TOM FRANCIS
REGRETS THIS ALREADY

Machine Of Death: Volume 2

I danced around the room like an imbecile when my story got into the original Machine of Death collection. I didn’t really know what it was doing there, next to all these awesome ideas, but I didn’t care.

Until it came out. Continued

Maybe Back Up Your Google Stuff?

This tale of abruptly losing a Google account without explanation, via roBurky, made me realise I should be backing this stuff up. Not so much because “It happened to him, therefore it will happen to me!” Just because the story makes you realise how boned you’d be if Google did shut you out, and how absurd it is to have total faith they never could. In all probability someone hacked this guy’s account and did something bad without his knowledge, in which case it has nothing to do with anything he did. Continued

Google+ Is The Exact Opposite Of The Social Network We Need

The main part of Google+ is a social updates feed like Facebook or Twitter. With Facebook, you have to confirm someone as your friend before they see your updates. With Twitter, anyone can see your updates without asking permission, unless you make a special ‘locked’ account. With Google+… Christ. Continued

Understanding Your Brain

My last post about happiness was about why success isn’t a good way to be happy, and three things that are.

In the comments, Johannes Spielmann said this:

Johannes: Great article!

For a more nuanced (and scientifically proven) view on the topic, have a look at this Google Tech Talk by David Rock.

The video he links, the one I’m about to embed, has changed the way I think. It’s like being given the owner’s manual to your brain after 29 years of muddling along with the default settings. It’s not only spectacularly improved my understanding of how people behave and why we feel what we feel, it’s actually made me more consistently happy. Continued

Post 500

Quickly, drink this. I just found a retroactive excuse for tonight’s pina coladas: I’ve posted 500 things on this site?

This 500th post calls for MINIMUM CONTENT and MAXIMUM STATS. They start from when the site moved to Pentadact.com in February 2008, and the graph looks a bit like this (click for readable size): Continued

Analysing Happiness

This is a series of reminders to my future self about what I’ve figured out about happiness. The gist of the last one was basically this:

The reason we want things isn’t that they’ll make us happy.

Often, getting what you want does give you a little rush of happiness. We can be fooled into thinking this is the sensation of having that thing. In fact, of course, it’s the sensation of getting it. We are feeling the change in our status, not its new level. Which is why it fades. Continued

The Podcast Of My Machine Of Death Story Is Out

The stories from the Machine of Death collection are being gradually released as a free podcast, a sort of episodic audiobook. Mine just came out, read rather excellently by Christopher Joseph. Warning! Strong language from the first word. Continued

How I Am Working

Gunpoint is going amazingly well. I’ve been splitting what’s left to do into little monthly task lists, and I’ve already finished everything I had down for March. I started making the game in May last year, and said I didn’t want it to take more than a year. So my aim is to release it this May. Expect it in July.

I typically only work on it about one weekend a month, and I forgot about it completely for two months last year. The two days I spent on it during the holidays shot it forwards to a really exciting point, and the feedback from testers on that version was amazing. So lately I’ve been spending about a third of my spare time on it – what we in the lazy industry call ‘crunch’. Continued

Advice

This section of preaching is directed at me rather than you, but I want to write it publicly to force myself to make sense. I’ll probably include some irrelevant music or photos with each post to distract you in case you get bored – this one’s the first big win of 2011’s adventure into the music other people discovered in 2010. Continued

2010: The Year In Forty Photos

You probably don’t want to hear about my year, particularly since it was good. So I’ll do what I did in 2009 and just pick some shots from it, and a track to listen to while you browse. Continued

Welcome To Site Six

I seem to redesign this place at the start of every year – boredom with the old design peaks just as the winter break hits with the spare time to fix it. This new design is mostly just a visual jiggle, but I’m counting it as site number six because it’s no longer called James. I’m not good with titles, obviously, so it doesn’t really have one anymore – it’s just my blog, or Pentadact.com if you need something more unique.

I’ve sort of decapitated the old design:

It felt flabby and basic, and those black bars bothered me for no good reason. The new one fits more on the screen, and is a bit smoother. You’ll notice I’ve brought it bang up to date with the hottest web trend of 2003 – very slight gradients. A few other things are new:

• Infinite scroll: it loads the next bunch of posts when you scroll to the bottom. It doesn’t currently tell you it’s doing this.
• Like button: fucking Zuckerberg. That ugly little thing is so goddamn hard to put on any non-white page without making it hideous. I can’t resist them, though – they’ve been awesome on the PC Gamer site for letting us know the difference between pieces that people want to respond to, and piece people just… like. Without something filling that role, you never really know when you’ve done something right.
• Category tabs: browsing by category was a little obfuscated in the last design. I wanted to put them front and center for the sake of people who don’t care about games, since that topic often dominates this place a bit. Of course, which category link do the vast, vast majority of people click on? Games. They look at my site about games and think “Goddamn it, this isn’t enough about games! ONLY GAMES!”

