New Year Paraphernalia

Each year, my brother and I spend the new year's eve building a new album to release. Also, I've been trying to get in the habit of releasing a little interactive solstice / new year card around the same time. So here they are.

Game

This year's game is a quick implementation of a puzzle interaction involving moving blocks around. The opening animation explains it better than I could:

Play

Album

This year's is called "Sassy Bunny" and you can listen to it right now:

Some highlights: Weird To Me -- a classic one-take Jimike song; Undone -- all sorts of interesting sounds in here; Intro -- really energetic track. Some lowlights: weird mixing in Great In The Future; She -- a track that is perhaps too mellow.

We are starting to accumulate a fair bit of audio gear. This year's album involved two guitars, a banjo, a Monotribe, three mics, and two different midi control devices -- a keyboard and a Push (run through a custom script to make it nice for use in Reason).

As always, expect Spotify links when we get around to pushing the files to our distributer.

TCHOW is Travelling (until August 1st)

This week, TCHOW World Headquarters will be driving up to Portland, Maine (helping a friend move). I expect it to be hard to code in a moving van with a dog sitting on my lap. As such, updates over the upcoming days may be somewhat sporadic and lacking in game progress.

I do have a few things I've been hoping to post about -- perhaps more prose-heavy and tangentially related to Rktcr than the recent slew of posts -- so this news page won't be entirely silent over the coming days. I'm also thinking of trying to write a 7dRTS; but... well, we'll see.

Also, why not give Rktcr Demo 2 a try, and comment/email/tweet at me?

Glimmers in Rktcr and Motivation

Recently, I've been making factual posts -- talking a lot about what I'm doing and why I'm doing it from a design or implementation perspective. Today, I'm making a short post to talk about the other side of things: motivation and direction.

I've heard indie developers (also fellow graphics researchers) complain about lack of motivation. This is not a problem for me; I always want to make progress, and I'm almost pathologically optimistic about outcomes. That said, I often feel the crushing weight of the whole TCHOW experiment; of not having a job, of not having any backup (if I don't do things, they don't get done), and of not having any hard deadlines (except when my self-funding runs out in ~13 months).

I know that for some folks out there these all sound like really good things. But, let me tell you, they aren't. They simply add planning time to one's already overburdened schedule.

And that leads to the big problem for me: not motivation, but direction. I start each day with plenty of creative energy, but it's never clear where I should be expending it. Do I work on Rktcr? Rainbow? One of the many prototypes I've been meaning to build? Do I put my effort into code? Art? Sound?

I don't really know the answer to that. So I just try to do something (or several somethings) each day, so that every week Rktcr and Rainbow and TCHOW games in general move closer to being done.

Today, that little thing was some glimmers for the portals in Rktcr, because they are sometimes hard to spot otherwise. It's a little bit of eye-candy, and it addresses a rough spot for new players.

TCHOW Goals #2 - What's happening?

I've been in Pittsburgh for two weeks now, and I'm getting settled in. So how am I doing in various areas of this TCHOW project?

Make Games

rktcr. I've been able to spend some good time on rktcr; enough that I'm thinking about starting to write development updates. Indeed, I'm getting to a point where the low-level gameplay is mostly finished, as is the pool of prospective levels. I'd like to send out another alpha version soon.

Two major tasks remain in rktcr: world-gen and story/cutscenes. The first is a programming task, which could prove unfeasible, requiring a fair amount of restructuring of the level2 concept of this game. The second is an art generation task, which requires me to sit down and do some serious inkscape-ing (for characters) and vim-ing (for story).

Puzzle. The potential puzzle/plot collaboration hasn't moved forward much. I'd like to work on creating some example plot, but I'm a bit worried about burning out on writing before getting to rktcr's plots. This is probably not going to be a problem, but I worry nonetheless.

Have a Social Life

This is ticking along nicely.

I've reconnected with old friends and acquaintances. (Some of which I didn't even know were still in town!) I also have friendly neighbors. I could certainly stand to do more social things, but I also don't feel isolated.

Additionally, I've been making use of OkCupid, which has resulted a couple of dates and a few interesting conversations so far. (Also, unexpectedly, a lot of good book, movie, and music recommendations.) However, it's also a fair amount of yelling into the wind.

Lose Thirty Pounds

No progress (not that I expected much). However, that's not going to prevent me from continuing rock climbing -- it's just good fun.