ChipWits Recruiting and Snowlocked Cabin
We got some great candidates for both producer and programmer so I shut down recruiting. We are going to take our time talking to them and deciding. I look forward to introducing the new ChipWits team.
Having these great candidates takes a huge weight off my shoulders because I know ChipWits is going to be in good hands.
The last few days have been productive for the Hel’s Bet rewrite. I am reading through a paper prinout – 650 pages! – with a red pen scribbling edits. I’m cutting a lot of dross, which feels great.
The Pad is now snowlocked for the winter! I tried to get up the snow-packed hill once too often:
The hill is steep and you have to gun it as you round the corner. Oops.
Brook helped me haul the car out and suggested I might want to give up on the hill for the season.
Good call. Part of the fun of living at The Pad is getting snow-locked and sledging in supplies and sledging out laundry and trash.
I got a great new sledge this year:
My new sledge holding a couple bags of laundry.
It’s deeper and sturdier than my orange sledge from last winter.
I buckled my belly band to my waist and let the dogs out the gate:
Mika pulls me as I pull my laundry.
It’s 200 yards to the car:
The gentle slope down from The Pad to the car.
When I got back from my laundry run I took the dogs for a walk:
Mika on Lake Almira.
Me in the balaclava hat I've worn for decades.
Ogre Island looked grim:
Humans beware! It's Ogre Island.
I love my little slice of Earth.
Looking for Coder and Producer for ChipWits
It’s time to hand over coding and promoting ChipWits to someone else. My health doesn’t allow me to do a good job.
Here is the email I sent current ChipWits players:
—
ChipHeads,
I’ve decided that I can’t program ChipWits any longer. My epilepsy has gotten worse and programming is difficult for me. So we are looking for a programmer and a producer to take over the game: http://chipwits.com/recruiting.html
ChipWits players are programmers so we are letting you guys know first. We’d love it if a hardcore ChipWits player took over.
I will continue to have a hand in game design along with Mike Johnston and our new team. I am going to concentrate on finishing rewriting my science fiction novel – www.helsbet.com – and working on a personal game about my disability – www.brainrot.wordpress.com.
Wish ChipWits luck this week in the Independent Games Festival: http://www.igf.com/php-bin/entry2009.php?id=731
They announce finalists on the 7th.
I am going to make a few tweaks this week and upload a new build, but I will wait until we’ve got a producer and coder onboard before running any more contests.
Thanks for your patience as we continue to improve ChipWits. Stay tuned for cool developments in 2009.
IFFEEL COFFEE T-> PICKUP,
Doug Sharp
—
Feels both sad and good. Sad because I love programming and making games. Good because now ChipWits will grow and thrive (and make $$$!).
Happy New Year from The Pad
Best wishes for a great 2009 from Doug Sharp.
This year I am going to find a publisher for Hel’s Bet and get ChipWits II out the door with a new programmer.
2008 was a year of ups and downs. My health was down but my friends kept me going. Thanks, all.
Happy New Years from Mika, here waiting for me to leash her up for a walk. She will never understand why humans don’t walk dogs every waking hour.
Happy Hogmanay from Travis, waiting for me to open the gate so he can terrify small furry creatures. A walk is like a video game for Travis – chipmunks and squirrels and rabbits hiding and squeaking and running away. It’s a game he was evolved to play.
The three of us hard at work while a blizzard rages outside.
I am determined to rock 2009!
Swans and ChipWits 3D progress
I saw the swan family for the first time today. They hatched 3 cygnets this year. I got a zoom-blurred shot of their outing:
Swan family outing
I hadn’t seen the nesting pair of swans for a month. They were driven out of the shallow beaver lake by bald eagles and nested beside a beaver lodge in Martel Lake’s marshy bay.
I burnt out on ChipWits again so I am moving at SNAIL speed.
Programming fries me if I keep it up for long – my damn epilepsy/pain neuropathy. When I program past my limit it feels like someone is holding an invisible sparkler in front of my face – the sparks don’t burn my face but arc through my brain. If I ignore that symptom and keep programming the sparks spit hotter and faster – like fiery static – and it’s impossible to think.
Four years ago I couldn’t program at all so I am grateful for what I can do.
