He cursed the thieves who had stolen him from the king’s grave.

He cursed the merchant who had imprisoned him in a water-and-flake-infested globe.

He cursed the tourist who had bought him in the marketplace, the woman who wore flowered mumus and talked to her cats.

But his most vicious curse he saved for the baby now rolling him about on the floor and slathering his glass prison with saliva. Channeling his rage, he willed that a lightning bolt might fall from heaven and smite the vile infant.

In centuries past, he had summoned thunderclouds. But that was when his pride and strength had fed on the offerings of kings.

He felt a surge of power. A small spark leapt from the surface of the globe and struck the child’s nose. The baby dropped the orb and began to scream.

Zlatoosk gloated in his revenge. The mantle rolled into view, and he knew the lesser idols of the hearth—especially the pale child with wings and ridiculously large eyes—were in awe of his power.

Then his orb rolled under the gate that had been placed across the basement stairs.

#

To this day, Zlatoosk lies beneath the stairs among broken shards of glass and scattered flecks of white.

He is still in a foul mood, though the mice do leave him offerings on occasion.

(This is my contribution to Advent Ghosts 2010.)

This Little Babe
Words by Robert Southwell (1561-1595)
Music by Benjamin Britten (1913-1976)

This little Babe so few days old, Is come to rifle Satan’s fold;
All hell doth at his presence quake, though he himself for cold do shake;
For in this weak unarmed wise The gates of hell he will surprise.

With tears he fights and wins the field, His naked breast stands for a shield;
His battring shot are babish cries, His arrows looks of weeping eyes,
His martial ensigns Cold and Need; And feeble Flesh his warrior’s steed.

His camp is pitched in a stall, His bulwark but a broken wall;
The crib his trench, haystalks his stakes; Of shepherds he his muster makes;
And thus, as sure his foe to wound, The angels’ trumps alarum sound.

My soul, with Christ join thou in fight; Stick to the tents that he hath pight.
Within his crib is surest ward; This little Babe will be thy guard.
If thou wilt foil thy foes with joy, then flit not from this heavenly Boy.

I love my workplace, because my workplace is full of nerds.

I mean, what could be better than a lunch spent hashing out how to turn the corporate headquarters into a volcano island guarded by laser-sharks?

But we nerds have a problem.

You see, people tend to be friends with people who are similar to them. And this is true of nerds, too. Nerds like hanging around other nerds.

However, people who succeed in business tend to know lots of different kinds of people. Your nerd buddies might be able to tell you the best place to buy board games, but can they help you with legal documents? Can they provide you feedback for a new product idea targeted at middle-aged women executives who like to skydive? Probably not.

Perhaps you’re an introvert. Perhaps the word “networking” aggravates your asthma. If so, don’t panic. Here are three tips for getting started down the networking path.

First, keep in mind what networking is not.

• Networking is not chatting over multiplayer Halo.
• Networking is not attending a Star Trek convention.
• Reading books about different kinds of people, while helpful, doesn’t count either.

Remember, this is about finding people who are different than you.

Second, if you’re sitting next to someone on the bus and they start up a conversation, they are not a threat. (Repeat this to yourself, if necessary.)

Finally, use your nerdiness to your advantage. Hey, we nerds are curious. We like to figure out how machines work, how systems operate. We like stories of far off, imaginary places with customs, technology, and institutions radically different than our own. We like to ask questions, like why the hoverboard was never released by Mattel.

Here’s the thing: there are people all around you with interesting stories to tell, stories just as interesting as a Timothy Zahn Star Wars novel. Are you going to leave these stories untouched, you who read every book in your elementary school library? Are you really going to let your smartphone distract you from uncovering the fascinating tales that lie, like hidden mithril, all around you?

Come on. The networking path isn’t as scary as it seems at first. Grab your hobbit-cloak, pick up your feet, and introduce yourself to that guy lurking in the shadows of the Prancing Pony.

I guarantee you won’t regret it.

All of the songs listed in the game’s credits can be found on 8bitcollective.

Here they are in order of appearance:

• Cloud Caller by Ookami
• Dancing 0n the M%n by FearOfDark
• Moonlit Memory by xaimus and malmen
• C0N51GR4 by Ookami
• Tiny Tunes by FantomenK

For those of you who just want a simple download, I’ve posted a zip file containing all the songs from the game.

Click here to play the game.

You can download the sample project here. As usual, feel free to use this code in your own projects.

Click here to see the sample project in action.

