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The Stuff
Originally uploaded by apes_abroad.

Had a good Halloween this year. Colin and I both had costumes for the Three Rings potluck night, to which I contributed “The Stuff” fruit dip and deviled eyeballs. I think the effort spent on presentation outweighed the fact that I can’t cook, and for one reason or another people seemed genuinely frightened by the food I brought. I’m putting the leftover Stuff into milkshakes for Colin.

We spent Friday at a friend’s party in a fantastically decorated house. Our costumes this year were alright: I sewed ping pong balls to black clothes and went as a mocap person, and Colin was a pretty convincing post-apocalyptic space pirate. It’s the beard I think: it’s like he was meant to wear a pirate hat. I’ll post pictures when they come up.

Flywrench: great game or greatest game?

http://www.messhof.com/games/flywrench.php

Flywrench is a game by Mark Essen who also wrote one of my other favorite games: You Found the Grappling Hook

It is artistically sublime.

The music by Jordan Stone is among my favorite tracks to a game ever. Along with the writing and the graphical style this makes Flywrench a game that will reach into your head and caress your brain.

It has surprising depth. The existing levels barely scratch the surface of what’s possible, so the included level editor makes a ton of sense. There is a steepish learning curve but it feels really good learning to manouver and hurl the Flywrench through harder and more dynamic environs. By the end of the game you can feel the depths of possiblity open before you.

Mark Essen should really get this on xBox live and earn some cash off of it. It’s amazing.

Sarah and I are, right now, attending Adobe’s Flash Camp for flash 10.

It’s like a hack-a-thon pre-release thing for CS4. Sarah is writing some code but I’m eschewing the hacka-a-thon thing and just watching the demos of the new flash tools and player.

But they are giving us a copy of the Flash Authoring Tool and Flex builder. So I feel like I should blog about it to pay them back a bit.

They are doing really cool things.

Fantastic Contraption runs about 14% faster on the new player and it cleans up some memory leaks I couldn’t track down. Although some of the animation stuff adds in new memory leaks. I hope those will be gone by the time it hits release.

The FAT is getting a huge update. So big that I’m sure alot of animators are going to have to re-learn alot of what they do. I’m not a FAT expert and I find doing anything in it a frustrating experience. So instead of these sweeping changes uppsetting me and my workflow they just make things work in a much more sensible way. It’s like they sat down and just said “ok, this is stupid. how should it have worked to begin with?” and just made it work like that.

The native 3d stuff is cool as hell. They have two seperate ways to work with 3d. One is the standard import stuff, write code to control stuff, full on 3d workflow.

The other is for animators. So you can define planes with pictures and graphics on them. And then define their location in 3-space and in relation to eachother. And then move them around. Even in the FAT. So this is a quick way to get some 3d effects in your UIs.

Right now a guy is demoing the inverse-kinematics stuff. Which is really cool. You actually define a skeleton and how it bends in the FAT and then you can animate the skeleton really easily.

Which, if I understand it correctly, should make it really easy to make a character walk programatically along uneven terrain and stuff. Which is wicked.

And there are some new API changes to the flash library. Some stuff that Sarah’s company has been waiting with for with baited breath actually.

And the Flex Authoring tool is getting alot better. Like it will intelli-sense your own classes now.

So I like what they are doing. Ties into the graphics card. Opening the SWF format. Very cool stuff.

Lets hope things keep going this way and M$ doesn’t take over the field with Silverlight and then stagnate all innovation. Like they do with everything they touch.

Just a quick post about World of Goo.

World of Goo is a physics puzzle game written and designed by Kyle Gabler and Ron Carmel. They released the first of five worlds as a sort of pre-order bonus which Sarah got me for my birthday last year.

World of Goo helped inspire me to get off my duff and write a game. It is one of the games in the ‘other awesome games’ section of the Fantastic Contraption credits.

The first world was great and remains almost completely unchanged. So it’s still great.

The new stuff is… wonderous. The art and story in World of Goo is just crazy compelling. It is well worth playing through just for visuals. World 4 is especially just mind-blowing. I also strongly urge you not to read any more about World of Goo before you buy and start playing it (available to the non-pre-ordering world on Oct 13 ’08). Go in blind so the surprises will the surprising and the unexpected will be unexpected.

They did this thing that I’ve been really liking from game developers lately. They make the game short and packed with goodness. I probably got 4 or 5 hours out of it (although with the time I spent playing and re-playing the first world I was well prepared for all but the last few levels).

So instead of spending half my time grinding through stuff or replaying the same level with a slight variation World of Goo gave me 5 hours of solid new puzzles and kept re-creating itself artistically. So instead of 10 hours of o.k. gameplay I got 5 hours of great gameplay. Which I can always replay, there are a miriad of personal challenges I set myself in each World of Goo level.

Although in this gush of puzzle and game-play ideas there were a few levels I didn’t love. There are a few levels that deviate from the very-fun goo-structure building idea and went for the not-as-fun stacking blocks idea. But these were in the overwhelming majority.

So World of Goo: super fun, go play it.

Colin sporting new suspenders
Originally uploaded by apes_abroad.

We’re getting married! Finally. In December, when we go back to BC for Christmas. It’s going to be a small ceremony with just family up in Rathtrevor park in Parksville, with lots of xmas goodies and beer but not much pagentry. I was sort of just looking to get it over with but now that I’ve started planning I’m kind of enjoying myself. I may even have a wedding dress, sort of! I’m thinking renfaire if I can get away with that, and Colin’s envisioning themes of space piracy. The pictures should be interesting.

I opened my Etsy store today to see if other people think bicycle inner tube suspenders are as cool as Colin thinks they are. He’s my model. :)