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[nathy after dark]

Fiiiiine.

Basically the problem is Fractive works by bundling all of your story's JavaScript in one file, so you don't have to worry about access to functions and variables from other source files as long as they get bundled in such a way that the functions you need are declared in the right order. But TypeScript works by importing files from other files, which is a much more responsible way of doing things. Your TypeScript files won't compile if you reference a global identifier without importing it. The problem is, when you compile the TypeScript, it gets output as JavaScript files that call require() wherever you used an import command. require() isn't defined by default browser JavaScript, and even after installing something like require.js which implements the function, it won't work because all the code is in one file anyway after the Fractive bundling.

So, I basically hacked a way for the TypeScript to compile without using pesky import statements: wherever I need to access a type from another file, I do this at the top of the file that's referencing the other one:

Code:

declare class ClassINeed {
    constructor();
    FunctionINeed();
    etc: string;
};

That way the TypeScript compiles, but in the resulting bundled Fractive story, it works the irresponsible way, just counting on those types to be declared globally. 

[JobLeonard]

 

[nathy after dark]

Aside from it being a terrible practice, it seems like what I did would be a common enough use case that it's weird I had to discover the declare class syntax by myself.

[nathy after dark]

Not too old for design documents

I'm ready to admit that one of the biggest mistakes I've made in this project, is refusing to sit down and define the project and its limits. Just because the story is eclectic and messy doesn't mean I can be that way and keep going without any sense of grounding or direction. I've wasted a lot time like that (with the advantage, though, that some of the crazy boundless ideas I've had are still usable and are gonna form the core of the game's voice. It's time, though, to come back to earth so this thing can be real.

5-episode outline:



So the Vibe has 6 different aspects. What do they LOOK LIKE in terms of dialogue and character decisions?



That mind-blowing moment when I realized the Vibe was like a Rubix Cube:



My artist veto'd this mockup of a fake band poster:



(It says Mormon Foreplay.)

Fun Home!
The Salt Lake Acting Company brought in Fun Home: The Musical and I got to see it last night!



I cried my f***cking eyes out. It was especially cool because the tickets were free—they featured a zine I made in a local comics art exhibit that was paired with the show! I'm so proud.

[JobLeonard]

Analog design is so underrated. I've noticed that working with your hands helps with thinking so often - I sometimes think that my mind and body is subconsciously made of many different people, and that both of my hands are little dudes who have some pretty smart ideas that it can only communicate if I give them a non-verbal way to express themselves, like paper prototypes.

My artist veto'd this mockup of a fake band poster:



(It says Mormon Foreplay.)

I assume you're familiar with Neil DaCosta's work?

http://neildacosta.com/mormon-missionary-positions (NSFW-ish)

[nathy after dark]

I actually wasn't until just now. 

[JobLeonard]

 

And here I thought you were a person of high culture!

[nathy after dark]

Nahh I can be pretty out of the loop. That's why it's so awesome when people recommend things in my logs--Every little piece of inspiration becomes a part of the web of creative knowledge it takes to be good at dreaming up cool things.

Here's a photo I found in the archive at work today: Salt Lake City, April of 1892:



(Click on it--the original is massive)

[Samaras-Sama]

Still following this, keep it up!

[JobLeonard]

(Click on it--the original is massive)

Their viewer actually makes it impossible to just download the image, but I found a work-around:

- going full-screen in Firefox
- using browser zoom to zoom out to 30%
- right click, "view image"
- copy the resulting blob image, pasting that into GIMP
- crop to content

[nathy after dark]

Yikes @ all these broken image links

So I've been uploading all the images for this thread to postimage.org:



Large parts of the log might be incomprehensible right now without the pictures. I'll try and fix that at some point but I'm not looking forward to it.... I've been worried about preservation of my TIG logs for a long while now. Is anyone running an archive to stop historical info from disappearing forever when links go dead, etc? Also, is there a better more trustworthy and convenient image hosting site?? I don't remember why I settled on postimage but yeah.

Gah this might have also affected my other game's log... why meeeeeeee 

[CodeLobe]

You can use http://archive.today/ to make an archive of each page of a thread and keep the links in a file.
Or, File -> Save Page As...   

imgur has been around a while, decent image host.  https://www.flickr.com/ exists, Yahoo owned I think; More for photos and social media mumbojumbo, can still use it to host embedded images though.  I like http://catbox.moe/ for quick and easy image hosting, no worries about takedowns as long as the site op keeps it up.  Just had its 3rd birthday, still has my day 1 imgs up.  You can upload an image to Twitter (they may compress it) or tumblr then link to the image there.

I feel your pain.  Used to use some other image hosts that went down in the past.  Fortunately the thumbnails of the images were stored on a site I was posting to (reddit) so I was able to reverse image search some of the thumbnails to find where some images had been re-uploaded. 

Might think of getting some web hosting yourself.  There are free web hosts, but there's usually some catch.

[nathy after dark]

For all the good sticky notes have done for me as a productivity tool, it finally blew up in my face this morning.



