Posted on December 21, 2012

As of writing this the Hamilton Beach Set ‘n Forget 6-Quart Programmable Slow Cooker is the most popular slow cooker on amazon for a reason. With the probe you can even do some Sous Vide cooking. This morning I “hard boiled” eggs in a bath of water for a hour under 145 degrees and got custard like smooth eggs that slide out of the shell after you crack them and have many of their more delicate proteins preserved giving it flavors I didn’t think a egg had. It was so rich in flavor adding seasoning to it was like pouring ketchup on a steak.

This afternoon I cooked a stew and the heat sensor let me know exactly when It was ready, and if say I didn’t arrive home on time it would have kept itself warm until I did. This dish was so easy to make and tasted delicious. I think anyone who likes eating home cooked meals, whether you can cook or not will enjoy this lovely device. All you need to do is leave the ingredients in the pot and wait, it does the rest.

My stew:
I mixed cuts of beef with
1 teaspoon dried thyme
1 teaspoon dried crushed rosemary
1 tablespoon paprika
1 tablespoon coarse sea salt
1 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper
Then added onions and bacon fat on top!

 

The genera was coined by sega to describe the unique game “gain ground” which has been so far the soul game in the algorithm action game genera. Perhaps the only game that comes close to relation is KOKUGA for the 3DS.

In an algorithm action game you play a slow live action battle where twitch skills are trivial. Your character(or characters) fires, and moves SLOWLY. You have to be smart and decisive with your button inputs and choices in order to succeed.
In order to doge enemy attacks you must predict them by learning their algorithms, not react. In order to survive you need to asses carefully the actions you make. Algorithm action games naturally make fantastic Co-op games because the action runs slow enough that players can communicate and react to each other as well as the enemies on screen.

In KOKUGA you can only fire ONE shot at a time and control a tank every shot must be aimed carefully before being fired because of the wait time. In addition you have a series of power up cards to strategically use to best clear the levels.

In Gain ground you have an arsenal of different wimpy fighters. None strong or versatile enough to complete the game by themselves, you need to use the best man for the job and sometimes several different men to complete a level successfully.

In these games you consider the enemies simple movement patterns and use your abilities to slowly clean the screen of enemies in the safest way possible with the best choices. They are mentally tense live action games of strategy.

I’m talking about this because as an experiment in my free time from being a full time student I’m going to make an algorithm action game of my own and blog about it along the way. I’m not sure whether I’ll finish the project, or keep up this blog, but starting today I’ll try.  I just finished getting moved into my first apartment complex and I’m excited to go back to programing.

Four Swords is more than pretty fun, Its the greatest competitive co-op ever made.

This title is largely underrated due to how difficult it can be to gather a group of cutthroat backstabbing bastards for this incredible multiplayer co-op/competitive roguelike zelda.

In it, you and a group of 3 other jerks rush to complete a randomly generated dungeon as quickly as possible. There are many different dungeons that range in level challenge from normal to many times harder than other zelda game’s supposed challenging arenas. They all have their own quirks but generally involve a mixture of things you can do alone and need 2-4 people to lift, pull, stand, solve in order to progress/get treasure.

The “goal” of the game is to beat the levels as quickly as possible(time bonus is a multiplier) and gather enough rupees total to unlock further areas. Money is everything in the game, you constantly see your groups total rup collection on the screen and when someone dies an amount is automatically deducted to revive them that doubles with each death.

Links can throw each other, this can be used to reach places without the roc feather and solve puzzles. This is important.
Links can also knock each other away with the sword without inflicting damage. Shove Fighting is tight enough its worthy of its own game. This is also important.

If you work as a team, protect each other and focus on getting to the end as quickly as possible you are COMPLETELY MISSING THE POINT.

The true GOAL of every dungeon is to beat it while gather more rupees than anyone else. At the end of a level it displays in a dramatic fashion each link being raised up into the air by their tower of rupees. Only one person can crowned the winner. This is NOT a matter of honor it is of pride.

So when you complete a section with your “friend” and gain access to 2 treasure chests you don’t run to your chest, you run at your friend, if you can knock him down with your sword you can use his stunned time to toss him out of the room, giving you time to grab BOTH chests you win.

With the right friends even the easiest of dungeons becomes highly challenging as you alternate between battling to near death and co-operating to prove that YOU are the better link.

At many points you’ll split up to search the dungeon as quickly as possible. Running on your own separate screens you will inevitably find treasure and areas you need others to help you unlock. You see ahead into the room and the wheels start turning as to whose help you’re going to get and how you’ll manipulate the situation to get the majority of loot to yourself.

