Scale detail in the snowy place with the big cheese - 2021-02-06

It's 5:00 and I wasn't sleeping, but I know I slept for a little while because I had some pretty good dreams:

Sara and I were living in this little snowy community. It almost seemed like a Frost Punk town or something. There was a cave where we liked to spend time mining, and a dining hall, which from the outside was this curvy shell-shaped thing.

The entrance to the cave had a big shed structure built over it. We were sitting in there picking minerals out of some rock that I'd dug up and Sara was talking to Lynett when it came to light that Sara thought "Iron" was a brand name. No honey, it's an element.

Someone had made a really cool little clay sculpture of some round-nosed lizard creature. I for some reason had it with me and had accidentally smooshed its face a little bit while doing my mining/iron picking/or something. I sort of fixed the mouth with my fingernail, and Sara commented "that's more realistic anyway" to help me feel better, but after that we were on the lookout for a pointy tool with which I might fix up the surrounding detail in the scales.

Sometimes I would stop by the cafeteria and peel off a chunk from this very large roll of cheese. I thought of it as mozzarella, but it was more salty and flavorful, like a soft white cheddar. One time I accidentally peeled off an entire segment (the natural grain of this cyllinder was across it; it had lateral cleavage) and Sara got a glimpse of it and her eyes got all big and she asked where I got it.

When it was time for dinner, everyone came to the cafeteria. I talked to friends on the way to an open spot at a table. Maybe Fizz was there? Maybe some socialists? It kind of felt like I was talking to other somewhat derpy/nerdy kids that I knew in 6th grade. When the food was about ready, the guy who ran the kitchen came out and said "time to smash all the plates!", and everyone got up and was like "rawr!" and grabbed a plate, but nobody was actually smashing them. That's good; we do seem to have a good supply of plates here (I'd been looking at the neat stacks of them earlier), but smashing them would be wasteful! (This may be related to I was thinking about the time when the dwarves came into Bilbo's house and sang the song about smashing the plates, because "that's what Bilbo Baggins hates!", but actually they very skillfully tossed them around without smashing them and cleaned up very nicely)

Outside the cafeteria (but surely not outside! Let's say it was in like a small foyer in the same building) was a Matrix treadmill. It had this app on it called, like "Gus" (or some other 1-syllable and slightly odd person name), which was also the name of the character whom you could watch as you did your workout. They weren't meant to represent you, and they made their own decisions on where to go, but their speed was determined by your speed on the treadmill. A few of my buddies and I were watching him run along a snowy creek and then take a spur trail off to the left before coming back to the creekside one as one of us walked on the treadmill. Maybe we switched off and started a brand-new Gus journey, and this time Gus went south and clockwise around a hairpin turn in what looked like a mall parking lot. As he was going around the end of the turn, which was 'towards the camera' (hence 'south'), the camera panned (maybe under my control) from a birds-eye view to being about level with Gus. And two floating pizzas popped up that we had to pass behind, because this app had adverts in it. Ugh, I don't want any pizza, go away, I told the floating pizzas to my friends.

The perspective change was interesting because it totally changed the feel of the game. It reminded me of, and so I started telling my group about how I have always wanted to make a 2D game with a 2D engine that edges on being a 3D one by using heavy parallax effects and allowing the character to move in the 3rd dimension, onto different parallax layers.

This idea was originally inspired by a dream I had when I was maybe 9 years old about 'Sonic 3' (this was before the actual Sonic 3 had come out), where Sonic was running along these elevated runways that made 90 degree turns in and out of the screen, so the view would rotate when you went around a corner. But it remained side-view, and it wasn't using an actual 3D engine (those weren't the default thing back in 1993), but just used some extreme tricks to get a convincing approximation of 3D graphics using the Genesis hardware. And that was part of its charm, like when people run 1024-color demos on CGA video cards.

And when I told them I'd always wanted to build a game like that, that's for real. Most of my attempts at building a game take inspiration from the sweet parallaxed Sonic graphics, which I want to emulate, but in a more immersive way, with a basically 2D graphics engine.

And there was another video game, this one a more primitive-looking top-down 2D one, that Timmy had been building out in an engine that Jason had written. I showed this to someone, maybe my dad, and they were impressed by it. They said "You should have them dig up that game code!" So I passed that message along to Dawne.

I was with Moriah and a third person. We were having a moving party, maybe for that third person. First stop was Taco Bell. I had Yoru in a cat backpack, and Wolfie was walking along on her own and stayed outside when we went in. Inside Taco Bell there was some drama where one of the employees, some teenager, was getting fed up with people yelling at them during their overnight shift. We got a bunch of 'Freezies', which were frozen slushies sealed in plastic bags.

Back at the apartment (of the person who we were helping move in or out), Moriah and I walked out back and were getting very chummy, and she let me kiss her, and we both liked that a lot. Anyway, that we were getting on this well was very exciting, for more reasons than kissing her felt nice. I was thinking now that Sara's a bit more open to poly now and also loves Moriah, maybe we could form a polycule with Devin and the three of us. Wouldn't that be fun!

Someone, maybe our third person, was talking about the herd of antelope who experienced time backwards. I say 'the' instead of 'a' because it was common knowledge that this herd existed, somewhere in the universe, even though we hadn't encountered them yet (I guess if we ever did encounter them there would be all sorts of paradoxes. Also they were purple and sparkly). And I said "I hope they don't evolve to become super advanced and wipe us out in the past!"

Back in the apartment there was a whole bunch of garbage scattered on the kitchen floor, so I was picking it up and putting it in the trash. Moriah's orange Freezy was there, half-melted. I asked her if she still wanted it, and she said no, I could drink it. It still tasted good.

Physical description of the apartment: A stout L shape, with the kitchen in one leg of the L, surrounded by counters but otherwise open to the rest of the apartment. The back door, through which we went to the field, was at the other end of the L, and the front door right next to the kitchen. We kept the lights off except for one in the kitchen, giving it an added sense of being its own space.

          back door, to field
            |  |__________
            |             |
            |  some chairs|
            | and a round table
            |    (_)      |
            |             |
 ___________|             |
entryway                  |
 __    ________           |
   |  |  |__|  |    __  dining area
   |  |__| S|  |  o|  |   |
   |__ kitchen |   |  |o  |
   |  |_____|__|  o|  |   |
   |__|__|__|  |___|__|___|
   fridge, sink

The apartment. 'S' represents the area I was picking up and where I found Moriah's Freezy.

The field which was actually an indoor field, and may have also been snow-covered. It was roughly a long rounded triangular, and the ceiling ramped down towards the back corner. The floor maybe dipped down a bit and then curved back up, and there was a pond about halfway back. Next to the pond was where we were kissing. 😘