LIVE From The Anchorage
When do you understand a system? When you can translate, model and simulate it. Biochemical systems are no different, however their simulation hits several hurdles: few systems are analytically solvable, then normal ordinary differential equation (ODE) solvers may not handle large numbers of species types, ODEs become too complicated to handle or a combinatorial explosion …
Continue reading “Mass balances through BerkeleyMadonna into BioNetGen Language”
Guns are extremely complex mechanical marvels. Or, at least they are from the perspective of implementation into video games. One of the most complex gun handling systems I have encountered is in the game Receiver, which contains the 1911 Colt (Colt M1911A1), Glock (Glock 17) and Revolver (S&W Model 10 “Victory”) according to the fan-made …
Subtitle: the value of questioning nothing for the type that questions everything. Several blogs and books, along with personal experience as INTP, have convinced me that a typical struggle of this MBTI type is the search for meaning. Similarly, time spent on the INTP subreddit provided similar voices in this general direction. The following sections …
Starting from the question why are most games on Steam absolutely never going to be a hit?, I came across Mechanics-Dynamics-Aesthetics (MDA) theory. In this article, I attempt to combine it with MBTI theory and I suggest approaches to make your game design more appealing to people. Mechanics-Dynamics-Aesthetics (MDA) theory Based on MDA theory, games …
Continue reading “Meyers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) in Game Design Theory”
Why exactly isn’t there a multidimensional variant of minesweeper? Let me explain. For a while I’ve had a copy of 4D MineSweeper (4DMS) on my desktop, a free Steam game supplied by the ever-crafty Julian Schlüntz. Beside chuckling at the immediate absurdity of having such an icon on my desktop every once in a few …
The last few days I’ve gone through a list of Mark Manson, Nerd Fitness and Joshua Spodek articles. First, Mark told me to be more vulnerable. Thanks Mark. The advice didn’t mesh with me quite well. I do like the idea but have no clue how to implement it. Luckily, Mark has more articles. Another …
Picture: Molotov Cocktail by clement127 under BY-NC-ND 2.0 When working on a mod for a while, you know exactly what goes wrong in a bug report. The stacktrace is your friend. The errors tell you where to look, what to do, what tests to perform. Easy-peasy. Bug fixing can be boring, but it can also …
Today I woke up and decided to spend the day deriving an equation for bullet ricochet, as you do, and hit a few roadblocks on the way. Solution The Story I’ve recently tried solving the Wijk Ricochet Criterion (Koene, 2016) in WolframAlpha. The formula looks like below, and should be converted to the form y …
Continue reading “Solving a Sextic in Wolfram Language: When More Is Less”
This story is going to be a counter to a much more academic study of projectile physics, several stories on Unity game design and further. Or so I think at the moment. We’ll look at the games Counter-Strike 2D, Dungeons of Dredmor, RimWorld and two games still in development, one by me and one by …
Continue reading “(Early) Adventures in Game Design and Development”
Nothing quite says “I’m bored” like selecting every option in Microsoft Excel or Google Sheets just to see what they look like. However, some of the most beautiful graphs come from it. This post is an ode to graphs, to randomly pressing all the options and seeing what the computer blurts out. Let us consider …
Continue reading “The Virtue of Screwing Around in Graphing Software”
QuestionBae