I only do Ludum Dare like once a year but apparently I blog even less frequently than that! So here we are with another blog entry about Ludum Dare 52 and another game I made in 48 hours. The theme was “Harvest” so I made Space Harvest, a game where you guide a growing civilization of bunnies over the course of 10,000 years … to be harvested by the approaching horde of space cats. But there’s a secret goal of trying to get the bunnies to the maximum civilization level so they develop space travel and escape the space cats. (In hindsight, I should have made that goal a little more explicit.)

I struggled with coming up with a game for this and I think it was over halfway through the event before I had an idea that could be a game. My basic idea was to make something like an idle clicker where you click a button every so often to increase bunny population. But that didn’t seem like enough of a game so I wanted to have a few resources that you manage. That led to sliders that you could adjust to automatically collect resources.

But the big thing I wanted was graphs. I’ve played a fair number of these kinds of games and it’s all about resource management. But it’s hard to manage them if you don’t know what’s going on. Hence, graphs.

In the Overall category, I ended up ranking 174th out of 424 Comp entries (individual people who made their game in 48 hours), so in the top half. I also ranked in the top 20% for Humor and the top 30% for Audio, so that was cool, especially since I only threw together the audio in the last hour or so.

If I do it again, I hope I figure out the game idea faster. It’d also be nice to have real graphics but I’m happy with what I ended up with for this entry. Up until the last couple hours, it was basically just a checkered sphere with a bunch of text.

Back in April of 2022, I participated in Ludum Dare 50, a game jam where you try to make a game in 48 hours. This year’s theme was “Delay the Inevitable” and I made Life of a Floof, a very simple game where you encounter an alien creature that is inevitably going to die. But you try to delay that by clicking flashing buttons every once in a while. You can play it on the web.

As usual, I used Unity again to make the game and created the music in Garage Band in the last hour or so.

It wasn’t really much of a game, it was more of a mood experience. So my overall ranking was 516th out of 805 Compo participants, not even in the top half. But my ranking in the “Mood” category was 151st, so in the top 20%, so I was pleased about that.

My goal was to try to create a meditative experience. In real life, all things inevitably end and I’ve found that it helps to be present in the moment. So the game starts off with you trying to frantically press the button to keep the Floof alive. But as the stages progress, it guides you instead to slow things down and focus on your breathing. My hope was that people would get to the final stage and just enjoy the music for a little while.

So, I made a political video. In don’t think very many people will see it and even fewer will see this blog post but both the video and the post were made for me and if you’re curious, here’s what led to it.

I’ve been pretty upset about recent turn of events. I get the arguments on both sides and I understand how the Supreme Court works (even Ruth Bader Ginsberg had nuanced thoughts about Roe v. Wade). But fundamentally, I think it’s a bad thing that women in the U.S. no longer have the autonomy to decide what happens within their own bodies. So I fumed about it, I made donations that I hope will help, and I plan to vote in November, and then … well, I was left with this frustration.

So I channeled that frustration into making this video. I don’t think it’s going to change anyone’s mind, I don’t think it’s going to make a difference. I just wanted to do something. Sometimes, maybe that’s all you can do.

In lighter news, I did have some other ideas about blog posts: I made another Ludum Dare game and I wanted to scan in some older things that I did a long time ago, like a picture book I made in 6th grade and a comic I made while I was unemployed! I know that virtually no one reads this, but I like having it around as a record of stuff I did. In that sense, I wish more people kept blogs around.

I participated in Ludum Dare 48, a game jam where you try to make a game in 48 hours. This year’s theme was “Deeper and Deeper” and I made Snake on a Sphere, a version of Snake where you’re on a sphere and it get smaller and smaller as you get longer and longer. You can play it on the web.

I used Unity again to make the game, which helped a lot. This year, I also used jsfxr to create sound effects and the LICEcap to generate animated gifs.

I was pretty pleased with my results. Out of 1145 people participating in the Compo version (where it’s a single person, writing a game from scratch), my overall rating was 112th, so in the top 10%. There were also a bunch of different categories, including “Fun”, in which I got 23rd place, which is just about the top 2%! So, that was exciting.

I tend to scope my projects pretty tightly. That helps me actually finish something in 48-hours. But my game is pretty simple and I noted that a bunch of games have a leveling-up mechanic where you go through the game multiple times and get a little more powerful each time, which I think adds a lot of replayability. So if I do something like this again, I’m going to try to be a little more ambitious and incorporate something like that as well.

