- Just after tweeting that I was back in the blogging game, I drop off the face of the earth! Welp, I started my post-job, pre-school vacation. I've spent the past week+ flying from state to state to visit friends and family I haven't seen in a while, and I intend to continue until the start of September. Next week will be particularly devastating to my Internet fame, as I'll be out on the ocean, where access costs $25/hour. Surfing Twitter just doesn't seem worth it at that rate, though I may stop in for no good reason anyway.
- I've been reading Reality is Broken for a couple of weeks off and on. As the people who accidentally added me to a circle on Google+ know, I've found plenty of fascinating passages. There were a few chapters full of broad statements made with little support, but because I knew close to nothing about game design and motivation, I've learned plenty anyway. I have an ARG in the early planning stages, which has helped focus my attention, but I'm not going to talk about it yet! Nope!
I have an embarrassing secret: I've never written a decent Tetris clone. I've tried many times, but always gotten distracted—bogged down by the details of how to handle collisions, or represent blocks. Hopefully my current attempt will finally set things right. It's written in Processing, mostly because its offline documentation and standard library are complete enough that I could work on the plane without Internet access. Here's the applet so far (Java):
Use the left and right arrow keys to move, the down arrow key to move the piece downward more quickly, D to rotate left, F to rotate right, and C to exchange the piece. There's no way to reset the stage, so if you lost while you were reading (the game will probably attempt to allocate all available system memory when that happens), you'll just have to reload the page.
- I went to an Interactive Fiction meetup in Berkeley before I left the bay. It was fun. We played Violet.