The players all run very slowly. Multiplayer is a constant race slash battle, if you sped the game up to normal Zelda speeds there would be some clear disadvantages:

Throwing and knock back would become less significant if you could recover the distance quickly and it would be much more unlikely to successfully take more than your fair share of treasure.

In addition you would be focusing more on a reactionary rather than strategy focused style of play. Less room for thinking, less weight on your actions, less time to scream at each other or shoot each other death glares.

There are 3 different seeds you can find in the level that increase your abilities until you die. One boosts attack power, one boosts defense and one of them boosts running speed. I don’t remember by how much but the way the game plays everyone naturally gets them all fairly quickly. You could say this compares to the game getting more intense over time. Thought theses seeds on paper sound like they give unfair advantages temporarily they are the only reason for you to kill another player and more often the real reason why Not letting yourself die is so important. dying fucks your chances at coming out on top since you lose your seeds and come back to everyone faster and stronger and more resilient than you.

As you play with 4 people I like to keep an eye on the other players faces, if they find something good I may crash their little party and try to take the treasure for myself. But you need the Pegasus boots(which are TERRIBLE for combat) to have the speed to cover the map effectively.

Still for the sake of time its important to an extent not keep secrets and deliver reports to each other of what you’ve scouted and what areas you’ll tackle as a group first. On the harder dungeons there will be invisible paths, or important puzzle relevant areas only ONE person can see but cannot cross alone so playing this game without communicating verbally would be impossible.

Finally item management is important, every link can only carry one of 9 different alternate items, such as a bomb, shrink cap or roc feather. Items sit on top of stations and by grabbing the item on it trade it for the one in your possession. Fighting or conning people over trading items can be the key to your success in acquiring more money than anyone else.

When It came out in many years ago. I declared it a revolutionary game that would surely be followed by many more competitive co-op games. Its 2014 and there’s only 4swords on the gamecube to match it but that lacked the rougelike element that was essential to replay value.

Like Godhand I feel like this game occupies a niche all on its own and Its because of nobody making games like Godhand or 4swords that I started down the indie dev path.

Get some friends together and play this game! Do not try to play the game by yourself, and try to form an opinion. Single player mode feels like playing The Lost Vikings on a Racetrack, but everyone went home.

 Here are the “moral guidelines” I live by when playing:

1. Truces are for the weak- There is only one winner in four swords and by co-operating with a friend to block out others you’re saying you lack the ability to seize victory by yourself.
2. Continuing to attack someone who has surrendered is taboo. If someone accepts defeat don’t hound them or continue to strike onto them when you have them backed against a wall.
3. On the other side if someone refuses to yield onto the point they die it is their fault.  When you die you are taking rupees away from everyone and there is no greater shame than resurrection. Better to be in 4th place than hold everyone back.
4. Share Armor seeds, Attack Seeds and give the heart container at the end of the level to those who you deem most in need. These items only assist survival not give no advantage in rupee gathering.
5. “Be dirty in action not of word.” I always keep my word and do as I say I will. If I say I’ll share the treasure on the other side of a pit if you throw me across to reach it, I mean it.

And I will do everything and anything inside the game to snatch victory so long as I can do so following my moral code.

DO YOU have a moral code you follow while playing video games? Do you see yourself as a mighty knight as you hunch over a tiny plastic screen? Leave a comment below!

Gameplay: “Blood is constantly dribbling out of your duck head.You can’t stop the blood from leaking out! But you can with the action button hold your mouth closed, building the blood up in your beak, expanding and then releasing to force your shots forward. More charge=more damage and size but also less distance, UNTIL your mouth fills up beyond bursting and blood squirts everywhere.”

Special controls:

–Esc to ESCAPE and skip cut scenes
–P to PAUSE
–R to RESTART
–F4 TO TOGGLE FULLSCREEN
–F9 TO TAKE A SCREENSHOT

DIFFICULTY:

Slow vs Fast– fast(60fps) is the game accelerated to 2x the slow speed(30fps).  Also levels are twice as long and contain twice as many enemies.

Gentle vs Hard– In gentle your hitbox is the center pixel of your eye, in hard, its  circle of gaspers head.As a bonus defeated bosses give you twice as much rage as they do in gentle mode.

Its recommended you work up the difficult tier. Slow mode is ideal for practicing and mastering the controls. Gentle mode is much more forgiving of your positioning and planning.

Life:

Gasper runs off rage and blood. 

