Author: Ward

I’m the creator and operator of this little corner of the internets, writing on all things related to art and more specifically my experiences trying to figure this whole thing out. I guess I’m trying to figure out life, too, but mostly I just post about art here.

From The Vault

I thought I would dust off the blog, and in the process of the house-cleaning I came across these two drafts of posts that I never published (till now).  While inarguably from a different period in my life, I found in re-reading them something, something latent worth sharing – or, if I am to be honest to say they are worth exposing – for what they are: purpled and incomplete.  Like any draft, they are forever dying from a lack of words and lucidity.  Nevertheless, when has a parent ever not loved their own children over all others?

Decisions, Decisions, Decisions

DRAFT February, 2011

Calm thyself, little pollen.  The great river flows and we are just here as spectacle and spectator.   Oh, how we languish amongst the many eddies and tide pools believing it is our own gravitas that so conjoins the river’s waters into these turbulent times when instead it is the river in its buoyant, orotund song that carries the melody that is our life.  I am often reminded how spectacularly fortunate, lucky, even spoiled much and most of my life has been.  Even amongst the innumerable hallmark moments that capture my own picture-perfect postcard moments of auto-perfidy still I find a humored malaise that belies my contentment in sordid slices that sluice over me.

I As Coward

DRAFT May, 2011

I as coward? Yes. Coward. I am a coward. I wish it were different. I wish I might be truer to the many multitudes of words in my mind and in my mouth, spewing out the very shadows of lies that stand resolute to the image of my self that I wish I were. But I am the Napoleon on fears and the Caesar of defeats, I stand here resolute to say I am coward.

I remember myself as child in front of the globe, as well as standing in front of the many maps that can be found at Metsker Maps on First Avenue in Seattle, wherein in the five-year-old child in me screams to me over and over again “I want to see that and That and THAT!”. But I go deafly, even mutely, from the store knowing that I live here in Seattle, a displaced central New Yorker amongst the dander and down layers of PNW life. Here I am. Coward. Do you remember when I did not climb Kilimanjaro, starting out on the plains of Africa trekking my way to the summit where, even in this remote land, the steel cans puncture the azure skies? Do you remember when I did nothing on the treadmill while the planes slammed into the towers, the debris that fell in rag-doll time from heights meant for angels? There is was not much for me that I knew how to do when my grandmother died; just breath and hope there was nothing my absence would suspend. I remember fondly the road-trip I did not take to New Zealand in a beat up VW van, a sojourn to revere the sites that disciple Peter Jackson has, with 35mm cellular uncture, wrought now most holy. How many times I have not stopped to introduce myself to the smile wrapped in sunshine and water falling hair? Were there not nights I would have been better home with friends than trying to cram one more line of code into a source code that will never be there to help me when I am sick? How many times have I dared to not deviate from the marks on the door that everyone is trying to match? And when she asked for my hand for life, did I not willing give her mine because I believed any hand, even a cold dead hand, was better than no hand at all? I am a coward. But then so aren’t we all? Are we not all the compromisers and usurpers to our needs? We step to the beat drummed by The Others, and follow with musket resting on shoulder to do our duty and die. Cannon fodder us all. We cowards.

site design first draft

I am pretty stoked to do a first draft of the new site design.  I have wanted to do something like this for the site for quite a while, but I have not had much opportunity other than quick jots on actual paper with a real-life pencil.  Till now, that is (see below for more on that).  You will note that there is a wavy line half down the drawing, denoting the separation between the header and footer of pages.  Content for the site will go in the middle and flow from top to bottom.  There are a few more variations on theme I want to try, but I am happy with this as a rough first draft.

Continue reading “site design first draft”

camera works!

For those of you who know me, that is not what you might think it means.  I finally got the camera working on the 2D HTML5 engine I have started to engineer.  It already supports some bells and whistles such as being completely configuration driven, and allows me to build arbitrarily sized maps from sprites.   Already it uses a simple painter’s algorithm to make sure that sprites overlap each other in a way that makes senses from the 2D projection.  And as of yesterday, I now have the camera following the player around the map, even correctly accounting for the edge of the world map.  You can try it out if you want (Left = A, Up = W, Down = S, Right = D, Re-center = X).

Continue reading “camera works!”

project unigon

I guess it makes sense to actually post in detail about project unigon, especially since this is why I created this blog in the first place.  There are really two parts to this project; first, there is the motivations underlying the project; and second, there is the intent of the project itself, as it were.   I already share a bit of this in the about section of this site, but to quickly recap, my passion is create storytelling experiences.  And while my current day job is somewhat related to this, I wanted a more direct outlet to things I care about as a professional.

And like every (indie) developer out there, part and parcel of the process of developing a game (or any product for that matter) is determining what you can create with the resources you have available.  And to be frank, even though I have over a decade’s worth of experience as a full-stack engineer, I have little experience developing games.  So unlike game professionals who are just reapplying well-honed skills to their pet project, I must develop both the muscles and the application of said muscles.  Why do I mention this?  Because, part of project unigon is to expose me to the inner-workings of game engines, rendering, and story-telling.  And frankly there are a lot of skills I need to hone before I really get this train out of the station.  And of course, like any good project I hope that at the end of it I have something that I and others enjoying playing.

So what are the things that I want this game to be about?  While I love playing a lot of different game plays, both the style of game that I enjoy and the style of game that I feel I can wrap my brain around the most completely is fantasy-based RPGs.  Yes, there is really nothing too innovative here, and honestly, I am pretty okay with that.  And after reading a bit of Joseph Kim over at Quarterview, his ideas around +1 Design resonate a lot with me.  In a nutshell, he is talking about how to address the question of market differentiation to be competitive.  He posits it is more effective to incrementally improve on a current success than try to complete on a revolutionary (and untested) game design.  Granted, his insights are drawn more specifically from the mobile game marketplace which is hugely (grossly?) saturated.  And since I am not motivated innovate deeply in the game space, I am arguably doing a bit of affirming the consequent, or some other silly fallacy nonsense.

But what kinds of games do I find fun and enriching?  That is a long list that spans indie games like Fez!, Closure, Limbo, Journey, Kentucky Route Zero, Super Meat Boy, Dungeons of Dredmore, and Castle Crashers to name a few.  And then there are the more main stream examples such as Skyrim, L.A. Noire, Last of Us, Walking Dead, and Assassins Creed II.  Of late, I have been re-engergized by the emergence of games like  CardHunter and Sorcery! which embody the kinds of gameplay that I find immensely satisfying, albeit for different reasons.  CardHunter’s tactical movement with cards is an interesting take on battle mechanics, and Sorcery! which is as much just a good old-fashioned text-based action-adventure wrapped in a unique UX.  And of course, if we look at the games where I have spent a lot of time then we need not go farther than Baldur’s Gate, to a lesser extent Perfect World’s NeverWinter, and of course, the undisputed king, BioWare’s DragonAge series.  The one common thread is that all of them provide a deep story-telling mechanic set in a world which I personally find deeply satisfying.  I am not arguing that these are revolutionary game designs, and that is very much my point.  I am not, at least this point in my life, looking to re-invent a genre but instead just get deep into the creation of a deep, high-magic fantasy world.