I’m now two weeks into my game-in-a-month project, and I think things are coming together better than I expected. I currently have a fully functional roach scaring simulator to play with, now all it needs is sounds, a menu system, the objectives coded in and some more polish (more furniture types, maybe a throw rug, pictures on the wall, etc). So I think I’m still good for a release on the 19th. Although, seeing as Halloween is coming up, I might just take a few more days to polish it up a little bit more and release it on the 30th for your creepy pleasure, seeing as the theme (haunted, dark mansion; ghosts messing with lights) just fits the season so well.

But I digress, on to the screenshots and new features!

As I mentioned, the code for the roaches it pretty much complete. The AI to make them move around was a lot of fun to implement, as I don’t normally think in terms of a bug’s brain when I’m pondering AI type problems. My first attempt didn’t turn out so well. The bugs seemed extremely unnatural as they would simply keep moving forward if no lights were on to influence them. After I bit of musing, I realized that what the needed was skitter, a little bit of randomness to their movement. So I made them start and stop erratically in small spurts, occasionally changing direction slightly, and even turning around completely sometimes, as if they were thoroughly inspecting the floorboards. Which they would be in real life, roaches gotta eat too! And it made a huge difference, they are almost mesmerizing to watch now, just sort of wandering about like that, forming all kind of strange patterns and just generally coming across as very roach-y.

The random wandering is only the first part of the AI algorithm, though, as turning a light (or lights) on really changes things up. Cockroaches don’t light lights, and my roaches will run from a light like a dog from a bathtub: in a straight line just as fast as their little legs will carry them. And being fairly mindless creatures, they go back to whatever they were doing before the moment the lights go off. It’s kinda funny to watch. Turn light on, watch roaches scatter, turn light off, light on, light off.

I plan on starting to add the sound effects to go with these motions this week, and I’m really starting to realize that the heart of the gameplay with this project, the bit that is “fun”, is playing God with the roaches and alternatively scaring them silly and then letting them wander. So I really want the sound design to augment that. Wandering roaches that aren’t actively being harassed by a light bulb should make little “do de do” sounds and generally just come across as having the IQ of a rock with a rubber-band motor attached to it with scotch tape. And when the lights come on, some Katamari Damacy style screams, pitched about three octaves too high, would be just about perfect. Add in a few Monty Python-esque “Run Away! Run Away!”‘s and I hope I’ll have a recipe that will delight your inner seven-year old for hours.

New title, same great taste.
Yes, the site has indeed been renamed. All of the previous “caerplatypus.com” links should still work fine, including the RSS feeds, although I haven’t had a chance to test those properly yet so if they break, my apologies.

Earlier today, my brother was fishing around for a decent domain name for his up and coming site (expect some linkage action in the near future if he should follow through) and as joke I suggested “how about ‘Awesomeness in a Box’?”. Of course, it took me about PI/2 seconds to realize that that was the perfect name for my own site, and a quick check revealed that it wasn’t taken. Seriously, what are the odds of that? I’m telling you, it’s fate, baby! That, and I realized pretty quickly that “Caer Platypus” wasn’t exactly the best descriptive title for what I’m doing here. The fact that I have had to repeat it at least twice to every single person I’ve mentioned it to has made that perfectly, painfully clear. So farewell, oh Scottish castle of platypuses. You will be missed. But I’m keeping the platypuses.

Silas is coming along great, by the way. I think I’m good to be finished by the end of the month. I’ll be posting an update with some screens of cockroach panic and mayhem tomorrow.

It seems to me that no matter how many times I get into this stupid cycle, I never learn from it.

This past week my coworkers and I have been playing around with the Wayback Machine at archive.org, which is a pretty cool thing that lets you view what websites looked like in the past, at various intervals. Today, I decided to check out a site I did way back in ’03, which housed an aborted comic and some various ranty type materials.

And I was stunned. It seems that the more time goes by, the more and more human my earlier efforts seem. I seemed so open, so honest back then. Of course, for all I know I was just as manipulative back then, but it might as well be a different person based on what I read. If I was late, I said I was late. Apologized, of course, but it was no biggie. If I was courting traffic, I made no secret of it. And now, I just feel so wrong. Everything I do is with the intention of “making it”, of utilizing my time for maximum result, not for fun. I think this is partially a reaction to my slowly getting older; the older I get, the more I realize that my time is limited, and I (naturally, I think) want to use it better. But the end result is, I don’t.

Back in 2002-2004, I worked like crazy on my projects in my spare time, at least as hard as I do now, if not more. But the critical difference was, I wasn’t ashamed of my shortcomings then. I have a mean perfectionist streak in me, that makes me want to hide away anything that doesn’t feel like the best of my best, and that includes art or programs that I have done before that seemed okay at the time, but no longer “make the cut”, and so get deleted from whatever public viewing location I had them up at. It also includes this website, which has gone through three different revisions without being posted, simply because I didn’t want to put up anything that might compromise any first impression I could have made with my honestly non-existent fans. I had fans at one time. Not a lot of them, and not really deserved, but fans nonetheless. People who looked at my art simply because they liked it. And I had online friends too, a network, people who liked what I did and I liked what they did. People with similar interests as me who would keep me straight and honest with myself, and vice-versa.

And then, I think around the time I was prepping to go to Japan, it all fell away, and because of me and me alone. I had a lot of real-world things to do, and places to go, and things to see, but I allowed myself to drift away from what I had in favor of the new. Things change, people change, and that’s okay, but I’m not convinced this was entirely a good change, and haven’t been comfortable with it for quite some time. My Deviant Art blog is full of “I’m back, no really this time!” posts, in which I would post some picture and promise more, but then never do so. And I think the big reason I did was because, I didn’t enjoy it anymore. The pieces that I did for myself, usually simple sketches in my sketchbook, were relaxing, comfortable. But in my narrow little mind, art for the web, for public exhibition had to be more. It had to be the absolute cutting edge of my skill level, something that in somebody else’s portfolio would make me say “Wow”. My goal was no longer to present the art that was a part of me, but art that I thought would be popular, that would make people think “geez, this guy is good”. With the result that I didn’t post anything.

And so, I’m going to try to pull myself out of the creative ditch once again, but with a slightly different tack. I’m going to upload things that are not perfect do DA, for a start. Heck, I’m going to upload things that aren’t even colored, and probably some that aren’t even shaded! And, I’m going to try to make the effort to make some new internet based contacts. I’ve still got my DA account, which should work okay for the art side of things, but I’m not so sure where to look to find other hobby game developers. I’m sure a short search will turn some stuff up, though.

Let’s keep it real. Even if my blog starts to sound like a whiny myspace page, I don’t care. At least it will be honest. And potentially entertaining ^^.