BLOOD-Getting hit lowers your blood, consuming the blood of your enemies and destroying enemy bullets replenishes your blood. If you run out of blood you pass out.

RAGE-Killing builds up your rage, the faster you kill bosses the more rage you get. passing out lowers your rage by 1000.  If you are passed out and you have no more rage left the game is over.

Controls for Gasper:

–Movement: Gasper normally moves at 3 pixels per frame,  Charging(Holding space) slows this to 2 pixels, Tapping the arrows allows for precise 1 pixel movement. During a Jetstream Gasper is slowed to 1 pixel until he rights himself back up.

-Firing:

BLOODDRIP -Doing nothing-Without you holding down the spacebar to channel blood threw your mouth gasper drips droplets of blood down for 30hp of damage, this happens on the 3rd frame of the idle animation which occurs every 60 steps(2 seconds in chill) If you are moving right or left, the MOMENTUM of your movement is carried in the bullet, so with practice you can effectively flick it distances otherwise impossible to stand above.

BLOODBULLET-Tapping space fires bloodbullets that do 2hp of damage, the average gamer can tap a button 7 times a second, so you can figure the average damage is 14hp per second in chill. 7 in turbo.

BLOODBALL-Holding and releasing the spacebar creates bloodballs. Gasper’s bill clicks between 7 levels of charge, clearly seen as his bill expands. Damage and velocity of the ball go

Bowling bloodball is this special darker colored 7th frame shows up for only a moment, when the blood is literally about to escape from gaspers mouth. This special bullet can penetrate threw enemies and continue falling down.

OVERFLOW-Holding space starts the charging animation. Gasper’s bill expands and eventually overflows with blood after 60frames (2 seconds on chill, 1 on turbo) This causes a “overflow” where for an additional 60 frames Gasper is invincible, destroy’s bullets on contact and using them to heal 2% hp and does 0.5hp of damage per step on contact for a total of 30hp of possible damage.

BLOODARROW -If gasper has a duck coin, holding and releasing the SPACEBAR+CTRL fires bloodarrows instead of bloodbullets or bloodballs. This bullet does a fixed 45 damage, but can be devastating because it penetrates through enemies and bullets alike in a straight line. The amount you charge the arrow affects its size and travel speed, but not its power. As with an overflow destroyed bullets heal 2%.

JETSTREAM– If Gasper has a duck coin and holds CTRL+SPACEBAR this triggers a Jetstream instead of an overflow,  where he becomes invisible while firing a wave of 69  bullets which each do 3 hp of damage for a maximum total damage of 207hp! This attack destroys bullets, and has a wide spread. Like a shotgun it’s most effective against bosses up close.

BLOODSHIELD -Holding SHIFT and SPACE while holding a duck coin blows a blood shield. This costs nothing however if gasper was about to be damaged the blood shield takes it instead in return for one duck coin as well as causing collision damage to all touching the bubble of 15hp per step for 6 steps for a total of  90hp of damage!  The size of the blood shield and thus the radius of its impact is determined by how long gasper has charged his bill.

HYPEROVERFLOW-Holding SHIFT and SPACE to the point of overflow while holding a duck coin creates a Hyper-overflow, which functions like an overflow in every regard except being 4 times in size .

F.A.Q.

Q.Where is Gasper journey 1 and 2?

A.In a parallel universe!

I realized when I layed out the design documents for Gasper 1 ,2 and 3 that I wouldn’t have time to make them all. So I rolled a die. Someday interdimensional internet will be possible and you can download all 3 episodes of the epic series.

For now please be satisfied with the final chapter of Gasper journey.

Q.I found an error! What do I do?

A. Congrats, you’ve done something in the game nobody else ever has, and I didn’t think was possible! If you get an error message, copy it and send it to me!  I’ll fix it ASAP!

Q. How long is this game?

A. Average play time for a single run is currently 30 minutes. Much of the game is randomly generated or open to many different solutions, so the game is designed to be replayed over and over again.

Q. How do I transfer my save file?

A. Easy! Just copy your settings.cfg and RECORDS.sav file to your folder.

 

Micro credits:

This game was made by Jonathan Daar.

Introduction storyboarding, title screen and duck voice credit goes to Cassidy Rae Henry
Narrator voice credit goes to John Mawhorter

Special thanks to Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) for the royalty free music!

Also you!!! I want to congratulate you, whether you skimmed or not, to have the desire to do this extra reading into my game makes you, to me, a rare person of exceptionally respectable caliber! I like you a lot!

For the holidays I wanted to give out gifts but I had no money! I decided I’d try to make something yummy with the things I already had.

