My Cognitive Dissonance
What is the point to life? Such a broad question no doubt warrants a yawn from many. However, it is a question we all ask ourselves time and time again. Perhaps it changes constantly. Perhaps it’s never fully realized. Perhaps it cannot ever be fully realized. However, this is getting too broad. To think, we have to weed out wonderfully interesting prospects. Otherwise, what do we accomplish besides yearning for acknowledgment of those concepts we only faintly grasp. We can’t start at the beginning either, however. To give up all the knowledge we’ve accumulated in a lifetime is dooming ourselves to genericism and disinterest. No, we have to start exactly where we do start when our minds let us know that things are coming online. Where is this in the overall balance between nothing and everything? Whose to say. Very paradoxical that one can ramble on and on about coherent thinking when ones’ own thoughts are so dissonant.
My Modding Misadventures in Minecraft
I’ve made a few simple mods for Minecraft that I find enhance the enjoyment of the game for me. You can find them all here.
It’s Been Awhile
Well, it’s been quite some time since I’ve posted here. The main reason for that is the things I have accomplished have primarily been offline things (I lived with my Grandparents for a few months in New York and worked at a restaurant washing dishes.) Now that I’m back (actually for a couple of months now) I am back in school working towards my CS degree. Lately I’ve been a bit depressed since I haven’t found a job yet since returning and my classes are all online this semester so I haven’t had much social interaction. I’ve worked on writing some new tracks (here and here) but I feel I’m not committed enough to music since learning newer things is hard and it takes a lot of time to write songs without any return (besides the enjoyment of listening to them, which is good.) I pretty much feel “in the moment” all the time, but it’s a miserable place to be. Sometimes I wish I could afford to talk to a therapist, but at the same time, I feel like it wouldn’t be too much help and they would probably just put me on medication regardless of what I said. Other than that, I’ve made a few mods for Minecraft and although they are simple, I can’t imagine playing without them anymore (kind of spoiled by all the resources.)
Falling Sand Experimentations
Grass grows in soil. Good? I think I might keep it like that for now, since it looks cool!
Falling Sand Clone update
Well, I was bored recently and did a few minor updates to my falling sand clone. I added a brick-cement like material that forms into neat little bricks using some modulus math in the render loop. Also, I added a soil type that creates a variety of colors and forms a dirt like texture. Here’s a portion of a screenshot to show some of the new things.
Minecraft: Thoughts
Minecraft took the indie gaming crowd by surprise by reintroducing the sandbox theme to many people, and also being a runaway success for the creator, Notch (aka Markus Persson.) What started out as a small project shared among peers on javagaming.org moved quite rapidly to having a budding community. Even when I first played the game, I (like many people I suspect, based on the amount of suggestions for the game) saw the grand potential of such a simple yet open game that Minecraft was, and is.
At the time of this writing, the game has sold over 30,000 copies, and without any decline in view, things are looking good for the Minecraft community. Although the game is only in Alpha currently, it already has quite a bit of polish and hours and hours of gameplay to give, and for a very reasonable price as well. I would recommend anyone who has not tried the game, to head over to http://minecraft.net/ and try out the free version of the game. One issue I’ve thought about, however, is that since the Alpha version of the game is much more exciting than the creative version, people not intrigued by simply building structures, etc will overlook the title. Hopefully once the game is released, there will be a way to try out the survival elements in the game before purchase.
Overall, I would say Minecraft is one of the best purchases I’ve made recently. It gives me joy to be able to check the development log and read about all the effort being put into the game constantly, and get to try out new features and the like as they come. Really, I wish more devs would have this kind of raw communication with the community while the develop the games, instead of wondering why certain games are flops and others are so successful. You don’t need luck to create one of the most riveting sandbox games ever made, as evidenced by Minecraft. So get out there and start diggin’!
Record Keeping for the Modern Man
These days many of us have a great tool available to us that many before did not: the Internet. It is useful for many things but one thing that I have slowly begun to realize about growing up with the internet is that it really is a great record keeping device. Recently I stumbled upon a forum I used to post on, and luckily for me, it was still online. I decided to read a few things that I had posted back then and it was interesting to see how my perspective on things such as technology and other topics had changed (quite drastically) since then. Even looking back on the earlier posts on this blog I see many subtle changes in my psyche and in my world image. Many of us have left great traces on the history of the internet that we could go back and look and see some of the ways we thought, etc, but now that Twitter and Facebook and many other social networking sites are growing larger and more commonplace, even our small day-to-day activities and thoughts may be preserved for our future selves to read and reflect on.
More Work on Platformer
Made some new artwork for the game.
I’ve added many things to the game now. Ledges you can jump up through but not fall down through, breakable boxes, ice, new spike graphics, and more. The game work is coming along at a pretty good pace right now, and hopefully will continue until I get a first release out!
Platformer Sneak Peek
No guarantees I will finish this game but I thought I would submit a quick screenshot showing what the game looks like. I recently picked it back up after about 6 months without working on it, but I’ve already improved it quite a bit in just this one day.
