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crasherfly · 4 years

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What I’m Up To

Taking a brief pause from my fantasy screenplay to talk a bit about what I’m playing/reading/listening to these days.

VIDYA GAMES

Cities: Skylines- Still working on my shithole city in all its glory. San Cruz has expanded to over 100k residents and in the past week I’ve built a level 3 park, extensive monorail system, and even extensive helicopter pickup lines. It’s still a terrible place to live, but it’s also fun to grapple with the challenges of a desert map.

Yakuza 0- I’m gonna post this take here, since we’re not on twitter and I’m safe from the mobs- Yakuza 0 is the experience everyone promised me Witcher 3 would be. Thrilling combat, a fascinating game world, and lovely, meaningful side quests. If this sounds like I’m digging at Witcher 3, I promise I’m not. I personally didn’t enjoy that game. But obviously, many, many people did and would disagree with my critiques. That’s totally fine! I’m just saying I’m enjoying Yakuza 0 for merits similar to what I’ve heard in connection with the Witcher franchise- and I could also see people having similar gripes, too! I’ve been on a well documented single player drought over the past couple months. Yakuza 0 finally broke me out of that, and it’s been a thrill. Getting out of the COD grind cycle has been a joy. This is a lovely experience that rewards curiosity by sparking yet more curiosity. I can’t wait to see how it continues to open up. Expect my Twitter account to go on about this for a while.

Mario 64- I have 8 stars! I’m told I have like, 113 more to go, a number which makes me groan. So far, Mario 64 has felt like an obligation that is occasionally fun. It’s very dated, but it has the DNA that would go on to make later games like Odyssey an absolute joy. Games like these feel more like an exercise in filling in my gamer history gaps than they do labors of love. Like most retro games, I have a hard time getting into Mario 64 for longer than 20 minutes at a time. So this will likely be a long-running project.

Star Wars: Squadrons- I probably should have known better, but I picked this game up ‘cuz the reviews were decent and the price felt right. Good news is that in the couple of hours I’ve spent with it, the gameplay is mostly solid and the graphics are beautifully rendered. It feels like both Rogue Squadron AND X-Wing, which is a hell of an accomplishment. Bad news is several of the missions appear to be badly broken, requiring numerous restarts. The game is generous with checkpoints, so it’s not a huge deal, but it is annoying. Hopefully they patch that stuff. I also haven’t tried multiplayer yet. None of my friends have bit on picking this up, so I’m not sure when or if it will happen. Assuming I can power through the hammy story, I’ll at least finish the campaign sometime down the line, even if I can’t be bothered to care how any of this fits into the larger world of Star Wars.

Warzone- Still doing that Season 6 thing! Subways have been mostly a disappointment for me so far, and the new marksman rifle has made the current meta a veritable hell for anyone with underdeveloped quick scoping skills, but I still get a couple matches in every day.

ANIME

God of High School- To say God of High School moves fast is an understatement. True to form, it sprinted its way through the finale. It’s got some lovely sequences, and I can’t wait to get my hands on the OST, but beyond a couple of choice battles, it didn’t leave a strong impression on me. I’m glad I saw it, but I’m not thirsting for a new season.

Dragon Ball- I switched over to the English dub of this show. I don’t usually do that, but I was struggling to keep my attention. I think in a way it helped? The English dub actors are far more cartoonish and silly, which really plays to the absurd animation and story turns. I’m on S1E13, and the first summoning of the dragon just happened. I won’t spoil except to say...this show has a deeply specific sense of humor, and I’m starting to dig it?

Fire Force- Season 2 is finally taking off for me. I’m on ep 14, and the focus has shifted over to the mysterious Joker. The battles have been compelling, as have been the mysteries placed by his storyline. I was struggling with feeling invested in S2 thus far, but the past few ep’s have reminded me of why I found this show special in the first place- when it gets serious and stays focused, it’s one of the tightest active shonen stories.

Manga

I’ve been on a bit of a manga break lately. Today I did take time with another chapter of Fruits Basket, which continues to be a lovely delight. I also recently received Master Edition copies of both Fairy Tail and Berserk. This week, my goal is to finish both Fruits Basket and my latest volumes of One Piece so I can dive into my new Master Editions.

Music

I haven’t had much change in my music tastes lately. I’ve been listening to a lot of Kompany and other dubstep artists, mostly ‘cuz I find the deep bass and variety of sounds soothing to me while I’m writing and zoning out during sessions of Cities: Skylines. I also enjoy its tempo while I’m running. Anything that helps the time pass, really.

Tabletop Games

I played 6 hours of DND this weekend. It was mostly a free-form improv session where I let the players do basically anything they wanted to within the gameworld we established during The Lost Mines of Phandelver. It was very heavy on roleplay, without a single instance of combat. While I was personally exhausted after the session, the players expressed that they had a very good time. We’ll be looking to finish up what they started in a bonus session for October!

Wrastlin!

My WWF Discord group just finished 1999 King of the Ring. Mr. Ass won! One of our folks actually got her bracket right. I had predicted Kane winning, so I was obviously out of luck on that. In the last RAW, Stone Cold Steve Austin just won the Heavy Weight Title from the Undertaker in an unlikely win! We’ll see how long that stint lasts...

Streams

I tried streaming from my personal Twitch using a schedule last week!

It...had mixed results.

My Warzone streams were my most popular, which is funny, ‘cuz I’m not that good at Warzone. My least popular were my Dungeon of the Endless and Yakuza 0 streams, which is not a big surprise. Those games aren’t that fun to watch.

I wanted to do the schedule as a an attempt to see if I could get a small audience or find some new meaning in games I was working through by presenting them as content.

I found the answer to both was more or less “not really”.

And that’s okay!

I also learned streaming, even just for an hour a night, is hard work. We should all be kinder to our content creators and in awe of the friends we have who do it even when on one is watching. Content creation is so unforgiving. Maybe if I stuck with it longer I’d have found my niche, but honestly, I just enjoy games for the games, and turning them into content just isn’t my speed.

I’ve been doing the whole SpriteClub thing per usual. I’m a paid subscriber now! And I even am on a greeting basis with some folks. That’s been really cool. We had debuts this weekend too, where creators submit new fighters. The system matches them with other fighters to determine ratings. It’s a lot of fun, and the event always has this festival atmosphere to it.

I’ve also been watching a lot of streams from the gals over at hololive-EN. Specifically, I’ve been watching Gawr Gura, Amelia Watson and Mori Calliope. It’s become nightly viewing in my household. I’ll save the debate on V-Tubers for a different place, suffice to say I have enjoyed the games they’ve presented and the personalities they’ve developed, and I think the success they’ve found is well earned. There are some talented folks behind these projects, and I find the streams to be relaxing, enjoyable, and at hours I can actually tune in for.

Personal News

Lately, I’ve been feeling pretty down. This can be easily correlated with the shift in temperature, for sure. I know a lot of people really dig fall, and I used to be a SPOOKY SEASON guy myself, but as I get older, fall has shifted into this period of mourning as I recognize the shortening days and the coming winter, which has always played hell with my body.

