Today has been a very good day.

I had my annual review at work, in which I got promoted[1] and a pay rise.

I got emailed a cute photo of Bethany along with a message that Bethany had insisted that I be sent this photo, which gave me a silly grin throughout the course of the day.

I got an email from a second board game publisher on the topic of when I go to the UK Board Games Expo next weekend to take Space Dogsbody[2] around publishers to see if they're interested, saying they're interested in meeting me.[3]

And then I had a jolly fun GamesEvening, in which someone who'd never played Space Dogsbody before played a game of it and was then recommending it to his friend who's not played it yet.

Overall, I'm very happy ^.^

[1]: The promotion doesn't mean I'll be doing any work different to what I've been doing the past couple of years. It's a kind of formal rank that doesn't mean anything. But it's still a target I've been working towards for the past few years.

[2]: I've been designing a board game called Space Dogsbody since January. It's been playtested extensively at GamesEvening, and people enjoyed it enough to suggest I try to get it published, so I've been working towards that.

[3]: Both games companies will only be meeting me for an informal chat - certainly nowhere near an actual contract yet; it might even be overstating it to say they're "interested" in meeting me, so much as just "agreed" to meet me. But it's still really exciting! :)

Poll #1831510 Christmas and Easter
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 17

2000 years ago, give or take a few:

Thirty years later, give or take a few:

Bethany has very good English aural comprehension. She understands a very large number of words – not just words for her toys and food, but most items of furniture, places, people's names, items of clothing, an increasing number of adjectives, and so on. And she can understand really quite complex sentences, such as "Why don't you pick up the red cup from behind the turtle and put it on the tower of blocks?" (When she didn't know where the red cup was, but could see a number of other cups, etc.)

However, her spoken communication bears much less resemblance to English. She will make a great variety of vocal sounds to herself, like she's chatting away in her own language, but they're not recognisably English, and they're not intended as communication. Certain things definitely are intended to communicate with us, though; so I thought it'd be fun to try to enumerate the words and other pieces of communication she uses.

( Read more )

So that's, what, perhaps 40 words and gestures that she uses? Whereas her vocabulary of understood words I'd say must be around 1000 now.

One other exciting development, as implied above, is that she's also now assembling short sentences. Two-word sentences like "Car gone" are common, and I've seen a few three-word ones: "Sheep song please" and suchlike.

It's delightful and intriguing watching as our daughter gradually becomes more linguistic :)

[1]: If you're not on Rachael's baby filter and would like to be, do ask; those posts are only filtered as a convenience to those browsing long friends-lists who aren't interested in baby stuff.

Ten years ago, I started work at The MathWorks. It seemed to me they looked like a good company to work for, as far as I could tell.

I had no idea how good they'd turn out to be, though. ( They gave me a computer as a thank you to me for being there for 10 years! ) The puter arrived on Tuesday, and it's basically all now set up and running, blissfully quickly. It reboots in 15 seconds! Starcraft II loads in 10 seconds!

I was also impressed by the way that cloud storage makes upgrades like this much smoother than they used to be. Chrome is my primary browser, and I have it configured to sync with my Gmail account. Which meant that about a minute after I installed it on the new box, it automatically added all my extensions and stored passwords and so on. Between that and Dropbox and Steam, it's been an incredibly easy upgrade; certainly much less painful than previous occasions.

The one point of fiddliness is getting Cygwin set up with Ruby on Rails, for Multiverse development. I expect this to be quite a pain: it certainly was last time.

But overall, I'm very happy with my new zippy computer. I'm not usually given to Squeeing over Shiny Things... or at least, any tendencies I have that way are usually overruled by my having quite a tight rein on my wallet in most cases. But at the moment, using my new computer just makes me happy, even if what I'm doing is mundane, because it's New and Exciting and Quiet and above all Fast!

Some people aren't familiar with the term I used in my last post, "Metroidvania". So I thought I'd give my definition of what kind of computer games count as in the Metroidvania genre. It's a somewhat fuzzy-edged category: I think a game can probably miss any one of these tests and still count.

