them on the screen, they simply spread out to positions where they no longer overlap. Here’s what it looks like in a room with a lot of sibling nodes:
New Studio space! I just moved some things into a workspace at The Museum of Human Achievement.
Now I am deciding what to work on next. I think there was potential in the installation I did for my graduate thesis show, but it was missing some important pieces to be effective. The first think it’s missing is a legible mini-map. Navigating a maze that is a tree structure is incredibly frustrating. It’s maybe the worst possible level design. people get trapped in branches too easily looking for the one door back up. I’m experimenting with maps in the web game using the api, but it’s very difficult, as I’ve said before, to automatically lay these maps out. You really need a force-directed nodemap, which clashes stylistically with the patterned-tiles-on-a-grid style. I’m playing now with some nodemaps using D3, and I’m going to functionally solve the problem first and then deal with the aesthetics.
It’s a little confusing to keep calling these posts studio notes, since I no longer have a studio space. I’m sitting in a room at our place back in Austin that’s still filled with unpacked boxes. Settling back in is a slow process, and the last month has been really busy with moving a relative out of this space as we move back in. We also got a new kitten, who we are slowly acclimating to our other cat through a pet gate, carefully negotiating their two territories and resources (is there a strategy game idea somewhere in cats claiming or sharing litter boxes, food dishes, toys and sunbeams?)
Still don’t have a project tag for this roguelike experiment yet, but it seems like it might turn into an actual game. Now I’ve added doors, (some of which are locked and have paired, color coded keys,) inventory, enemies, and slightly janky click to pathfind to suppliment arrow key movement. I’m about to add sound with howler.js and audiosprite next.
A big thing that is missing is fog of war. I made kind of a mess getting my Grotto tiles working and it’s not as straightforward as it would be in a normal ascii rot.js game. I’ll give it some consideration once I get sound added.
I added fire and death to the little rot.js roguelike game I am tinkering with. This is separate from Grotto but uses the same visual language. It’s a difficult proposition to try to integrate this with Grotto, as this is turn based and Grotto is a multiplayer database driven thing with no understanding of items or characters positions in a room. This feels like a new game so far and not an extension of grotto, although there could be some interactions between the two using Grotto’s API. What should it be? It could either be a totally new dungeon game or I could try doing some sort of zero player ant-hill arcology thing to go with Archon as I had originally imagined. Hmm.
Two work notes-
I was able to use the Grotto API to make a bot player, hosted on Glitch, that has simple logic that has the player check the cleanliness level of the room it’s in once and hour, if it’s dirty it uses a scrub brush item, if it’s clean, it moves through an adjacent unlocked door.
I also had some moderate success using my tileset to build a small dungeon map using the roguelike javascript library rot.js. using a rat’s nest of conditional logic, it does sort-of-cellular-automata-style matching rules to draw walls and shadows around a floor map, in the style of Grotto rooms.
I have graduated and I am back in Austin. All of my stuff is still in a u-haul box on a long drive here from Los Angeles.
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Last night was the opening of the UCLA DMA Thesis show, which held the Grotto-connected installation I’ve been working on this quarter.
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Grotto is now at v1.01. The last push included a text-entry interaction that can be used for writing notes with a letter item and for updating a character greeting. Letter item and Potion item both are now functional, although Potions aren’t particularly useful yet.
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behind on grotto main game schedule, but making progress on installation stuff.
The scripts that generate book content from Grotto are done, the output requires a little bit of tweaking after they run, the pdf output looks good and I’ll try printing soon. This is going to be an expensive print job, as the book is over 1000 pages, 500ish 2-sided. I intend to print signatures and stitch it coptic, including whatever thesis writing is done.
Having all sorts of long-term ideas go out the window. Up until now I’ve been using a solenoid lock to stop a ratchet wheel in one direction and another ratchet wheel and arm to keep the assembly only turning in one direction. I had a limit switch that would flip on a turn.
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Flailing. A few issues made me abandon my idea for a doorknob controller plinth in which the doorknob portion revolves to select a “door”, reorienting the player- first the reintroduction of a projection screen into the space, which would make variable player orientation weird, and 3 or four mistakes in laying out an mdf laser cut that made the complicated revolving encoder/slipring assembly off center or needing hand drilled holes over and over, resulting in a lot of wasted time. The alternative (keeping the doorknob controller) is an additional spinner knob control on the top of the plinth. I don’t love it. The idea here is there’s a projection of a circular array of the doors in the room, with the color of the room and doors, a spinner revolves them, the doorknob tests them to go through.
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Big leap forward today- passing through a door in grotto gives it a color marking of its connecting room, letting you know what path you’ve taken. The maze is still disorienting, there are no cardinal directions in the map view, but you leave a breadcrumb trail as you traverse it.
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Some small updates to Grotto- keys are no longer single-use, but rather have a chance to break on use, like shields and brushes. Shield bashing- you can attempt to shield bash locked doors now, but this has affected regular character shield bashing and will need to be revisited. Added incense animation.
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the node app I made to check the grotto api and send mqtt (mosquitto) messages to things like lights and the doorknob controller is working, which is huge.
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Genealogy breakthrough today- was able to fix a wrong name and add one generation prior to the earliest Fridel family member on record as well as a few additional people in other families. This means another version of the GEDCOM file, which is kind of a hassle at this point, because a new GEDCOM file totally rebuilds the game maze and I need to make sure that the cenotaph activation and relic csv’s all have all correct person names.
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The cheapo usb 5.1 audio interface I got only does surround sound through a bunch of 3.5 mm analog plugs, and the surround speakers at the lab are digital only (the interface has optical out but it only carries stereo).
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My current challenge is to find ways to connect Grotto to a gallery space for my final show. I’d like to avoid falling into the same pattern of “Thing projected on a wall” that you see at a lot of these shows. So far I have been concentrating on esp32 microcontrollers or headless raspberry pi’s that can get information from Grotto’s API. I’d like to use lights and sounds and weird tactile interfaces as much as possible.
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