Today, I found the entry point for the leak in the downstairs window. This has been a monkey on my back, if you’ve been reading the blog, for about three, if not four years. Hoor-fucking-AH!

It’s still not fixed, but this is the single biggest step forward for this problem in ever. Getting someone to fix the problem, at this point, should be trivial.

I can’t tell you how much of a relief this is. Seriously.

So, a while ago, I posted some thoughts about what a game designer does for a living. And while I like the efficiency-oriented interpretation of what a game designer is, it’s missing something. I think in the context of a game-developer-as-creator-of-product, it’s a fine definition. And being so mired in creating *product* over the last 10 months, the definition really stuck with me.

But there’s definitely another side to it. The side that creates things that are *new*. The efficiency model isn’t contradicted by this, or superceded by it – I think the two parts are completely compatible, because the design is about coming up with a concept (the creation), and the implementation of that in an efficient, accessible manner (the implementation).

In many respects, as a designer, I am an implementor. There are parts of me that, I think, succeed at the “creator” aspect of game design, but most of the novel ideas I have are because I am good at implementation. As a result, most of my ideas are relatively pragmatic, and relatively rational.

Thing is, I would, at least in part, like to see games that step away from rationality, and embrace something totally new. I’d like to see, for instance, a game that’s entirely about the emotion of pain, or suffering, or loss, or ambivalence, or ambiguity, or something – ANYTHING – *other* than fun.

Though I haven’t played through it entirely, the game that most successfully embodies that for me so far is Shadow of the Colossus (please, no spoilers in the comments). I can’t remember who it was (I believe a co-worker of KV’s), that said that they were having trouble playing it because it wasn’t very fun. I understood that immediately. It’s epic, but it’s also very morally ambiguous. There’s sort of a point where you have to question the righteousness of what you’re doing, and one of the reasons that I stepped away from the game was actually that I couldn’t answer that question for myself in a satisfactory way.

In some sense, not playing the game became part of playing the game, and I think, though I’m not sure, that to some degree, that was the intent of the designers. I don’t know. Maybe too meta.

But again, this is a relatively rational approach to a game. It takes a lot of existing game concepts/mechanics/cliches/formats and tries to make some sort of new statement about something based on the foundation of what is already “videogames.” The question that *I* have to face, as a designer, is whether I’m satisfied with that.

Sometimes, I want to see whether there’s a way to create something that’s compeletely different. In the way that say, I don’t know – Matisse is different than Da Vinci. There’s a measure of … I don’t know – insanity? that it takes to look at the world, then represent it in a hyperreal way like Van Gogh does, or in something that’s only marginally intelligible as real, but still conveys some essence or emotion of the thing, as some of Picasso’s art.

I feel like games have the potential to do this in a way that no other medium can, but I’m not confident in my ability to actually *see* how that fits together. I feel like I know enough to recognize genius, and as always, see that it is not within *me*.

Who knows, though.

Just as an aside, I dreamt one idea that I thought would be sort of interesting. Imagine a world of completely unremarkable people. At the start of the game, everyone’s essentially the same. They look the same, and there are subtle differences, such as gender and hair color, some of the first things that one notices about a person.

The “game” is all about interacting with these people – talking to them, looking at them, touching them, etc. As you become more familiar, and more intimate with them, they take on distinguishing features. You might, for instance, notice that one person’s nose is really big. If you focus on that through conversation, or where you’ve directed your line of sight, their nose may actually become comically large, because it’s such a defining characteristic.

You might have a line of conversation that shows how confident a person is – their visual representation may take on a glowing aura. Or someone’s short, and have a Napoleon Complex, so their representation becomes comically short, and they don a Napoleon hat. How you see them is a visual metaphor for your interactions with them, and your avatar’s understanding of who they are.

I think this happens to a large degree in the real world. People you like become more attractive, and people who are superficially attractive may become repulsive simply through the force of their personality. Certain people are defined, visually, but a relatively small number of facial features, or a particular expression. We all develop some shorthand for understanding who we’re looking at, and their appearance triggers in us a shorthand representation of *who they are*, which is a cumulation of all you know about their personality.

Yeah. Sometimes, a post doesn’t come to a satisfying end. This is one of those times.

So, I’ve been watching a little bit of American Idol, ’cause Ei-Nyung’s been watching it, and I just wanna put this down now, ’cause I figure if I don’t say it, I won’t be able to say, “I told you so.”

Chris Sligh for the win.

So… a couple weeks ago, the roofers finally game, fixed some serious problems with part of the roof, then left. The rain was kind enough to come several days later, and show me that their work in fact did NOT fix the roof, much to my chagrin. What they’d done managed to change the behaviour of the leak ever so slightly, but the *other* problem was that they also in the process eliminated the obvious *source* of the leak, which was the poorly installed “gutter” around the edge of the roof.

Of course, at this point, that presumes that they actually did the fix properly, which I sort of have reason to doubt at this point.

Thing is, there was one other place that seemed to be a reasonable source of the leak, which is the split between the stairs and the house body. So, I just hosed that down for some period of time. It illustrated how poorly made the stairs were with respect to water runoff and the like, but that wasn’t all that surprising to me. What *was* somewhat surprising was that this doesn’t appear to be the source of the problem.

