Giraffe Adventures is so close to being finished & it's the last thing I really wanted complete before school starts back up (which happens in two days), but you know what? I don't feel like working on it.
So there.
So that's it for a while, I probably won't get back to game development for a few months. TRY TO SURVIVE WITHOUT ME.
Monday, August 31, 2015
Tuesday, August 25, 2015
Giraffe Adventures Update #3
I got back to work on Giraffe Adventures today after avoiding it for quite a while. Here's the thing with choose your own adventure stories: even if you're only giving the reader binary choices, after just 10 pages you have 2^10 = 1,024 story threads. ONE THOUSAND AND TWENTY GOD DAMN FOUR. In practice, of course, it doesn't necessarily work out to quite that many, as threads are terminated in story endings or merged with other threads.
Both of these mitigation tactics, however, carry certain limitations. You can't just end a thread because you feel like it. I mean, you can, obviously, but then you've ruined the whole experience for the poor sap that took the time to read your stupid thing just to end up at a shit ending. Don't get me wrong, Giraffe Adventures already has a few shit endings, but I want to avoid them as much as possible.
Thread merging is a whole different beast. It's really difficult to do right, to make it work while maintaining continuity in the story, & at the same time it's kind of a bullshit thing to do to the reader. It really only benefits the writer & maybe not even that since it makes writing the story a confusing mess. To the reader who chooses to give the story multiple readings, it's just annoying. Making different choices just to end up in the same place as before kind of defeats the whole spirit of choosing your own adventure, right? Of course, I'm merging threads like mad right now.
The old choose your own adventure books that I used to read as a kid were fun for their novelty but they were always pretty terrible. I could recognize that even as a kid, though maybe I couldn't tell what exactly made them so bad. Now I know. They did all the things that I just wrote about not doing, but look, they did it because they had to. They had to cram it all into like 50 pages. My upper bound on pages, on the other hand, is large enough to be considered infinite. It is equal to the maximum number of pages I could possibly write in my entire life.
YOU GUYS. Do you see how hard I'm overthinking the crafting of tale of a retarded baby giraffe who does things like catch great white sharks in his urethra & hang out in pyramids with Beyonce & Karl Malone? This is why I can't get shit done. I'm just going to get drunk tonight & finish this thing.
Both of these mitigation tactics, however, carry certain limitations. You can't just end a thread because you feel like it. I mean, you can, obviously, but then you've ruined the whole experience for the poor sap that took the time to read your stupid thing just to end up at a shit ending. Don't get me wrong, Giraffe Adventures already has a few shit endings, but I want to avoid them as much as possible.
Thread merging is a whole different beast. It's really difficult to do right, to make it work while maintaining continuity in the story, & at the same time it's kind of a bullshit thing to do to the reader. It really only benefits the writer & maybe not even that since it makes writing the story a confusing mess. To the reader who chooses to give the story multiple readings, it's just annoying. Making different choices just to end up in the same place as before kind of defeats the whole spirit of choosing your own adventure, right? Of course, I'm merging threads like mad right now.
The old choose your own adventure books that I used to read as a kid were fun for their novelty but they were always pretty terrible. I could recognize that even as a kid, though maybe I couldn't tell what exactly made them so bad. Now I know. They did all the things that I just wrote about not doing, but look, they did it because they had to. They had to cram it all into like 50 pages. My upper bound on pages, on the other hand, is large enough to be considered infinite. It is equal to the maximum number of pages I could possibly write in my entire life.
YOU GUYS. Do you see how hard I'm overthinking the crafting of tale of a retarded baby giraffe who does things like catch great white sharks in his urethra & hang out in pyramids with Beyonce & Karl Malone? This is why I can't get shit done. I'm just going to get drunk tonight & finish this thing.
Monday, August 17, 2015
Justin Bieber's Mega CockBlockaz Official Release!
The internet's premier Beliebers-only puzzle game is now available from potatoclockgames.com!
While the first installment of Justin Bieber's now infamous Mega CockBlockaz puzzle game series was released in Japan to overwhelmingly positive reviews, legal battles over the game's graphically sexual nature and overtly racist message stalled & eventually prevented an official U.S. release. The game's sequel, Justin Bieber's Mega CockBlockaz 2, has been censored heavily for U.S. audiences, though keen players will still find it difficult to ignore the game's racist overtones. Bieber has publicly denounced the U.S. version, complaining that it, "seriously detracts from [his] original message."
Get in on the controversy! See what all your favorite celebrities are blathering on about!
"While I am obviously disgusted by the game's shameless racist soapboxing, I cannot help but to find myself equally enthralled by the way that these brilliant puzzles have changed the way that I see the world. Everything that I have, I owe to this game."
-Kim Kardashian and also Bill Gates
LET'S BLOCK SOME COCKS!
While the first installment of Justin Bieber's now infamous Mega CockBlockaz puzzle game series was released in Japan to overwhelmingly positive reviews, legal battles over the game's graphically sexual nature and overtly racist message stalled & eventually prevented an official U.S. release. The game's sequel, Justin Bieber's Mega CockBlockaz 2, has been censored heavily for U.S. audiences, though keen players will still find it difficult to ignore the game's racist overtones. Bieber has publicly denounced the U.S. version, complaining that it, "seriously detracts from [his] original message."
