I am Blakeyrat, ask me anything. (no longer answering questions)
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#I am Blakeyrat, ask me anything
Ok. What the fuck. Let's try it for real.
Thread rules:
- I am Blakeyrat
- Ask me anything
- I reserve the right to answer your question with a "your mom" joke
- I reserve the right to put this thread on Mute as soon as you idiots make a mess of it
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Anything
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I am not crying and you people are risking this thread being put on mute in record time.
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Are you feral or domesticated? ...nevermind.
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Do you like regular cheese or glow-in-the-dark-zombies-ate-my-neighbors-cheese?
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- How old are you?
- How many game titles do you own?
- How much money do you
wastespend on game every month? - Any other hobbies but games?
- Is there any game that you actually like?
- XBox or PS4?
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What are you doing then, if not crying?
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How old are you?
I was born in the late 1970s.
How many game titles do you own?
At least 1,039.
How much money do you wastespend on game every month?
On average, probably less than my cable bill. Ass-pull 1 AAA game a month ($60) + maybe one bundle a week ($3 each).
Any other hobbies but games?
Not really anymore.
Is there any game that you actually like?
Yes.
XBox or PS4?
Original Xbox > PS2.
Xbox 360 > PS3
Xbox One == PS4
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How much are you willing to pay for HoloLens?
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How much are you willing to pay for HoloLens?
HoloLens looks sweet as shit, but I'm a pretty conservative computer hardware buyer, so I probably wouldn't purchase one until I have a concrete use-case for owning one. For example, I've never owned a tablet, because I've never seen the point to owning one.
I'd probably pay a couple hundred if I knew (or even heavily suspected) I could put it to good use.
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How has Lemmy of Motorhead influenced your career?
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I shall phrase my question in the form of a video:
Seriously though: We know you love Mac Classic and HyperCard, what got you most interested in programming? What was your first programming job? Did you ever work any further on the game you talked about a year ago? If not, why not?
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What are you doing then, if not crying?
Do you have to ruin everything? Seriously, a lot of us likely find this interesting, don't make him mute it right off the bat. That would be shitty.
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Seriously though: We know you love Mac Classic and HyperCard, what got you most interested in programming?
A lot of things, but I gotta give a shout-out to Warren Robinett's excellent Rocky's Boots, possibly the best educational software ever created.
Our family had a Commodore 64, and my brother and I would make little apps and games on that. Nothing too advanced, just BASICv2 and enough PEEKs and POKES to change the character set around and do some basic sprite animations. We had a big notebook of graph paper where we'd sketch out our sprites and convert them into decimal numbers to put in the BASIC program's DATA statements.
Later we got a Mac SE/30. Then a Mac Classic, then a Quadra 610 with DOS compatibility card (allowing me to play Wizardry VI and Doom and etc.).
On those early b/w Macs, my brother and I would play rounds of RoboWar, a game where you give your robots little programs to run, and they try to shoot each other.
What was your first programming job?
Writing web analytics code in IE6-compatible JavaScript.
Did you ever work any further on the game you talked about a year ago? If not, why not?
No, I didn't get very far on it. Why not? I dunno, I'm a lazy asshole I guess. My general game development arc goes like this:
- I'm really excited, I wanna make a game!
- Ok, I made something that kind of works, but goddamned are these placeholder graphics and sounds terrible
- I've spent the last 3 weeks working on these graphics and they're still terrible
- I'll just do something else
My brain seems to lack the ability to tolerate placeholder assets long enough to get the game complete-enough to shop-out and find graphics people. And I have absolutely zero artistic talent.
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On those early b/w Macs, my brother and I would play rounds of RoboWar, a game where you give your robots little programs to run, and they try to shoot each other.
Nifty, never heard of that game. It sounds similar to a game that came out last year that my cousin was raving about where you program your assets in JavaScript.
Is your brother a programmer also?
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Why is there no blue food?
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And I have absolutely zero artistic talent.
I have negative artistic talent, I suck art out of any gallery by mocking/trolling the artists when/if we visit with friends or my wife.
In any case I could make a game!Have you tried Unity3D?
