Mary Rose Cook

1. Players stand in a circle, each an arm’s length apart from their neighbours.

2. Someone shouts, “One! Two! Three! Ninja!”

3. On, “Ninja!”, the players adopt a ninja-like pose and remain still.

4. The person who counted everyone in now makes their first move. Their aim is to use their hand to touch the hand of another player, thus killing them. The player’s move must be made in one smooth motion. They may only take one a maximum of one step. The player being attacked may move their upper body in defence.

5. The next player then makes their move, and so on around the circle.

A video of one of the games we played at the Bocoup offices:

About a week ago, Kanen Flowers interviewed me on his show, Scruffy Thinking. I am very honoured. We talked about my latest record, using emacs, Pistol Slut, Kanen’s alien snuff movie, BBEdit, dressing like a teenaged boy and landing in Bangkok for a two day layover and only finally leaving a year and a half later. To listen, go to the Scruffy Thinking podcast on iTunes. Here is a post about the show on the Scruffy Thinking site.

I got interviewed on The Setup and, in doing so, wrote a love letter to emacs.

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A few months ago, I released my new record, 10997. I put it out as a CD-R and gave copies to friends and to people who emailed me. I was reluctant to make it downloadable because the lyrics are about stuff that was current affairs. Now, however, that’s not really true, so stream and download away.

The first version of the artificial intelligence code that controlled the enemies in Pistol Slut, my 2D platform shooter, was a nightmare thicket of if statements. Fortunately, someone told me about behaviour trees, and, after reading half of an excellent article about their implementation in Halo 2, I rewrote the Pistol Slut AI code as a hierarchical state machine. To do this, I made a little JavaScript library called Machine.js that implemented a generic behaviour tree. This code is open source, like all of the code I write in my spare time, but, today, I broke it out into its own library and released it as a separate project. This should make it easier for other people to reuse.

Go to the Machine.js home page to get the code and read a tutorial.

And, in case you are interested, here is the entire behaviour tree for the enemies in Pistol Slut:

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I’ll be speaking at JSConf in Portland on 2nd May. I’m very excited. I will talk about Pistol Slut. Specifically: fakery, artificial intelligence, collision detection and falling in love.

I have finished my new record. It has four songs: Argentina, Somaliland, Barcelona and Nicaragua. I recorded it on my phone in the kitchen of my apartment in Berlin. You can listen to and download it here.

Update: I gave a newer version of this talk at JSConf US 2011. See the slides.