Please standby a bit longer while I collect myself together, I'm all over the place (I'm too fukken introvert.)

Play the second one (Original KotM version here)
Also the first one (not too important.)

The final semi-serious work awaits.
A farewell to the old, influenced by both old and new.
Man I wanna move on to new already.
But first lets do this!

So, for the past couple of months, I've been poking at the idea of interactive fiction without a parser. I had a grand idea, years ago, for a graphic adventure game with a comics-based interface. My idea is essentially that the entire story is always available at all times, and that you can make the protagonist do things, or, undo things, at any point in the story. I realized recently that I could bring many of the same ideas to text, which is much quicker to write than comics are to draw.

So I began to build it.

So today, I'm ready to release a little tech demo, for people who might be interested in such things. It doesn't even really demo the tech that well -- I don't use any world state, though the capability is there to do so, and there's not even any branching like Choose Your Own Adventure. The interface is still kind of rough; I definitely haven't worked out all the kinks in deciding when to show which options to the user. I don't even know whether I should be showing or hiding clickable words. (Right now they're hidden because that's the last thing I tried.) Basically, I'm still exploring the idea, but I'm interested in your comments.

Anyway, if you like, you can try it out and tell me what you think. Click on words that are clickable to get a menu of things you can do. Once you've seen everything in the game, maybe you'd be interested in peeking at the story's source code (not the engine's source code) to get a feel for what writing IF in this sort of system might be like.

(recenty entry on my site http://kirkjerk.com/ )

Ever rediscover a half-remembered book from your childhood and realize that it was probably wildly influential on you? Such was the case with David L. Heller and John F. Johnson's "Dr. C. Wacko Presents: Atari BASIC & The Whiz-Bang Miracle Machine". I recently found a good PDF copy at Atari Mania's Page of Atari 8-bit Books

The book was a beginner-level but thorough guide to BASIC programming - I suspect I knew most of it by the time I got my hands on a copy, but it was still very cool. The style can perhaps best be described as "Early Doctor Demento" -- hardly a paragraph goes by without a gag of some kind, but still it seems like it would do a good job of explaining fundamental concepts.

I can even see the book's influence in my own guide to Atari (2600) Programming,
Atari 2600 101. (No cartoons, more's the pity.)


I was reminded of this book when I ordered some Eggs Benedict, and I thought about this chart in it:

Anchovy Burritos:	280 Calories each
Twinkle Cakes:	340 Calories a look
Guacamole Juice:	90 Calories per slurp
Clam Dip:	70 Calories a dip
Greaso Burgers:	470 Calories per bun
Quicko TV Dinner:	400 Calories a tray
Pizza a la Hollandaise Sauce:	900 Calories a sniff

I think that for years that was my main image of Hollandaise, some kind of insane calorie vortex. (I guess I forgot how the other foods needed only a glance...)

Atari Mania also finally let me read the book's -- prequel? It was much more advanced, but came first-- companion, "Dr. C. Wacko's Miracle Guide to Designing and Programming Atari Computer Arcade Games". I'd like to think if I had had this book at the appropriate time, I finally would have gotten those damn "player/missile" graphics and in general made some better games.

This past Halloween I made a "mid-90s Hollywood-style Hacker costume". I looked silly enough with my ex-trendy wardrobe, but it was my Micron GoBook laptop (Windows ME, 64MB Ram, PCMCIA Modem, 3 1/2" Floppy drive, 2Gig internal!) that completed the look. I took screen captures of every UI seen in the film Hackers for reference, and then did additional research into various top-ten lists of improbable and unrealistic hacking in films, to ensure my interface would have that look that makes you wonder if its creator had ever used a computer in their life.

Controls are Space, Enter, Shift, Arrow Keys, Escape, and Keyboard Mashing.

Move over, Crash Override, Acid Burn, Lord Nikon, and Cereal Killer. Here comes Venom Byte!

Hack the Planet!