I bought some characters in their market, and put together a game in a week, that I think did not suck! I even used OpenEars for some speech recognition, and used Vuforia for Virtual Reality
All in all it took 3 weeks, and I am not even a C# programmer and did my development in Linux.
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Alright then. What games do you actually like and what do you like about them?
I like tons of games, so there's no way I can give this a complete answer.
Generally speaking, I enjoy games that set up an "system" with its own rules you can exploit. What does that mean? I like open world "do whatever you like" games like Skyrim, STALKER, most western RPGs, etc. I dislike linear hand-holding talky-talk-talk-talk games like most Japanese games. I loved SimAnt as a kid. Even though it's probably the least popular of the SimX games. But it had an AMAZING manual.
Some of my all time favorite games in roughly chronological order:
Mission: Thunderbolt, Marathon, Starsiege: Tribes, MechWarrior, Wizardry VI+, Escape Velocity, Unreal (and that style 90s FPS shooters in general), Morrowind, Oblivion, Skyrim. Civilization. Kerbal Space Program. Uh. Arx Fatalis. Probably three dozen more if I kept thinking about it.
I used to love flight sims. On the C-64: Project Stealth Fighter, Harrier Combat Simulator was great because it was open world-- you could conquer the map however you wanted, and you had to "move" your ground bases every so often to extend your range, but you had to secure the grid before moving it, them, etc.
On the b/w Mac there was the AMAZINGLY PERFECT P-51 flight simulator. I loved it. LOVED IT. Strafing trains was the best. Again: the best thing about it was it just plopped you down at a south-east England airfield, and says "hey, there's Europe. It's full of Nazi planes, and all kinds of targets of opportunity. Take off and do whatever." No hand-holding. If you wanted to do a simulated "mission" you came up with it yourself (although IIRC the manual had a bunch of guidance on missions you could do.) You did all the navigation with nothing more than a compass and an accelerate time button.
Come to think of it, P-51 Flight Simulator reminds me of STALKER. Huh.
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Is your brother a programmer also?
No; he got his degree in music composition, then went back to school and got a second degree in civil planning and now he is a civil planning engineer.
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Have you tried Unity3D?
I've had it installed at various times, but I can't honestly answer "yes".
All of the work I did, I did in XNA/MonoGame.
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Civilization
Which one?
I'm a IV fan (still) myself - I don't like what they did with V. Can't speak to Beyond Earth but I've heard good things?
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Which one?
Hm. The first or second. The first hasn't aged well.
As the series has grown, the rules have become more and more complicated until it's to the point where you have to keep so much stuff in your brain to play the game, and I just suck at that. Civ V has mechanics and rules I can't even come close to wrapping my head around. Civ IV was kind of the same way. The last Civ game I felt I really understood, honestly, was probably Civ II.
I loved the original Colonization, but I haven't had much luck getting into the Colonization remake they did on the Civ IV engine. (Even though there's really not much difference between it and the original.)
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Yeah, I agree. I liked IV a lot though - probably because that was basically "the game" I played a couple years ago. I enjoyed the Colonization remake too - unfortunately the original and Civ I and II were a bit before my time.
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I used to love flight sims. On the C-64: Project Stealth Fighter, Harrier Combat Simulator was great because it was open world-- you could conquer the map however you wanted, and you had to "move" your ground bases every so often to extend your range, but you had to secure the grid before moving it, them, etc.
On the b/w Mac there was the AMAZINGLY PERFECT P-51 flight simulator. I loved it. LOVED IT. Strafing trains was the best. Again: the best thing about it was it just plopped you down at a south-east England airfield, and says "hey, there's Europe. It's full of Nazi planes, and all kinds of targets of opportunity. Take off and do whatever." No hand-holding. If you wanted to do a simulated "mission" you came up with it yourself (although IIRC the manual had a bunch of guidance on missions you could do.) You did all the navigation with nothing more than a compass and an accelerate time button.
Pretty amazing that they did all of that with such limited resources compared to today.
This talk makes me want to do some nostalgia gaming.
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Pretty amazing that they did all of that with such limited resources compared to today.
