eturnerx

2012-11-04

Joust Conversion for Twine

Here is a conversion of Joust. This is another one of those games I copied from source in a book to learn how to program as a kid. Bringing these old games back to life is like paying my dues.

This is not a difficult game - you will play through it in just a few minutes. There is also not too much in the way of flavour text compared to other games. I'd rate it as about the same as Highnoon in terms of depth but the game play feels much less varied.

SPOILER: Once you work out a winning attack / defense combo then keep repeating it and let luck do the rest.

The game logic is entirely implemented in Twine/twee code. This could've been much simplified by using custom javascript macros to handle the logic branching or even by coding a "switch...case" macro system for twine to substitute for "ON X GOTO line, line ..." code from the original. I used if, else, endif blocks and despite being a bit complicated and verbose they did handle the task well enough.

Debugging something with such tricky logic wasn't easy but I used a couple of tricks. These might be useful to other Twine/twee code authors too.

TIP1: Debug nested if, else, endif blocks by copying into another text editor and indenting like a regular programming language.
Complex nesting of if, else, endif blocks can be annoying to debug. The are formatted in non-obvious ways to suit the needs of end display, not the programming. So, just for the purposes of debugging, try indenting it as if it is a programming language.

TIP2: Debug nested <<display>> chains with html comments. e.g. <html></html>
Chasing around through multiple display macros gets hard. Add html comments to insert invisible stuff into the code so that you can inspect the page and track where the display macros are leading. It helps narrow down where the bugs are really quickly.

Checkout the other games I have converted

2012-10-28

Camel Conversion for Twine

Here is a conversion of Camel. I can vaguely remember coding and playing this game as a kid in the early '80s. If it left that kind of impression then it must've been a fun game so I decided to give this a shot for a Twine conversion. It is similar in many ways to Highnoon in that there is an underlying game system represented by some quirky text.

The game play can be frustrating! Oases appear frequently enough that water is almost never a problem (just don't forget to drink). The biggest problem is the pygmies. They have a 10% speed advantage on your moderate speed, but running your camel at full speed burns it out three times faster.

SPOLIER: The mathematically optimal strategy is to go full speed twice, moderate speed once then rest. Drink when warned (actually the turn after). If you are captured then wait for the ransom. Even with an optimal strategy a win is not assured. In this game the player loses more often than not. Prepare for frustration.

I made extensive use of the custom macro <<randomp>> that I made for another project. This simplified a lot of the handling where things were triggered by random events.

I intentionally left as much logic in place as it is in the BASIC code with a couple of small changes. The capture submenu display the request for sub-command before the menu and the "Miles travelled" text appears more than in the original. There was also something where asking for a status report would fall through to also taking a drink. I assumed that this was a bug and changed status report to not force a drink at the same time.

From the viewpoint of 2012 the text could appear offensive. I prefer to think of it is ironically anachronistic because there are many obviously mismatched facts and intentional mispellings. Many of the other books edited by David Ahl do contain some quite detailed information about the historical context of the games so I do not assume the authors of this game were naively flavouring the game they way they did.

Checkout the other games I have converted

2012-10-22

Nicomachus Conversion for Twine

Here is a conversion of Nicomachus for Twine. This was a much simpler program than Highnoon so I further restricted myself to making all program logic happen in Twine's tweecode.

Twine surprised me with its arithmetic handling. Up until now I had been ducking into Javascript for all but the simplest of expressions. Twine was easily able to handle an arithmetic statement with three sets of parentheses and about six terms.

Twine does lack a loop function (like a while). I was able to simulate this with an if, else, endif macro that keep displaying another passage (itself) until the condition expired. You can check the code for how I implemented this. The technique is known in computer science as recursion.

The verdict; A fun quick conversion.

Checkout the other games I have converted

2012-10-21

Arduino LCD: Mugwump

This is an old game I never recall playing but it was one of the inspirations for Hunt the Wumpus and it has some elements of a game I was thinking of writing. There are four mugwumps hiding at random locations in a 10x10 grid. The user supplied an x & y coordinate to scan and is told if they have located a mugwump. The user is also told the distance to any mugwumps not yet found. The game ends after all mugwumps are found or then turns.