This brain-damage stuff is no fun to write or read so I don’t talk about it much in my blog.
The important thing is that, however slowly, ChipWits is moving toward release. The 3D testures are still under construction, but here’s what our Mission Gadget looks like:
We’ll release ChipWits when it’s ready. I have a pretty short list of bugs and features to add.
I have kept writing Operation American Freedom and am feeling good about the book. I won’t PR it seriously until the end of the month when I have more chapters written.
We’re having a doggie support group tonight. Mika and Travis are huddled under my desk touching my feet with their backs. We’ve had some glorious thunderstorms tonight and the dogs are not as enthusiastic about lightning and thunder as I am.
Here’s a shot of my beautiful, willful little husky Mika:
Mika, the beautiful
Clarion West Write-a-thon
I am diving into the Clarion West Write-a-thon. My Write-a-thon goal is to write 1 hour a day at least 6 times a week. My personal goal is to finish Operation American Freedom by September 6th – the date of the Republican Presidential Convention.
The Write-a-thon raises money for scholarships. It would be great if you sponsored me. Last year for the Write-a-thon I finished the first draft of Hel’s Bet.
It’s the 4th. Perfect time to launch my online novel, “Operation American Freedom” – http://opamfreedom.com .
———
It’s 2013 and George W. Bush leads a band of American insurgents against Chinese/Iranian occupation forces. It’s hard work.
Try not to puke as:
– President Cheney appoints Alberto Gonzalez to the Supreme Court.
– President Limbaugh becomes the ChIranian’s puppet for an endless supply of Oxycontin.
– Fred Phelps’ church stops picketing soldiers’ funeral and dirty-bombs American cities.
– Blackwater buys the Department of Defense.
– George W. Bush cements his place in history with a bloody cover-up.
Thrill as:
– Dubya is waterboarded at Guantanamo
Operation American Freedom (OAF) is a profane, below-the-belt tour of a nightmare Republican future.
I’ll post new chapters frequently.
“George W. Bush is a skidmark on the underpants of history.” – OAF
————–
I’ve got OAF plotted in detail and 22k of its (estimated) 75k words written.
Some pix I’ve been meaning to post:
My cabin, perched looking out on Martel Lake, crowned by a double rainbow:
Double Rainbow oer The Pad. The 2nd rainbow is subtle.
Trillium were insane this year:
Bunch o Trillium
The day of the thaw, long ago:
Ice Piled on the edge of Martel Lake the day of the thaw
Closeup of thawing lake ice
I had a good night working on ChipWits. We will release it from beta when it’s ready. I hope July.
White on White on a Grey Day
Trumpeter Swans are back. I don’t know if these pairs are going to stick around or if they are just passing through:
Last year a pair successfully raised one cygnet. I bet the male loon shows up next week. I hope the loons have another successful year. They’ll have to find another nesting site because the lake has risen.
I celebrated the swans’ arrival by giving myself a radical makeover:
After the last snowstorm the car got stuck on the last climb:
Back to ChipWits hacking. I hope to launch a new contest this weekend.
I’ve always felt that “grey” is greyer than “gray”.
Tons of ChipWits downloads
Someone listed ChipWits on Versiontracker, and listed us as freeware. We are getting lots of hits. They listed it under Mac software, and the Mac version is less tested that the Windows version. I wish they hadn’t linked us for 2 more weeks.
But the current build is looking pretty good. I quickly edited the ChipWits website to emphasize to visitors that the game is still in BETA! and that it is shareware.
I’ll be interested to see how many register their game.
Cosy Feeling, Sad Anniversary, and Hel’s Bet agent letter
I just had my Winter’s supply of propane delivered – 4 100-gallon cannisters. Earlier in the week I got my Winter firewood delivered – 3 face cords. The wood truck dumps the logs in a huge pile and I’ll spend the next couple of days stacking them under my firewood shelters beside the house. I hauled and stacked 112 logs yesterday and aim to stack over 100 per day.
Feels great to have the Winter’s warmth taken care of.
We’ve been getting deluged by storm after storm. The lake is up 18 inches from its Summer low. Still have another 18 inches to go to reach last year’s level.
