Particularly Wavy Update Three

hey all,

Still hard at work on Particularly Wavy. I now have ten puzzles up and running, and have the main mechanics of the game set. I hope to be adding some music from one of my coworkers in the future.

Banished Game Analysis

Banished Analysis

David Hunter

September 18, 2017

1 Overview

Banished is a city-building strategy survival game developed by Shining Rock Software and released in February, 2014.

2 Formal Elements

2.1 Players

Banished is a strictly single-player game, with the player taking control of a group of outcasts in the wilderness. It is played from a top-down three-quarters perspective, with the player indicating the number of citizens which should work in each profession and designating which buildings to construct, and which resources to collect. The citizens are randomly assigned to these jobs, and will actually change to different ones on the fly. Especially in the early stages of the game, when the population is small, great care is required to manage and place the citizens, how resources are used, etc.

2.2 Objectives

The objective is to build the city as large as you can, using any strategy that the player hits upon.

2.3 Rules

2.3.1 Citizens

Unlike many strategy games, the player never issues commands directly to citizens. Rather, if the player wants citizens to chop down trees, the player will use a menu tool to select the area from which they desire trees to be removed, and if the citizens have nothing else to do, they will begin chopping them down. For specific jobs, it works in a similar way: for farming, the player must activate the farms they want to cultivate, use the menu to set the number of farmers for each farm, and make sure that they have assigned the correct number of citizens to the ”Farmer” category. The games takes care of which citizens work at which farm by itself.

All citizens require food, clothing, tools, and shelter. Without food, they slowly starve and die. Without clothing, citizens will become cooler and they are more likely to die during the winter. Tools help citizens do their work, whether that is chopping trees, farming, mining, making clothes, or what have you. Without tools, they will continue to work, but at a much reduced output. Shelter, such as stone or wooden homes, or boarding houses, give citizens a place to stay warm, sleep, store food, and conceive children. Without a home of their own, young people will not get married and will not have children of their own, which greatly reduces the rate of expansion of our town. Like in real life, only a younger woman (less than 50) is capable of producing babies.

The player must further worry about the health and happiness of their citizens. Positive events like the birth of a child or going to markets, taverns, cemeteries, or chapels increase happiness, while family deaths and mines and quarries decrease the happiness of those that live near by. Happy citizens get more work done. Additionally, citizens will sometimes become sick, damaging their health and possibly infecting others, but this can be prevented by building a hospital and keeping the town stocked with medicines.

All citizens start out uneducated, but when children reach a certain age they can attend a school (should the player have built one). After graduating, they are educated and will be much more productive at whatever job they take.

Citizens only have one job at a time, although it seems like they switch jobs somewhat randomly.

2.3.2 Resources

Besides citizens, resources make up one of the other pillars of Banished’s gameplay. Resources are primarily gathered from the environment, and like those in real life, come in renewable and non-renewable varieties. Iron and stone are removed from visible deposits and outcroppings, and do not return once removed. Trees, berries, herbs, mushrooms, roots, and onions are gathered from forests, and slowly regrow given enough time.

Fish and animals can be fished and hunted, provided the player has built the correct buildings for that, and close to 30 different crops and three different types of domesticated animals can be grown or raised. Although usually only one or two crops are available to the player at the beginning, the rest can be acquired through trade.

These resources are critical for different parts of your village. As noted before, all your citizens need food, so getting food in some way is necessary. But they also need homes, and places to store the food, for which wood and iron must be gathered. Wood, iron and stone are necessary in different ratios for almost every building, from houses, chapels, woodcutter lodges, blacksmiths, and tailors to boarding houses, hospitals, and schools.

Many of these resources can be converted into other resources at appropriate buildings. Iron and wood are converted into iron tools, but if the player has coal as well, steel tools, which last longer, can be made instead. Any fruit can be turned into ale which increases the town’s happiness, provided the player has taverns. Wool gathered from sheep, and leather gathered from deer and cows can be turned into coats to keep your citizens warm. Wooden logs must be chopped into firewood for your citizens to use in warming their homes.

2.3.3 Buildings

Buildings provide the focus for many of the resource conversions described above. They also function as resource gathering or generating sites in the case of farms, orchards, mines, quarries, and several others. Some buildings will almost never be used. Wells are only used in the case of a fire, and hospitals are only used when some of your citizens are sick, for example.