Code: http://eturnerx.com/files/arduino/011_mugwump_eturnerx_arduino_lcd.html

Mine differs from the original in a few minor respects; distances are rounded to the nearest integer in order to fit the display. Distances over 9 are simply not given. These small changes only make the game slightly tougher and most games can be completed in seven turns.

This looked like an easy game to convert; and it certainly is much less complex than many others. The kicker is that much of the supporting historical information is not in place and the game is kinda tough. I spent more time writing a wikipedia article and creating an HTML5 based game cheater *cough* helper than doing the Arduino code.

Checkout the other games I have converted

2012-10-15

Arduino LCD: Acey Deucey

There's something satisfying the challenge of fitting games into the limits of a 16x2 character display. This week I did a version of a card game called Acey-Deucey. The basic rules of the game are: first the player antes into the pot. Then two cards are dealt. The player may then bet on whether or not a third card will be between the first two cards. All you need to do is outlast an Arduino-AI opponent.

Code: http://eturnerx.com/files/arduino/005_acey_deucey_eturnerx_arduino_lcd.html

I did make some small changes to the game as it is played live:

Ace is always higher than King and never lower than 2
Pairs do not result in an automatic penalty
The ante increases every few turns

A player can pass by betting "0". A player's maximum bet is limited by the size of their stack and the amount still left in the pot. The AI will bet only when the spread (distance between the two cards) is seven or greater. The AI bets more with wider spreads but will bet only up to half its stack. This is not a bad default strategy.

Since this game is mathematically solveable for optimal long-term play I intentionally made the Arduino-AI a little stupid; the AI does not count cards. There is a single standard 52 deck (4 suits, 13 ranks) being tracked and you are told when the deck is reshuffled.

You can gain a big advantage by simple card counting. Counting 234|QKA versus 6789T should do better than chance. You gain even more of an edge by tracking ALL cards and counting the ratio of good vs bad cards; Just how poker players count "outs". If you're really nerdy you might even try Kelly betting. Hey, whatever you find fun :)

Checkout the other games I have converted

2012-10-07

Highnoon Conversion for Twine

This week's creative project is a conversion of Highnoon for the Twine interactive fiction system. While I was converting/reimagining for Arduino I had two thoughts. The first was that I'd like to do a more faithful conversion with the original dialogue and secondly that such a conversion would be a way to demonstrate the power of Twine.

So, you know the game; You're in a showdown with Black Bart. You each have four shells and are 100 paces apart. In this original version there are more win/loss conditions than straight death.

Twine allows quite a lot of expressiveness and flexibility when writing interactive fiction. It also outputs the results to a single .html file that require no supporting libraries or other files. If you are interested in the basics of Twine then I'd suggest looking at this tutorial.

The conversion to Twine was fairly straightforward. I used the Jonah Story Format because it places passages one after the other without clearing the screen like Sugarcane does. I made a few tweaks to the inbuilt functions; the first to totally suppress the output of passage titles and the second to totally deactivate old choices. This was not difficult; it was more a matter of removing the bits of code from existing functions that I did not need.

I also based passage names around the line numbers in the original code. This eased moving from the GOTO style of the original code to the structured coding style of Twine.

The verdict; a very playable old-style game.

Checkout the other games I have converted

2012-10-01

Arduino LCD: Highnoon Conversion

This week is a conversion (strictly a re-imagining) of a game from 1970 called High Noon. Try to kill Bart in a shoot out! Your have a range of options that can be accessed using the left, right and select buttons on the Freetronics 16x2 LCD shield. After your turn Bart has his turn. The video shows only a few of the things that happen in the game.

Code: http://eturnerx.com/files/arduino/004_high_noon_eturnerx_arduino_lcd.html

The AI is probably tougher than the original. The text prompts were shortened to fit the screen and a few new things added for flavour though the essential game is the same. A few edge cases (running away) were changed and the being shot in the back was also changed. Any action the fails, standing still or walking/running 0 paces results in a penalty making you easier to hit.

The implementation uses a state machine in the main loop in the same way that the Hunt the Wumpus conversion did. In addtion, the static string data grew too big for the working memory on the Arduino so I needed to use the PROGMEM trick and create a string table.

If you are interested in a more faithful, online playable version then check out my HTML conversion of Highnoon.