I waited too long to post last week’s contest so I am going to try again tonight. My Mac is crashing randomly so I haven’t been able to test the Mac build well.
Yesterday was the 10th anniversary of my disability. Ten years ago I was having a blast as the demo god for Microsoft Research’s Virtual Worlds group. I worked with artists, coders, musicians, interns putting together and running demos of our cool Virtual Worlds tech. On Oct 17th, 1997 I realized that my seizures were coming back so often that I could no longer work. I remember sitting in my office going over and over again how frequently my seizures were hitting me. The real test was that I was not producing. Every time I sat down to code my seizures hit me and I shied away.
My seizures are not grand mal – I don’t pass out. They involve chest pain, confusion with language, static in my thinking, free-floating pain, and at their worst uncontrollable twitching and verbalization.
Over the last 10 years I hit some pretty low lows as the pain became overwhelming. Talking with interesting people about fun stuff became impossible. I bought my cabin as a refuge for healing and it has worked. I am rebuilding my ability to work. I am still very slow and find it impossible to hit deadlines because I still have small seizures when I work hard and have to spend many days resting. But I am on my way back! That’s the great news after 10 hard years.
And as part of my return to the Doug of yesterday I have written an agent query letter for Hel’s Bet. I’ve sent it to friends, Clarion colleagues, and Paul Park and received some great input. Paul Park has promised to get back to me this week with comments and as soon as I incorporate his input I’ll send off the query.
So on my 10th anniversary of a sad, sad day I am nearing completion of ChipWits and am just about to start hawking my completed novel. What a great feeling.
And it feels great to know I won’t freeze to death this Winter.
Working on the game
I spend most of my days working on ChipWits. I am shooting to have a solid release for October 1st, which is the deadline for entering the Independent Games Festival.
I really like having deadlines. The Clarion West Write-a-thon deadline lit a fire under my tush to finish Hel’s Bet. I am getting better at working hard for a deadline but not letting it burn me out.
I am working on ChipWits content – tutorial missions. Each simple mission introduces a new chip ( SKATE, ELECTROCRAB, RIGHT45) or feature (comments, clicking on an existing chip to change it). I hadn’t created a new mission in many months until this week – I had a sort of mission block.
I’m through that now and being productive. Each mission requires lots of twiddling to get it right – the maze, the distribution of things in the maze, writing the intro text for the mission, creating a ChipWit to start the mission, allocating cycles, legal operators, and arguments.
I am still creating missions with a kludgey system starting with an Excel spreadsheet, saving the spreadsheet as text, and converting it into an XML-format mission with a utility program I wrote. Soon I’ll be able to use Mark Roth’s ChipWits Mission Editor. He’s working hard to get it ready for Oct 1. Can’t wait to see what missions players come up with.
The temp dropped from 77 to 47 today so the weather was wild. No rain but lots of wind. I took the dogs out canoeing and have sore shoulders from paddling into the wind.
The maples and birch away from the lake are about 50% into full Fall color. Surrounding the lake they’ve just started to turn color. Wonder why.
October is the prettiest month on Martel Lake. The oak, maple, and birch are psychadelic.
ChipWits Subpanel comments and 1st comments on Hel’s Bet
I got a real geeky ChipWits feature working – Subpanel comments. A player can now record comments for each Subpanel, like “Follow the wall and store each move on the Direction stack” and “Got a bug in this panel. Gets stuck in symmetrical rooms.”
Laid the foundation for deleting Subpanels.
Got some nice comments on Hel’s Bet from Denis Grundmann, my best friend from high school. This is the first time he’s read it.
“Putting down the bk is hard. Is that a part of the authorial art? To torture grown men to yearn to know what happens next? Then you’ve achieved, at least up to page 300, your goal.” “I’ve got to say you’ve got it down in this book, the plot is good and the theory let’s me pretend I’m in on it with the best of ‘em.”
I’ll take that as a thumbs up for the first 300 pages.
Second night of thunderstorms. Last night’s storm washed away the gravel I’d put in the ruts of the road up the hill to The Pad. Tonight’s storm will deepen the ruts. I need the exercise of hauling wheelbarrows of gravel up the hill.
I’m playing loud music – some Eels – to mask the sound of the storm because my 2 horrible dogs freak out at thunder.
