Flattened Perspective Demo

One thing I’ve always enjoyed about beat ’em up games from the past is when they’ve put a city skyline in the background. It’s a minor touch, but it makes a big difference. It does a great job of transporting you to a new world.

The problem with having a background, however, is that you limit your foreground space. You need to take up about half the screen for your cityscape background and half for the foreground map in which your user will fight the baddies. For my game engine, I wanted to have a sandbox-style world like Grand Theft Auto. This meant requiring a map that gets large and potentially grows vertically and not just horizontally. This would mean getting rid of the background artwork, which would severely limit the experience I am going for.

One day, looking at the album artwork for the latest Bon Iver album, I realized that maybe there was a solution to my problem:

Why not combine the background with a foreground map that can scroll up and down? i.e. fake the perspective. After sketching out how it might look, I sat down and actually implemented. Here’s what it looks like:

In my head, it worked out a lot better, but I think this is decent. The above demos I think illustrate how it might work in a game situation, but I need to create a few more complex levels. What I’m really trying to go for is an immersive game world that retains that 8-bit flat 2D art look.

What do you think? Let me know in the comments!

The Love of a Parent

This story always chokes me up:

I think everyone can relate to this story even if their parents don’t play Animal Crossing. It never ceases to amaze me how much my mom has supported me over the years and is always watching out for me and making sure that I do the right thing.

Burnout — The Latest Fashion?

It’s an interesting time to be working. There are so many options available to get your work done: you can do it from home, you can do it on the road, you can do it while waiting for your plane to board, or even while you’re on the plane. Just pull out your laptop or your iPhone. Many companies are flexible with their hours, allowing you to work from home or come in at non-traditional hours. Sure, you can drop off your kids in the morning and pick them up later, just be sure to make up that time at home later.

As a result of all these options, though, I think we’re all feeling a little overworked. With technology making it easier to work from anywhere, it almost seems there is no more any excuse to not stay on top of your work. This flexibility and technology is empowering in some ways, but it can make you feel like a slave to your job. You can no longer escape it. When you leave work, there’s no longer that threshold between work and life.

For me, I’ve been working a lot more hours recently and part of it has been away from the office. When I have some time outside of work, I’ll get on my laptop and try to bang out some more work since I couldn’t get it all done on regular hours. As a result, it’s burning me out. I’m starting to lose sight of my own free time. I’m getting tired and not eating right.

It was a slow steady build up, though. It’s not something that just happened one day where all of a sudden I was working longer hours. It was a matter of months that work started to find its way into all my waking hours. Even if I am just out for a walk, I can’t escape some of the latest problems I’m trying to solve at work. Why not—my mind is “free” at the time anyway, right?

Obviously, something like this isn’t sustainable, and I’m starting to realize I’m starting to get burned out. It’s hard, though, to draw that line because you feel as though you have commitments to your job. You promise things, which may seem unreasonable later on, but at the time it makes total sense.

If you are feeling the same way as I am at the moment (and you likely are if you found your way to this page), you might want to watch this excellent video from the Word Economic Forum in Davos earlier this year. It is a lively discussion on burnout in today’s work force. You can tell that all the members of the forum have personal experience with this topic. That alone should cheer you up out there. Burnout can hit us all.

This is why I love YouTube comments

A lot of people find YouTube comments moronic or offensive. I think they’re taking the comments on there way too seriously. You’ve gotta treat them at the same level as writings on a restroom stall. When you do that, you’ll find a lot of hilarious gems there, such as from the following video.

If you haven’t seen it, watch the video, then jump to the comments section for some witty one-liners, such as these:

“I’ll watch a funny video on youtube, see if I can? finish my research paper.”

“I’ll reverse engineer my microwave,? see if i can make a car.”

“I’ll spread the butter on my? face, see if i can communicate with aliens.”

“I’ll herp a derp in binary, see if i can walk into? Mordor”

“I’ll paint the? windshield of my car, see if I cannot see”