Checkout the other games I have converted

2012-09-24

DPI & Compression Problems - demo PDF

Seasoned print designers know all about DPI, but it is difficult to convince design students unless they are shown an example as to what can go wrong. I made this sheet where the same image is shown at the same size except in 300dpi, 70dpi and 30dpi. I also included a badly compressed JPEG so that students will know what to look for.

The correct DPI to use will always depend on the printer that is being used so ask! If the DPI is too small then some blurring and pixellation will occur. This can be seen where the text is not clear and where there are square step blocks.

The poorly compressed JPEG shows how the textural detail in the wall and sky are flattened out and bruising artefacts appear where there is a change in contrast (e.g. around the text).

Having a poorly compressed JPEG and DPI that is too low is a double blow to the quality of the output image.

Feel free to share the document. Link: The DPI Problems PDF

Note
maximum_display_size_in_inches = pixel_size divided by the DPI
(there are 2.5cm in an inch. So, approximately 4 inches in 10cm)

2012-09-23

WorkOut Poker Episode 3: HUD

Continuing on with first steps towards an ExerciseUI, this episode adds on a HUD to give stats that help decision making while playing.

The HUD shows VPIP / PFR & AGR / 3Bet stats. These are only basic but there was not much room for any more since the size of the numbers needed to be increased.

I had the dreaded problem where the Kinect would stop updating in FAAST. It turns out that the shortcut I was using to launch FAAST lost "Run in Administrator" mode and you should disconnect the Kinect power USB converter from the computer after a reboot. It was fiddly but once it was running it was rock solid.

Getting the HUD running was not trivial. It causes a huge load on the computer to run FAAST, PokerStars and Holdem Manager 2 at the same time (while I was recording). The FAAST display would sputter and gestures would not be recognised. The solution was to use ImDisk and move the HEM2 database into RAM. I also made a different ImDisk RAMdisk and recorded the video straight to that. Time to buy an SSD.

The HUD stats were useful. There were not many hands on the other players but even still some information was better than none.

Episode List
Episode One: Basic Functionality
Episode Two: Bet Sizing
Episode Three: HUD

2012-09-19

A Question of Professional Ethics and Friends

Professionalism and ethics questions between two parties are fairly cut and dried. However, things can very quickly get murky when muliple parties are involved. Justice asked me to advise on a situation.

Justice works for DesignStudio and they have a large client account BigClient. Recently BigClient employed an in-house designer called Riley. Coincidentally Justice and Riley happen to be friends who both move in the same active social circles. One day Justice overhears the DesignStudio execs wondering why they are now getting less work out of BigClient than before. They are discussing the latest design outputs of BigClient and wondering where they are coming from. Justice knows from social conversation with Riley that Riley turned out better than BigClient expected so BigClient is giving more work to Riley instead of taking it to DesignStudio.

Should Justice tell the DesignStudio bosses or not? I would say no.

Telling DesignStudio bosses might win some brownie points and demonstrate loyalty towards DesignStudio. But Riley probably did not intend the information about extra work to go any further than the social group. If DesignStudio bosses acted on this information and spoke with BigClient then that might make things difficult between BigClient and Riley.

One could think that Riley should be more careful with what they say but add in a couple of drinks and people toasting each other's accomplishments for the week and it's easy to let things slip. Telling the DesignStudio bosses is acting in the employer's best interests but loyalty between friends should count too.

There needs to be some leeway and forgiveness between friends. Firstly it would be a sad world where friends could not privately discuss some aspects of their work out of fear of being taken advantage of. People need safe places to vent their excess emotions; happy or sad. Secondly this time Riley let slip some information, next time it could be Justice innocently doing the same. Friendship is not about one-foot-wrong and you get taken advantage of. A good friendship will outlast a job.

For these reasons, if I was Justice, I would not tell my bosses about Riley. DesignStudio's Account Managers will probably be told if they contact BigClient directly and ask.

(Scenario based on a true story, real names not used)

2012-09-16

“Should I study graphic design?” Jobs, Career, Money

Having a suitable personality is only one part of the decision to study design. In these economic times (Economic Crisis during 2012) students thinking going to design school need more certainty that there are jobs, careers and money after graduation.

