Mucking About with Norn Brains

The title sounds like I did something awful but don't worry, I haven't severely disabled any more Norns yet. Today was observation only.

There's this great website out there, don't know if I've linked to it before, but it's called The Creatures Developer Resource. It's no longer being updated, but it has some really good information about the Norn brain and some astoundingly useful tools for analysing Norn brains. Norn brains are something I'd love to come to understand, but due to their complexity it's not good to jump right in and start making random changes that I think might work (which seems to be my approach to other areas of Norn genetics, hehe...), especially because, even with Chris's awesome tools from CDR, it's hard to understand exactly what the changes you've made have done if you don't understand anything about Norn brains.

So I thought that, in order to properly accustom myself to using Chris's tools and to wrap my head around something Norn brain-y—the Norn learning process, which I know about but have never seen in action on a neuronal level—I thought I would do a little bit of an observational experiment: I would create a new baby norn in a new world, and using the monitoring tools from CDR, see if I could track some of the things it was learning. I downloaded the Brain Viewer, Lobe Study, Brain Cell Monitor and Brain Activity from here to assist me with this experiment.

Comic!

I was feeling kind of arty so I made a little comic for y'all to enjoy. Drag it into the URL bar to see it full size.

Creatures Online

I don't know if there's any of you who don't know this already, but I thought I should share the link to a statement Fishing Cactus made a few days ago about the development status of Creatures Online:

http://blog.fishingcactus.com/index.php/2016/01/21/creatures-status-fishing-cactus-official-statement/

I think it's really sad to see this happen, especially as, from the sounds of it, they were really close to having something they could release. What's more, I don't feel that Bigben Interactive has been fair to Fishing Cactus in the way they have handled the game, and nor do I feel that Bigben has been fair to the Creatures community—their communication with us has been exceptionally poor.

But still, what's done is done, and even with the Fishing Cactus's statement there's a lot we don't know about why the decision to halt development on Creatures Online was made.

It would be a right old shame for three years of hard work from Fishing Cactus to end up totally wasted, though.

Fight!

Today I sat down to creatures and the tedious but necessary task of getting the Norns to eat. Even so, as much as the task is tedious and sometimes frustrating, it is always kind of relaxing too. 'It would be good to play a nice, relaxing game of Creatures,' I said to myself as I booted up the game. 'Jolly good.'

Naturally I wasn't too ready when this happened almost as soon as I started:

He wasn't even really old. It always hits me right in the heart when this happens, especially when you're not expecting it. I'm gonna miss this kid.

Glitch Norns

I figure it's probably about time to introduce you to another one of my experiments gone haywire: the Glitch Norns. The idea I had in mind when I made these was to create Norns with funny poses that would move strangely but could still do stuff fairly normally. I gave them the name 'Glitch Norns' because the end goal was essentially to make them look like they were all weird and glitchy. I made two versions of the Glitch Norns, the second one 'improved' from the first (it wasn't really: predictably I screwed it up). There are only two Glitch Norns: Pythagoras, the first one, and Tessa, the second.

Essentially, the method I used to make these Norns was quite simple: enter the genetics kit, change up pose strings and hey presto, you're done. Very scientific.

CCSF 2015

OK, I'm late to the party. Even so, I'm actually really excited by this year's CCSF, and I have been following along this whole time; I was just too lazy to post anything until now. There's been a lot of really good stuff so far and I can't wait to see what comes over the next couple of days.

The link to the CCSF is here, in case you missed it.

I think the thing which really makes the CCSF (you probably know already, but just in case you don't, CCSF stands for Creatures Community Spirit Festival) special is that it shows that, even though the series is like a decade old, we're still here, and we have it in us to pull off something like the CCSF every year. And more than that, I think it shows just how much we all love the series.

I could say something eloquent about community spirit and endurance and what have you, but, essentially, that's what it boils down to: we all love the series.

'Nuff said.