New blog. Back to ChipWits.
I’ve moved blogs from doctordroog to this one. I moved all my entries from there to here and added my entries from the Clarion West Write-a-thon forum.
I finished my novel, Hel’s Bet and started circulating it to friends. Hel’s Bet has a number of meanings in the book. It is an upgraded Pascal’s Wager: “Work for the Singularity to increase your odds of living indefinitely. Don’t bother if you have a taste for dirt.”
The book turned out to be 139,000 words long – over 300 pages when printed. I always thought of it as a short book, but it grew. I’ll probably cut a couple thousand words from it as I paw over it before submitting it.
Once I have some feedback from friends that they were able to read it without their heads exploding I am going to look for readers in a Singularity Institute email list. If I can get a blurb or two from there I’ll use them in my cover letter to try to snare an agent.
I am back at work on ChipWits and it’s going very well. I expect to have my list of bugs fixed and features added sometime in early September. As always with me, dates are goals. I am going to have the game ready to submit to the Independent Game Festival, deadline Oct 1.
I’ll be blogging more frequently as I work on the game.
Still no nibbles on The Pad. I may be here this Winter. Very mixed feelings about that. I love this place, but want to be with the one I love.
Doug Sells Out!
The Clarion West Write-a-thon is going swell. I’ve hit my 500 word/day target every day since Sunday. I’m going to cross the 110k word line tomorrow for total Channel Zilch word count.
I’ve got an auction at eBay going for the Write-a-thon:
“Be an Astronaut or a Hacker in the Novel Channel Zilch”
http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=270136201579
I’ll let you name an astronaut or singularity hacker in the book if you win the auction. I’m proud (and a bit surprised) that it has a bid from someone I don’t know. A cheap way to have your name enshrined in high-class literature – bidding has started at $10.
Time to work on ChipWits.
Got ChipWits working on the Mac
Running under Adobe Apollo. Apollo is slick. It was a cinch to convert my Flex project to an Apollo project.
I gave one last shot at getting ChipWits running under MDM Zinc and it went off into a loop that was impossible for me to debug on the Mac. So I bit the bullet and converted it to an Apollo app.
Apollo isn’t ideal because it’s in alpha right now. The installation will be a hassle because a user will need to install Apollo first and then the ChipWits.air Apollo file. When Adobe rolls out the release of Apollo installation will be a one-step deal, but for now if a player doesn’t already run Apollo they’ll need to install it manually.
I got a Mac Powerbook off eBay a few weeks ago – a 1.5 ghz G4, which will be the low-end Mac we support. I picked this Mac as the target at the suggestion of Jay Bibby of Jayisgames.com . ChipWits runs a tad slower on the Mac than my PC of the same speed, which concerns me. I may hire a Flax/Flex animation guru to review my code to help me pump up the performance of the game. Flash isn’t the speediest game platform, for sure.
It felt good to see ChipWits running stably on a Mac again after 23 years.
Major New Build of ChipWits
The latest build of ChipWits is filled with LOTs o’ new features. I really pumped up the IBOL editor. The most important features are undo/redo and multi-chip drag and drop. Both features were requested in ’84 and are finally ready for your enjoyment. Since a lot of the player’s time is spent in the IBOL editor, making it slicker is a big win for the game.
I also changed the Subpanel system, letting players create as many named Subpanels as they need rather than just A-G.
I added the new Register operators to let ‘Wits do math and have addressable variables. The ChipWit can now drop a Counter object, which has a numeric value. I am going to create Register-based missions with a CounterLock – a door that opens when a Counter with the correct value is dropped onto it.
I also added the ability to add comments to chips. This will help a lot in making IBOL programs understandable.
I am going to wait a week to get some feedback before I hold a contest.
Until then I am going to work on the Mac version and start working on a full suite of tutorial missions.
Feels great!
New Build and ChipWits Contest
Feels great to post a new build and kickoff a new ChipWits contest. I haven’t been very productive the past few weeks, so I can sleep well tonight knowing I’ve hit another goal.
