Coding simple prototype

Some free time has allowed me to get out of YouTube Tutorial Procrastination Corner and into Solid Progress Town.

The fun comes from a three-state door that will ultimately be the bones of the opening puzzle. Door needs pass, pass is crumpled, player needs to find a way to flatten it. What I’ve got here is the door and the pass and the rough inventory working … acceptably. The door reacts to no pass (“PASS REQUIRED”, bump player away from door trigger), differently to holding the crumpled pass (“PASS NOT RECOGNISED” , bumps player away from door trigger) and again to the flattened pass (the door, well, working as a door).

Obviously, all the stuff around this is just prototype mess, but the concept is working. All the things hide/display correctly, and the gating is working.

Quiet week, small win

Apologies for the lack of engineering posts, but I’ve got enough of the day job in my head already, to let it into my home life any more than it already is.

On a very much related note, the day job’s taken precedence this last week, but I have managed a small win - I’ve found a tool that I already use to help with planning: Notion.

I don’t propose to spend more time faffing around with an admin tool than working on the game, so I won’t be doing anything more clever than nested Kanban Boards.

Top Level Board

Level Layouts Board, where departments are assigned to Decks

The list of departments I’ve assigned to Deck 01

I love me a Kanban Board, so the idea of having a card on a board that I can click on, and be presented with a sub-board or list within it (and so on down the stack!) is delicious.

Keeping it small

Before I give myself the gift of massive overwhelm, I’m going to stop and intentionally limit myself to a demo of just this lowest deck to get a proper sense of how long things will take to make to a standard I’m happy with.

The things I want to have to call this a successful demo:

  • Working inventory system to allow for fetch-quest style puzzles.

  • Logo/intro screen

  • Title screen

  • Deck 01 functionally complete and populated with approximately 50% my own sprite assets for characters.

  • Placeholder art is acceptable, but I’d like to at least get the walls/floors in my own art if possible.

Stretch goals if things go well:

  • Dialogue trees for unlocking progress.

  • Music

  • Sound effects

  • Combining items from inventory for point & click style puzzles.

Pencil Prototyping

Yesterday I started mocking up the entry deck, a spaceport which will function very much like an airport (allows for some lightweight humour). Before that, I’d started the other day by just drawing a load of different ‘spoke’ elements outside a common main hub for a few decks. I was just getting a feel for what sort of variation I can get, and then I plan to quickly test the spaces to see if they feel about the right size.

Mini-maps of 4 potential decks.

With no real plan in mind, I just took the first one and started to adapt it to my idea of a spaceport, thinking about how it would function as an opening chapter allowing me to set the tone of the game

First go at the lowest deck

I figured you get off your ship in the non-VIP hangers, and are directed through a series of airport style areas. I took the ring element to the right, made it a single linear loop for security, and everything else started to fall into place. Shortly after I’d finished this, I texted it to a friend, and by the time I’d finished typing out the message I’d already figured out a change I wanted to make…

Revision made in about 3 minutes.

So I’d quickly decided there’d be a visible (if not ever playable) route for VIPs to skip security, via some NPCs at barriers, and I thought why not send the payer through duty free on their way into the station. Having done this on my iPad (with iconfactory’s Linea Sketch app, naturally), I was then in a position to throw the basic blocks into Aesprite, and immediately into GB Studio. The whole exercise from picking up one of the mini-maps took about 30 minutes. Most pleasing.

USG - Not making life too hard

Yesterday I mentioned my solution to altering a deck not being likely to scale well. The way I’d implemented the change was simple: when the player interacts with the actor on Deck 01 a global variable changes from 0 to 1. Whenever the player interacts with the lift Dog, the game is using an IF statement to check that one variable, then directing the logic to take one of two paths. If the variable is 0, selecting Deck 06 takes the player to the original Deck 06, but if the variable is anything else, selecting Deck 06 takes the player to altered Deck 06 with a hole in.

My concern is that this won’t scale well. If I have 6 decks, and many of them have multiple states, there might be a dozen or more altered versions decks, and I can’t have nested IF statements tracking all that. I don’t even know how deep GBStudio can nest IF statements.

