Monthly Archives: May 2013

My Daughter’s Storybook, and What Griefs Came of It.

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My daughter came up to me with a book. It’s one of those “books” with four pages, entirely fabricated from impact rated cardboard and primary color paint. Within is depicted a house (Along with what seems to be a completely random assortment of other objects. A dog, a tire, a pond, what is this? It should be titled “A Child’s Guide to Pastoral Free Association”… But I digress.) with a front door, a couple windows, a roof. Common fare.

But it is not common to her. To her, this house is a place of infinite mystery. Continue reading →

Prerequisite Automation

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If you do A and B then you can try doing C. Oh, but you have to do A and B every time you want to do C. No, you can’t skip those parts. It’s core gameplay!

Seriously, what’s the deal with this? Can’t I prove to you that I’m capable of these tasks? I mean, collect some statistics on my performance or something. Even degrade it by 10%, or 50% for that matter, just let me use MY performance for the “auto calculate” instead of the developer’s expectations or the AI’s abilities.

I’ve already written on this topic before. Hopefully this article will offer another angle of approach to the concept of not wasting the player’s time. Continue reading →

Kerbal Space Program

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A couple of weeks ago, dudecon introduced me to Kerbal Space Program, an in-development “space program” simulator. Since then, I’ve started getting up early to squeeze in an hour or so of play in the mornings, played at home, played at work, and spent no less than 20 hours developing a Python script to parse the game files to do out-of-game “rocket science” analyses on parts and spacecraft. You don’t know me very well, so in case I’ve not made it clear: I think this game is a ton of fun.

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