Monthly Archives: Aug 2014

Aside 50: Out of Touch

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I need to come to terms with my growing irrelevance.

Everyone else is obsessed with smartphones while I just don’t care. I love to play singleplayer games while the world wants 4-player co-op. I want a DVD with a printed manual in a box when the masses want digital downloads and always-online storefronts. I want a desk with a keyboard shelf.

Do you know how bloody hard it was to find a desk with a keyboard shelf, let alone one big enough for an adult? You don’t, market forces say, even have a keyboard anymore. You’ve got a laptop, at best. Even then, you don’t really want a desk, you want a feature piece for the corner of your living room that needs to look pretty rather than actually get used.

I don’t think this universe has a place for me anymore.

Blog 602: You’re Not the Boss of Me

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Well, I couldn’t exactly play the ill-advised prequel without going on to cleanse my palate with the real deal. While floating around the grungy millenial streets of Deus Ex, I got to thinking about one feature that was particularly controversial about its prequel: boss fights. Because the original Deus Ex doesn’t actually have a final boss… Or does it?

Beware of spoilers.

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Bob Mooches Around the Free Fringe

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I was going to do a fringe write-up but SOMEBODY beat me to it. Ah well.

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I love the Edinburgh Fringe. Sometimes.

Last weekend I made the arduous journey northwards through the signal-less wastes of Northumberland and the Scottish Borders to visit one of my favourite cities. I adore Edinburgh; it’s the nearest major city to the town I grew up in, so I have a lot of fond childhood and teenage memories of visiting the place. Oddly though, we never used to go to the Fringe. I really don’t enjoy crowds, the last bus home was too early, and I wasn’t really into stand-up comedy before starting uni. These days though I seem to end up in Edinburgh about once a month visiting one of my best friends (Jono – more on that mess later), and I’ve started a bit of an annual tradition of popping up for a weekend and going to free fringe shows with my good friend Robbie.

This year I decided…

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Aside 49: Feature Creep

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As I progress with No Excuses, I realise that I’m pretty much implementing a top-down singleplayer Unreal Tournament. I’m actually okay with this, but I do wonder how much of a contortionist you’ll have to be to press all these buttons at the same time when I add the four five active abilities on top of these extra movement keys.

I finally added strafing the other week (after fixing the last of the animation bugs). Strafing was never in the original brief — Nox didn’t have strafing and that’s my baseline for combat and navigation. Nox also did not have dodge-jumping, which I intend to add soon enough to round out the strafing ability. I am probably going to throw on backpedalling for good measure too.

Gosh, programming AI behaviour around this is going to be a riot…

Blog 601: Mecanim

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Ah, I often moan about things in Unity being too difficult or weird for my brain and then struggle free in barely an evening. I stand by previous comments about how delightfully quick Unity is to get to grips with, even after lengthy off-periods playing through ill-advised prequels.

Today, then, let’s talk about animation systems.

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