NaNoWriMo-ers (and drawers, poets, knitters, etc), you've got 5 days left! What's your status?

Since the last Blindside post I've implemented the majority of the in-game scripting language, which I am calling Sai. I don't want to go into a lot of detail about it but technically I will say that I'm pretty happy with it as a language in general. I do need to write up documentation for it which will be interesting slash annoying but for the moment I am setting it aside and returning to the issues of game balance and derived stats.

For those just tuning in, there are twelve base stats: power, magic, empathy; defense, dogma, sagacity; accuracy, speed, stealth; essence, constitution and ego. (Two of the last three have changed; essence was awareness and ego was charisma; the concepts are somewhat similar in intent but the names are now clearer.) 

Each character starts off with a unique but balanced set of those twelve base stats ranging from -5 to +5,  depending on gender, race and class. They're balanced because they sum to zero. As a game designer, I want to make gameplay different in interesting ways for each character so the game has replayability. When the game starts, I will offer the player several free skill upgrades so they can further customize their character.

So let's talk about derived stats, or how those base stats are used to arrive at the numbers the game uses in its calculations. (I'm not going to detail the formulas, just talk about derivation in general.)

Our first three derived stats are health, mana and stamina. Health is largely based on the constitution stat and is the familar "hit points" metric, or how much physical damage you can take. In the game, physical health will be handled somewhat realistically; you can't just swig a health potion. I want players to generally regard combat as a high risk activity, something you do only when you must, and then only when you are well prepared. If you take damage, you will recover some of it slowly on your own to a degree as your body heals itself, but getting back to full health will require intervention.  

Mana, the resource used by casting both types of magic is based mainly on the ego stat, and represents how much mental focus and disciplin you have. Mana will regenerate fairly quickly on its own, but a period rest will be required to restore it to full. I don't intend to allow you to cast spells like machine gun bursts, but on the other hand characters who are physically weak but have powerful magic should still be competitive in combat. 

Stamina grants you the ability to perform sustained physical activity without becoming winded. The more stamina you have, the more swings of a sword you can take, the farther you can sprint, and so on. You will be allowed to exert yourself to exhaustion in battle if you wish, but if you do so you will need to catch your breath before taking further actions. Stamina is mainly derived from the base stat of essence, an interpretation of the concept of chi or body focus. Essence, like constitution and ego, also affect other derived stats where appropriate. 

Our next three derived stats are defense modifiers for to recevied physical, magical and empathic attacks. Largely based on defense, dogma and sagacity, they do also include some influence from constitution, ego and essence. Defense modifiers are straight percentage modifiers and are intended to take into account the character's familiarity with differing forms of attacks. For example, a character skilled at physical combat will naturally know how to reduce the effects of a physical blow to her body. 

At this point, the realm of physical attacks splits into three specializations. Very generally, strength attacks use blunt weapons, dexterity attacks use sharp weapons, and accuracy attacks use pointy or projectile weapons. And so there are three derived stats for physical attacks -- bash, slash and pierce -- that model competency at perpetrating these three types of attacks. Bash is logically based on the base stat of power, slash on speed, and pierce on accuracy, with additional modifiers. There are also two derived stats for magic and empathic attacks which are primarily based on magic and empathy, with modifiers as well.

Finally, the base stat of speed has its own effect on gameplay as the speed factor; the faster your character is, not only the higher your slash attacks, but the faster the game will complete your commands! This effect is very small but can make a difference in some combat situations. So if you're playing a Pixie and you have a Justice for a companion and notice that you keep getting ahead of them, that's why -- they're the fastest and slowest characters in the game respectively.  (Interestingly, because of the high speed, Pixies can do frightening amouts of damage with edged weapons due to their high slash modifier -- and though the Justice is a slow and plodding character their very high power makes them just as dangerous with a hammer!)

Balancing all of these stats is where I'm spending my time right now. I have some fairly impressive spreadsheets being auto-generated by the game engine where I get an overview of all the possibilities for each character that can be created. Not just of these derived stats, but of combat consequences, like damage output to stamina exhaustion for different types of weapons.

