I mentioned this in another post but my game is finished! It's been getting good feedback in the jam and I'm pretty happy with it. I am probably going to wait a while to work on another game-like thing but I have some ideas I want to play with. This week I re-read the docs for Ink, which I have not used but seems a lot more powerful than the interactive fiction language I concocted for some of my own IF experiments many years ago.
This week I found ThemeParks.wiki, a great public API that aggregates ride wait times and performance schedules from basically every theme and amusement park that publishes them. There's a fairly comprehensive web interface on there that makes all the data human-readable, but it's a touch programmatic and cumbersome, so I spent a day making my own version, creatively called Theme Park Times. I spend a lot of time every day looking at the wait times at Disneyland and dreaming that I'm riding a boat past some pirates, and probably once a month I take the short drive to Universal Studios Hollywood to like see some dinosaurs in the afternoon, so I'm already very familiar with all this information, but now I have a little more control over how I look at it.
DJing over the weekend went well! I didn't bring my little numpad to play samples, there was plenty to think about without it. If you want to know what DJing is like, it's like this:
Around 1:30am, a group of young women appeared in front of the booth. One of them asked me to play "2000s." I vaguely accepted the request, bemused by the possibility of what this person who definitely wasn't alive in the year 2000 could have meant. She walked back over to her friends to take photos. I started scrolling through my collection to find something they might recognize as "2000s music" and started playing the next song that I already had queued up. Her friend walks over as she recognizes that a new song has started, smiles at me, and holds up her phone. It says "SKIP." I smile and shrug and do not skip the song because that is a wild thing to ask. They leave shortly after. That's DJing!
Now that the gig is over and the game jam is done, I need to decide what other extracurricular thing I'd like to do. My next big-ish project is probably a small-ish diorama to set in the yard, a mini version of one of my big Halloween displays for a different season. Before that I think it's time to tidy up this website and document a couple things I've finished in the last couple years! I've always struggled to categorize my work and the lines keep getting blurrier, so I would like to just arrange everything I've done into a chronological list of "projects," not unlike Casey's website. Sort of a portfolio, sort of a digital garden. Could be nice!