Short, sweet and change of schedule
Game programming patterns, Blender illustration, philosophy of life and games
Hallå my pals!
Jonas here with another issue of Indie Notebook to get some ideas out of my noggin, and to inspire you to do the same.
I spent a long and nice month and a half with friends and family in Sweden. But now I’m back in France!
When I was writing yesterday I couldn’t wrap it up in time for today’s issue, and I don’t wanna rush that piece too much. So I’m saving it for next week. Today will be a short and sweet one!
Also, related to the newsletter. I wanna try to change up the publishing schedule a bit. I’ve been writing on Sundays and posting on Mondays, but now I have more time to write during the week so I could free up my Sundays by posting another day of the week. I’ll try Wednesday next week to see how it feels.
Mini notes incoming!
Mini Notes
🔴 Youtube video - How I approach illustration in Blender!
Louie Zong is extremely versatile as both a musician, storyteller and artist. He puts so much care into everything he creates, this how-to/tutorial video is the ultimate proof of that. He’s composed an original soundtrack adapted to what is happening on screen. It feels like watching Bob Ross teaching Blender. Super inspiring stuff!
📚 Free Book - Game Programming Patterns
I haven’t looked too deeply into this myself yet but I’m sure this will be a treasure trove once I get serious about making my next game(s). When I was doing my internship as a 2D artist at a small game studio someone taught me what a State Machine is and how to make one using switch cases in C#. That was a huge boost to my programming.
🎧 The Ezra Klein Show (podcast) - A Philosophy of Games and Life
Art manipulate us through what we see, music through what we hear. But games manipulate us through our agency.
Without analytics we can bullshit ourselves a lot. The danger is that you stop seeing the things that can’t be measured.
“You can track anything, but at some point the tracking becomes the point.”
I’m currently on a 60+ day Duolingo streak and that is often the reason I keep opening the app every day, cause I’m afraid of losing that streak. My french is improving, so it’s probably a great, harmless hack at the moment. Maybe I will keep practicing French on there once I’m 100% fluent, in fear of losing that streak.
This was a long, interesting podcast. Great for a long walk.
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Take care and have a creative week.
Love that Space Deer drawing - good composition.
The whole streak aspect of Duolingo is great - the gamification in general is really involving. When I used it there would also be these team challenges where you and a friend profile together would have to gain a certain amount of points in a certain amount of time in order to get a prize. Once my teammate had done their part I was usually very motivated to do my own :)
Besides that, I hear that there are better alternatives out there for learning a language - but if none of those alternatives are as fun or addicting as Duolingo then that's certainly worth taking into account.
> I’m sure this will be a treasure trove once I get serious about making my next game(s).
I remember the dichotemy of two kinds of problems: Problems you solve that make your program interesting, and problems you solve that are inconsequential to whether or not a program is good.
I had tried that resource you linked on game patterns. And I am now better at programming. Here's my secret: I ignored everything I read there because it didn't help with real problems. It's easy to get excited about patterns. It's hard to want to sit down and write the complicated parts of a program that would need to exist with or without patterns. Patterns are usually useless complications unless there is a very very very very concrete reason for adding it. I counter that resource with another, huzzah! https://youtu.be/KcP1fXQv0iU
I hear duolingo's teaching is mediocre from people who recreationally learn languages, but it must win out in the long run for most people because of the long-term incentive its users get for free!
Cool stuff :) Back in France!!