-
All responses Most smiled responses
-
asked by sanxionLet me say something. When I was very a young child I saw a simple video adaptation of Hans Christian Anderson's "The Ugly Duckling", and at the very end there was a narration line that went something like "He was so happy, but not prideful, for a true heart is never proud." (I can't find this particular wording in any online version of the text, so I must assume it was slightly elaborated from the original.) For some reason, I was quite impressed with that line, and took it to heart during my childhood. So, from early in life I have, implicitly and unthinkingly, treated the entire concept of pride with cautious suspicion. It doesn't come readily and rapidly to me.
Of course, as a child I had very little reason to feel either pride or its opposite, shame. Certainly I was quite satisfied with being myself, and with my schoolwork, and such, but I never genuinely conceived of such self-satisfaction as anything other than natural and constant. (And why not? That is surely the defining mark of a good childhood.) It was only after the end of my adolescence, when I began to fully apprehend my responsibility to the world as a human being and a member of society, that this childish serenity fell away.
Since then, my self-worth has been governed, not by who I am, but by what I do, and what I create. This is an ethic which I have built for myself from culture and academia in general, but primarily from the Internet. On the Internet, what you create *is* who you are. People are known to the world not by what they look like or by their personality in and of itself, but by what works they have given us. Unless you create something, you are nobody at all.
And, on the Internet, I - like everyone else - am vastly fortunate to be surrounded by people who create great things. I have been immeasurably, undeservedly, unjustly enriched by a great tapestry of treasures, delivered to me freely, instantly, unknowingly and thanklessly from many people I have never met and can never meet, outside of this place. I count myself blessed to be alive with them, in this place.
And yet... what have I personally done to repay them, and the world that has brought them to me? What have I done to count myself among these people? In my personal appraisal... very little. Very little work that only I could have created, that tells the world *who I am*. Most of it is just things that anyone at all could have done, if they had only decided to do so. Three months ago I asked people to "retweet this if you feel guilty that people on the Internet give you so much and you have so little to offer them in return." That wasn't a serious request, but I really do feel this kind of guilt. Many people even in close proximity to me have made and built so much more in as much time as I have been alive. I can hardly take pride in what little I have while I am still so indebted to so many.
-----
...Hey, hang on, what do you mean _you're_ proud of what I've done? Why are you taking pride in what little work I can claim for my own?? Come back here, you scamp! -
asked by Grognor
I'd like to take this opportunity to assure everyone that I do read every non-question I receive in this Formspring inbox, even though from now on I will not necessarily respond personally to each of them.
-
I'm also responsible for the Mac port of Zelda Classic. The latest versions are here: http://www.shardstorm.com (but build 1401 for Mac doesn't work so use this link until the next one arrives: http://l.j-factor.com/zeldaclassic/ZC-250-rc2.tgz)
-
Yes.
I'm also the same Leon Arnott who did some comics for Mezzacotta.net. (http://www.mezzacotta.net/postcard/author.php?author=5, http://www.mezzacotta.net/garfield/author.php?author=4, http://www.mezzacotta.net/owls/author.php?author=7).
I'm also the same _L_ who made the Super Meat World chapters "Super Meat Land" and "Meaty Jill Off", with maybe another on the way.
And as you can tell from a few questions below, I'm also the same _L_ who's been coding Zelda Classic for the past few years.
What the hell am I doing with my life. -
asked by daphaknee
Since I so seldom get questions I've never once had this situation arise. But I would probably never hold anyone to account for failing to be a cooperative interviewee. It wouldn't really achieve anything. I'm sure everyone here understands that their every answer forms the content of their Formspring, and the quality and informativeness of that content is their responsibility to take up or abandon.
By the way I think I should apologise for that question about lost Internet stuff; that was kind of insensitive of me and I should have been more discerning about which of my followers to ask it to. -
-
"Will you just clam up for once in your life? Always carping and carping and carping! You go completely overboard with your emotions, always looking to reel in drama wherever you can. I am up to my gills in it! I just can't salmon the strength anemonemore."
Oh wait, that's from Homestuck.
Cod dam it! -
Is there anything in particular you wish was asked of me?
-
One beginning which I particularly like is that of the Game Maker game Reset. The first words you see in the game are "Press UP to launch". Do so, and your craft launches. You slowly accelerate past asteroids for several seconds alone in the darkness.
And, then, two things happen at once. First, bright red triangular enemies swoop in and fly in close pursuit of you, not yet attacking but still facing you - waiting and watching. And, in the same instant, these words appear:
"Your craft is unarmed"
"Use LEFT and RIGHT to evade"
That moment of sudden simultaneous revelation, of your vulnerability and the presence of threats, is one I find really quite effective. It instantly and meaningfully conveys the dominant themes of the game - vulnerability, pursuit and evasion.
(Reset itself both a game whose player-character is both extremely vulnerable, and not able to 'die'.)
Another beginning I quite like is, funnily enough, When Pigs Fly. It does has some problems, I must admit - the manner of the pig's accident isn't all that emotive or effective, and when the words "HOLD SPACE TO JUMP" appear and you fruitlessly jump, it isn't really clear what's going on. Is the pig trying to jump seven times her height to get out of the hole? And why can't we yet move left and right? (Maybe the pig has broken her legs??)