2.4 Procedures

There are several procedures that the player will engage in during play.

1. Manage birthrates: The player can indirectly control birthrates by limiting or increasing the number of houses.
2. Balance food/resource collection: especially during the early game, the player will not have enough citizens to farm and to collect stone, iron, and wood. During the winter, the player may change the farmers to laborers, since the farmers are not gathering food during the winter anyway.
3. Expand: As population increases, more workers will become available. The player must decide how to delegate jobs to them. More people obviously require more food, but only some of the new workers need be assigned to food. Others can be assigned to make new homes, new resource collection buildings, or the player can assign them to work at existing resource collection sites to increase the rate of resource collection.

2.5 Resources

2.5.1 Abstract

• Citizen Health: Most citizens will keep high health as long as they have enough food, warm shelter, and clothes.
• Citizen Age: This cannot be controlled by the player, but all citizen’s age as time goes by. Most citizens will survive until around 70 or 80.
• Citizen Education: Provided there are enough seats available in your schools, all children of the appropriate age will receive an education.
• Citizen Happiness: As discussed before, many events influence the over all happiness of the town.

2.5.2 Physical

• Food: Food comes in many forms in Banished. The particular form does not seem to matter for the citizens.
• Buildings: The player designates which buildings to construct, but storms and fires can damage or destroy them.
• Tools: Citizens need tools to perform their quick in a timely manner, but they break over time and must be replaced.
• Materials: Besides food, wood, iron, coal, leather, and cool are also needed for many actions.
• Animals: Chickens, cows, and sheep provide food and clothing materials when they are slaughtered.

2.6 Conflicts

2.6.1 Materials

The same materials are required for many different actions, which creates conflict as often the player does not have enough of the material to simply do both at the same time. For example, the player may want to build a new home to expand their territory, but not have enough wood to do that and keep the town supplied with firewood.

2.6.2 Gathering versus Other

Certain activities can only happen in the woods, like collecting logs, herbs, and hunting. The player will need to position these away from the village to maximize their effectiveness, but as the village expands, these areas may be overtaken. If the player builds structures in the woods, that reduces the area from which the player may gather the above resources.

2.7 Boundaries

2.7.1 Map

The maps have specific sizes and terrain types. The player may not build on mountainous terrain, except for mines which must border mountains and may not build on water, except for trading posts, fishing docks, and bridges, which also must border water.

2.7.2 NPCs

There is no communication possible to the citizens in the villages besides assigning them to different jobs.

2.8 Outcomes

The game never really ends. The player can continue playing for as long or as short as they may wish. Even when the entire population dies, you can still try to issue orders and gather resources, and construct buildings, although naturally there will be no one to do these things.

3 Dynamic Elements

Banished is a game all about dynamics. Small changes can make a huge difference over time in Banished. I’ve had a prosperous, thriving village of over 400 suddenly collapse to less than 200 due to not prioritizing coal collection. This lack of coal in turn prevented my blacksmiths from making enough steel tools, which delayed everyone’s work and in particular prevented my 166 farmers from gathering enough food. In one year more than 200 of my villagers had died of starvation due to that one oversight.

As another example, wells are costly to build and are only used in the event of a building catching fire. However, proper placement of wells can be critical when a fire does break out. Without quick access to water, the player could easily lose five or more buildings, which will then require demolition and reconstruction, using up resources that could have been used for other things, as well as halting an production that was taking place in the burnt out buildings.

3.1 Patterns

This section focuses on game patterns as discussed by Ernest Adams and Joris Dormans in Game Mechanics: Advanced Game Design.

3.1.1 Slow Cycle

Banished has a yearly cycle of four seasons. The temperature changes with the season, and all growing and farming activity stops during the winter. The player might opt for creating many farms in order to stockpile enough food to last through the winter and the growing season, or the player may try to rely on hunting, fishing, and gathering, which take place throughout the year. A combination of both strategies is also possible, but requires enough surplus population to assign workers to both farms and the other food gathering buildings.

There is another slow cycle in the life and death of the village’s citizens. The average citizen lives about 80 years, barring accidents and illnesses. From age 10 to 17 is school age, after which they become laborers until they die.

