Names and titles

Being such an indecisive person, I'm surprised I was able to come up with a blog title that I liked.  And well I do like this one.  "The Words of a Self-Proclaimed Genius."  It sounds pretty big, pretty epic.  And, it mixes in one of the things I love to point out.  See, at first glance, one might think that a title like that is something an arrogant person would come up with.  But, I think that that would be making an unjustified conclusion without fully considering everything.  The joke is that the term self-proclaimed generally implies that other people don't feel the same way.  It made sense to arrogantly call yourself a genius, or to have other people doubtingly refer to you as a self-proclaimed genius, but what did it mean to call yourself a self-proclaimed genius?  At the very least, it showed an awareness of the fact that not everyone would necessarily think of the speaker as a genius.  So, it could be interpreted as, "Maybe some people think I'm just calling myself a genius, but I think I'm an actual genius."  Or maybe it could be seen as, "Even though I'm calling myself a genius, I don't think I'm an actual genius.  I know I'm nothing more than a self-proclaimed genius."  Or it could be anything in between.  It could even be nothing more than a cool sounding example of something that could easily be misinterpreted.  An illustration of the mistakes that could possibly occur when one is to quick to judge, and even the variety of valid interpretations that can make an accurate judgement difficult despite a careful consideration.  Yeah, it could be all that and more.  What was it actually intended to imply?  I dunno. Who knows?

You might also be wondering why I chose DdRMaSTeRDan as my Youtube name.  Well, it's because at the time I picked the name I was utterly convinced that I was the best DDR player in the world.  There's actually a short story behind it.  A friend of mine came over when I first got Mario Kart DS, and before I tried playing online for the first time, he put a name in for me.  The name he put was DdRMaSTeR.  So, a long while later when I was about to create a Youtube account but had no idea what I wanted as my name (I'm not very good at coming up with names, as you can see from the name of this blog), I figured, "Hey, why not use that name my friend put in my DS, with 'Dan' added at the end?"  And so I did.  And then when I had to create forum names for various forums, I thought, "Why not use the same thing, or something similar?"  The problem was that people would get a certain impression from the name DdRMaSTeR, and they might not read carefully enough or stay around long enough to notice the things that hinted that that first impression might be wrong.  So, I began to use DdR_Dan instead.
I don't particularly like that name though.  Eventually, I might start going by a different name.  Maybe Regened.  It kind of sounds like I'd be new and improved then, you know.  Regen(erat)ed.  And it also kind of sounded like something else.  You could pronounce it so it sounded like レジェンド.

Pipelining Analysis

Well I ended up making that one game during winter break.  If you don't know what it is, here's an overview of it:

First, some design decisions: score formula was 25*[1.25(# of matches)+.5(# of halves)-.25]*chain number.  Looking back, I'd have liked to increase the bonus for more matches (as is, it's 1.00 for a single match and then +1.25 for every extra simultaneous match; I was thinking something like 1.00, 1.25, 1.5, ...), but considering that the entire fan base for the game would be upset if the scoring changed now because of all the high scores being set with the original scoring, I'm not going to change it.  Also, the bomb piece wasn't originally planned as a part of the game.  You could then be stuck with unplayable pieces, and I would just say too bad, set your pieces better or something.  But, in the end, I think the bomb was a nice addition.  Not only can it open up unplayable sections, but it also helps deal with unlucky piece distributions.

As for the game, I think the graphics are all right.  Not amazing but not bad, which is fine by me, I wanted to make a game, not draw a picture.  I find myself humming the music in my head occasionally, so I guess that's good too.  I do like the voices, and not just because I made half of them.  The game itself can actually be fun for anyone who enjoys games like this.  See, Blockmania was a 3 in a row game with 4 colors and only single blocks, so if you put each color in a separate column, you never fill up and the game's pointless.  It only got interesting if you were into making long chains.  This game isn't like that; it has it's difficulty.  The game also gets harder as time goes on: at first you only need to drop 6 blocks to get a starter drop, but if you play long enough, you won't get more drops until after placing 20 blocks.  The pieces also fall faster.

In battle mode, you send 1 garbage block for every 200 points.  Garbage is cleared by exploding a piece next to a garbage block.  Now, the questions I have are how well this system works when 2 people are playing without any knowledge of deep strategies and how this system affects the optimum strategies.  A single half-hearted sample run (no one I knew was very interested in testing out the game) brings up some possible answers.  Maybe, maybe garbage can be cleared really easily?  Maybe?  It might be the case that the game drags out because most players will have trouble sending a ton of garbage without knowing any strategies?  Which would be all right because the game isn't too easy.  This might happen because you can clear like 20 blocks and only send 12 garbage blocks or so, and then if the opponent can make a match they might be able to get rid of most of that.  However, it could also be possible that someone wins with a big match usually.  It's also possible that garbage isn't really that easy to clear, it only gets cleared quickly if you have a buried match and dig down to it, which I think is what happened in the only somewhat evenly matched game between new players ever played.
And I can only guess what high level play would be like.  But, at least I can guess.  I guess I have a lot of guesses.