I own all 10 seasons on DVD. Even the last one, which *really* wasn’t the greatest.

When Stargate Universe was announced I was skeptical. I wasn’t big on Stargate Atlantis, but I decided that the new series deserved a fair shake.

So I watched the first half of the season. It went from “Not bad” to “Ehhh” to “*sigh*” to “Why bother” pretty quickly for me. Since it was taking a 4 month break between the first and second half combined with me not really caring about the major characters, I never watched the second half.

Today on the most excellent Stargate site, Gateworld.net, they released some ratings numbers. It looks like I wasn’t alone in my decision to tune out. Check out this nifty plot I made of the ratings over time:

*sigh*…..

http://valleywag.gawker.com/5288759/flickr-founder-calls-nuked-user-a-dick

Overall I found myself agreeing with the various comments and evaluations of each game type (pacman, tetris, etc.). But when I got to the end of the “Advanced” topics section, I laughed out loud:

RPG – if you hate your life (and some apparently do), this obviously final year attempt at video game programming glory is likely to end badly.

That pretty much sums up my experience so far with my attempts to make a “simple” RPG. There’s a lot going on in a typical RPG, and it takes a lot of effort and attention to detail to pull it off and make it look good and play well. And even then, if you manage to get the mechanics of the game engine working semi-decently, then you have a tall order to fill by creating the contents (scripts, maps, graphics). Needless to say it can quickly become a huge time sink. Which isn’t to say it isn’t fun, because it is. But when you get overwhelmed on a project like this where you are working for yourself (i.e. not getting paid to work on it) it becomes very difficult to get your motivation back.

Personally, I’m hoping to get my motivation back to work on my little project some more. I think what I’ll probably wind up doing is working on it in-between other projects.

Easter Eggs are little hidden things in side of a bigger program. Some times it just the developer’s names, other times it can be something totally unexpected like a flight simulator hidden in a spreadsheet program. With the power of Javascript and nice tutorials like this one, there’s a lot of opportunity to have some real fun!

Just think, with all of the computing power a modern browser affords us developers, it should be very easy to recreate tons of games from the Atari 2600, early Nintendo systems. The imagination can very easily run wild….

One of the best parts of the show is when the developers are either talking about or pitching their new games. Just from hearing the titles of the games I wish some of them had been made! Cool titles like “Monkey vs. Cobra” or “Hobo Killer” or “Family Ties: The Video Game”. Plus some of the shots of the games looked pretty funny too. Check out the whole list here: Games featured on Code Monkeys

All of those wacky titles reminded me of all the times in other movies, TV shows, games, etc. I saw a “fake” video game and thought it was the coolest idea ever. Like “Billy Graham’s Bible Blaster” on the Simpsons. Or “Astro Chicken” in the Space Quest series. Classics!

And thanks to the wonders of the internet/web2.0/lazy web/wikipedia, there’s a massive list of all of these fictional games! Check out the list here: Fake Games

Seeing all of those games there got me thinking: Wouldn’t it be cool if someone made some of these games based on just the title? (Or in the case of shows like the Simpsons, take the clip of the game and expand it into a full fledged game!)  That would be so cool. So cool in fact, I think I’m going to start doing that, looking at a title and then trying to come up with a game. Cheesy, yes. Wacky, you bet. Fun? Lets find out.

1. It sounds like a game I would have really been interested in
2. Although it had been out for some time, I had never heard of it
3. I’m wanting to make a RPG that isn’t based in a dungeon
4. The world needs new games that aren’t just derivative sequels of the same-old-same-old

Its always sad when a product is retired, but this situation sounds bad. According to the comments on the Ramapant Coyote site, lot of people are feeling the same way I do. But at the end of the day, its the author’s call, and in this case the author decided to pack it in.

I stated in #4 above that the world is too full of games that aren’t anything special. That’s why indie games are so exciting. Many are of the games that are made on the indie seen are passion works on the part of their creators. As a result these games are different than what you normally find in a store. They try new things, they take chances.

But sadly, just as in real life, sometimes you win, sometimes you loose. I hope Mr. Moffat finds the success he is looking for in his future endeavors.

