My green fingers sweat on the handle of my pistol as I creep through the door, into the next room. I found two boxes of ammunition in the previous room so I’m well equipped for the next horrible monster I encounter. My grip on the pistol tightens as a horrible three-legged spherical thing jumps down from the ceiling, pirouetting to land on its feet and shooting a stream of acidic liquid at me.

“Oof,” is all I manage to get out, as I feel the Burster’s fluid eat into my skin. Without thinking I fire at it, killing the thing in two shots.

While reloading my pistol, I notice a glowing jewel on the stone. If it’s what the briefings said, this is the teleport stone that will allow me to phase out of our normal reality just long enough to escape the next deadly monster I encounter in DUNGEN [Star].

Looking through the entries, I could only spend a minute or two with each entry. It helped if the game ran in my browser, so HTML and Unity were big. Here are some of the games that caught my eye.

Now that two weeks have passed (a geologic era in internet time), I’m ready begin to look back on the #procjam talks and the entries to the jam that caught my eye. I’ve been very busy lately working on my own submissions INSceptahdeckwu and Patchwerk, among other commitments, so this is by no means an exhaustive look at everything in #procjam.

Procjam updates

I’ve spent the week at a couple of major international conferences sponsored to some degree by old dead-tree journals. I was struck, following last weekends’ #procjam talks, by the lack of openness. None of these talks are going to be made freely available. Photography and recording is actively discouraged. The official conference hashtags, when provided, were silent or only used by those in attendance. While this exclusivity may generate profits for the aforementioned dead-tree journals and give a leg up to those fortunate enough to be able to attend these conferences, I find it ethically reprehensible in the 21st century, given the tools that we have available.

I’d like to once again thank @mtrc for hosting and streaming #procjam. Because conference was made freely available, I was able to interact with the attendees in a way that would be impossible if I was trying to divine through twitter what was going on behind closed doors. I think this kind of openness can only generate more interest and ideas, regardless of the field of study.

Patchwerk

A Quil sketch designed to generate patterns for quilts. The code is available on github.

#procjam updates

#procjam is upon us. The conference is on and popping, streaming at http://www.twitch.tv/procjam. I’ll try to precede my #procjam posts with a little update on some of the cool things I’ve seen that need pointing out during the jam itself.

@GalaxyKate will be streaming some tutorials today, following the conference.

@sudorossy is currently streaming some development and modeling at http://www.twitch.tv/sudorossy. I imagine that sudorossy will continue this throughout the jam.

The #7dfps jam is also going on this week. So, I’ve decided to release my third person procedural tweeter. Or maybe it’s a fourth person tweeter, third person once removed.

Fourth-person tweets

I’m at it again, making a twitter bot like @styx_ebooks. Only this time it’s in a completely different language and it’s got a completely different corpus. Corpus is a Latin way of saying text, in case you forgot.

I’m thrilled to announce that I’m going to participate in the upcoming procedural game jam called #procjam. #procjam is a global game jam and a live-streamed conference in London focused on making things that make things. You can keep up to date by following the jam tumblr procjam.tumblr.com. There’s already a handy list of procedural generation tutorials available on the tumblug.

In addition to submitting one or two projects I’ve been working on, I’d like to cover the content of the talks with perspective and reactions, and to check out the contest entries after it’s finished like I did for Space Is Red from #spacecowboyjam.

Needless to say this will be a month-long endeavor, what with my weekly (ish) blogging schedule. With one or two posts focused on submissions, I think four blog posts may be conservative, so I’ll keep writing as long as I’m interested.

To make it easier to follow along, I’ll tag up all the posts with the procjam category and I’ll try to do the same for the tweet announcements, even if it’s out of style because the jam was weeks ago. That’s how committed I am to making this happen.

If you get the sense that I’m trying to psych myself up for this, I am.

The next couple of months will be very busy in my life. I’ll be traveling and attending conferences, activities that have traditionally consumed my precious blogging time like so many Frito pies.

I may be setting the bar high, but if anything the purpose for aiming high is success. All too often I hear about jams in the middle when everyone is tweeting out cool prototypes and in the thick of design, or I’ll hear about a jam when the contest is long over because someone pointed out that the winning entry was amazing. Through dumb luck and exquisite taste in following @mtrc on twitter, I heard about this gamejam with enough lead time to mark it on my calendar.

Even if I don’t produce anything interesting or important, by gum, I’m going to participate in and cover this gamejam. I’m not going to let another really cool gamejam slip under the radar.

Here I’m drawing a comparison between games that are subjectively perceived as party games and games that are more in-depth. I’m avoiding using loaded terms like casual and hardcore, but I think the distinction is likely the same. Both types of games can be complex, but subtle balancing issues can affect the subjective sense of fun when playing these games.

For discussion I’m going to focus on relatively advanced moves in Super Smash Bros. and TowerFall: L-canceling and dodge canceling, respectively. I was inspired to examine this balance issue by a recent tweet by TowerFall creator, and, in the interest of full disclosure, my close personal 3DS friend, @MattThorson.

Today I’d like to look at how to bet in the spectator mode of Super Smash Bros. on 3DS. I’m surprised by how much I enjoy /Super Smash Bros.‘/ spectator mode. It adds the thrill of a horse race alongside an already great game.

Here are some of the betting strategies I’ve found useful:

• Always bet the full amount
• Always bet your earnings
• Bet the odds
• Don’t be afraid to take your money and run
• Know the metagame
• Know the good players, you may see them again.
• Set limits
• Trust your judgment

I reached out on twitter in a somewhat misguided appeal to #gamedev, asking whether devs consider ethics when designing games. Apparently there is so much traffic on #gamedev that any tweet will be lost in a deluge of announcements and automated bot retweets. Oh well, I thought, I’ll go it alone. Given the recent tone in the communities surrounding games, I feel the need to examine this question: Do ethics matter in game design?

Brief note here. Following a Summer of travel and visitors, posts should be returning to a more regular schedule soon. It’s great when I can post here regularly, but I’m not going to get bent out of shape when I have other commitments. So, if there are unannounced, prolonged absences, you can assume that it has something to do with spending my weekends traveling or socializing, which is undoubtedly a good thing.

I recently came across this stackoverflow answer introducing git for version control in Unity projects. Note, the question specifically refers to Unity3D, but this will work for Unity2D as well.

I’ve already written about setting up a .gitignore file. Here are some steps you can take to optimize the way Unity stores information, so git can track it.

Git was built to work by diffing large files containing text, specifically code. Git works just fine with binary files, but it defaults to a less efficient method to diff those files, which can result in bloated git repositories. Nobody wants a bloated git repository.

Here I’ll summarize two of the steps from the answer that I found helpful, using Unity v4.5+. It’s worth noting that these steps will increase the size of your project—although I’m unsure whether they affect the size of any deployed binaries.

So if the size of the project on your development machine is a critical issue, you may want to think about keeping the default settings. The project I tried the steps on went from 86.7 MB on disk (including its bloated git repository) to 86.9 MB, so it’s probably not going to create an appreciable change in most projects.

Switch to Visible Meta Files

Switch to Visible Meta Files in the Edit → Project Settings → Editor → Version Control Mode Menu.

If the Visible Meta Files option is turned on, the .meta files associated with parts of your project will have textual information rather than binary.

Switch to Force Text

Switch to Force Text in the Edit → Project Settings → Editor → Version Control Menu.

If you choose Force Text this will cause Unity to use text to serialize assets that it would normally store as binary files.

Save

Save the Scene and project for these changes to take effect.