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The Best of My 2020

Tomorrow I’ll be recording an episode of OHAC, where Mikhail, Jack, and I will be discussing yearly themes. That will serve as a nice recap of the year and a starting point for 2021.

To wrap things up on this blog though, I figured I’d go back through my posts from 2020 and select one or two favorites from each quarter, and maybe write a little bit about how I view those posts now. I don’t often revisit my expository writing, so I think it’ll be a good exercise.

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Remote Christmas

I’ll be spending this Christmas away from family for the first time ever.

I’ve been left trying to make the best of the situation. I’m not alone: I’m spending Christmas with my fiancee, and we have been decorating her small San Francisco apartment with lights. Our parents have sent us cookies and gifts, and we have a small tree on the table. 1

I think the biggest difference is that this is the first year where I don’t have a distinct build-up towards Christmas externally pressed upon me. Until I graduated college, there was always winter break. The last two years, flying home for the holidays was a clear marker where I was now working remotely for a couple of weeks, surrounded by family and trying to see all my friends who were back as well.

None of that is available to me this year. I’m not going anywhere, and working from home is no special deal. Hence, decorations everywhere except the bathroom. We have a home automation set up called Christmas Time that sends our lights flashing and Christmas music playing. We made mint cookies this weekend, and decorated sugar cookies my mom sent us. I’m happy with how we’ve adapted.

  1. The apartment is less than 250 sq. ft. so there’s limited space for anything more than the 2-foot tree we chose. ↩
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Advent of Code 2020

A coworker told me about Advent of Code last week. It’s an independently run site that provides an advent calendar of programming puzzles. Similar to sites like Project Euler, they are of varying difficulty and not designed to be completed in any particular language.

So far, the puzzles have been clever and fun. There is a central plot for the entire month of needing to get a currency of star coins to pay for your post-Christmas vacation. I take it not as tone-deafness to the pandemic, but more of wishful thinking for a better 2021. They’re cute premises.

Anyone who like programming puzzles will enjoy these; I highly recommend them. I came to it a few days late (and if you’re reading this post, you’re behind too!) But it’s reasonable to do two in a day, and you’ll probably want to!

Of course I’ve been using Python for all of them so far, but I could totally see myself using the puzzles as a way to learn another language; they’re overall more accessible (and engaging) than Project Euler.

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Text Adventures Part 4: The Document

A text adventure would not be useful to me if it was not written down. Particularly when the goal is to have an unfeeling, strict parser doling out commands only when successfully prompted, it’s important to have a reference that is clear, contains maps and explanatory information, space for notes, and everything the “computer” needs to say throughout the game.

With the exception of Recurring Nightmare, I write every text adventure using LaTeX. Over time I’ve built up commands and formatting to make this process simpler. For Recurring Nightmare, I tried my hand at InDesign since I had received a license from work. That license no longer exists, and it’s easier for me to edit a .tex document than an InDesign document, so LaTeX continues to be the way forward.

In this post I’ll talk about some of the decisions I made for formatting my document, how I make maps, and other bits of trivia that come to mind.

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Perfect Shot (NaNoWriMo 2020 Story 1)

Although I’m not doing a complete take of NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) this year, I still wanted to put in some concerted effort writing some pieces that weren’t blog posts or text adventures. So, I’ve committed to writing at least 2 short stories this month, a medium I find beautiful and incredibly tricky to nail down.

This first one is particularly short, only about 3 pages if printed, and the idea comes from a post on /r/WritingPrompts.

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Text Adventures Part 3: The Mechanics

Text adventures are, almost by necessity, designed to railroad the player into doing something without it being obvious or annoying. Any mechanics introduced should be a natural extension to the world the player discovers, provide sufficient freedom so they don’t feel like a funnel, yet guide the player in the correct direction. In the text adventures I’ve listen to played on the Cortex/Upgrade crossover episodes, I’ve noticed that mechanics often act as hints. They are like bumpers on a wall (which may kill you, but you can make a different decision the next time.)

All these realizations have come after thinking carefully through the mechanics and puzzles I wrote which were clearly bad (and the few which were actually good), and trying to figure out what precisely caused them to have the effect on the players they did. It’s often me not paying attention to my good sense and the feedback of testers. More frequently it’s me trying to subdue the text adventure genre until it allows me to try and tell a story, rather than building a story that works within a framework.

Directly, most of my text adventure failures have come from a single mechanic undermining any positive decisions I made.

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