Luckily, I’ve got loads of options:

  • I could use different versions of the lift scene to break up progression, so when certain events occur in game, I could divert the player to a new, updated version of the lift with an altered deck menu.

  • I can rigorously plan the game to keep it linear, making tracking things simpler.

  • I could abandon the idea of a single lift core between decks, and have segmented lifts that only go between certain decks. That can be worked into the story, as I was toying with the idea of decks being analogous to a sort of class system. It might be that to get to the upper decks, a new lift has to be unlocked by completing certain tasks, proving that your character has enough wit/charm/brains/fashion sense/whatever to be allowed higher up the structure.

  • I can use a combination of all these - none of them are mutually exclusive

USG - Baby Steps

Here’s the entirety of the available gameplay of Untitled Space Game. The lift attendant (dog) can take you to any of the 6 decks, and talking to the only NPC in the game on Deck 01 will cause Deck 06 to change state.

All of the available ‘gameplay’ of Untitled Space Game as of right now.

My plan is to keep up a little bit of progress every few days, even if it’s just small proofs of concept. All I aimed to do in this session was get the lift working, but I was able to stretch it out and make a little gating/progression. I’m not sure how scalable this method of switching is. I’ll explain what I’ve done later. Hopefully writing out the problem will present a solution.

USG - Planning

To make consistent progress on Untitled Space Game, even in small steps, I need an outline plan of how to approach this. I’m going to draw on my experience designing structural frames, and work in a sort of ‘sculpting’ method. I usually start with the broad strokes of a building, then refine it down as I go.

I’ve identified some key pillars that I can also switch between as and when I need a change of scenery:

  1. Story

  2. Puzzles

  3. Dialogue

  4. Art

  5. Design/Layout

Right now, I’m working on Design and Layout of the main game areas, and I’ll sculpt them down as and when I can. I’ve got a picture in my head of how the main layout will work, and it won’t take long to finish a bare bones working prototype to get a feel of the space, and whether it’s too big or too small. To speed that up, I’m planning on spending a bit of time in Tiled this week so I can draw maps nice and quickly.

Untitled Space Game

Inspired by a friend of mine, I’m embarking on a side project. The plan is to make a simple Game Boy game very much in the Space Quest yet System Shock area. The tools I’ve got to work with are a 10 year old MacBook Pro, my 4 year old iPad Pro 12.9”, a little bit of software specifically for creating Adventure Games, and a couple of pixel art editors. It’s been in a state of gestation in my brain for years, but if I don’t just get off my backside and start it now, it’ll never happen. I’ve even started actually spending a little bit of cash on some software to give myself a bit of impetus to do this thing.

Current outlay:

Subtle Notebook - £25 (or thereabouts including shipping)

Aseprite - £15.49

Pixaki - £10

GBStudio - Free (donationware)

Tiled - Free (also donationware)

Yeah, it’s pretty boring right now, but it works!


A visit from the PM

Tomorrow our business will be receiving a visit from the Rt Hon MP for Richmond and Prime Minister of the UK, noted diminutive Rishi Sunak. We are told that after the initial tour of the factory, we can ask un-vetted questions. I’ve spent the last week trying to think of a single question that has a reasonable chance of actually being answered, and I don’t think I’m doing so well. Here is a non-exhaustive list of what I’ve come up with:

  • What’s the plan for economic growth in the face of a swiftly falling population? Birth rate in the UK is at less than 1.6 and still falling.

  • Two of your biggest success were arguably the Windsor Framework and your deal with Albania. Both were examples of quiet competency, diplomacy, and compromise. Why then do you waste time on divisive, noisy policies like your Rwanda legislation, which will never work as an effective deterrent?

  • In 2022 you lost 485 councillors at the local elections, and in 2023 you lost another 1063. How many councillors can you predict to lose in May’s local elections?

  • When and where is the Square One you say Labour will return us to?

    • Is it before Liz Truss put another £500 per month on the average mortgage?

    • Is it a time when you get NHS care in a timely manner?

    • Is it a time when the Education System was respectably funded?

    • Is it a time before post truth populism gripped the Conservative Party?

    • Is it a time before we were changing Prime Ministers every year or two?

