Sweden is slowly getting warmer. I’m hoping by the time I get back from SF it’ll be all nice and sunny. Then I can finally start running outside again, and get a bike to cycle around the city instead of catching subways everywhere. Stockholm is too pretty to be on a subway. The run to work would now be a bit under 5km, perfect warmup distance for the real training - for a half marathon. Maybe. Possibly. I’m not going to commit to anything until I can test running outside a bit more. I’m not really a big fan of long distance running and only want to run a half for the sake of the accomplishment. 5-10km is usually the most I can do when it comes to actually enjoying the run.
The new apartment is great. I’ve somehow managed to develop an obsession with keeping the kitchen clean while continuing to display zero cooking skill or enthusiasm. It’s just such a nice fricking kitchen, with this awesome setup where you can sit at the wooden table next to the heater and work for hours.
Promiscuous Flea is going ok except for my pathetic sprites. It seems that as my coding experience goes up any sort of artistic ability I used to possess diminishes proportionally. People used to tell me I was going to be an artist someday. Clearly there was a hiccup in the great plan somewhere, likely right around the time I made a rectangle move across an HTML5 canvas for the first time. It’s like…who cares what the rectangle looks like? It moves!
This does not bode well for the actual look of my games.
Anyway, I’ve been trying to sort out the schedule for all the sessions I want to attend at GDC. The ones I really want to make it to are:
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From Great Ideas to Game Features - Maciej Szczesnik (CD Projekt RED)
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Designing DayZ: Lessons from Cherno - Dean Hall (Bohemia Interactive)
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Under the Hood of Blizzard’s Internal Build System - Blaine Whittle (Blizzard)
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Exploring SimCity: A Conscious Process of Discovery - Dan Moskowitz (Maxis)
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Creating the AI for the Living Breathing World of Hitman: Absolution - Mika Vehkala and Maurizio De Pascale (IO Interactive A/S)
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HTML5 Cross-Platform Game Development: The Future is Today - Ibon Tolosana (Ludei)
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Schrodinger’s Cat in a Mercedes: Making Games with Nonlinear Narrative - Mateusz Tomaszkiewicz and Marcin Blacha (CD Projekt RED)
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Why Virtual Reality is Hard (And Where It Might Be Going) - Michael Abrash (Valve)
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Reinforcement Learning Based Character Locomotion in Hitman: Absolution - Michael Buttner (IO Interactive)
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How to Build a Better Apocalypse - Dan Pinchbeck (thechineseroom)
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Artificial Intelligence in Computer Games Roundtable - Neil Kirby (Alcatel-Lucent)
I may or may not be secretly hoping that one or more of the CD Projekt RED speakers will leak something…anything about Cyberpunk 2077.
I’ve had to cull a lot of sessions because they conflicted with each other, but the end result is still pretty evenly split between programming and design topics.
Back to making fleas hump each other. You can see the code-in-progress here, by the way.