I'm just at the point where the spreadsheets look "good enough" so it's time to start actually running simulations that pit characters against each other to see who wins. Which will also give me some initial passes for NPC artificial-intelligence!

It's kind of exciting, but also kind of scary. I'm a little worried that the huge amount of work I've done so far in creating the stats and the combat model will actually be impossible to balance. But on the other hand, I feal reasonably sure that I'll be able to sort out most minor issues.

So really the question is, have I taken a huge misstep?

The next week or so will tell.

If D&D 5e is your bag, and/or if you like fey creatures, there's a new post in my gaming blog about, well, fey creatures in D&D 5e.

I was raised on syndicated TV, as I suspect were many my age; I never watched the original Star Trek at the stately original pace of one episode per week, but rather every day for years, thus seeing them over and over again.  And so it was with most TV I watched.

This, apparently, prepared me perfectly for this modern age of marathoning TV shows via Netflix or DVD or whatever.  To the extent that I find I do not like shows as well when I watch them weekly, or rather, I like them better when I jam through them again at some later date.  If it weren't for that last bit of me that doesn't like the Internet telling me everything that happened in an episode before I see it, I think I might at this point stop bothering to watch TV when it's new.  Thus contributing to the end of TV, I recognize, although it's not like I've ever been in a Neilsen family.

Anyway, I digress.  Point is, this has given me the peculiar habit of marathoning my way back through a TV series I've already seen as a comfort food, the moreso in the winter when seasonal depression is a constant companion.  Some years ago -- when the show was not only still airing but was about midway through its run -- I marathoned my way through Scrubs one winter to catch up.  The next year I marathoned my way back through all of it up to that point.  And so on, so that December 2013 I once again began with the first Scrubs episode and ended with the last episode of the spinoff.

This has been the year that it's almost too easy to do this kind of thing, though.  After the Doctor Who 50th anniversary a year ago, I started watching the old series with its first episode (obviously watching reconstructions along the way) and am currently in its 22nd season.  My wife and I are slamming through Supernatural after doing the same with Lost Girl before it.  The family's marathoning Arrow (to catch up) after having finished Alias after having finished Hercules and Xena after having finished ... well, I forget what, but I can tell you every Star Trek series except Enterprise was in there, too.

Not sure if I'm going to do Scrubs again this year, though; there's so many options now.  Maybe it's time to marathon New Girl...

One thing I have focused a lot on as an instructor, a manager, and now as a parent is giving the people I've been instructing, managing, and parenting opportunities for constructive failure. At some point as a kid, myself, I became a little too afraid of falling - I was 10 before I learned to ride a bike, and I've never learned to properly use skates or a skateboard, and I've always wondered if maybe being a little less afraid of falling would have translated into better balance and thence into competence.

The biggest thing, though, is that I don't believe you can ever learn the difference between "hurt" and "injured" without being injured. I don't think you ever learn the difference between "oops" and "oh shit" if all you ever experience is "oops" - and certainly not if all you ever experience is "I followed instructions and everything turned out fine!"

The more we allow people to turn off their brain, the more we allow them to rely on systems already in place, the more we endanger them. It's like removing all the traffic signals from an intersection to force people to pay attention and make decisions.

I have to constantly remind myself how important it is to let others screw up. I'd think it would come more easily, given how frequently I screw up myself.

Fellas, who's doing No Shave November/Movember? Show me your beards.

One thing I knew before I became a parent was that parents and kids interpret "maybe later" differently. What I didn't realize is how inescapable it is when you're suddenly the parent. Even knowing that my son is going to take "maybe later" to mean "yes" when I really mean "either this is going to postpone the tantrum, or you're going to forget about it, and either way that's a win for me," I just can't stop. Because it really is a win either way.

On the other hand, before I became a parent I was just FULL of quiet disapproving clucks for parents that wouldn't just take a moment to indulge their child in whatever harebrained scheme the child was concocting at the moment, when really all it would take is just a little time. Now I'm relieved that I never actually clucked out loud, because I've finally realized that kids always have a harebrained scheme that will just take a little time to indulge, and if a parent even makes it out the goddamned door, it's because they callously cut one of those schemes short.

