On Creatures Journalling

Despite my community inactivity overall (I'm doing an extra-bad job of sticking to the 'community collaboration' theme this year), I feel like I'm playing Creatures more than ever these days. I've just switched to logging my Nurturing worlds in Google Docs files. As much fun as it is posting logs here to share, it can be a bit tedious to deal with uploading pictures and placing them nicely and writing lovely descriptions of everything. It's fun in its own sort of way, but it sometimes gets to the point where I feel like I can't really play Creatures without making a chore out of it. Keeping these more casual, personal creatures journals shared only with a handful of close friends at most feels like a happy medium to me. These peeks inside are really only the most public-worthy examples-- most of the logs tend to tangent off into rambles on things I want to develop but never will, or worse, tell stories about the creatures in the world that died of neglect while I was too busy rambling (for how long I've played this game, you'd think I'd be able to keep creatures alive by now).

One thing that I really love about Google Docs is the fact that I can paste screenshots directly into the documents themselves without having to save or upload them elsewhere first. Using a tiny application called SnapaShot (I greatly prefer the free Classic version; it's much lighter), I can easily copy a portion of my screen to my clipboard, and then paste it directly into my document-- no saving, cropping, or uploading mess required!

It's worth mentioning there's also a service called Gyazo that does something similar, but also uploads the image to their servers and gives you a link you can easily share with others. I don't use this personally for the screenshot feature (I'm still slowly going through and fixing all the photobucket images on my blog so I'm a little wary about where I host my images right now) but I love using it to take short animations to demo how something might work.

Anyway, back to journalling. The only pitfall I ran into was actually getting good screenshots. In order to be sure I get creatures into a good pose, without their eyes closed, their nametags overlapping, looking away from the camera, etc., I usually have to pause and unpause the game a few times to get the perfect shot. Personally, I much prefer using the Pause button on my keyboard to avoid dealing with that that panel getting in the way, but guess what happens when you press Pause on your keyboard? The big ugly panel slowly pulls itself out from the side, and then when you unpause, it slowly moves back into place before you can pause again. That doesn't really work well with my style of pausing and unpausing many times in succession. So I wrote up a modification to the DS Keyboard Handler which I'm calling QuickPause. You can download it here.

QuickPause does just what you'd expect-- pauses the game as soon as you tap the Pause button on your keyboard, unpauses when you tap it again. Additionally, it hides the creature and attention indicator arrows, which I feel get in the way of otherwise lovely screenshots most of the time. I haven't taken the time to super bugproof this script, so it's probably not a good idea to mix pausing with the control panel and the Pause key. I've also only tested this on my Windows 7 computer, so I don't know how it will work on Macs or other systems, but I thought it was worth sharing at least.

If you're like me and find yourself sometimes struggling with the added work of documenting your Creatures worlds publicly, you might get something out of keeping a journal in Google Docs or any other software that lets you paste images directly into the document. I guess this suggestion is actually kind of counter to the theme of community involvement, but at least for me personally, the more I play (and document) this game, the more I am inspired to develop for it. A lot of the little things I'm trying to tidy up to get into a releasable state this week were inspired by the worlds I was logging over the summer, so despite the reclusive nature of private logs, I probably wouldn't have much to post this year without them!

Eleven Months Later, a Speech Bubble Update

Hello friends. I'm still around, if in a mostly lurktacular sense.

I've gotten a little fed up with myself and my bad habit of posting "hey, look at this thing I'm working on!" and then never releasing it, or in this case, releasing it almost a year later. It's something I have mixed feelings on because on one hand I feel like it's important to document the process of things so that other can chime in and maybe learn from it, and on the other hand, it stresses me out so much to have little loose ends of projects I haven't finished floating around out there. I've also kind of come to the conclusion that I think gain a lot more satisfaction out of documenting and discussing the process with people than actually finishing/releasing something. But of course, just talking or posting about something doesn't do much to help people who just want to see the finished product!

I think the standard I am going to try to set for myself is to only post about an unfinished project if A) I require more feedback/information from the public to move forward on a project, B) if the documentation of the process can help people in some way, such as including discoveries or notes about how a particular aspect of CAOS, genetics, or the brain works, or C) If it's a particularly large project that I've already posted about previously and people are asking about how it's going.

My previous post about the Speech Bubble Update accomplished none of those things. In fact, in the time that it took to write up that post, I probably could have finished up the expanded sprites that I was too lazy to work with and just released the thing. This is the sort of posting I'm looking to avoid in the future. I'd like to indulge my desire to just talk about stuff pointlessly a little bit less, if it means I can get more done in the very limited time I have to develop these days.

