This game looks insane.

Remember the Nethack development team, and how it has "thought of everything"? Well, here is a game that is attempting to do that in a very literal sense.

This is Scribblenauts, a new DS game being developed by 5th Cell (the developer behind Drawn to Life and Lock's Quest). It's not going to be released until fall of 2009, but it sounds like it will be worth the wait (and they're certainly going to need that much time to work on it).
Basically, you control this character, Maxwell, and you have to get shiny things. You use different objects to get to the shiny things. Sounds like a fairly regular puzzle platformer, right? But it's not.
See, you spawn every object you need to use by writing in its name. So if you want a doughnut, you write doughnut, and *poof*, you get a doughnut.
And the thing is, you can make anything. Absolutely anything. Apparently they've already spent several months just scanning through encyclopedias and compiling massive lists of basically every object in the known universe. They've obviously drawn the line at "anything vulgar" and "copyrighted material," but other than that, they claim to have thought of everything, even stuff that is "so obscure" that nobody would ever think of it unless they released a full list of objects in the game at some point (I am curious, though, about whether you could make something that does not actually exist, such as a dragon or a little green man or something).
Because of that, there's billions of ways to solve every puzzle.
In the video I saw (it's the only one there is right now; I hope they show more soon), the star that the player needs to collect was in a tree. It showed the level being solved in three different ways.
A ladder was spawned, so that it could be climbed up and the star could be reached.
Then a football was spawned and thrown so that it knocked down the star.
After that, a beaver was spawned, and it bit through the tree and knocked it down (along with the star).
At the end of the video, it showed someone attempting (and seemingly failing) to use a doughnut to lure a policeman into jumping at the star or something like that.
Apparently items can be combined, too. So you can make glue or something and attach multiple things together to make something more useful.

When I read about this, I was just thinking: "Seriously?!"
But apparently, it is real. It's crazy.
I'll definitely be watching this one; I hope they continue to show more videos and such.

:::Source expected
:::13.12.08
:::STOP

Nostalgia time.

I was looking at some old files on my computer, and... wow. Some of it I'm not sharing because it's so embarrassingly dumb.
...But I will still show you a few things.
Some of them I think are still interesting, but others are just not quite as embarrassingly dumb as the rest of the stuff.

First, this extremely short stop-motion video that I made about two years ago:

Ah, it's so gruesome....
It's a play-dough alien creature incising larger play-dough alien creature with some sort of sophisticated alien weapon (it's actually the stylus to a PDA or something of that nature).
I'm not sure why, but I believe that is the only stop-motion video I have ever created.
I should do one again some time....
Anyway. I think it's funny because of the surprise ending, but in retrospect it would have been better to exaggerate the scale even more and make the monster start farther back.

Next I wanted to share a piece of writing. The one I ended up picking is not terribly old (it is in fact relatively recent; it's only about a year and a half old), but it's a classic:

I found myself in a much more pleasant room with carpet, lights that were on, and a large, comfortable-looking chair in the middle of the room. There was another door at the back wall. I was about to go and look to see if there was anyone in the chair, but suddenly it spun around, and I saw an extremely thin man sitting there wearing the most peculiar thing on his head. It looked to me like a gigantic orange and yellow sock, but I suppose it may have been some sort of mask that was too big for him. It covered his face entirely except for one hole for his right eye.
“What are you doing here?” he asked furiously.
“I sort of just… walked in.” I replied. “I was following this guy who looked suspicious.”
“Oh. You probably mean Frederick. He always looks suspicious.” The man replied calmly.
“So what you mean is that he’s always carrying guns and/or cases of the sort that usually contain bombs or large quantities of money?”
“I did not say that.”
“Yeah, well he had both.”
“Uh-oh… When did you start following him?”
“Probably about five minutes ago.”
“I’m very sorry, but I’m going to have to kill you now.”
“You don’t sound very sorry…” I said.
“I lied.” He replied nastily, pulling a knife from his belt.

That was an excerpt from "Normal, Mostly ...Sometimes", the piece that pretty much made me what I am today.
Not really, but it is an important work nonetheless. It's not unusually funny or interesting, but it defined my style.
Another reason I posted this is because it made me think of my old LJ blog. ("Normal, Mostly ...Sometimes" was the prequel to a strangely written "story" I did for that blog, you see. Incidentally, that was the last post I ever made.)
I'm not going to give you the URL to that (major, major kudos to anyone who still remembers it), and I'm afraid of looking at it too much myself because it will probably make me want to take it down. But I guess I'll drag out something for you to read.
A, here is a post from nearly two years ago (so, yes, around the same time I did the animation up at the top there) called "There was a title, but thens it ranned all away and goed splat-splat-splat" (seriously):

Anyway, I've been wondering about Greyhound buses. See, since they're so big, it seems like if they were driving in the weather we've been getting lately, they might slip pretty easily and stuff, and what if they run into telephone wires? It seems to me that since their built pretty low, the bottom of the vehicle might actually touch the ground, which would obviously be wet and snowy, and then it would also be touching the telephone wires. I think some sort of induction would occur, possibly electrocuting the passengers. It just doesn't seem safe, so my basic point is that we should have better greyhound drivers. All the ones I've known have been pretty good, but still, you've got to wonder if that's a fair representation of ALL of them... Also, I think that the drivers should wear hats. Hats are cool, and professional. But they should be really, really cool hats. Maybe they could glow or light up or something. They could have a radio-attached energy sapping system to the bus's battery... But that hasn't been invented yet, so it's probably better if it's just a rechargeable battery... So it would be like "Ridiculously Awesome Bus Service: We have safe drivers that wear really cool glowing rechargeable hats. Which pretty much makes us way cooler than anybody else. And we don't cost an arm and a leg. Did we mention our buses run on Cold Fusion and are no hazard to the environment whatsoever?" ...They would be having such the business there. I mean seriously.

This is interesting for several reasons. Firstly, it seems I used to take requests as to the content of my blog posts, as the point of that whole section was to incorporate several words / phrases Adam suggested that the post contain. The cool part is how well I managed to fit these words and phrases into the post. I actually didn't catch the point of it all at first.
Secondly, I see that I was a poor writer/communicator, I made dumb mistakes, and I apparently did not proofread my posts.
Thirdly, as I read further, I learned that at one point I doubted the accuracy of Wikipedia and even went so far as to say that it drove me nuts. Those were dark times indeed.
Fourthly, it marks the first recorded use of the phrase "really cool hats." This is a very valuable piece of information, is it not?
And finally, it shows that two years is a lot longer than I had initially thought. It doesn't seem to be a very long time, but this stuff is just weird. Reading it is a very strange and surreal experience.
Now I will put in one more quote from that blog that will probably only be interesting to three particular people (I must remember to tag these people once this gets imported to Facebook):

At some point during the [band] rehearsal, Zach drops his pencil. I have no idea why, but after this Alec steps on said pencil. Small tussle ensues. Alec gets pencil. Alec will not give back pencil. Now, I'm not entirely clear on what what happened after this, but at some point Riley gets the pencil? I don't really know, but I do know that it's now in someone else's possession. Anyhow, after band Zach comes up to me and says:
"Hey, do you want to join my gang? You need connections... friends in high places. I can provide those connections. So what do you say?" (or something along those lines), so I told him, "Sure, why not." (I'm still unsure as to whether this was a good idea). After this he says something like:
"Good. With you, I think I have about nine people! Now we can get my pencil back."

I don't think I ever heard anything else about that. Was the pencil ever returned to its rightful owner? I must know.

Anyway, talking about my older blog makes me think of my very very old MSN blog, which no longer exists. I did save a text file with its contents, however.
Let's see if I can find something from there that isn't ludicrously frightening.
Remember when I was talking about this being a "strange and surreal experience"? Well, it's about to get much, much worse. Of course, this probably just applies to me...
At any rate:

Breaking News!
John and Seth keep incessently repeating, "I'll blast you till tomorrow noooooooooooooooooooooon!"
Details at 11.


Back to our regularly scheduled programming:

Now the following portion makes no sense seeing as tomorrow it will be June, nowhere close to January, but they're already selling series 2006 cars, and you can use some imagination right? It's just so funny so I had to put it in before I forgot.

So I've decided to make a new annual tradition of making New Year's Resolutions I have no plans to keep. So this year's will be that I won't do anything, random, unnecessary, wasteful, or otherwise pointless. But since I did that knowing I wasn't going to try to keep it, it's furtherly pointless, and so I just broke the promise by even coming up with it.
Oh my, that was well worth the too much time I spent concocting it. I'd be rolling on the floor laughing by now, but It's a lot harder to do when no-one else is...
And since nobody probobly thought that was funny, it will never happen. Furthermore, that was altogether pointless in about six hundred ways, since the purpose of it was nothing and the subject was pointlessness, it just goes on, and on like this.

This also tells us some interesting things.
1. Life in my house has not changed much. That is a great HSR quote though.
2. I have never been that funny.
3. I used to try.
4. I also used to be a loser
5. My writing/communications skills were even worse back then
But then again, that is to be expected; are there really that many people who look back at themselves three and a half years ago and are proud of what they see?
Anyway. Here's the really funny part about this post. It ends with this statement:

So thus endeth my longest post ever.

