August, 2, 2004 archives

the funny bit about danny o’brien's notes on andy oram’s talk at oscon is that he’s clearly the person who was entering just as i was leaving. andy had just pulled up the slide about trackback when i stepped out. (i had a flight to catch.)

the complete guide to isometric pixel art is nifty. (via colin viebrock.)

for reasons that made sense to me at the time, the isometric game i was the lead programmer on had a staggered coordinate system instead of the obvious rotated system. it’s funny to see that walkthrough, since we actually had a fairly nifty level generator — each level was specified using a crazy little map layout language. the system for chatting with the in-game characters was also hypertext.

for the next game i was to work on (before coming to my senses and fleeing knowledge adventure), i was trying to talk the artists into non-diagonal artwork.

one idea we talked about early in the design process for that last game was including historical information via a feature to be called reality checks. it would have let us warp history to fit the gameplay, but still provide some educational value.

i still really need to learn python so i can play around with pygame. actually, it’s not so much the learning python that is the block, but the figuring out how to get the right things installed on mac os x so i can play. it would be fun to tinker around with a little isometric game again. the hard part is the artwork, but i could probably get by on ripping the artwork out of the dr. brain game.