Ice Cream Clouds + Sourdough Envy

Jun 21

Jun 21 Ice Cream Clouds + Sourdough Envy

What’s up!

Blogging

I’m starting to post here with more consistency. I like it.

Time between posts (2 ago): 45 days
Time between posts (1 ago): 24 days
Time between posts (this post): 22 days

Making a blog post is strong evidence that I’m generally doing well and have been happy and productive. I’m not trying to post as often as possible, but tracking the gaps between posts still indicates something to me. Once every 3 weeks feels like a good place to try and stabilize.

Working out

Recent workout data:

Two streaks ago was 46 days, from 3/27 - 5/11. This ended due to attending a wedding in SF.
One streak ago was 22 days, from 5/17 - 6/7. This started once I got back from the wedding in SF, and ended once I again had to leave town, this time for a bachelor party in Cleveland.
The current streak is 7 days, from 6/13 - present.

Game Dev

Game dev is on the same streak pattern that fitness is. I took time off while in SF and Cleveland, but other than that I’ve been at it daily. The new minimum hours a day I ‘have to’ work on the game for it to count toward the streak is 1.5 hours (up from one hour).

The biggest addition to the game for this post is our dream sequence now has a new background. Here’s what the level looks like with the background running.

And here’s a still frame where you can see each of the individual pieces that make up the background:

Reviewing what we have here….

The Chipwich, top left. You can tell that this is a chipwich, specifically, due to the sides being covered in chocolate chips. Something like a Toll House cookie sandwich doesn’t feature those side chips.
Cherry dipped soft serve cone, top right. Your low-grade soft serve place will have vanilla, chocolate, or twist. Medium range will have chocolate dipped cones available, which form a hard shell over the soft serve. The places that are the real deal however will also have cherry dipped cones, which are my soft serve fav.
Strawberry shortcake ice cream popsicle thing, middle. This one visually looks the least like the real thing. I might take another pass at it eventually. The real thing has those little crumbles covering it…it’s not a smooth ice cream. I most associate these with the candlepin bowling alley my extended family owns back in Massachusetts. The alley always had an ice cream vending machine that offered these.
Ice cream sammy, bottom left. Just your classic ice cream sammy.
Choco taco - bottom middle. As far as premium products from the ice cream truck go, the choco taco was near the top. If my memory serves, as a kid the chipwich was an even dollar, the top priced item in the truck. The choco taco was second, at $0.75. As of this writing, the Choco Taco was discontinued by its owner Klondike. If I make enough money making this video game, I will at least kick the tires on a private equity move for the choco taco brand. Stay tuned.
Creamsicle, bottom right. Owned by the same company that owns the Strawberry shortcake bar from #3. If ‘creamsicle’ is offered as a flavor of something, I will heavily consider ordering it.
Generic ice cream cone, middle right. Added this in but it’s a bit meh.

Elevating the Chipwich

Here you can see my version 1.0 of the chipwich, versus the final version on the right. I rarely make an effort to save in-progress versions of stuff, but I kind of want to change that, since it’s nice to see your own progress with an art piece. I happened to send this side-by-side comparison to Erika, so it got preserved.

The left is flatter, while the right is put on an angle that makes it seem more 3d. Also the chocolate chips in the cookie itself where changed. In v 1.0 the chips in the cookie have a precise spacing / pattern, which real cookies don’t have. The right fixes this and makes more irregular, blockier chips. The chips found along the ice cream side, however, do look okay if they’re evenly spaced and mechanical looking, IMO. In version 1.0 I wanted to have chips on the ice cream, but the lack of contrast between the chips in the cookie and the ice cream made it look weird. With the changes made in 2.0, the side chips returned.

Other, smaller art additions

While the new background is the biggest update, there’s a few other small art additions.

All of this stuff won’t be right next to each other in the game - I’ve just clustered them here for this screenshot. We’ve got:

A giftbox and a trashcan - two items that will be searchable. Both are essentially ‘chests’, though the trash could have nothing useful in it. Both pay homage to the Mother series, where giftboxes and trash cans were always searchable.
Three vending machines - these helped round out the feel of the airport section of the dream world.
Two football players - I had Bud and Lou from Mother 3 in the back of my head when making these two. Bud and Lou were the comedy duo in that game, who themselves were a reference to Abbott and Costello. I picture these two always appearing together and having ‘buddy comedy’. The animal control guys from parks and rec also come to mind.
A trash, recycling, compost setup - these also helped flesh out the feel of the airport, where a standard trash can felt out of place.

New Bread Projects

I’ve done a lot of baking since the last blog post! Three projects are shown here - a wheat sandwich bread in the top photo, rolls below that, and a challah loaf below that.

In terms of skill progression and new baking experiences, the sandwich bread in the top photo was the first loaf I’ve baked that used a ‘preferment’ (like, fermented before-hand). I’m still a novice in the bread world, so take what I say with a grain of salt (fine sea salt mixes better in dough - use that for baking), but here’s my understanding of the term ‘preferment’.

First what it is - it’s when part of your dough has already started to rise in advance (typically a day in advance) of the mixing of the rest of your dough. So when I made the top sandwich loaf, the day before the bake, I mixed flour and water and yeast and let it sit out overnight. The next day, when I went to actually make the sandwich bread, I threw the ‘preferment’, shown below, in and mixed it with the rest of the dough.

So you might think, ‘wow Rob, you must be so excited about this new preferment tech. Look at the weird science goo you’re making! omg.’

The real life experience is….yes and no. All three of the loaves featured in this post used a preferment, and they all came out great. So I am excited about this whole preferment upgrade. But, learning about preferments in the context of gaining bread skills FEELS as much like being on sourdough training wheels as it feels like a satisfying step forward.

Let me elaborate. And again, I’m not a bread expert so this is just based on what I understand so far. But you know when people say they ‘have a sourdough starter’. This basically means they have a bunch of dough with living bacteria and natural yeast in it that they keep alive and occasionally will use a chunk of as the preferment in something they bake.

So that’s the thing. Sourdough is like, the more advanced preferment. From what I understand, deliberately preparing a preferment for one bake happening tomorrow is kind of the training wheels version of maintaining a sourdough starter at home (where your preferment is now permanently living with you). Or maybe a better analogy is the deliberately prepared preferments I’ve been doing are the one-use disposable cup while the sourdough starter is the re-usable bottle.

Or instead of analogies I could just list facts about how the processes differ. Such as:

The deliberately prepared preferment uses store-bought yeast, while the sourdough starter will naturally cultivate yeast from the environment through whatever scientific things bread does. They didn’t teach science at Wharton. Part of what is cool about bread to me is this local nature of it…your sourdough has different bacteria in it than someone somewhere else.
The sourdough starter develops over a long time giving it stronger flavor
You will feel cooler if you have your own sourdough starter and can talk about it at parties
You will have an additional pet if you make a sourdough starter. Pets are good.

So in conclusion, this step up to making preferments has made me jealous of the cool kids who have a sourdough starter. Such is life though - I’m motivated to learn more. I’ve started the process of making a sourdough starter now, so maybe you’ll see it next update.

BYE