Non-fiction and Classics for 2015

I've been trying to alternate my reading with one modern fiction (usually sci-fi) then one classic or non-fiction. I find it's the best way to keep me aggressively reading more and more. This year started off great with Snow Crash, which I considered a classic, even though it was only from the 80's, to me it was kind of the grandfather of alternate reality sci-fi books. Dracula was way better than I thought it was going to be, and another fantastic book overall, even if I didn't really care for the ending.

However, it kind of went downhill form there, the first non-ficiton of the year was Nick Offerman's "Paddle Your Own Canoe" a kind of memoir and advice book. The trouble was that it came of extremely preachy, and most of his success came from other people covering for him, or giving him a shot, all the time while saying things like working hard are how to get ahead. It just left a bad taste in my mouth when someone claims that their hard work got them to where they are while having lucky breaks like an entire group of actors and a manager covering for you while you were arrested for petty shoplifting for fun. The book would have been great if Nick would have written it with a bit more humility I think, something he pretends to have throughout the book, all the while spouting about his hard work and implying how great he is.

Count of Monte Cristo I was super excited about, and had such a great beginning, throughout the entire prison and escape I was so excited to keep going. But then the book turns into a serious of coincidences that are just hard to swallow. Things outside of the protagonist's control just keep happening in his favor, maybe it was supposed to highlight his "divine providence" he was supposed to personify, maybe it was just the style at the time to have incredible coincidences be a major plot device, but the book was just too long for so many of the major plot moments to seem to happen on their own.

And then I tried a book called "the willpower instinct". Which I downloaded as an audiobook.  Which was promised to: 

"explain the new science of self-control and how it can be harnessed to improve our health, happiness, and productivity. Informed by the latest research and combining cutting-edge insights from psychology, economics, neuroscience, and medicine, The Willpower Instinct explains exactly what willpower is, how it works, and why it matters." 

The first twenty minutes are the author explaining how awesome her class is, and how many people it's helped. Then it turns into a self help seminar complete with "complete this stage of the worksheet now" type of learning. It marketed itself as a psychology book when it's completely a self-help seminar book you'd pick up after attending a one day conference. I only spent half a credit from Audible on it and still feel robbed. I understand that if you're looking for a self-help book it's probably great, but I just couldn't get over feeling like I was tricked into the book.

Other non-notable non-fictions I went through this year included the great "What If?" by Randall Munroe (creator of XKCD), and Super Freakonomics. Both were incredibly short, but some of the best audiobooks I've listened to while stuck in traffic. Nice and pallet cleansing between Sci-Fi books.

A game I'm not sure I'm going to finish

I picked up Unity again, planning on doing some 2D unity games. It takes a while to learn these tools, and honestly I've taken almost a month's break from trying to make this game, but I have some sprite sheets I made during it's development.

The main idea for the game was a 2D side-scrolling shooter, which is usually done with space ships and large bosses. This was going to be a guy running through the streets of a city shooting hordes of gang members and orcs in order to save a girl (who turns out to be the mastermind bad guy).

I really liked the way the sprites turned out, but I didn't care for the gameplay. Maybe I'll finish the game later, but it's shelves for right now.

I'm working on another side-project to keep sharp with HTML, javascript and CSS that's looking fairly promising. I'll post a link once it's playable.

Dracula - Way more scary than I thought it would be

I've been trying to mix in some of the "classics" to my reading list, or at least what I consider to be genre classics. I've found most of these books didn't live up to the hype I saw surrounding them. The main problem was that I knew the basic plot and ideas presented in the books before I even open them, so they don't contain the impact they would have if I had read them when the were originally produced.

1984 for example was a good book, but considering I already knew about Big Brother, doublespeak, and constant surveillance in the book from references to it in popular culture and more modern books, it didn't have the same effect on me as it probably did to the first generation that read it.

But then I read Bram Stoker's Dracula.

Warning: some spoilers

First off, the book is way more scary than I thought it would be. The book is written from journal entries from the main characters, always after the day's events, and them speculating on what will happen to them later that night. Nothing is in the moment, it really draws a really good picture of the fear and uncertainty of the character's interactions with Dracula. It allows for a strange multi-perspective first person narration that you don't get too often in books.

Secondly, I thought I knew the plot of Dracula from movies and other books. I did not. The first maybe fifth of the book takes place in Dracula's castle, I thought the vast majority of the book would be there. There are other characters I didn't even know about, like an insane asylum patient named Renfield, a man who traps flies in his room using his leftover food, to feed to spiders, to feed to birds, and so on, so he can eat the final animal in order to consume as many lives as possible at the same time. Truly creepy stuff.

Lastly, the restraint from professor Van Helsing after he already knows the danger they're all in, but has to ease them into the idea that something supernatural might possibly be real, and that he's not another madman spouting gibberish is just fantastic writing. In fact a good majority of the book is about characters attempting to subtly read the actions and intentions of the other characters, something I know felt really relatable to me while reading, it drew me into the situations, even the benign ones discussing trival matters.

There book starts and ends with action but the suspense exists the whole way through, if you're a fan of horror, I highly suggest to check this out.

