It's Taxes

I said I would get back to some more interesting gameplay-related enhancements to Critterbits, and this morning I deliver! For a while now I’ve had player-controlled movement in the engine, which was easy enough to implement as simple velocity changes in response to keyboard or controller input. However, it was about time to give some life to my non-player-controlled sprites, so I went ahead and implemented a couple of algorithms to help with that.

The simplest algorithm for this sort of animation tweening is called linear interpolation. It looks like this:

new_position = start_position + percent × (end_position - start_position)

Essentially we’re just dividing up the movement from the start to the end evenly over time, hence the “linear.” It looks like this in the engine:

Sorry for not perfectly looping it… I know it’s a bit distracting. But the elk is moving from a start position to an end position and then back again, evenly divided over 1.5 seconds of travel. I also added another algorithm called quadratic ease-in.

While I won’t call this a review by any stretch of the imagination, I did want to share my experience with the recently released Pokémon Sun & Moon. Pokémon is one of my favorite game franchies, so I was really excited to get the latest entry in the series. With each new iteration, it’s interesting to see how the game evolves and changes, and I think Sun & Moon mark one of the biggest evolutions in the franchise since the original Ruby & Sapphire back in 2003.

_©2016 Pokémon/Nintendo_

Just to understand where I’m coming from, I’m actually not a long-time fan of the game series. I was already in college by the time the first Pokémon games hit the United States (1998). At the time, with all the cutesy marketing around the franchise and the cartoons squarely aimed at younger children, I kind of wrote it off as a kids’ game and didn’t pay any attention to it. A few years ago, though, I was getting into the pet battles in World of Warcraft and really enjoyed that feature. A friend pointed out that the pet battles were a simplified version of Pokémon battles, and this piqued my interest. On top of that, about the exact same time my wife got hooked on Twitch Plays Pokémon. So it was pretty much decided—we picked up the most recent games at the time (Pokémon X & Y). We instantly fell in love. I have 900 hours on my Pokémon Y cart alone, and since then I’ve gone back and tried out HeartGold, Diamond, and both Black & White games. While I have a frame of reference for the earlier games, I’m definitely not as caught up in nostalgia as a lot of other players. Is that a good or bad thing? I’m not certain. Feel free to interpret it how you will.

Anyways, let’s talk about Pokémon Sun & Moon.

After about a month off, it was time that I got back into working on Critterbits. Honestly, after my previous post, I was having a bit of trouble getting back into the headspace of creating. It also doesn’t help that Pokemon Sun & Moon were just released. But I still have a lot of work to do, so let’s get started!

I sincerely hope this is one of the only posts I have to tag with “politics.” It’s not a subject I particularly enjoy writing about, as I’d much rather be goofing around making a video game like I intended to. But, for reasons I will get into, I’ve been having a serious anxiety attack since last night, and I need to write as a form of self-therapy.

I’m not a big fan of Hillary Clinton, but I did support her over Trump for a very good reason: she’s qualified and capable of doing the job of President of the United States. She would have brought a sense of continued stability (and the markets seem to agree). She’s not perfect, but no candidate ever is. Trump on his own scares me not just because he’s a bigoted bully, but because he has no idea how to run a country, and I’m pretty sure he’s just going to make a fool of himself (and the rest of us) when it comes to foreign policy. He doesn’t have a diplomatic bone in his body. His domestic policy will probably be just as bad (don’t worry, I’ll get to it in a minute).

But it isn’t just Trump.

I’m back! The last couple of weeks felt like they lasted forver, mostly because it’s been an extension of living out of hotels for the last month or so. I’m finally settling down in a new apartment in Austin, though there’s still a lot of boxes everywhere. If you’re curious, here’s a quick recap of the last two weeks for me.

Disney World

My wife and I really like Disney, so admittedly we spent our honeymoon here (in 2014) and decided to come back for our second anniversary. If you hear me talk about vacations, you’ll quickly learn that for us, it all revolves around the dining. I wouldn’t say were “foodies,” but we do love to try new places and the Disney dining plans are great for that. Last time we didn’t get our reservations in until three months before our trip, so we missed out on a lot of the restaurants we wanted to try.

Here’s a few highlights from the trip: