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seagaia

238 karma · joined May 28, 2011

Game developer - current project is www.anodynegame.com
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seagaia··on I open-sourced Even the Ocean
Thanks for sharing this! This is the programmer/co-developer Melos (posting from my ancient college-era HN account...)

As other comments point out, yeah this is technically NOT Open Source, but other terms don't communicate the intent as quickly at a glance (I would argue the general understanding of the term would include Even the Ocean/Anodyne's repositories)... and as someone mentions, it's basically a "come on, we're two people, don't screw us" License that's otherwise pretty generous, and the license does distinguish the repos from Open Source (tm).

seagaia··on Ouya Android console up for pre-order on Amazon
Hey I made that game! My friend posted this link. cool. glad you like it.

(if anyone wants to try it, there's a demo at that website!)

seagaia··on Functional C Programming (Or, why God, why?)
Can you make this into a ruby gem?
seagaia··on Ask HN: FizzBuzz for mathematicians ...
Perhaps it shouldn't be solving one problem, but maybe explaining a base concept in a field most mathematicians know, and how it's important - since there's no one right answer, it would also show their experience and so forth - most people probably know what they are, but the more experienced will be able to talk for quite a while. iono, Cauchy sequences, maybe. or groups
seagaia··on How much will your first indie game make?
I know you're not - I just wanted to point it out for the audience who isn't as familiar with the Flash game market.
seagaia··on How much will your first indie game make?
Thank you for bringing this up. I would still draw the "indie" label at a small dev team, but those games you mentioned - at least Burrito Bison - while fun, and it has some interesting bells and whistles but at the end of the day isn't particularly meaningful - just press a button and sit back, maybe have a few interactions with it in-game, buy a few things, wash and repeat. They're still "indie", but perhaps in a whole different level of games, compared to Super Meat Boy or Braid...there is no way the intention wasn't to make something addictive that would monetize well. But, it is the Flash game market and to make a living off of that, that's what you have to do, I suppose.

Thanks for reminding me why I even do game development. Occasionally I get too wrapped up in marketing and the like...trying to think how I'll make any money off of it, and while important, what's the most important is the actual game itself (who would've thought?). Although to reiterate, I do understand why Flash games tend to usually be different in terms of intention - it's hard to deviate a lot from the formula and still manage to have food on your plate.

To add to stats, my first game sold for less than a thousand :P

seagaia··on Minecraft Physics
Fascinating, thanks! Also useful in general for me!
seagaia··on Coding tricks of game developers
I think #15 - attacking a bug directly instead of going about it with patches (although possibly there could be a fine line between "direct' and using patches) can be especially relevant for anyone (even outside of games).

The CRC one, #16, was cute.

seagaia··on Ask HN: I want to be a game developer. What should I do?
I have no idea how important thorough knowledge of game design is at a bigger company where you'd likely be working on something small. For smaller experience with games there's a bunch of frameworks - Flixel, Flashpunk, Unity, etc...that might be a start?

I'm interested in this question as well I suppose, so upvoted.

seagaia··on Minecraft Physics
Anyone done this for other popular games? could be interesting as well!
seagaia··on Good Creative People are Never Bored
Is there a paper or article you know of I could read relations between creativity and hypomania/other psychological things? It interests me.

Never mind, found one

http://my.psychologytoday.com/files/attachments/33524/person...

seagaia··on Ask HN: Where to sell music for games?
Bandcamp. A handful of famous indie game musicians (Danny B, C418, Zircon, etc...) use it to sell their stuff and seem to prefer it over other things.
seagaia··on Christmas: Brought to you by chinese slave labor
Hm, this sounds tough then. So what would be a more viable mode of action? What do people currently do to work on improving these labor conditions?

I'll admit my first thought was "I'm just never going to buy these toys for so-and-so ever!", but unsurprisingly it's more complex than that.

seagaia··on Super Meat Boy leaves database wide open
http://www.formspring.me/EdmundM/q/274876035885957785

I find it disturbing that people would go through and even attempt deleting levels and altering things en masse. It's okay to point out the bug, and maybe change one thing to display this fact...but the people changing everything? It's a selfish thing to do this to thousands of creative works (the user-created levels), in the motivation of just showing one developer something he did wrong. Thankfully, there were backups.

Parts of this thread, the somewhat arrogant reaction of the Team Meat programmer, and the motives and subsequent actions of some of the people modifying the database, made me a little sick. If anything it's a showing (on both sides) of the lack of maturity of some programmers.

Look, I know that this could be justified in saying "well, someone would have done it sooner or later." In that case, I suppose whether or not this was okay is left up to whether Tommy (the programmer - Edmund did design) would have patched it. And with his defensive response, I'm sure he knew and was going to do so, but probably didn't want to admit it (from interviews he seems to have bit of a bitter ego)

seagaia··on Bach cello suites visualized
Neato...this visualization is sort of well suited for a piece like that Prelude because it's mostly arpeggiations - when the strings change shape you can sort of feel more beforehand how the chords will change (the shrinking kind of tightens up, makes the pitches higher), moreso than looking at the sheet music.