I’ve been struggling with a number of phantom symptoms that seem to pop up this time of year- bad digestion, terrible sleep (likely resulting from mild apnea), fatigue and heart palpitations. In turn, my mental health has been seriously flagging.

At the suggestion of my therapist, I’ve started up a new vitamin regimen including a multivitamin and magnesium. I’ve also focused on finding potassium enriched foods and have cut back significantly on my drinking and caffeine. So far, this has actually resulted in me gaining weight ‘cuz I’ve been indulging in a lot of sugar as a coping mechanism, but I’m working through getting back to a healthy place where I can both track my intake but also be content with where I’m at. Right now I’m doing my best to try and fight the urge to become a Nap Guy.

Last week I took several naps, even on my off days, and I’ve had a hard time sustaining my energy throughout the day, so I’m doing a better job of getting the sleep my body asks for while also structuring my day with more purpose so I’m left with less time just lying around wondering what to do.

Last week I broke my personal best for a 5K, breaking 24 minutes. For today’s run, I plan to try and break my 7:30 time on my mile run to the gym.

For weights, I’ve gotten into a rhythm of 3 times a week, with Mondays and Fridays focusing on my core exercises- presses and curls, with Wednesdays focusing on pulls that are centered on working out my back, as well as bodyweight exercises such as dips and pull ups. This variation has given my limbs more time to heal up, which is welcome. Now if only I could be kinder to my body AFTER the gym, I might see some actual progress!

Work continues to be what it is. I’m at 30 hours now, which continues to be a huge positive. I don’t think I could keep at it with 40 hours. Change is a constant, and they seem to find new ways to make our jobs more convoluted every day. I have a quarterly review coming up with my new supervisor, but I have a feeling it won’t be nearly so traumatic as the last one, as I’ve done a good job of straightening up and flying right.

As I get more distance from August, I’m starting to recognize it- the events of my workplace disasters, my unplanned vacation, my off the rails spending and drinking- for what it was- it was a breakdown. And I’m still recovering from it. I was deeply unwell, and I took on some trauma- some of it wasn’t stuff I was looking for, some of it was stuff I brought on myself. I’m working through it. I wish I could say things like therapy have made a huge difference, but frankly, most of the work comes from stuff like this, where I’m just writing and being transparent with myself. That’s where I find the most healing work happens.

I still have a lot of my social media muted. When I need news, it typically filters through into my Discord, or Yahoo dings my phone or I see it on my Facebook feed. It’s fair to say that lately it’s felt like everything just Happens So Much.

I feel for my friends who are directly impacted- by the election, by the supreme court, by...just, everything. It all makes my own personal journey and endeavors feel...deeply small. At the same time, I just don’t have the emotional capacity required to house this perpetual crowd of events or constantly process everything in real time. I’m not sure when, if ever, I will have that again. I struggle to read ANYTHING- even friendly sites like Defector or The Discourse, without feeling an immense downswing.

I don’t know what the answer is. I wish I could just gut up and stay constantly plugged in for the sake of pals who might need to openly hash this out or draw attention to their causes or needs, but based on the past few months, I’m not sure I can take care of myself, let alone others. As I often tell close friends, my priorities these days are this small and in this order- Stay Healthy, Stay Kind, Stay Employed, Stay Productive- anything that goes right beyond that feels like a bonus in 2020.

At any rate, thanks for reading the update, y’all!

I’ll try and post these more regularly. I just wanted to check in with everyone and let y’all know how everything is going these days. Stuff like this helps me keep honest, as lately I’ve had a hard time sussing out what my direction is these days. Stay safe and well, and hit me up with what you’re up to, when you find a moment!

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aion-rsa · 3 years

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Free Guy: On Set With Ryan Reynolds and Jodie Comer

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“Let’s get those energy levels up guys… let’s just get this done!” Shawn Levy is in motivational mode. The Night At The Museum director is cajoling his crew via megaphone for another action-packed take on the set of his new movie, Free Guy—it’s nearly the end of the working day, and the finish line is in sight.

The scene is reset, and a worn-out Ryan Reynolds–looking decidedly un-badass in a pastel blue Henley t-shirt and beige chinos—psyches himself up for another highly choreographed fight sequence. His opponent? A very badass-looking stuntwoman in combat pants, leather jacket, and sunglasses, pistol at the ready.

As soon as Levy yells “Action!,” though, Reynolds flips the switch into action hero mode, throwing himself into some impressively complex—and lightning fast—gun-fu, before the weapons are tossed aside and the fists start flying. Appearances, it seems, can be deceptive.

It’s May 2019, and the action is unfolding on a wobbly monitor underneath Boston’s huge Leonard P. Zakim Bunker Hill Memorial Bridge (simply “the Lenny” to the locals), just beside the famous Charles River. Sure, it’s a picturesque spot, but—Reynolds’s presence aside—this feels more like the guerilla shoot of a modestly-budgeted actioner than a huge Hollywood production.

But again, things are not as they seem. This set-up is actually a tiny fragment of a much more ambitious canvas. Boston is doubling for Free City—a bustling open-world video game setting that’s home to Reynolds’s Guy, an increasingly self-aware non-player character (or NPC for the gamers among us).

“What you’re seeing today,” Levy enthusiastically explains, shouting to make himself heard over the almost gale-force spring breeze, “is Guy taking control of his life and fighting back against some of the people who are wreaking havoc and violence in his city.”

Guy’s burgeoning sentience is spurred on by the appearance of “Molotov Girl” (played by Killing Eve’s Jodie Comer), the captivating, tough-as-nails avatar of human programmer Milly. Before long, the two are fighting side-by-side to save Free City from being shut down for good by the real-life “bad guy”—obnoxious game publisher Antoine (Taika Waititi). “Guy realizes that he doesn’t necessarily need to just accept the world as it is presented to him,” Levy says. “He can actually have input on it. And that’s something I think we can all understand—the possibility of affecting the world around you is a powerful thing.”

“It feels like a five-year-old getting an accelerated education on life,” adds Reynolds, joining Levy quickly before another take. “There’s something sweet and child-like about this guy. I love that there’s this kind of wish fulfilment element to it, which I don’t see too often in modern films. It felt important and timely—I like playing an optimistic character right now.” (Little did he know at the time, that sentiment was to become even more relevant to Free Guy’s delayed release in a post-Covid world.)

cnx.cmd.push(function() { cnx({ playerId: "106e33c0-3911-473c-b599-b1426db57530", }).render("0270c398a82f44f49c23c16122516796"); });

A high concept often requires a high bar when it comes to onscreen action, especially in today’s post-Marvel blockbuster landscape (Free Guy, incidentally, was one of the last Fox films to be in production as the Disney takeover was completed). Judging by today’s on-set antics, Levy and Reynolds have that box ticked—and then some. “It’s a video game, so anything is possible,” the actor says. “That’s just one of the greatest tools or gifts you can have as people who love creating stuff—it allows you to think outside the box.” When it comes to the stunts, Levy describes that “absence of rules” as “liberating;” for Reynolds, we imagine it’s pretty exhausting, too. “I mean, days like today I definitely feel 42 years old,” he laughs. “But no, it’s a ton of fun. I mean, I’m running around, doing choreography… I’m having the time of my life.”