I think, unfortunately, that finding the source of the leak has become my problem. I think soliciting anyone for advice would be the thing to do at this point, given that I’m a.) out of ideas, b.) out of my depth, and c.) incredibly frustrated that this has been going on for years, now, with no resolution.

Sheesh.

So, I tried a different, simpler recipe for Buta no Kakuni tonight. Instead of steaming for a couple hours under grated daikon, this time, the pork was quickly browned, then simmered in a half cup of sake, water to cover, green onions, and some ginger rinds.

After the initial 1.5 hour simmer, I took the meat out, and ran everything else through a gravy separator, to get rid of most of the fat that had come off the pork.

I made a mistake, just prior to this – that is, I’d added more water – the simmering liquid was getting really low, but I didn’t realize how close I was to the “next step” when I did so, and ended up with about four cups of liquid, where I should only have had about 2.5. As a result, once I added the sugar (4tbsp), mirin (2tbsp), sake (4tbsp), and soy sauce (4tbsp), I had too much pork broth, and the flavor of the final simmering liquid was too diluted. I cranked the heat up, and reduced it for a bit, which helped condense the flavors, but it was a mistake, and I wouldn’t do it again if I do this another time.

Anyway – after adding the flavorings, the pork simmered for another hours. At this point, it was quite tender. I added some daikon and potato at this point, waited another 30 minutes, added some carrot, and simmered another 15 minutes or so.

The end result was that the daikon and the potato were perfect, the small pieces of carrot were good, and the large pieces of carrot were slightly underdone.

All in all, not bad. The meat was really tender, and less sweet than yesterday’s recipe, but even though the simmering liquid had reduced quite a bit, the flavors were substantially less intense than they were in yesterday’s effort. More soy sauce, for sure, probably a touch more sake, and I should have tossed in a little of the remaining ginger during the final simmer.

So, I’ve never cooked much in the way of Japanese food. Well, aside from things like temakisushi and instant ramen, that is. Last weekend we went to one of our favorite restaurants, Gochi, with K & N, and had a dish called ‘Buta no Kakuni,’ which is basically braised pork belly. We’d had it before, both at Gochi, and at Sushi Sam’s, and at both places, it’s absolutely glorious. The pork is melt-in-your-mouth tender, bursts with flavor, and even though an order of the stuff basically gets you four bites, it’s totally worth it.

So, I thought, ‘I can make this.’ The only thing really standing in the way is time, and right now, I’ve got a lot of it. So, I looked around the giant truck that is the internet, and found a handful of different recipes. There seem to basically be three major ways of tackling the dish – one is a quick stir-fry then a long braise, one is just a long braise, and the last, which was the most complicated, required steaming the pork for 2.5 hours in a bed of grated daikon, then a simmer for half an hour in a sake, soy sauce, mirin, sugar, water, and ginger mixture.

I figured I might as well try the most convoluted one first, so that’s the one I did. No, I didn’t take pictures (though I should have). There are a lot of variables. Mostly, the sake/soy sauce/mirin/sugar/water ratios, but beyond that, the type of sake and mirin you use can have a radical effect on the sweetness of the dish. Since you braise the stuff for so long, the flavor profile changes quite a bit, so it’s hard to tell what the final product will taste like simply by tasting the mixture at the start.

The result tonight, following the recipe’s timing, left pork that wasn’t as tender as I would have liked. Fortunately (for the dish), Ei-Nyung was a little late home tonight, so it got an extra 45 minutes to simmer, and texture-wise, that mostly did the trick. Another 45 minutes and it would have been awesome. The smaller pieces (this particular piece of pork belly had pretty irregular thickness) were perfect, but the larger pieces weren’t as tender as they should have been. Flavor-wise, I was reasonably happy with it. Ei-Nyung thought it a little too sweet, and I think she’s probably right, though the level of sweetness was acceptable to me.

Tomorrow, I’m going to try it again – Ei-Nyung’s out to dinner with some friends, so I’m gonna try one of the stir-fry->simmer recipes, with a slightly different ratio of the various simmering ingredients.

In tonight’s dinner, I also threw in some parsnips, carrots and blocks of daikon, which simmered in the sauce for about 35 minutes or so. I could probably have just made a dinner of the veggies, to be perfectly honest.

Good stuff, but could be better. I’ll take pictures tomorrow.

Ah, moving. Hate it, love it. On one hand, it’s a huge pain in the ass, turns the house upside down, everything looks like crap, and there’s no usable space. On the other hand, you’re taking space that was being used poorly, and at least starting to use it better, if not well.

Ei-Nyung’s needed space to use the sewing machine I got her for Christmas, and after getting the MacBook, I haven’t needed as much space for “computing.” As a result, the whole notion of having an “office” wasn’t really making sense, ’cause I wasn’t spending any time in there, and Ei-Nyung stays on the couch when she works from home. So… yeah. What we *did* need was a guest room, ’cause we get enough people happening over and such that it actually made sense to keep an extra bedroom at the ready.