As a side note, if you try to install pyglet on a Mac, there is a small catch. I’m running 10.4 Tiger which uses Python 2.4. Pyglet.org does offer a dmg file to install itself, but it doesn’t work. The reason for this is that Pyglet does need ctypes, and ctypes did  not become a standard part of python until 2.5. So, to get pyglet to work on your Mac, you’ll need to get (and build) ctypes, or install Python 2.5. I installed ctypes and found it to be pretty painless.

Its still in an alpha state, but I thought it sounded interesting so I decided to take a look at it. Compared to pygame, it seems to be a little more streamlined. I’ve never really push pygame to the limits, so I can’t really compare the two as fully as I would like. One thing that I did like were the demo apps and the examples in the documentation. They were concise, yet demo’ed useful things that I would want to do in an app.

I started reading the documentation after lunch the other day and within a few minutes I found myself modifying the code as I read through the docs. Within 5 minutes I decided that I would try a sprint: Could I implement a quick and dirty game of pong within an hour using pyglet? Well, the answer is Yes!

After playing around for an hour I had everything except the computer’s paddle in place working. A few days later when I had some time I spent and additional 15-30 minutes (while watching the game on TV) and knocked out the “AI” for the computer player. This isn’t award-winning code or game play (the bounding box collision test is pretty crappy), but it did show me that I could get something done quickly using this framework.

So, check out pyglet. Here’s the code to my craptacular version of pong. (There are 3 files, two images for the paddles and the ball, and the source file pyglet_pong.py)

Now I know what you are thinking, but its not a crazy thing to do. In a situation where you can’t see the display or access the controls (for example with an iPod Shuffle, or when I have my iPod mini hooked up to my car stereo and I have to control it with the CD changer controls which only allow skipping and turning the shuffle on or off) this “random searching” is actually a pretty good strategy. Basically you randomly skip through songs until you get to the artist you are looking for. Once finding the artist, turn off the shuffle part and search one song at a time until you find the one you are looking for! Pretty straightforward and a fun way, well ok, a way to pass the time while sitting in traffic.

Norvig’s article talks about the math behind this type of search. Specifically he solves how long it would take to find a song (on average). He describes the problem as a Markov Decision Process that can be solved using a value iteration algorithm. Its amazing how something that sounds so complicated is actually pretty straightforward. The code that is used to implement the solution is in python and it is pretty short so it is doubly impressive, at least to me.

I looked closer at the selection and noticed something odd: Among all of the RPG books there, most were dedicated to game worlds based around magic (duh), werewolves, monsters, dragons, and other Tolkien type stories. There was one based on the future, but even that one had mutants which are the equivalent of monsters.

Personally, I’m a fan of the post apocalyptic genre. For some reason I find the idea of starting over, or at least having to adjust rapidly in the aftermath of a disaster, to be really intriguing. Its a very accessible topic, after all it is based on the world of today, and there’s no shortage of scenarios that can be drawn from that.

Yet for some reason, there few RPG’s (and to an extent comics/graphic novels also) that tap into this rich vein of material. I’m really puzzled by this, reality TV (shows like Survivor, etc.) shows that the general population is interested in the idea, yet this isn’t reflected in a lot of other aspects of our entertainment. Fallout was quite popular, but that was almost 10 years ago. Lost and Jericho are popular, but few other shows seem to be following their example.

Is there such a disconnect between the D&D community and the rest of pop culture? Or is the idea of a post apocalyptic world just too scary, and in the post 9/11 and post Katrina world, too close to home? Or am I just shopping in the wrong stores?

I was using Pixen which is highly regarded and does just what I need it too. Buuuuuut… I can’t get the program to run more than a few minutes without a crash. And that just really bums me out because it seems like the perfect program. Sadly, I’m not the only one having this problem, posting around the net seem to indicate that this is a common issue.

And unlike Windows, the Mac doesn’t seem to come with any simple programs a-la Paintbrush. What’s up with that? I realize Apple is all about minimal cruft and what-not, but this really takes it to an extreme.

For the moment I’m trying out tileeditor which is a pretty minimal editor, but at the same time seems to work pretty well. (Although as a side note I would like to point out that you need to start the editor in the same directory as your artwork, otherwise it seems to try and save to the wrong directory. Every time I did this is put _tmp and the front of the path, which of course doesn’t exist. I’m not sure if this is a Mac specific thing, but just starting the program in the art directory seemed to get around this issue.)