Primary changes:

• In-air movement is calculated more like running movement. When you release the arrow keys, horizontal movement gradually slows to a stop. The old logic was suitable for a jetpack, but not a traditional platformer.
• EDIT: The jumping logic now allows jumps slightly after the character leaves a ledge.
• EDIT: The script now uses Time.smoothDeltaTime instead of Time.deltaTime.
• I’ve stripped out a bunch of things I didn’t use, such as having different walk vs. run speeds, the particle effect stuff, etc.

Bug fixes:

• Respawning from a moving platform sometimes caused the player to be affected by the platform’s position in the respawn frame. To remedy this, activePlatform is set to null in Spawn.
• When standing on a platform, the character could be pushed through walls and other obstacles. To remedy this, the effect of a platform’s movement on the character is not directly applied to the transform. Instead, it is combined with the other movement input and passed into CharacterController.Move, which handles collision detection.
• EDIT: It turns out that for moving platforms, transform.position must be updated directly. If this isn’t done, the character will eventually fall through the platform. The code now modifies transform.position directly when the character is standing on a kinematic rigidbody that has a non-zero velocity.
• If the character brushed a block diagonally when jumping, he could end up floating slowly upward. This unintentional flying ability was remedied by detecting ceiling collision as part of determining whether the apex of the jump has been reached.
• In certain cases, when jumping while standing on a falling block, the character could end up jumping/landing without ever leaving the block, making it seem like the jump key wasn’t responding. This was fixed by getting rid of inAirVelocity and not making the jump velocity dependent on the velocity of the active platform.

I also modified PlatformerPushBodies. The primary changes I made were to comment out the layer stuff since I wasn’t using it and to only change the velocity of the rigidbody being pushed if the rigidbody’s velocity was less than the character’s. Without the latter change, rollable spheres would “stick” to the character when the character stopped moving.

The project also includes a double-sided vertex-lit shader, which is used for rendering both sides of the character sprite.

I’m applying the final spit and polish to Langman, my new word-based puzzle/platformer. You can play it here.

Feedback is welcome.

It isn’t game-ready, but it’s simple and (hopefully) easy to understand.

Click here to see the code in action.

Here’s the Unity3D project for the above example. And here’s the source code for the XYMouseController script, which is attached to the capsule.

XYMouseController.js

#pragma strict

// FixedUpdate is a built-in unity function that is called every fixed framerate frame.
// According to the docs, FixedUpdate should be used instead of Update when dealing with a
// Rigidbody.
// See http://unity3d.com/support/documentation/ScriptReference/MonoBehaviour.FixedUpdate.html
// for more information.
function FixedUpdate () {
	var mousePos = Input.mousePosition;

	var worldPos = camera.main.ScreenToWorldPoint(
		Vector3(
			mousePos.x,
			mousePos.y,
			Mathf.Abs(transform.position.z - camera.main.transform.position.z)
		)
	);

	var newPos = Vector3(
		worldPos.x,
		worldPos.y,
		transform.position.z
	);

	// Move the object
	rigidbody.MovePosition(newPos);
}

// Require a Rigidbody component to be attached to the same GameObject.
@script RequireComponent(Rigidbody)

This was especially befuddling because in the Unity3D editor, I was getting framerates upwards of 1000fps. And in other browsers (such as Safari) the graphics were smooth.

The solution turned out to be simple: I enabled interpolation for the rocket and the sheep rigidbodies. Viola! The jittery behavior disappeared.

Interpolation involves smoothing the motion of objects. In Unity3D, interpolation is used to hide the fact that physics and graphics run at different rates. In some cases, this graphics/physics difference may be so small it’s unnoticeable. But in others, the differences can be so dramatic that the gameplay is hampered. If you’re seeing jerky, choppy behavior in an otherwise well-performing game, you might want to give interpolation a try.

You can read more about rigidbody interpolation here.

EDIT: Since I wrote this post, I’ve learned a bit more about framerate issues.

1. The frames-per-second (FPS) shown in the Unity Editor stats window is not the actual framerate. It only reflects the time required to draw the graphics. Use this script to see the actual framerate.
2. If you have fast-moving objects, you might want to use Time.smoothDeltaTime instead of Time.deltaTime.
3. A couple other parameters that can be used to control choppiness are targetFrameRate and “Sync to VBL”.

Supplies Used:

• Studioscale’s Millennium Falcon blueprints
• Scissors
• Compass
• String (for drawing large circles)
• X-Acto knife
• Scotch tape
• Elmer’s glue (for reinforcement—I wanted it to be relatively kid-proof)
• An old vacuum box, toilet paper tubes, and other miscellaneous cardboard scraps
• Paper
• Posterboard
• A rubber band (aka Han’s seatbelt)

Punch it, Chewie!