Summer’s here and my poor little air-conditioner is working it’s heart out but isn’t quite up to fighting the sun. Ah well – four more months and I’ll be cursing the cold and dark.
Decided to try a digital painting of the dog character. In my painting class last winter my teacher kept telling us how important using warm and cool colors in your work was, so I included lots of bits of the rainbow in this one.
Hi everyone. Well, I’m finally moved into my new place and opened enough boxes to be able to navigate the hallways. Unfortunately, my computer didn’t make it. It made it all the way to Minnesota, and was even working in my hotel room for a month, but it couldn’t make it the last quarter mile to my new place. Ah well. My manufacturer is doing some paperwork and I’ll hopefully have a technician out here to fix it soon.
Aside from that Minnesota is a beautiful place (if rainy). It’s pretty common to see bunnies and ducks hiding in the grass as you’re walking along the sidewalks. I’ve even run into a few deer. Hopefully there are no black bears around here.
After my night in the motel, I woke up with the dawn and was on the road with the hopes of reaching my destination by nightfall. Things went well, and despite some confusion with toll booths (we don’t have those in Ontario), I was making good progress. I entered Minnesota with my van slaloming gently beneath low mountains dripping with vibrant shrubs and trees and set against a steel grey sky. There were some scattered showers, but they didn’t last for too long.
Things were going well and I was about 20 miles from my destination. I pulled off the main highway and started driving past large farmlands. I had been using the maps feature of my cellphone to help me navigate, but it was only receiving signals intermittently out in the countryside and I was relying on map images that had downloaded when I last passed close to a cell tower – and more frequently now that I was on the backroads.
And so it was that I pulled into a driveway in the back of a large farmhouse. It wasn’t really a driveway anymore – more the remains of what used to be one but which had long since been allowed to return to grass and sedge. (I had overshot the main driveway – it’s not easy to find good places to pull over when you’re traveling highway speeds in unfamiliar territory). I checked my map, planned the next few turn of my journey, turned the keys and…
…heard the back wheels spin while the van did little more than rock back and forth. The rear wheels were sunk about an inch into the soil slick with the recent rains. My second and third attempts at starting the engine were no more productive than the first. I partially unloaded the van, not expecting that it would help much. It didn’t. Then it started to rain again.
I got everything packed back in the van and decided to call a tow truck. If there wasn’t any cell service in the area, though, my cell phone wasn’t finding it. So I decided to swallow my pride and ask up at the farmhouse. But no one was home save for a large Labrador who was stalwartly defending the front door. I went back to the van, checked the map and then set out on foot back up the highway to the nearest town I had passed.
About a mile and a half up the road, I came across a large building that looked inhabited and with a big door marked ‘Office’. The woman inside was kind enough to let me use her phone to contact a tow crew to get me back on the road. She offered to help pull me out with some of the machines they had around the place, but I felt it was best to go with a tow company that the U-haul people provided just in case something went wrong. In any case, a big thank you from me to the Schneider family of Schneider Heating and Air Conditioning and their two little terriers.
Anyhow, the tow arrived in about a half hour – it was large as long as an 18-wheeler. He wrapped a cable around it and hauled my truck back onto solid ground. The owner of the farmhouse had returned home by then and was out driving around on her riding mower. She said that she didn’t mind the mess my truck had made at the end of her lawn and wished me luck on my way. I tried to replace the divots from the drag marks as best as I could, but I could only cover so much.
After that, the rest of my journey went smoothly. I did get lost a few more times, but I was very careful to only consult maps when I had solid pavement under my wheels.
So, I had several adventures on my journey to the west. This is probably one of the creepier ones:
I’d been driving my cube van filled with all my worldly possessions all day long. The sun had set and I was starting to make dumb decisions. I had planned to go further that day, but I realized I needed to sleep for the night. Being lost in the dark in a semi-urban area I was unfamiliar with, I decided to just check into the first hotel/motel I came across. A roadside motel emerged from the gloom – my refuge from the road.
The check-in desk was a tiny 4×3 foot box with a safety glass window. I got my room key and went to my room. It was dirty and beat up and had something slimy congealing between the carpet fibers. It stunk of cigarettes and every piece of furniture had burn holes and stains. Still, I figured since I was just going to sleep there, I could put up with it and be gone the next day.
So I was lying on top of the covers (no way I was going to sleep under them) and checking my cellphone when out of the corner of my eye I spotted something above the door.
From a distance it looked like a circle. Odd spot for it, I thought. Maybe it was a holding bracket left behind by a fire alarm or clock? I had a closer look.
Yes, gentle readers, I was staying in the motel room that had been engaged by the Prince of Darkness himself. Now I’m not really that superstitious, but when you see a pentagram inscribed above your motel room doorway, it does give you pause for thought. I felt a heart-to-heart with the motel owner was in order so I stepped outside my motel door…
…and into the tail end of a tornado weather system. One of the heaviest downpours I’d ever seen. Thunder and lightning too.
Anyhow, I made it out alive. Mark: one; horror movie cliches: zero. Unless it’s more like a Rocky Horror movie. No singing transvestites so far. I left most of those behind in Toronto.
What is Roguelike?
Is mostly a game with feature levels that are procedurally generated. This means your character your character death is permanent so you have to start over from a predetermined starting point fresh. So a roguelike should force you to learn its systems through the cost of failure being steep.
Still some roguelike enthusiasts set out to create some guidelines. This defines a number of high value and low-level factors that go into a roguelike game. Namely, the permadeath aspects, and random environment generation are two of the key factors that go into what a roguelike is. But you’ll also find features such as games being turn-based and grid-based, or even featuring worlds that are represented with ASCII characters.
Mind you, there are some people who disagree on the importance of these factors, or how they factor into the definition of a roguelike. But these factors are at least somewhat definitive of what a traditional roguelike should be.
Games started popping up in the late 2000s and early 2010s that took inspiration from roguelikes without necessarily using the conventions of the genre. Some eschew the whole “start from nothing” aspect that roguelikes often have, giving players permanent progression to start out and work toward.
Differently, several of these roguelike variant games became financial successes. Spelunky might prove to be the most influential roguelike-inspired game because it introduced many of the conventions of roguelikes into a challenging platformer game. Its intense difficulty wound up making the game a real accomplishment for those who could beat it – and those who could consistently do well-earned renown in the speedrunning communities.
I’ve been working on a video game for several months now and have finally posted some early footage of it. It’s a Roguelike dungeon explorer inspired by classics like Hack and the ancient cave from Lufia 2 and you’ll be able to play with the best accessories like headsets and keyboards from sites as HotRate online. You can see the game here if you’re interested:
Also, please take a look at my Patreon page. I’ll be posting updates about this project there, as well as other interesting things I’m up to.
