Tuesday, 5th March 2019 ◆ Strangely, I don't cry; AI used to find meaning (10)
I used to be a stickler for grammar, and an avid prescriptivist. I would get annoyed at signs proclaiming "5 items or less". I read Lynn Truss's Eats, Shoots and Leaves and was wholly on board: punctuation must be used correctly. I was the annoying person spouting: "I think you'll find it's "you and I", not "you and me"." If you were to ask me for a fruit salad, I would suggest a bowl of chopped tomatoes and cucumber.
Read more...
Monday, 25th February 2019 ◆ Boring me is replaced by key steward (6)
This weekend I participated in a game jam with some colleagues from work. Our theme was Small World, and each of the six of us took it in a completely different direction. We had a shooter, a puzzle game, a humerous concept, 3d tech demos, and from me, a digital board game. In terms of engines: Unity, Unreal, SDL and LibGDX were represented.
2 days of hard work
Read more...
Sunday, 3rd February 2019 ◆ Unwanted maps returned (4)
Not long after I added a commenting system to my site, I felt oddly proud to discover I was getting spam comments. I made the commenting system from scratch, so I thought I would be safe, expecting that bots would specifically target blogspot or wordpress comment boxes (or other recognisable forms).
So, what feature of my comment system have the bots latched onto to realise it's for comments? On this page, I've embedded four comment forms (in addition to the real one), along with a counter on each to track how many times it's been submitted to. With luck, the bots will discover this page, try to submit to it and then we will be able to see which comment forms are the most popular.
Read more...
Thursday, 15th November 2018 ◆ Something unexpected in grand omelette (6)
Note: this is a follow-on post from follow your dart.
In making games, I often want to randomly place objects inside a circle. I have always done this one of two ways, but I feel unsatisfied with both.
Method 1: Randomly pick a point surrounding square, and reject points which are not in the circle.
Read more...
Thursday, 8th November 2018 ◆ In Europe, girl eyes chef oddly (6)
Polis: Fight for the Hegemony is a two-player asymmetrical territory-control board game. I'm usually cautious of territory control games, but Polis avoids most of my reservations. Firstly, it's strictly two player which means there is no kingmaking to contend with. Secondly, the game is exactly four rounds long so you don't have to play for aeons after a loss becomes evident. Its asymmetry is exciting, and the theme is strong.
Read more...