GameDevDad

Um…yeah.

Current Weight: 320.1
Delta: Gain of 1.8 pounds
Number of days this week I walked an hour: 5
Number of days this week I ate fewer than 2000 calories: 2

I’ve got the exercise habit down. It’s the food thing that’s much harder. I think the hardest part is when it gets late, I’ve been working on my programming, and I don’t want to go to bed hungry.

This is getting disheartening. And it was made worse by the fact that it was Twisted Pixel that turned me down.

Frankly, I’m in serious trouble. Everybody either wants console experience (which I’ve got, but just a bit) or, on the PC side, MMO experience (which I don’t have at all).

The Going Theory is that in April companies are going to realize that they need developers to make their Christmas deadlines and will start hiring again. I dearly hope that is true.

(For any new readers, PTFSD is short for “Put that freakin’ sandwich down!” and is the title of my personal weight loss initiative. The line comes from a Homestar Runner cartoon, of course.)

And now, drum roll please:

Current Weight: 318.3
Delta: Loss of 3.3 pounds
Number of days this week I walked an hour: 6
Number of days this week I ate fewer than 2000 calories: 5

You’ll notice my weight is a little higher than I reported earlier. I was pretty bad during the week of my birthday and my weight got up above 320, which prompted action. Now it’s coming back down again, thankfully.

Right now I don’t feel like making any projections about when my weight is going to be at what stage. Doing so always leads to disappointment. I’m just going to follow the plan and let it happen.

I recently noticed that my four-year-old daughter was doing something a little strange when she was playing The Maw.

In case you’re not familiar with the game, it features a user-controlled character named Frank and a non-user-controlled character named…The Maw!!!

(Yes, at some point I’ll stop talking about The Maw. I swear.)

Uh…sorry. Anyway, Frank can call Maw to him and Maw will come if he’s close enough to hear. I noticed that my daughter was calling Maw and then immediately running behind a tree, then running around and around the tree to see how long she could keep Maw from touching Frank. And giggling madly the whole time.

She’d found a new game inside the game. The developers of Maw never intended for people to play keep-away inside their game but it grows naturally out of the gameplay elements they did put in.

Which reminded me of a couple of stories. My friend Ryan Clark told me that he was working on an early version of the Zarria engine (which later powered Hit & Myth) and he was testing the 2D physics of the game. The test map consisted of a house, a whole bunch of NPC frogs and the player’s character. There was no combat, but if your character bumped into one of the frogs it would be thrown back away from you.

He showed it to his brother, who immediately found a game that Ryan hadn’t programmed – trying to wrangle all the frogs into the house by bumping into them. Of course, the more frogs you got together the more they’d bump each other around. The only way to keep the frogs inside the house was to stand in the doorway, but you had to leave the doorway to go get another frog, which means that three would probably escape.

And Ryan even found an unintentional game in an early version of Inaria. I made a map with one of every creature on it to test their AI. Most of the AIs were designed to hunt you down as soon as you came near. Ryan instantly started triggering every single unit and then seeing how long he could stay alive. Since there were structures on the map he eventually found a way to trap or block them all and stay alive.

And then of course, there’s these guys who found a new game to play in Super Mario 64:

In case you don’t understand Japanese, these guys are activating a one-up mushroom and then running away from it and seeing how long they can prevent it from touching them. This is hard because it not only moves pretty fast, it can fly through the terrain of the level. It’s pretty funny to hear them freak out whenever it suddenly appears through a wall next to them.

And let’s not forget this excellent article by Shamus Young, wherein he programs Starcraft to play itself so he can find out which enemy AI is the strongest.

So what’s my point? Um…I dunno. It’s long been known that humans can make a game out of anything, and you don’t even need a good framework to do it. Maybe I just wanted to brag on my daughter

A Steam-powered Maw, of course.

On Friday, Twisted Pixel released The Maw on Steam for the PC.  You should definitely check it out.  Just…don’t let him get too big.

As I look back on last year on this, the day of my birth, all I can really say is…

Last year sucked.

Indeed, there were several times last year when I was pretty sure I wasn’t going to make it to this day.

But I did, and despite everything I’m very grateful.

I’m also grateful to the support I’ve received from you guys through this past year; I really needed it.

Here’s to the eternal hope that the future will bring better things!

Whenever I get laid off I’m always unemployed on my birthday.

And it never fails that there’s some game that I really, really want.

Last time it was Oblivion.  Ah, sweet Oblivion.

This time it’s Star Ocean: The Last Hope.  First because I’m just in the mood for a JRPG – something epic yet slightly silly.  Plus that game is pretty, and I’ve always enjoyed Star Ocean’s combat system.

Of course, speaking of silly – come on!  Your main character is named “Edge Maverick”?!  They may as well name him “Fate Liongod”.

Oh, wait…

It’s time to congratulate my long-time friend Jari Komppa and his wife Mia – they’ve just had their first child, a boy named Niklas Antero!  Both mother and child are doing well, and I’m sure Niklas will be coding logic simulators in no time.