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Site News

Site News #4: Quiet Month

One could definitely say that there is no point in saying anything if there is nothing to be said. However, I personally don’t like silence from sites and services that I frequent, especially the smaller ones that are prone to dying easily. So in a case like this, I’d rather make a, “yes, we’re still alive” post than keep you guessing. Reading material, if nothing else.

So like the title says, this has been a quiet month. Not much has happened with the site apart from a little WordPress update. I am still definitely

Categories
Site News

Site News #3: Time to Clone

Happy Halloween everyone!

This month’s announcement is a little less exciting than last. Not much has changed lately, except for one thing.

Electric’s source code is now properly obtainable through our own Git implementation found at http://creamery.cheesewatergames.tk/rdmarsee/Electric.git
To download the code, you can either follow that link and click the little download button to get everything in your favorite compressed archive format, or use a git client on your desktop

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Site News

Site News #2: SSL and Creamery

Hello again, everyone.

As you may know, this site has suffered from the lack of SSL encryption since the first day it was online. In those early days, I didn’t really know or understand the importance of encryption in general. As I gained more and more experience, it became disturbingly apparent that encrypted connections were imperative to not only my own security, but the security of all our subscribers.

However, I still hadn’t the motivation to both generate a key and have it signed (although I did generate an unsigned one for my storage use). Finally,

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Site News

Site Outage 8/30/16-8/31/16 && Site News #1

Hey, Daniel here. I apologize for yesterday’s outage. Obviously I should have warned here ahead of time, but it was intended to be a quick patch and upgrade, but it quickly became much more of a nightmare than that. Luckily, I had the site backed up but it wasn’t easy restoring original functionality.

We have some additional services running in the background that are used internally. One of them was falling out of maintenance, but upgrading that required an upgrade to the web server software. While I was well aware of the config changes I would need going ahead, something unexpected happened

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Social

Experience Point 1/3: The Context of Violence

Here we are with the age-old discussion of violence in video games.  The problem is that violent video games may or may not cause violent behaviors; this Crash Course Games episode describes it well in a nutshell.  And I am here to say that maybe we have been looking at the problem incorrectly.

In one corner, we have many people, especially parents understandably, who believe that violence in video games influences people to enact violence in real life.  They reason that

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Difficulty Uncategorized

Level Up: Difficulty

This will be the title for these wrap-up sections until I end up with legal trouble from someone else’s publication called “Level Up.”  Well, anyway, these passed few weeks have been a rough ride, so let’s get started.

Difficulty Does Not Imply Quality

This article was the sole reason I wanted to do this subject.  I have no problem with knocking off some points from a game

Categories
Difficulty

Experience Point 3/3: Difficulty Curves and Spikes

I decided to write this one in light of the recent Pokemon Go’s difficulty slope beginning at level 20.  Everybody has a fairly common conception of the ideal difficulty slope which, naturally, looks like y=e^x for 0<x<1 on a graph (pun totally intended).  But as we all know, difficulty curves don’t always actually happen that way.  As we don’t all know, there are sometimes good reasons, or at least understandable reasons, for this.  Oh, and if the math joke didn’t tip you off, I’ve been watching way too much Numberphile lately, so things are going to get mathy.e_x graph

All graphs were made in Desmos.

Back in the bad old days of the arcades, many games would begin easy,

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Difficulty

Experience Point 2/3: Artificial Difficulty, What We All Know and Hate

This article is a bit shorter than usual for three reasons:

  1. Rather than actually making an argument (other than the obvious one: Don’t do artificial difficulty, kids!  Artificial difficulty is not cool!), I’m mostly providing a definition.  This is informative, not persuasive.
  2. This is practically an addendum to last week’s article, Difficulty Does Not Imply Quality.
  3. Currently, I write these on the day that they’re published, and I’m tired of them always going up at 11:59:59.999 p.m. every time.  Sometime in the future, I will probably start writing these the day before, like I should be doing now.

So, what is artificial difficulty?  Sometimes, a certain mechanic will be flawed in a certain way:

Categories
Difficulty

Experience Point 1/3: Difficulty Does Not Imply Quality

There is one fallacy that I tend to hear once in a while. It goes something along the lines of “It’s not that bad; it’s actually pretty difficult.”  The problem that we have here is that this argument assumes that a game’s difficulty is always proportional to fun (including fear or rage-inducing, for horror or rage games, respectively), and that the relationship is causal (not casual) where difficulty always increases fun.  That isn’t always true. 

Categories
Ambition

Rando Follow-Up: Ambition

To begin with, this subject overall went (relatively) quite a bit better than education did, despite its somewhat misleading title.  For recap, the subject was about when young people want to become game makers.

Rando Post No. 4: You Can Ce Whatever You Want to Be*

I forgot to mention how there are reasons other than parents implying otherwise that this isn’t true.  For instance, I used to want to be a fighter pilot, thanks to Ace Combat 5.