Finished a Tiny 2D Space Shooter

So I finished a small game, it's pretty simple, ship spawns in the center, bad ships spawn around the player until eventually he gets overrun and dies. The real test here is to see if I can host through dropbox and blogger to have Unity games directly playable without adding a separate service.

WASD or arrow keys to move. CTRL or SPACE to shoot.

note: requires unity web player to function, it'll show up as a "plug in blocked" on most browsers that you'll have to click to get to work.



I have another project I'm going to start on shortly.

Ready Player One and Snow Crash

I finally got around to reading a book I've been meaning to for a while now, Snow Crash.

Snow Crash is a light-hearted cyberpunk novel published in 1992 the same year the first photo was published to the web. The plot takes place in grim future of north america which as been broken up into a lawless land where the only rules are based on whatever corporation operates in the area. There are really two worlds that everyone operates in, the real world filled with dark scenery and lawless abandon, and the Metaverse a virtual reality world simulator where half of society (and the book) spend their time. A "snow crash" is an old term for a computer crashing while it was writing a bitmap causing the computer send jibberish to the screen looking like t.v. static, although more colorful. A good book, holds it's age well considering how much has changed in computer science since it was released.

And then we have Ready Player One, a video game themed book loaded with pop culture references from the 80's and 90's.

Ready Player One is about a bleak future, where half of the population spends time in a virtual reality MMO that is more game like. The creator of the virtual world has a program trigger when he dies that gives the rules for a competition to win his inheritance, a nerdy scavenger hunt of sorts. The basic plot structure is the same, big corporations want to take over the virtual reality world and by extension the outside world too, and the extremely talented, but not well off, protagonist has to stop them. They're both filled with nail biting action, tons of comedy, Ready Player One is probably the less serious but more fun of the two. I enjoyed Ready Player One way more than Snow Crash but that might just be because it was focused around early video game culture instead of religious tie-ins to computer science like Snow Crash was.

Both are excellent alternate reality cyberpunk books though, and both are definitely worth your time if you're interested in the genre. Snow Crash is clearly the inspiration for Ready Player One (and many others), but I really think Ready Player One was the better of the two books if you're looking for something funny and light to read.

Some of my Older Art

Haven't made much progress on Unity, still trying to get comfortable with inkscape to make some sprites for a small roguelike I'm working on. I'm probably going to abandon that project for a while to complete some smaller games first. I think that's the sensible idea, maybe some clones of classic games?

Not sure, either way I'm posting some of my older artwork, some sprite sheets and pixel art I've made previously.

This little guy was created to be a worm enemy in a collaboration project I was doing. Unfortunately the project lost steam and fell apart, but I still like the way he ended up looking.

This masked ghost was for the same game, I really like the way he ended up looking, he was going to be the "goomba" of the first world. Slow moving enemy you can jump on.

This was the logo I made for the collaboration that was making the game. They ended up not using it, but it's still one of the nicer looking pieces of pixel art I've done.

Fully animated flame enemy for use with RPGmakerVX ace. Super easy to recolor, 4 frames per animation which was handled by an add-on script. It's a copied and heavily modified version of a breath of fire III for SNES enemy.

My favorite books from last year

I know it's three months into 2015 already, but I'm just now starting my blog so, whatever. I'm going to post my favorites from the books I read last year.

The Android's Dream - John Scalzi

By far my favorite book from last year, it's a humorous sci-fi adventure. Scalzi has a slightly more realistic approach to the future while still giving outlandishly fun technology and characters in his world. The book is filled with spies, extremely advanced AI, farting assassinations, and my favorite part an entire religion based of making fictional prophecies come true. 

"not because they were divinely inspired but because they weren't. If a group actively working to make entirely fictional prophecies come true managed to pull off the stunt, the whole concept of divinely inspired prophecy was thrown into doubt, chalking up a victory for rational thought everywhere."

I enjoyed every moment of this book, it's lighthearted and fun with a lot of excitement. Strongly recommend. 

The Martian - Andy Weir

A fantastic series of catastrophes leads to an astronaut being stranded on mars. The main character is incredibly lovable, and with a very open personality. The book is written in kind of a mix of first person log entries and third person narrative. The technical details are very abundant, which adds to a sense of realism to the main character's struggle for survival. If technical details are not your cup of tea, you may want to skip it, however, if you want a really fun and exciting survival story this is definitely the one I'd recommend. 

There were some other great books I've read this year, but those two were by far my favorites. Both sci-fi which used to be only a guilty pleasure of mine now seems to be my genre of choice. 

First Post - I Discovered Inkscape

A couple days ago messing around with Unity 2D and trying to figure out the direction for a small game I want to make I realized I don't have any artwork necessary to make the game I want. Since the only game art I've made in the past has been spritesheets and pixely backgrounds I went seeking a new tool and found Inkscape a free vector graphics tool. 

I followed along with this tutorial and made myself a logo. I figured that'd be the easiest way to get used to the program. 

Then I found a great blog 2D Game Art for Programmers and messed around with his first blog post making similar characters. I plan on going a little further with that blog, hopefully I can get some decent art for some games soon.