Paul Eres - Humble Tengu Reporter

rinku @ 2009-07-06T03:12:00

2009-07-06T07:13:01Z

rinku @ 2009-07-05T23:21:00

2009-07-06T03:24:44Z

today i just made the script cause creatures and the player to stop moving after character 20, as per wynand's / fenrir's suggestion

i've also been forgetting to count line totals! here's today's: 11169 (11142 was 2 days ago, so over the last two days, i added a paltry 27 lines)

rinku @ 2009-07-05T23:20:00

2009-07-06T03:21:30Z

http://bytesizebio.net/index.php/2009/07/04/from-predator-to-plant-in-one-gulp/

"Two researchers have shown a striking example of endosymbiosis forming now: in 2005 Noriko Okamoto an Isao Inouye reported on a unicellular organism called Hatena. Hatena (”enigma” in Japanese) leads a curious life cycle. Hatena is a single-cell organism, swimming around in the water, using a little feeding apparatus to eat cells and organic material smaller than itself. At some point, it would feed on another unicellular algae, the Nephroselmis. Once Hatena swallows Nephroselmis, it does not digest it. Rather, Nephrosolmis makes a rather comfortable home inside Hatena. Actually, the algae starts growing inside Hatena: it grows to about 10 times its original size, filling up most of Hatena. The alga also seems to lose most of its own organelles, except for the chloroplast. The chloroplast actually grows bigger.

"Hatena changes too as a result. Before ingesting the alga, it has a rather complex “mouth”, or feeding apparatus. After ingesting the algae, this mouth disappears. Instead, it is replaced by an eyespot from the algae. The eyespot is a light sensing organelle, a very primitive eye that guides algae to light sources. In this case, it also guides the host, Hatena, to light. Hatena has obvioulsy stopped feeding, and least through its mouth. It is now swimming to the light, letting the alga photosynthesize its food for both of them.

"Hatena reproduces by binary fission. So once it splits itself, what happens to the symbiotic alga? Well, one daughter cell gets the alga, and the other gets ot be a predator.. at least until it eats another alga. So here we are, looking at a fascinating evolutionary snapshot: two creatures, they can live apart or together. One is not quite an organelle yet, but definitely on its way."

rinku @ 2009-07-05T14:41:00

2009-07-05T18:42:34Z

it's funny how quotes on twitter are abbreviated, making the person quoted sound like they can't write

"What u get by achieving ur goals isn't as important as what U Bcome by achieving ur goals. -J. W. von Goethe"

rinku @ 2009-07-05T13:26:00

2009-07-05T17:27:19Z

http://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=7081.0

if you play indie games, go vote for the indie games you're most looking forward to. currently fez and the undersize are in the lead

rinku @ 2009-07-04T22:38:00

2009-07-05T02:49:38Z

worked on script/text display a bit. pondering whether to allow the player and the creatures to continue to move during dialogue or whether to pause the action.

favoring the former, but many problems arise: what to do if the player accidentally moves off the screen during dialogue (missing what is said)? how about the text getting in the way of what the player is trying to do? also, what button/click to use to make dialogue progress? if the action is ongoing, clicking to go to the next textbox will simultaneously cause some action (whatever function the player has equipped).

so it seems like it'd just be simpler to pause the action during text, despite it being fun to move around during text (i remember the first time i was able to do that was in chrono trigger, although in there you can't actually perform many actions while talking, but you can walk around)... thoughts from you guys?

rinku @ 2009-07-03T23:10:00

2009-07-04T03:13:32Z

worked on save file system. invisible objects can now save their width and height, as well as their script file; creatures now save their friendedness state. had a fever too

lines of code: 11142 (+17, a paltry amount!)

rinku @ 2009-07-03T15:01:00

2009-07-03T19:01:57Z

http://www.polyneux.de/archiv/290-im-pulverturm.html

ID review in -- german, i think

rinku @ 2009-07-02T22:29:00

2009-07-03T02:33:24Z

switched to gimp from psp3 as per the instructions of tuftears and making objects out of tiles went a faster today; not enough to make it enjoyable, but faster. i think the biggest improvement was just in how the selection tool works: using the magic wand selection tool is easier than using rectangular selection (although the latter is necessary when fiddling with the wand's settings aren't enough to get it to select the tile correctly). no lines of code today, just work in gimp, so still 11125 lines.

rinku @ 2009-07-01T23:46:00

2009-07-02T03:52:03Z

created a script for the level editor to generate a random area. it's a pretty stupid script right now, just placing a random number of random things in random locations around the area, but it can be useful when trying to get ideas for areas. unfortunately since a lot of stuff isn't in yet (lots of tiles and enemy graphics and obstacle types and special room effects (weather, etc.) and so on), the variety of rooms it can create are pretty small -- it reminds me that i need to start creating the 'obstacle' class of objects eventually (things which are not creatures but which interact with the player in some way: slowing them down for instance)

also created a few quick new areas using this feature, perhaps five areas added

as added incentive, because i like to see numbers go up, i'm going to start recording the lines of code at the end of each day, even though it's a stupid sort of motivation; i don't know the number when i started today, so i'll just start from here and post change in total lines of code starting tomorrow.