Jodie Comer Q&A

You’re playing two versions of the same character in the film. How different are they?

They both have their strengths, but in very different departments. In the real word, Milly is a games programmer, and then Molotov Girl is this avatar she’s created within the world of Free City—she’s this badass chick who rides a motorcycle and is ridiculously cool.

What’s been the most challenging aspect of the role?

The physicality of Molotov Girl. I’m having to learn so much, because she’s very agile, super athletic, does everything very smoothly… and I’m not! It’s requiring a lot of physical training and an awareness of my own physicality. I did a scene the other day where she was even just walking away, and everything about her has to be otherworldly and fierce. Shawn was on the other end of the street and he was just like, “More Beyoncé!” And I was like, “OK! I know what that means.” [Laughs]

This is your first big Hollywood blockbuster. What was it about this project that really stood out for you?

There’s something very new about this script. This is a video game, but it’s live-action—and seeing how [the filmmakers] are getting those nuances in, whether it’s the speed or angle of the camera or the sets or what the costume and make-up departments are coming up with, is just brilliant. With games and film, I feel like a lot of it is becoming intertwined now, and this is a very fresh outlook on the gaming world and how it’s shown on film.

Are you much of a gamer yourself?

I don’t actually play a lot of video games, but I have been recently—I was like, if my character is a gamer, I should probably get into it… Spider-Man is my favorite at the minute. I tried Grand Theft Auto but it just gave me mild anxiety. I was coming away from that quite stressed. So I am sticking to Spider-Man—he’s my go-to guy!

Free Guy is set to be released on 21 May 2021

The post Free Guy: On Set With Ryan Reynolds and Jodie Comer appeared first on Den of Geek.

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#aion-rsa #Den of Geek

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thunderlummox · 7 years

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Gaming Efficiency and the Child

I think I’ve figured out what is fueling my recent gaming habits.

When I was a kid/teenager/college student I had mountains of time on my hands. When I wasn’t working or studying I pretty much had that time to myself, meaning I had sometimes 4-8 hours of game time I could play daily, sometimes even more on my days off during some periods of college (it was not unusual to put in about 10-16 hours on days off with no school work to handle).

I am now of course 37 with a wife and kid, a 50 hour a week job (with commuting time) and various responsibilities adjacent but not necessarily related to those primary responsibilities. As such sometimes, especially in tax season (accountant), I have maybe an hour, maybe two, tops during the work week to play a game, and that’s if I’m not dead exhausted where I just want to hit the couch and watch Parks and Rec (again).

I think this is, without a doubt, the main reason my gaming habits and desires have changed dramatically. I used to be able to go through a 60+ hour game in a fairly short amount of time, even in between work and school, because I could spend several hours at a time deep diving and not worrying about outside concerns. This is no longer the case. Even on weekends there are responsibilities that take me out of the running for some of these games.

The child is the major reason for this. I had demands on my time before, but his demand is on my mind and soul. Even if I’m able to get a long stretch of time to play games I can’t really get into an immersive experience anymore because I need to have at least some of my attention on the kid and what he’s doing. He needs to go outside and play, and as he’s autistic he hasn’t yet gotten a cadre of friends to gang up with and go out on his own. The tunnel vision necessary to succeed at some games or the immersion that keeps you interested isn’t something I can spare at this point in his life.

I also have to be cognizant of the material of the games I’m playing. Much as I’d love to dive into Horizon Zero Dawn or the Last of Us Remastered on my PS4 my play time on those would be limited to the hour or so a night after he goes to bed, which makes it very difficult to get into a rhythm or feeling about the game in those short intervals. The subject matter is absolutely not appropriate for a 7 year old autistic child, especially since he’s not yet progressed in his communication enough to tell us when he’s scared or where we can explain the difference between video game and cartoon violence and real-world violence to a degree we can be satisfied with.

The trend towards the vast open world with millions of things to do is counter to my gaming needs; I have a completionist mindset when it comes to gaming (I famously lost a summer in ‘02 playing Tony Hawk Pro Skater 2 to absolute completion, in the days before achievements and trophies) so ignoring all the side quests and collectibles scattered around the open-world genre is almost impossible for me if I want to enjoy a game like that. And forget about JRPGS; that genre has barely evolved since the mid-nineties and still in recent games rely on save points (which are the most disrespectful thing to an adult gamer’s time) for the recording of progress, something that necessitates a certain about of play time be set aside to get from one point to another.

So what does a game need to get my attention? I’ve prepared a list:

1) Lack of graphic, realistic violence. I know there is a severe lack of proof that violent video games cause real-world violence (famously I point to the drop in crime statistics after the release of a GTA game, look it up) but in my head it’s not that it will turn my kid into a psycho it’s that he may not understand that violence isn’t a quality answer in most real-life situations. And I can’t gauge accurately how he’s absorbing that information as yet. Plus since becoming a father I’ve found my hunger for ultra-violence has dropped considerably if it isn’t attached to a quality underlying metaphor or message.

2) Efficiency. I need to be able to feel like I’ve made progress in a game in a short period of time, half hour to 2 hours at most. I can’t be shackled to a game without consistent auto save after everything you do, or a quick save function hot keyed to a button. Drop of a hat I need to be able to get out of that game and do other stuff.

3) Easy to learn, difficult to master. I’ve tried Dark Souls I can’t say how many times: I will never play these games well. The difficulty in merely learning the basic things you need to win makes it impossible for me to get into a rhythm on the game and get to the point where I can progress. Same with an open world game like the Witcher 3. I basically have to relearn the controls and menu and crafting system each time I pick it up, and even with the presence of auto save functions and the like I can’t seem to find the sweet spot. Plus it’s violent as all get out at times. Someday maybe, someday. I have to be able to pick up a game, learn the basics needed to play on the easiest level, and then see if it can hold my attention long enough to master.

These parameters have led me to basically be a 2-3 game player now. Diablo III and Overwatch are perfect games for my lifestyle; easy to learn the basics, difficult to become a master at, able to be played in short intervals and still feel progress, and lack of over the top violence makes them playable in or out of my son’s presence without me worrying too much about his fragile little mind getting warped. That and they are SUPER fun to play, per the usual Blizzard product. Add to that whatever I’m playing on my Vita (since it’s portable it allows me to play whenever I have a spare free moment in my day) comprise the full list of games I play regularly.

Aside from an occasional wistful remembrance of hours spent wandering the World of Warcraft or exploring the galaxy of Mass Effect I don’t really miss the experiences anymore. It’s a sacrifice I’ve willingly made, and I’m still stockpiling games and books for when I reach an age with more time on my hands, like when the kid is grown or I’m retired (semi retired; I picked accounting because as long as I’m still mentally sound I can do it until I die at some level).