• Platform game. Not an absolute requirement, but pretty close. I'd say Aquaria counts, but only because it's so clearly following all the other traits of Metroidvanias.
  
• Powerups granting new abilities (not just increased firepower or whatever). Upgrades to the height you can jump count, for example, or gaining the ability to destroy bits of scenery you couldn't before.
  
• Nonlinearity. Being able to revisit areas you've been to before, in order to collect things you missed or weren't able to reach first time round, or in order to find routes to new areas.
  
• Secrets! Many games have optional bonuses and hidden bits, but they're an absolute staple of the Metroidvania genre. The best games in this category have at least three different kinds of secret: for example, extra health, coins to spend on upgrades, and occasional new types of weapon or optional powerups that aren't required.
  
• Enemies and bosses to fight, and ranged weaponry. It's a slightly odd criterion to mention here, but many players do consider this a required part of the genre.
  

My game will meet all of these criteria.

Read more on ToothyWiki or TVTropes.

As longtime readers may remember, I'm rather a fan of Metroidvania style computer games. I've blogged about how much I like Iji, Untitled Story, Aquaria, and similar games. I regularly check the Metroidvania category on JayIsGames for new releases, and they come fairly frequently these days: about every month or so there's a new one, and I almost always enjoy them. (Some good ones I haven't mentioned before: Endeavor, Legend of Kalevala (the anthropologist wolf game), and You Have No Legs.)

I also like programming, and would say it's one of my principal hobbies. (I've been writing my own computer games since age 11, or perhaps earlier.) I do have a visual novel part-written, Mermaid Liaisons, and I am planning to return to that, but I haven't felt up to VN levels of prose composition for a little while.

Given all of which, it's frankly startling that until a week or two ago, it hadn't occurred to me to write my own Metroidvania game.

( Read more... )

Bethany's thirteen months old today, so I think it's time for another list of things that I find it fun or exciting that Bethany can do now.

• She can obey any of these instructions: "Clap your hands!""Press the button." "Press the button on your turtle." (when she otherwise wasn't thinking about the turtle) "Give it to Daddy." (a very useful one for when she's picked up a stone or something and is trying to eat it) "Where's your foot?" (That seems to be the only body part she can specifically identify, so far) And she can also reliably imitate a number of nonverbal sounds, such as clicking her tongue, raspberries, or going "Wubble-wubble-wubble" by waving her finger over her lips.


• She can pick up her sippy-cup, turn it round if necessary so as to put the spout at the bottom rather than the top, drink from the spout, and put the cup back on the table or tray. This skill is great because it means there's a reasonable proportion of meals for which the three of us can all sit at the dinner table and eat and drink simultaneously, without one of us having to specifically feed her every mouthful.


• She can indicate to us that she wants us to help with something by giving it to us. For example, she'll bring us her music-box if she wants us to wind it. Or if she's hungry, she has been known to look through the bag for her box of snacks, pick up the box, and bring it over to Rachael or me as a request for us to open it and give her a snack. She has a word she says at these times, something like "Dudi". Her Granny thinks it's "Do this", but that's probably being a bit too generous ;)


• She can climb an entire flight of stairs, quite confidently. She sometimes does this when Rachael's upstairs and I'm looking after Bethany downstairs, if I open the downstairs stairgate for her.


• She can dismantle constructions of several Mega Bloks or Duplo bricks. If you hand her some blocks joined together, expect them to be systematically pulled apart.


• Rather more excitingly, she's also shows some understanding of assembling blocks together. But interestingly, she hasn't shown any sign of thinking this is something to be happy or excited about, the way she did with feats like standing up on her own or climbing a stair, which when they were new always used to make her turn to us and grin. I think in her mind, she has concepts of "where to put things when I put them down", and one place to put a block is "slotted into another block".


• We also have fun playing in the bath. If I put a rubber duck on her head, she'll become still and carefully reach up to her head and pull it off. If I put the duck on either of her hands, she'll use the other hand to pick it up. And sometimes if we hand the duck to her and tell her "Put it on your hand" or "Put the duck on Mummy's head", she does!


