Cyberganked Summer 2021 progress

[Ice Cream Jonsey]

I don't know if anyone else feels this way about being creative. But if I can eliminate distractions for about 25 minutes then I can work forever until interrupted by real life. But man, that first 25 minutes and trying to get focused can be tough.

I said on Twitter I would post my Github stats at the end of the month so I am using public embarrassment to get myself working again.

[Ice Cream Jonsey]

This showed up in a Google Alert. It was written last year about an interview I did over a decade ago.

https://l-idiot-mystique.blogspot.com/2 ... glish.html

[AArdvark]

Le Idiot Mystique? Gerting into the European scene now. Thats pretty cool, actually. Did you ever think your IF would go worlwide? Will your games get translated into nine languages and more importantly, will the humor translate?

[Ice Cream Jonsey]

Mine will never get translated, but that is ok because as you said, the jokes won't translate.

I am going to have to go back to some of them after 20 years because I want them on Steam and I'll play through them again. I hope the jokes land. The good thing about making a Defender joke, though, in 2001 is that nothing changed with Defender in 2021.

[Ice Cream Jonsey]

Something I have been doing is using Daz3D for some items.

There are a few sites where you can buy obj files. 3D models of items. I have tried for 8 years, for instance, to locate someone that owns an M1917 Browning Machine gun and I have come up empty. Infuriating! But with the magic of 3D objects, I was able to buy this model and import it into Daz3D. Set a little background light and we get:



And after using the Indexed Colors function from Photoshop on it, so that accurate CGA colors are used, I end up with this for the game:



Some things to note:

- Daz3D makes it the hardest thing in the world to bring in a non-native object and apply the texture. I have to use the same Youtube video explaining it each time. It's SO DUMB. I know that "rendering programs" are relatively new and we haven't gone through the UI/UX revolution that websites did. (And all that good progress was abandoned.) So I am more forgiving of it. Kind of.

- I definitely want to make a game where the actors are played by 3D rendered characters. To some degree that would go faster. I can't make anything in CAD yet so I am at the mercy of that, so it's not perfect, but it is a lot cheaper to have a 3D render of a character than to pay an actor. (Cryptozookeeper II, when I get a chance to work on that, will probably be the last one I make with real humans.) For instance, there is no "X-ray specs" object as far as I can see, and the main character in Enceladus used those. I can use Photoshop after the fact or pay a person to make the obj I suppose.

[AArdvark]

Man, I would put that on a snowblower in a heartbeat!

[Jizaboz]

Nice! I've been doing a bit of the same thing lately.. using 3d objects to render a scene just so I can take a proper 2D render image. Never heard of this tool though!

While I don't own any guns of that sort, if you want to add German 1938 Walther P98s or German 1938 Mauser bolt-action rifles to the game I have both sitting behind me.

[Ice Cream Jonsey]

If I can accomplish one thing on Black Friday, it would be to get these pictures in the game. They are the last remaining objects / weapons / ammo / armor that need to be in. I get distracted very easily trying to add pictures of objects because the "fun ones" have been done for 7 years:

leather jacket
leather suit
pager
mallet
Watchman
Mace
note
pocket book
ibuprofen
adrenaline
capacitor
seltzer bottle
carbonated water
steroid

The Watchman and pager are in the attic.
Dunno if I want to have spray "mace" or a real mace that you swing in the game.
The steroid should probably be a syringe and needle.

[Ice Cream Jonsey]

Well, this is 2024 progress. The account for the game on Twitter has 2303 followers. After 24 hours, this tweet has 9 views. One of them is me.



I think Twitter may have a bot problem.

[Flack]

I think the last I read Twitter is getting around 350,000 tweets/hour, so the odds of any one person seeing any one tweet are pretty low at this point. Additionally, Twitter sinks tweets from accounts that don't tweet often or get a lot of action, so this one probably got buried. They've also been known to devalue tweets that link to competing social media sites, which means this one probably got double buried.

My last few tweets all have 150-250 views with either 0 or 1 likes/interactions. It's literally why you see people tweeting links to the same things 3-4 times a day. It can feel pretty hopeless.

[Ice Cream Jonsey]

Great point, with Twitter pushing that view that isn't chronological in order, even before the sale, I am sure it was buried.

I need some spot to make social media updates for my BRAND. Almost every time there is an IF article nobody reaches out to me. I'm a forgotten man!

Are you thinking of sticking with Twitter in the short term for your stuff, Flack?

[Flack]

Well... that's a tough question!

Honestly what I would do I set up WordPress and a subdomain -- cyberganked.joltcountry.com or something more generic if you want to use it for future game development, too. I'd write game development entries there, and then I'd write summaries of them and post them to Twitter and Mastodon and wherever else, but the goal is always to direct people to one focal point (which to be honest, I haven't always done well with). Like, for every van video I upload to YouTube, I write a corresponding blog entry on BigRobsVan.com. And then i point Instagram people to both, which isn't a great idea. They say blogging is dead so maybe standing up a WordPress site in 2024 isn't the best advice, but it's probably what I would do.

The other thing I would do is when posting on Twitter I'd figure out what the popular hashtags for text adventures and interactive fiction are and add those to every post. I hate when people randomly tag me in posts that have nothing to do with me, but I do see them and the hope is that I (or anyone) would retweet them.

If either of us were 20 years old I would say forget everything I just said and set up a TikTok account.

[AArdvark]

Is blogging dead? Is that 'cause nobody reads words anymore? That makes me want to double my writing output, just to be contrary

[Flack]

That's part of it.

Back when everyone had blogs, people used RSS readers to track when new articles were posted. When you wanted to know what your friend was up to, you checked his website. When you wanted to see a news article, you went to CNN or MSNBC or Fox or whatever your news source of choice was. And when you wanted to see memes and pictures posted by people who didn't have websites, you went to Facebook. Facebook was just another website -- a big website, but just a website.

And so the social media sites set out to kill RSS feeds. Google, who had the biggest, most popular RSS feed reader, shut it off. And the big plan, which wasn't a secret, was that Facebook or Twitter would become your news feed, replacing RSS. Why go visit CNN to see what's new when you can go to Facebook and someone will have posted a link to the article? The difference of course is that now, Facebook can track what links you click on, combine that information with your personal information and other gleaned metadata, and sell it.

WordPress used to automatically send links to Facebook and Twitter whenever you published a new post, but those websites intentionally broke that functionality. Then people wrote plug-ins to get around it, and Facebook and Twitter intentionally broke those, too. Both of those sites began devaluing links to WordPress sites, and when all of them changed to their current algorithms (doing away with chronological order), sites that get more clicks get more value. I have friends on Facebook who literally never see my posts, but if I post a link to a popular website, it shows up.

All that aside, no, nobody (more or less) are reading blogs anymore. My kids tell me they get their music from TikTok and Instagram videos. It's video first, then pictures, then text. Go ask any kid under 20 what their favorite vlogger is. Then ask them what their favorite blogger is. You'll be shocked at the answers.

[AArdvark]

Man, we are all being left in the dust of text only communication. I suppose it's like cursive writing, something quaint and old fashioned.

THE
REST HOME
FOR TEXT
AARDVARK

[Flack]

My wife is a member of a small group (a dozen or so) that was looking for a way to stay in touch. I suggested a forum first, Discord second... and it got vetoed 0-12 real quick. The overall consensus was group text and/or Facebook group.