So while I read all the issues with Mass Effect Andromeda or about people having amazing experiences with Horizon Zero Dawn I don’t really feel the need or pull to get into those games anymore. I’m happy to experience the new arcades now; online games like Diablo and Overwatch that you pick up and play at leisure, but still have depth for people to explore and become amazing at. Because honestly, I’m going to eventually have more time to play the games I’m missing, and by then I’ll probably only need to play the most excellent of them. And they will be dirt cheap to purchase as well.

PS I know in Diablo you basically make demons explode in huge gouts of blood all the time, but I make the argument that the artsy nature of the rendering and lack of human characteristics makes it still a game that doesn’t do too much in the way of violent imagery. Besides if demons do come around I want my son to know it’s ok to kill them.

#gaming

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impurelight · 6 years

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6 Things I Learned Using Unity

You've probably heard about Unity. It's what indies, and many other game devs, use to make games. Unity is great, don't get me wrong. There's a massive asset store, the games made are cross platform, and the engine does a lot of heavy lifting for you. But it's not perfect.

I learned a lot from coding in Unity and I decided to write some of them down. Here are 5 things I learned using Unity.

It's Not Really A Game Engine

I went into Unity thinking it would be this fantastic drag and drop tool. Turns out not so much. Unity only does 2 things, that I'm aware of: graphics and physics. Yeah, it has a nice system for handling those two things. Like collision layers and shaders and stuff like that. And it has some other things like UI prefabs and anchoring.

But I really expected more. Unity revolves around game objects which each have components attached to them. These can be unity components like a collision mesh that allows your object to collide or a mesh renderer which allows you to actually see the object. Or these can be your own scripts. I use C Sharp. Apparently you can use Javascript too but whenever you Google about something the code they give you is always in C Sharp. So if you choose javascript you’re just shooting yourself in the foot.

The problem is Unity over relies on custom C Sharp Scripts. I guess I should expect this from a game engine as open as Unity but I just expected more. I expected most things to already be done for me so it was just me and my creativity.

When I first started out whenever I Googled for stuff I expected some simple built-in feature in Unity to solve it for you. And sometimes that happens with anchoring. But 95% of the time, they just tell you to suck it up and write a custom C sharp script. What a pain.

The Camera Is The Most Important Thing

How important could a camera be? Turns out: very important. I have a simple game where I move the camera around a planet. And because the camera was not looking straight down I had a few problems.

First if you went over (or under) the poles the keys would be reversed so up was now down, down was up, left right you get the deal. So that's easy. Just get some linear algebra to solve it.

But that introduced problem two. When I was looking at the north -pole everything was fine and dandy. But when I looked at the south-pole I couldn't quite look at the south-pole. Because my camera was at an angle the computer thought trying to look at the south-pole would change the key orientations.

This was a pretty bad bug. And I finally found the solution. I think the solution I found was genius. Now, granted, probably all the game studios already know it but I discovered it myself.

You don't move the camera directly. You have a point you're looking at called the focal point and move that. And with that one change all of my problems went away.

So that leads me to my number one rule of game design: Anything is possible with enough abstraction

Best Practises: There Is No Such Thing

In University there was this one lecture I had about 'code smells'. Apparently nested for loops were bad. Who knew? There was actually quite a bit of controversy on this slide but I didn't think too much of it at the time.

Now in Unity I have to worry about a bunch of other things. It all revolves around the concept of a manager. Now I'm not really sure if this is a good thing to have, I just copied it from someone else. But the basic idea is you have one script keeping track of the camera, one script for the mouse, one for the game, etc.

And the problem is how do you get all these scripts to find and talk to each other. Right now I'm searching for the object in the start() method but I might change that. Now according to people on the internet I should be making these managers singletons. Actually no, because no one can agree if this is a good idea or not.

Also people cannot agree on whether having a static class is a good idea. Anyways, in programming no one can agree on anything. So now I'm just doing what I want and I'll fix it later.

UI Tools Are Finicky AF

Unity apparently has this UI system. It’s pretty basic, there’s only a few options. I just recently discovered the anchoring system which allows UI elements to scale which I thought was pretty magical. Yeah, no alignment guides or snapping here. Just bare bones tools.

So you’d think it’d be pretty easy to do stuff, right? Nope. Here’s a list of things that have gone wrong so far with the UI: forgot to import UnityEngine.UI and almost no one thinks to mention this online, buttons randomly stop working apparently this was because I had too many Canvases, and the most recent one: clicking a button crashes Unity.

This last one was infuriating because I couldn’t figure out what was the bug. I tried everything. Turning off things I didn’t need, commenting out options, clearing the cache. Finally I moved everything to a new canvas and everything started working again. So that’s Unity’s UI tools. Janky AF.

Refactoring Is The Best Part

I originally thought refactoring code would be boring. Turns out it's the best part. It's not much work and there's basically infinite upside.

And turns out I make a lot of little hacks. Like I implemented something one way which in hindsight was a bad idea. Right now I found a mistake which makes me go, 'What was I even thinking when I thought of that?' which I'm definitely going to have to change. And it's all my code so I know what everything does and I make liberal use of comments.

So it's easy. Refactoring is fun. This might be the biggest difference between users and developers. Developers will be like, "This is the biggest update ever, we refactored everything!" and users will be like, "Yeah, but what did you actually change?".

Unity is Ugly And Broken (At Least On The Mac)

Unity looks perfectly fine on Windows as Windows is uniformly ugly. But on Mac there is a noticeable inconsistency in the design. There is a definite 'this app was not designed for the Mac' feeling. Also it appears to have been designed with Windows in mind because things like renaming files uses Windows-isms and not Mac-isms (as in the normal keyboard shortcuts do not work).

I know that most gamers use Windows computers but Mac is still an acceptable platform to be developing games. The code is cross platform and I don't need a silky smooth 60FPS to test if everything works. I could probably get by with like 8FPS and still be able to fully debug, at least at my current level of development.

Also there are very common graphical hiccups like menus looking distorted when running the code. It makes it look like one of those cross platform apps. Like Adobe Air. Remember that?

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howtocloudtech-blog · 7 years

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Smaller than normal audit: Test driving a completely stacked, $4,000 27-inch 5K iMac Skylake CPUs, quick GPUs, a 1TB SSD, and 32GB of RAM make this iMac enjoyable to use.

A couple of weeks back, we investigated the new 21.5-inch 4K iMac. It's a strong desktop with an awesome screen, however its default setup comes up short (especially its moderate 5400RPM hard drive).

In the event that you truly solicit a considerable measure from your figuring hardware, however, there's still not a viable replacement for the 27-inch 5K rendition. More partitions the little and vast iMacs than any other time in recent memory: the 27-inch forms incorporate new Skylake processors from Intel, while the 21-inch adaptations utilize the more established Broadwell design. You can just get committed GPUs in the 5K iMacs. The Mac Pro is as yet Apple's speediest Mac if your workloads routinely maximize different CPU centers and GPUs, however for other power clients and experts the 27-inch iMac is the one to get.