That being said, it's not like it's a very useful visualization (just neat). I'm sure one could train oneself to get a feel for the visualization better, sort of in the way that if you read music long enough you can sort of play a piece in your head and get a rough feel for the relations in the notes (not necessarily the correct pitches unless you have perfect pitch, but the correct relative pitches...if that makes sense - a musician could very well think in their head what a C-E-G sounds like, but not all would imagine a 440Hz tone for the C, perhaps one would think of a 500HZ, but the ratios between the notes in their imagined C-E-G and an actual C-E-G would be the same.

seagaia··on Can you beat 99% of programmers? Try the FizzBuzz challenge
How is it possible that 99% of programmers fail this? What qualifies as a programmer? (Where is that statistic even from...) Does that mean someone with a CS degree? Are the failures stemming from not knowing the general concept, or is it just lack of familiarity with any language (I suppose both are quite horrifying)
seagaia··on Ambulances turned away as computer virus infects medical center computers
Would this kind of problem be less prevalent if everything was run on a linux-based OS? I feel Ubuntu's GUI is friendly enough for most people working in the hospital, and in general there wouldn't be as many viruses and the like.

Or are there lacks of software for the health industry when it comes to linux distros...? Or some sort of strange bureaucratic thing that stops this...

seagaia··on Harvard 1869 entrance exam
does the requirement of Latin strike anyone as a bit elitist? or was Latin really that necessary in order to (presumably) study some Classics?
seagaia··on Matrix multiplication in O(n^2.373)
+1 For someone helping us understand this - is there now an implementation (or could someone now given this paper, produce an implementation) that will run in this new time? Or is it just (as FaceKicker asked) a new analysis?
seagaia··on Does a terabyte of illegal downloads constitute art?
I think what helps make it art is that this artist took this idea, made it into an object (the hard drive with all the data), and then labeled it/made it accessible in such a way that we start to question it differently than if we had just looked at some old hard drive in our room.. So yeah, it's art, but in a sense away from typical mediums like music or painting, etc.
seagaia··on 42 Fallacies
Wow, this is pretty cool, thanks for sharing. Interesting to see a name put on all of these argumentative structures that pop up.
seagaia··on China to cancel college majors that don't pay
I've wondered how necessary it is for colleges to force a $50k tuition on students. Where does the money actually go? I'm skeptical. The administration at university just seems like one big, disgusting fraud.
seagaia··on WolframAlpha FM Synthesizer
Yep. A lot of sounds tend to get that FM-synthesis flavor. I've found MAX/MSP to be useful when processing audio in realtime or using some pre-recorded stuff (some funky custom flanger on some piano recordings, for instance).
seagaia··on WolframAlpha FM Synthesizer
While we're in the vein of FM Synthesizers, if anyone has MAX/MSP, it should come with an example patch called "X-FM~". If you modify things right you can get usable and interesting sounds.

In terms of other similar things to MAX/MSP (a visual audio programming interface, among other things), here's one for unix-likes, I believe (never used it, anyone know how good it is?)

http://puredata.info/

seagaia··on Is High Ability Necessary for Greatness?
"After all, working memory is common, but greatness is rare."

So...it must just be a combination of many factors. Inherent intelligence or working memory can be useful, but so many other things influence whether you become "great" at something...unsurprisingly.

The papers linked to were interesting in how they looked at the different domains (poker, piano sight reading). I mean this certainly is an interesting thing to study, but I don't imagine there will be some proven way to achieve greatness any time soon rather than just deliberate hard work or something. Or maybe there will?

seagaia··on Ask HN: What is Startup Weekend like?
It depends. The one I went to, teams formed around the ideas - everyone pitched an idea, then you had to go mingle with people to get votes, then the top ten were the ideas that most people worked on.

Usually a couple of teams actually stay together for over a month, most usually fizzle after the weekend.

The one I went to tended to be a little more business-oriented than I liked (the winning team didn't write a line of code), so maybe be careful at first if that's not what you're looking for.

I think it's worth going to for at least one day. You aren't (or shouldn't be) bound to sticking with it the entire weekend.

seagaia··on Occupy Flash: An Anti-Flash Movement
I feel this is a bit extreme. What about many independent game developers who rely on things like Flash Player to etch out a living? I think there could be a nice compromise (other than just "Kill Flash!") with the valid security issues, while the a large medium of game development transitions away from flash-based platforms.
seagaia··on A ridiculous patent for arbitrary compression
True. It's also a bit frustrating, reading other stuff on gzip (from where I found this), that the author of gzip wasn't able to make it run as fast as possible because of patented algorithms. Sort of disappointing.
seagaia··on Experts often end up where they started as beginners
Hmm, upon looking at the quote again it really isn't that great. When I say "played" I mean just getting the notes right at the right time - no other of the many dimensions that can change based on the player's skill level. When a skilled musician is reading sheet music, I think they're doing more than just straight playing through it (again using my definition of play, maybe a bad word choice?)
seagaia··on Experts often end up where they started as beginners
I liked the quote on music. Sheet music is good, but as any video can tell you, you can't just play it and expect it to sound good...

"Beginning musicians play by ear, to the extent that they can play at all. Then they learn to read music. Eventually, maybe years later, they realize that music really is about what you hear and not what you see."

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