November 17, 2017
02:48 PM

The game is: you go to in-n-out.

Literally you just start either at your house, or already in your car on the way to in-n-out. And the entire game is just eating at in-n-out. If you try to do anything other than eat at in-n-out then you will die. I.e. you drive past the exit on the freeway, BOOM 20 car pileup. Don't make a right at the intersection? boom T-boned. etc etc

The in-n-out and everything on the way there is extremely detailed tho. like you can order literally anything you could at a normal in-n-out and you have tons of dialogue options. you can even choose to eat inside or go through the drive thru. every NPC is there for a reason and has a backstory.

and theres no objective, its just an extremely accurate depiction of what would typically happen when you eat at in-n-out. like every single possible avenue explored. going to the bathroom, doing that milkshake trick kayvon talked about, sneaking into the backroom, impresonating an employee etc.

August 18, 2017
08:31 PM

Okay here's how I think it's gonna go down.

There's two time periods in the story. 2012 and 2213. In 2012 life basically sucks. You wake up, go to school, listen to *literally* 8-hour long highschool lectures and do bullshit homework assignments, and go home. The (hidden) objective is to get enough money to cryogenically freeze your brain ($70,000) and kill yourself in such a way that your brain is preserved, so you can travel to the future.

It's a sandbox game, so you can do whatever you want, but the consequences are realistic. If you decide to steal a car and take it for a joyride, you're gonna get caught. You won't have a wanted level like in GTA, you'll constantly be tracked down no matter what you do. Each car also has a limited amount of gas in the tank and not all cars are up for grabs.

If you randomly beat someone up, they'll call the cops and ID you, and eventually you'll go to jail. And the timeline will be realistic. If your sentence is a week, you will be staring at a virtual jail cell for a week (or until you decide to reset the game and start over from the beginning).

In order to simplify things, the game will start at 7:30AM and reset at midnight. That way the world is predictable and making money won't be that hard.

May 20, 2017
11:15 PM

Everyone's dialogue style will be different.

Since this is in the future, people will be able to communicate in different ways. Some people use speech, others use text. That way you can get away with some voice acting, but not completely 100% voice acting. You know, fill in the blanks with different styles of dialogue. Since some messages could be delivered more effectively depending on how they are displayed.

I think it'd be best if you were a crippled old man or something. If you're using mouse + kb, that is. Maybe there's other people like you who control androids like that.

May 18, 2017
04:13 PM

Every character in the game will be staring at a screen. Walking down the street looking at their phone. Driving looking at their phone. At home watching TV. In their room on the computer. On the subway on their tablet. In coffee shops on their laptops.

You are the only character that is not perpetually staring at a screen. But the thing is, you're not human. Eventually you will find someone locked away in his room, on the computer. Controlling you.

I think the game will go into how poisonous modern computers are. All dialogue will be text based, which is nice because I can just explain that away with the fact that everyone is glued to their screen. So, naturally, text would be the only way one could communicate.

I'm not sure how the story arc will go. Free everyone from their computers? Sounds like a cop-out. Maybe replace all of the humans with robots, since it is impossible for humans to function in such a society anymore?

The idea I really like about this is that I can go into like, the truly poisonous and horrible habits that people develop with excessive computer usage. I was thinking about doing one of those twitch streamer YouTube people. And someone addicted to porn. And someone else who spends excessive amounts of time on internet forums and whatnot. And maybe some programmers too.

March 23, 2017
03:38 AM

So.... it's 3AM and I have a final in 5 hours. I really shouldn't be writing a blog post. But I just thought of what the "game" I'm planning on making should be.

I never wanted it to be a game. I honestly am not very excited by most games these days. Something about fighting NPCs or solving puzzles just doesn't do it for me anymore.

So, how do I make a game that isn't a game? At first I looked into other mediums to see what's so good about them. A book immediately came to mind. So make a game that's basically a book, right? Dialogue and story heavy. But then I realized if people want to hear a story, they'd just read a book or watch a movie. A videogame isn't good for that kinda stuff.

At that point I basically hit a wall, and that's pretty much what has been discouraging me from finishing it. But I think I just had a breakthrough.

The "nightmare" sequence in Life is Strange really stuck with me for some reason. That part was easily my favorite part in the whole game, despite there being essentially no gameplay in it. It reminded me of one of those rides at DisneyLand or something, where it's essentially a really cool, interactive, art exhibit.

