Week 32

sections

• work
  • nested design components
  • screencast
  • making the heading real
• one finger

Good things

• kids being at classes all week
• "new" tv
• went to the zine library

Make a mouse handout

I'd really enjoyed making my tiny adaptation of Tunnel Goons and I'd been looking for an opportunity to do something similar. The process of analysing the informationa and trying to represent it as clearly as possible with words and images in this super-constrained format makes all my UI / comics / visual communication neurons fire, and the fact that it targets an analogue platform is also very gratifying.

…and it's just as well I enjoy the process because the outcome didn't work out the way I wanted! It looks the part, but when I tried to use it in the game it failed on every possible front:

• my players didn't understand that it was self-contained, and tried to reference the main handbook
• some of my layouts caused confusion
• the children didn't even use it! 10yo used the manual and 7yo needed hand-holding through the whole process anyway
• there were serious transcription errors (not just typos) that I don't think I can be bothered to fix

I'd already published it as an itch.io project and so I've just reverted it to a draft so it's hidden. Bad luck to anyone who downloaded it I guess.

Here are my positive takeaways from the whole process (becasue you know I try to be positive!):

• enjoyed the exercise of making it happen
• learned that I should test things in the field before publishing them
• do simpler things first (execerpt the whole player section!)
• I anticipated some of the problems the players had with it, so it's comforting that my UX instincts were on point!

Raspberry pi streaming

I found a video in which a guy does cool stuff with a raspberry pi and — although I've done all those things separately on various occasions — something about his presentation of it made me excited to duplicate his demo.

Needless to say, it did not flow as effortlessly for me as his video implied it would. Took me like 3 days to access the app on my LAN; I was asking for help from a network engineer friend and all sorts. Turned out I hadn't configured the server settings correctly 🙄

Well anyway I solved that problem and several others and I got as far as having a fastapi server running that captures an image on page refresh when I ran out of steam, partly because my camera is night-vision and therefore seems to be pretty low-res. monochrome and crap. Maybe I'll get a regular camera module and try again to get to get full-motion streaming.

The good things are:

• as usual, I enjoyed the process
• made use of raspberry pis I had lying around
• used Nuxt.js, which is relevant for work
• refreshed my neural pathways for if I want to use something like this in future.

Revenge of the squishmallows

I managed to get both the kids involved in a creative project this weekend, and I'm really proud of myself and them. This is the kind of parent I would like to be 100% of the time (instead of 0.3%).

R wanted new batteries in her toy camera. K had just finished a week of animation classes. We came up with a short film concept (a girl mistreats her soft toys and gets her comeuppance), storyboarded it, and produced the main sequence, which includes an animated section.

R said she'd "literally never seen me so excited".

I don't deny it. It's one of these things that you think would be cool to do, and you feel like you could, should, will do, but in practice it's just too hard to co-ordinate, to idealistic. And yet here we were, doing it together, doing it properly, having a good time, learning together. Awesome.

The Estate - session 1

WE DID IT! We finally got a Mausritter campaign off the ground!

This has been a long time coming and I'm very excited at the prospect of running The Estate as a campaign for my party of friends and family.

We were timeboxed to a couple of hours, so we went at it with a plan: set up the characters and party, get a sense of the campaign hub (Brickport) and figure out what adventure we want to pursue in the next session.

Mission accomplished.

I have almost as little experise as a GM as my group has as players, so it was a learning experience for us all. I was surprised how many of my notes were to do with physical, practical things (sit on the long edge of the table so I have more space to organise my materials) rather than about the execution of the narrative.

As a fledgling GM, I think I did a rather good job of shepherding things along while letting the players make their own story.

Highlight of the week!

Work: goals and progress

I was really proud of myself for getting my personal development goals in on time. By "on time" I mean "before the absolute deadline", whhich was July 31st. We're like, halfway through the year, so it's kinda late to be formulating goals, but whatever!

I put in 5, and 4 of them have different themes aligned to the organisation's strategic goals. I'm proud of that, for a start. I wrote them with well-considered success criteria that account for my individual agency within an 'agile' team. And then I immediately acted on them, scaffolding out the documents I said I'd provide as evidence and planning how to fill them.

My goals overlap in various ways, because (guess what) they're part of a coherent drive and not distinct, discrete objectives. I had one about design / development workflows; I had one about innovating on documentation; and I had one on design system goals.

On Thursday evening I did a thing I thought was good: I figurd out how to solve a component composition problem in Figma and I recorded a screencast about it that I posted to the DS teams channel. NGL I expected to get some feedback on Friday (though I was on flexi).

Well, I'm leaving it up there despite my suspicion that I've deeply embarassed myself. See what happens.

END