Wow, it’s been a year, right? I don’t know about you, but I’ve had a hard time dealing with all the stuff that’s going on. Even after the election, which I thought would be the end of it, it just felt like it just kept on coming. I felt exhausted and stressed all the time.

Then I started meditating. It’s not a magic bullet or anything, but it made it possible to deal with everything and keep on functioning. By the time the Capitol riots happened, I still felt frustration about it all but I could tell it wasn’t taking over my life like I think it would have before. So, anyways, I thought it’d be interesting to make a video about what that experience was like for me.

On a lighter note, if you’ve seen any of Julie Nolke’s Explaining the Pandemic to My Past Self series, you’ll recognize what my video is inspired by. It was a fun challenge to try to match that in style from camera angles to the font she used in the date at the beginning. It also made me wish I had a better camera, better sound, and better lighting; was a better actor, a better writer, and a better director. But hey, you work with what you’ve got. =)

I had this idea for a silly video where the joke is that one character is somehow able to sing a barbershop quartet by himself. I’ve done a bit of singing in the past so I thought it wouldn’t be too hard. Well, turns out that trying to get the timing right with yourself is incredibly challenging. Fortunately, I was sorta able to fix it in the edit with a copious amount of retiming.

I could have used some pitch correction as well cuz I’m a bit rusty with the singing (I think this is the first time I sang since before the pandemic began) but that would have been too much work.

Another fun detail is that the puppets came from a sock puppet movie I directed over a decade ago. That was a lifetime ago so it was good to see them put to use again.

I work at Apple now! I’m a software engineer on the prototyping team in the design studio. This is something I’ve been working on for a while. In fact, the hardware archeology posts I made back in May were related to a presentation I gave during the year-long process:

• October, 2019 – Contacted by a recruiter about the role.
• November, 2019 – Met with someone on the team who knew of me from Pixar to learn more about the team.
• January, 2020 – Meet and greet with with the team at the Apple campus.
• March, 2020 – The pandemic hit.
• April, 2020 – Virtual interview with a several members of the team.
• June, 2020 – Gave a presentation over video chat to the larger team and interviewed virtually with more people.
• September, 2020 – Got an offer from Apple.

A couple issues came up during this whole process. One is that it’s a pretty long commute. I initially passed on applying because of that but I kept on hearing great things about the team and the more I heard about the role, the more it felt exactly like what I wanted to do. But the second issue was the whole pandemic. That probably delayed everything by a few months and it was also more challenging to interview virtually than in person. On the plus side, it looks like I won’t have to worry about the commute for a little while.

Looking back, I’m very grateful for my seven (!) years at Google. I learned so very much and got to work on cool projects like object scanning, the Cardboard app, and of course, Tilt Brush. I got to work with incredibly talented people, travel the world, and eat some wonderful free food. I still think it’s a great place to work and would heartily recommend it to anyone interested. But the company has shifted focus in the past year or so and I’ve been looking for an opportunity to do the kind of work that I think the new role at Apple will provide.

It’s been a weird year. But even for 2020, September 9 was an outlier as the sky turned orange in Berkeley because of the ash from the California wildfires. There’s just something undeniably surreal when the entirety of your world looks completely different from anything you’ve ever seen before.

Like a lot of people, I’d been struggling with the challenges of 2020 and September hit me particularly hard. We weren’t even done with the year and then the whole state catches fire?! But something about the weirdness of that day made me … well, not exactly hopeful, but it did make me feel like change was in the air. And I felt like I wanted to do something adventurous.

So I decided to drive my family an hour and a half to a drive-in theater in Sacramento to go watch Tenet.

It was amazing. The movie was everything I was hoping for. More than that, I felt like the world was still full of possibilities. And for the first time in a long time, I felt inspired to work on another personal project: a video about Tenet using the time travel mechanics of that movie’s universe.

This was going to be one of my most ambitious videos so I had to do a huge amount of planning. I had to plan out all the time-streams and figure out where to break them so I could splice them back together. I also needed to be precise about stage directions because I had to shoot everything in a single day so that my camera would be consistent for all the shots.

But another huge challenge was that I needed to do the main section in a single take. That meant memorizing and performing a couple minutes of dialog and action without making any mistakes. It was particularly hard because I had to pause and react to imaginary versions of myself. Also, I’m not the greatest at memorizing dialog and motions, so I had to rehearse a bunch and did many, many takes.