So, I spent most of the day today moving stuff from the “office” to the downstairs, where there was potentially at one point going to be a kitchen, but since we never actually ended up splitting the upstairs and downstairs completely, we’ve never actually pulled the water and gas feeds out of the wall.

So, it’s an area that’s very well lit, that has a lot of electrical outlets… Perfect for a “hobby” room. So, I’ve moved my music equipment downstairs, Ei-Nyung’s sewing stuff, and my old PC into that area.

The “guest room” is going to basically have a lot of bookshelves, a bed, my old Sony TV, and the xbox. Good times.

Good grief. So, as I’m sure I’ve mentioned before, I’ve now got almost two weeks off. Today, we went to Great China (great, see below), and I went biking with Alan in Joaquin Miller Park (also great).

Been playing some FFXII, which is surprisingly good. I absolutely despised FFX – everything about it, from the battle system, general gameplay, sphere grid, Blitzball, writing, characters, the works. I just hated everything about it. FFXII… it’s much better. The best piece of game design advice I’ve ever heard was, “Figure out what your players will be doing most of the time, and concentrate on making that fun.”

FFX’s core gameplay consisted of, “Walk to the red dot. Walk exactly away from the red dot to find a hidden item. While you’re walking, every five seconds or so, we’ll spawn a random battle.” That was just about all you did in FFX from start to finish. But walking from place to place was an absolutely torturous disaster, because of the random battles, and the fact that all you had to do was point your joystick in the direction of the dot.

FFXII improves on this in a fistful of ways. No random battles, for one, which is the single biggest improvement in the entire series, ever. There are a lot of random, and relevant generic NPC dialog snippets. There are a lot of nonlinear levels, where you’re not absolutely required to walk from point A to point B in a straight line. The combat is actually engaging and fun. Finding stuff, as a result of the less linear levels is also fun.

The writing is leaps and bounds better. Where in FFX, the plot was extremely heavy handed, and the characters were little more than ill-conceived plot devices and deuses ex machina, the characters if FFXII are (mostly) charming and well-written. The sole exception, so far, has been Vaan (the main character), who’s a bit of a precocious (obnoxious) twit. But Balthier, far as I’m concerned, is thus far the best character I’ve ever seen in a Final Fantasy. So, that’s a win for them.

A lot’s been written about the battle system in FFXII, and I won’t add more other than that while I thought automating the busywork would basically automate all the gameplay, I’m glad that basically the choices that *aren’t* automated are now much more significant, strategic, and interesting. And the gambit system’s design is quite flexible and interesting, and moreover, unlocking pieces of it actually opens up its complexity at a proper rate, and is surprisingly rewarding.

So, yeah – surprisingly good.

I’ve got two weeks free. One of the main things I want to do is arrange our old “computer room” into a “guest room,” and make the downstars “kitchen” (which isn’t a kitchen, but can quickly be converted into one) into a “hobby room,” where all the music equipment, the PC, and Ei-Nyung’s sewing stuff will live. We’ll see how that goes.

Should be fun.

Whoa. So, tonight, Uyen took us to Great China, where we got the Peking Duck, the Ong-Choy with Garlic Sauce, and the Walnut Prawns.

It was, to put it mildly, astonishing. The Peking Duck, we’d had before, and it was great, as always. The Ong-Choy was pretty much what I’d expected – hearty, garlicky, and … they gave us a huge pile of it. The Walnut Prawns, we got because Ei-Nyung had heard they were good. They were incredible. Not too sweet – just perfect in every way.

It was one of the best meals I’ve had in a good long while. Awesome stuff.

Seriously, if you’ve never gone, and you’re in the area, call us, let’s go. This is the kind of place everyone should go to at least once or a hundred times.

That was my last day at Backbone. I’ve got 12 days until I start at the new job, and I’m looking forward to tidying up the house, cooking, and taking it easy for a bit. Had lunch with some of my co-workers, and it was fun. I’ll miss working with many of them, but honestly, there’s a lot I won’t miss at all.

I’m really looking forward to the new job. Obviously, a whole new set of challenges, problems, personalities, what have you, but I think it’s going to be really good.

There’s this whole Playstation Home announcement that’s been floating around – rumor that at the GDC, Sony’s announcing a Mii-like framework for achievements in Playstation games. While I think the announcement, if true, sounds awesome, I’m a little disappointed, because a couple of my friends and I had come up with this a couple months ago, and I thought that it was the sort of thing that XBL would absolutely have to have.

As it is, I can’t say I have a lot of faith that Sony will really pull it off all that well – their network-related stuff has been incredibly ham-fisted thus far. But maybe this is the core of a really novel online framework. Given that I think the underlying idea is totally awesome, I hope they get it right.

Also, today marked a week at <213.5 lbs, averaging 213.47lbs, mostly because this morning, after a night of temakisushi, I wasn't, shall we say, on the lower end of the scale. Still, a day or two "off the wagon" is fine, as I plan to hop back on it, and work my way down to 200 even or less by the end of the year. I just need some sort of motivation to get there. ;)