A film poster that annoyed me

First, the poster...



"Growing up can be the adventure of a lifetime"? It makes me want to puke. And it doesn't even make any sense: if I went to do voluntary work in the third world for a year, that might be the adventure of a lifetime. Growing up is something we all do. It's part of our lifetime whether we like it or not.

But oh, what's that? This was inspired by a true story? Incredible! Somebody really did have the adventure of a lifetime growing up. Yeah, some pretentious twat.

I've been dying to write that down somewhere so I can let it go. Pathetic maybe. But it's my blog and anyway nobody reads it.

Well, here's my work-in-progress for my Two Games One Name challenge entry:

City of Refuge

It's pretty vague in a lot of areas at the moment, but what I have here seems like an exciting foundation to me.

It uses the constraint "out-of-game interaction is punished by the game".

Two Games, One Name

My first post in ages. Strangely enough, my last one was a couple of years back and then I had an annoying cough (which I had forgotten all about). How queer then that today, when I come to write here again after so long, I also have an annoying cough I can't seem to shift. Odd, check! Not very interesting, check!

As of today, it looks like I'm going to be submitting an entry into the Two Games One Name challenge over at Story Games. Dave Cleaver has very kindly asked if I would like to take over his theme (he's not got much purchase on it yet by the looks). I've accepted.

I've found myself drawn back to that site this week, after skulking around it now and then over the last few years. It's so much more my kind of place than The Forge.

So my game title is City of Refuge.

The year seems to be racing by

August is just a few days away and it seems to have gone awfully fast! On my mind at the moment are The Wedding, Ruby, What Interests Me At Work and getting rid of this stupid cough!

The wedding arrangements are coming along at last. The main thing I need to work on is the band and music for the day; they're the things that aren't as far along as I'd like. Mind you... I haven't definitely sorted by best man yet, or what I'm going to wear. Shorts and flip-flops will have to do.

Oh, and then there's our iminment trip to Germany. Hope that M enjoys camping, otherwise it could be a bit of a bummer. We can always fall back on hotels I suppose.

Six months on... still with a creative backlog!

I can't believe that it's been half a year since my last post. That time has just flown past.

I looked through my last post and saw all that stuff about cutting down on video games. It seems to have sort of worked. I've stopped agonising about what to do with all my games and consoles - I just did what I said I'd do and put a load of them away. I've played some Crackdown and I've played some God of War and I've played on my DS, but rarely to the extent where I've felt shit about it. Of far more interest to me now are other forms of leisure...

I'm trying to write a table-top RPG, based around heroism in days of old. The vibe I'm going for is very Beowulf, quite a lot of Norse legend and a smidgeon of Greek mythology.

The end of an era?

Well, here we are in 2007. I saw it in with my lady-friend and a couple of friends in Falmouth, Cornwall. On the strike of twelve we heard a solitary ship sound its horn in the harbour, and watched fireworks across the water at Flushing. Beyond that, an occasional blue and green picked out the ridge over which lies Mylor. I drank more wine and we watched Lily Allen and others on the Jools Holland's Hootenanny (sp?) thing.

I'd been speaking to my friend earlier in the evening about creativity and how easily it can be stifled by the many trappings and interruptions of modern life. I resolved to phase out some of the things in my life that I'm unhappy with, and playing and collecting video games is one of the main ones.

I feel that they're sucking out my imagination, wasting my time and turning me into a bit of a zombie. I'm an addict. And I work in an office full of professional addicts.

Playing a video game is an easy option comparing with most stuff I do to 'relax' at home. I've been starting to think that video games are insidious in the harm they cause me: they destroy my creativity. Here's my theory: video games (and TV to a lesser extent) feed my brain with fantastic images, and they feed it fast and hard. My brain soaks this stuff up - I love all this imagery and action - but, oh dear, it doesn't have to do any imagining for itself... And I can easily soak up hours in this state.

We talk about games engaging the imagination, but I reckon what they really do is replace it.

So, I'm cutting down. And I'm not expecting it to be easy. I reckon I need to get rid of most of the consoles and games I own, because having them nearby, plugged-in, playable-within-one-minute, makes it the easiest option when I have nothing much else to do. First, I'm going to box 'em up, then I'm going to start looking for ways to get rid. Donating them to my girlfriend's school might be an option, or else flogging them on eBay. And there's a longer-term behavioural change I need to make, and that is not keeping abreast of the latest game releases. I'm going to stop checking gamerankings.com, for example. I'll cancel subscriptions to games-related newsletters.

What am I going to do instead? Things that take more imagination and thought on my part: looking at the stars and planets, playing my guitar, drawing pictures... stuff like that.

You can call them resolutions if you want.

Next time: (not) getting things done on a computer that has internet access...?

Ultraviolet

Crap film. Don't bother seeing it. I know that the very high levels of CGI is core to the look of the film and it's not supposed to look very realistic, but it makes for pretty bland visuals. I suppose it complements the bland story though. It seemed very much like a Milla Jovovich vehicle to me, cashing-in on her 'sexy-but-tough action hero' that worked so well in the (first) Resident Evil movie, but Ultraviolet just didn't cut it for me.

