Hello, my friends! I apologise for no February update, the COVID situation threw everything into disarray on the teaching front and it took most of February to get on-board with “online delivery” of teaching content (this being a common experience of many academics at the moment). But here’s the update I was hoping to post … Read More
Here’s the URRpdate of the last two months. A lot of travel and my laptop breaking while abroad has slowed things down, but a lot of progress has been made both on finishing off the last remaining bug-fixes, and adding the final small “feature” required for 0.8. The game is becoming increasingly stable, as well … Read More
Here’s June’s big update. The bugs and fixes continue to get smaller and smaller with each passing fix, and they’re generally taking less time, being more and more obscure, and often involving text or grammar for sentence generation rather than things which actually cause the game to crash. With that said, some new crash bugs … Read More
Welcome to May’s URRpdate! Things are still moving along, and rather pleasingly, it has now been a full month of coding since I discovered any more major bugs. Now, maybe that’s tempting fate, but I choose instead to read it as a very encouraging step forward. It does actually seem now that only small bugs … Read More
Things slowed down a little in the past few weeks due to a lot of unexpected travel and some job negotiations (more on this very soon), but here’s another set of fixes and corrections: – Fixed a complicated bug which spent a long time to hunt down, and involved guards trying to exchange positions with … Read More
Continuing to chop down the list of URR stuff to be checked before 0.8’s release! Here’s what has happened in the last couple of weeks: – Resolved some strange issues with churches, especially if you approach them at night. Priests weren’t sure where to spawn or where to sleep, and random worshippers kept appearing off … Read More
More URR progress! I am now down to the final two things before URR 0.8’s release, which are 1) check every line of dialogue as comprehensively as I can, and 2) deal with some strange issues regarding game speed and optimisation which are bothering me. In the mean time, though, the fact we’re now at … Read More
It is with immense pleasure that this month’s blog entry is going to be a long and pretty thorough update on what I’ve programmed into URR in the last little while. As many of you readers will know, the latest version – 0.8 – has been about 90% done for over a year, until I … Read More
I am very proud to announce my first book, The Unpredictability of Gameplay, is now out and available from Bloomsbury Academic! The main goal of the work is to unpack what I’ve taken to calling “unpredictability” in games – the ability to put in one input, and not know what output will occur – into a … Read More
I’d like to start this entry with an anecdote, which outlines the basic issue I’m pondering far more effectively than an abstract discussion. A few years ago I found myself in the position of trying to teach someone who had never played a single video game in their life – and had extremely limited experience of board or card … Read More