Get in on the controversy! See what all your favorite celebrities are blathering on about!
"While I am obviously disgusted by the game's shameless racist soapboxing, I cannot help but to find myself equally enthralled by the way that these brilliant puzzles have changed the way that I see the world. Everything that I have, I owe to this game."
-Kim Kardashian and also Bill Gates
LET'S BLOCK SOME COCKS!
Tuesday, August 11, 2015
Blocking the Last Few Cocks
CockBlockaz is at the point where I'd feel Ok about releasing it but there's still a lot that I could do. There are a few missing sound effects, a couple of puzzles I'd like to replace, a lot of placeholder text still hanging around. Also, at the moment nothing happens when you 100% the game, aside from a number on the screen unceremoniously changing from 96 to 100, which is a bit of a let down. I'll just keep working down the checklist until I get to the end of it or get bored of it. Either way, I'm saying one week to release.
GET READY TO BLOCK SOME COCKS.
GET READY TO BLOCK SOME COCKS.
Friday, August 7, 2015
Surprise Double Header!
STOP THE FUCKING PRESSES.
Head over to potatoclockgames.com to snag 2 of the worst games ever made! These were going to be part of Outer Space Future Battle Massacre 1997 but just didn't quite fit in, so I'm releasing them on their own.
Revenge of the Vengeance from the Future of Outer Space is a short (like, 1 small level short) first person shooter made in Game Maker. PROTIP: you should not try to make a first person shooter in Game Maker. I can't believe it works at all. The music is pretty good & the enemy models are homemade stuffed animals but somehow that doesn't make up for the horrible controls & even worse level design.
HyperLincoln is an almost sort of cool fake computer hacking game. It's actually the first of like 10 levels that I just never got around to making. I'd kind of like to finish it but I had no idea of how to really program when I started it & the code is a god damn nightmare so this is all you get. It's winnable in about 2 minutes once you know what you're doing.
Head over to potatoclockgames.com to snag 2 of the worst games ever made! These were going to be part of Outer Space Future Battle Massacre 1997 but just didn't quite fit in, so I'm releasing them on their own.
Revenge of the Vengeance from the Future of Outer Space is a short (like, 1 small level short) first person shooter made in Game Maker. PROTIP: you should not try to make a first person shooter in Game Maker. I can't believe it works at all. The music is pretty good & the enemy models are homemade stuffed animals but somehow that doesn't make up for the horrible controls & even worse level design.
HyperLincoln is an almost sort of cool fake computer hacking game. It's actually the first of like 10 levels that I just never got around to making. I'd kind of like to finish it but I had no idea of how to really program when I started it & the code is a god damn nightmare so this is all you get. It's winnable in about 2 minutes once you know what you're doing.
Monday, August 3, 2015
On Save State Hacking
CockBlockaz auto-saves the player's progress whenever a new puzzle is solved. Saving the game state is a pretty simple affair; there are 25 puzzles, each of which is in one of three possible states (locked, unlocked, or solved). So all I have to do is write a 25-character long string (one character per puzzle) to a text file, using the characters 0, 1 & 2 to represent the 3 possible states. For instance, "1000000000000000000000000" means that the first puzzle is unlocked while the rest are locked (this is the initial state of the game).
So that's fine. But, obviously, anyone could open up that text file and edit the string to mark every puzzle as available or completed. My general stance on this matter is, who gives a fuck? There's no cash prize for completing the game (as far as I know?) & no online leaderboards or anything, so the only motivation to hack the save file is for the pure joy that certain flavors of crypto-nerds get from doing those kinds of things. I think that's great. In fact, it makes me want people to hack my save states.
But now I have an unexpected problem. If I'm approaching save state hacking as a sort of meta-game, just a fun, geeky thing to do, then my current save file is way too easy to figure out! I could obfuscate the shit out of it so that only the serious cryptokids could figure it out, but that's not really what I want. How do you encrypt a string, but just enough to make it a little bit of a challenge, something that anyone with the motivation to try could figure out? I'm not sure, but I'm gonna give it a shot.
First person to successfully hack the CockBlockaz save state wins!
So that's fine. But, obviously, anyone could open up that text file and edit the string to mark every puzzle as available or completed. My general stance on this matter is, who gives a fuck? There's no cash prize for completing the game (as far as I know?) & no online leaderboards or anything, so the only motivation to hack the save file is for the pure joy that certain flavors of crypto-nerds get from doing those kinds of things. I think that's great. In fact, it makes me want people to hack my save states.
But now I have an unexpected problem. If I'm approaching save state hacking as a sort of meta-game, just a fun, geeky thing to do, then my current save file is way too easy to figure out! I could obfuscate the shit out of it so that only the serious cryptokids could figure it out, but that's not really what I want. How do you encrypt a string, but just enough to make it a little bit of a challenge, something that anyone with the motivation to try could figure out? I'm not sure, but I'm gonna give it a shot.
First person to successfully hack the CockBlockaz save state wins!
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