The picks this week all involve a group of friends dealing with a supernatural foe. While the premise of each is different, they share similar tones and pay homage to 80's era horror.

Games:

• Oxenfree - A group of friends are tormented by a supernatural presence on an abandoned island. Fun, engaging, and only takes a few hours to play through.

Movies:

• It Follows - A girl is hunted by an unstoppable shape-shifting creature. Good execution of …

NOTE: This is an update to a previous post.

Okay, it's been a while since the last post on this topic. Since then, I've switched from using the original AsciiDoc utility to Asciidoctor. This along with some minor tweaking has changed how my task lists look.

Here is the basic structure:

= My Task List

[NOTE]
========
.Category Tags
[horizontal]
`code`::
    Code related tasks.
`doc`::
    Documentation related tasks.
========

== Current Tasks
.Updated 2017-01-06
********
NOTE: Arranged by priority.

  - [ ] `2017-01-05 …

The Youngstown Game Developers had our second annual game jam this past weekend. It was a great time and I learned a ton. It had been several months since doing any game dev stuff so I did spend a fair amount of time relearning Unity.

During the keynote, we were advised to avoid games with common mechanics like jumping. So of course I made a game about... jumping in the dark! Yeah, I know, not …

This week's pick is a legend of the video game industry: Jesse Schell.

Companies:

• Schell Games - Jesse founded this Pittsburgh based company in 2002. It is the largest game studio in Pennsylvania. They make great games like Enemy Mind and I Expect You To Die.

Podcasts:

• The Debug Log, Episode 50, The Art Of Game Design With Jesse Schell - Excellent interview with Jesse covering topics inspired by his book.

Videos:

• April Fools' Game Jam Keynote …

Couple of random podcast episodes for this round of picks.

Podcasts:

• CppCast, 13 March 2017, emBO++ With Odin Holmes - Good discussion of how C++ is evolving in the embedded systems field.
• Embedded FM, Episode 190, Trust Me I'm Right - Great interview with the creator of Compiler Explorer. Smart guy with an interesting background.
• How I Built This, 13 March 2017, 5 Hour Energy - Interview with the founder, he is not what I expected. Super humble …

Ciao friends! Been a while since the last "weekly" picks but here are some to help you learn a new (spoken) language.

Software:

• Anki - Great flashcard application! Lots of pre-made decks available to help build vocab.

Websites:

• Duolingo - Free and amazing language learning site. The mobile app is quite good too.
• Forvo - Not sure how a word is supposed to be pronounce? Forvo's got your back!
• Google Translate - Essential for those unknown words!

In a previous post, I was kicking around some ideas for updating a pet project of mine called Doctrine. Here's a quick update on the progress of the second iteration of the project.

I decided to go the JavaScript/Electron route. Electron is easy to work with, it does what is expected (usually) and haven't run into too many surprises. The functionality of Doctrine2 is coming together nicely and I hope to make the code …