There are jobs in graphic design in the skills NZ employers want. These are; advanced web, mobile, and cross-media design. There are some jobs in other media and the competition for these jobs is fierce.

In 2012 Web design is no longer a specialist role – it is now part of the overall package expected of an entry level designer. Many first jobs expect a cross-media designer who can apply a consistent visual look across many mediums. Specialist web design roles require advanced HTML/CSS with at least one of the following; mobile design, front-end development (such a jQuery), serverside skills or CMS skinning.

The NZ Government Careers advice section now says:

Number of design graduates increasing, which has created more competition for jobs. Because of the high numbers of design graduates, competition for most entry-level design jobs is high. Employers often prefer to hire people who have specialist knowledge and/or experience with design programs. People wanting to enter design jobs may have work on a short-term or freelance basis, or volunteer their time, before they can get full-time work.

Why is website gloomy? Their definition of graphic design is narrow and outdated. Print is seen as key and web only gets the barest mention. This does not reflect the reality of the job market.

Now entry level jobs pay less, expect more and require new hires to be immediately profitable. There is no time or patience to train because employers can be choosy. A new entrant designer might earn just over minimum wage until they have proven themselves. Employers now use word of mouth to fill entry-level positions because they do not want to deal with the hundreds of unsuitable applicants who apply to any and every design job ad. How does this affect the decision where to study design?

Does the design school have specific training in the skills, mediums and technology that are currently employing. One red-flag phrase you might hear is: “Technology changes but good design does not”. This view ignores the rising role of the aesthetics of time and interaction and neglects how a viewer's relationship with a medium affects communication. Each medium has its own peculiarities that require specific skill masteries. Furthermore, that red-flag line would be unaffected if the students were trained in more employable mediums. It is simply no longer enough to hope an overall strong aesthetic sense will be enough without employable media skills. Consider also how the school is working with future technology. Graphic design and technology have always gone hand in hand and big changes are coming.

A good design school will have a strong visual culture. Most will claim they do but check the work by attending their graduate exhibitions. Look at the typography. Look for a variety of work in different styles. Look for consistency of design across mediums. The work should be aesthetically rounded and conceptually pushing boundaries.

How successful are graduates of the school jobs in design? While finding you a job is not the design school's role, the percentages of graduates transitioning from study to jobs in graphic design within six months of graduation can be telling. Beware of the super-star stories; “Famous Person studied here”, "we have graduates working for Famous Company". A few super-stars is not a good indicator of an excellent course because some people will just succeed despite their education. Instead look at what happens to the average graduate. How are the B students doing?

There are far easier ways to make a living than graphic design but it is a very rewarding field full of change and challenge.

Read more articles about graphic design careers.

2012-09-15

WorkOut Poker Episode 2: Bet Sizing

Continuing on with first steps towards an ExerciseUI, this episode makes some improvements to existing gestures and adds gestures for bet sizing.

Some of the existing gestures needed a bit of fine tuning so that they would trigger more reliably and not trigger at unwanted times. The gesture for fold changed into three raises of the knees in either a left-right-left or right-left-right pattern. This is to allow some variation in the marching step used to fold. The previous left-right pattern just didn't quite feel right when playing.

In the last episode the Kinect would stop updating in FAAST. This was edited out of the video, but having to restart FAAST every seven or eight hands was tiresome. To anybody else having this problem, the answer is to run FAAST in administrator mode and to plug the Kinect into a USB that connects directly to the motherboard. Usually these will be on the back of the computer. It seems that the Kinect does not play nicely when going through intermediary USB hubs.

There are four betsizing actions for 33%, 50%, 75% and 100% of the pot. It was ticky getting the 50% and 75% actions to distinguish from each other. Doing cross hand above the shoulders move would trigger both the 50% and 75% pot size bets. I did manage to get something workable, though some care must be taken such as; squarely facing the Kinect camera, pausing after raising hands and pausing after hands are crossed. I hope to make this even more robust in future.

The increased stability meant I got in a 50min poker session. I ended this voluntarily - the software was rock solid this time. The activity level is still very low but it does beat sitting around. The next episode will experiment with multi-tabling to see if that improves the activity level to something more resembling a workout.

