Code Sketching with Sketchpad.cc

So I've always been a little obsessed with "sketching" with code, ever since I learned to program in BASIC. Over the years there have been many tools come and gone which let me quickly bang out a simple (visual) idea. None of them have ever been "the one", though they've each had their pros and cons.

Lately I've been noodling around with Sketchpad.cc — basically Processing.js plus a simple online editor and gallery front-end.

There are always different metrics for what the "right" sketching tool is, but two that commonly rise up for me are:

1. Easy to start a new project.
2. Super ridiculously easy to share sketches.

While Processing.js may not be the most performance-capable sketching environment (in fact, it's terrible!), and the online editor at Sketchpad.cc may be slow and clunky and feature-poor... In those two criteria it blows pretty much everything else away.

The reason those two metrics matter so much is because they are the main obstacles between me actually making something and you actually seeing it. So in the end they carry a lot of weight!

There's probably some kind of lesson here about tool design, but I'll leave that to you.

Also, check out my gallery there. Just a few sketches, but hey, it's more than zero!

Picking on Zombie Minesweeper

Here's a talk I gave at Full Indie almost a year ago, just after Zombie Minesweeper was released on Kongregate.

I talk about:

1. Keeping the game fun and playable at all times -- possibly the pinnacle of iterative design.
2. Different task-tracking methods for different parts of the production.
3. A simple insight into procedural content.

Here is the powerpoint. (Make sure you have the Note panel showing.)

Not the greatest bit of public speaking I've ever done, but hey, it's a thing!

Evernote: The Best Notepad I've Ever Used

During my time off these past few months, I've had the privilege of being swamped with creativity. So much, in fact, that it's kind of prevented me from actually creating anything! However, the situation could have been a lot worse if I hadn't been using Evernote.

 

This is a fairly simply note taking tool. It lets you create a new note from a global hotkey, and quickly jot down whatever is on your mind. The note can then be tagged, and is saved as soon as you finish typing.

Once you've got a heap of notes, you can browse all your notes on a long roll sorted by date, filtering them by tags or keyword searches. This is pretty expected functionality, but in practice Evernote makes the process very smooth an intuitive.

Finally, Evernote has a few other special features that bump it over a glorified todo.txt:

• Full RTF and HTML support, so notes can be formatted with bullets, tables and images.
• Online syncing and writing: You can rune Evernote on multiple computers and have the same set of notes on each, as well as creating and accessing those notes online, and posting new notes by email.
• If you use the online syncing, it also performs text recognition in photos, which is used by the search index. Take a photo of that napkin game design, email it to your notebook, and search for it later.

Evernote is definitely not a replacement for the personal wiki that many of us have. It doesn't allow notes to be linked to each other, and can't impose any structure on notes other than tags and dates. But for something fast, easy, and transparent to make sure that your ideas get recorded somewhere, and are available whenever you need them, you could hardly do better.

Evernote Home Page

PFrank - Easy Regex-Based File Renaming

Anyone who spends 8 hours a day on a computer pushing around assets for a big game has at one point or another needed a way to rename bunches of files at once. I've been looking for a good tool to deal with mass-renaming for some time, and they all generally fall into two categories:

1. Namby-pamby tools that can't do much but change a file extension or add a number to the end.
2. Command line tools that, while powerful, are obtuse and dangerous.

Recently I came across a nice free tool that sits (for me) in the ideal middleground: PFrank.

PFrank is quite powerful, utilizing regex for it's main renaming functionality, though it supports standard windows wildcard matching as well (E.g. *.jpg to select all jpgs). Where it really shines though is in the peace of mind it offers for large operations. It lets you preview your renames on a bit of sample text while editing, giving you a chance to get the expression just right. As well, before the rename is run, it will preview the entire operation, showing the before and after of all affected files. Finally, you can save an undo file, letting you easily revert a rename operation.

There are a load of other features as well that may or may not be useful to you: You can save rename operations for later, for example to run them periodically, or to share with coworkers. You can write custom renaming plugins in Python to handle complex cases. It will read metadata out of images and audio files, allowing you to rename files based on this information.

So I'm sure that all my programming buddies are going to point me to some tool in cygwin that can do everything this can and more. But this is a tool for those of us that don't live on the command line and still need advanced renaming functionality.