That's what I think my "game" will be. An interactive art exhibit. Like, a full sandbox, with no plot essentially, where you basically roam around and check out all the cool parts in Sunnyvale. I was thinking about having it be set in the "future".... like, a combination of 2012 and 2052. It'd essentally be pure world building and sandbox... the only things I like in a game.

Of course I probably could add some "gameplay" mechanics in there, but those would be very minor. Maybe I'll sprinkle a puzzle in there or two. I really don't want to add NPCs, I'd rather have you go against another, real person.

And that's another thing. I think I will completely skip out on the online stuff. Just local multiplayer. Not only is it easier to code, but it will promote people interacting with each other in real life. Plus I can take advantage of multiplayer mechanics that wouldn't be possible in an online game (Melee / Project M, for example).

March 05, 2017
05:05 PM

I sometimes think about an alternate universe in which painting pictures grants you some specific, exhaustible, magical power upon use. Imagine if you draw a painting of a river, then maybe shaking it would net you some water or something. More water comes out depending on the quality of the painting.

Since we live in an industrial society, an entire economy would come from painting pictures of rivers.

Blue paint becomes the most manufactured type of paint. Tons of studies are conducted on how to draw rivers really fast and efficiently. Engineers start designing cheap canvases that are made of the perfect material to paint rivers on.

Then you have these kids who go through their entire youth with the intention of getting into a trade school to paint rivers. Once they get out, they start working at painting companies in San Francisco, where they're told to churn out river painting after river painting.

Everyone knows how to paint rivers. Nobody cares about painting flowers or trees or people anymore.

February 18, 2017
06:21 PM

Sooooo.... I figured I should do a timeline of my programming trajectory before I forget it

Biggest gains: PHP, GMod Lua, cycript, and LuaJIT game engines.

Biggest mistakes: Staying at Quixey for too long; staying at mulberry for too long

Current ideas:

September 16, 2016
10:44 PM

i need to make the truck model

i also need to play the witness

September 13, 2016
10:26 PM

im hitting a wall lol

i don't want this to amount to solving a hard puzzle or killing a bunch of bad guys or leveling up. i want something rawer than that

and also i forgot how to make games

September 11, 2016
04:47 PM

I coded in screen recording so I should be able to upload a lot more gameplay videos.

That's basically a poor-man's gravity gun. It may be a good idea to make something like a GMod-style spawn menu, playing around with blocks is getting kinda boring. I'm pretty tempted to add networking at this point too, maybe networked game-dev, since Lua is so dynamic?

September 10, 2016
10:59 PM

commit 1005bbc9f7769c4917e78084194f638e36eb1aed
Author: Reed Weichler <rweichler@gmail.com>
Date: Sat Sep 10 22:37:08 2016 -0700

check glfw version

commit 0af77adfbf64ef2173fbc270326b2c9b1250f19c
Author: Reed Weichler <rweichler@gmail.com>
Date: Sat Sep 10 22:29:20 2016 -0700

greatly improved console, raytracing (spawn block with mouse1), crosshairs
September 10, 2016
01:31 AM

I feel the burn out creeping up on me. Maybe I should take a break.

September 09, 2016
08:49 PM

Progress on the Reno house:

Yeah I know it's ugly. Took me about 10 minutes though, which isn't too shabby. TrenchBroom is pretty nice. I actually spent like 4 hours mapping out the house though; to get the dimensions right:

Kinda reminds of of that time I made that Game Kastle map for CS:S. Wish I knew where I kept the file for it. It's probably gone forever at this point.

September 09, 2016
04:00 PM

Looks like I spoke too soon. There is something out there that's better than Hammer, and it exports to .obj. TrenchBroom. It's a Quake editor, but that's perfectly fine because HL2 is based off of Quake anyway, so I already know how to use it for the most part. The guy added a lot of cool features on top of it too, like vertex editing and 3-point clipping. I'm watching videos on YouTube about it and it seems perfect for my uses.

An honorable mention should go to LevelBuddy, which I was initially going to use. But I found TrenchBroom through looking up reviews to LevelBuddy, lol.

September 08, 2016
09:39 PM

LEVEL LOADING YESSS



That's an arbitrary .obj file I made in Blender. It's loaded in bullet as a static physics object!!!! Making levels couldn't be easier.

(Not really tho.... if I could somehow leverage Valve Hammer Editor that'd be ideal, but that's way too much work)

It's time to model the truck in blender. I also should probably start implementing animation. And maybe ragdoll physics???? Seems too ambitious but HOLY SHIT LEVEL LOADING IM SO HAPPY!!