The outside

Will keep this ridiculously short, on the grounds that almost no has changed about the outside of the 5K iMac. Indeed, even a portion of the interior updates that were new to the 21.5-inch models—Thunderbolt 2, for one—were at that point incorporated into the 27-inch display last year.One change is a more extensive shading range, a similar one we found in the 4K iMac. Past iMacs utilized the sRGB shading space, yet the new Retina models bolster "more than 99 percent" of the DCI-P3 shading space normal in computerized motion picture theaters. DCI-P3 incorporates the whole sRGB shading space however is equipped for showing more shades of red and green (which likewise influences auxiliary and tertiary hues like yellow, orange, red, and cyan, however blues in DCI-P3 are generally the same as in sRGB).

To bolster this more extensive shading range, Apple has changed far from utilizing standard white LEDs for backdrop illumination, which regularly consolidate a blue LED with a yellow phosphor to make white. Apple is presently utilizing red-green phosphor LEDs to extend the shading array, a procedure already exhibited by LCD producers like Sharp.

Likewise new are the info gadgets, the Magic Keyboard, Magic Mouse 2, and Magic Trackpad 2. Each of the three supplant AA batteries with rechargeable li-particle renditions. The mouse appears to be identical, however the console and trackpad are both thinned down and streamlined.

Lightning links are utilized to revive the embellishments, however they'll additionally convey information when associated with your Mac. This deters the requirement for isolated wired and remote adaptations, since any remote adornment adequately turns into a wired extra when you connect it to (all things considered, the position of the Lightning port on the base of the Magic Mouse 2 makes this illogical). When you connect to the accomplices to a Mac running El Capitan, they'll likewise consequently combine with it.

The console and mouse are incorporated with all iMacs for no extra charge, however the trackpad will cost $50 additional.

Within

Here's the place we get to the fun stuff. The new iMacs hop two CPU eras, one GPU era, and twofold the measure of capacity data transfer capacity that the old ones had.

Mac sent us the speediest variant of the 27-inch iMac that it makes, finish with 32GB of RAM and a 1TB SSD—this PC retails for an eye-popping $4,099, however a full $1,300 of that is wrapped up away and memory updates. It's expensive, however kid is it quick.

The CPU is a Core i7-6700K, a 4.0GHz (4.2GHz Turbo) top of the line, quad-center Skylake CPU that we've quite audited. Intel's year-over-year CPU execution picks up have impeded as of late, so on the off chance that you've as of now got a comparatively timed Haswell chip the additions are generally little. In case you're supplanting a quad-center iMac from 2010 or 2011, you can hope to see some more critical lifts. We pulled comes about for a large portion of a time of top of the line iMacs (in addition to the quickest 4K iMac with Broadwell) from the Geekbench comes about database to illustrate.This iMac additionally enlarges the execution hole amongst it and the quad-center form of the Mac Pro—with the 6700K, it's the undisputed single-center execution champion, the speediest processor you can get in any Mac in the whole lineup. Multithreaded errands still improve more centers, however, so in the event that you need 6, 8, or 12 CPU centers, the Mac Pro is as yet the best way to go. The 5K iMac really stands up genuinely well to the 6-center Mac Pro, yet the 8-and 12-center forms still overwhelm it. On the off chance that Apple ever gets around to refreshing its expert desktop again, Intel even has single-attachment Xeon CPUs with 14, 16, and 18 centers now.he past 5K iMacs utilized AMD Radeon R9 M200-arrangement GPUs, the M290, M295, and M295X. The new iMacs climb an era, beginning with the Radeon R9 M380, and proceeding onward up to the M390, M395, and the M395X that is just accessible as an update on the most noteworthy end demonstrate. The last three GPUs accompany 2GB of GDDR5 RAM, while the M395X accompanies 4GB.

In spite of the model number hop, it doesn't resemble this is an all-new design here or anything. From all that we can see, it appears as though despite everything we're taking a gander at an adaptation of the "Tonga" GPU center with 2,048 shaders. There's no new assembling process or critical increment in handling power, and that implies no colossal execution increments either.he Offscreen tests are the ones to look for crude execution, since they all render pictures at the same 1080p determination. The Onscreen tests demonstrate to you how the GPUs will deal with their particular Macs' local screen resolutions. You won't diversion at local determination on a 5K iMac, however crude GPU execution for a few tests is still superior to the GeForce GPUs in 2012 and 2013-time iMacs (you likewise pick up a great deal with respect to the incorporated just 4K iMac).

For reasons unknown, the numbers we escaped our M395X in GFXBench were lower than the middle scores from the outcomes database—this may simply come down to driver insufficiencies, however it's difficult to state. Regardless, Mac GPU execution enhances similarly as steadily as CPU execution, so think about that when you overhaul.

GPU throttling: Much superior to a year ago

One of the worries some power clients and gamers had about a year ago's 5K iMacs is that the Radeon GPUs in them appeared to throttle rapidly while under load. The apparatuses to quantify this sort of thing don't generally exist in OS X, however we could do some testing in Windows that affirmed the issue. To put it plainly, the top of the line R9 M295X would rapidly warm up to more than 100 degrees Celsius, and soon thereafter the GPU would drop from its most extreme clock speed of 850MHz to a to some degree bring down 784MHz.

The top-end Radeon R9 395X in the current year's iMac appears to be better acted. We ran the same Furmark stretch test that we ran a year ago, and, following 20 minutes of stress testing, the GPU's temperature seemed to have crested in the vicinity of 94 and 95 degrees. The GPU kept up its greatest clock speed of 909MHz without an issue.

Furthermore, that is with a GPU-just anxiety test. When we utilized Prime95 to at the same time maximize the CPU, the framework fan kicked into overdrive, making the iMac somewhat louder (not stream motor noisy, but rather effectively perceptible over the sound of whatever diversion you may play) yet keeping the GPU cooler. For this situation, the most extreme GPU temperature never went over 80 degrees Celsius. The CPU maximized at around 101 degrees Celsius and after that started throttling, settling down at around 95 degrees at a clock speed of 3.3GHz.

We couldn't test the other Radeon GPUs that accompany the different 5K iMac arrangements, yet the way that the top-end model is so all around carried on is a decent sign. It would seem that you can hope to get precisely the GPU execution you paid for regardless of what you're doing.

Capacity execution: More PCIe paths, more speed

For the most recent few years, Apple has concentrated on enhancing the execution of its SSDs in a way that couple of other PC OEMs have. Apple changed from the more established, bottlenecked SATA interface to PCI Express in 2013, something that numerous PC creators still haven't done. Also, this year, Apple has enhanced execution by giving its SSDs significantly more PCI Express data transfer capacity to utilize.

The 4K and 5K iMacs with SSDs and Fusion Drives give those plates four PCI Express 2.0 paths to work with, twofold the quantity of the 2013 and 2014 iMacs. The drives additionally utilize the NVMe convention, which up to this point has just been utilized as a part of the Retina MacBook. The outcome is a truly quick drive.The 1TB SSD in the 5K iMac does also in QuickBench as the 15-inch Retina MacBook Pro, despite the fact that that gadget utilizes four PCI Express 3.0 paths rather than 2.0 paths. Either NVMe is helping the iMac's speed, or the additional data transfer capacity gave by PCI Express 3.0 is still pointless excess for now's SSDs (the way that the MacBook Pro is utilizing a littler 512GB SSD may likewise be influencing execution to some degree).

