So, with a lack of any real idea of what to say, I guess this will just be a log of all the things I do and create. I already do that but in two-word bullet points in a .txt file, so now it’s gonna be at least three words per bullet point.

So, week of Jan 25th, 2015:

I decided I was gonna start following a “Don’t break the chain” ideology. I gotta work on a game for some amount every day without exception, getting a little better each day.

I started the week with an idea for a super-simple game involving a car with pistons for wheels travelling through parking-lot-traffic by running over everything in the way while avoiding anything popping up in sunroofs or hitting cop cars. It went alright with prototyping, I made it over three days using Unity’s 2D engine so I got some experience with that and its perlin noise implementation. I made the assets using gimp and I finally got my pen tablet working.

For the next few days I started working on a project inspired by my AI class. My partner and I had to come up with a simple game concept that wouldn’t require any intensive programming or graphics so we can focus on the AI alone. One of the ideas that was scraped because another was significantly better was pretending to be a crazy mall cop trying to stop thieves. So far I’ve created another prototype in Unity 3D using some basic models and textures. So far I’ve used it as a practice in UV mapping, light mapping, and baking ambient occlusion maps.

Along the way I also got distracted by my friend’s endeavor to become a daily streamer on twitch.tv. His tagline is “come by and heckle me” so I got to writing a bot that would do just that in python. I’m not to strong with python so it was great fun and super simple. Whitespace-sensitive languages are heathens though. I’m not aiming to do a lot with that, all it does is spit out a random, pre-defined ‘insult’ whenever someone types !heckleme. I put insult in quotations because the best I could come up with was “I bet you don’t even like crayons” and “your mother is a respected member of society,” but my friend is filling up that dictionary.

Lastly, I started a small project in my livingroom after missing a rather important email on one of my many email accounts. So I started looking into writing a script that will display a notification on the TV in my livingroom whenever I get one. It shouldn’t be too hard, that TV is hooked up to an ubuntu desktop that I use as a server for various things, although I plan to also attach a PIR motion-detecting sensor via an arduino so that it can tell when I enter the room to display the message. Otherwise it would either always be on the notifications screen (risking burn-in I think) or always be in screensaver. Again, a very simple project, but it still takes some time amidst everything else.

I should note I don’t foresee entries being this long every week. This week was the first of the semester(weird school) as well as a busy one relatively speaking, so future entries will probably be rather empty by comparison. Now I’ve got to go write a pull request for my HFOSS’s class Github repo, which shouldn’t be too hard (knock on wood) or worth writing about as it is a level of git I’m vaguely familiar with. I think this class will be fun though, Github and sourcing is something I’ve always been fascinated with, but never been able to master since it tends to go alongside a project that demands more attention. Now I’ve got a chance to put some time into it.