  • If the Treasury has the confidence to brief out a potential suite of £20B tax cuts, when can our International Aid Budget return to 0.7% of GDP?

  • Given the world is becoming more unstable and only getting worse, why has Army recruitment failed to hit its goals every year since 2010, and what is being done about it?

  • Was it wise to grant such dubious resignation honours for disgraced former Prime Ministers Boris Johnson and Liz Truss? Do they not cheapen honours bestowed upon regular people for lifetimes of public service?

I’m not sure any of these would get a straight answer, but tomorrow I’ve got to pick at least one. We’ll see how it goes.

Project HoHoHo22 - The Beginning

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As is now customary in the Pie Household, it’s time for me to decorate our windows with a festive silhouette design. This year I’ve decided on a simpler design than last, mainly to keep the cutting time down to something reasonable. Last year’s design probably took 40 hours all told, and that’s a bit much. This year it’s all about the hometown, with some iconic views that most tourist will recognise.

York Minster, as seen from Minster Gates

York Minster, as seen from Minster Gates

The Shambles, as seen looking towards Stonebow

The Shambles, as seen looking towards Stonebow

The two designs go one the two windows on the front of the house, and they’ll end up being cut and carved somewhat to make sure the important details don’t get lost between window frames. Initial cutting out of the panels is all done - next is the process of moving the designs onto the paper and cutting out the backgrounds.

People willing to tolerate Twitter can find a process thread at #HoHoHo22

Project Paperless

A long time ago, I was posting regularly here. There was a time when I even had ambitions of writing a series of posts about paperless working.

Well.

Now is the time. As part of an investor buyout in my company, paperless is officially on the agenda, and I am being asked to make recommendations to the new board.

Part of the problem of writing regularly has been that of lack of ideas and motivation. It’s easy to think “I shall write about area X or Y” but trying to gather the disparate threads of my monkey brain into coherent (and hopefully interesting) words is tough. Too tough, when alternatives are things like annoying my cats, doing parenting, occasional Netflix.

But now there is external pressure. The fear of the deadline. The ambition to make changes and the desire for the benefits they bring.

Time to truly get my thinking cap on.

Perspective drawings and lineweights

Today at work I was asked to give advice on perspective drawing to one of our younger staff members. I couldn’t resist a bonus lesson on lineweights once I was done with the basics.

Done on the fly in about 5 minutes.

Done on the fly in about 5 minutes.

So upon getting home I naturally couldn’t engage in any sort of leisure activity until I’d done a version I was a bit more happy with, and a touch more colourful.

New and shiny! Thanks to Linea Sketch

New and shiny! Thanks to Linea Sketch

Getting Back to Work

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Bifurcated. That’s the best single word I can think of describing how things seem to me right now. We’re in this strange period of emergence, where things are half locked-down; half exactly as they ever were. 

My working time is now split 60:40 between remote working from home and the office. I’ve written a rota to get one engineer per day into the office for the next 6 weeks. Mini-pie is back in school 2 days a week. Next week I’m attending an actual, real, in-person, external meeting to kick off a new contract. I’ve just been to a book shop where I had to queue to get in and immediately use hand sanitiser upon entering, as directed by a staff member wearing a full plastic face shield. On my walk home, I saw crowds of people drinking beer in the sun, crammed in by the river.

So in this weird in-between phase I’ve found myself making some foundational changes to my approach to my work. There have been three broad areas of change: 

•  Task Management

•  Equipment

•  What’s on my Phone

Task Management - Bullet Journal No More

Since the start of the year, I’ve been using a physical bullet journal to track all of my tasks. Ever since I started using pen and paper, I knew that I was doing it out of sense of wanting to feel in control, but there was always a risk that the sheer amount of tasks I need to juggle would overwhelm the system. That point duly arrived in the middle of last week, when I started going over two pages, and I was losing the will to keep up with it. 

Sorry pen and paper; it was nice while it lasted.

Back to GTD

Whenever I feel overwhelmed or feel I’ve got too many tasks to keep track of, I fall back on the Getting Things Done (GTD) method. This new disjointed life I’m leading lends itself to a more systematised life management scheme than ‘write a list of all the things I need to do in a book that I carry everywhere’, and GTD’s contexts are going to be especially helpful. 

