00:00
00:00
CrankyRabbit
Would-be DJ/Producer. Plays too many video games. Drew a webcomic once. Old fart.

Age 52, Male

Coordinator

New Zealand

Joined on 5/7/04

Level:
19
Exp Points:
3,603 / 4,010
Exp Rank:
14,595
Vote Power:
6.04 votes
Rank:
Safety Patrol
Global Rank:
30,371
Blams:
94
Saves:
224
B/P Bonus:
6%
Whistle:
Normal
Medals:
2,345
Supporter:
1y 4m 14d

CrankyRabbit's News

Posted by CrankyRabbit - January 30th, 2024


OK, I've already started preparing for the RPM Challenge 2024. An omnichord app is on my phone (since my Galaxy Tab won't upgrade to Android 11). I have found a nice synth sample bank. Lo-fi shenanigans loom!


You can follow the journey on my brand spanking new daily podcast tracking my progress.


Basically I'm spamming this because it keeps me responsible for pushing onwards. Ten tracks by March or bust!


Tags:

Posted by CrankyRabbit - August 11th, 2023


So you may have noticed that I published a song... a rather glum one. Screw EDM, I'm going lo-fi for Zinefest.


Wellington Zinefest is taking place on the first weekend in October (7-8 Oct), so I'm working on a fresh zine for it, as well as working sporadically on a couple of CDs I'll make zines for, and flog them too. Of course I need to keep eyes open for when registrations come available, and actually get on and finish the darn things.


Now I've tried my hand and other body parts at making dance music, but really I started with ideas of emulating Chris Knox, solo and in Tall Dwarfs, with a touch of Wendyhouse, a good twenty years ago. For some reason I find doing so hard. This though... it feels fun and I intend doing more of it. The same cannot be said of the weeks-long Lung Oyster Season I suffered through in July though.


Currently I'm working on the instruments for the second track "Lubberland".Then I'll get the gitbox and ukelele recordings for "Playtime!"


If I manage to finish this EP project (provisional title The Next Small Thing) in time, I'll release it on Bandcamp after the event's over.Depending on how things go, I might even offer physical copies for sale.


Well. Better get on with it. There's a lot to do.


Posted by CrankyRabbit - November 14th, 2022


According to this site, I've had an account here for over twenty years. High time I put ol' cb_boxeddobbs.jpg and the whole SubGenius thing to bed.


So you know, I DJ. A Lot. Weekly, actually. In a club in Second Life. And I have an debut EP on Bandcamp.


Well, there's that.


Posted by CrankyRabbit - October 23rd, 2020


You know, reading this, it's a good thing I didn't pursue this idea any further. Read my older posts and you'll see where this came from.


https://docs.google.com/document/d/1bXvXjzwvllQyK0gMRUqRgILfzKRDtYkWgJwxaxZbZQ4/edit?usp=sharing


Posted by CrankyRabbit - August 15th, 2019


So, with the power of Automatonism, Ableton, and a desperate need to make something, anything, I've been doing sort of dark ambient stuff under the name invisibl nudist.


  1. say hello to heaven
  2. choke points in biography
  3. next stop godot
  4. every sky its own limit

Tags:

Posted by CrankyRabbit - March 4th, 2017


Some quick snaps of sketches for this game. The first three or so are back from when it was called Totally Unoriginal Roguelike Dungeon (I know, juvenile acronym). That was maybe about two or three years ago. However, I already had the basic concept - even the design of the playfield! What was bogging me down was the level progression: where the player and his eventually unlockable companions (who unlock special attacks, power-ups etc.) end up going.

The initial playfield design (for combat)

The core of the game is combat on what I now intend to be a 9x9 grid of tiles. So the big stumbling block is writing AI that can be set from "thick as two short planks" to "cunning b'stard".

Token token design and equally token map design

Each tile (token) on the board fills up your score, inflicts damage, or fills up charge bars to do things that are either a) very good for you (if you do them) or b) very bad for you (if the enemy does them). I was also considering the possibility of using a similar mechanic for looting a treasure chest (limited moves, I expect), dodging traps, and navigating the dungeon. After all, back then I called it Totally Unoriginal Roguelike Dungeon.

Early character designs

Early character designs. Already I had the notion that each companion would be uniquely shaped, and Roger Ramjet's influence is already showing in the hero at left.

The Handsome Hero meets the Kindly King

Years later, and I drew up this concept for the throne room, the location of the first gag-filled and gag-inducing cutscene and gameplay introduction.

KING: Now, oh Handsome Hero, you know why you are here.

HERO: Yes, these two guardsmen marched me here at spear-point.