A seemingly perpetual desktop with a pretty screen

What does the greater part of this speed mean in this present reality? In any event in the all-SSD adaptation we tried, it implies you don't need to sit tight for quite a bit of anything (unless you're aggregating code or transcoding video or doing different things that constantly push each of the four centers). Altering RAW pictures and high-res Photoshop records, trimming and sending out video, opening and exchanging between applications—it's all, quick.

Be that as it may, dislike more seasoned iMacs feel moderate at this point. A year ago's 5K iMac was at that point an entirely decent machine—the current year's simply takes it and enhances it with the current year's segments.

A portion of the things you may need in an iMac in 2015 still aren't here, however. We're basically discussing Thunderbolt 3, which would do three things for another iMac: it'd support the speed of Thunderbolt adornments (duh), it'd give you new USB Type-C good ports, and it would incorporate more DisplayPort 1.2 paths than Thunderbolt 2. That last one would permit you to associate an outer 5K show to the new iMac utilizing a solitary link (and possibly reestablish the as yet missing Target Display Mode to boot).These are costly machines, and there's no iMac more costly than the one Apple sent us to play with.

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What Went Wrong With Dwayne Johnson’s Doom Movie?

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When Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson took to the stage at the Amway Arena in Orlando, Florida on March 29, 2008, few could have predicted what would come next.

The budding action star was there to induct his father and grandfather into the WWE Hall of Fame, however, at times, his speech felt more like an impromptu comedy roast.

“There was big controversy with the WWE and illegal torture,” one convoluted gag began. “Apparently they would find Iraqi insurgents, tie them up and make them watch DVD copies of The Marine.”

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John Cena, who starred in The Marine, was in the audience that night and took the ribbing in good humor, with his exaggerated on-camera reaction spawning what would come to be known as the “John Cena oh s**t gif”.

Johnson wasn’t finished though.

“By the way I made Doom. Did you ever see Doom? Well, you probably didn’t and it’s okay because nobody else did either.”

Cue laughter.

Nearly three years on from its release, The Rock could finally laugh about Doom. No one had been laughing when the film first debuted in October 2005 to rank reviews and a poor box office return.

Film critic Richard Roeper was among those to tear into the film.

“The performances are awful, the action sequences are impossible to follow, the violence is gratuitous, the lighting is bad and I have my doubts that the catering truck was even up to snuff.”

He had a point.

Largely filmed in a series of identical-looking and poorly lit corridors of a generic space station, Doom had the look and feel of a bad Alien knock-off. Worse still, it bore almost no resemblance to the source material.

Johnson may be the biggest film star in the world today but back then he was still just another wrestler trying to make the leap into movies. In truth, he was fortunate that Doom didn’t torpedo his chances in the way countless misfiring movies had for other aspiring wrestlers-turned-actors.

So where did it all go wrong?

Arnold Schwarzenegger and ILM

Film adaptations of popular video games are famously fraught with difficulties.

You could probably count the number of good video game movies on one finger – Paul W.S. Anderson’s Mortal Kombat, before you ask.

But id Software, the developers behind the pioneering Doom franchise, had been hopeful of bucking the trend back in 1994 when Universal first purchased the film rights.

“I think Doom would be easier to write a script for than, say, Street Fighter,” business manager and co-owner Jay Wilbur told PC Gamer.

Wilbur’s vision for the movie certainly sounded appealing.

“I see Arnold Schwarzenegger with all the Doom garb on, Industrial Light & Magic supplying the special effects and the story would be something along the lines of Arnie stationed on Mars when the dimensional gateway opens up and demons flood in…So everybody’s dead – well maybe not everybody, you need a little human interaction and comic relief going on. But mainly, just non-stop seat-of-your-pants sweat-of-your-brow action.”

Fusing elements of Commando, Total Recall, and the later Arnie effort End of Days, Wilbur’s sketch of a Doom movie sounded perfect – but there were issues from the start.

According to former CEO Todd Hollenshead, several potential scripts were vetoed by id Software for failing to stay true to the source material. While Schwarzenegger was approached, plans for the project were ultimately shelved in the wake of the Columbine High School massacre and negative press it generated around the game.

Doomed Casting

It would be almost a decade before interest in a movie version would be rekindled by producers Lorenzo di Bonaventura and John Wells, who obtained the rights after footage from Doom 3 was shopped to agents from Creative Artists Agency.

Di Bonaventura enlisted David Callaham, then a novice writer in Hollywood, to pen a script based loosely on a handful of ideas he had pitched during a chance meeting.

Schwarzenegger, by then, was not only significantly older but also busy as Governor of California. Alternatives were explored. One rumor, neither confirmed nor denied, suggests Vin Diesel was in the frame to star. Ultimately, however, it was Johnson who ended up landing top billing.

Not that anyone was complaining. Johnson was largely a B-movie star up until that point, making Doom a good fit to potentially take him into the big leagues. There was just one problem though – The Rock didn’t want to play the good guy.

Producers had originally slated the WWE star to play the film’s main protagonist, Staff Sgt. John “Reaper” Grimm. Johnson had other ideas, though.

“When I first read the script, and read it for [the part of] John, after I read it I thought wow John is a great character and, of course, the hero of the movie,” Johnson explained at the 2005 San Diego Comic-Con. “But for some reason I was drawn more to Sarge, I thought Sarge was, to me, more interesting and had a darker side.”

He agreed to star but only in the role of Sarge, leader of the film’s Rapid Response Tactical Squad sent to Mars and someone who ends up becoming the principal villain.

Karl Urban, fresh from featuring in the Lord of the Rings trilogy, was cast in his place in what represented the first major misstep.

Watching the film back now, it’s tempting to wonder whether Doom might have fared better had the two switched roles.

After all, Johnson has carved a sizeable niche as an all-American good guy in the years since, while roles in Dredd and The Boys highlighted a darker streak to Urban’s repertoire.

It’s certainly something Wesley Strick, who served as script doctor and ultimately co-writer on the film, concurs with when the notion is put to him.

“That would work better,” he tells Den of Geek. “I think you are onto something there. The swap was his idea though and this is all with hindsight.”

Blame Superman

An experienced screenwriter with credits on Arachnophobia and Martin Scorsese’s Cape Fear, Strick ended up working on Doom as an indirect result of Tim Burton’s failed Superman movie.

“Lorenzo [di Bonaventura] was head of production at Warner Bros when Tim Burton asked me to come onboard for Superman Lives,” Strick explains.

“Tim and I and Nicolas Cage cooked up this whole scenario for a Superman movie and we would often walk into Lorenzo’s office to do battle with him, essentially, because he was stubbornly opposed to almost every idea we had,” Strick says. “Consequently, Lorenzo and I really butted heads and sometimes it could get quite ugly…I felt like I might have burned my bridges.”

