Jay McGavren’s Journal

$ ruby %scripts%\xbox_live_alert.rb nephariuz frejya

I, [2008-08-21T21:16:22.343000 #1968]  INFO --
#Utility::Email::Email:0x793e340:
@body="nephariuz\tXbox 360 Dashboard\nfrejya\tXbox 360 Dashboard",
@recipients=["me@wirelesscarrier.com"] ...

Thanks to a Live status feed someone published and a quick REXML script, I can get a text message whenever two or more friends are online, along with what they’re playing…

Those who want to see something new in gaming owe it to themselves to check out Braid on X-Box Live Arcade. It introduces entirely new concepts, requires thinking in an entirely different way. The ability to reverse time is exploited in just a huge variety of new and unique ways, and you will repeatedly say to yourself “Wow, that’s clever” or “I’ve never seen that before”.

Stephen Cakebread >= Shigeru Miyamoto. This is not just design, this is craftsmanship. This is genius.

For starters, pickups are exactly what the game needed. Having to drop a bomb is no longer a failure, now it’s a descision, because you’ll be surrounded by pickup chips. I found myself doing so on purpose in Deadline mode for speed’s sake. You may start approaching snakes instead of fleeing, because they drop so much. Oh, and making them a multiplier instead of a flat value is another stroke of genius; you want to grab all you can at the start of the game, but toward the end you need to concentrate on killing things so you don’t waste that x1000 at the top of your screen.

Rockets, too, seem deceptively simple - what’s so ingenious about an enemy that only flies in a straight line? Well, combine that with spawn patterns and the gravitational influence of black holes, and suddenly you’ve got a whole slew of unpredictable new behaviors. Even the visuals feed into the gameplay here - the orange color demands your attention, and the elongated shape gives instant feedback on direction of movement.

I don’t think the gates quite live up to their potential - the explosion radius is too small, and reflecting bullets off them too random and ineffective. Maybe further play will reveal some technique I haven’t thought of, though, and they’re interesting regardless.

Geometry Wars was a combination of simple elements that combined to make an incredibly deep game, and each new iteration has only added seasoning. This game is a work of art, worthy to be studied, not just played.

Psst, Stephen! I know you have to be Googling your own name right now - leave a comment if you read this! Consider it an autograph for a fan.

Not too impressed with SCIV thus far… I mean seriously, ONE real new character?! (And no, I’m not counting Algol, and certainly not effing Yoda.)

My wife of course loves the elaborate dress-up mode, and I’ll enjoy online play if it works properly. But the new character designs are horrible, the 360 controls (at least) are frustratingly unresponsive, and I’m just overall unimpressed after the smorgasbord that was SCIII.

Goddamn, you mean to tell me the difference between full-screen and windowed in (Ruby) SDL is from this:

SDL::setVideoMode(640,480,16,SDL::SWSURFACE)

…to this?

SDL::setVideoMode(640,480,16,SDL::FULLSCREEN)

I’m going to like this framework, even if the English documentation is crap right now.

Have you noticed what a central notion powerup management is to many games? D and I were playing Gauntlet last night, and we knew we’d barely squeak by the level we were on. So every hunk of cheese that dropped was carefully rationed to ensure it wasn’t wasted on a mostly-full health bar. This happened on the fly, but required a bit of hasty debate.

I don’t think this is even an intentional gameplay mechanic for most games that have it, but maximum HP definitely increases the need for teamwork. I wonder if the model can even be improved upon…

The iTunes “Priority Electronic Music” playlist just burned a new CD for me, and it included some Stendeck… I realized that song that had been stuck in my head for a week but couldn’t remember who did it was one of his. He’s not an incredibly versatile artist, but at least I like his one style. (Yet another track with ultra lo-fi drums and sweeping, plaintive pads… Count me in!)

The new Goozex account is working out pretty nice. (They’re a game-trading service.) Finally, I can find good homes for the titles on the Pile of Shame that I know I’ll never get back to. Shipping stuff out is especially easy for me since I only have to stop by the mailroom.

Wiimote and nunchuk attachment required. (I haven’t used either extensively, so I may be assuming they’re more capable than they are…)

Each control represents one of your arms, which you can position/wave wherever you like. Press a trigger to close a fist on that arm, release it to open the fist. Contact an object with a closed fist to punch it. Close a fist while in contact with an object to grab it and wave it around. Open a fist while holding an object to release it/throw it.

“Object”, by the way, can be a chair, gun, enemy, or whatever else. “Wave it around” can mean use it as a shield, toss it into an enemy, or throw it off a rooftop. This can lead to lovely mechanics like picking up an enemy, smacking him a few times with the chair in your other hand, using him as a human shield against a few bullets, and finally tossing him headlong into the guy that’s firing at you.

Ah, gets my adrenaline pumping just thinking about it. Substitute robots for people if you don’t want an M rating.

I read an interview of a Halo 2 developer eons ago, without which I probably wouldn’t have gotten nearly as far as I have on Zyps. It was chock full of good ideas on networking.

And now I’m using the AI bits as well… He mentioned that the enemies had to “take turns thinking” due to the XBox’s limited processing power. Basically, an AI was given a few processor cycles to size up its situation and choose its action, which it would then dumbly perform until its next turn to “think”.

Zyps is getting really slow when there are dozens of creatures with 5-7 behaviors each on the screen. It’s time to assess splitting up my processor time as well.

Right now the plan is to add Behavior#condition_frequency, which will take an integer. If you set behavior.condition_frequency = 3, then every third update, it will get a chance to select a new group of targets to act on dumbly for the next 3 updates.

The problem with this is that if they’re created simultaneously, every behavior where condition_frequency = 3 will be called on the same update, meaning the first two updates will be ultra-smooth, and the third slow as hell.

I think I have a way to spread things out evenly: assign an incrementing offset to each Behavior that will decide which update number it receives from those allocated to its update frequency.

Here’s a prototype, with a Counter that shares its “brains” with all other Counters in existence:

Continue Reading »

We ordered ourselves the full Rock Band set for our anniversary… Diana’s sitting here positioning her tattoos in the character editor as I write.

There’s just something eerie about watching a tattoo slide around on someone’s skin…