Previously, I used a bunch of Evernote hacks to create a GTD system, but Evernote’s pricing hikes pushed me off their system a couple of years ago. Luckily, an application called Notion has changed their pricing structure to be free to individual users with no limits.

Notion

Notion is difficult to describe in a few words, but for our purposes it can be thought of as something capable of creating a sort of personal website, and that website can have built in elements like databases. The really powerful feature that makes it useful for GTD is the ability to have linked databases. Conceptually, it’s like having a spreadsheet, where individual cells can also be spreadsheets. 

Barebones task table. Very much a work in progress.

Barebones task table. Very much a work in progress.

Above is my Task Table, as it currently stands. This is the master task list, where all tasks are logged with as much metadata as I can throw at them. It’s roughly analogous to my longform list of tasks from my paper notebook. It’s exactly as unwieldy as that, which is why I use the Dashboard to view what is most relevant to every working day.

Heath Robinson Dashboard

Heath Robinson Dashboard

Under each of the main visible headings in the main window, you can see ‘Task Table’. What that is telling you is that each of those two tables you see on the Dashboard are really like windows, peering into the master Task Table. The tables you see in the dashboard really represents a bunch of filters applied to the main table, so I can just look at what’s important.

I’ve got more work to do, especially with context filtering. I’ve made a page which shows me all the tasks tagged with ‘able to do from my phone’ on it, but I need to make a bunch more of those types of shortcuts.

Once I’ve got the full system up and running, I’ll post about setting it up.

Equipment - Mega Mobile Office

The time has come round for The Big Five Year Upgrade, and my venerable iPad Pro first gen is being put out to pasture. I’ve dropped all the pennies on a brand spanking new iPad Pro 12.9”, as well as the Magic Keyboard. This is now the one personal computer for me (home and travel edition). 

It’s not super-grammable, but there’s a snoozing kitty in the background. You’re welcome.

It’s not super-grammable, but there’s a snoozing kitty in the background. You’re welcome.

For the structural analysis software our company uses, I need a PC running Windows 10. Right now at home that’s done by my 15” MacBook Pro (2015) under Boot Camp, which although slightly long in the tooth, is still as capable as any desktop in our office for the work I do. The difference is that now, the laptop will be parked at home, and become effectively a small desktop. 

If I’m in the office, I have a desktop PC. If I’m remote working from home I’m using the MacBook. 

In the medium term future, there may come a time again when I need to travel and design, and under those circumstances I’ll be forced to pack up the fairly chunky MacBook and take it with me. Even in the Before Times though, these events were rare. Usually if I’m travelling for meetings, I’m rarely doing design work: I’m participating in the meeting, taking notes, making sketches. Maybe if there’s a break I’m answering a few emails, or firing off a few Slack messages. This sort of work is iPad Nirvana, and I’ve been doing it for years.

This breaks my computing life down into nice structured, discrete areas. 

1.  Work from home primary computer: MacBook Pro running Boot Camp

2.  Work from the office primary computer: Desktop PC

3.  Constant Companion computer: iPad Pro

Phone

I’ve had to do The Bad Thing

Oh nose. Work emails. Outlook. Bad Martyn.

Oh nose. Work emails. Outlook. Bad Martyn.

I’ve had to relent, and put my work email on my phone. And yes, that is 31 unread emails.

One utterly ruined weekend circa 2009 has kept work emails off my personal devices for the better part of a decade, but alas, the fallout from Covid-19 has pushed even my sacred belief in work/life separation past its usual breaking point. I just receive so much email that I can no longer afford to not to keep on top of incoming messages. Those 31 unread messages came from a productive Thursday spent with focus on one task, and a Friday which ended up revolving around troubleshooting site issues and a scheduled internal meeting. The good news was that even though those 31 emails are marked unread, I was able to glance at them as they came in on either my phone or my watch. Without some sort of mobile access to email, that would just have been a millstone around my neck.

