http://wiki.nickretallack.com/ 2010-04-16T07:32:06+00:00 http://wiki.nickretallack.com/ http://wiki.nickretallack.com/lib/images/favicon.ico text/html 2009-08-21T20:15:34+00:00 http://wiki.nickretallack.com/adventure?rev=1250885734&do=diff Eliminating Sources of Randomness Rolling dice and shuffling cards creates random noise that competes with the signal of your story. Would you rather your adventurers succeed through their own decisions, or as the result of random chance? A good GM fudges the rolls to tell a story. They can be something of a distraction from the plot and from the intellect of our characters, so lets not bother with them. text/html 2009-09-02T05:02:02+00:00 http://wiki.nickretallack.com/best?rev=1251867722&do=diff It's hard for me to find things I like. Mitchum Deodorant is pretty good. text/html 2009-09-18T05:36:13+00:00 http://wiki.nickretallack.com/bookshelf?rev=1253252173&do=diff Getting Things Done This book taught me how to write down todo items that are actually do-able, and to get all those ideas out of my head without losing track of them. It's very enlightening if you take it seriously. It even got me excited about filing cabinets. The Pragmatic Programmer A book of helpful metaphors about programming. Can be very useful for grasping important concepts, and explaining them to your boss. Learn You a Haskell For Great Good Though it's hardly a practical guide t… text/html 2010-03-22T09:09:21+00:00 http://wiki.nickretallack.com/cardgame?rev=1269248961&do=diff Goal To assimilate all card game concepts into a generic system that ensures balance for every possible card that could be created, while allowing enough possibilities that players can be creative when they create their own cards. Cost/Benefit Freebies Many games have a few cards that will do something for free. Basic healing potions, antidotes, buffs, etc often have no downside to playing them beside the fact that they took up a whole card. How do we model these in a system dominated by c… text/html 2009-09-02T02:16:37+00:00 http://wiki.nickretallack.com/drawing?rev=1251857797&do=diff Loup Guru Tutorials text/html 2009-06-04T02:07:25+00:00 http://wiki.nickretallack.com/dreamcatcher?rev=1244081245&do=diff The following is a design I typed up in late 2007. I plan to revise it soon. This describes a small device designed to record your ideas at any time and never lose them. Vision This device is about capturing all those fleeting bits of creativity that slip away just before you can jot them down. Have you ever been on a long walk through the forest, or even the city, mind wandering as you do, until you make a sudden realization--have a brilliant thought--that you rush to jot down, but in th… text/html 2009-06-24T07:48:41+00:00 http://wiki.nickretallack.com/elementalchess?rev=1245829721&do=diff Elemental Chess is an original board game based on Stratego and Rock Paper Scissors. Two players compete by moving Spells around a grid, attempting to defeat each other's Wizard. Spells come in three elements: fire, water, and plant; and three sizes: small, medium, large. text/html 2010-04-07T22:44:31+00:00 http://wiki.nickretallack.com/game_design_grab_bag?rev=1270680271&do=diff I have a lot of ideas buzzing around my head, and I need to get them out! If you like any of these thoughts, tell me so! You can feel free to make a game about them and thank me in the credits, or ask me to develop it with you. Most of these are inspired by games I've played that weren't quite fun yet. They can be made fun though, I swear! text/html 2009-05-18T11:13:41+00:00 http://wiki.nickretallack.com/graveyard?rev=1242645221&do=diff Lets mourn the loss of all those old projects that just weren't backed up well enough. Here they are in reverse chronological order: * Kraterbikes - an internet multiplayer deathmatch in space - the revision control and wiki were hosted on the school's site dforge.ucsc.edu and they lost all data for all their hosted projects. * Bouncy Physics - a nifty demo of squishy stretchy circles within circles in ruby+opengl - my host had a raid failure that destroyed all data, my school account clo… text/html 2010-04-02T03:50:10+00:00 http://wiki.nickretallack.com/horde?rev=1270180210&do=diff A parody of massive multiplayer online games. The idea is to have hundreds of players involved in one epic battle or dungeon crawl at once. Imagine crowds of cute little adventurers flooding through the halls, pushing huge obstacles, firing volleys of arrows and tinking their swords against giant monsters. Like Pikmin, all controlled by human players. text/html 2009-06-24T21:50:54+00:00 http://wiki.nickretallack.com/ilovesketch?rev=1245880254&do=diff You may have seen the videos of this nifty 3D sketching program, ILoveSketch. It first hit reddit Oct 12, 2008, but since then I haven't seen much about it. So I thought I'd scrounge together what I can find. Media * Interview with the creator text/html 2009-10-14T03:08:07+00:00 http://wiki.nickretallack.com/kudos?rev=1255489687&do=diff * Pyglet * Pylons * BeautifulSoup * Elixir text/html 2009-05-17T19:51:35+00:00 http://wiki.nickretallack.com/me?rev=1242589895&do=diff Nick Retallack on Linked-in text/html 2009-09-08T08:18:01+00:00 http://wiki.nickretallack.com/outliner?rev=1252397881&do=diff new controls 'x' indicates that binding anything to this key might be a bad idea. They are likely to be overridden by native key bindings, such as: * Application switching * Mac Spaces 'v' indicates that this command is ignored in the current context in favor of another one.'?' means I haven't thought of a binding for this yet. text/html 2009-05-25T00:06:24+00:00 http://wiki.nickretallack.com/school?rev=1243209984&do=diff People can get behind in classes sometimes. That's a problem. Those people may end up getting really stressed out trying to keep up, and not learn very much or have a very good time in the process. They might be better off dropping the class and taking it again next term, but then they have to start at the beginning again and lose a lot of time in between. There's also the bad grade in the interim. text/html 2010-03-17T11:32:48+00:00 http://wiki.nickretallack.com/simplefun?rev=1268825568&do=diff Passing Functions Instead of applying functions immediately, you may want to pass one as an argument to another function. Prefix it with an ampersand (&) to prevent the function from executing. You must continue to prefix with the ampersand to keep the function from executing. Oh god, then it's not like a regular value, is it? text/html 2010-04-02T01:40:10+00:00 http://wiki.nickretallack.com/speedrun?rev=1270172410&do=diff A game of speed and style, agility.Specifically, a fast-paced 2D action side-scroller. Inspirations Mega Man, Mischief Makers, Mirror's Edge Graphics Probably 2.5D. Character models should be somewhat fluidly animated, though they would just be the same generic body with custom markings. The art style is very similar to new-style MegaMan art like in MegaMan ZX. However, there would be a lot of influence from Mischief Makers, including the target indicators. text/html 2009-06-04T02:28:10+00:00 http://wiki.nickretallack.com/start?rev=1244082490&do=diff So far, the only good page is elementalchess. There's some stuff hidden in the automatic index though. text/html 2009-05-17T09:10:26+00:00 http://wiki.nickretallack.com/useful?rev=1242551426&do=diff (Document from Dec 2007) Have you ever had a class in your major where you had to do a lot of silly tasks that seemed utterly pointless at the time, but then years later took another class where all that pointless stuff became immediately useful? Unfortunately, you didn't pay much attention to it at the time, so by the time it became useful you'd utterly forgot.