But anyway, moping aside, you can now download the Speech Bubble Upgrades!

Just to refresh you, the purpose of these updates is twofold:

To provide a larger speech bubble so creatures with long names can completely express themselves.

And to allow easier directing of commands to specific norns, Prefacing a command with 'hey' will direct that command to your currently selected norn, without you having to type out their whole, ridiculous name.

The zip file contains a .cos you can just drop in your bootstrap if you don't want to have to fiddle with injecting it every time, but if you go this route make you you inject the agent into a world at least once first to ensure the new speech bubble file gets extracted.

Also, happy CCSF everyone! For once I'm not completely skipping out this year, but like usual I didn't make any formal submissions either since I'm so awful with deadlines and painfully subject to altering and finishing things at the last minute. Nevertheless I'm going to do my best to use the festival as motivation to get a few posts made over the next few days, so look forward to that!

(Note: The Speech Bubble Upgrade was updated on 11-27-17 to fix a critical bug reported by Pixis (Thank you Pixis!) The download link has been updated to the newer version, however, if you want the old, broken version (for some reason) you can still download it here.)

(Also note: The Speech Bubble Upgrade received a substantial update for CCSF 2021 to add support for custom styles! You can check out the release post for more details. If you prefer the old version, you can still download it here. If you prefer a camera-shy version of the old version, check out Invisible Speech Bubble Plus!)

Some Downloads Broken

Hey all, just a heads up that I'm having some problems with the host for several of my downloads right now. It's only temporary and everything will be back to normal on the first of January, but I'll try to get some of the more popular ones rehosted sooner (I've been needing to do that anyways), Sorry!

Speech Bubble Update In Progress

The CCSF has come and gone and my goodness, I blinked and it was over. These past few months have just been absurdly busy for me I was unable to get anything out. As I think I've mentioned in a recent post, I've been frustratingly at a standstill for years it seems wherein the only projects I have motivation to work on are those so big, so absurd, that the chances of actually ever getting them in a releasable state is slim to none. If only I could stick to smaller and more manageable projects, I might actually finish something one of these days.

Anyway, one of the CCSF releases that caught my eye was Splincer's Protective Tub Short Name List. This list address a problem with Protective Tub that's been low-key nagging at me for years-- the fact that no one is going to want to type out a long and obnoxious name to address a particular norn directly. So during a rare afternoon off I decided to try and see what I could do to address this. 

The solution I eventually came to was a modification to the speech bubble script that intercepts any typed command that begins with the word "hey" and changes it to be prefaced with the name of the currently selected norn. This makes it easier if you just want to give a command to one specific creature and not everyone in the room. I had thought of other words to preface the command with, like 'selected' and 'creature' but in the end I wanted it to be something short and quick to type, since that was really the point of the whole thing. It came down to 'you' and 'hey,' and well, 'hey' just sounded more fun to me.

 While I was at it, I tried fixing one of the other problems with really long names-- the speech bubble occasionally cutting off due to the names just taking up so much space. I still really don't like how huge and cumbersome the speech bubble is, but hopefully it won't be seen all that often with your average Protective Tub name.

There's still some quirks that I have to iron out before it's in a releasable state, but hopefully that won't take too long. In the meantime, there's some other things I would like to fix about my older agents, such as the plane for the nametags being set way too high, and about a million little bugs in the Garden Box. But we'll see what I find time and motivation for.

Is there anything else you all have noticed in my agents that needs fixing/tweaking, before I get bogged down in another impossible project and you don't hear from me again for three more years?

CCSF Blog Carnival: Day 7

Why do you like Creatures? If your interest in it has come and gone and come again, what brings you back? Despite how hard it can be to run on modern machines and the total lack of official support now, why do you play?

I guess I have quite a few reasons for this one. A pretty big reason I keep coming back is that there's just no modern replacement. Even after twenty years, no one has developed a sim game with the same or greater level of detail when it comes to biology, genetics, and brain simulation. When I'm itching to raise some A-Life, Creatures is simply the best way for me to scratch.

 Another reason is just plain nostalgia and attachment-- I've been playing this game on and off for so long that even if something more interesting does come along, I'll probably still come back to raise norns occasionally.

But really what usually draws me back in the first place is getting a message, comment, or email from someone who has a question about the games or something I've developed. I think it's seeing that interest from other players that inspires me to play again too. Sometimes life gets so busy I forget Creatures exists, forget games in general exist! But having those reminders once in a while from other community members helps me remember how much I really do love this game and how much I enjoy playing and developing for it.