Episode List
Episode One: Basic Functionality
Episode Two: Bet Sizing
Episode Three: HUD

2012-09-09

WorkOut Poker Episode 1: Basic Functionality

In a previous article "The ExerciseUI" I explored the idea that exercise should be something integrated into our daily workload. Technology is becoming cheaper and easier to use. Here are some baby steps.

I happen to really like Poker, so I made some custom gestures in the FAAST Kinect software for PokerStars. The three man gestures are: fold, check/call and bet.

Playing one table of Zoom poker creates a low tempo of activity. The most common poker action is folding so this is linked to the most common exercise: walking on the spot. The other actions require big hand movements with energy levels that correspond to the severity of the action.

This is early days yet; there is much more to do. While the activity levels are low, making this control more than one table will improve the tempo considerably. I also hope to estimate loads placed on different muscle groups to vary the gestures for actions to meet exercise goals. In this way we can work AND exercise.

Episode List
Episode One: Basic Functionality
Episode Two: Bet Sizing
Episode Three: HUD

2012-08-28

PhD Progress Report to August 2012

It's been awhile since I have posted on this topic so here's what I've been doing with my PhD. I have since made several improvement to the semantic web browser described in my last PhD update and have been experimenting with techniques to reduce information overload.

Reminder: My research tries to reduce information overload when displaying data where the structure of that data is not known ahead of time.

There is a good body of research in linking determining how related text strings are by meaning (the linguistics meaning of semantics). The problem for me is that the speed is not fast enough for building displays at runtime in a web-browser. I instead went with lexical methods that use naïve rules to just compare characters in a label. There are well establish algorithms for this; Dice, Levenshtein to name a two. My implementation of Dice in Javascript is now in the WikiBook project called Algorithm Implementation

What is not immediately clear is how these algorithms should determine similarity when two triplets with labels resolved are compared. Assuming that the subject is equal/equivalent then just how does x->firstname:John relate to x-->surname:Xeedown? My most recent chapter took Dice and Levenshtein string similarity algorithms and then compared an averaging of the predicate and object similarities versus simply taking the higher of the predicate or object similarities. I conducted a study with twenty human participants and have analysed the data. The data is indicating that a naïve lexical algorithm can give acceptable (i.e. “usefully better than random”) results in line with what human participants would say about the same triplet pairs. This is encouraging.

In that study I also tested any algorithm for determining if triplets were redundant. This is used to subsume (not display) triplets when it is deemed that other triplets contain equivalent information. I already had built such an algorithm using intuition and voodoo – and the testing on humans indicates that the algorithm is usefully better than random at matching what humans also rank as redundant data. This is also encouraging.

Using the redundancy algorithms I now manage to avoid displaying quite a number of triplets. In some cases, using data from dbpedia, about 55% of triplets are simply not displayed because they contain redundant information or are turned into lists.

I also used the similarity algorithms (actually the inverse) as the distance metric in hierarchical clustering of triplets. The cluster hierarchy is then flattened which results in groups of related triplets. While not giving perfect results, for a “first naïve attempt” at grouping triplets the results appear to be better than random – though I have not tested this.

I am currently writing up research results and learning tons about statistics as I go. It is particularly interesting to read about the debates in statistics for multi-rater agreement in Likert scales. After trying to come to grips with so much math I eventually went with the old method of just just looking at the shape of the of raters histogram.

Going forward from here is the next chapter. This one leaps off from the “first attempt” approaches described above and attempts to find algorithms that learn the user's preferences for ordering, grouping and redundancy. Recommender systems research has some particularly interesting avenues to explore here. I currently invisage a conversational User Interface that allows the user to express their data display preferences (order, grouping, redundancy etc) via direct manipulation.

The performance of any algorithms found and adjusted will then be tested against human raters. Once that study is complete I then theoretically switch into “write up” mode for the thesis but will need the ocassional coding distraction of actually implementing the results of the studies into Eme. Things are looking promising.

Arduino LCD: Hunt the Wumpus Conversion

This week I recreated an old text game that I remember as a kid in the '80s: Hunt the Wumpus. The game is apparently from 1971. Basically you wander around a map trying not to fall into a pit trap or get eaten by the wumpus. You win by shooting the wumpus - but don't shoot yourself!

