David Stark / Zarkonnen

If you've been following my Twitter, you may have seen a series of increasingly exasperated tweets about my computer. Basically, for work reasons, I had to upgrade my Mac to Mavericks, the newest OS X version. Unfortunately, Mavericks causes my machine to freeze irretrievably after a few days, and only a complete reinstall temporarily fixes the problem.

It's just occurred to me that to reduce some of the potential issues with the Badness score, the algorithm could take into account how far apart in time connections are.

On the advice of Twitter, I have finally bought and played Don't Starve. I like it a lot. Here's how it fits into my earlier thoughts about survival games:

I've been participating in an increasing number of game jams, currently the Cyberpunk Jam, and am really enjoying myself. Restrictions breed creativity: being restricted in topic and time lets me try out different things. And the limited nature of game jams makes them a nice way of doing something a bit different before returning to the project at hand.

So here's a quick idea for a game jam format that popped into my head the other day.

Once you have survived in a survival game, what do you do? You have found or made clothing, shelter, a steady source of food, means to defend yourself and heal yourself. You have mapped the dangers of your environment and can defeat or avoid enemies. What comes next?

There are two major rules of optimization: first, only optimize when you have to. And second, measure before optimizing. If you try to be clever and write fast code before you know which code is actually causing performance issues, you are liable to spend a lot of time optimizing code that is not the bottleneck.

Selenium Builder 2.2 includes some very basic support for data-driven testing, but now I need your input on how to complete it.

Builder is a tool for recording and editing Selenium tests that I write and maintain in the service of Sauce Labs.

Axolotls are essentially salamanders that have refused to grow up. Salamanders, being amphibians, start their life as aquatic larvae, but eventually metamorphose into at least partially land-dwelling lizard-like animals. Axolotls are the exception, spending their whole life in their larval form, becoming sexually mature without metamorphosing.

Last weekend, I participated in my first Global Game Jam, together with @LK_Ink and @xeophin. Together, we built ArtCritic, a simple and snarky game where you visit a series of art openings and try to impress the other visitors despite your total lack of knowledge. Playable unity game within.

You know about Peak Oil - the point in history where we extract the most amount of oil out of the ground. After peak oil, oil doesn't disappear, but it does become scarcer and more expensive. Long before peak oil, a civilization may encounter Peak Wood.

A major feature of academic publishing these days is the "impact factor" - the average number of times a publication's papers have been cited somewhere else. Impact factors get a lot of attention, and it's sometimes no longer enough to just publish something. To really be seen as successful, you have to publish in a high-factor journal. I guess people like scores, and will gamify anything if you let them.

Apart from individual airship fights, there is also a strategic game where you seek to unify a number of cities under your rule. Each city gives you more income and some kind of bonus: new technology like gatling guns, or advantages like reduced steel armour cost.

You know the "Risks" section Kickstarter introduced a while ago in an attempt to get people to disclose things like "we actually have no idea how to do this" or "product relies on major quantum mechanics breakthrough"? The one that everyone fills in with bland stuff about how there are totally no risks and everything's under control?

Well, this isn't a kickstarter, and I am not fond of the "if you have nothing nice to say, say nothing at all" culture, so here's an actual risk assessment for Airships.

I always thought it'd be cool to be able to create your own coat of arms in a game. With Airships, this makes a fair amount of sense, as you play as one potential empire in a late-19th-century-esque setting.