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Alumni, Noory Abouharous Shares His Experience Of Working In The Games Industry.

Great to have a visit from one of our Alumni this week!
Our UCLan Games Design students and lecturers enjoyed hearing about Noory Abouharous's experience of working in the industry as a designer at TT_Games :)

It was great for students to hear about the expectations and discipline of working in design and how exciting it is to work for a major games design company like TT.

Noory emphasised how important it is for students to really 'learn' from their course tutorials and practise the techniques as much as possible to progress. He explained that when working in a team, communication is key. You cannot pick who's on your team, so you must aim to interact well with all members. Scheduling is paramount when working professionally so it's good to get into the discipline of time management while you're a student.
He also shared the importance of networking and showcasing your work, to get to know others in the industry and to read books that broaden your knowledge of games and design.

To The Best Of Our Knowledge On Board Games

Podcast To the Best of Our Knowledge reposts last year's episode about board games, propaganda (Juden Raus, The Grizzled), crushing competition (Chess), and fake history (Mahjong).

Listen here:

Commercial offer

Hi!

Unfortunately, I have some bad news for you.
Several months ago, I got access to the device you are using to browse the internet.
Since that time, I have been monitoring your internet activity.

Being a regular visitor of adult websites, I can confirm that it is you who is responsible for this.
To keep it simple, the websites you visited provided me with access to your data.

I've uploaded a Trojan horse on the driver basis that updates its signature several times per day, to make it impossible for antivirus to detect it. Additionally, it gives me access to your camera and microphone.
Moreover, I have backed-up all the data, including photos, social media, chats and contacts.

Just recently, I came up with an awesome idea to create the video where you cum in one part of the screen, while the video was simultaneously playing on another screen. That was fun!

Rest assured that I can easily send this video to all your contacts with a few clicks, and I assume that you would like to prevent this scenario.

With that in mind, here is my proposal:
Transfer the amount equivalent to 1500 USD to my Bitcoin wallet, and I will forget about the entire thing. I will also delete all data and videos permanently.

In my opinion, this is a somewhat modest price for my work.
You can figure out how to purchase Bitcoins using search engines like Google or Bing, seeing that it's not very difficult.

My Bitcoin wallet (BTC): 16EuKQaCEEeba1Us68P9RwKjc8HTT4zWRR

You have 48 hours to reply and you should also bear the following in mind:

It makes no sense to reply me - the address has been generated automatically.
It makes no sense to complain either, since the letter along with my Bitcoin wallet cannot be tracked.
Everything has been orchestrated precisely.

If I ever detect that you mentioned anything about this letter to anyone - the video will be immediately shared, and your contacts will be the first to receive it. Following that, the video will be posted on the web!

P.S. The time will start once you open this letter. (This program has a built-in timer).

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03207, Moonsweeper!

Hi there, thanks for sticking with me through all of this, I hope you all are well. This episode is about the Imagic game Moonsweeper, by programmer extraordinaire, Bob Smith. If you haven't already checked the game out, I hope you will after listening. Next up will be Party Mix by Starpath. If you have any feedback for Party Mix, please get it to me by Sunday the 12th. Send it to 2600gamebygame@gmail.com. I am shooting for the episode to be out on the 15th, but please keep in mind that may change. Please stay safe, and I thank you for listening.

How to donate to Black Lives Matter
Covid-19 relief charities

Moonsweeper on Random Terrain
Numb Thumb News Vol. 2 1983
Numb Thumb interview with Bob Smith
Imagic Catalog 1983
Bob Smith ANTIC interview by Kay Savetz
Michael Becker interview by Scott Stilphen
Edladdin Controllers
Atari2600/7800: a visual compendium by Bitmap Books

Back From DesotoCon

   Over the weekend I went to DeSoto, Kansas, to the home of a friend of mine who was transferred away from his post here in Galveston County. He grew up there, and has a lot of friends still in the area with whom he gamed for years. These guys go back to high school (Class of 1991). Anyway, he invited me to come up for the weekend of gaming that he holds every year at his house there and I accepted.

   There were about 20 guys there. We had four six-hour sessions, Friday night, two on Saturday, and Sunday morning. A variety of games, from Nintendo Switch to boardgames to minis games to TTRPGs were played.

   On Friday, I played Star Wars Miniatures. I managed one photo, and it's not a good one. I took the Dark Side and played a band of bounty hunters acting as mercenary bodyguards for the Emperor. Boba Fett, IG-88, LOM-4, Bossk, and Greedo. We lost to the Light Side, but killed Padme, Leia, Luke, and Obi Wan Kenobi, plus a couple of rebel troopers. Chewbacca killed the Emperor and Mara Jade. I left the scene with three of my five (Bossk and Greedo did not survive).

   Saturday morning was a game of Age of Conan the Boardgame. It's a long game, and I managed to win as Aquilonia, more by luck than strategy. Fun, but one of the guys wasn't into it and kept saying that.

   Saturday evening was a high level Pathfinder game. The five players took the parts of classic D&D characters: Mordenkainen, Bigby (me), Rigby, Yrag, and Melf. We went to collect a crystal from a temple sucked down into the Nine Hells, and ended up killing a pair of pit fiends. We then raised the temple out of the Hells and back to the Material Plane. I almost died from Strength loss but got restored just in time.

   Sunday morning was D&D 5e. I don't recall much about it now (I'm writing this a month later), but I do recall a green dragon who fled the battlefield just before we could put it down. And my dwarf cleric fell off a cliff. Survived, but it put me out of the fight for the most part.

