February 25, 2008

• Like Hell of Sand but with sparkly explosive goodness! No weird little people, though. There went 20 minutes of my life.
• The little fighters are pretty funny, especially when you give them a box to kick.
• This is nice.
• There's supposed to be a way to save them for sharing, but damned if I can figure it out. I had a little-dude apocolpyse I wanted you guys to see.
• Needless to say, the instructions are not exactly crystal clear.
• Not enough ghost.
• Well, duh.
• Before there was a Torch material, I made a few nitro "engines" with igniters of magma trapped in Bloc. View this text file. Select all and copy. Then paste the text into the textbox above the dust game and click "Set" to load the game data into the Powder applet. Enjoy.
• Oh! And then there was my circuits. I found that when you go up to 16x scale and choose the tiniest pen, you can draw on the edge of a Bloc and this way you can make a line 1 pixel wide. So I'd make Clone-lined Bloc and let C-4 grow in the middle. Because there were TWO Clone rows flanking the C-4, it would regenerate quikcly and you could get your latency down. Then I could fire circuits by the shock from my nitro engines. I hadn't got to the point where I could make logic, but I'm close. Here's a friend and I trying to make a one-way. Almost works!
• Bonus! A powder gun that doesn't quite work, and some more engines that mostly work.
• Way to take it to the next level, Steely Duran!
• (just updated the some-engines.txt file to include modern torch-based igniters and spinny wheels, for their hypnotic, soothing effect.)
• Whoops, and sometimes you have to re-wet the nitro clones to get it going. note that with single pixel clones, when they catch fire, they soon go out. I'm exploiting that, and I hope it doesn't change. I'm also exploiting how flammables can trigger each other diagonally. I'd exploit how clones produce materials at empty diagonals, but that's very slow, and my hope is to get the speed of firing and then restabilizing as short as possible. I *really* need a brush of size 1 that's actually one pixel. And also: I really need a solid object that can get pushed around, but doesn't break up or catch fire. If I had that, or if I could do it with fluids somehow, I could make a real reciprocating engine or maybe even a steam engine. (The sure way to have enough time to explore all of this is to wait until I have something much more important that's urgently due. Then, after the deadline has passed, my coworkers will panic at which time I show them the game, and they say, for example, "What?! You've been playing a game?!! I can't belie-- Wait, so oil floats on water, and water floats on nitro...so...AHA, I see! But I can use C-4 as the container, and set that off with a magma clone...")
• Whaaaaaaaa?
• Steely Duran is the Nikola Tesla of the Powder Game.
• Lara, I think these guys are really getting way deeper into this than I want to
• Guilty as charged! I really do love the thing, though. It's strange: Give me a general purpose computer that can do anything, and I don't create much. Meanwhile, give me a simple game in which you can only do a limited number of things, and my mind goes wild.