With Superman years in the past, di Bonaventura called Strick to gauge his interest about working on Doom.

“I really wasn’t interested,” Strick says. “Just because I knew nothing about the game. But I have two sons and they were teenagers so there was a lot of enthusiasm from them. They told me to look into it and were excited about the idea of their dad working on this video game movie. Any project you can do where your kids are involved and excited is fun. So that appealed to me.”

Strick was also sold on the film’s director, an exciting young Irish filmmaker called Enda McCallion. McCallion had made his name with a series of striking TV adverts (the Metz alcopop ‘Judderman’ campaign) and music videos for the likes of Nine Inch Nails.

He was being tipped to follow in the footsteps of filmmakers like Jonathan Glazer by transitioning into features.

“Enda was this up-and-coming new Irish director who was hyped to me as a visionary and someone who was going to bring something very original to the movie. It wasn’t going to just be this piece of product.”

Big picture stuff

Strick was tasked with simplifying Callaham’s script to ensure it translated into a workable schedule and, crucially, that it could be made within a modest budget of $60–70 million. That meant cuts.

“The producers looked at it and tried to put together a schedule and realized it was too complicated,” Strick says. “So, I read it and came up with a simple solution. In Callaham’s draft the marines kept going back and forth through this portal. Three times or something. It was unnecessary. They would go over there and then chase back and then regroup and then return to Mars or whatever. I said no, do it once and be done with it. I also had a list of a couple of monsters I thought the movie could do without.”

The decision to cut several monsters familiar to Doom enthusiasts was a contentious one among fans, with Callaham’s original script featuring both the Cacodemon and Arch-Vile among others. Strick had been through this kind of process before though.

“This is sort of the big picture stuff,” he says. “You can get a lot of shit from fans when they feel like you are trespassing on their genre and I think that happened to an extent on Doom. People were like ‘how dare you’.”

He cites his experience on Batman Returns as an example of when the fanboys miss the point.

“I hadn’t read a comic book since I was 12 and I loved them but I was 37 then,” he says. “Way past comic book age. In my mind, that’s okay because you’re trying to write a movie, not a comic book. You don’t want a comic book fanatic on a job like that – what would they bring to the movie?”

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Despite ringing the changes, one sequence Strick was determined to retain from Callaham’s script was the five-minute first-person shooter sequence.

“That was one bit I wanted to keep in no matter what. It was just funny. It had a great attitude and visually it was just delightful. If anyone ever proposed cutting it, I would argue strenuously against that. It was a great idea. Real, in your face.”

All Change

By the time filming commenced in Prague in the winter of 2004, however, Strick found himself working on a very different film. McCallion had departed the project for reasons unknown. He didn’t respond to our request for an interview.

In his place came Andrzej Bartkowiak, a seasoned cinematographer who had recently branched out into directing in the early 2000s, helming a trio of Jet Li action movies.

“I was deeply disappointed when Enda left the project,” Strick admits. “It became the thing that I was assured of at the beginning it wouldn’t be. A more conventional approach to a movie like that. I don’t know what kind of movie Enda would have made but at least there was the possibility with him that it was going to be something special.”

Strick was also having to contend with issues elsewhere.

“When Doom moved to Universal, a guy called Greg Silverman became my executive on the project and he didn’t like me. He just always gave me shit,” Strick says. “Once he told me everything I had portrayed about the marines and their tactics was inauthentic. He wanted real, genuine, marine combat tactics. I went back and did loads of research, read books like Jarhead, and really immersed myself in the whole marine mindset. I did a rewrite where I fixed all of the combat stuff, so it was genuine US marine combat protocol. And he hated it. I tried to explain that was exactly what was happening in Iraq, but he was just like ‘nah’. So we ended up going back to the fake stuff.”

It’s an anecdote that hints at that dreaded but all too familiar issue on disjointed projects of this kind – studio interference – and Strick wasn’t the only one experiencing frustration. In the run-up to the film’s release, his co-writer Callaham had begun interacting with angry Doom fans online, who had heard rumors of the film taking liberties with the source material.

Writing in a lengthy open letter defending his screenplay, the young writer managed to make things worse.

“Let me assure you…, that the themes and elements that you love about Doom are ALL represented strongly in the film…just with some new twists,” he wrote.

Few were convinced, however, particularly after he went on to claim he had watched a “bunch of strangers bastardize” his original vision of the film.

Strick has some sympathy.

“As soon as you engage in a fight on the internet, you’ve lost. I don’t think Dave realized that until it happened, but he got the shit kicked out of him by Doom fans. He was determined to defend himself and his movie against all comers and they just kicked him around. But he got back up and got moving again.”

Callaham certainly did that, going on to pen The Expendables and, most recently, Wonder Woman 1984.

Strick remains philosophical about his experience on Doom and still has cherished memories of taking his sons to the premiere [“they were in awe of The Rock” ].

Positives and Negatives

“I thought the film was pretty good. Particularly in the sequence where it becomes like the video game. It’s the one great thing in the movie. Ironically, it’s a movie but it’s at its best when it devolves into pure video game action.”

Bartkowiak took the brunt of the criticism for the film’s visual issues – visual effects wiz Jon Farhat took charge of the much-lauded first-person shooter sequence.

Things would get even worse for the experienced cinematographer-turned-director a few years later with his next film, Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun-Li, which pulled off the ignominious feat of being an even worse video game movie.

Johnson rode the storm though, eventually hitting A-lister pay dirt with 2011’s Fast Five – a movie that breathed new life into his career and the Fast & Furious franchise as a whole.

Today, Johnson is able to laugh about Doom, recently claiming its failure was the result of a “video game curse” he successfully broke with Rampage. The jury is still out on that one.

With a different director, more ambitious budget and the right stars in the right roles, Doom could well have ended up being a great video game movie – but Strick thinks making a truly great video game movie “is next to impossible.”

It’s about narrative,” he explains. “In a movie, we’re taking you for a ride whereas in a video game you are in the driving seat. So they are two conflicting and competing ideas for what makes a story engaging. Sit back, relax, we’re going to entertain you versus you’re immersed in an environment that you control. I don’t know where you find the center for that where the two opposing ideas co-exist. That’s possibly why the video game sequence is so good. It took on that paradox. You’re watching a video game movie that’s a simulation. It’s a kind of reminder of what the movie could never be.”

The post What Went Wrong With Dwayne Johnson’s Doom Movie? appeared first on Den of Geek.

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Why Hunt A Killer Is the Perfect Murder Mystery Game for Amateur Sleuths

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Have you ever watched a crime show and thought you could solve the mystery better than the detectives? Is your ideal night out a Murder Mystery Dinner Theater? Are you a true crime aficionado? Do you love deciphering coded messages? If you answered yes to any of those questions, Hunt A Killer may be the game for you.

