Flash 8 plugin required.
After a couple of hours of hacking around learning the ins and outs of the new BitmapData class, this is what I have come up with. My version of the “Hello World” program.Click here to see it.
Something to Read
This here page is a hoot. It is the online journal of a fella who spent a couple of years teaching English in to Japanese schoolchildren. Safe for work, unless work has a problem with you howling with laughter in the middle of the day.
Kingdom, Complete
Weeellllll here it is. A total of about ten hours of development, and perhaps not the cleanest code in the whole wide world, but it is done. And already I have several ideas for a sequel.
Curse You, Amazon Gold Box!
Saving up money for the new house has been more difficult lately, what with all of the great books popping up in my Gold Box.
First up was What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy by James Paul Gee. When I first opened the book I was struck with the fear that Mr. Gee might be a wanker, because the chapters had names like “Semiotic Domains”, and “Situated Meaning and Learning”. Turns out I was wrong; Mr. Gee has many useful things to say about the spaces our minds inhabit when we are immersed in the gaming experience.
Next: A Theory of Fun for Game Design by Ralph Koster. I have not read this one yet, but a quick skim tells me that the ideas in this book will be compatible with the ideas in Mr. Gee’s book.
And finally, Chris Crawford on Game Design by Chris Crawford. I love this book. Crawford uses lessons learned over twenty years of designing and building games, to come up with 95 principles to keep in mind when starting the game development process. He is a wonderful writer.
Only a few more weeks until A Feast for Crows hits the shelves. Five years is a long time to wait for a sequel.
Kingdom
This is the first draft of my version of one of the first video games I ever played. Variously called Kingdom or Hammurabi, it is a simple economic game. I first played it in the Impressions 5 Science Center in Lansing, Michigan. I must have been about eleven years old.
You are the ruler of a kingdom. Your duty is to acquire land and peasants. You do this by planting crops, feeding your peasants, and indulging in simple land speculation (buy low, sell high). Chaos enters the system in the form of rats eating your grain, peasants dying of plague, and variation in the price and fertility of your land. The “bushel of grain” is the standard unit of currency.
Right now the balance of values is as follows:
-Each peasant eats 20 bushels of grain a year
-It takes 2 bushels of grain to plant an acre of land
-Each acre of planted land will grow between 2 and 5 bushels of grain
-If you under-feed your peasants, they will starve to death.
If you try to spend more grain than you have, the game will simply do nothing when you click the button. And this leads me into the “to do†list for the game
-alerts which tell you when you are spending too much.
-adding logic so that each peasant can farm no more than 10 acres of land
-allowing a set number of years so the game does not continue forever
-if too many peasants die, the survivors revolt and cast you from power
I like this kind of game. It packs a nice amount of complexity into a very small package. I imagine that the idea for Warcraft grew out of something very like this.
Aquisitions
Now that class has started and I have no free time, I have gone back to reading books and listening to music. I briefly moved away from reading purely for pleasure and picked up Flash Hacks, a book which contains 100 “tips and tricks” for the serious Flash hacker. The day after that, Chris Crawford on Interactive Storytelling appeared in my Amazon.com gold box, which I took as a sign that I was ABSOLUTELY required to purchase it. I am glad I did, because it is a fantastically interesting and enjoyable book.
In the last couple of weeks I have picked up a couple of novels; the first being Shaman’s Crossing by Robin Hobb, which is every bit as good as her previous books in the Live Ship Traders, Farseer and Tawny Man trilogies. And just today I began reading Forty Signs of Rain, an eco-thriller by Kim Stanley Robinson.
But life is not all about reading: In the past few weeks I have picked up three CDs which I have been listening to nonstop: Action Packed: The Best of the Capitol Years, a best-of collection of the songs of Richard Thompson; Bacchanal/1969, a double-album set of the songs of Gabor Szabo; and Everybody Hollerin’ Goat, a collection of songs performed by Otha Turner and the Rising Star Fife and Drum band.
This last CD in particular is amazing. Listen to the samples on the amazon.com page. If you hear something and say Where have I heard that before, it is probably “Shimmy She Wobble”, which was played in Gangs of New York, in the opening scene of the movie, just before the big Five Points fight.
Aaannddd last but not least, I spent $12.00 on the “Best of the Web” issue of Step Inside Design magazine, because it highlights a couple of projects I worked on while at BBK Studio: Discovering Design and Pique.