Code: http://eturnerx.com/files/arduino/003_wumpus_hunt_eturnerx_arduino_lcd.html

The map is a squashed Dodecahedron. Arranged into three rings. The inner and outer rings have five rooms while the ring between them has ten rooms. Every room links to exactly three others; back and forth on the current ring and another to change the ring. While the interconnections in the map never change, my version of the game scrambles the room names whenever a new map is generated (on power up or when selected at game over). A new map also randomises the starting positions of the player, the pit, the bats and the wumpus.

Shots can travel up to five rooms, but can only travel into rooms that you have already visited and or have been one room away from. It is possible to shoot yourself.

The implementation uses a state machine in the main loop. It's a pretty big one but things don't seem to get out of hand. That's why I love the state machine approach; it allows the programmer to think of the overall structure but then just concentrate on the single task they were working on. For a much simpler state machine check out the previous video.

Checkout the other games I have converted

2012-08-12

Arduino LCD & State Machine Demo: Life & Poison counters

Continuing on from the last video; adding a hidden Poison counter is a good chance to build a simple switch()...case state machine.

The code: http://eturnerx.com/files/arduino/002_mtg_lifepoisoncounter_eturnerx_arduino_lcd.html
Last video: http://youtu.be/t6Y_GCoSUt4

A more comprehensive example of a state machine is in the next video; A Hunt the Wumpus game conversion.

2012-08-05

Arduino & Freetronics LCD - Magic:The Gathering Life Counter

My very first YouTube video. This is my first real Arduino project. The next video in the sequence explores adding a hidden poison counter.

Link to code:
http://eturnerx.com/files/arduino/001_mtg_lifecounter_eturnerx_arduino_lcd.html

LCD Quick Start Guide
http://www.freetronics.com/pages/16x2-lcd-shield-quickstart-guide#.UBKMm7T9OK9

LCD Product Page
http://www.freetronics.com/products/lcd-keypad-shield#.UB4Q8LT9Oqc

2012-05-22

Design Demons: The Critic Demon

An earlier post gave an overview of the design demons: Creative, Critic and Pragmatist. This post takes a closer look at the Critic Demon. A designer should also seek to develop ability in each of the each of their demons so that the overall team is stronger.

The Critic Demon is more strongly related with the left side of the brain. It is the analytic thinker that evaluates and judges the ideas flowing from the Creative demon. The Critic demon can be overly picky and will have impossibly high standards. When the Critic demon is rejecting all ideas then perhaps trade-offs should be made in the design. The Critic demon is most suited to the development and refinement stages of the design process. The Critic demon will cripple the Creative demon if the Critic demon has influence during the Concepting phases. The Critic demon's favourite word is: Perfection.

The problem with perfection is that there is never a single solution and design is often a trade off between many competing factors.

The underdeveloped Critic demon will be unable to properly evaluate the ideas of the Creative demon. The underdeveloped Critic will allow poorly resolved and aesthetically unpolished work to progress. A person with a weak critic demon and good execution skills will make a high volume of rough work. They might be successful through volume alone.

The strength of the Critic demon can be improved through education, reflection and critique (see the critique section). Critical analysis and logical thought is the life-force of this demon. Any study into understanding of design theory, history and case studies will permanently strengthen this demon. The act of reviewing and thinking about design work - especially honest criticism confirmed by trusted peers - is the Critic demon's gym workout.

The noisy Critic will distract the Creative demon and may war with the Pragmatist demon during the later stages of the project. The Critic will discourage the Creative demon by saying how each idea of stupid and this will stop the Creative demon from leaping from idea to idea. The pragmatist will want to finish a project but the Critic demon will insist that it is completed properly before it can be released - even if this means expending more resources than allowed for the project. This can delay the delivery of a project.

A noisy Critic demon can be taught to speak only in turn. Use good conceptualizing procedures where the Creative is free to talk for a set period of time before the Critic can judge the ideas. Standard brainstorming technique is to simply record all ideas without judgment or editing for a set period of time and only then allow for the Critic to speak. Focusing on the resources allowed for a project (esp. the deadline) gives the Pragmatist demon enough power to overcome the Critic. A beginner design can delegate the critic function to a trusted and more experienced peer. This should eventually train the critic to influence at the most useful times.

