Middle Earth: Shadow of Mordor is an action-adventure game set in Middle Earth, which is most famous from the Lord of the Rings trilogy and the Hobbit. As far as game inspirations go, it is most clearly inspired by Assassin’s Creed and the Batman: Arkham series of games, which it manages to blend together with a mix of the former’s intriguing stealth and the latter’s brawling fisticuffs, and add some of its own twists to the mix.
Author: homoeoteleutonadmin
Back From the Dead
I’ve been really bad about updating this blog, so here’s a brief overview of things that I’ve had going on:
I’ve been working on a number of tiny side projects, none of which have ever really been taken to fruition; d20m was a hybrid modular d20 system that I need to polish up a bit and then release the core elements of, and The Gods Left Them, which is a post-apocalyptic science-fiction game that needs a setting rewrite. I was also doing a weekly video game stream, but lack of time really began to interfere with that and I stopped doing it.
The main thing I have to show for the time since I last wrote is my honors project, which has continued along more or less as planned, though a little more slowly than I would have liked because of class. I’m still using XMICAE, with all the slowness that comes with that, but I’ve made a couple of improvements to the code and stability. I plan to release XMICAE 0.1.1 eventually, though I don’t feel comfortable with releasing all my content to the public until after I defend my thesis (just to make sure that people know it’s mine). If you’re interested in seeing its current state, though, you can check out xmicae.homoeoteleuton.com.
Finally, over this weekend I made a mockup of a game, tentatively titled “The Inky Depths”. It’s a steampunk tactical game with roleplaying elements, plus giant mech suits and a needlessly complex system. I’m including its 72-hour build here, and I hope to eventually polish it and put it up on 1km1kt (as it stands it’s not really “finished”), but this is its “rough draft” if you will. The Inky Depths Rough Draft can be downloaded here. The main changes that will come in the upcoming days are to fix some things that came as a result of deadlines (I was going to do this as an early entry for 1km1kt’s 24-hour competition, but it dragged out to about 72 hours of time and 16 man-hours of work (which should be a testament to just how messy my weekend was),
Project Update: XMICAE 0.1.0
XMICAE 0.1.0 has undergone some testing and finishing, and I have to say that I’m happy with where it has come. The roll system should work fine, so a lot of what remains is going through and putting in some end of life support for the platform and whatnot. This means documentation writing, which shouldn’t be too horrifying, as well as cleaning up my production folder. I’ll leave all my test files in there so that people can mess around with them if anyone wanted to extend/learn from XMICAE. Continue reading “Project Update: XMICAE 0.1.0”
Project Update: Rolling On
XMICAE 0.1.0 is ready for release once I finish a few tasks, namely fixing an issue with the interplay between XMI and the roller (which use separate methodologies) and polishing up the documentation so that it’ll be usable, especially since I went through and changed a lot of the things, and because the roller wound up utilizing only a partial feature set. Notable as well is the fact that I decided not to have the roller have the ability to load files—instead that task is relegated to XMI, which should now neatly load any number of files you specify with a <load> element (similar to an action, but it can’t hold variable changes, only files to be loaded). Continue reading “Project Update: Rolling On”
A Temporary Delay
I was going to switch over to using a new computer the other day, and nobody would have been the wiser had I not run into issues. Long story short, yesterday I had a productive coding session, until the parts for a new machine arrived in the mail. Unfortunately, the day was filled with technical difficulties with these parts (the RAM and the GPU are the only parts that didn’t cause some technical difficulties) so I spent about ten hours today having to do a variety of things to get my computer to boot—which it did for a singular session before something failed. Continue reading “A Temporary Delay”
Approaching 0.1.0
As I write, I’ve just finished up some work on objects for the roller. I hope to be in the testing phase for 0.1.0 by Monday, which will basically entail finishing up the roller. Unfortunately, due to the approaching deadline for my thesis, it’s likely that the project will sit at 0.1.0 for a while as I continue to build up content. This doesn’t mean that I’m not going to be supporting XMICAE, rather it just means that I’ll be feature freezing and focusing on bug fixes and necessary things to get the players through my content, then (hopefully) return to finish it up a little more once I’ve got more time.