Katrina: Articles of Note
Katrina: Pointing Fingers
Actually, the finger-pointing started before the hurricane hit the mainland.
Who is to blame for lack of preparedness in this disaster? Well, since no-one in this country has EVER prepared for a natural disaster to the full extent they were capable, that is kind of a pointless question. So let us say, who was responsible for the levees bursting?
The New Orleans government? Nah, not really. New Orleans has not had the money for that level of civil engineering in, well, forever.
The Louisiana government? Hmmm. Didn’t they request money to improve the levees and get turned down repeatedly? So not really their fault.
The Federal government? Well, they were the ones who refused to give the state and local government the money they needed to fix up the levees, so to a certain extent, YES. But not just this administration; for how long have the levees been too weak to withstand a category 5 hurricane? Forever. So call it the sum of the history of having a city below sea level in Hurricane Alley.
But: what was the most immediate, and most visible, nationwide result of the levees bursting?
The spike in gas prices. Across The. Entire. Country. A nationwide fuel crisis because the locals didn’t pile enough dirt between them and the lake? Don’t think so. The cognitive dissonance in that idea could kill a man.
The single most important material in our economy flows from the gulf, up through the New Orleans area, and from there to the rest of the country. And people are nitpicking about who should have been responsible for bringing in the Army Corps of Engineers last year to fix the place up.
The real answer is, the oil companies and their employees are the ones who, from the day the first pipeline went in, should have been building up the levees and hardening that whole part of the gulf against something like Katrina. Sure, New Orleans is not (officially) the property of Big Oil, but don’t you think that if you build pipelines through a city, it is YOUR responsibility to protect the city, not the city’s responsibility to protect your oil, especially if that oil is for distribution to THE ENTIRE COUNTRY????
If you want to point a finger, point it at the people who turned a sharp profit the day the Gulf coast drowned.
Assholes.
Katrina: Omnia Mutantur
One of the highest points of my vacation to New Orleans—other than seeing my Dad and stepmother—was a visit to the Audubon Aquarium of the Americas, just down the street from the French Quarter. I took many photos, and got to experience the wonder of seeing some amazing animals at arms’ length.
Now a great many fish (maybe 50% so far) have died because the filters and pumps for the tanks haven’t had power for eight days.
When I talked to Dad yesterday he asked me how it felt to be one of the last people to see New Orleans as it once was.
Disorienting.
I took about 50 photos, of Dad and Linda, of my brother Kurt, and Dad’s dogs, some of the local wildlife and the fish in the aquarium, and a few random shots of the French Quarter. I start to feel like I missed a spectacular opportunity, then I realize that people have been taking pictures of NOLA since the camera was invented, so the fact that I didn’t take a picture of the magnolia trees along the river doesn’t mean that such a picture was never taken. Just not by me.
And I will happily trade a thousand professional photos of the Mississippi River for one off-center shot of my Dad and brother standing in the mouth of a shark.
Katrina: Extraordinary Letter From the CFR Global Health Program
Across the region we have some of the worst poverty in America, and most of that poverty has a black face. Mississippi, Alabama, and Louisiana: these are states that consistently, since the Civil War, have ranked in the bottom five states in America for virtually every social achievement, from education and infant mortality to police corruption. Government, for many of the region’s poor, has had one of two faces: corruption or overt neglect. New Orleans has had one of the highest murder rates in the nation for decades and a notoriously corrupt police force. In our experience dealing with catastrophes and epidemics overseas, there is a DIRECT correlation between the historic relationship between government and its people, and the willingness of the populace to believe in and correctly respond to government instructions. Of course tens of thousands of people failed to evacuate: why believe the government this time? And of course those folks who are slowly starving and baking in New Orleans assume that government has abandoned them.
… none of the people now trapped in New Orleans or wandering around in shock along the Mississippi/Alabama coastal communities have any idea what is going on. They have no electricity, and therefore no television or radio. Information is entirely rumors. When reporters interview them, these desperate souls are grilling the journalists for news. This means that the comfort of observed leadership is completely absent. No matter what the Mayor of New Orleans says, his people cannot hear him. They do not see the vast destruction. I doubt more than a handful of the folks trapped inside New Orleans at this moment have any idea how massive the damage to the Gulf Coast is.