3.1.2 Build an Engine

Banished, like many strategy games, features the build an engine pattern. Constructing more homes will allow the village’s population to increase more rapidly, but will also increase the required amounts of firewood and food to warm and feed those extra people. In time, the children will grow up and increase one’s work force, but for 17 years they are an investment in the future and burden on one’s economy. How the village develops depends on the placement of those laborers. Placing all of them in food production guarantees enough food for the foreseeable future, but even farmers need firewood and tools. At certain points, some of the workers must be placed in positions such as miners, stonecutters, tailors, blacksmiths, and others. If the player desires to be mostly independent, a very careful balance must be struck among all those positions. If the player instead specializes production to some degree, the player can take advantage of trade to prevent the neglected professions from damaging the health and stability of the village.

4 Dramatic Elements

There are few dramatic elements in the traditional sense. The back story is that the group of settlers which the player starts out with are exiles from another town, and the player must help them establish a new town to live in.

4.1 Characters

There are basically no characters. The NPCs all have random names, and zero dialog.

4.2 Story

The drama comes from the sudden turns of events and the way in which the player consciously or unconsciously turns those events into a narrative. In this sense, there are almost infinitely many stories, but they will all bear a familial resemblance.

5 Conclusion

Banished is not a game for everyone, but its detailed exploration of early farming civilizations is refreshing in a genre that cannot seem to exist without combat.

5.1 Potent Elements

Banished provides hours of fun and enjoyment for the player willing to learn its systems, and will sometimes frustrate even the most careful of players by forcing them to pay attention to relative production rates of materials in order to prevent one catastrophe or another.

5.2 Areas for Improvement

Banished has a few visual bugs and even on powerful machines sometimes hiccups during some of its update cycles.

Particularly Wavy Update 2

hey all,

Here is a second video showing the progress on Particularly Wavy. I have completely redone the system of tracking light reflections and refractions. I did a whole bunch of google searches, and I discovered that many ray tracing programs use something called ray trees.



Now, as a linguist (and if there are any out there, please forgive the mistakes in the VP of this tree), I'm used to using tree structures like the one below, so it was kinda cool to get to use tree structures to make my light puzzle elements work. The way ray trees work is you have a root ray, and then you calculate any intersections for that ray. If it intersects anything, you decide what to do based on the object it intersected. If the object is reflective or refractive, then you create children rays and perform more intersection calculations on those children rays, and so on. Each frame, you simply traverse the tree from root through each of its children, and each of their children, etc, updating intersection values as you. If anything has changed, then you can simply prune that subtree, and recalculate intersections and create new children as necessary.

Particularly Wavy

Hey all,

Above you can find a video showing a prototype puzzle game that is based around the physics of light.

I've been working on it for about 3 weeks now, and this is about the best I've got it looking so far. Considering that every video game has some kind of light simulation component in it, it was extremely difficult to model the physical reactions that I wanted. As you can see from the video, there are still some issues with it, particularly when it comes to refractions and secondary reflections.

Watch Dogs 2 Analysis

Watch Dogs 2 Analysis

David Hunter

August 25, 2017

1 Overview

Watch Dogs 2 is a third-person open world action shooter with RPG elements. It was developed by Ubisoft Montreal and published by Ubisoft in November, 2016.

2 Formal Elements

2.1 Players

The player primarily takes control of a hacker called Marcus Holloway as he attempts to bring the Blume corporation to justice for stealing their San Francisco customers’ private data and using it in various nefarious ways. Near the end of the story, the player will briefly take control of supporting characters. Marcus and the other characters are all controlled from the traditional third-person perspective, as are the vehicles which the player may drive.

Although the main missions are all single player oriented, it is possible to travel around the city with other players in seamless multiplayer. During these times, they may either compete or cooperate in a few different modes.

2.2 Objectives

In the tutorial level, Marcus joins a hacktivist group called DedSec, whose goal is to reveal the truth about Blume’s ctOS and other corporations who are taking advantage of their consumers and sometimes actively harming them. To do this, they need to accumulate enough followers who download the DedSec app onto their mobile devices. These followers contribute computing power and memory which DedSec makes use of.

In order to increase the number of followers, Marcus will complete 14 main missions which usually involve talking to people about the target company, going to that target company and hacking into their building to steal information, and then releasing a closing video that reveals to the public what the company has been keeping secret from them.

2.3 Rules

Like many open world games, Watch Dogs 2 features somewhat complicated rules.

