Best Albums of 2013

Kelsey's been spending the past few weeks trying to figure out what she's going to list for her top albums of the year over on Violent Success, the music blog that she's an editor and contributor for. I've come up with a short list of my own from discussing what's actually come out this year that I've been listening to. Assorted punk rock goodness of 2013 follows.

FIDLAR: s/t

The past year and a half has seen me begin to embrace a newfound obsession with surf-influenced punk rock coming out of LA. The debut LP from FIDLAR, takes the mellow fuzz of surf punk and cranks the speed and energy way up. Most surf punk shows I go to are pretty tame with people enjoying the music. Last time I saw FIDLAR live, the kids were climbing on the rafters and 2 girls dressed as nuns (it was halloween) were not pulling any punches in the pit. The energy matches the name, which stands for "Fuck it dog, life's a risk."

Audacity: Butter Knife

Audacity is the band that originally made me realize my love of surf punk with their album Mellow Cruisers, which would become my anthem for the summer last year. This fall brought about the release of their third LP, Butter Knife. It's a bit more laid back than their previous efforts, which is complemented by some really great song writing on guitar with catchy riffs that really tear through the speakers. It all fits together into an incredibly well rounded album that I've been listening to a ton in the past month.

Smalls: Expecting the Worst

This little 4 song EP has made me excited to see what's next for this relatively new pop punk band from LA. They're my new hope for some fresh pop punk in the vein of Daggermouth or Set Your Goals. I first heard what is possibly the best song of the four, Game of Kings, on Act Your Age, a punk rock podcast out of Vancouver, that I've been listening to since its inception. Game of Kings took me by such surprise that I literally paused it to look them up halfway through the song and start syncing the album to my phone from spotify. I'm also very upset with them because they're about to go on tour through my hometown in Indiana but aren't making the effort to come up to Chicago.

The So So Glos: Blowout

I have a long history of seeing The So So Glos play basements and abandoned theatres in Fort Wayne to crowds of only a few dozen people. They somehow captured the hearts of a rag-tag assortment of punks and metal heads in my hometown with their punk-influenced indie stylings. Which is why I was surprised to see them drop an album that Pitchfork reviewed, and even liked. And then I went and screwed up and didn't get tickets soon enough to a sold out Chicago show with Desaparecidos. What's great about Blowout is that despite their newfound publicity after years of staying strong as a relatively unknown group, is it stays true to their style. Dreamy songs of life in the city, with faster riffs coming in at just the right time, and great lyrics over the top of it all.

Night Birds: Born to Die in Suburbia

This album really caught me by surprise. I picked it up on a whim at the record store, having never really gotten into Night Birds previously. What I got was an incredible album that is both poignant and clever. For some reason this band is in my imagination what FEAR would be like if they were a modern punk band influenced by the likes of Dillinger Four instead of an 80's hardcore band.

Direct Hit!: Brainless God

I started listening to this pretty late in the year. After seeing them play in the rain on the last day at Riot Fest, I decided they warranted a further listen and got really hooked. It's fast, offensive, and catchy. What more can you ask for from a pop punk band?

Indie Speed Run: Scarlet

A little while back, I held down the programming end of things on my second year of participating in the Indie Speed Run 48-hour game jam with some of my incredibly talented former coworkers from Michigan State's GEL Lab, where we worked together on a motion controlled game set in ancient Greece, which is in hindsight, weirdly similar to the concept behind Crytek's Xbox One title Ryse.

Anyways, last year we were a close runner up to having Ron Gilbert's finalist nomination with our game Umbrella Party. Here's a shot from that game. It was a nifty little speech simulator game that was pretty silly:

This year, the theme we were randomly given for the game jam was "Secrecy," so naturally we made a game about keeping your spouse from finding out that you'd been cheating on them called Scarlet. It was a bit stressful for me since this year our team had extra art support instead of extra programming, but it turned out pretty well in the end. We got some early recognition when the games went live on the Indie Speed Run website, and even more amazingly, was Peter Molyneux's pick for a finalist. Here's a screenshot from the finished game:

Besides wanting to get around to shamelessly plugging our successes with our games on my blog, I wanted to point out a few of the features in Unity I used to save us a lot of time getting the look and feel right within 48 hours. Although we unfortunately didn't have time to get in one big gameplay feature, the ability to select your gender at the start and swap out all of the items you have to hide around the house accordingly. Heck, it would've been as easy jump from that to avoid gender norms entirely and be able to select both your gender and your spouse's gender, and the gender of the person you're having an affair with, although I'm not sure if that actually has any relevance to the core of the game. Maybe this is why I'm not a designer in my day job. Anyways, there were a few things that went really well on the technical side of things.

