GRG's Miscellany

I've just discovered this game, and I'm absolutely loving it. You take a B-17 Flying Fortress on bombing missions over Nazi-controlled France. Each mission starts with a briefing where you are shown the target. Then you fly the mission, where you alternately shoot at fighters from the various gunner positions and guide the bomber through clouds of flak, then do the bomb run. You go through another phase of gunning and avoiding flak on the way home. This all lasts a few short minutes. Shooting at planes is very much fun. You hear warnings like 'Fighters at 1 o'clock low', which prompts you to click on the appropriate gunning position on the touch screen. The top screen is a 3D first-person view from the selected gunner's position, where you press up/down/left/right and fire to fend off the fighters. Dodging flak is less fun. You see a top-down view of the plane, with small black explosions randomly appearing ahead of you. You have to press left and ...

Ohoho, so I had my first official lesson observation today. I'd been bricking it all week, but the lesson turned out to be the best yet with that class. They had plasticine to make shapes with and drop through rice flour paste in a measuring cylinder. Only one exercise book was totally soaked with paste, and I managed to avoid getting covered in it too! So it turns out I'm doing okay. I'm beating myself up too much, but I am actually progressing onto targets about the kids' learning as opposed to my lesson survival. So I'm totally chuffed.

I led my first educational workshop today, on invisible ink and ciphers. Developing lemon juice ink with an iron is a FAFF. Shalln't be bothering with that one again. It worked, but took for EVER. It became a serious timing problem with a group of 30. However, Sodium Bicarbonate dissolved in water worked well. I developed that with red cabbage water, which turned the paper violet, and green where the ink had been painted. Very pleasing colours, and it even generated a few 'wow!'s. :D Through a happy accident, it turns out that lemon juice is also developed with red cabbage water, turning quite a fetching magenta-pink. Not as clear as the green, but visible nevertheless. If I were to do this again, I would try both lemon juice and sodium bicarbonate with red cabbage juice, and try to find another ink for a second one. Or possibly use white candles/wax to draw a message and wash over the cabbage water. Anyway, I'm shattered, but I had fun. It seemed like...

Well, I enjoyed it. I'll probably play it some more to complete some of the missions. The problem is that the missions are the worst part. The raids are fairly random, as are the defend-the-area-from-the-baddies missions, and the demolition experts are puzzley but aren't really satisfying as puzzles. It's very pretty though, and knocking buildings down with a hammer, or by driving through them, or by blowing them to itty bits never ceases to be immensely satisfying. All in all, a worthwhile experience, but with many frustrating wtfs.

I started playing this recently, and it is so very satisfying. The first 'tutorial' town is dead easy. You go around blowing stuff up and shooting many people. Great fun. The second town, I found rock hard. Gangs of soldiers shoot back rather accurately, and despatch you without delay. They run for cover, and then advance ruthlessly - don't think they'll still be waiting in the same place when you've finished cowering. Also, it hurts when buildings fall on you - who knew? This was all very frustrating until I realised that my play strategy needed addressing. Had the game been 'Red Faction:One Man Tank' I would've been fine. However, I have now realised the value in running away and coming back later. It's still early days, but so far I've found it a fun but unusually tricky game where engaging your brain actually helps. So far, I'm impressed.

I have had my last day in a job that I've found increasingly oppressive over the last two years. It feels momentous that I no longer have to go back. I have my sights on being an indie game developer in a couple of years, and this is a considered step towards it. It feels so good. :)

Safe Area Gorazde by Joe Sacco is a graphic novel which is far from an easy read. It tells the stories of people from the former Yugoslavia, and the atrocities they experienced. It is powerful, compelling, harrowing - but not enjoyable. I still haven't finished it because I simply can't take reading it for more than a short while at a time. I imagined a game designed to express the same harrowing stories. It would put the player into the situation, presenting them with the desperate decisions - trying to harvest fruit under sniper fire, or trying to slip through to the Red Cross post across the river, avoiding the soldiers executing civilians on the bridge. It was tastefully done - not comic - not fun. Developing it would be difficult to get right. Exposing enjoyment in the atrocities would turn the game into a sick joke. Joe Sacco managed to avoid this when producing his book. Graphic novels are all to often dismissed as mere comics, but he showed me they can sens...

When I code at home, I get about an hour tops before I'm ready to either fall asleep on my keyboard or chuck it through the window. When coding in such small chunks, I've found it difficult to maintain the direction of effort - getting sidetracked, or concentrating too much effort on inconsequential things. It's also easy to forget quite how much I've achieved. There's sometimes a nice surprise when I look at my code and realise I've already solved a problem I thought might prove tricky, but I think it'd be nicer to know I've already solved it. With this in mind, I decided to search for a free/open source task management app. That way, I can spend some time building out a skeleton plan for my project, and when I want to code something, I can easily see what the next step should be. My searching turned up Task Coach , which is available under GPL v3 for Windows, Mac OS X and various flavours of Linux. I'm trying to keep my development Linux/...

I recently bought Ninjatown for the DS, and I'm enjoying it immensely. It's an RTS, very similar in mechanics to Desktop Tower Defence but it's far more than just a re-skin. The basic idea is that wee devils (the bad guys) have invaded Ninja Town in order to steal the secret recipe for ninja cookies. You play a series of levels, each with entry points where the bad guys spawn, and exit points they'll try and reach (or an objective they'll try and attack). Your job is to stop them - let too many through and you fail the level. You stop them by placing and upgrading different types of ninja huts, each of which spawns two ninjas appropriate to the type of hut. Each type of ninja has different abilities (slow and powerful, faster and weedier, ranged attack, etc.), and will automatically attack any wee devil that comes near. Building and upgrading huts costs currency (ninja cookies), so you have to choose your combinations carefully. There doesn't appear t...

I've decided to open my blog with a response to an article which I took exception to. I urge you to read it before continuing, but at the risk of misrepresenting it, I shall summarise here. The article extols the virtues of shared experiences in MMOs, where players use their experience of playing the game to enhance their enjoyment of the social aspects of it. Indeed, I think it shows convincingly that experiences common to sizeable groups of players are quite essential to MMOs. However, it also contrasts shared experiences with algorithmic content as if it's some kind of opposite. Now, the author may be talking about a specific type of algorithmic content, but that's not made clear. It's not shown how algorithmic content supposedly undermines shared experience - it's just asserted that it does. Game flaws which are the result of bad design are attributed to algorithmic content itself, rather than the designers of that content. I think this displays a lac...