On player death, they will be respawned at the nearest autosave location, which is usually just outside the area where they died or just before the mission stage they died on. Unlike Grand Theft Auto V, where the player spawns outside the nearest hospital having lost a good chunk of cash, there is no in game explanation for the respawn. The ctOS which controls traffic lights, steam vents, circuit breakers, gas mains, traffic barriers, and several cargo moving machines (including cranes) can also be hacked and controlled to blow up, stun enemies, block their path, or move objects or the player to places normally unreachable.

Like the Grand Theft Auto series, there is a notoriety system which increases as the player performs more mayhem and killing without hiding from the authorities.

2.3.1 Gear

The player may carry two weapons plus the stun gun, the RC jumper, drone, and explosive and electroshock devices. Only 360 bullets and (depending on upgrades) 2-5 explosive or electroshock devices may be carried, while the stun gun has infinite ammo. The RC jumper car and drone may be used for surveillance, hacking, reaching places the player cannot travel to or cannot travel to safely/easily.

2.3.2 NPC Interactions

Most NPCs are there for filler. Almost any NPC in the game, and every vehicle may be hacked. Hacking an NPC allows the player to recharge their botnets (a kind of stamina, magika, or energy) which the player uses for hacking, but also gives the player access to some personal information, and allows the player to distract them, steal some data or money, or a few other options.

2.3.3 Stats and Leveling

The leveling system uses the number of followers of the DedSec app as other games use XP. Only by completing quests and activities can you increase the number of followers. Each level up occurs at a scale somewhat similar to the Dark Souls progression and awards the player with increasing numbers of points to invest in seven different skill trees. Each base skill costs 2 points, and increases in cost by two at every branching (the next two cost 4, the next 6, the final ones cost 8).

2.3.4 Quests

There are several different side quest types, but most of them devolve to going somewhere, and hacking something. The only quest that I became emotionally invested in was a short quest that I stumbled onto which involves hacking into ctOS box and discovering a recently laid off man attempting to commit suicide in his garage. The player must hack the garage door, garage fan, the man’s phone, and the car horn in order to alert a neighbor to come and rescue him.

Although multiple quests may be ”active” at the same time, nearly all of them are triggered by going to the next stage marker and activating it, which prevents the player from going from the middle of one quest’s stage to another quest.

2.3.5 Combat

The player may engage almost any NPC in combat. This could involve tapping the melee button to knock them out, shooting them with a stun gun, or using one of the many different rifles, pistols, shotguns, or grenade launchers. The environment can also be used to eliminate NPCs, whether enemy or civilian, by hacking circuit breakers, gas mains, and other hackable objects. If the player is witnessed attacking an NPC, the witnesses will notify the relevant authorities, which may be other gang members, the police, or the local security force. Otherwise, if an NPC comes across the body, they will become alerted and alert other nearby NPCs

2.4 Procedures

2.4.1 Talking to an NPC

Marcus will often have to meet an NPC and talk to them to receive information or other assistance for a quest, or just to progress the story. Sometimes, this will additionally involve navigating or climbing to reach a difficult location.

2.4.2 Hack Something

For a game about hacking, the hacking is fairly one button, as with many Ubisoft takes on activities. When they released Assassin’s Creed, it featured one button platforming without the player needing to worry about timing or skill. The combat in that game series is also mostly one button. The Far Cry series features one button crafting. Anyway.

There is a hacking minigame, which like so many hacking minigames is a Pipe Dream-like affair. While it can be interesting, there is so little variety to this and the game makes use of it so much, that it soon becomes repetitive.

2.4.3 Searching an Area & Scavenging

The player will sometimes be tasked with exploring an area to find particular parts, NPCs to hack, or computer terminals to hack.

2.4.4 Selling Loot

As the player explores the city of San Francisco, they will pick up fitness bands, computers, phones, and other expensive gadgetry which can be sold at pawnshops for money.

2.4.5 Leveling Up

When a set number of followers has been earned, the player can level up. The level system is complicated by the fact that certain higher rank skills can only be unlocked after the player has performed a specific hacking task in the world to collect the data or schematic needed for that skill.

2.4.6 Managing Health Conditions

Marcus has regenerating health, so the player need only stay in cover for a certain amount of time to get back to full health.

If any NPCs are nearby the player may hack them to recharge their botnet points, which can then be used to perform other hacking actions.