The idea is that cutscenes are like Roger Ramjet: very limited animation cut to quick-fire dialogue.

Your first enemy: Guard #1

Meet Guard #1. He's the dumber of the two guards who marched you in at sp - er, halberd-point. And he won't let you leave because he wasn't told at the start you were allowed to leave when finished, so up comes the playfield and fight!

If you're all very good, I'll stop right here and not threaten to continue working on this, i.e. scripting, writing the cutscenes, drawing art assets etc. Otherwise expect even more concept arts, cutscene excerpts, and getting sent off to rescue the lovely Princess Andertits (all three of her) from the wicked Count Whocares.


Posted by CrankyRabbit - February 7th, 2017


Yesterday managed to succeed at three things with the framework.

  1. Include support for cursor keys as well as WASD for movement (or indeed anything).
  2. Load MP3 files for music and have one loop. Turns out the loop runs outside of a state if you declare its handle as part of the main game object, I think.
  3. Progress bar! Finally worked the damn thing out.

This might not sound like much, but for me it's quite a lot. I now know I can implement two out of three input methods - the third will be clicking in the general region of where you want the player to go (left, right, up and down). That's a central conceit to bringing this game together.

To celebrate, I think I'll plug the tablet in and draw up some basic art resources, and redo that splash graphic. Maybe it's time to get serious about prototyping.

And come up with a better plotline than I currently have.

Incidentally, I was going to upload my first release under the title Invisibl Nudist, Centipede, until I read the conditions. I'm a little too reliant on prefab samples and lightly mauled MIDI clips, to say nothing of sampling a 20-year-old audio of young Billy Burroughs. So I decided against it. It's on Soundcloud anyway.


Posted by CrankyRabbit - January 21st, 2017


Six years ago I was attempting to learn enough Flixel code to make a game, but that fell through. I just didn't have the time and energy. Phaser came to the rescue.

Currently I'm slowly poking along building a framework for the game to reside in out of Phaser's state system. I like it. It makes me think of Second Life's states, just without a default{} one. The step I'm at is working out how to make a basic preloader animation - I'm just thinking a background image, some text and a loading bar.

Also I'm rereading some very old C++ code. You see, I once went down to a small games startup in in the late 90s, floppy in hand and a head full of Aspergers assurance that I'd land a job and it would be fun and easy.

The floppy held a simple demo of my game concept: You move your player piece around a tiled playfield and swap places with other tiles. When you match three in a group, scoring happens, new tiles fall out of the sky, rinse and repeat. (I did have a theme for the finished game, revolving around "cute anime kitteh inflicts horrific violence on monsters and other people and things" but it never got that far.

Some of the code I'm seeing boggles me. The playfield updating function has a switch(step){} logic that is empty for the majority of the case: branches. On second glance I get it though - I was thinking of making the player and destination tile "hop" rather than just slide straight, and any sideways motion would have been put in there.

Frankly, I'm beginning to wonder if I could make an object for tiles with their relevant properties and just send calls to that. It might make actually programming the important part easier than calling every damn thing from the main game loop like I did twenty-odd years ago.

It's good for me to look at this stuff. Otherwise I'll get caught up in contemplating canvas sizes, art styles, sound and music assets, and shopping for cheapo drawing tablets on Trade Me.

Well... I might make some simple assets again. Just for testing purposes.


Posted by CrankyRabbit - September 12th, 2010


While the game I've been bleating on about gets a theme, development has been hampered for the simple reason I'm an absolute novice at Flixel. (The more complicated reason involves job search.)

So I'm practising with a simple platform game that currently looks suspiciously similar to jmbt02's Achievement Unlocked.

I guess part of the problem is that I find the overall finished look of the game to be entangled with being able to develop the machinery. As I need to learn Flixel, a simple throwaway platformer should be safe enough for making mistakes on.


Posted by CrankyRabbit - June 5th, 2010


Two months ago I came up with a game design which required a theme. After all this time of wrestling with how the mechanic would work, and what graphics set would be used, I've decided that all this time I've been barking up the wrong tree.

So "Bob" Goes to Dobbstown will be a semi-puzzle tile-pushing game like the LID I made way back in the 1990s. The stage will still be 640x480px, but I'm currently looking at doing up the graphics a bit which may involve changing the tile size to something more visible. When I wrote the original LID in C++ with the SDL library the game was played fullscreen. Not too big on modern displays though.

Once I've got a basic LID, I can start throwing extras into the mix - maybe enemies that ruin your carefully planned groupings, or static ones that you need to make groups with the tiles beneath them to get rid of, and of course powerups. Everyone likes powerups.