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[nathy after dark]

@i03 creations You are correct on both counts, technically! The riddle of a person with four moms is actually a real-life situation for someone I went to high school with. She was adopted by a lesbian couple (two moms) who eventually split up and remarried new lesbian partners (2 stepmoms). Quadrimom!

I made some changes to the to-do list on the first post for scope control: no more zine, and no crowdfunding campaign. I'm probably going to do the whole game in a collage art style on zero budget—this is contingent on whether I think this project would qualify as fair use of copyrighted materials. I'll try to write a post on that soon.

Very little progress on the game itself, although I've had a few more tremendous inspirational experiences. I don't wanna talk on those until I can actually convert them into tangible features/content for the game. Don't wanna let myself stay bogged down with inspo posts forever.

[nathy after dark]

Quick Expansion on the Vibe

This morning I had a new insight into how the Vibe should work. The point of the Vibe is to capture the overwhelming complexity of a mental/emotional life lived deeply. So it would be kind of weird if the Vibe was always just showing you labels of what you're feeling, i.e. "Depression" and "Panic Attack" and "Apathy" labeled right off the bat. In real life, you can feel something hundreds of times before you learn the right name for it. That's one of the scariest things about feelings! So I'm adding a mechanic where special states of the Vibe do have names and special effects, but their names are a mystery until you unlock them in dialogue.

In real life, simply knowing the name of a feeling, can give you the sense of strength/control it takes to make informed choices and counteract that feeling. One of the big drawbacks of Depression Quest is the all-or-nothing mechanic where some choices are simply unavailable no matter what:



It's a very poignant mechanic to teach neurotypical people how hard things can be, but in my experience seeing depression as a deterministic force never helped anyone with depression find healing. So I want opportunities for the player to make very good choices even when their character is in a terrible emotional place. Because in life we really can pull it off sometimes. People are strong AF!

Band Name Guessing Game!

Here's the board as it currently is, plus some expanded hints:

The Band-name Guessing Game

+ 1 point for naming the source of inspiration for each fake band name.
+ 1 Extra point given for a good explanation of the joke/pun behind it.
+ Endless goodwill points if you find any of my jokes funny

You can guess on as many of the names as you want to at the same time.

Number. Band name -- Hint
1. Mystyk Spyryl -- Fictional band from a grunge-y cartoon of the late 90's. (Daria) +1 point rarelikeaunicorn
2. Hungry for Apples -- Got milk?
3. Mutant Patriarchy -- Alternate title for one of the most popular comic series ever
4. Acid Reasoning -- Listen to this album carefully for a phrase that sounds like something else.
5. Pyrosis -- Fictional band from a sci-fi comic book to return on February 28
6. Quadrimom -- Play on the title of an indie game. Bonus point: Explain a situation where a person could have 4 moms in real life. (Octodad) +2 points io3 creations
7. Vlad and the Not-My-Presidents -- Current American politics
8. Nancy Alpha Tango -- Don't try to decode it with this.
9. RM Taxi -- One letter shift away from a real Chicago rock band -- What they would be named if they were from Utah, and why
10. 20-minutes Adventure -- Quote from a TV cartoon whose 3rd season ended not a really long time ago
11. The Soft Hugs -- They're from another game with a TIGSource dev log!
12. Pickle Jar Hero -- Not actually from the same TV show as #10
13. Every Girl a Goddess -- Based on the name of a YouTube channel that officially ended recently.
14. Fruit Sex -- Very obscure reference to a classic DC comic book by Alan Moore
15. Ahoy, Smexi -- Reference to a Noah Baumbach film
16. Fudge Bourbon McQueen -- Reference to a recent film adaptation of a famous mystery

[rarelikeaunicorn]

1. Mystyk Spyryl -- Fictional band from a grunge-y cartoon of the late 90's.

Mystik Spiral! Trent's band on Daria.