current lines: 11125

rinku @ 2009-07-01T22:48:00

2009-07-02T02:49:34Z

http://www.examiner.com/examiner/x-2521-Sioux-Falls-Video-Game-News-Examiner~y2009m7d1-Indie-developer-spotlight-Radical-Poesis-Games--Creations

it's basically just saying what our site itself says, and the examiner is a site where people write articles for money rather than an actual news source, but good to see nonetheless

rinku @ 2009-07-01T14:14:00

2009-07-01T18:16:19Z

something i miss about old jRPGs -- in the old days, you had to "talk to everyone!" in order to figure out where to go or what to do next: today, they just tell you in cutscenes, and sometimes even provide a big arrow pointing which way to go (like in Final Fantasy X) -- pleasantly, at least atlus games retain some of the "talk to everyone!" mechanic, even if no other jRPGs do

rinku @ 2009-07-01T07:33:00

2009-07-01T11:34:15Z

Haha: "NOBODY likes Iji. People may think they do, but it's not a fun game." -Overman on the Game Maker Community forums

rinku @ 2009-06-30T22:20:00

2009-07-01T02:20:38Z

put a bunch of orchard-l's flowers into the game; made a test area for them

i tried posting a few screenshots on twitter a day or so ago; one of the people there said that the game looks like 'spore for the snes, in space'

rinku @ 2009-06-29T22:13:00

2009-06-30T02:16:12Z

really hate piecing sprites together, very tedious work

have the feeling this will go on for a long time. i wish orchard sent them to be pre-assembled into various structures ;_;

rinku @ 2009-06-28T23:05:00

2009-06-29T03:07:59Z

SD work consisted of annoyingly tedious cutting and pasting of sprites and tiles into slightly larger structures as well as figuring out what's the best program to do that in (i just wound up using good ol' paint shop pro version 3); back in the snes days it was optimal to cut up stuff into little tiles (to save storage space) but now that storage space isn't as much of an issue it's more optimal to use larger pre-arranged groupings of them in order to increase render speed

rinku @ 2009-06-27T23:27:00

2009-06-28T03:29:11Z

just put in komera's new sprites; four new ones there. as an aside, i kind of like the underwater textures (craters) used in this pic, adds a bit of depth; maybe i can ask orchard if he'd draw more stuff like that

rinku @ 2009-06-26T22:56:00

2009-06-27T02:59:02Z

not much to report today: still working on having the invisible entities save and load properties and working on the creatures saving their friendliness states when you exit and re-enter a room, made some progress but not done w/ that; file systems don't make for interesting screenshots

rinku @ 2009-06-26T17:54:00

2009-06-26T21:55:18Z

the best let's play ever; clysm linked me to it

rinku @ 2009-06-26T12:04:00

2009-06-26T16:04:43Z

jason rohrer and chris crawford documentary trailer

too much game design power in one room

rinku @ 2009-06-26T00:14:00

2009-06-26T04:15:15Z

rinku @ 2009-06-25T23:46:00

2009-06-26T03:47:06Z

worked on adding invisible 'script' objects which trigger specific scripts when moved onto; not done with them yet but i am partially done with them

rinku @ 2009-06-24T23:44:00

2009-06-25T03:45:08Z

set up venus's dream area (for the intro) and started working on converting wynand's intro script to the game's format

rinku @ 2009-06-24T00:05:00

2009-06-24T04:07:52Z

i'm going to sleep now but just had a sadistic idea: you know how faqs and walkthroughs ruin games? how it's not as fun as figuring stuff out yourself before the age of the internet where you could just look a puzzle up to solve it? imagine if the game itself had algorithms to detect when you seem like you know exactly what to do without having to experiment or figure stuff out, and then punish the player for it? (or even just say: you used a faq to solve this, right? try experimenting next time ;_;) haha

reminds me of my idea to detect when the player is skipping textboxes too quickly without reading them and punish them for not paying attention to the story

of course, i don't really think serious games should do these things, but it'd be fun for joke / experimental games

rinku @ 2009-06-23T20:49:00

2009-06-24T00:50:56Z

the story file interpreter now it takes tags and draws bgs, i.e. the text file reads

" In the year 21XX, humankind finally realized one of its greatest dreams: to break free of the prison of the sky. To build new cities on new worlds. [mercedes-basic.png]"

and the script takes that bracketed name and draws it to screen when that sentence is displayed

this should make it easy for the other people on the team to add stuff to the game