Testing

I'm testing something for Godfinger really quickly.

Posted on: 2010-05-27 02:33:20

Factory dead... and go through warp!

Factory Games died about a week ago. I'm out looking for jobs and have had good responses so far.

Here's a fun little thing I made for a job app:

Posted on: 2010-03-09 12:57:51

Valet Hustle site

Oh yeah, and don't forget Valet Hustle's website. I did all the code for it.

http://www.valethustle.com/

Posted on: 2010-03-02 17:17:13

Valet Hustle on the app store!

This was silly of me; it took me several days to even post Valet Hustle on here, and I posted it pretty much everywhere else. What can I say, I'm not really an avid blogger.

http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/valet-hustle/id352179893?mt=8

Posted on: 2010-03-02 17:15:55

Never done

I always seem to say we're almost done with our iPhone game and then two months later I make another post saying the same thing... hm, well it looks like it might actually be real this time. Cross your fingers.

Supposedly we give it to Apple on Monday. We'll see...

Posted on: 2010-01-15 18:12:10

Still working on our game...

We're still working on our super awesome iPhone game, but we're at the home stretch! All the levels are in, most of the polish is in too, just adding a few things, fixing a few things, etc.

Posted on: 2009-10-13 17:16:30

Crunch month

This is the last month before we release our iPhone game, so it's super hectic. Yay! That's all.

Posted on: 2009-06-12 20:07:07

Twitter

I went and got a Twitter account. I don't know if anyone will be interested or if I will ever update it, but you can take a look:

crumpleskins

My usual internet name "demonpants" was taken by some lamer who hasn't ever logged in or done anything. Lame! Could have actually been me a long time ago and I just don't remember, who knows. Anyway, crumpleskins is my backup name and I like that too. So yeah have a look.

Posted on: 2009-04-21 02:43:48

LD14

I actually ended up making a crappy game in 8 hours for LD14. You can see the page here:
http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/?category_name=ld14&author_name=demonpants

Also I finally got the video for A Lasting Impression up on Youtube. You can see the limelapse here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8GMAG2Krl4U

Oh yeah and the timelapse for Too Heavy for Re-Entry:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CGy94EFjw1k

Hooray?

Posted on: 2009-04-20 15:21:30

Hellooo

A random and short post. Raw Meat Games is coming along well, we're releasing our first game probably in July. It's an iPhone game. Buy it and I will be happy (I'll post more details and links when we're actually near release time). I'm actually the programmer lead on the project, which is pretty cool. Also, there is now an ad embedded somewhere secret on this site, maybe you can find it. It pays almost for the cost of my web host, so that'll be nice for me.. one less expense to worry about.

I was going to do Ludum Dare #14 but I decided I didn't want to stay in all weekend programming, considering that I program like 40-50 hours a week already (and that's already on games). I've lost most of my motivation to work on my own projects. Maybe next time...

Posted on: 2009-04-18 21:19:30

Spoo4k

I made an entry for the 4k game competition. Check it out.

Play in Applet

Play in Webstart

The sound got a little messed up somewhere along the way, but it works well enough.

Posted on: 2009-01-09 18:04:05

Back to work

I've returned from Christmas vacation, so now it's back to work. I just discovered that the Java4k competition ends on January 31st, not the 1st as I previously thought. That still gives me a chance to make an entry or two, although obviously they won't be official because I'm judging the competition. Even so, I'd like to take a crack at the whole 4k thing.

Posted on: 2009-01-02 15:42:32

Engaged!

I got engaged to my girlfriend on the top of Sunrise Peak in Arizona, a 3,000-foot high mountain here. Everything worked out well and I don't think it could have gone better.

So, obviously she said yes!

Posted on: 2008-12-29 12:21:09

Ludum Dare 13 Results

The results are in, and I was pretty much exactly where I had expected. There were 59 people in the contest.