I decided to make Peppermint Hot Chocolate.

Perfect Peppermint Hot CoCo

My first steps were to make a batch of the stuff, and it had to be perfect. I would mix ingredients together and try 4oz cups.

After much experimentation with many different ingredients such as condensed milk, vanilla extract, peppermint extract and dozen of test tastes until my tongue literally went numb and I had to take a break before starting again, I’ve made the perfect peppermint hot coco. Combining the soothing aspects of peppermint leaves with the comforting effects of chocolate. Peppermint hot chocolate is one of those things that I’ve always had a love affair with.   Combining Organic Raw Cacao powder, Soothing peppermint leaves, and German Rock Sugar makes for me the perfect cup of Chocolate Tea.

I then went threw several revisions for the Instructions looking for the best way to make Peppermint Hot CoCo.  All in all I ended up drinking most of the coco that I had tweaking the ingredients and trying to find the perfect mix.

My final Instructions for Cup:  Bring one cup of water to a boil.
Mix in  1/2oz coco while stiring vigorously.
Wait 1 minute then add 2oz milk. Final product should be the color of chocolate milk 

 

Here’s a picture of my test lab:

Next steps: I need to find a cute inexpensive way to store packets of it and print out labels while portioning it out to a average serving.

I used my vacuum sealer to package them into servings for 1 to 2 cups of coco. 

and made labels

 

And here it is!

I put easy tear cuts in the sides of the bags and taped the labels on.

This was a fun project but it was also really stressful at times. I made 12 packets of CoCo ranging from .60-1oz or 3-5 teaspoons all in all I wish I had made a larger batch of coco, but that would have involved going to the market and buying more than I should be spending.

Hopefully everyone will appreciate these single serving drink packets.

I hear a lot about what’s the right temp to brew tea but I never hear anything about drinking it! After sipping on tea too hot and burning my tongue yesterday, I decided to finally set down and take the temp of the tea as I drank. My intentions were to determine at what point tea is safe to drink and at what point its lukewarm.

Here’s what I found:

135 F+ is burning I can drink it past this temp but doing so will burn the inside of my mouth ever so slightly.

130-134 F is ideal if I SLURP it.

125- F is a great temp for tea, its cool enough to drink without slurping but still feels hot and nice. At 120 F- the tea’s becomes lukewarm and I would prefer to have it iced at this point.

This was tested on my mouth only, what I’d like is to hear from others. Brew a cup of tea or hot water and take its temp as you drink it.

Try to find: The range that slurping/sipping is bearable Your favorite temp The temp at which point it becomes lukewarm

UPDATE:

I’ve surveyed a lot of people and I’m concluding that you should to be safe try to wait until the tea is 130 degrees before you start drinking it.

I’ve found people who drink a lot of hot tea build up a tolerance to it, if you need to drink tea at a dangerously hot temp in order to enjoy it that’s fine fine the temp that you’re comfortable at but don’t drink higher than that. There are serious health concerns linked with drinking tea at extremely hot temperatures.

Sources:

http://www.accuratebuilding.com/images/services/charts/hot_water_burn_scalding_lrg.gif

http://azdailysun.com/news/drink-tea-when-temperature-s-just-right/article_7dc9a472-8dcf-52fd-a10c-ba4fd5f13537.html

Tea Tips with Jonathan Daar

• If you want your tea cup to stay warm longer pour some hot water in the cup first and swirl it around, once the cup warms dump the water out and use the cup for tea.  This is important if you want to brew the tea in cup
• Green and White tea will be burned and turn bitter if you cook them at a boiling temperature. I recommend soaking them in water at 175 F
• Slurping tea is a way to oxidize and cool the tea when its normally too hot to drink. Try it, professional tea tasters do it, and its fun.
• If your looking for a caffeine boost eat the tea leaves! Tea leaves have significantly more caffeine than coffee beans per ounce. The reason why tea has reportedly less caffeine is because the leafs are normally discarded, while in coffee the beans are ground up and consumed. Really you can eat tea, with high quality tea this is especially enjoyable.
• The Sky is the limit when you are making tea. Try making tea out of garlic! You’d be surprised what you can put in hot water that will still be edible!

Here’s my tea collection:

Above: Left top to right clockwise: Airtight and dark canister for keeping tea fresh longer, electric tea kettle with variable temp control, stainless steel teaspoon, and a lot of tea.

Tea is best kept in a cool dark airtight place. I keep mine in the freezer section of the unplugged minifridge I use for console gaming.

