My cat is a turning into a fierce hunter.
Every evening he sits in the grass waiting for his pray.
It’s been raining today, so the likelihood of him being successful is high.
I hear meowing at the back door. It’s what he does after a successful hunt.
I brace myself for the enviable, opening the door slowly.
He has been successful again.
Unfortunately for my cat Frank (who suffers from Myasthenia Gravis), the prey is another worm.
This one’s quite big though, Franks skills are improving.
“Awwww” I say, and give him that look.
You know the one, the one with the crooked fake smile.
The worm is currently full speed trying to escape – weirdly unharmed.
Frank now content , he has fulfilled his obligation of feeding us this evening, disappears back into the grass again.
His meows of pride communicate his hunting prowess.
I put the worm round the side of the house in the plants.
I have no idea why he is hunting worms.
Maybe he’s catching them to lure birds.
Maybe he’s practicing before he moves up a hunting division.
Maybe he’s just a little slow.
I remember working in the operations team and learning to code. I made a calculator app and showed it to the developers.
They made the same “awww” sound I made for Frank and his worm
I eventually ended up making and releasing a bunch of games but I always felt like I was punching above my division.
I am drawn back to when I had a game where I wanted to make the pigeon look towards the brick you threw at its head.
Low and behold, all those times I ignored my maths teacher banging on about pi equations and angles, I needed that skill more than ever.
There is lot of angle and circle calculations needed to have eyeballs move in the direction of a pixel brick.
There is also loads of maths to work out game-time equations so you can slow the action and have a projected orthogonal camera zoom into the avian panic stricken face.
I was unable to solve many of these on my own, thankfully stack overflow came to the rescue and I could take snippets from other people who hadn’t flunked maths
Fast forward to more recent time and I have decided to see how far AI has come with games development (in my limited capacity).
In the course of a few hours, I had managed to make a custom game just for me.
It’s missing the creative polish, but the underlying game architecture was a simple prompt.
I have loads of ideas and those are normally curbed by my limited ability to execute the how.
This seems to have largely been removed with AI advancements.
I’ve even been able to use AI to take complex computer vision datasets and implement eye tracking and measurement tooling.
Something I would have said impossible even 2 years ago.
10 years ago, It took me weeks to implement a game state handler system for screens and animations. Now its just added in as part of an agent developing your game system – “awwwww”.
Given the current software trends, a full game is an “awwww”.
Hell, even writing Adobe apps is now an “awwww”
https://getartcraft.com/
What is that “awwww” after all?
People don’t paint to become famous artists,
Play sports to become famous athletes,
Play instruments to become famous musicians.
So perhaps when frank brings me another worm,
I should be less sorry for him, and more excited for what it means for him.
After all, some people start on worms.
awwwwww
Here’s some pigeon footage
I didn’t do the animation, sound or visuals, thats was the talented Mr Scott Castles – check him out.