But the moment after that is a really grand moment. In frustration, The screen grows bright, and the pig (who may or may not have mentally retracted into fantasy in her last dying moments) magiraculously sprouts wings. And the colour slowly fades back in, and we see that the words above have become:
"HOLD SPACE TO FLY"
The key is, of course, the replacement of the mundane verb 'jump' with the word 'fly'. It's interesting, don't you think, how emotionally loaded the word 'fly' and the concept of flight is with us humans. It really does invoke feelings of wonder and joy to imagine something indisputably earth-bound given the ability of flight. In all good movies and cartoons, the moment that the characters first take flight is always a reverent and impressive moment. And, of course, Superman's most iconic power is his power of flight - "You'll believe a man can fly" being the first movie's tag-line, and "It's a bird! It's a plane!" opening each episode of The Adventures of Superman.
What is also key is the slow fade-in. Its gradual appearance evokes the gentle, dawning realisation that an event literally synonymous with impossibility is about to happen. Together, it makes for a beautiful moment - one that is sufficient to last for the entire game. (Even if the game itself attempts to replace your feelings of freedom and buoyancy with constraint and trepidation pretty much immediately, when the player tries in vain to fly out of the narrow hole through which the pig fell.)
...
You might notice that both of these beginnings involve static text, and its accentuation of the game's portrayed events. This is something I've been interested in for awhile, but have yet to properly explore or examine. -
It's an original work, entitled "A Quiet Place". It features several of my favourite things: wistful marble pillars, flowery hillsides, distant stars, and gradient-coloured sunsets.
-
The best video game is "The Best Video Game", a Flash game by Jimmy Joe Joober (age 9) from Little Rock, AR. It contains 50 aliens and 20 buzukas [sic].
-
No no no, the guitarist's mouth is the part that poems shoot out of! The mouth!
...Is what I was going to type, but then I searched for "poetaur" and found that it is a legendary relic in the Sonichu fancomic 'Moon-Pals'. It does, in fact, emanate poems. So, I guess this means that there's always the possibility of people getting simple, natural processes completely backward. -
-
Fish stayed in the sea when Amphibian found the flat world and hid up there, safe from Fish's hungry mouth. Fish didn't miss Amphibian. In the sea, Amphibian was just another shape.
Eventually, Fish forgot about Amphibian.
Fish didn't recognise Amphibian's great-grandkid when its hands reached down and pulled Fish into the flat world. Amphibian's great-grandkid had the last laugh - it had made the entire flat world its mouth. -
-
Well, you see, The Lost Panels (http://l.j-factor.com/thelostpanels/) was originally something I just did in between my previous attempts at pixel art comics and the day when I would get a scanner and be able to do comics using pen and paper, released from the apparant restrictiveness of a mouse.
But then in March 2009 when I upgraded to a computer that could run Game Maker, I siphoned most of my creativity into overambitious coding instead of pixelling. And then last November when I finally got a scanner, I realised that my hand-drawings actually look like this (http://l.j-factor.com/sketches/earl_n_april.png) which, while not necessarily all that bad, was a little bit of a blow to my ego, to the point that I mentally put aside the entire notion of making images for the sake of images for a time.
But thanks for your declaration of support! I feel I could very well make these things a bit more regularly. -
asked by MrPodunkian
It's actually pretty accurate! I don't know exactly how the original ZC developer (who is named Jeremy Craner - http://www.jcraner.com/zelda.html) managed to do it, but he seems to have stepped through the original game frame-by-frame with an emulator, or possibly even read its decompiled source code, and replicated its behaviour as finely as he could.
Perhaps the most illustrative example is this source code comment for the code that manages that cutscene where Link bursts into Ganon's room holding the Triforce.
/*
************************
* GANON INTRO SEQUENCE *
************************
-25 DOT updates
-24 LINK in
0 TRIFORCE overhead - code begins at this point (f == 0)
47 GANON in
58 LIGHT step
68 LIGHT step
78 LIGHT step
255 TRIFORCE out
256 TRIFORCE in
270 TRIFORCE out
271 GANON out, LINK face up
*/
This of course means that I and the other developers have the responsibility to ensure that the original NES behaviour is untouched when we make changes, fixes or additions. Our bug forum has a separate category called "NES Inconsistency Bugs" for just such things - though the reported bugs are given minimal priority over more serious bugs.
However there are some areas of authenticity that are traditionally regarded as "unreachable". Such as, say, mimicking the NES sound chip. Since Jeremy just used MIDIs for the music and WAVs of the original sound effects, no one else has really felt in the mood for coding a more authentic sound and music system. (Actually, at this point we have the ability to use NSFs in place of MIDIs, so we could do that, at least.) Also, there is still some extremely obscure behaviour (such as http://www.gamespite.net/talkingtime/showpost.php?p=203460&postcount=69) that isn't yet replicated, mostly because such behaviour is a little bit bothersome to integrate. -
Well, the most audible complaint is that the last "official" release of ZC was v2.10 in 2005, and every subsequent version for the last five years has been "beta". This has caused numerous users to wonder for most of these five years which is the 'real' version of ZC that they 'ought' to be using. Wondering whether they should they stick with the endorsed version, or try out the beta version with twice as many features but no ironclad guarantee that those features won't suddenly be moved around or repealed altogether, or that it won't crash unexpectedly and destroy your unsaved file, or that they can even play a quest without it bugging up and making all the Goriyas walk backwards or something.