I hope this doesn’t mark a permanent shift for me to routine email access out of work hours. I am acutely aware of the need to keep work and home separate, and that’s what I tell my team. I want people who can switch off as they leave their office, or their home workspace - I believe it makes for healthier staff. I just hope I can kick the habit if and when things go back to ‘normal’.

Hello isolation my old friend

Well it’s safe to say things are somewhat unusual right now.

  1. I am now both designing steelwork and managing my team remotely, which is a bunch of challenges, big and small.

  2. I am now responsible for the care and education* of a mini-me, which is fine and dandy of a weekend, but difficult to juggle with item 1 midweek.

  3. I am troubled about the wider governmental response to the global pandemic, and also very troubled regarding the way in which the construction industry in particular has been handled.

*educational merit of my ‘lessons’ are up for debate

Headlines out of the way, I can say that my entire family thus far has thankfully been unaffected from a physical health point of view; nobody has had the illness as yet. For that, I count myself very lucky. From a mental health point of view, I’m juuuust about coping.

Things which contribute to the near-constant feeling of despair which keep me up at night, staring at twitter, the ceiling, and an ever-growing to-do list:

  • Feeling of responsibility to my colleagues. Working for a small to medium sized business in this uncertain period is plenty stressful enough. When I stop and remember how cash flow affects a steel fabrication business it sends me into a short-lived panic.

  • The briefest of moments when I let my stoic guard slip and think “how is that person managing to do all their normal day-to-day things so well and blog about how their new online classical guitar lessons are going?". I objectively know that whilst some people have accrued time in lockdown, and even though I’m just about treading water and that is fine, every now and again those negative thoughts do slip in and they really affect me. Sometimes it’s jealousy, sometimes disbelief, and sometimes it’s self-loathing because I know that I’m objectively one of the luckiest ones and shouldn’t even be thinking of complaining. None of it is helpful.

  • Constant fatigue. No amount of rigidly trying to keep to even the simplest of schedules can keep someone on top of their game under constant stress like this. Even when I manage to keep to the schedule I’m still usually knackered by mid-afternoon. My attempted schedule is simply:

    • Get up at 5:45 to 6:15am like I do usually

    • Get to my desk by 7am, because I’m usually in my car at that point

    • Eat somewhere vaguely near midday

    • Attempt to be in bed about 10:30 - 11:00pm

On the other side of the scales - Responsibility for keeping me the right side of sane comes from a few places:

  • My immediate family. Everyone is chipping in to help each other keep on top of spinning all the plates. Huge thanks in particular to Mrs Pie for being a total badass about keeping everything going.

  • Being super-fortunate in the place we live, at a macro and micro level. Firstly, York has one of the highest compliance records of Staying at Home, so we feel like we’re in good company. We’re also lucky enough to have a dedicated study where Mrs Pie works from home, and I have commandeered the dining room to set up my Heath Robinson home office.

Not massively Instagram-friendly, but an accurate depiction of my work space right now.

Not massively Instagram-friendly, but an accurate depiction of my work space right now.

  • We also have a small garden, which considering we live in a terraced house in a city centre is an utter luxury. During a working day, Mini Pie has his own room, a playroom and the living room to bounce between.

  • Pets. I know I bang on about my cats, but they’re a great source of comfort and of regular entertainment.

  • Being comfortable not being perfect, or even in the same timezone as perfect for that matter. I have cultivated a mostly-healthy mindset of knowing when good enough is good enough, and I have realistic expectations of how days will pan out. For example, a full working from home day is a success if I complete my work, everyone gets fed, and nobody catches fire. Everything over and above that is a massive bonus.

  • My age and upbringing. I’m a borderline Millennial by definition: I grew up with computers and the internet, so I’m used to getting a lot of my social interaction via a keyboard and a screen. The abundance of video-conferencing now available to me means that if anything, I see more people outside of work than in the Before Times. We’ve been using Slack within my team for internal communications for a few years now, so the day-0 dash to get everyone working remotely wasn’t as big a shift for the design team as it was for all the other departments.

  • Friends both met online, and of the real world. There’s plenty of support out there, and just picking up the phone or joining a WhatsApp group or two can make a big difference.

I’ll make a concession to the weirdness of the times and open the comments. How are you all managing? I hope you’re all safe and well.