Actually I think I'm just gonna make something like the physics gun in GMod. It's kinda lame just spawning blocks at the center.

Also, I've been playing a few games and watching interviews with Jonathan Blow etc to get my creative juices flowing. I am so much more set in the "no HUD" thing now. No minimaps, no "journal", no "objectives", nothing that is 2D flat on the screen. (except the console)

Any info you need to know will be observable in the actual game world. For example, if you want to switch weapons, you'll have to tell by the color the glock emits.

Hell, I'm even thinking about not having a pause menu. Well... you'd be able to pause the game, but it would be more of a like... "freezing time" effect.

Actually... I could take that a step further. It's be a freezing time effect, but you will also be taken somewhere completely different. Like, a matrix-like 'whiteroom' with doors you can go in to exit/save/load/etc. And it will also have a delay. So pausing the game will actually give you a slight disadvantage, because a) it takes time and b) you have absolutely no idea what's going on in-game when you come back to your computer.
September 07, 2016
07:33 PM



Bullet is nice. God damn. I should have just picked this from the outset. No wonder Rockstar uses it.

It's so much faster and accurate, and the API is easy to understand, especially with all the tutorials out there.

Unfortunately I had to fight with the build system a bit. I've grown to tolerate CMake, but bullet does this weird thing where it creates like 6 or 7 different .dylibs for each sub-thing instead of one nice one I can use with LuaJIT.

Thankfully I made aite, which made it pretty easy to just completely ignore bullet's build system and compile it the way I wanted. I had to strip out the Bullet3 stuff (except for Bullet3Common, since it's used for logging), and it built without any hiccups! It took like 35 seconds on my laptop tho. But again I guess that makes sense since it's so fully-featured.

Also, getting it to work with LuaJIT nicely is a huge work in progress, because I basically have to hand-write a C wrapper for every function I want to use. But it really isn't bad at all. The workflow is really nice since I'm using aite. I can just integrate my C wrapper directly with the core library, and then just run aite to compile that one file and relink it. Takes like 6 seconds.

Edit: Takes less than 1 second now. I spent some time optimizing aite after writing this.
September 07, 2016
01:34 PM

So.... reactphysics3d is extremely buggy. It actually crashes a lot. CapsAdmin suggested ODE since it has a C API but it looks like it isn't maintained anymore, although it seems stable and was once extremely popular. But meh. I'm done with half-baked solutions that end up not working out.

Time to bite the bullet. Unfortunately it only has a C++ API, but I've had to go down the C-wrapper road twice already, so nbd. Also it looks like they're working on a C API. Seems like a worthwhile investment.
September 06, 2016
05:27 PM

So... I probably should have thought of this before, but I need physics simulation on meshes. Not just cubes. Reason is: converting the .obj levels I make in Blender to cubes will be a bitch to program. So unfortunately, qu3e won't cut it.

Thankfully, I don't have to swallow the bullet pill just yet, as I found another, less advertised engine called reactphysics3d. It's really well documented, has a small feature list, and it seems to have been in development since 2008! It also has support for static physics with concave meshes, which is all I need since it will be a level!

Unfortunately it's also in C++, so I need to go through the pain of understanding the C++ API and wrapping it in C again. :( Hopefully this is the last time.
September 05, 2016
07:30 PM

Physics!
September 05, 2016
12:47 AM



So yeah all I really have to show from last time is the skybox. I've been refactoring mostly. And since qu3e is in C++, I had to write a C API for the Lua ffi bindings. So now that's out of the way, I just need to actually integrate qu3e with my engine. Hence the refactoring. I think it's ready to integrate now. I'll probably finish by the end of tomorrow.

After that... I think I'd be pretty much set as far as the engine goes. Shadow mapping and model animation would be nice, but I can always do that later. I think it's due time to start on the creative process.

Eh, actually.. I should do model animation first.
September 03, 2016
01:52 PM



Added lighting to the model, and CS:S textures. Now it has the cool animations of 1.6, but looks modern!

Well... the engine doesn't support animations yet. Need to implement that.

I honestly can't believe this is pure LuaJIT tho. It's so snappy.
September 02, 2016
11:41 PM



MODEL LOADING OMG!!11!!!! And yeah that's the glock from CS 1.6. Had to convert it in Blender. Turns out it's pretty easy to use.

Now I can start making maps and physics and shit!!

I would continue into the night, but there's a fly in here that's tripping me out. So until Sunday!

Edit: Wait I forgot that I still need to implement animation.
September 01, 2016
09:24 PM



I feel myself about to hit a wall. I'm basically idling, implementing font rendering / console / joystick support instead of actually moving forward with rendering / mapping / modeling. Going on reddit to avoid it etc.