The main reason for this state of affairs is that soon after v2.10 was released, ZC changed from being the hobby of one person to that of a bunch of different volunteers he hired, each of whom had something big and radical that they wanted to bring to the table. Here's a not-entirely-inaccurate account: this guy added a new double-sized editor interface and an assembly-based scripting system, the next guy added a C-like language compiler and full editors for the items, enemies and inventory screens, and when I joined in late 2006 - just a couple of months after this post (http://selectbutton.net/archive/topic/5642) introduced me to ZC in the first place - I added a whole bunch of new items, sideview gravity, drowning, advanced message strings, and added to each of the editors in turn. ZC v2.10's design focus and paradigm wasn't so much shifted as violently defenestrated. But hey, look at all this neat stuff you can do now! Who am I to question this wealthy bounty?
Of course, this cascade of features resulted in something of a combinatorial crisis. Every option in the various editors needed to work, and everything had to behave reasonably when used in conjunction with everything else, or when a script monkeyed with the game envornment. Previously it was enough to just know what the intended behaviour of an enemy or item was - the hookshot always went that far and stunned enemies, Like Likes only ate the magical shield, Link couldn't jump over things - but it became much harder to anticipate situations which needed fixing. And, there was the burden of making sure everything in the editor program itself worked correctly, as well as the burden of making sure every quest file created with the betas wouldn't suddenly stop working in a later beta. It became clear to a number of people that we wouldn't be able to get a hold of these bugs unless we concentrated.
So, after publicly promising to put the freeze on new features, me and the other fellows spent most all of the last two-and-a-half years fixing bugs, finishing unfinished features, and polishing the interface of the editor. (Though, to tell the truth, a good deal of the work was done by me, as some of my predecessor developers slowly became... fatigued? I don't blame them, though.) I'm glad that we have had a steady and dedicated group of bug reporters throughout these years, and that one of my companions developed http://shardstorm.com/, a site which automatically posts changes made to the ZC Subversion repository and posts new compiled builds quickly. You can see everything I've been doing on that site.
Yet, as I write this the current Zelda Classic version just falls short of being declared completely stable. Me and the current developers are fairly certain that it will finally get done at some point this year. The influx of bug reports has slackened, and most every feature has been rounded off to an acceptable shape. There's not much left to do but to keep plodding forward.
...Anyway, I actually don't know what the other most common complaints are. Maybe that it's a bit hard to learn the basics in quest editing? -
Since late 2006 I've been a developer of Zelda Classic (http://zeldaclassic.armageddongames.net/ and http://www.shardstorm.com/), a program originally designed to steal the food from Shigeru Miyamoto's children's mouths, but soon repurposed as a way to let people play with the game engine of the videogame The Legend of Zelda, experiment with its rules and mechanics, and make their own levels and hacks, without the limitations of actual ROM hacking. Do you remember the stepladder? How it let you walk across one tile of water, but you could only move in two directions while using it? Or those red skulls that permanently jinx your sword until you touch a blue skull? Or what about those old men that trap you in a room and won't release you unless you give up an entire heart container or a certain sum of rupees, rupees which you might not even have? ZC lets people freely toy with all of these things and use them in new ways on new adventures.
(Of course, the recent addition of an unrestrained scripting system with access to most all of the game's data, as well as the Allegro library's drawing routines, provides unchecked designer freedom at the expense of ZC's tight focus and core vision, and would have our mutual friend Anna frowning disapprovingly. It remains, however, much easier to make a Zelda game in ZC than it is to make something else entirely.)
I am also working on an 'official quest' campaign for Zelda Classic, tentatively called Neo First Quest (http://l.j-factor.com/zeldaclassic/neofirst.php), which I hope to complete by year's end.
My other hobbies include working on a collection of Game Maker games called Webbed Space Arcade (http://l.j-factor.com/gamemaker/) - "Webbed Space" being the name I accidentally chose for my website and subsequently attached to various other projects of mine.
And, of course, I'm also responsible for the Webbed Space Amateur Variety Twitter (http://twitter.com/webbedspace), the entries of which are sort of like Very Short Stories (http://twitter.com/#search?q=%23vss), except that I don't think of them as complete stories, but as fragments of much longer stories that don't exist. Throughout my life I've been frustrated and enticed by the unanswerable silences of fragmented works, such as the verses of Sappho, or the Chris Van Allsburg book "The Mysteries of Harris Burdick" (which I took altogther too long to realise was just made up by Van Allsburg himself). I'm not under the illusion that most of what I post is all that amazing, but it nonetheless stands as the largest amount original writing I have, as of now, ever put online. Unfortunately.
-
Loading...
