Cosine Gaming Blog

A Blog about games, new CG projects, and more.

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Ask Me Anything!

I've created a questions page! AMA! This is inspired by Bill Wurtz and partly to replace my old contact page.

Bill Wurtz has this amazing questions page. I absolutely adore it, checking every single answer posted there, nearly every day. Now, I love Bill Wurtz. I love his aesthetic, I love his approach to life and I love his ethos. But I swear I would not love him nearly as much if not for this questions page. We see plenty of his opinions and personality in everything he Read full post)

Check out my new personal homepage

Remember when I bought lunaphippscostin.com? Well I just designed a shiny new page for it! Previously I had a very ugly little homepage there, mostly for my own personal use and satisfaction. But I was thinking it would be nice to be able to send a quick overview to prospective colleges / employees. The homepage of the domain with my name on it should be nice. I messed around with some fancy <canvas> graphics, but they were mostly either very slow or very underwhelming. So I just sort of started doing text-only graphics inspired by Bill Wurtz. I think it turned out pretty well, and I can modify things as I want. (The beauty of the web!)

Pale White Dot - New Game

I recently released my newest game Pale White Dot. It's a web-based incremental game set in the solar system. You start as Earth’s moon, known as Luna. You can accumulate resources and build an army to take over the solar system. Go ahead and play it!

I made Pale White Dot for Ludum Dare (A Small World) and decided to continue to work on it. I think it's come a long way, considering that it was one of the LDs I got the lowest rating on. I think it's a testament to how continued work can make a game work better. I added AI, more images, more feedback all around, fixed some pretty bad bugs, and balanced it way more. Now it's quite a relaxing / entrancing game that really satisfies my hoarder instinct!

I'm going to work on it a little bit more still, as I want to add a few more graphics I still haven't gotten to and balance it a little more, but it's nearly ... (Read full post)

Solipsistic Utilitarianism

The ethical conflict between my instinct for egoism and philosophical adherence to utilitarianism has nagged at the back of my mind since I read about child soldier Ishmael Beah shooting his fellow nationals at gunpoint in A Long Way Gone. I have found a reconciliation between these two. I was debating with my brother (a strong utilitarian) who described ethically preferring self-interest in some cases, and I claimed his understanding could be reasonable under utilitarian ethics. How?

Imagine you're given the choice: you must either commit an action that would break someone else's arm, or one which would break your own arm. I imagine that most people would quickly choose to break the other's. This might make them feel guilty - this is inconsistent with whatever understanding they have of morality. But is it? When a moral theory flies so strongly in the face of most people's considered moral judgements, perhaps it warrants an examination.

I think not many would argue that our ... (Read full post)

Indigo Engine Discontinued

Bill Wurtz, one-man band, obsessive creator, and unique personality, is often asked, “How do you practice?” To which he responds, “practice? forget that, i say do it for real!” Wurtz didn’t practice, he wrote, played, and experimented. Everything he ever wrote, he put in huge binders. Eight of them. Any idea, melody, or song, he tucked away, and years later, he determined to record every single one of them. I learned to do it for real when I stopped working on my biggest project. The Indigo Engine. If you browse its history, you can see the little updates (commits) become decreasingly frequent, their messages decreasingly enthusiastic, petering away like a droplets of rain at the end of a storm.

I made games. I made them because my brother told me, “in video games, the designers have to account for every possible move you can make.” I suppose the idea of sculpting infinite tiny worlds, specially for each decision a user might make, felt about as intimate as a creator can be with her ... (Read full post)