Read past the break for more explanation and the XMICAE roll documentation.
Project Update: Rolling On
I’m working on the roll system. It’s taken me a while to get happy with my design document for rolls, which I’ve entirely scrapped several times because it doesn’t work nicely with XMI and the action outcome functionality. I think this most recent version, however, will be more friendly and have a better outcome. I still haven’t made much progress on implementing prepared statements, either, but I did get sidetracked into working on an XML editor, which I’ll include the very unfinished code for (i.e. doesn’t edit, doesn’t handle all the child nodes like the final version will, but can write new blank files and directories as well as load up finished XMI files) in the next release. Continue reading “Project Update: Rolling On”
Project Update: It’s finally here.
XMICAE has now been released on SourceForge. This 0.0.0 release is far from final, but represents a meaningful step toward a finished platform, and is also an opportunity for people to explore and engage with the code as it exists right now. Continue reading “Project Update: It’s finally here.”
Project Update: Approaching a Test Release
I’ve got only a handful of things remaining to finish before XMICAE is ready for a test release. Some of these might not even make it in to the first testing, depending on how ready I am when June 7th rolls around. I’d hoped to make the June 7th release be a public test, but it’ll probably be 0.0.0 in my version system and include a without-warranty source release under Apache 2.0. I should be able to start a private test this weekend, and release 1.0.0 as well as open it up for public testing some time the week afterward. Here’s the stuff I have left to do:
- Some UI sidebar stuff
- Removing old test files
- Adding in rolls
- Finish switching over to prepared statements.
Continue reading “Project Update: Approaching a Test Release”
Review: Scratch 2.0 Beginner’s Guide (Second Edition)
The Scratch 2.0 Beginner’s guide covers a variety of useful skills and applies them to practical applications created with Scratch. Somewhat unlike most tutorials for Scratch, the book focuses on an adult audience of parents and teachers, rather than just focusing on students in its audience; it is not too complex for students to grasp but it does also focus on giving educators and parents ways to explain the projects and Scratch itself to an audience.
Perhaps the most appropriate way to describe this comes out of the author’s own foreword, in which he points out that “I did not set out to write a computer science textbook. It’s… a tutorial… to learn how to use Scratch to create stories, animations, games, or art.” This is not to say that it does not give a good background, but the focus of each project is notably oriented on practical use of Scratch to achieve goals.
The Scratch 2.0 Beginner’s Guide is great as a starting point because it covers all the concerns that a novice to Scratch would have, whether they are tech savvy or not-its automatic saving, block structure, and more are all clearly explained in the early chapters.
The nature of the tutorials are well-balanced. There’s a conscious attempt made to move from novice difficulty to more advanced projects, so the early projects involve simple Scratch activities to demonstrate basic features, replete with in-depth explanations of Scratch’s drawing tools and file management system, while the later projects then move on to more scripting heavy projects. It’s a good flow throughout, and works well to help acclimate a novice to Scratch in ways that are easy to follow and satisfying to complete.
My favorite part of the setup for this book is the way in which it examines Scratch’s available tools. It is immediately apparent that the author is fluent with Scratch and knows how to utilize every possible method at his disposal when working in Scratch, and it comes through in the quality of the explanations throughout the book. While some of the tutorials may not be the most glamorous, focusing on seemingly mundane things like animating a birthday card or building a fortune teller, they manage to do a great job of exploiting a variety of the approaches to Scratch programming and providing a basis for understanding the process of programming rather than just using the methods and functions contained in the examples.
In short, the Scratch 2.0 Beginner’s Guide is set up as a very basic tutorial, but if you’re unfamiliar with either programming in general or Scratch in particular and want to teach a student or yourself to use Scratch, it’s a great starting point and will help you learn not only the basics of using Scratch but also put you onto the path for more advanced projects with Scratch.
If you’re interested in picking up a copy of Scratch 2.0 Beginner’s Guide, you can get it on Amazon or directly from Packt.
Disclaimer: I got a digital reviewer copy of this book from Packt. I was not and will not be financially compensated for writing this review, nor was I pressured to write a positive review.