Need-to-do: So yea, nbd
August 30, 2016
03:47 PM



23:05:51 PDT

I'm only gonna map out the parts of the bay area I care about / have been to. Everything else will just be a cliff, where if you look down it's too dark to see. If you fall off this cliff you'll land in Lavender Town. Your glock will turn into an actual usable gun and there will just be a bunch of Gastly/Haunter/Gengar/Cubone mobbing you. If you end up killing them all, the Marowak will come out and actually kill you.

Every time you die, your dead body will be left there. So if you die 5 times, and fall into Lavender Town a 6th time, you will see 5 dead bodies.

Each exit from lavender town will go to the actual routes. But that will just be an illusion, it will slowly fade back into lavender town. It'll just basically be an infinite room sort of deal.
August 29, 2016
07:08 PM

TWOOOO CUBEESSSSSS (and FPS camera control!!!!)


Update (at 22:52:38 PDT)

I read through the rest of the tutorial, lighting is next. After that part I should start refactoring my code and start integrating the qu3e physics engine. Then the model loader, then learning Blender again.

After that though... I have no clue. Idk how I'd implement the level or the game logic. I guess I'll cross that bridge when I come to it.

Update (at 00:29:04 PDT)

WOOOOO
August 29, 2016
12:47 AM

Hell yea, got a spinning cube in (mostly) pure LuaJIT. Followed this tutorial. Instead of writing it in C++ (ewww), I just translated it into LuaJIT and C. :D

The performance of it is surprisingly snappy. I guess we'll see how well it turns out when I add more stuff to it. I'll probably have to rewrite the render in C at some point, since it's probably slow somewhere. And multithreading in Lua is a nightmare.



As far as game mechanics go... I think it's going to be a counter-strike esque FP"S" when you're on-foot, and a GTA type game while in the truck. You can only use a controller while in the car, and only mouse + kb while on foot.

As far as weapons go, I think I'm only going to have the glock from 1.6, with a custom modern-looking skin. No bullets of course. It would be projectile based stuff. Like gravity gun, hookshot, etc. The ammo info + what mode you're using would be on the top of the glock. No HUD. Possibly holding down right click would give you a better view of the top of the glock.

I really like the idea of combining mechanics from different games, and forcing the player to use those mechanics. No mouse + kb for driving. No controller for FPS. It'd be similar to how you don't use a wheel and gas pedal while you're walking around, and you don't move your legs while driving in a car. The context switch is still there, which would make it more immersive I think.

Oh yeah... I forgot to mention before. excessive's LD33 submission works on OS X with minimal tweaking! So now I know what's theoretically possible.


I could live with graphics / mechanics similar to this. And this was only made in 4 days!

Also... I was looking around at physics engines and I found qu3e. It's purely box-based physics, which kinda sounds bad at first, but apparently that makes it way simpler. So with that in mind, I think it might actually be workable.

Like, I'm already cutting corners on the physics engine by making it a hovercar instead of a regular car, so I think this makes sense. Plus you can basically make crude polygons out of cubes, if you rotate them right. I think the GIF in the README.md file really sells it:

August 28, 2016
12:41 AM

This is what it's gonna look like I think:


Kind of like GTA, but with no violence. And hovercars. Mostly dialogue and story driven, I think. But also a sandbox. I don't know how I'd pull that off.

I might have the setting be in Sunnyvale and San Jose, and you just drive to Pokemon League and play pokemon or something. I like the idea of recreating where I used to live.

...Maybe it'll just be the bay area but with things added that I wish were there. I really like the hovercar idea though. It'd be pretty funny to just see you go on a roof or something with the car half over the edge, and then turn off the hovering mechanism and just have it *plop* over the side of the building.

Plus, the physics for it would be waaay easier than if it was an actual car lol

As for looks, I think I'm gonna go for something of an inbetween of Killer7 and Wind Waker. Dark, but cartoonish. Always night time too. It'd be especially funny since it's in Sunnyvale. And also it would be way easier to explain away the lack of other cars and NPCs, since that's how Sunnyvale actually is at night.
August 27, 2016
12:01 AM

I think I'm gonna get back into making games. Seeing the awesome stuff Karai and shakesoda are doing with Love3D in LD35 and LD36 is motivating me. 3D is hard, but they make it look easy and fun.

Hopefully their LD36 submission works on OS X out of the box... I need a good reference to get started.
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