• Oh, and she's got quite into bouncing balls in the past month or so. She can keep herself fully entertained for quite a number of minutes just picking up a ball, dropping it, following it to where it rolled, picking it up and throwing it, and so on.

There's a lot of photos and videos of many of these things on our Picasa site. I'm particularly fond of the recent sequence where she explored a giant chessboard, where the king and queen were about as tall as she is :)

Bethany's continuing to be delightful. She's toddling around the house confidently now. She discovered the magnets on the freezer, and has a delightful play pattern in which she picks a magnet off the freezer, plays with iit for a few seconds, then puts it into mummy or daddy's hands. Then a couple of seconds later she'll pick it out of our hands, and put it back on the freezer.

She has a concept now of giving things to people. Sometimes when she's done with a toy, she'll hold it out at Rachael or me, quite insistently, until we take it or she puts it into our hand or lap.

There was one utterly cute moment when she was playing in the porch with a toy, and Pepsi walked up. Bethany looked at the cat, said "Cat", and put the toy in front of Pepsi's paws! She gave the toy to Pepsi! It was so adorable.

( More about Bethany: books, talking )

Posted via m.livejournal.com.

Here's a random assortment of what I've been up to recently:

( Less Multiverse; Mermaid Liaisons; Puzzles; Watching Bethany walking! )

Typically, I write my LJ posts over the course of a couple of weeks. I'll have an idea, let it foment at the back of my mind for a bit, a few days later I'll write a couple of paragraphs on my PDA, then a couple of days later add a bit more, and eventually post it.

I'm realising that I can't do that with Bethany, because she develops too quickly. If I have something she's done once and it's cute, by the time I got to posting about it two weeks later she's done it twenty more times, and moved on to something else!

So. Bethany's Utterances.

She's been somewhat vocal for a couple of months now. (Today is her nine months' birthday.) She's been going "Gagagaga" as if she were an adult imitating what baby talk is meant to sound like. She's also had a few gestures we can understand, such as reaching for a cup or foodstuff meaning she wants some of that.

But as of yesterday, she's got three distinct sounds – basically consonants – that she uses in circumstances specific enough and consistently enough to make us fairly confident she's using them as words:

• "Ca", "a-ca", "cuh", "cat": Used when she sees either of our cats, Pepsi or Tango.


• "Duh", "da": Used when she sees a toy dog we have that plays Twinkle Twinkle Little Star on a music box.


• "Tuh", "ta", sometimes "tuh tuh": Used when she's playing with a musical turtle toy we've got.

We were utterly delighted when she started saying "Ca" and "A-ca" on seeing the cats. Initially I think it was a general excited noise, although I had been making a point of saying the word "Cat" quite clearly to her when she saw a cat for several months. But I think in the past week or so she's realised that we praise her for saying "Cat" when there are cats around, and not at other times, so she's made the association.

She still doesn't seem to have made the connection between the real, three-dimensional animals that rub against her, and the pictures of cats in books, or ineed any toy cats or photos of cats. But frankly that seems pretty healthy: it feels somehow good for her first word to be an animal that she actually interacts with in real life, rather than just reading about and playing with toys of.


She's also made real advances in the past week in her crawling, and also in her ability to toddle-while-holding-an-adult's-finger. A week ago she could sit up in a crawling pose, and could drag herself forward with her hands but not making use of her legs. Three days ago she could make two or three crawling steps before flopping down on her belly again, and getting frustrated. But yesterday she could happily crawl half the length of the living room, following the aforementioned turtle toy (it has a mode where when prodded it will plod along for a few seconds as well as playing its music).

It's great watching her learn new skills, because you're able to see her trying at something, repeatedly, not quite managing it, but over the course of several days she'll keep trying, and get closer and closer, and then suddenly she'll manage to do it once or twice. Then she'll still have difficulty at it, but will keep practicing it until she's able to do it quite confidently.

She's really growing in independence, as well as capability. Although curiously she seems to be going through a phase where, when feeding, she doesn't want to feed herself off the spoon as much as she used to, preferring to have us put the spoon in her mouth.

But I'm sure it'll all be different again in a week's time...

Posted via m.livejournal.com.