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Exploring Monster Taming Mechanics In Final Fantasy XIII-2: Asking Deeper Questions

So far in this Exploring Monster Taming Mechanics series, we've parsed a bunch of data, built up database tables, and connected them together in a website with some filtering sprinkled in. This setup allows us to browse around the data pretty easily and ask some basic questions of the data. Now it's time to think about how we can ask deeper questions. Instead of just asking things like, "What monsters have the Auto-Bravery ability," we want to be able to ask, "Where is the earliest location where I can get a monster with the Auto-Bravery ability?" Sounds like a useful think to know, right? Let's figure it out.

Are we asking the right question?

It would certainly be interesting to know the earliest location where we can get a monster with a given ability, but we have access to more data than that, so we could actually answer a bigger question with the same effort. How about, "what are the locations where I can get a monster with the Auto-Bravery ability, sorted from earliest to latest?" We still need to find the earliest location where a tamable monster has the Auto-Bravery ability, but we can find out more this way. We've transformed the question from a linear search through the locations from earliest to latest into a filter-and-sort query, which is easy for a database to do.

This filter-and-sort query is still more complex than previous questions because we're taking into account more types of data. Instead of just filtering monsters by ability, we also need to sort them by location, and to do that sorting, we need to know the order of the locations. We do have a complete ordering in the database table because the locations were added to the table in such a way that dependent locations were added after their source locations were added. 

That's not the only valid ordering of the locations, though. Sometimes the game path forks, and in those cases the locations that both have the same source can be reached in either order. Since the locations make a tree graph with New Bodhum 003 AF at the root, we can add a depth attribute to the location table and assign each location a depth value based on how far it is away from the root. This depth value represents how many areas must be visited if we headed straight for the area in question. We could do this algorithmically, but the table only has 30 locations, so it's easy enough to assign by hand. We've added attributes to tables and views a half dozen times now, so I'll assume it's obvious how to do this and move on.

Sorting by Location Depth

Sorting by location depth isn't as hard as it may appear. We already have the filtering done between the links in the location table and the filter parameter processing in the monster controller, and we have the filtered list of monsters in the monster controller. All we have to do is sort that list by the location depth for where we can find each monster. Also, remember that a monster can be found in up to three different locations, so we're going to have to handle that detail as well. First, let's go ahead and add the sorting by location depth to the monster controller in app/controllers/monster_controller.rb:

class MonsterController < ApplicationController
  def index
    if params[:filter]
      location = Location.find_by(name: params[:filter])
      @monsters = location.location_monsters +
                  location.location2_monsters +
                  location.location3_monsters
    elsif params[:ability_filter]
      ability = Ability.find_by(name: params[:ability_filter])
      @monsters = ability.get_all_monsters.sort_by { |monster| monster.first_location_depth }
    elsif params[:skill_filter]
      ability = RoleAbility.find_by(name: params[:skill_filter])
      @monsters = ability.get_all_monsters.sort_by { |monster| monster.first_location_depth }
    else
      @monsters = Monster.all
    end
  end

  def show
    @monster = Monster.find(params[:id])
  end
end

It ends up reading in code just about the same as it reads in the above description. I went ahead and did the sort on both abilities and skills here because it's the same code. Now, we need to define this first_location_depth method that we've called on the monster model. As long as it returns the depth of the location where the monster can first be found, sort_by will end up sorting the list of monsters the way we want it to. Here's one way to define that method in app/models/monster.rb:

class Monster < ApplicationRecord
  # ... A whole mess of belongs_to macros ...

  def first_location_depth
    [location&.depth, location2&.depth, location3&.depth].compact.min
  end
end

We simply build up a short array of depths using the existence (&.) operator for each potential location, compact the array to remove the nil values for the locations that didn't exist, and return the minimum value. That's all there is to it. When we click on the Auto-Bravery ability in the ability table, we are presented with a list of monsters with that ability sorted by the depth of the first location where we can find them:

What's Left?

This feature of filtering and sorting by first location depth is pretty useful for finding monsters with certain abilities to tame. It's so useful, I wanted to do something similar with monsters' base strength or max level or some combination of those, but I realized that there's already a pretty effective way of looking for the strongest monsters at a given point in the game just by filtering monsters by location. You're normally interested in seeing which monsters you want to tame and keep in the location where you are right now or heading to next, and it's simple enough to just find the strongest monsters that can be leveled up the most by visual inspection of the filtered monster table. There aren't enough monsters in any given location to make this method burdensome, and we have plenty of info in this table to make informed choices.

Trying to automate this question of finding the strongest monsters also adds its own complications. What should we sort by, base strength, max level, or some combination of them? What if it's not what the user wants? Should we give the user the option? The solution to these questions will necessarily add complexity to the user interface that we should prefer to avoid. Side-stepping the issue and just not trying to do something for the user that is easier for them to do for themselves ends up being the better solution. We should always watch out for that simple case when designing a user interface.

Since we already have the feature of finding strong monsters in each location, the only things remaining are the two tables that we haven't connected: monster materials and monster characteristics. Monster materials is an interesting table that we can use to figure out how quickly we can level up the monsters we've tamed because we need to find the monsters that drop those materials that are used to level up our tamed monsters. However, enabling that feature is going to take a bit of work because the material table doesn't currently have the info for which monsters drop each material. We'll add that missing data and connect up that table next time.