The next few weeks are mainly about building ChipWits missions, and I had some fun with ChipWits Caves tonight. The maze is 8 rooms in a row that spell out “ChipWits” with their walls. There are 2 CDs worth 2,000 points in 6 of the 8 rooms, and those CDs don’t respawn. They are each adjacent to “islands” of walls in the center of rooms. I’ll be interested to see if any playtester codes for that condition or if blind fumbling is the most efficient strategy.
It snowed today – wet and sticking to the trunks of trees. The whole world got whiter again. With the grey sky it’s like the contrast got turned way down.
I decided to do some fish watching this evening so I took my dogs and flashlights down to the lake. It was way too wavy and snowy to see a thing in the water. But it was fun walking with a flashlight through the snow.
So I still haven’t seen a single fish after a week of open water. I wonder when I’ll see the first Central Mudminnow swimming up Mudminnow Creek? I’ve got 4 of them in my aquariums and they are cool fish with a very commanding attitude. Their spawning run is like a miniature version of a salmon run. I spent hours last Spring watching these cool little fish fight their way upstream over dams made of twigs and leaves. The water is running in the creeks but the isn’t warm enough to trigger their spawning yet.
Good day of programming
I’ve had some problems programming recently, so I haven’t pushed ChipWits forward much. So it felt good tonight to have a productive session. It looks like I will meet my goal of having a new build of ChipWits tomorrow. And I will kick off a new contest.
I added high score keeping for each mission. So players can keep tweaking their ‘wits to break the high score and high series records.
The lake has been open for days – way too early in Spring for the thaw. The past 2 years ice went out on April 9th – this is almost 2 weeks earlier. A definite result of global warming, which scares me.
The next few decades will be stressful for the plants and animals in my woods and lake. It’ll be sad to see marginal species die off. I wonder if the pitcher plants will survive? Or the flying squirrels?
It’s been too blustery to take advantage of the extra week of canoing. Maybe tomorrow.
I just announced ChipWits in Some Geek Gamers Forum
This is a big night for me. ChipWits is ready for a fresh new round of playtesters and so I’ve asked for feedback on the Indie Gamer Forums, which is the best forum I’ve found for independent game programmers. Also Gamedev.net, which I am just beginning to explore and which looks quite good.
I expect to get some really useful crit out of these geek gamers. I’ve left posts asking for playtesters in a couple other programmer forums as well.
I had a lot of fun today working on a new type of mission – the mini mission. I decided it would be good to have a bunch of really small 1 or 2 rooms missions under 250 cycles. Once that thought popped into my head I began to get lots of ideas for actual missions. I knocked off 2 today and it was a blast.
A lot of the work we have before we ship the game is developing new missions – intro (tutorial) missions and game missions. This is really fun work and I’m looking forward to the next weeks.
I am keeping on an even keel – not stressing out – and that’s helping me be fresher in my creative efforts.
Usually the last month before shipping a game is hell, no fun at all. Concentrating on bugs and being very very conscious of time slipping by. Shipping ChipWits soon is crucial financially, but I am in a pretty good groove of productivity right now. I still get stressed, believe me, but I am enjoying myself, too.
It helps that this time ChipWits isn’t headed into a box on a shelf in a computer store. I’ll be able to keep improving it after our initial release, so I don’t feel that every second is do-or-die.
I spent yesterday in the Twin Cities at a friend’s house working on the Mac version. Made lots of progress, but I hit a snag when it started crashing randomly – a bug in MDM Zinc which is out of my control. This means I probably won’t have an installable Mac version ready for our initial release, bummer. Since I developed ChipWits on the original Mac it means a lot to me to get a Mac version running ASAP, but I can’t take the time to do it now.
I feel really good about the game. Within 2 weeks ChipWits will be released and raking in the dough. Count on it.
Buried in the Drifts
We are snowed in for the 2nd time this week. This time the snowplow guy refused to plow the last 1/3 mile of “road” to The Pad. He plowed only to my 2nd-nearest neighbor (the nearest neighbor is a Summer cabin – no one home) so I moved the car to their house in the middle of the storm – up the hill.
The hill is a challenge in Winter – it slopes North and often has got an icy underlayer – and I don’t blame the snowplow guy for giving up on it. He plowed partway down before giving up, though, so he left a 3-foot high plowed mound of snow right in the middle of the hill. I had to get the Subaru’s speed up and punch through the mound while climbing the hill. The snow is light and it made a satisfying snow explosion as I slammed through it.
