Squiggle City's back on its feet! Guess I'll host here after all. While I'm here, I might as well mention some of my upcoming projects...

* Project Flicker (working title) is maybe the most promising one. Deep within an abandoned industrial facility, you'll learn to be afraid of the dark again. Watch a demo of the monster's illusion powers here. Still in development, of course.

* Human Environment 1 is a text adventure about the real future of VR internet. Still in development, but be warned--this is not the bright and sanitary future that you were promised. The worst elements of humanity come forth where consequences dare not tread.

* Project Torment (also a working title) is a first-person character action game in which a vampire who feeds on suffering meets an unlikely friend and kicks some ass.

Well, it turns out being flat broke limits your options for hosting. I might be able to switch over to SDF, but that's gonna take a few days.

More importantly, the squiggle.city certificate is out of date. I don't know what happened. Maybe I'll shoot an email over to Brennen or something.

I was listening to the SDF official radio station the other day. It had some kind of classic rock playing, but the vocals were in what sounded like Korean. Then a little kid came on the radio and said he was pretty sure this is the new Korean National Anthem and gangnam style started playing. Every once in a while you'd get some overlapping synthesized-voiceover (half the time I couldn't tell what language, the other half it was Microsoft Sam advertising an upcoming event). It was the coolest.

I'm making a couple minor changes to this thing, because I realized that it's linking to an *ancient* copy of my resume on GDrive. I also lowkey think I could get more mileage out of a Digital Ocean instance than out of this.

Then there's the new project, Human Environment 1, though it might be a little late to poke fun at rampant consumerism. We're a little too far into the cyber apocalypse to really make fun of it.

That having been said, I didn't update this page much anyway...

So, I got to talking with some of my friends about game design, because I like game design. One of them pointed out Splinter Cell: Conviction's multiplayer, specifically the deathmatch mode.

In SC:C's multiplayer, you get dropped into a map with another player. You are also surrounded by NPC enemies who will attack either of you. Your goal is to kill everything; NPCs net you a single point, while a successful kill against a human opponent gains you five points and takes three from the target. Splinter Cell is a stealth game, so much of the combat revolves around taking shots from an unseen position, and PvP is similarly focused on not being seen.

I also brought up Watch_Dogs, which had a multiplayer component in a similar scope to Dark Souls; multiplayer was not a separate mode, but something that happened in regular gameplay. One player's goal would be to stay within a certain distance of the other player, and wait for a progress bar to finish; the other player's goal would be to hunt the first player down and either kill them or exit the 'trace zone' and force the other player to lose by distance. One popular strategy, apparently, was to simply shoot into the air to chase away NPCs.

Both of these games had good ideas. Watch_Dogs had some flaws--most notably, there was no punishment for simply going gung-ho. In Splinter Cell: Conviction, starting a gunfight is a terrible idea; the gunfire can draw attention from your opponent, and fighting in the open underneath a streetlamp is a recipe for lead poisoning, administered from a dark corner. In Watch_Dogs, firing into the sky is the easiest way to find your opponent. Another flaw in W_D's implementation was a lack of cover--encounters occured on open streets with wide, clear spaces and very few things to hide behind. SC:C fills its maps with waist-high structures, dark corners, walls and doors and hallways and crates; breaking line of sight is shockingly easy. If W_D had such a variety of hiding places, maybe shooting into the air would simply give the enemy a way to take cover.

I would like to see something that combines the level design elements of SC:C and the focus on tracking instead of killing that W_D tries to use. SC:C clearly did a good job in trying to bridge the gap between stealth and competitive multiplayer, but I think the best way to create a multiplayer stealth game would be to emphasize something other than straight combat. It's hard to keep the players from just shooting each other when the goal is to just shoot each other.

It's been a little while again. Honestly, I need to spend more time on this place; rambling bits of inane text into the emptiness of the Net is a good way to relax.
Work has been pain, as it was before, and I've come to the conclusion that the point of a job isn't necessarily to be fulfilling as much as it is to give you a means of finding fulfillment, if that makes sense. You don't seek employment to change the world; you seek employment to fund your change. As such, I am at peace with whatever I run into in the future, so long as I get paid decently.
And I desperately need to get paid decently--I can't remember a time when I wasn't just a little sick, not hungry enough to be worth buying a feast, not tired enough to sleep, but sick, tired, and hungry all the same. Maybe once I nail this certification--second time's the charm, especially when you find updated study material--I'll be able to get a nice apartment somewhere in Hot Springs or Dallas or wherever I damn well please.

Is it weird that I like being left alone? I mean, I've been growing more and more upset with the state of politics; Hillary's campaign came and went, and Trump came and stayed, and it all feels like so much caricature of Bush v. Gore and Obama v. McCain, only this time both the candidates were actively under investigation for various crimes (which of course are false allegations against my candidate, but completely true regarding yours). Of course, Syria surprised me--with all the rumors flying, I realized that this would've been the first time in my understanding of US history that we've meddled in foreign affairs, possibly given weapons to our enemies, and then come out on top. Not the first time we would've given weapons to our enemies, though. You'd think that after Al Qaeda blew up in our faces, we would've learned.
And all of that to say, I'm more convinced than ever that I need to save up for a nice artificial island out in the Pacific. Which is concerning, since I'm already not getting enough social contact. The loner feels lonely, how ironic.