I'd already got my little brother playing the 529-in-One Pirate Kart, and he enjoyed it as massively as he could considering GameMaker games don't run on his machine. So I then installed KNP onto my brother's computer, told him, and showed him the Level Editor, Event Editor, and so on (but gave him very little guidance other than that).

After a week, I came back and found this.

I thought it needed to be posted, seeing as it's a wonderfully terrible game by a real, actual twelve year old messing around in KNP. Enjoy, or otherwise.

Many geoengineering schemes have been proposed, but all can be reduced to two main strategies: reduce the amount of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere (increase the amount of infrared radiation escaping to space) or reduce the amount of solar energy the Earth system absorbs. Two of the most common examples of these geoengineering china travelstrategies involve removing carbon from the atmosphere by adding fertilizer to selected regions of the ocean to increase phytoplankton growth and reflecting more sunlight by injecting tiny, non-absorbing particles (aerosols) into the upper atmosphere (stratosphere).

While both of these geoengineering examples might counter global warming for a time, they could also have significant drawbacks. Increased fertilizers and/or phytoplankton growth could havechina tours unintended consequences on ocean ecosystems, including increased ocean dead zones and toxic blooms. Adding aerosols to the upper atmosphere could modify the chemistry of the upper atmosphere, affecting ozone and thereby having possible unintended impacts on the lower atmosphere.

Who is responsible for this: http://scratch.mit.edu/projects/14wehttam/1286669

I attended PAX this year! As part of my devious plan to spread the Glorious Trainwrecks way of game-makering, I put aside an hour to set up a laptop in a vaguely low-traffic area with an attractive sign promising people that I would make games for them. I quickly got a taker, who sat down and chatted with me for about an hour as I made PAX Quest In Glorious Klik-O-Vision! Many other people looked and smiled -- one guy even stopped to say he liked my sign -- but no one else stopped to see what I was doing. It may or may not have had something to do that I was mostly looking at my computer and there was a dude sitting beside me, presumably getting a game made. (Turned out he was a Mac user so he won't be able to play it.)

In conclusion: Fun experiment! Mixed results. Afterwards my legs hurt.

Oh, the game? PAX Quest is a fairly accurate representation of some of the more annoying portions of PAX. I resisted the temptation to make waiting in line real-time.

Basically uploaded onto here so that my friend Tyler could see it, this is the engine for a game I never got around to making.

The controls are arrow keys to move, Up to jump, and Control to spin attack in midair. By tapping the arrow keys twice in a direction you can dash, and by pressing down then up on the arrow keys, you can do a super jump. If you're facing towards a wall and you press up, you will kick off the wall. Finally, press S to control whether or not the screen scrolls.

Now that the Pirate Kart II is finally out in the world, I've been able to find time once again for MarMOTS; the greatest telnet-based collaborative ANSI art editor and game engine EVER WRITTEN!

I'm still super-excited about MarMOTS even though there are so few people using it (basically me and qrleon, and I don't ever draw anything). And I've decided it's high time to start letting people make stuff besides pictures. Thus I have begun the implementation and design of the scripting language* and its editor! No screenshots yet, unfortunately, but rest assured I'm plugging away. If you have any ideas for textmode games that you might be interested in building in MarMOTS, please feel free to talk about them in the comments and I can make sure that the language comfortably supports your use.

In the meantime, I've deployed a new version of MarMOTS that features line wrapping in more places, like text entry, and "buttons". No more typing off the edge of the screen when chatting, or worrying about making a picture whose name is too long!

* possible names for the scripting language (please vote or supply more suggestions in the comments):

1. MarMOTScript (tm)
2. Marmota (the proper name of the genus of Marmots)
3. Groundhog (the groundhog being a type of marmot, also makes me think of the movie Groundhog Day, which is a plus)
4. Monax (the groundhog's proper name is Marmota Monax, kind of sounds like "monad", but way more metal -- maybe "Monäx"?)