Lets get right to business, coming back from the Global Game Jam I got to see a lot of people make games in under 48 in teams, and I made a game in under 24 by myself on the side of working on another project, so I think I’m reasonably qualified.

Find people to support you– This is a no-brainer, having others pick up tasks for the game is going to save time and it’s a great motivator. Even though my game was a side project to something else, the support and attention of others not only gave me motivation, but their feedback helped me quickly understand what steps I had to take next.

Make a game not a game engine-Unless you are a professional programmer with a pre-built framework you’ll need to pick something like Game Maker, MultiMedia Fusion 2, Unity, or Construct 2 to work with… these are all great high level languages designed specifically for making the process of creating games as simple as possible and simple to the experienced means fast. Someone with a solid grasp of any one of these tools can get a complete game running in mere hours. Personally I love game maker, a solid review of it can be found here

Take breaks the right way– Eventually you will get tired and you will get hungry. If you need a break go on a walk, sit in the park just get away from the computer and relax yourself, don’t surf the internet or play video games. If you are hungry go out and eat something healthy. If you’re tired sleep, don’t try to force yourself to wake up if you are going to end sleeping later on, you’ll only be more exhausted. This is supposed to be fun, you can work hard and finish without feeling like you beat up your body, I did. I actually found the simplicity of the game jam to be rejuvenating, I didn’t have to worry about anything other than making games, and the times I spent sitting in the park relaxing gave me my best ideas. 

Understand your priorities– This is the most important lesson I can give you, what order to take things when you make a game. The core of every game is the gameplay, a game is still a game without art, without sound, without a story, but without a gameplay you don’t have a game, as such the first thing you should do is:

1. Decide on what kind of gameplay you want and plan out how you can achieve that. I decided I wanted to make a game about the thrill of throwing a boomerang while moving around and using it to fight off enemies. I decided I needed in terms of art a image of the character holding the boomerang, one of them throwing it, and images of the boomerang rotating. For the sound I needed one that played, on the throw and one on the catch. For the Programing I-this is getting too long to write!
2. Implement this basic core idea as quickly as possible, just get it to work. Needless to say I was able to get the basics up and running very quickly. I used every shortcut I could to get to it, even making different colored clones of the player as enemies. 
3. Congratulations you have a game in a few hours! Now that you got that out of the way its time for the hard part! Making a GOOD game. You’re going to have to decide what direction you want to take with the gameplay and continue to add to it while sticking to the same rules, focus on something, figure out what needs to be done and do it, In my case I wanted to have waves of randomly generating enemies come at the player, then I wanted to create different enemies, then I decided to add health, then power ups, each thing was isolated and broken down, I was careful never to build on anything I had not already firmly established in the game, so if it turned out to be a dud, I could quickly move on to something else. 
4. At a certain point you may decide that you have had enough adding features you want to polish the game. Polish is a word I like to use to describe those little details that although small and time consuming can bring up the quality of a game or at least make it feel more complete, good examples of this is flashy graphical effects, playing with the friction of the game or in my case I wanted to find a way to teach the player how to play my game. I ended up making a tutorial level that gradually brought the deeper gameplay mechanics to the player. In the time it too for me to do this I could have easily added a series of levels for the main game instead, but it would have meant little if the game’s initial difficulty scared away players.

 

The biggest mistakes I saw at the Global Game Jam was people adding features or even polishing details, when their core was still not functional. Remember make a complete simple game first, build upon it next, and finally polish, fix the stuff that could be better, throw away the stuff that doesn’t add to the game.

Remember its all code-Everything in the game is being stored as 1’s and 0’s and it’s the programmers job to put it all together, all the art sound and good ideas in the world won’t make a computer game.

I hope you found this informative, I highly recommend How to make a game in 4 hours by Cactus. If you are going to watch it open up this write up too which covers the same event:  http://www.tigsource.com/2009/03/23/igs-09-the-four-hour-game-design/

Amendment:

Looking back at this article and thinking about my own struggles I realized I missed something, something so obvious it stands right in the face of everything, but still needs to be mentioned.

The most important factor, this significant integer is SKILL. Nobody just wakes up one day and decides to make a great computer game in 48 hours. They spend years developing and refining their skills and their output in this constrained time is some reflection of that skill. In the above article I merely wrote my observations of what successful groups seemed to have in common. But what really made them successful was the years of experience and skill they had brought with them.

If you are reading this you are probably still not completely satisfied with your abilities, and that’s a good thing. As long as we yearn for more, as long as we see what we could have done better next time, we will continue to grow. A crocodile only grows if it eats, so stay hungry my friends and bite off more than you can chew.