It can be so useful to have a pad of sticky notes in your pocket but if you let that sh** run through the laundry... 

[JobLeonard]

Oh no!

I had that once with notes that I wrote on, I hope this didn't happen to you!

[nathy after dark]

Luckily no notes lost on my end, thanks to a new invention of mine! I call it my Laptop.



It's two flaps of cardboard with a hinge made of Gorilla Tape. I put my current TODO notes on the inside, and there's a special space on the front for whatever note I'm focusing on. I've found it really helps me to limit my focus to one task at any given moment. As of yet I haven't had a single sticky note get lost from this system! (I've lost so many sticky notes by keeping them in my pocket or on my (real) laptop.)

The other day I upgraded it with a manila envelope on the back for storing things like notes, business cards, stamps, more sticky notes, etc. Based on the inscription you can probably guess which classic sci-fi book I've been reading for the first time.



Then there's my more traditional New Laptop, a Lenovo IdeaPad 320 that only cost like $320. It's more lightweight, and hopefully more reliable, than the 6+ year-old hand-me-down laptops I've been using. I'm taking it to New York! I leave on Wednesday 

I'm working on getting my Ubuntu GamePack install as well set-up as possible before I get to the Recurse Center. And while I do that, binge-re-watching The Office to stave off the pre-trip nerves.



In other news I bought a typewriter for fun and for making zines:



It's a Royal Model-O Portable (or a very similar model--it didn't come with a manual). I ordered some new ribbon and got it installed yesterday morning to write a Patreon thank-you letter. But alas, this is the one of my three new laptops that won't be making the trip to NYC. It's too damn heavy, even if it comes with a carrying box.

[nathy after dark]

Why do you build me up, buttercup?
Post in which I eat these words

So for a long while this game has been in preproduction hell, and I decided while I'm at the Recurse Center for the summer, with the freedom to focus on my programming projects fulltime, I'd take drastic action against that. I revived Stream of Pretentiousness, my daily episodic vignette game, using SpaceFractive as a way to stress-test the engine and force myself to start implementing the features I'd need to add to make Space Bard viable in it.

This was a great decision, but yesterday I stepped back to assess how much work I've put in/still need to put in before SpaceFractive could be an acceptable candidate for Space Bard's engine. And that amount of work is massive, not to mention I'd be one of only two people capable of maintaining the engine even after it's usable. Yikes! That's fine for a small, loose project like Stream of Pretentiousness, but not an acceptable state of affairs for the game I've been dreaming about/pouring my soul into for more than a year already. So yesterday I learned enough Ink to prove it's a much better choice for Space Bard. Mostly thanks to inkjs, which I've already started contributing back to!

So yeah. Once again, big shift in the technical direction on this game. And continuing to be very heavy-hearted about the 0% progress I have to share.

[JobLeonard]

How does it compare to the Twine dialects?

http://twinery.org/

And continuing to be very heavy-hearted about the 0% progress I have to share.

Hey, the devlogs that make no real progress are the devlogs that keep on giving

[nathy after dark]

Twine was the engine for the first 30 Stream of Pretentiousness episodes. I liked it but I thought the syntax was really unweildy and not robust (at least in the default dialect of the newest version). Fractive was really nice because it was like Twine but with an approachable, extensible codebase and Markdown formatting. But, I think Ink is going to be the best candidate because it imposes a structure (something the lack of which I blame for accomplishing very little so far) on gameplay and is also extremely well-designed to slot into another engine, like Phaser.

As for this being the log that keeps on giving... Maybe I'll change my Patreon tagline to "Nat Quayle Nelson is making sporadic long-term devlogs" and just lean into what I'm best at. ;P

All this self-deprecation hopefully undercut by a loving, jestful attitude at the core of it. I ain't about that self-loathing artist shtick

[nathy after dark]

Lately my life's been a whirlwind...



I'm on my own in a new place and sometimes I feel like I'm not my whole self



This might just be another one of my stupid mega-projects, a whole lot of skeleton but no will to make it flesh



I always was more like this thing, just hopping around without much of anywhere to go



I always thought I had to write my own great big novel, but whenever I've attempted ambitious and original stories, I've gotten nowhere. I've been playing a lot of Openxcom and old Gameboy ROMs, looking at the source code for Blades of Exile and thinking how cool it'd be to port to SDL and web assembly, and it just leads me to think... what if game preservation, cross-platform accessibility, and adapting classics, is where I'm actually meant to be?

I've been thinking lots about this with all the free time and resources to be pursuing whatever I want in programming. Why is it that Space Bard is always the thing I procrastinate? I know all the signs of having too many ideas to bring to life so they all end up dead anyways.

[JobLeonard]

> I always thought I had to write my own great big novel, but whenever I've attempted ambitious and original stories, I've gotten nowhere.

If there's one thing I've learned, it's that the sketches that creative people make where they don't pressure themselves too much are usually their best work, or at the very least the seed of it.

The more you make a big deal out of it, the more you block yourself from the flow