Tekken 2, PlayStation (1996)

Martin Luther King on Poverty

Candles Update 26: Kyle’s Guitar

So I have the shade up and running. But for the shade to fulfill its purpose, I need notes: musical notes. So I hopped into Apple’s Garage Band and I tried to grab some notes.

Shhh–this is a secret, but there’s a chord we’re focused on. The notes are F, C, C#, and G#. I used to play this chord in high school, having no idea that it was an actual “thing”, or that I would reuse it for the basis of a puzzle 20 years later.

But for Kyle’s Guitar, I need more than these four notes. For this to be a “puzzle”, there must be “wrong answers”. I’ve decided to include every guitar note for all six strings within the first 5 frets. Not including playing a string open, that’s 30 notes…well, something like 12 notes in 3 different octaves…whatever.

I played every note in Garage Band and exported. As I was editing the audio to include one note per track, I remember that guitars break the tuning pattern between G and B strings–so there’s some note sharing. I think I’ve set it correctly. We’ll see…

Next step–make a playable guitar. My writer suggested using an interface. Since I had a guitar 3d model available, I opted to use that.

First, I duplicated the in-scene model and childed it to the player. I start the game with it deactivated so that it may be activated later. The model I downloaded had to be blown up to 1.5x size to be “realistic”. But because the guitar cannot get too close to the camera without clipping, I had to blow it up to 4x to sufficiently fill the screen.

To “pick up” the guitar, I’ve set a new check for the tag “Guitar”, and I can make the call in PickThingsUp:

Then in my guitar script (which is actually on the player):

Looks like I need to delete that PickThingsUp reference…

Here, I grab the necessary scripts. You can see the two functions to “pick up” and “put down” the guitar. All pretty straight forward–but I ran into a weird bug. In the if statement, I found that when holding the guitar, if tried to put it down…it uh, didn’t work. I’m not sure why this is happening, but since I’m using the same button to pick up the guitar and put it down, I thought I’d make sure to never allow the two actions in a single frame. The script was working fine previously, but the next day not so much. This seems to fix it. Next, I’ll be trying to build a canvas-based UI that lets the player click on notes…and we’ll see how well I’ve picked out notes for the game.

A friend is making a cool, story driven indie game in Unreal 5!

Chris Hedges on America entering the “Trump Phase” of late capitalism

For 50 years, the median wage of hourly workers stagnated or declined while the stock market and CEO pay skyrocketed. Is it any wonder so many feel abandoned by the system? People lose faith, and a demagogue fills the void. This is why we must fix the system.

Tax cuts for billionaires are the epitome of wasteful spending.

I don't think "I told you so" is helpful here. You can feel validated without furthering the divide.

If only 70+ million of us had warned her about exactly this, over and over again, maybe she wouldn't have voted for a fascist rapist who promised to do exactly what he's doing.

If only he had a record of violence, selfishness, cruelty, and incompetence to look at, maybe she wouldn't have voted for a fascist rapist who promised to do exactly what what he's doing.

Gosh, if only.

The greatest tragedy of Among Us is making friends and then accidentally disconnecting before you get to say goodbye

Perfect Tides is a beautifully animated point & click adventure set in the year 2000, that tells a coming of age story of an awkward teenager who lives in a so-called island paradise

Read More & Sign Up For The Beta (Steam)

DOGE is a doomsday device. Send Elon to the Hague.