[nathy after dark]

Yasssss @rarelikeaunicorn! 1 point to you! The additional joke is that while Trent mentions it as "Mystyk Spiral" with two y's, I've given them the largest amount of y's physically possible.  

They often introduce themselves as, "We're Mystik Spiral, but we're thinking of changing the name." Some of the alternate names have included "Helpful Corn" and "Something-Something Explosion". They also wondered aloud if it would help if they "spelled Mystik with 2 Ys".

[nathy after dark]

This is going somewhere

Here's a series of recent events, big and small, affecting the development of Space Bard:

- I started writing for a sketch comedy show at my college.








- I got a job programming an API for the campus library's archive of Utah newspapers.
- I got accepted to write weekly articles for Her Campus Utah, and I've published 2 so far!
- My classes this semester are more rewarding than they've ever been. I say this at the start of every semester.)

Each one of these new things comes with amazing advantages for my career, but take more time away from Space Bard development. There's one more thing, though, that I was able to spin back to the project's advantage.  

- I'm taking a seminar class called Cross-Cultural Existentialism in Film and Literature. The assigned readings/viewings are largely decided by the students! So far literally all of it has fit in the realm of inspiration for Space Bard. I told my professor about the project, and she's going to accept it as my semester-long journal assignment. So now, I'm being graded on whether I finish episode 1. Sure lights a fire under my ass.

Engine upgrades

I wrote a deviously clever pull request of Fractive that lets me define flexible macros in story text. With this, I implemented a basic system for making sections of text conditional on the current Vibe state.

Then today, I really dug into the capabilities of having Phaser embedded alongside Fractive, and implemented a super zany visualization of the Vibe:



I mentioned earlier that I wanted to have the Vibe visualized in a small section of the HUD. Today in one of my classes we were looking at Jackson Pollack and other abstract artists, and I realized "That's so stupid! The Bard's emotions are anything but compartmentalized, and if I can get away with it, why not have them literally obscuring the player's entire view of the world?"

[JobLeonard]

- I started writing for a sketch comedy show at my college.
- I got a job programming an API for the campus library's archive of Utah newspapers.
- I got accepted to write weekly articles for Her Campus Utah, and I've published 2 so far!
- My classes this semester are more rewarding than they've ever been. I say this at the start of every semester.)

Really nice to read that things are going well for you!

Aside from your own reflections, they all sound like things where you will learn skills and gain insights that are broadly applicable and will positively influence this project too. As long as they don't take all time away from it I suspect they will help directly and indirectly in the long run

[Sanud]

It's great when there's an external motivator like a college class to kick your ass into development! I miss college and the free time it gives 

[nathy after dark]

@JobLeonard you're absolutely right about the positive impact this all can have on the game. The sketch show is helping solidify my comedy skills and be more confident that I can make the game actually funny. The library job is connecting me to all kinds of bizarre artifacts from Utah's past, which can actually be direct inspirations for Planet U.T.A.H. -- like this old advice column that's so freaking adorable:





For a long time I've been planning for one of the episodes to be a deconstruction of romance in games/dating sims. First place I'll go for research: The Heartitorium!

And since the project is so multimedia maybe some of these scans will even end up in the game for players to puzzle over.

@Sanud absolutely! Sometimes I get really upset with myself when I can't find time to work without external motivators. I have this high expectation in myself that my internal motivators should be just as, if not more important, than external ones. But really, it's way easier to embrace it and engineer some external motivators every once in a while to trick the brain into caring.

[JobLeonard]

Is that column public domain? Because if so that thing needs to find a  place in the game :D

[nathy after dark]

It is indeed.

[nathy after dark]

Commemorating the brief moment when this thread had 69 replies and 5280 (1 whole American mile!!) worth of pageviews. Seems special somehow.

[JobLeonard]

So, John Perry Barlow passed away this week, and due to this I learned a whole lot of things about him that I did not know about before. Incredibly inspiring person.

