dwrensha, wlog

Here’s a video showing some of the 8000 new path segments...

Mon, 29 Apr 2013 20:12:27 -0400

Here’s a video showing some of the 8000 new path segments that ZEPTO players have generated in just the last week.

In the past few weeks, players of ZEPTO have generated more than...

Sun, 21 Apr 2013 21:03:00 -0400

In the past few weeks, players of ZEPTO have generated more than 4000 path segments for the duoludo database. Today I made some videos to help visualize this data.

The video embedded above runs at about 2x speed and shows players labelled by the name they gave at the initial prompt. “Harry Q. Bovik” is pretty common because it’s the default value. There’s an exciting bit near the end of the video where a player makes it through the extremely difficult final area in only four attempts.

The video here shows about the first minute of the game with players unlabelled.

Evidently, most players are playing through the game strictly linearly, somewhat against the intended purpose of duoludo. I think the user interface is partly responsible; it may be hard to discover that you can click on any path in the leaderboard and build from it.

Here’s a hint if you want to get yourself a lasting position on the leaderboard: work from the start of the game. It’s the cumulative number of ticks that counts, so any mistake in the past leaves all future progress vulnerable.

The server is still live: dwrensha.ws/duoludo. You are encouraged to keep on playing!

I am pleased to present duoludo, a game whose purpose is games....

Sat, 06 Apr 2013 09:21:20 -0400

I am pleased to present duoludo, a game whose purpose is games. Duoludo was my submission to this year’s SIGBOVIK conference.

Last weekend I was in Toronto at Vector, where Lea’s game...

Sun, 03 Mar 2013 11:47:52 -0500

Last weekend I was in Toronto at Vector, where Lea’s game was on display in a gallery. At the festival were many inspiring things to see and people to talk to, e.g. Proteus, Necrophone, Droqen.

Witnessing Toronto’s thriving community for game makers made me wonder what we could do to help that kind of community to grow here in Pittsburgh.

My entry to the latest Ludum Dare is a dance game with...

Sun, 16 Dec 2012 22:06:52 -0500

My entry to the latest Ludum Dare is a dance game with inverse-DDR mechanics.

In other news, Jim, William, Chris, and I made an Album-a-Day a weeks ago.

Another Ludum Dare! The theme this time was...

Mon, 27 Aug 2012 23:34:05 -0400

Another Ludum Dare! The theme this time was “evolution”. My entry is a game about moths, showing off Functioning’s support for OpenGL and Box2D.

Here’s my take on New Slang by The Shins.

Sat, 18 Aug 2012 16:19:19 -0400

Here’s my take on New Slang by The Shins.

I’ve made a cover of Just Like Heaven by The Cure.

Thu, 28 Jun 2012 13:39:02 -0400

I’ve made a cover of Just Like Heaven by The Cure.

This weekend I again participated in Ludum Dare. This time I...

Sun, 22 Apr 2012 20:02:15 -0400

This weekend I again participated in Ludum Dare. This time I used the competition as an excuse to learn javascript. You can play my game here. My official entry is here.

For SIGBOVIK, I’ve released a new version of my robot...

Fri, 30 Mar 2012 23:20:05 -0400

For SIGBOVIK, I’ve released a new version of my robot platformer game. Added features include: character animation, four levels, one bonus level, fully deterministic playback, and better physics.

For Ludum Dare this weekend, I made a game about robots....

Sun, 18 Dec 2011 21:31:50 -0500

For Ludum Dare this weekend, I made a game about robots. It’s a platformer in which each of the platforms has programmable rocket boosters. You can record a sequence of booster actions and later replay them as you jump among the moving platforms.

You can get the OSX version here and the Linux version here. My official contest entry is here.

Due to timing issues, the replayed booster actions sometimes accumulate error and don’t exactly match the recorded actions. The effect is more pronounced on longer and more complicated maneuvers. I had suspected that issues like this might arise, but I didn’t think they would be quite so noticeable. Apparently, feedback is important for control even in this simple of a setting.

This game uses Functioning, which is Rob and Chris’s frameworkification of some of Tom’s Standard ML libraries, including a source port of the Box2D physics library.

Check it out! I made a comic for 24 Hour Comics Day. I put about...

Sun, 02 Oct 2011 09:54:29 -0400

Check it out! I made a comic for 24 Hour Comics Day. I put about eight hours into it.

Music.

Sat, 04 Jun 2011 23:51:47 -0400

Music.

Here is a song about staying in Brooklyn for a week.

Sun, 29 May 2011 14:38:25 -0400

Here is a song about staying in Brooklyn for a week.

This weekend was another Ludum Dare 48-hour game-making...

Mon, 02 May 2011 09:14:50 -0400

This weekend was another Ludum Dare 48-hour game-making competition. My game uses data from the OpenStreetMap database and physics from the Box2D library to explore what it would be like to take a major metropolitan area for a joyride.

Play it here (tested on Safari and Firefox with Java 1.5). My official entry is here.

Yesterday I made an Album-A-Day with Chris, William, Jamie, and...

Sun, 10 Apr 2011 13:08:59 -0400

Yesterday I made an Album-A-Day with Chris, William, Jamie, and Gwillen. I was in charge getting sounds to and from computers.

Enjoy it here!

Lea provided moral support and made the album art.

take the AC train

Sat, 15 Jan 2011 23:26:23 -0500

New music for you!

check your mail

Fri, 31 Dec 2010 15:05:00 -0500

Yesterday, using some of my new toys (an iPad and Logic Express!), I made a theme song for a holiday greeting card. Enjoy here.

Or Perish

Sun, 19 Dec 2010 21:28:29 -0500

This weekend was another Ludum Dare! Therefore I present a game:

You can play it here, or look at my official entry, where other Ludum Darers should be posting comments in the coming week.

Everything here is my work—logic, music, graphics. I wrote the game in Actionscript using the Flixel library, which made all of the physics and scrolling stuff pretty easy.

The levels may be a little bit too big and empty, but I promise there are rewards at the end of all the hallways!

I was chilling with Tom and William for much of the weekend. You can see their entries here and here.

innocent review

Sat, 30 Oct 2010 18:58:40 -0400

Was on a plane/train/bus for a large portion of the past 72 hours, during which time I read Ian McEwan’s The Innocent. It’s a fairly effective antidote to Pynchon: crisp, coherent, plot-driven, and structurally conventional. A young and nerdy Englishman gets his first job away from home doing intelligence work in cold war Berlin. He proceeds to lose his innocence in various ways. Good stuff happens, bad stuff happens, tension builds, and, you know, eventually everything gets resolved.

McEwan’s language and psychological insights are just lovely, as in the scene when our hero, Leonard, struggles to talk to a German woman: ”She smoothed away a wisp of hair from her eyes. Her forehead, so high and oval, reminded him of how Shakespeare was supposed to look. He was not certain how to put this to her.”

My favorite part is a flashback sequence in which Leonard dazedly stumbles to work while a murder scene from the previous night replays in his head. It reminds me of those heist movies where the planning and the execution of an elaborate crime unfold in parallel. The nonlinearity lets us witness both the action and its explanation without ruining the suspense.

I give the book an 8/10.