2.5 Resources

2.5.1 Tangible Resources

1. Ammo: Each weapon, excepting the stun gun, has limited ammo. This can be bought from pawn shops, or picked up from fallen enemies.
2. RC Jumper: Can jump, move through air ducts, and small places that Marcus cannot reach. Limited in range. If destroyed, it will respawn after a cooldown.
3. Drone: Can reach areas which Marcus and the RC Jumper cannot, but it cannot be used for nodes which must be physically hacked. Limited in range. If destroyed, it will respawn after a cooldown.
4. Weapons: Includes pistols, shotguns, combat rifles, submachine gunes, sniper rifles, and grenade launchers.
5. Vehicles: Come in many different varieties, from boats, to cars, to motorcycles.

2.5.2 Intangible Resources

1. Health: If health drops to zero, the player dies.
2. Botnet: Watch Dogs 2 equivalent of stamina or magic.
3. Money: Can be used to buy cars, weapons, or clothes.
4. Followers: Watch Dogs 2 equivalent of XP.
5. Research Points: Allow the player to research a skill.
6. Skills: Grant the player new abilities, like crashing the ctOS locally, increasing botnet number, or reducing the botnet cost of using abilities.

2.6 Conflicts

2.6.1 NPCs

There are several different factions in the San Francisco of Watch Dogs 2. These factions are mostly gangs, but also include some private security forces. These can actually be brought into conflict with each other temporarily through player hacking, but there is no long term effect to this.

2.6.2 Stealth versus Guns-blazing

NPCs are quite perceptive in Watch Dogs 2 compared to other games, which makes the stealth gameplay even more challenging. Since alerted NPCs can also call for reinforcements (even, ridiculously, during a mission which takes place on a boat in the middle of the ocean), this makes a huge difference for gameplay. If the player uses camera, the RC Jumper, and drone to scout the area, mark enemies, and lay booby traps, then proceeds to use silenced weapons and melee attacks to take out the rest of the enemies, the mission will feel a lot different than if the player puts an explosive device on a car, hacks that to enter the enemy’s hideout, then triggers the bomb, proceeding to use combat rifles and grenade launchers to take out enemies. Both approaches are possible, and it is even likely that the player will start stealthy then be spotted and have to go loud at some point. Once the player has gone loud, it can be difficult if not impossible to deescalate the situation.

2.6.3 Lethal versus Non-lethal

There are several lethal and non-lethal ways of taking out enemies in an area. In terms of gameplay, it usually makes more sense to just kill your enemies, as knocked out enemies tend to come to after a few minutes, which can make escaping the area very difficult.

2.7 Boundaries

2.7.1 Map

Watch Dogs 2 recreates a smaller scale version of the San Francisco Bay area, including downtown San Francisco, Marin, Oakland, Silicon Valley, and the island of Alcatraz. The player cannot travel beyond these borders.

2.7.2 Leveling

There appears to be a max level of 23, which allows the player to unlock every skill in the game.

2.8 Outcomes

There is only one outcome: the player has led Marcus and DedSec to victory over Blume.

3 Dynamic Elements

3.1 Weather & Day/Night Cycle

Watch Dogs 2 features a day/night cycle in addition to dynamically generated weather. For the most part, these have no affect on gameplay, except for night making sneaking somewhat easier.

3.2 Notoriety

As Marcus performs violent acts in front of witnesses, Watch Dogs 2 will increase his notoriety rating. If he continues to do so, the rating will continue increasing, with more police, and stronger units aggressively chasing the player until Marcus is killed or the player manages to escape and hide, resetting the notoriety level.

3.3 Patterns

This section focuses on game patterns as discussed by Ernest Adams and Joris Dormans in Game Mechanics: Advanced Game Design.

3.3.1 Playing Style Reinforcement

The leveling system also contains the playing style reinforcement pattern. As the player plays in a certain way (stealthy, or guns-blazing for instance), they will receive Followers, which can be used to purchase skills. These skills, if wisely chosen, will allow the player to perform more of the actions which gave them Followers in the first place.

3.3.2 Dynamic Friction

Watch Dogs 2 contains many examples of the dynamic friction pattern. Each level up requires greater and greater numbers of Followers, requires more actions and missions to be completed in order to reach the next level.

As the player purchases upgrades, they become more and more expensive in each skill tree.

3.3.3 Stopping Mechanism

The player has a limited amount of health and of botnets, both of which recharge over time. This recharge timer is in effect a stopping mechanism, preventing the player from taking more actions which were causing the drain on the resource (stopping the player from hacking until the botnets have recharged, or stopping the player from moving out of cover until health has recharged).