It somehow feels.. I dunno, thematically relevant to what you're doing? I'm not sure how, but still, I have a feeling you should listen to/read all of this, in this order:





https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2018/02/john-perry-barlow-internet-pioneer-1947-2018

https://www.thisamericanlife.org/74/conventions/act-three (transcript: https://www.thisamericanlife.org/74/transcript#act3 )

https://w2.eff.org/Misc/Publications/John_Perry_Barlow/HTML/cynthia.html

[nathy after dark]

I've watched the first video. So intense, and I agree, in some way it's hard to pinpoint, very relevant.

Your legal concepts of property, expression, identity, movement, and context do not apply to us. They are all based on matter, and there is no matter here.

Our identities have no bodies, so, unlike you, we cannot obtain order by physical coercion.

Like, you can almost take that snippet and apply it to the whole realm of hyperreal imagination/fiction/art/ideology that I'm trying to express in the game.

[JobLeonard]

Right? It felt thematically related

The rest of the stuff is just as powerful but for different reasons entirely.

[nathy after dark]

I've gotten to everything but the last link at the moment. From my own research, he actually wrote the lyrics of a song called "Salt Lake City" so there's another huge connection. I'll have to research more about Barlow and the Dead's connection to SLC.

From the This American Life snippet, I've come up with a new fake band name: Unix Weenies by Armani. 

With regard to concerns about the free, open internet, I've been researching more and more into MaidSafe's SAFENet. Super cool stuff.

[JobLeonard]

"Salt Lake City, just really makes Des Moines look second rate"

Hahaha, weird how I barely know anything about either place but how the joke gets across anyway

Unix Weenies by Armani. 

Hahaha, yes! That one stood out to me as well! I bet it was one of the jokes he used in the Steve Jobs roast

Hope you'll find some cool inspiration from all this!

[nathy after dark]

Welcome to the Trash House (also, TypeScript is bae)

I'm trying to be more disciplined about working on the projects that are so important to me, including this one. I want to be able to say on any given evening that "Today I took legitimate steps forward that are reflected in the working product, not just in some Trello board of whacky ideas that will probably get cut." My Travel Writing professor tells us that the best time of the day to write without distractions is 4:30 A.M., and after reluctantly trying it for the first time, I've learned that he's totally right—and I'm gonna try and leverage that schedule to guarantee at least an hour or two of Space Bard work every morning.

I got two poems accepted into a local self-published anthology called "Poetry and Other Pleasures", and got invited to help bind the books by hand at a place called Trash House, so of course I knew I had to go do that. Trash House lived up to the punk ethos I was hoping it would, and I made some new friends who helped me nail down more of the core philosophical concepts in the game, as well as make a complete story outline for the five episodes.

I'm also making the transition from scripting the game in pure ECMAScript 5 (the version of JavaScript that modern browsers can actually execute directly) towards writing the code in TypeScript, the same language Fractive is written in. This has already alleviated so many headaches for me by allowing me to just write the engine with OOP. It's gonna pay off like crazy.

There's also a bunch of new developments to the design of the Vibe, so maybe later today I'll post pictures of my notes.

[JobLeonard]

> also, TypeScript is bae

Yes, yes it is.

[nathy after dark]

@JobLeonard of course, when I went this morning to start re-integrating the Typescript classes with the codebase so they could run in the browser, everything started blowing up. I think I could use a better primer on integrating modules with the browser JavaScript environment. Do you know of any good resources that might lead me towards the best practices rather than fiddling around with hacks in my build script?

EDIT: Ah never mind! I found a good solution.

[JobLeonard]

EDIT: Ah never mind! I found a good solution.

Nuh-uh, that's not how it works! You have to share it now!

At least a general outline

Think of all the times you had to google a fix for a driver bug or something, and all you found was a forum where someone asks the exact same question, followed by an "nvm, found a solution", and how frustrating that experience was.

It's like that quote from Gladiator: "What We Do In Life Post On-Line, Echoes In Eternity"