Six weeks ago, we visited my (American) family for (Canadian) Thanksgiving.

(Can I note that I don't understand why so many of my [Canadian] friends felt the need to be perplexed by this trip?  My parents are retired.  We can visit them whenever we want.  What mattered is not that it was Thanksgiving, but that we had time off, and it was a lovely time of the year to go to PA.  Well, really, every time is a lovely time of year to go to PA, except possibly winter.)

It feels remarkable that we were there six weeks ago, mostly because a week after we went to PA for three days, we went to Asia for two weeks.  The one trip kind of overshadows the other.

Anyhow, we went to the nut outlet, while we were there.  You know, the nut outlet.  And they had strikingly good prices on a lot of, well, nuts.  So there are a lot of nuts in my pantry now.

Our favourite nuts are macadamia nuts.  This is in no small part because we fell in love with good fresh mac nuts when we were in Hawaii in December 2012 and 2013.  The mac nuts we have found since we returned from Hawaii have been, well, mehcadamia nuts. 

But the ones from the nut outlet?  They were good!  I bought two bags.  This morning's pancakes caused me to finish the first bag and start the second.

And the nuts in the second bag aren't as good.  The last nuts from bag one (which has been sitting in a tupperware in the fridge since I opened it) taste much fresher than the first nuts from bag two (which has been sitting in the panttry).

Moral of the story: refrigerate your nuts. 

Meanwhile, tonight's dinner was excellent: composed baby spinach salad, with roasted butternut squash and brussels sprouts, Sichuan pepper duck breast, apple, pomegranate and flash-pickled onion.  Oh, and (less good) macadamia nuts.  We have to try harder in winter, but occasionally it's worth it.

My kid is participating in MIT splash which means I'm in Cambridge, Massachusetts for the weekend.

This morning we waited in the longest, most efficient line I have ever seen or heard of. Then I got the hell out of her hair. The undergraduates who run splash make it very clear you should exit helicopter mode when dropping off your young person, who can competently manage her own schedule of Arduino whispering, Estonian street slang and whatever else the MIT students feel like teaching. There is a Parent's Island where you can be entertained to make you feel relevant but I already feel relevant.

So I went to the MIT museum. I admit I was expecting something, well, triumphantly techie. What I got instead was a poignant exhibit of nineteenth century daguerreotype photography. France gave Daguerre a pension instead of a patent, and the daguerreotype became essentially open source, especially in America where everybody had their own variation. I am surprised that the exhibit didn't draw this comparison.

The museum also features many kinesthetic sculptures, all of which are notable for their emotional impact as much as anything. And the collection of Polaroid cameras feel just as much a piece of the past as the daguerreotypes.

Of course there is some straight up geekery. Ah, the LISP machine! From a time when LISP programming was going to give us artificial intelligence and a purpose built computer just for LISP made sense. Currently the closest analogue is a custom bitcoin mining rig. Except that has no admirable air of mad science.

This gadget flunked my Turing test.

Afterwards I rented a bike- cheaper these days, with the city bike system in competition- and pushed off down Massachusetts Avenue. I pressed on past Harvard to the edge of the next town before returning for a late lunch / early dinner.

Tonight the cold I thought I had defeated came back. So I thought about taking a nap. But somehow I wound up pedaling down Broadway, across the Longfellow bridge and up Beacon Hill. Because I am crazypants.

I rolled down the other side and into Boston Common and looked at the skaters with longing, but with Eleanor's laptop on my back that wouldn't be cool. So I continued down beacon street and discovered a park on the Charles River.

Finally I returned to Cambridge via the Boston college bridge and went for Loop around the MIT campus. Where I discovered a building that clearly indicates lysergic acid is still a research tool.

Of course the building is full of robots.

Now it's time to meet up with my kid. The aquarium for me tomorrow I think.