As ever, please let me know what you think and if anything isn’t displaying right for you. I have some tweaking to do and presumably a lot of bug fixing, though it doesn’t look too disastrous so far.

Construction Ahead

Please excuse the state of this place while I tinker with it a little. I have a visual retartening planned out, and the current design will start to look glitchy as I rip it up and force the new one in. I’ll let you know when it’s supposed to look right, and you can tell me that it really doesn’t.

Old Year Resolutions

Christmas is over, I’m home, and I have a bit of time before I go back to work. My resolution last year was to be more prolific – take on lots of different stuff, do it all, stop whining. In that spirit, I’m going to try to get a bunch of stuff done. I doubt I’ll manage it all, but here’s the plan.

Work on Gunpoint for two days straight
Making Scanno Domini in 48 hours was exciting and eye opening. The deadline not only sped progress, but forced brutal and useful decisions about the design. I want to do the same for my longer-term game Gunpoint, aiming to get it to the point where you can meaningfully complete a level using the game’s central mechanic by the end of the year.

Every hour of work you put in before that point might be a complete waste of time, so you have to get there as rapidly as possible. I’ll probably work on it on the 29th and 30th.

Redesign Pentadact.com
The intentionally misleading title of this place is starting to cause actual harm in world increasingly reliant on search ranking. I have to call it by my own name. I also want to make the design slightly cleaner and less busy, and implement infinite-scroll rather than those archaic ‘Older posts’ links. Might tweak the colours and add an archive if I have time.

Start ‘Notebook’
A new category or subsite on here for what I used to call philosophy, but which has evolved into increasingly practical advice given by myself to myself. I need to write the shit I figure out down so I don’t forget what little I’ve learned, and doing it publicly helps get it straight in your head.

Post: What Makes Games Good
One I’ve been tinkering with for too long. It’s about giving names to the different metrics on which great games succeed – the ones that really matter. Because they’re not ‘graphics’, ‘gameplay’ and ‘multiplayer’.

Post: What Games Are Bad At
Less of a priority, but I’ve often wanted to do a series on the things I think the industry is repeatedly fucking up. Most of my obsessions about games relate to what they normally get wrong, so explaining why and how might turn that into useful advice for making them better.

Tweak Scanno Domini
So much I could do to this from here, but to avoid letting it distract me from more important stuff, I’ll stick to the quality-of-life essentials. Snow and single-barreled weapons fire both need to be darker – they’re invisibly bright on some people’s screens. Bots still sometimes get stuck camping you, forcing a restart. I really should let you use the keyboard for movement if you want to. And I might either make the game a little easier, add an easy mode, or do something clever with the difficulty so that it ramps up more smoothly. Watching my dad play it was informative.

Christmas 2010

Some pictures from mine. It’s snowy here in England, and the Dorset hills are a nice place to stomp around in it.

I got a Kindle! If you mail me stuffs – anything like a .txt .doc or .pdf – it’ll pop up on my cyberhyperbook! This is the address: pentadact@free.kindle.com

STARVATION Review

I was a little dubious about this one, solely because one character refers to the other as ‘kid’ – something I’m not yet sure people do in real life. But it’s one of the most interesting settings for a Machine of Death story – one of the few that has the courage to put the machine itself well into the background of the world, and tell a story that is affected by it, but not about it.

It’s about two soliders, stranded on an island, who both know how they will die. One is STARVATION, the other is HOMICIDE. So the entire scenario is overcast by both men endlessly reconjecturing about how their personal prophecy could come true.

That makes it very tense at times, particularly since my twist-happy brain likes to spend its downtime trying to pre-empt every eventuality. But I can honestly say the ending surprised me, and in a way that made me the story seem smarter than me.

Machine of Death: a book that appears to be good so far. It’s now $18 from Amazon or Topatoco in the US, or in the UK for £11.50 with free shipping from The Book Depository. The whole thing is free in PDF form, and is trickling out steadily as an audiobook in podcast form. My story for it is online here.