• Rebuild 3: Interfaces & common resolutions in 2013

    The target aspect ratio for Rebuild 3 is widescreen 16:9. Rebuild 1 and 2 were 4:3 which is pretty normal for Flash games that have to appear on sites like Kongregate with ads and stuff around them. But the PC/Mac and mobile versions of Rebuild 3 will support glorious fullscreen, where 16:9 is the new norm. Check it:

    My dubious hobby/addiction to making colorful graphs

    So the plan is to design an interface that fits snugly on 16:9 iPhone5s and wide PC screens, but scale and move around to fill more square screens. Here’s a few ways we might do it:

    Concept art for Rebuild 3 at 16:9 and 4:3
    Rebuild 3 concept menu
    Alternate concept with broken sliding hud
    Rebuild gui left menu concept
    Concept with menu down the left, taller menus.

    I hope my addiction to mockups leads to something useful. Adam’s doing the same thing on his end, finding inventive new ways to convey a ton of information without looking cluttered. I want the game to feel natural at any resolution, so you don’t feel so much like you’re buried in an endless stack of menus. Which… come to think of it, is not a totally inaccurate description of the game.

  • Rebuild 3: First look concept art

    Rebuild 3 logo

    After an exhaustive search for a Rebuild 3 artist, sifting through 150 applicants and agonizing over the decision for months, I chose the art and style of Adam Meyer (of Steamroller Studios and Crystal Clear Art). When he’s not working with me on Rebuild 3, Adam’s got a zombie game of his own on the go – the beautiful Deadwood with a super unique art style involving wooden people.

    As for the style of Rebuild 3 (tentatively called “Gangs of Deadsville”), we’re going to go for something cleaner and more cartoony than Rebuild 2… but not nearly as cheesy as my stickmen from Rebuild 1. Here’s a rough mockup of what we have in mind:

    Rebuild 3 concept mockup
    Adam’s mockup for the new look to Rebuild 3.

    The new characters have so much… character! They’ll have mix & match features like earlier games, and a bunch of new clothing options. Hipsters, geeks, cops and cowboys – I can’t wait to make my last stand with these adorable bastards. I’ll leave you with some of Adam’s survivor sketches:

    RogueSheriffGood Natured
    HipsterMilitiaPunk

  • Solution to the BirdBrain Puzzle

    I posted a very hard puzzle here and challenged the Internet to solve it. It’s quite a hard puzzle and it took about a day from originally posting it for someone to solve it. That someone was Mark Ivey (@zovirl). I asked him to write a quick description of his solution and he did up a very nice little post which I thank him for. Here is Mark Ivey’s solution to my puzzle:

    The Solution to the BirdBrain Puzzle by Mark Ivey

    Overview: A down-and-left circuit moves the birds to the first & last yellow pellets. A decaying memory circuit bounces the birds up off the red ball. Since this loop decays over time the birds will go down again after clearing wall #2.
    Down-and-right circuit
    To bounce up, the birds have to hit the ball from the top. If they hit the side, they’ll bounce at the wrong angle.
    The right signal is slightly stronger than the down signal to make sure the birds get over the ball before hitting it.
    Decaying Memory Circuit
    Bouncing up requires reversing the ball signal. Keeping the birds moving up after they hit the ball requires a memory loop. When a bird hits the ball, the ball signal gets injected into the loop. The 2 neurons in the loop keep the signal alive even after the bird leaves the ball. Then the signal is reversed (repel from the ball instead of attract to it) and passed to the wings.
    Don’t want the birds to keep going up forever, just want them to go high enough to clear wall #2. This means the memory of hitting the ball has to decay. A sidetrip out through the 1/2 neuron does this. To keep the signal from decaying too quickly, more connections are added between the 2 memory neurons. This dilutes the effect of the 1/2.

     If the bounce signal has to fight against the down signal, the birds move too slowly. To prevent the bounce from having to fight the down signal like this, a bunch of parts of the bounce circuit send suppression signals to the down-and-left circuit.
    Tuning
    Once the birds are moving in a nice down-up-down motion, it took some tuning to get them to just barely clear wall #2 before going back down to the 3rd pill.
    Tuning #1: The memory decays slower if there are more connections between the 2 memory neurons (this dilutes the effect of the 1/2 signal). About 5 connections in each direction worked well.
    Tuning #2: The suppression lines are doubled in a few places to suppress the down signal even more.

  • BirdBrain Puzzle

    Hello Internet. I have a puzzle for you. It’s quite hard.

    In this puzzle you have to build the brain of a bird. The brain already has several Neurons, you need to connect them with some Axons.

    The puzzle is here: BirdBrain

    Don’t run off though! You need some instructions and I happen to have some hastily written instructions right here:

    Controls: Click on a Neuron (the grey disks), drag to a different Neuron and let the button go. This will make a wire between the two Neurons.

    Click on a wire to delete it.

    You want to make the stream of birds pass through each yellow “food”. If you get one dot then you’ve figured out how to play. If you get the second dot then you are clever indeed. The third one is genuinesly hard, I really doubt you’ll make it there so why stress about it?

    There are Three broad catagories of Neurons and Nine specific kinds.