Donald A. Hill, Jr. was famous for the amount of work he could squeeze out of a 68000.
I forgot to mention it, but one of the amazing things about his P-51 flight sim is that it included (I am not kidding) a complete and exact reprint of the original P-51 flight manual. Handed to pilots. When they first received the plane in the 40s. Incredible.
It also ran in 16(?) colors if you had a Mac II. Back in the days when the Mac II was the only color Mac and it only supported 16 colors.
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How much would I have to pay you for you to do one of your 10-minute video game review videos for Dwarf Fortress?
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Probably nothing.
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You'd do it for free?
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You'd do it for free?
I would be flabbergasted if that were the case.
I would also be one of the first viewers if true.
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Donald A. Hill, Jr. was famous for the amount of work he could squeeze out of a 68000.
I forgot to mention it, but one of the amazing things about his P-51 flight sim is that it included (I am not kidding) a complete and exact reprint of the original P-51 flight manual. Handed to pilots. When they first received the plane in the 40s. Incredible.
It also ran in 16(?) colors if you had a Mac II. Back in the days when the Mac II was the only color Mac and it only supported 16 colors.
You have me wanting to try out this game. Is it available on an emulator or something? Or would I have to go all-in and track down a vintage Mac?
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You'd do it for free?
Either that, or nothing you could possibly pay him would be enough. I'd go for the latter.
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couple hundred
Oh darn. The dev kits start at $3k...
And I definitely don't have a real use case at the moment.
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Have you ever been in love?
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This may probably explode into a whole thread in its own right, but since I was not here during the Early Discodays: What's so wrong with gamification?
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Software Development. 9-5 job or cornerstone of your identity?
I'm curious about this because when I've gone looking for jobs you see advertisements that say you must eat, breath and shit code or something to that effect. Most of the people I've worked with just see it as a way to pay the bills.
Actually if more people want to weight in on this I'd love to read your opinions.
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The last Civ game I felt I really understood, honestly, was probably Civ II.
I still love to play the first Settlers/Serf City. Did you ever play that?
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This may probably explode into a whole thread in its own right, but since I was not here during the Early Discodays: What's so wrong with gamification?
Oh man. Is there a Swedish idiom that compares to our "You just kicked a hornet's nest"? Maybe something like, "You just angered the cow by sticking a salmon up its ass along with an onion"?
Because that's what you have done.
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"Now you've shat in the blue cupboard", but that would imply that I've done something wrong without fully understanding it. I like the salmon version though, and will immediately start looking for an excuse to use it.
I am aware that this is a trigger point, but I am curious, and this thread seems like there is a good chance to get a sensible and coherent answer rather than just a rant (which I fear would be the case elsethread).
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How did you get to this site / the forums initially?
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Is it Ghostbusters 2?
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- What is your favorite Starbucks drink?
- Are you married/involved with someone?
- Are you currently insolvent?
- What is your mother's maiden name?
- What's your opinion on Hawaiian pizza?
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I loved SimAnt as a kid. Even though it's probably the least popular of the SimX games. But it had an AMAZING manual.
That was a great game.
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1. What is your favorite Starbucks drink?
2. Are you married/involved with someone?
3. Are you currently insolvent?
4. What is your mother's maiden name?
5. What's your opinion on Hawaiian pizza?
What's your ATM PIN?
Why type of tires are on your car?
Bosco or Nestle Qwik?
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File a bug on meta.d. I don't think they have been made aware of that particular one yet.
Filed Under: FTFY
My questions for Blakeyrat:
What do you - as a person and as a persona - like about this community?
Have you ever regretted playing the asshole jerk role?
Filed Under: Also: If you had a magic wand that could change anything in technology... jk, I already used that joke
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You'd do it for free?
I'd play the game 10 minutes for free, I can't guarantee I'd post the video if it didn't turn out well. Plus given how Dwarf Fortress "works", it's probably pretty shitty content to do-- no graphics, no sound effects, no background music, probably a PITA to record...
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You have me wanting to try out this game. Is it available on an emulator or something?
I have no idea.
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There are GUIs for dwarf fortress. But I can't stand all the micromanagement.