While I will admit to having a low scare tolerance, I’ve loved murder mysteries since growing up on reruns of Murder She Wrote. Given the inaccessibility of events like dinner theater during the pandemic, the idea of solving a murder mystery right in my own home sounded like a perfect opportunity for my husband and I to do something fun together. Hunt A Killer is a subscription service where you receive episodes of a murder mystery in a monthly box. The full mystery takes six boxes to solve, and each episode has a particular goal for you to resolve. The result is a mix between a role playing game, a party game, murder mystery television, and dinner theater—and utterly enjoyable.

Part of the reason the combination works so well, according to Carlea Holl-Jensen, one of the staff writers on the currently released season, is that the writers for Hunt A Killer seasons come from many areas of expertise.

“The teams have really diverse sets of backgrounds,” she explained. “We have people who come from video game backgrounds, who come from educational backgrounds, who come from TV and theater.”

The very first game produced by the company was an immersive theater live event; co-founders Ryan Hogan and Derrick Smith worked together to try to figure out to scale that for a broader audience, how to bring it into people’s homes. “In 2016, they started producing boxes basically in our co-founder Derrick’s living room,” Carlea laughed.

When I mentioned that the style of social mystery-solving reminded me of the old How to Host a Murder party game boxes, Carlea said there were three people on the Hunt A Killer team who hadn’t just played those, but written for that type of game themselves (many members of the company are also Dungeons and Dragons players, which will surprise absolutely no one familiar with both games).

While some similar games are one-shots, the serial storytelling nature of murder mystery television programming helped the Hunt A Killer team land on a subscription model—and they borrowed the style of writers’ room collaboration for creating the story of each season from television as well.

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The current season of Hunt A Killer, titled Curtain Call, is a cold case mystery. In 1934, actress Viola Vane disappeared; the case was closed quickly by police of the era, but when her mummified body is discovered by the current theater owner, it’s clear she wasn’t missing—she was murdered. Neither the police nor the theater board are particularly interested in picking the case back up, but the theater owner is determined to achieve justice for the woman, so she hires you, the player, to solve the clues.

When you open the first box, you receive a letter from your contact—a private investigator—and a second letter from the theater owner. Inside the box are documents, physical objects, clues, and collectibles.

Each episode also has a particular mission for you to achieve; for example, in episode one of Curtain Call, the clues provided give you enough information to identify the murder weapon. We found that it didn’t take us long to solve the episode’s mission—but that the sheer amount of information provided about the rest of the mystery had us guessing about who had motive (and who might be having an affair; or why the victim had so much money in her purse!).

“That’s really what we want, is for people to keep coming back and going, ‘Actually, now that I think more about that, that couldn’t have been right,’” Carlea said.

While they do have people who play the boxes solo, many people play them socially—some even collaborate virtually, despite the physical objects in the boxes. “Sometimes people come to it with a little bit of anxiety, like, ‘Oh, I don’t know how do ciphers, or I’m not that good a detective,’” she continued, explaining that especially first-time players may feel more comfortable pairing with a teammate who has different skills. “It’s also just fun to debate and talk about things.

The amount of research that goes into each element, especially in a historical story like this one, is intense. Each episode comes with a physical object—a cufflink, a handkerchief—that provides tangible information about the murder. Even the documents are physical objects: the texture of a letter produced on a typewriter gives more tactile experience than a mass-produced photocopy. Carlea discussed how one of the staff designers, Krystle Alder, researched even the fonts to make sure they were available on typewriters in 1934.

Because Curtain Call takes place at a Broadway theater, Carela talked about how much research had gone into the theater of the era. “I did a lot of listening to podcasts and reading about sort of characters, real people in the period who kind of had similar stories. So there was a lot of sort of, ‘Oh, this person had a similar trajectory, or something happened to them,’” she recalled, and though none of her historical figures met the same grisly death as Viola Vane, she was able to crib notes from the backgrounds of real performers.

One of the staff writers, Elinor Haney, did a lot of research into what would happen to a body left in an attic for 80 years—she looked at mummies and tried to figure out how Curtain Call’s victim would appear upon her discovery. (Forensic and legal research is important in other seasons, which have primarily featured contemporary murders as well.)

I asked how the team selects the props, and while some of it comes down to what it would cost to produce a particular piece for every box sent to subscribers, a lot of it has to do with the story. The writing team will pitch an idea they think will have the most impact to their procurement manager, Kristina Green. Sometimes, Carlea recalled, Kristina’s response is “Absolutely not. That’s ridiculous. There’s no way.” But in most cases, “she just does such an incredible job of finding the stuff that we just kind of dream up out of thin air.”

Ultimately, no matter how cool the concept (some seasons have required players to destroy a piece of evidence in some fashion to be able to get the clue!), the question for the team is “How is it serving the story?” Each clue is designed that way: a cipher, a photo, a playbook from a fictional Broadway musical, or a physical object like a cufflink.

Curtain Call is also a transmedia experience. In addition to the box, there are clues delivered through a “file-share” system (which includes some very tasty recipes for mixed drinks that would have been served just after Prohibition ended; pictured is a non-alcoholic Tango Twist I tried out—and it was quite tasty). The team also created a website for the Cadence Theater (where I found possible additional clues for the episodes I haven’t yet received while I was writing this article). While I’m an old-school gamer when it comes to this type of experience, and prefer for everything to be able to be done without an Internet connection, I was surprised to find how much I felt the online component added to my experience. (We also looked up conversion rates for currency, street addresses, and other hidden pieces of information.)

The team behind each season is huge, including not only the writers (for Curtain Call, that’s Elinor Haney, Travis Madden, Stephanie McGowan, and Carlea Holl-Jensen) and designers (Krystle Alder and Keith Pinkston), but also photographers (Leah Hewitt) and costumers (companies Milk & Ice and The Marilyn Johnson Sewing Design Studio, who provided period clothing for all the photo shoots), Director of Production (Melissa LaMartina, who coordinated the photos and shot the website video), and Sourcing Manager (Kristina Green).

On pieces like the website, players may wonder which parts are created media and which are found photos—and that’s part of the delight. The newspaper clippings, magazine articles, advertisements, and receipts are all produced with the intent to feel so real, players can get fully immersed in the world of the story.

When players run into difficulties (one player wrote in to say a dog had eaten one of the clues to the mystery!), Hunt A Killer has social forums and other accessible hints where players can reach out for help. If players just can’t wait until next month for their box, because they want to binge it all at once, there’s an option to expedite the next box—or players can purchase completed seasons or premium mysteries from the Hunt A Killer store. Players that want a more X-Files experience can also delve into the Empty Faces (paranormal mystery) or Earth Break (sci-fi survival) boxes. While the games have a higher price point than some at-home subscriptions, the Hunt A Killer team encourages cost-sharing and playing with friends (in ways that are safe and responsible during the pandemic).

But whatever you bring to the table, whatever your play style (solo or team, role play or riddle focused), you’re doing it right. “There’s no actual right way to do it,” Carlea confirmed. And that’s part of the fun.

Do you have what it takes to Hunt A Killer? Click here to find out! Use code DENOFGEEK for 20% off your first box!

The post Why Hunt A Killer Is the Perfect Murder Mystery Game for Amateur Sleuths appeared first on Den of Geek.

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