Carbon emissions

In the UK at the moment there's a lot of talk about carbon footprints and the like. In particular there are plans to put a carbon limit on each business (and eventually each person). I'm in favour of this on principle, but there are some pretty serious problems. The main one is that there are lot of countries out there who are pumping out a lot of shit in an attempt to get industrialised and expand. We did this once and nobody tried to put carbon limits on us, so why should they feel that it's okay for us to do it to them? If these countries don't cut back then carbon limits for the UK aren't going to make much difference to global carbon levels, but it seems so arrogant for us to say: "yes, we've been through a long period of progress and expansion and we're telling you it's not fair on the planet, so you shouldn't do it". Oh, and while you curb your progress we'll further ours, thank-you-very-much, by continuing to exploit you in other ways. What a mess...

Films, memory and me.

I've decided that since I never seem to be able to remember the details of films I've watched - even those I've really enjoyed - I'm going to write something down about them in a blog. Not reviews exactly, just a little bit of mental exercise. So, to start the ball rolling...

Watched a film called The Matador the other night. I liked it a lot. It stars Pierce Brosnan and that guy who plays the gay neighbour in As Good As It Gets. I like him - he's the sort of actor who seems to play roles you can warm to easily. Brosnan was very good too - a pretty nasty character who nevertheless manages to evoke some sympathy by the end. The musical score also got my vote: it was very funky in parts and generally complemented the film well.

Oh yes, and there was a short, bizarre scene in a swimming pool with a what looked like great white shark. I'm still not sure what that was all about. :|

I was thinking of exposing an FTP server running on my home PC so I could easily transfer stuff to and from work, but I hit on another idea.

I may well run an FTP server, but for starters I'll expose my Perforce server instead. That'll allow me to work on the same files from home and work which will be cool. If you happen to be reading this and thinking "big deal, it's not rocket science" then I would totally agree. But it still seems cool to me right now, especially as we're talking about Windows here and I haven't had to buy any software at all to enable this. :)

Test tinkering

Following on from the heightened interest in unit-testing at my workplace I had a tinker with some software at the weekend. I figured that if I wanted to start some unit-testing it would be good to have a place to keep all my code as well as having a nice command-line tool to build them. I didn't fancy using nmake for the latter and was quite keen to learn about writing makefiles.

The first was a source-control repository for me to use and I was happy to find that Perforce is free for limited use. I downloaded and configured it and was soon happily using it to create my own depot and check stuff in and out. The rest of my time was spent installing and configuring Jam.

I'd seen the contents of Visual Studio-generated make-files before and remember thinking they looked a little daunting. Jam is an alternative to the 'make' tool (or if, like me, you develop mainly using MS Visual Studio, the 'nmake' tool). It's part of Perforce Software's suite (although you download it separately to their SCM) and I elected to sync to the latest beta build direct from the Perforce Software public depot. It came down as source so I had to build it (using nmake) first.

After all that I didn't really get a chance to use either tool in anger.

Testing game tools

Where I work we create software (tools and runtime libraries) for making games. We already have a lot of code and when we fix something or add a new feature it'd be great to be able to run some automated tests to check we haven't inadvertently broken something. We haven't practiced any form of test-driven development as of yet and as such we have a lot of code that's tightly coupled and has low cohesion. (These are bad, and here's why.)

Getting some unit tests in place would be a good start. My idea is that we'd start with tests for chunks of our low-level code (such as our maths and memory management libraries). When we come to submit some changes to our source control system (which is incidentally based on Perforce) we can perform custom actions. This would allow us to run a set of tests automatically before allowing the changes to make it off a developer's machine.

Creative overload and staying the course.

I reckon myself to be a pretty creative person. I write software for a living and contrary to what some non-programmer types might think, it's really a very creative occupation. But I don't always get enough from it to soak up my creative juices - I'm always coming up with ideas for things I'd like to do. Things I'd like to create.

In the last year alone I've been getting into Norse mythology, writing Interactive Fiction games using Inform (versions 6 and, only very recently, 7), designing pen-and-paper RPG rules, writing poetry, drawing figures from life (and other doodling), learning the Perl programming language, and tossing around ideas for an MMORPG with a totally new bent.

Needless to say, there's plenty on the plate and I simply don't have time to indulge in them all. Because of that I tend to pick at things. Nothing ever gets completed and in fact nothing tends to get very far past the start...

I'd dearly like to address this and get some creations created, done, finished, released out into the world. I figure that I'll never be the best games programmer around - there are too many really clever people doing that - so instead I want to bring to my life the stuff I can do well. And that's come up with creative ideas. Lots of them don't lead anywhere, but that could well be that I'm prone to losing patience and going off at a tangent. When I've gone off on a few tangents I inevitably lose faith in the germ of the idea I originally had, and I give up. It's frustrating and I have to nip it in the bud!

So much for the diagnosis - now for the _cure_. I'm going to pick two things to work at and I'm going to keep going with them. The first is to learn Perl well by having a concrete piece of software to develop. The second is to create an IF game about a group of ancient Norsemen settling a new land.

How stuff works

Just found this site: HowStuffWorks. Never seen it before but it could be fun. Doesn't tell me how VideoPlus works though: I was wondering about that the other night...