I was 14th overall. 1st in food. 2nd in journal. 10th in humor (got a lot of 1s here, though). 12th in sound. 16th in fun. 17th in graphics. 18th in technical. 20th in \"towlr.\" 23rd in polish. 24th in innovation. 26th in theme.

Not bad. Hopefully there will be a theme that is more interesting to me next time.

Posted on: 2008-12-21 23:43:13

No Retro Remakes

I'm gone tomorrow and it's late tonight and I don't have a complete game for Retro Remakes, even though it's due tomorrow at 4:00 PM PST. I've got a pretty damn impressive tech demo, but not an impressive game. Basically you can fight enemies, run around between levels, do combo hits, create custom weapons, look at fun particle effects... but it's still not a game. It needs a start and an end, and a difficulty curve, etc. etc.

So anyway I'll still be banging away at this because I think it will be a really cool project (especially when it's networked multiplayer), but for now it's got to remain behind the scenes. Bummer dude.

Go play my Ludum Dare game.

Posted on: 2008-12-13 05:08:46

Exproad, Improad, Reroad!

It was the Ludum Dare #13 contest this weekend, and I found some time to put something together. The theme was roads.

Play via Webstart
Info at LD13
Info at JGO

Posted on: 2008-12-08 00:31:29

Deadline extended!

The Retro Remakes deadline was extended a week! Woohoo! Unfortunately that means I might not be doing Ludum Dare #13. Well we'll see... I might need to take a break from break from game programming. (Programming Playing In Traffic for work, programming LCR for Retro Remakes, then maybe programming something else for Ludum Dare. Whew!)

Anyway I think with that extension I'll actually be able to get a good game done. I'm in programming crank out mode right now and the advancements are coming on quick.

Posted on: 2008-12-04 16:31:20

More fun stuff

Well, the end of the contest is coming soon (Saturday) and I guess I've got a decent amount of stuff done to the point where I will have something to turn in. Unfortunately, that something isn't nearly as good as what it could be, but it happens.

I've added in a lot more stuff, like editable weapons, better enemy AI (getting there), multiple factions, and more. I also optimized stuff quite a bit. You can kill like 200 enemies at once before you get any slowdown from all the particles (200 x 15 x 35 = 105,000 particles), and that's including collision algorithms and all that. I don't think the actual game is ever going to host nearly that much.

Anyway, here's a video of what I've done (on Vimeo). Have a look-see.

LCR Dev Diary 2

Posted on: 2008-12-04 16:06:32

Frame rate

I don't know why YouTube made the frame rate of that video so damn awful. This might eat up my bandwidth but whatever.

Posted on: 2008-11-19 16:15:32

Pixel explosions!

Lots of good work has happened on LCR in the past couple of days. I've got really really really basic enemies made, as well as really really really basic attacks and health. I only put those in, however, in order to test out the particle effects that happen when you kill somebody. They are polished, done, and look really cool. Plus there's a basic UI that the pixels fly into when you pick them up. Nifty!

Check it out in this YouTube dev diary video I made:

Posted on: 2008-11-19 15:43:35

LCR Still going...

Yup, still trying to get work done on my game for Retro Remakes. Although spare time and my willingness to spend even more hours programming comes and goes, I'm making fairly steady progress at this point. Tonight I finished creating the basic framework of the game; everything from the model to the controller to the world can communicate in a basic fashion. More important than that, however, is that the back-end for all the different utility stuff is a good ways through. I've got a pretty complicated utility that rips variable sized sprite sheets very quickly in there, allowing me to save gads of memory I would otherwise lose if I had every single image separate like I usually do. Absolutely all of the character's actions are currenly in one 8kb sheet that takes milliseconds to load into multiple (77 to be exact) OpenGL sprites on startup.

I've also got animations and animation sets in play, which are working just fine. They're all stored in a map so it's really easy for the controller to simply say 'unit.setAnimation("Punch");' and then he'll start punching. Because it's also state-based, however, it will automatically keep lower priority animations from interrupting higher priority ones. As such, the controller constantly tells the unit to do his idle stance, but because it has a very low priority it will only play if nothing else is.

