Some work on the Piglet logo

Piglet is the renamed successor to WideEyes, which I've been talking about on here for a while - I'm looking to start working on it over the summer.  I mocked up a very very quick logo that I'll be iterating on soon, so I thought I'd throw it up here for a blog post.

The idea is that Piglet could be animated in different states (happy, sad, concentrating), and I could overlay them onto the program.

Advanced FOSS retrospective

It's been an entire semester in Advanced FOSS, and I'm supposed to write a blog post as both a retrospective and as a final wrapup of what's happened over the summer.  I mentioned a couple of blog posts that there were a number of final tasks I wanted to work on and possibly finish up before the end of FOSS.

I ended up closing around 6 of them:

• Send the Construct 2 wikipedia article upstream and get some feedback from the community and let them know what my plans are for it (https://www.scirra.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=156&t=104286&p=784029#p784029)
• Open source Halloween Touch (https://github.com/danShumway/Halloween-Touch)
• Decide on a new name for the AI (https://github.com/danShumway/WideEyes/issues/1)
• Decide on a license for the Piglet (https://github.com/danShumway/Piglet/issues/3)
• Get the basis's of our puzzles working in Python Math (https://github.com/danShumway/python_math/issues/22)
• Get a playable prototype up and running for Python Math (https://github.com/danShumway/python_math/issues/22)

Both Advanced FOSS and Humanitarian FOSS have been great experiences for me.  They've kept me extremely busy, kept me writing a lot of blog posts (maybe slightly more than I wanted), and given me an opportunity to get more involved in FOSS communities and to get more used to the tools of the trade.  I have no regrets over taking these courses, and I'm looking forward to interacting with RIT's FOSS community in the future.  Thanks for reading so far!

Playtesting Games with 4th Graders

We recently had the opportunity to try out Python Math: Adder's Garden Adventure (and another game I won't mention here) with some fourth graders near RIT - it was a great experience.  We got a lot of pretty useful feedback, mostly related to graphics and the way we were laying out levels.

We also stopped for ice cream, and just had a chance to get off of the RIT campus for a while, and that was pretty nice as well.

The best thing though is that events like these remind me why I like making games in the first place, so it was a great opportunity for me to kind of recharge.  Watching a bunch of 4th graders figure out how a puzzle works is awesome.  There are a lot of things that go into making a game, and when they get silly or annoying it helps to realize what the end goal is.  I spend a lot of time advocating for stuff like this in games, both in the proprietary and Open Source ends of the spectrum.

Know what the heck you're making and why you're making it - that way when you have to deal with stupid hard stuff, you know why you're subjecting yourself to this crap.  When I watch people playtest the games that I make and I see them smile, I realize how ridiculously worthwhile everything is, and it helps me to stop being so wrapped up in the minutia of what I'm doing.

Quiz: Lit Review

When?

1. April 2012

Who?

2. David McCandles
3. Marley Whiteside, Kathryn Ariel Kay, Peter Ayres
4. N/A

Where?

5. http://hfoss-fossrit.rhcloud.com/static/books/rhetological_fallacies.png
6. Wikipedia, FallacyFiles.org, Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Skeptic Dictionary, ChangingMinds.org, LogicallyFallacious.com, e-ducation.net, EvolutionWiki.org, Infidels.org, Philosophical Society, Sjsu.ed, TVTropes.org, Santarosa.edu, A concise Introduction to Logic (patric J Hurley), Beginners Guide to the Scientific Method (Stephen S Carey)

What?

7. Manipulating Content, On the Attack, Faulty Deduction, Garbled Cause and Effect, Appeal to the Mind, Appeal to Emotions
8. French, Spanish, Italian, German, and of course, English.
9. Creative Commons

Lit Review: Common Fallacies

   Who
        David McCandless

    What
        Rhetological Fallacies: Errors and manipulations of rhetoric and logical thinking.

    Where
        http://hfoss-fossrit.rhcloud.com/static/books/rhetological_fallacies.png

    When
        April 2012

    The Gist
        An infographic explaining some of the more common logical fallacies out there.

    The Good

Clear use of colors to divide into sections
Pictures and text worked well.
High quality, useful resource.


    The Bad

Limited article, didn't include all fallacies.
Citing sources like Wikipedia and TVTropes (not necessarily a bad thing, but does decrease credibility)
Would have worked better in responsive HTML5 than as a single image.


    The Questions

What went into choosing the fallacies to include?
What was the original intent and target audience of the graphic?
What were all of the fonts used in the infographic?


    Your Review
        You're seriously going to ask for a linear rating from 1-5 on an infographic about logical fallacies?

Issues: Stuff I'm working on or want to work on soon.

Wikipedia

• Fix errors/add sources to the Construct 2 article (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Construct_(game_engine))
• Expand on the Construct 2 article (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Construct_(game_engine))
• Send the article upstream (post it on the Construct forums) and get some feedback/help with it.

Halloween Touch

• Get the code up on github, open source the project.
• Adding some assets, making some issues, thinking about where exactly this thing is supposed to go.
• Write up Gamasutra article about Halloween Touch design explaining what decisions I made/why I made them, what people's reactions have been.

WideEyes

• Decide on a new name for the AI (https://github.com/danShumway/WideEyes/issues/1)
• Decide on a license for the main engine. (https://github.com/danShumway/WideEyes/issues/3)
• Set up my gitignore for the engine (https://github.com/danShumway/WideEyes/issues/2)
• Set up repo for secondary component, monitoring chats on Twitch  (https://github.com/danShumway/WideEyes/issues/4)
• Start legit development on WideEyes (uploading code that runs).

Python Math

• Get the basis's of our puzzles working (https://github.com/danShumway/python_math/issues/22)
• Get a playable prototype up and running (https://github.com/danShumway/python_math/issues/19)

HFOSS and Advanced FOSS

• Making a proposal to the course syllabus to restructure the way that we approach assignments. (https://github.com/decause/advfoss/issues/110)

Wikipedia Edits: Moving forward with the Construct 2 article.

For a third community contribution in my advanced FOSS class, I decided to go back and follow up on the edits and structural changes I had been planning for the Wikipedia Construct 2 page.  There were a couple of reasons for this.

• I still feel like I'm at least mildly qualified to make the changes, and
• I hadn't followed up on them, and I didn't want to just keep jumping around from project to project.

You can see the edits I ended up making up here.  The big point of all of this is to make it easier for the page to be expanded in the future, which I hope to contribute to.  The biggest structural change is to shift the article from focusing on Construct: Classic, which is outdated anyway, to focusing on Construct in general, with Classic and Version 2 being separate sections under releases.

Features, etc... which are the sections that would be most likely to be expanded, are now relating back to the current version.  I plan in the future to go back and try and add some of those features, and to get the article out of it's current "stub" label.