In the end, I managed to get a few decent takes and then came all the editing. A green screen or some software to automatically extract the background would have been great, but I didn’t have those so I manually rotoscoped a bunch of stuff for hours in Final Cut Pro X. In the process, I discovered that my camera had moved slightly in between and the lighting changed significantly while shooting.

But you know what? I’m pretty happy with the result. It’s not perfect and I don’t think a lot of people are going to see it, but I accomplished what I had set out to do: make a video with cool time travel mechanics about a movie that I delighted in experiencing.

If you’re curious and you’ve seen the movie, here’s my final video. If you’ve seen the video, here’s some director commentary:

• The scene where I get the hat? I performed it backwards so that I dropped it after wiggling my fingers. Then I reversed it in the edit so that it would look like I wiggled my fingers and it popped into my hand.
• The second time the hat pops into my hand, I’m actually using my other hand from offscreen to throw it.
• The “oxygen mask” is actually just an N95 mask taped to an extension cord.

I wanted to get a sense of how effective masks were in curtailing the pandemic spread. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find a source of data per state for that. (This NY Times article is close, but they don’t list out the counties.) But I did find a Wikipedia article on political party strength. So I combined that with the New York Times covid data repo and came up with the graph above (here’s the spreadsheet). The color indicates which party that state voted for in the 2016 elections. All the lines have been normalized per state population.

I was stunned. When this all started, I figured it would mostly be an issue in the states that are more densely populous, which is mostly the blue states. So it’s not surprising to see higher positive case numbers for the blue lines. But I was shocked to see how much faster the red lines were growing in the last few weeks. The highest blue lines are New York, New Jersey, Rhode Island, and Massachusetts. The highest red lines are Louisiana, Arizona, Florida, and Mississippi.

I think this is a pretty clear indication of the effect of politicizing what should absolutely not be a political decision. We have medical experts, epidemiologists, data scientists, and examples from other countries. Politicians should be taking their cues from them.

Here’s another graph, focusing on California, which is where I’m from so I’m a little more familiar with it:

In this one, I graphed the number of positive cases last week (normalized per million people) versus a “Republican factor” that I got from this Wikipedia article on voter registration numbers per county (further right is more Republican). I’ve also made the dots for the 12 biggest counties bigger for easier visibility. As you can see, California isn’t an entirely blue state.

The thick gray line going through the middle of the dots is the trend line and it’s pretty flat. That means there’s no correlation between political party infection rates in California. But looking at the counties I’m most familiar with, I see that San Francisco and Alameda are pretty low and I also know that mask usage in the SF Bay Area is pretty good. But I’ve heard from friends in LA that mask usage down there is pretty bad and sure enough, Los Angeles has a significantly higher infection rate right now. So from this, I take away two things:

• Leadership is important. I believe the reason we don’t see any political correlation at the county level is that the Governor sets the rules for the entire state. Each county has to follow the state guidelines.
• Individual choices are important. I believe the reason we see such a variation between Los Angeles and San Francisco is that individual people are choosing whether to obey the social distancing and mask guidelines. The guidelines can only do so much. People still have to be responsible.

But I think there’s also room for optimism for red states. Right now, they still have a lower number of positive cases. It’s possible for individual people in those states to choose to take more precautions beyond what their Governors state and stay that way.

I went into the garage and found a couple more of my old devices. These were PDAs (Personal Digital Assistants) from around 2002-2004, which is what people had before there were smartphones. They were significantly less powerful (no internet or multi-touch) but surprisingly similar (color display, touchscreen, and apps for things like calendar, notes, etc.).

The first one I had was the Sony CLIÉ PEG-T615C. Two of the coolest features were the jog-dial (sorta like a mouse scroll wheel) and a dedicated non-display touch area that you could scribble on to input characters. It wasn’t as fast as typing but more convenient than trying to peck tiny buttons on the screen.

I got the Sony CLIÉ PEG-TG50 a couple years later and it had several big upgrades: its own physical keyboard, a microphone, and it could play audio. Also, I wrote a few programs for it.

One was another implementation of the card game Set. This was a significant improvement over my HP 48GX implementation in that it made use of the color display and the fact that it had a whopping 12.2 times as many pixels.

Another was a simple implementation of the PSP game Lumines. A friend had it on the PSP and I loved that game. Unfortunately, I didn’t have a PSP. But I did have an awesome PDA with a jog dial and a touch screen so I attempted to see if I could make a version of it on my CLIÉ. It’s been so long that I don’t remember what I wrote it in, but it was probably C++.