...Following about 420 words of mindless babbling.
420 words!
...If you don't find that humorous, you have not been reading this blog long enough. I think my shortest post is about four thousand words.

Yes, I know. That was an exaggeration.


Anyway, this post went in a direction I had not intended. I wanted to share pictures and stuff, not dumb blog posts!

Let's continue then.

Remember this guy?
Probably not. I'm pretty sure nobody ever saw him but me.

A long time ago, I used to make games. In PowerPoint.
It's not the ideal software. But it can indeed make games. They're just incredibly linear.
Nowadays, however, it has become more difficult due to the newer versions of the program. Back in '97, it used to allow subsecond delay times, but not anymore (well, there's something like .5 seconds, but that's still way too long). It's hard to do smooth animations and transition from one event to the next when there's basically a delay of at least half a second between each frame (not really each frame, but I imagine you understand what I mean by this point).
At any rate, due to the restrictions of the program (most notably the inability to use any sort of variable or flag), there were essentially two types of games I could create:
1. Point and click adventure games
2. Trivia / quiz based games
This character is from the latter.
This one (called "Melonheads" for reasons that should be quite obvious) was a more elaborate game, and there were very basic minigames (such as a glorified game of rock paper scissors) that you had to play after every few questions.
I didn't get very far on it, because if one thing has never changed it is my inability to complete projects (I keep coming up with better [?] ideas!).
The first big game I ever finished (I believe) was one in the first category called "Typhoon Katana." You played as... some sort of martial artist or ninja or something. I think you had to fight ghosts (back then, I was terrible at any graphics on the computer, so it was all I could do) or something like that.
It represented months (or at least weeks) of work, and I think I actually thought it was cool when I first made it.
A few other interesting things about this game:
1. It was pretty ugly. I think I knew that at the time but I didn't really want to admit it to myself.
2. It took about twenty seconds to complete (OK, that's maybe an exaggeration, but it was short).
3. I made many shortcuts and oversights and did not bother to fix them.
...I think I still have the game on a disk somewhere, unless I've already "lost" it. But as you can probably tell by now, it has little actual value as a game anyway.
The funny thing is that I often talk about how I want to include a dumb game as an easter egg in one of my games and say it is "my first game."
I'm not going to explain how this goes because it's funnier if I tell it to you (even then, you won't think it's funny unless your sense of humor is somewhat similar to mine). But basically it's absolutely terrible and is not really a game at all.
Anyway, thinking about it now... heh, that makes me think of Derren Brown (doubtlessly a topic of discussion for another time).
Oh, sorry. What was I talking about? (Oh, the irony.) Right. Thinking about it now, this imaginary game is not all that worse than these actual games made in PowerPoint.
Now, this reminds me of some cartoons I made in PowerPoint with Andy, but, much to my dismay, those have been lost. I wonder if I have them on a disk somewhere? Somehow I think I must (or Andy does, if I don't).
Anyway, that is a very very long story. Not for today.

Moving on.
Here's something that you will probably find interesting. I know I did, at least.
I knew the concept (or at least, the character concept) for Purple Jelly was old, but I never knew it was this old (and possibly even older):



I believe I did these very soon after I discovered Game Maker. I wanted to make a platformer right away, but that was way beyond my abilities at that point.
These sprites were made about two years ago.
The first image's filename? purplejelly.png.
Not "purple blob". Not "purple ooze". "Jelly".
Eerie.

One more thing before I call it quits for today (and yesterday, and the day before that... I've been working on this post off and on since Monday, despite the fact that it is not terribly lengthy):

...This is the logo under which I was going to "publish" my games at one point.
I initially spelled it "squarkle" because it was an amalgamation between a square and a circle (this came up my first year at LABC because we were unable to properly form a circle any time we all gathered for any form of meeting; I'm not sure who coined the term initially), with -- for unexplainable reasons (likely for no reason at all) -- an image of a weedy sea dragon in the center.
That was before I read Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, naturally. Then I started spelling it differently and attaching the name to various random things (I'm sure we've all heard the story about dodgeball already, so I won't tell it again).

"Dude, we just got owned by squerkles!"

Expect interesting stories in the future; I liked doing this... In a weird sort of way.
If it's been a while and I still haven't told any, remind me.

:::Source expected
:::10.12.08
:::STOP


Quick note-
New poll. Maybe this sort of question will become a recurring feature?