So we’ve got a 1/3 mile walk to the car. Getting another load of firewood will have to wait. We’re doing pretty good on propane, but I’ve cut the thermostat to 60. If we’re snowed in long we’ll have to use our toboggan to haul wood to the cabin.
I had a great day of programming yesterday. I will probably drop a new build of ChipWits tonight. I fixed a bug in ELECTROCRABS – now they can actually damage your ChipWit – 20 E-CRAB ZAPs and you’re done.
We’ll finish the current contest and then next week let some of the geek game forums into the playtest.
Channel Zilch: The Book
I am posting my novel Channel Zilch. I’ll post new chapters regularly. Let me know what you think of it.
I’ll post a new build of ChipWits by Sunday. We’ll hold a new contest – ZAPing ELECTROCRABs in ChipWits Caves or Doom Rooms.
We’ll also open up our ChipWits forums.
And the Winner is…
Visit ChipWit.com’s Prestigious Hall of Pie.
That was fun.
Got a late entry in the 14 and under category and since it’s the only one I am running it right now to generate scores. Looks like it might kick the tin bootie of the oldsters. [Update: Eric Hsu’s tightly coded and elegant ChipWit takes the youth division and, yep, comes out on top over all. Congrats!]
Playtesting week and the Contest
We are uncovering some good bugs in ChipWits playtesting this week. So far none have been a mystery. I’ve been able to replicate and squash them in short order.
Also doing a little gameplay tweaking. I was nervous about the SAY chip because when I first implemented it the voice synthesizer would lock out all mouse and keyboard input while it had its SAY. So I set the cycle cost to 5 to ensure that the mission would end quickly. Now it’s much better behaved and Mark Roth suggested it be free to encourage its use. So be it. Along with that I made SING free. So ChipWits can talk and sing without sacrificing scoring.
Now that I know ChipWits behaves well on a number of people’s machines I am going to slowly spread the word. Not going to do a major PR campaign until we’ve run another week’s contest with a more challenging mission.
The next few days I’ll tweak baddie behavior and animation. Electrocrabs were idiots in the original game and I plan to raise their IQ’s a few points.
We will start selling the beta game tomorrow. I’ve got an account with the online distributer BMT Micro and just uploaded a batch of serial numbers. By the end of February I should know whether I have a future as an Indie Gamer.
First ChipWits.com Contest
We are kicking off our very first contest at chipwits.com with fabyoolous t-shirt prizes. Greedville is the mission and high average score for a series of 20 is the contest.
2 age brackets – 14 and under and Unlimited – so grownups have a chance to win something, too.
We will enroll the winners in ChipWit.com’s prestigious Hall of Pie. 1st week’s winner gets +10 Geek Cred points.
I notice traffic at this blog and chipwits.com has picked up quite a bit since I dropped the playable build. Cool.
Moving Forward
I haven’t published a game in 15 years. Haven’t programmed professionally in 9 1/2 years. For most of the past decade I was too disabled by my brainrot to work. I had a part-time aide.
My “brainrot” is a nasty blend of epilepsy, peripheral neuropathy, and quite probably chronic fatigue syndrome. It is an hourly challenge to work around my cognitive limitations to get ChipWits out the door. I am about 30% as productive a programmer as I was 10 years ago.
I have been really beating myself up about missed “deadlines” for dropping a playable build. In the past when I was shipping a game it made sense to make myself feel awful for schedule slips – back when timing for Christmas release was life-or-death for a game’s sales. While working on King of Chicago I can remembering seeing the first orange Autumn leaf and my knuckles going white with stress.
In talking to friends about how ChipWits is going I find myself saying We made progress today, or We got something done, or It keeps moving forward.
I have a great deal of hope that releasing ChipWits as an ongoing beta will be the ideal way for me to get back into the game industry. I will post known bugs and features to be added and knock them off at the pace I can accomplish.
Stressing about deadlines was keeping me from enjoying rebuilding ChipWit. I am getting better at feeling good about moving forward.
Walden 3.0 
Get OFF MY LAWN!