First off, we made the really obvious decision of emulating a simple color palette with very hard edges on geometry (especially on characters) to create a polygonal look, obviously there were important benefits to this for saving art development time. However, it turned out looking pretty good for a couple of reasons in the engine itself. First, I leveraged Unity's lightmapping system to get the shading and shadows on static objects, even though all of our materials were just using a simple constant color. This ended up being very similar to what the game Super Hot did recently which uses lighting on mostly white levels coupled with red enemies and bullets. The items that the player must hide in Scarlet are also red, but that's as much to do with them being the color of a torrid affair (and also obviously ties in to the name of the game we chose), however we opted for more of an array of duller shades than just the stark white of Super Hot.

To get this working is rather pain free, just make sure your level geometry is all set to static for lighting in Unity, and I got the results seen in the final game with a few iterations on some test bakes late on Saturday evening to get the settings right. Namely just some fiddling with amount of bounces and the lightmap resolution. getting the bounces right was important for having the soft light fill the room from just a handful of point sources. There's one glaring bug with the static lighting you can see above where the ceiling lights are set to not cast shadows and the light is just kindof blown out in the ceiling. With a little more time and placement, making those object play more nicely correctly could probably have become a reality, but wouldn't have been worth the amount of time needed during a game jam.

The second part of what I did after getting the lightmaps set up to bake (we would repeat the baking process a few more times the next day as art became finalized), was that I needed some way to handle lighting of the characters as they ran around, since it would be a little off-putting to have the wife not become shadowed in the same way that lighting is handled bouncing around the scene. Unity's light probe system seems to be the correct way to handle this, and while I'm no stranger to Unity's lightmapping system, this would actually be my first adventure with setting up and baking probes. I would post a screenshot of my probe layout, but unfortunately my Unity install is currently non-existent since I wiped my computer and repartition my hard drive. It worked pretty well though, my biggest gripe with it is that to my knowledge there's not a great way to then integrate dynamic shadows into the dynamic and static objects to bridge the gap between the static and dynamic object's lighting. I'd really like some sort of hacky shadow projection coming off of the wife as she runs around from a fake directional light (possibly even rotating it based on her position relative to the main light in each room), you'll notice she has no shadow in the screen shot.

Finally, it's worth mentioning Mechanim + Pathfinding working in tandem, two features of the engine that I have never used before. It took a little digging to get my feat wet, but once I got it working, it worked shockingly well. It's a bit goofy the way the she runs around the house, but it was also quite the crash course for me. The best was that baking the pathfinding graph basically just worked with our static geometry and collider placements, and getting the wife's AI to have her visit different important locations was very straightforward. It took a bit more effort to have her animate when moving around, and ended up abandoning an attempt at having root motion work, deciding feet sliding was acceptable to get better results working faster and then just move on. By far though, it was most impressive to see Mechanim retarget the animations to the character rigs, stunning results I really wish I had access to when I was using Unity in the GEL Lab. Really wish we had gotten the gender select in on Scarlet, since this would have made the character model swap work very smoothly. Definitely will be looking to learn a bit more about how to tune it just right in the future.

Well, I guess this concludes my little micro post-mortem of Scarlet. Hopefully we'll end up doing another Indie Speed Run game next year!

Here's a links to the web pages for my 3 compatriots from Scarlet:
Marie Lazar: http://www.pixelbutterfly.com/
Andrew Dennis: http://tc.msu.edu/users/andrew-dennis
Jordan Ajlouni: http://www.jordanajlouni.com/

And our pal Adam Rademacher was on Umbrella Party in the place of Andrew the year before: http://www.whitefoxproduction.com/

New Home for The Blog

Went to thre coffee shop for my usual bout of Sunday afternoon caffeine and coding, and needed to run on a dev kit, that is not currently with me, within a record time of 10 minutes. At least I found my bug quickly.

Anyways, I've decided to instead take the opportunity to finally pull the trigger on abandoning ship from blogger and launch "Jon Moore Blogs about things 2.0." All the old posts will stay posted there, but I finally got squarespace's blog import features playing nice with google. My current plan is to do all future posts here, and you know, to actually blog semi-regularly again. If I can figure out how to make them easily double post to both here and the old blogger I will, but my reason for jumping is that I can't handle how stuck in the past blogger feels these days, I'd rather have it rolled directly into my personal site and use squarespace's blogging tools for better or worse.

For better or worse, in the year or so since I've posted anything I think I've finally chilled out substantially about video game development being what I spent all my time on, and am thinking I'll be posting about music/comics/guitars/art as well for some extent. So for anyone that actually cared to pay attention to my posts, expect a dip in the signal to noise ratio compared to when I was posting regularly on AltDevBlogADay. That being said, I've had some interesting ideas and side projects in the year or so of absence from longer form internet activity, hopefully some of that will make for something goof. I've been thinking I've missed writing regularly for a little while now, so we'll see how this goes. I'm going to start my first real post shortly :)

Plus, there's no better way to upset someone's RSS feed than to just randomly change sites.

It Was Warm In Chicago Today

It's back to being unseasonably good weather in Chicago today, so I spent some time tonight skateboarding.

