March Notes

I wanted to note a cool playstation game that I read about from Grewn's article talking about video games as art. He mentioned a game called Shadow of the Colossus

I thought the description of the game was cool:

In Shadow, the ‘monster slaying’ is only a small part of the world. Most of the world is unlocked: the player could just explore for hours and admire the scenery and the creatures. The player can watch the creatures he will slay, because they usually won’t attack him—he must choose to attack them. This is conveyed by the player’s own growing grief and sorrow over the beautiful landscapes he travels. (But just in case the point was lost on the player, the character art also grows paler and more demonic.) He seeks out and destroys each wonder of nature, becoming an ever paler shadow of himself… But the past cannot be undone, nor can its deaths or sins be undone. So in the end, he is sucked into an endless vortex.

The wikipedia page for game as well is really... filled out haha. I find that games with high praise and noterity tend to get more beefy wikipedia pages. Which, makes sense, people who are interested and have a fondness for the game are more wanting to help preserve it. The game was for the ps2 so it might be worth to just emulate at this point. One of the more annoying things about being interested in older games vs films and books is the inaccessabilty of it all. If I want to watch an old movie, its usually pretty easy to find a streaming platform, or "free site" that I can watch it on. If I want to play an older game, its much, much harder. For example, I wanted to try out CIV I, which is a DOS game. I had to get a dos box emulator, download the game, and then spent like forever figuring out how to mount and play this game within the emulator.
Or I would have to own a old computer with dos, get a floppy, and then play civ I that way. Even games from 20 years ago can be a pain to play sometimes. I was trying to play a game from around 2000 ~ 2005 ish, (after the age of dos games), and that was a pain as well. Having to figure out what compatibilty mode to run it in, what screen resolution, and praying it doesnt crash.

Or if I want to play games from different consoles I either need to own the console myself (I have an old wii for that reason) OR get an emulator on my pc. I don't see this trend dying out anytime soon. But I honestly hope we figure out a better way to make older pc, and console games more accessable. I do like that nintendo has gotten ok about supporting older games on the switch. I don't really know if playstation or Xbox has done something similar to that. But ya its just frustrating discovering older games to play, and remembering how frustrating it can be to setup emulators. Because I do want to play Shadow of the Colossus, but I probably have to emulate it on my pc, and figure out how to set that up.
(at least now I have experience with dosbox, and DeSmuME)

I havent ever made a table before, so Maybe I can make one for some games I be interested in emulating for playstation 2, and other retro games too

I think I want to make an about me page, and like in part of it have a table of like games I want to play, as well as have played.

fishing game

I still need to work on other pages as well. Ive been thinking about trying to change the layouts I have on my homepage. it's very cobbled together, and I'd like it to be a bit more condensed. I want to find some other sites I like on the indie web for design ideas. I try not to look at modern sites made with frameworks or have a cookie cutter "Squarespace" look to them. I really enjoy the styles that have emerged from the indie web. I also think I want to convert my site from floats to css "grid". Thats like a whole thing so maybe some other time. At the same time I want to also make a fishing mini-game. something small to dip my toes in game development. Also need a scanner tbh.... so much that I need. I looked at using phaser, but im not sure if thats the best thing for me to use tbh. Part of me things maybe I dont want to make a canvas game persay, but instead maybe more akin to cookie clicker? not sure. Or maybe unity? Not sure. My goal, is to make a game based around fishing. I play a lot of "cozy life sims", and fishing is always a part of the game, but never really the focus?

basically, I want to have a game about freshwater fishing in the midwest. I really like mii's a lot from nintendo so having a character creator where u can like change the different features would be cute. I also want to make sure have inclusive hair, a bunch of colorful skin swatches (or maybe i can just do a slider?), things like that. I do want the characters to be different though to not run into copywrite issues. Also want to make the fish u catch with watercolor! I also want to go fishing more in real life to help me understand fishing better. I don't want to make a carbon copy of videos games with fishing. I think that actually fishing in real life will help me come up with mechanics that are more interesting then i ever could just by guessing.