Code Log

Cannon Fodder (v03) is the third iteration on a prototype for a game inspired by the barrel cannons in Donkey Kong Country. I recently downloaded DKC for my Wii and was reminded of how much fun the levels that use the cannons are. The point of this prototype was to get the rotation and movement of cannons working and to see how much fun it is to just shoot the comet around. The only controls are the space bar, which fires a cannon once it’s loaded (sometimes the comet sticks, just keep pressing!). My idea is to keep that as the only player input and simply work in a lot of variety in the level design: moving cannons, rotating cannons, auto-fire cannons, maybe surfaces with different amounts of bounce.

Heather thought that it was kind of boring because sometimes you have to wait a long time for the comet to intersect with a cannon. But I find it pretty interesting to just watch the comet bounce around the stage. It is sometimes a bit like listening to one of Steve Reich’s phase pieces: the comet will get into a bouncing loop that encloses the moving cannon but the period of the loop is not the same as the period of the moving cannon and the shape of the loop is slowing changing. It’s possible to watch an interaction like that occur and then start guessing how many more loops it will take before the comet intersects the cannon.

So I’ve been browsing the Wordpress Theme Viewer looking for a nice, understated, mildly geeky theme for this blog. I really don’t want to have to design one myself. However, judging by the standard fare found in the theme viewer, it’s starting to feel like I might be doing just that. There really seems to be a problem with over-designing, putting the design above content (themes with a ridiculously thin column for blog posts, for example), bad color combinations, etc etc. I’m not saying I’m a design wiz, because I’m not, but some of these people seem to be designing with their eyes closed. By far the coolest theme I found is CLI 2.1.2 by Rod McFarland. Like the name suggests, it is a command line interface to a Wordpress blog. Totally cool and also almost totally unusable. I mean, if you don’t want people to read your blog, ever, use that theme. Even still, I’m impressed by the execution and the sheer geeky opaqueness of the concept.

Drum Machine is a sketch I made to test out the AudioSample class in the audio library I’m working on. It is a really simple grid-style drum machine. There are three rows of sixteen buttons each. The rows are, from top to bottom: hi-hat, snare, and kick drum. The buttons correspond to sixteenth notes. So, you only get one measure to make your sick-ass beat. You can change the tempo by clicking in the BPM box and dragging the mouse up and down. It does a pretty good job staying in tempo, even though I didn’t do anything particularly fancy to calculate beat length.

Unfortunately, there is no way to load or save beats that you make and also no way to choose different samples. Perhaps these features will be added in a future version. For now, it’s just a fun little sketch to play with.