I've been skating a lot since graduating this past Spring, and unfortunately I'm not nearly as good as I used to be (in comparison my increase in guitar practice has had great gains). There's a sort of 20% of the tricks that I'm missing. My coworker Nate always says that the last 20% is usually the hardest part of any task.

Honestly, it's fear. There's a sort of commitment required when you set up a trick and then there's a weightless moment where there's no going back and then you come back and snap the trick into the landing. I'm copping out and doing things like instinctively putting a foot on the ground in that moment. It's safe. It's lame. It ruins the trick.

That moment of insecurity is what doing tricks on a skateboard (or more realistically for me, a snowboard, my preferred sport), is all about. The reason people enjoy progression is because that feeling is like a drug. It's the rush of flying through the air or sliding across a 40 foot piece of metal or spinning across the top of a box and just enjoying the experience of doing it right. It's why fear is what what ruins tricks, the fear that makes you fight that moment instead of committing.

Progression is natural in board sports because people just want to extend that moment: another rotation, a longer rail, a bigger jump. Competitiveness with other riders is only a small part of it.

In snowboarding there's fewer opportunities to bail without falling and feeling some pain, I think it's a blessing in disguise. The thing that's terrifying about programming, is it's just the opposite. There isn't always an easy route from A to B, but you can hack one together. Programming is open ended.

Sometimes you have to rely on a piece of paper and some matrix algebra to get you to the other side.

Sometimes hooking up a debugger won't be an option.

Sometimes you'll be up all night trying to figure out why the AI is jittering as it moves.

I think that it's one reason why there's this gap between general software engineering and game development that a lot of people have trouble crossing. Especially when there's so much demand in the world for software engineers that only have to solve straightforward problems.

Don't put your foot on the ground. Do it right.

Summertime, Clustered Shading, and Blogging

It's summertime! Now is the time to be roasting hot dogs and marshmallows around a fire (just did that myself this evening back on my parents farm)! I graduated with my Bachelors diploma a few weeks ago from Michigan State University, which actually feels substantially weirder than when I graduated from High School. Perhaps a big part of it is going away from working with some great people over the past 4 years, namely Brian Winn and the GEL Lab as well as the crew over at Adventure Club Games. Adventure Club may not have left East Lansing after they graduated from the University a year ago, but that doesn't mean they haven't been doing a lot of great game dev projects (and more in the pipeline to my understanding).

Speaking of East Lansing game dev people of interest, the awesome Dan Sosnowski has stepped up to the task of President of Spartasoft, the MSU game development club and has recently started as my replacement as the Iron Galaxy Studios intern in Chicago for the summer. I'll be moving back to Chicago myself this coming Friday, where I'll be moving into a full-time graphics engineering position at Iron Galaxy. Whoah. Growing up I guess. I'm hoping to possibly make it back to East Lansing for the Meaningful Play Conference that's coming up again this fall, if you are interested in games in a capacity beyond entertainment, such as art or education, consider attending! or submitting a talk or a paper or a game to the showcase!

On the note of conferences, I've been tossing around the possibility of trying to make it to SIGGRAPH this fall in Los Angeles, especially because I do enjoy nerding out to computer graphics. Especially after reading the pre-print for Clustered Shading from the HPG conference that has been going on recently. The idea is to take the tiled rendering used to optimize many deferred renderers, and extend upon it. The "Forward+" renderer used in the AMD Leo Demo got a lot of buzz at GDC this year for combining tiling with forward rendering by utilizing DX11 features. The idea presented by Clustered Shading is to improve tiling by have it operate in 3D instead of just slicing in the screen into 2D tiles to cull lights. This is really interesting to me because binning in 3D matches the load of a designer or artist much better when spacing out a large number of lights in a scene, whereas a tiled renderer will have hot spots pop up more due to a particular camera angle where many lights align. I expect for more flavors of core rendering pipeline to pop up if next-gen consoles mostly support the more flexible possibilities of compute shaders on the minimum spec for multi-platform games. Hopefully I'll start playing around with more of my own DX11/CUDA type stuff this summer, as I'm planning to start putting together a new computer that runs DX 11.1 code to keep myself relevant with the future.

Obviously, I won't be pushing this meandering pile of thoughts up to AltDev, but I do hope to push some more technical articles out to both this blog and AltDev. I'm uncertain if I will actually rejoin the two week schedule though, because I'm uncertain if my current side projects and learning will either fit well into a two week turnaround or be all that interesting. I'm also going to try to do more personal-ish posts up on here because I've realized that I've become a little more spread out across the nation/world from many friends and acquaintances, so maybe I should be making better use of this newfangled internet technology. Hopefully I didn't say anything too stupid in this post, because I don't entirely feel like going through my normal revision/proofreading process that helps me be a coherent writer.

Finally, I had an awesome experience hanging out with some manatees at the Columbus Zoo and my awesome girlfriend Kelsey in my free time between graduation and moving. AREN'T MANATEES THE COOLEST?

(You should go hang out with them too, and then adopt a manatee from Save the Manatee Club)