A very boring post. At least I admit it.

This last week did not start well.

On Monday morning I was having a strange dream wherein I was helping Steven Spielberg and George Lucas produce a movie out of a secret base in the closet of a building they did not have permission to film. I don't see why it would've been that difficult to contact the building owners, but when you're working with those guys, you don't ask a lot of questions. And also it was a dream, as I have already stated.
Actually, maybe I was having a dream where I met Daisuke Amaya. No, it can't have been that; that was a good dream (though also strange, admittedly). It must have happened later in the week.
Anyway, I decided I'd had enough of this more underhanded approach to filmmaking, so I got out of bed.
It looked to be a ordinary day (id est, a good one). I took a shower and threw together all the stuff I needed at school. Then I looked out the window.
It was unspeakably terrible.
Snow.
Everywhere.
Now, I'm not sure this could have been handled in any better way, but I do know, based on the events that followed, that it was not the greatest idea to go outside and begin shoveling the driveway immediately.
Our driveway is ludicrously large, and we did not have enough time to shovel even the portion we needed and still be able to leave on time. Of course, "on time" does not normally mean a lot to me, as I've been spending first period practicing my clarinet or reading or something.
But if you are observant you will notice that something has been missing up to this point, and that is breakfast. Some people never eat breakfast, and I don't understand them. Breakfast is the most important meal of my day. It decides everything else; if it goes poorly, it pretty much ruins the rest of the day.
See, I was thinking at this point that I would just eat breakfast at school. I do that half the time anyway, because it's free (for me, anyway) and is not the cold cereal I would be eating at home (I actually like cold cereal but I don't find it to be the ideal breakfast food). The problem, naturally, is that by the time we got there they were done serving breakfast.
So now I was hungry. And the weather was bad. Determined as I was to not let the environment affect my mood, I was not very happy at all.
I then went to the library, or the media center, or whatever it is the cool kids are calling it these days. I sat down and I... Well, I'm not entirely certain what I did that day.
Oh, that's right. I'm pretty sure this was the day I began outlining the biggest weapons manufacturing corporations for Heroics Won't Save You.
Now, you may complain that you have no idea what I'm talking about, and with good reason. If you did, I would be genuinely concerned, seeing as I haven't talked about it here -- or, indeed, much at all.
Basic summary: It's my next (as in: after Purple Jelly... mostly) big project. The title is tentative I guess.
It's a platform shooter. I've always wanted to do one.
It has bullets, and fire, and cool hats. It looks promising.
Now, where am I? Ah, yes. I am sitting at my desk.
But at this point in my story, I am actually in the school library. I'm coming up with some nice-sounding (and mostly quite silly, because this is not a serious game) names for these corporations. I decided I was done with that about ten minutes before the bell rang. This happens a lot, and then I always just put whatever I was doing away and sit there.
So after I got done sitting there, I went to the band room and got out my clarinet. Then I sat there a bit more until the rehearsal actually started.
It went as well as usual, which is... From one perspective, fairly well... I guess we get a lot of stuff done. But on the other hand, there are many things we are doing very very wrong, and we will probably continue to do them wrong even for our concert.
They aren't major issues. It's usually something like this: We are playing something incorrect rhythmically. It does not sound bad because another section is playing this rhythm. But it's not exactly right for our section.
Anyway. That finished up, and I went home. Things got better from there; most notably, I ate breakfast.

I actually got very little done this week. I did finish one laboratory in Purple Jelly. It's very very difficult though (despite being quite simple), and I'll probably end up placing it quite a bit later in the game than it is now (it's currently Lab 02; they start with 00 so it's the third stage).

After that I decided to continue the ongoing saga of trying to find an MMO that I actually like enough to continue playing.
But it's still way too early for there to be any news regarding that; most of the stuff I looked at wouldn't run on my computer anyway, or was very large and wouldn't fit, or was just dumb.

...I'm sure I did many other things this week, but I have gotten to the point where I am now realizing that this post has been immensely dull, and I can tell you exactly why that is.
I am talking about my life in extensive detail, something I thought I had decided to not do a long time ago. I'm not sure how this happened.
Now you can see why I don't do it.
Now, I would make an exception if I fell off a train and got kidnapped by a gang of sock smugglers, but that kind of thing never happens to me.

There is one thing about this post that you cannot deny, however, and that is, simply, that it is here at all.
That's pretty impressive considering my track record recently, is it not?

...Yeah, you're probably right.
You take all the fun out of life. Go home.

Yeah, I know you are. So maybe you should go somewhere else first and come back.


:::Source expected
:::07.12.08
:::STOP