A strong Critic demon is important for a designer to produce professionally polished works that are executed well. Working to improve the Critic demon will give long term benefit to the designer.

2012-05-12

Design Demons: The Creative Demon

An earlier post gave an overview of the design demons: Creative, Critic and Pragmatist. This post takes a closer look at the Creative Demon.

Each of the demons has their own levels of ability and influence. Ability is the strength of the demon in their specialisation. Influence is how likely the designer is to listen to demon. Each demon‘s talents are better suited for different parts of the design process therefore a designer should train themselves to minimise the influence of each demon and instead judge when their advice is most appropriate. A designer should also seek to develop strength in each of the each of their demons so that the overall team is stronger.

The Creative Demon is strongly related with the right side of the brain. It is the lateral thinker that comes up with the original ideas. Many of the Creative demons ideas are impractical, but one should not discourage the Creative demon from making them. When somebody has Designer's Block then their Creative demon is tired and out of ideas (see the Creativity section for help). The Creative Demon gets enthusiasm and rewards from coming up with many cool ideas. This makes the Creative demon very useful during the concept stage of the design process but a distracting influence during the development and production stages. However, the Creative demon can be useful during problem solving that can happen during production. The Creative demon's favourite word is Freedom.

The underdeveloped creative demon can come up with only derivative ideas occupying a limited range. A person with a underdeveloped creative demon but with strong execution skills will be very good within a small number of visual styles. This person will follow tutorials on the internet on how to produce some effect in popular software.

The strength of the Creative demon can be improved through stimulation and exposure to many different ideas. Inspiration is the life-force of this demon and it must be constantly replenished. Viewing the design works of others, visual art, music, culture and new experiences all provide inspirational fuel. Increasing the visual knowlege of the designer makes their creative demon permanently stronger. Also the act of creation in itself - especially when creating with others - is the equivalent of sending the Creative demon to the gym.

The noisy creative demon will continue to distract the designer way past the time concepting is completed. A noisy creative demon will always interupt with a completely different approach while the designer is trying to develop and produce an already selected idea. This can pull the designer off track and if they are seduced by their Creative demon's voice then they will always come with something new instead of finishing what they have started. This can delay the execution and delivery of a project.

A noisy creative demon can be taught to speak only in turn. Until the Creative demon knows to only speak in turn or when something is very important, the designer should move deliberately through each stage of the design process. At the end of each stage the designer should force themselves to make a decision that is not reversible without a second opinion from a more experienced colleague/friend. This should eventually train the Creative dragon to be noisy and quiet at the right times.

A strong creative demon is important for a designer to produce works that go beyond the mundane and ordinary. Working to improve the Creative demon will give long term benefit to the designer.

2012-05-05

PokerStars on an iPad (including HUD)

Some people are curious as to how I play PokerStars on the iPad - complete with Holdem Manager HUD and TableNinja. The answer is easy: remote desktop. I use this setup to play from around my home, any place with wifi, and even over 3G (tethered to my cheapo Android phone). Sure there's the brilliant PokerStars app, but that doesn't have ZOOM, HUD or TableNinja.

Specifically: I use the LogMeIn Ignition product. Install the free LogMeIn client on the desktop computer, grab the LogMeIn Ignition app from the app store, set up an account and you're good to go. And it only costs a few dollars total to do. You can probably use other free/cheap remote desktop products (e.g. VNC, RDP) but I like LogMeIn Ignition because I don't have to worry about firewalls and other complications because it just works.

This technique should work for any Poker site.

TIP: On the iPad, once you're running Igntion, use the settings to force the connection to use 1024x768 screen resolution. That's the iPad1/iPad2's native resolutions so you'll have less problems with things being too small. Ignition will reset the desktop computer to it's original resolution when it ends the remote desktop session.

TIP: TableNinja works brilliantly in this setup. No keyboard? fine it still does default bet-sizing for you.

TIP: TableNinja and a wireless keyboard is where it's at. Connect the iPad to the big TV (or a projector), sit back on the couch with a beer and it's game on!

Multitabling does work - but due to the low screen-res you'll want to do this in stacked mode.

Result: ZOOM poker - anytime anywhere. Oh yes we can :)

If you like this article then perhaps you'll also like WorkOut Poker where I use a Kinect to play poker by waving my arms around.