Robinson Farrar

our world deserves curiosity, compassion, and change. social justice, vegetable farming, programming, games, art. he/him

[Robinson Farrar @RFephemeration]

I have a set of personal affirmations that help me confront and calm myself. I add a new one every once and a while, and would like to share them. Maybe they will help you. 1/

I matter to myself, and to the world. Independent of achievement or behavior or thought. I matter.

[Robinson Farrar @RFephemeration]

@_grizzlygames Very cool! I've enjoyed this game quite a lot. I saw an ad on Instagram today for a copycat. Dunno if there's anything to be done but here's a screenshot. They might share enough assets and sounds to violate copyright... The soundscape was nearly identical.

[Robinson Farrar @RFephemeration]

Tonight's model is a crocodile car. I'm prototyping a racing game and playing with aesthetics.

[Robinson Farrar @RFephemeration]

I made a model of a hand, and rigged / posed it. Trying out mixing in lots of hard edges. I'm particularly proud of the knuckles / webbing. I think it gives a nice effect of organic shapes while embracing being polygonal. I have some ideas for making the thumb less awkward.

[Basel Musharbash @musharbash_b]

There is little or no reason to believe this “tradeoff” between continued welfare spending and inflation was a real risk.

For the millionth time, post-pandemic inflation was not driven by consumer demand or runaway wage hikes; it was driven by supply disruptions and monopoly profiteering. In that context, pushing down consumer demand — whether by cutting welfare spending or by raising interest rates — likely *exacerbated* inflation, not ameliorated it.

On the one hand, raising interest rates likely made it harder to finance new production capacity and raised barriers to entry for would-be competitors to monopolists. On the other hand, cutting stimulus spending definitely took money out of consumers’ pockets — likely shrinking the available demand that new and existing producers needed to justify investments in expanded capacity.

It is just not true that “inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon,” as Milton Friedman imagined. It arises from different circumstances at different times — and requires policy responses *tailored to* those circumstances. Anything less is just malpractice in governance.

[Robinson Farrar @RFephemeration]

@mykola A shared spreadsheet might be a good step up from this with a small team. Columns for version, status, assignee, whether it's a bug or feature, and target release. With drop down chips for each of these. Then also name, date, and description / repro steps

[Robinson Farrar @RFephemeration]

Took a pass this morning before work. Not sure that the additional detail is where I want to take it, but it's interesting to try nonetheless.

[Robinson Farrar @RFephemeration]

I made a model of a hand, and rigged / posed it. Trying out mixing in lots of hard edges. I'm particularly proud of the knuckles / webbing. I think it gives a nice effect of organic shapes while embracing being polygonal. I have some ideas for making the thumb less awkward.

[Robinson Farrar @RFephemeration]

I also think I could get some tendon effects without many more polygons to make the back of the hand a little more interesting.

The model as is uses 414 triangles, for reference. I'm not aiming for being as economical as possible, but I like to keep ballpark numbers in mind.

[Robinson Farrar @RFephemeration]

I mostly read this as a sign that the Harris team has pretty good data on who is leaning towards them.

I remember being relatively disappointed when I was canvasing in NH for Hilary.

[MattHardigree @MattHardigree]

Overall (TL/DR), Dems are motivated, not a single Independent was voting for Trump and instead voting for Harris, moderate Republicans were all voting Harris. Other than the first door I didn't meet a single Trump voter.

[Robinson Farrar @RFephemeration]

@ScarletAstrorum @vazserox That's way closer than I was expecting

[Robinson Farrar @RFephemeration]

Of course heavy starting randomness comes with its own set of balance changes.

A lot of the comments pointed to the correlation of expressiveness with balance.

I think some automated balance loops also have the ability to enable small teams to produce meaningful variance.

[Robinson Farrar @RFephemeration]

I'm interested in systems and meta systems to counteract this. What rewards are there for niche play? One version of this is market costs in deckbuilders, with budget restrictions. When something becomes too popular, it receives additional financial pressure to push people away.

[Robin Poe 🐑 @RobinPoedev]

Dominant strategy is corrosive to creative thinking, I will not consider a game good at encouraging and facilitating creativity, or multiple styles of play, if it has clear and obvious Dominant strategies people gravitate towards

[Robinson Farrar @RFephemeration]

I think randomized starting conditions have a significant role to play. If the metagame terrain is varied, gradient ascent looks different from every position. Even the perfect response requires developing more complicated rule understanding than copying dominant strategies.

[Robinson Farrar @RFephemeration]

@lorenschmidt Exactly! I'm happy to share. It's been satisfying to think about and I really appreciate the examples you have in the thread.

[Robinson Farrar @RFephemeration]

@lorenschmidt The idea was to let players both write their own subroutines and their own tree nodes to choose between.

And maybe even to write the underlying game logic in the same language.

https://t.co/PeVZLieZpl

[Robinson Farrar @RFephemeration]

@lorenschmidt Yeah I spent some time writing a DSL for commanding units a few years ago. Subject verb (object). These actions result in setting one of a few low level options over the course of many frames.

"run away from nearest enemy" "target highest DPS / health enemy within range"

[Robinson Farrar @RFephemeration]

@lorenschmidt I think about this in the context of rts games as well. Where you're searching through the available command space with a goal in mind. It could even relate to assistive programming, searching from type inputs to outputs of a function, using as midpoints what's already entered.