this is a legitimate way to design a roller coaster.

Okay so I took the rough track design I had for the THEM! coaster I sketched and tried to (sort of) re-create it using Roller Coaster Tycoon.

So I'm already hitting some design problems. I'm not quite sure of what the acceptable number of lateral Gs is, but as far as vertical Gs go, I'm pretty sure astronauts take 4 Gs during liftoff and I'm skirting dangerously close to that number.

The lateral Gs mostly come into play in the turns right after the first drop and are a bit more intense than I thought they'd be. The whole idea of the first drop was that, at the end of the lift hill a giant ant animatronic would come out and "attack" the cart, causing the driver to slam the gas pedal to the floor and kind of careening off into a dark passage.

Then the "convoy" falls out of the incomplete onramp in an "oh shi--" sort of moment and you plummet into the ant hive, where you kind of careen about avoiding more giant ants

The problem here is that the first drop works great (like I expected it to), but then it builds up a lot of speed. The ant hive bit is supposed to have a lot of tight turns to kind of add that frantic feeling that you're in a really bad place.

-BUT-

Tight turns with high speeds means high G-forces. From a story perspective, the ant colony HAS to come right after "Here we are heading to the rescue oh crap" bit, but from a design perspective, it might be a little too intense.

the RCT way of doing things would mean that I just add brakes to the bottom of the first hill, but if this thing were to actually be made, that would make no sense at all. So it might be that the underground ant hive I originally envisioned will have to be indoor and above ground in a kind of sound stage, which means I'll have to re-think the opening "oh here we are going to the rescue oh crap" bit.


I think otherwise, this just looks sloppy, now that I see it laid out.



...wait a minute I just used a video game to be productive WHAT IS WRONG WITH ME


oh also it's my birthday today! Woo!

Unwarranted Feedback

Being that I am the "critique judge" (i.e. I am going to write walls of texts for entrants in an attempt to try and help them improve their skills) for the upcoming Tournament of Flash Artists being hosted on Newgrounds, I started writing some stuff for Adam Witt/Nitwitt, the tournament's manager(?)


http://munchymedia.com/feedback/

The name of the column(?) is "Unwarranted Feedback" because that's what I feel like I'm doing, giving artists unwarranted, completely subjective feedback on how to improve their work. We'll see how things go, but I have a feeling that a lot of these guys are going to be way better than me.

:3

It was then that he got on one knee, looked her in the eye, and said the magic words:






...well, most of them

(LOL REFERENCE HUMOR)

My beef with Flash cs5

I have to say, some of the UI design decisions made for Flash cs5 are pretty frickin' dumb. For example:



In order to work fast, I need fast access to adjusting the tools. Again, I usually work with lines from .5 to 10, so I really do appreciate the ability to go extra fine. And while it's cool that I can make a line 200 px (or whatever their measurement) is thick, I really don't need the slider to go all the way up like that. In fact, if I want to make a line 2 px (or whatever.) thick, it either takes me forever to pinpoint the spot on the slider or I need to type it in, which takes a lot longer than adjusting the slider (especially if I need to constantly transition from holding a stylus to typing).



Oh and by the way, the default way to select colors is by the red value. Yes, you can switch it and it's dandy that you can do that, but it makes no frickin' sense as to why it's on by default (really, can you make any sense of this color picker?)



I can rant and rave about how much this UI is terrible, and yes, some of it can be attributed to me not being used to the layout, but a lot of it is just bad design decisions, as if they're trying to make Flash look like something it's not, which in turn makes my work flow slower