4 Dramatic Elements

Like many Ubisoft games, Watch Dogs 2 features a strong story.

4.1 Characters

The main character is Marcus Holloway (codename Retr0), a young hacktivist who wishes to remove a crime for which he was framed from his account on the San Francisco ctOS servers. Following his success, his is recruited into a hacktivist group called DedSec, which has characters like the mechanical genius but painfully shy Wrench, the hacker Josh who probably suffers from Asperger Syndrome, the socially active Sitara, and the ”leader,” Horatio. Later on, they are joined by Ray, a former member of Blume who became disillusioned by the company and its aims.

The only other characters which are developed to any degree are movie star and probable Tom Cruise stand-in Jake Slater, and the CEOs of several Silicon Valley company stand-ins (!nVite for FaceBook, nudle for Google, ScoutX for Instagram, and Galilei for SpaceX). Most of these CEOs are connected to Dusan Nemec, the CTO for Blume Corporation. Much like the CEO of hooli, Gavin Belsin, from HBO’s Silicon Valley, he practices yoga, is arrogant, and breaks the law regularly to get an edge over his competition.

4.2 Story

The story follows Marcus as he attempts to gather enough followers to take out Blume. He and DedSec go about this by hacking companies which they discover either have public or hidden agreements with Blume. As they hack more companies, they discover just how far and how pernicious the connections go. A religious organization which seems to spoof Scientology blackmails its members and its enemies using data bought from Blume, for example, or a Senator has made an agreement to pass certain legislation in return for help from !nVite (the FaceBook stand-in) to get him reelected. As the stakes escalate, one of their members is abducted and killed, and the FBI is alerted to their activities by Dusan.

Eventually, Marcus and DedSec are able to gain access to the servers at Blume’s headquarters and get the information about all these deals that Dusan has made with other companies, the US government, and China, and they release a final video showing how he has betrayed his consumers’ trust.

4.3 Attitude

The attitudes and characterization of the city, its neighborhoods, and its characters is so joyfully ridiculous that although at first the player will be groaning at how lame and far-fetched everything is, soon the player will become infected by it.

5 Conclusion

Watch Dogs 2 is in many ways a success. Its protagonist and his motivations are relatable, and most aspects of the gameplay are fun and enjoyable. The characters are well-acted and memorable. There is a large gap between the themes and the gameplay, however. The player’s ability to steal cars anywhere and to kill completely innocent civilians creates a disconnect between the character Marcus and the actions the player performs. The game world also fails to react to this. For every in-game news release praising DedSec’s actions, there will be zero about the hit and run you got into in which three innocent people were killed, or the shoot-out started because you entered a restricted zone to pick up a collectible. DedSec harps and harps on the the responsibility of those with power, yet the other members will never harp on Marcus after he kills everyone in a building instead of hacking in and getting out without anyone being the wiser. Marcus is just a hacker, not some kind of emotionally hardened killer, so it makes no sense for him to be allowed to kill so indiscriminately.

For a game about hacking and the use of information, the player is actually given zero choice about how to use the information Marcus acquires through hacking. Granted, Ubisoft has a story they want the player to experience, but so did CD Project Red when they made all the The Witcher games, and all those games allow the player to influence the story through their actions. Although the design of the world and its basic interactions has been set up to promote player agency, the heavily scripted story removes any feeling that our actions are having an influence on what happens.

Desert Planet

Just a few small previews of what I hope to add to Desert Planet soon. I'm also working on adding step detection, so that if the player walks on the sand in a repeating rhythm, the sandworms will be attracted to it.

Now It's Personal

hey all,

I must apologize for missing last week's post. I was convinced to take a two day hike to Hotaka-dake, one of the highest mountains in Japan, but...well, long story short, during the hike I pulled my groin and got rained on for four hours, and promptly caught a cold. Rather than complete the hike, I decided to turn around and go home. Anyway, I've had an ice pack on my thigh and/or knee, and a box of tissues and a bag of throat lozenges next to me since last.

The other wonderful news is that because of that trip, I missed the deadline for one of the game jams I was participating in.

Work on that game, which I call Particularly Wavey, Desert Planet, and another game I was making for a Leadership game jam continues, but this game jam seems to have disappeared from itch.io.