    The Three catagories are:

    1. Input
    2. Processing
    3. Output

    These correspond to the top row, the two middle rows, and the bottom row of the puzzle. The top rows generate directional input, the middle rows can change that input, and the final row takes whatever is being fed into it and steers the bird in that direction.

    Here is a run-down of all the neuron types:

    This Neuron points towards the red baloon. But, and this is important, only if the bird is touching it. The bird is blind, it can’t see the baloon, it can only feel it.

     

    Up/Down/Left/Right: These Neurons point in one direction at all times no matter what. Try conecting one of these neurons to the final “motor neuron”.

     

    These are your basic normal Neurons. They average whatever input they get. If you pass them a down and a right you will get down-and-right out of it.

     

    This reverses whatever you pass in. If you pass it a down and a right you will get up-and-left out of it.

     

    Will average whatever input it gets and then multiply by two on the way out. If you pass it down and right you will get down-and-right-but-fast out.

     

    Will average whatever input it gets and then divide by two on the way out. If you pass it down and right you will get down-and-right-but-slow out.

     

    This is the birds wings. It will fly in whatever direction you like. If you pass it down and right then the bird will fly down and right.

     

    Wires: are used to connect Neurons. Information flows along the wires in the direction you draw them. If you draw from the Left Neuron to the Motor Neuron your birds will go left. If you drag from the Motor Neuron to the Left Neuron the bird will not move.

    Inhibiting Wires: These wires inhibit whatever they are connected to acoriding to the strength of the information passing along them. If you connect the Down Neuron to the Motor Neuron with a normal wire and then the Left Neuron to the Motor Neuron with an Inhibiting wire the bird will not move because the Motor Neuron is being inhibited with the strength of the Left Neuron.

    Loops: You can make loops.

    Overlapping Wires: You can place a wire between the same two Neurons as many times as you want going in either or both directions. There is no graphical hint to tell you how many wires are there.

    Special Case: Neurons average all the information they get except for the special case of zeros. If they get a zero they will simply ignore it. Since the birds can not see the Baloon when they start connecting the Balloon Neuron to anything will have no immediate effect because it is sending no information. Combining anything with no information results in no change, not a halving of the value.

    Good luck. You’re going to need it. (and yes, it is possible, here is a picture of my birds getting to the end)

    If you’d rather just mess about in a sandbox I have one of those here.

  • Confusing Good with Respected

    Taste’s of a King

    Human beings are relentlessly status seeking, and we are voracious consumers of novelty. These two things combine in weird ways when people talk about art.

    You hear people leaving movie theatres saying bizarre things like “Yeah I really liked that movie but I wouldn’t consider it Good”. This is madness! Clearly if you enjoy a thing then that thing is good, that’s the best definition of “good” that I can think of.

    But there are cases when you would be wise to couch your praise for fear of seeming a rube! We are all always, subconsciously, attempting to raise other’s opinion of us on pretty much every topic imaginable and when we can’t do it honestly we fake it. That’s why you didn’t ask the teacher questions in high-school if you were truly lost (unless you were confident that everyone else was also lost).

    This means we all want to have “sophisticated” tastes in movies, painting, wine, music, games, everything. But what is “sophisticated” is what is liked by the medium’s Ultra Fans. People who devote all their spare time, or even their lives, to a topic. I am a games Ultra Fan, but I am not a wine or music Ultra Fan and hence I behave oddly around wine and music. I have actually caught myself looking up reviews for an album before suggesting it to a friend lest my taste turn out to be “incorrect”. I am very uncomfortable at wine-tastings because of the chance that my lack of wine-sophistication will be uncovered, even though it’s totally normal to not know anything about wine!

    It’s also why people have “guilty pleasures”, songs they listen to in their headphones but don’t want people to know they like because the song is beneath their tastes.

    There are times where you will profess ignorance and things I profess a proud ignorance of, like cars and sports, but that’s also status seeking “oh cars? I enjoy more intellectual pursuits thank you”.

    A lot of the time we are trying to seem as sophisticated as possible, which is always more sophisticated than you actually are, so we deny our love of things that we think an Ultra Fan might not like. Ultra Fans used to like summer blockbusters, they were 13 once, and loved them (maybe only secretly) but the price of our voracious lust for novelty is that Ultra Fans get bored. They’ve seen a lot of action movies, rom-coms, slashers, and those movies have lost their novelty. So the best way to seem like an Ultra Fan is to think something is boring. To fake cool your default stance on everything should be boredom, because no matter how good something is you can always claim you’re above it.

    This is offset by people wanting to gush about things they actually genuinely enjoy hence the “I liked it but I wouldn’t say it was a Good movie”. Simultaneously expressing your joy and couching it lest someone think you are unsophisticated.

    We do the reverse sometimes and say something is “wonderful” if we think an Ultra Fan would like it, which is why total nonsense can be highly praised. If you don’t understand it then it must be for a more sophisticated audience than you and by praising it you appear to be part of that audience.

    I was going to end this with a whole paragraph defending myself from accusations of extreme vanity, but that would just be more status seeking. I’ll let you decide for yourself, just as you should with whatever movie you watch next or game you play. If you like it, just say so.