Karen McMullan

Some years ago, I decided that I wanted a fitness app to exist that didn’t.

Meeting a weekend or two a month for over a year at the very excellent Mantra Coffee House in Azusa, my friend Tim Handley (a game designer and programmer) and I chipped away at making a Unity app that would allow me to create customizable workouts down to:

1. Which exercises
2. What order
3. How many sets of each exercise
4. How many reps in each set
5. Detailed rep breakdown
   • Each rep with a 4-step structure: a hold at the top, negative (eccentric) movement, a hold at the bottom, a positive (concentric) movement.
6. Rest durations between sets and exercises
7. Runtime voice over – vocalized step cues, counts, rest timers
8. Save/Load functionality

This was the MVP feature set for my personal use.

Continue reading “FitnessApp Update”

I recently got a spam message comment to a blog post and usually I just flush them, but this one was from Murnald Terry.

Murnald.

I can’t even begin to describe how much I love this name. It’s going to make it into some creation, a game, a story, something.

MURNALD.

It’s World Kidney Day. Not a day that I’d ever heard of (until actually today, in fact). And not a day I’d normally pay much attention to, except that in early February, I donated a kidney to my friend, Jen. 

I haven’t talked about it publicly (READ: on social media) because I don’t super like being a focus of attention and for a long time – several months – it wasn’t even clear if I would be able to donate.

Continue reading “Oh, the Places You’ll Go!”

In 2019, I saw a Game Design position posted at robotics company Embodied, Inc. The company was in stealth mode, so I couldn’t tell much about what they were doing, but I was intrigued. I applied, interviewed, and got the gig!

There was no way to know what an adventure was ahead of me.

Continue reading “It Takes Moxie”

The Challenge: Swift Movement + Platforming + Light Narrative

Create a brisk Sonic-like level with double jump, leaning heavily on horizontal platforming, but including vertical elements, loops, branches, vistas, and a touch of narrative.

In a week. Play it here.

Even though there’s no falling damage, crossing that arch still makes me sweat.

Continue reading “SWIFTHEART: A Level Design Challenge”

Sometimes Unity makes me sad. So very sad…

Create. Empty. Child.

/weeps

Itch.io is an indie game portal and there’s some really great stuff going on there. I made a creator account and will be uploading the platformer games I made for my Level Design classes.

I’ve decided to rebuild Mustachio again, so it’ll be a bit while I add that to the projects I’m juggling. I haven’t messed with Mustachio in a while! Seeing all those assets again was like visiting old friends. <3

Photonica is uploaded. Check it out!

 

2017 was ‘The Year of Trying Things.’

I had no idea what a great title that was when I wrote it. I tried things and there were trying things. There were wonderful trips and concerts and shows. But there were awful things seemingly everywhere. Natural disasters. Unsettling revelations. A year of whiplash.

For starters, a quick review of the items on last year’s list.

Things I Tried: Continue reading “2018 Development Goals”

The strength training that I do is taxing and concentrating on form is what takes most of my focus. With dozens of workouts stacked up in memory, sometimes I lose track of where I am in sets during a workout, particularly as volume has increased. Was that the 5th set? Sometimes I think an abacus would help, but have settled on using little tags of painter’s tape lined up on a shelf in my garage (where I work out). I move them back and forth as I finish sets.

In strength training, I usually do only a few exercises per workout, but as many as 10 sets, depending on the exercise. My warmups and mobility routines have a lot more exercises. It was a lot to keep track of, so I created Continue reading “FitnessApp Begins”

The World of Obora

I have long suspected that the boardgame Small World, with it’s wild juxtapositions, would make a terrific way to randomly generate a history for a game world.

As a hands-on exercise in my Worldbuilding class, we played a game of Small World on our lunch breaks to do just that. I need a game world just now, so this is timely!

It worked even better than I could have hoped.

Continue reading “Worldbuilding with Small World”