One cool thing I've also added in is the NES color palette, verbatim. When a sprite sheet is scanned, it's automatically converted to its nearest NES neighbor colors. This is important both for getting the right nostalgic feel but also to fit my game's unique hook, which I'll describe below.

Maybe you noticed, but the title of this post was LCR, not RCR. That wasn't a typo. I'm entering this into the 8-bit mashups sections of the Retro Remakes competition. As such, there's got to be something mashed with the RCR part of the game... which is LEGO's. I'm taking a bit of liberty here because although there are indeed 8-bit LEGO games, they all suck balls and don't really contain the buildable functionality I'm lifting. That would probably fit more the with the more recent LEGO Star Wars games by Traveler's Tales. However, I'm positive that I'm still within the rules for the competition, so all is well.

So... LEGO's and RCR. Together they become LEGO City Ransom. That's right, the levels will all be built out of blocks. Unlike most (all?) LEGO games where you play as LEGO men inside a world of proportionally-sized LEGO blocks, you'll be playing as a human-sized person inside a world with normal-sized LEGO's. That is, every pixel in the game represents a unique LEGO. But, your people are made up of LEGO's... so when you kill a baddie they explode into a shower of pixels, basically like an 8 bit particle effect. These pixels directly reflect the coloration of the guy you beat up, and you can run over them to pick them up and place them in your inventory. All currency, experience, etc. is actually different colored LEGO blocks.

There are 64 colors on the NES, and something like 58 if you take away the extra copies of black. That means that in my game there are 58 different types of LEGO blocks. Some will increase your stats, some will regain lost health, some will let you buy stuff from the store, some can be shot onto the level like graffiti... but most importantly, they can all be used to customize your character and his gear. In the original River City Ransom, there was something like 8 different weapons you could pick up and then wield. In LEGO City Ransom, there are infinite. Because you'll be getting so many pixels/blocks, adding different attributes to your weapon will cost lots of blocks, and almost all weapons will break frequently. As such, you'll constantly be spending more blocks to rebuild your weapons, and/or you'll be seeking out those super rare blocks that make your weapons stronger or even unbreakable.

So that's the idea. Can I finish all this by December 6th? Definitely not. But, I think I can easily get a basic RCR clone done that has at least like 5 different colors of blocks and the ability to make customizable weapons. Either way it'll be fun getting there!

I'd also like to add that I want to get this thing online multiplayer at some point...

Here's a screenshot of what's going on right now. Look, I'm Alex standing behind Alex! (The background is just a google image search result, obviously.) Currently you can walk, run, stand, punch, and kick.

Posted on: 2008-11-17 03:51:28

OpenGL Stress Tests

I moved my little stress test application to OpenGL and the results are absolutely ridiculous.

Java2D Results:
- In a window of size 300 x 300 with 20 entities flying around, 50 fps.
- In a window of size 1024 x 768 with 20 entities flying around, 20 fps.
- In a window of size 300 x 300 with 100 entities flying around, 10 fps.

OpenGL Results:
- In a window of size 1024 x 768 with 20 entities flying around, 60 fps (at least, I was limiting it at 60).
- In a window of size 1024 x 768 with 1000 entities flying around, 60 fps.
- In a window of size 1024 x 768 with 5000 entities flying around, 20 fps.

So if you're counting that means that at the point where the FPS of OpenGL matches the FPS of Java2D there are 250 times more entities flying around. Holy motherfreaking crap sticks. 250:1? Either I am doing something way way wrong with Java2D or it is just completely pitifully awful.

But at least I've determined that there is no way in hell doing this in OpenGL is ever going to be any sort of problem. Which makes sense because what I'm doing was originally done on the freaking NES. Maybe when JavaFX comes out they'll have some sort of vector/image rendering that doesn't completely blow.

1000 entities on OpenGL:

5000 entities on OpenGL:

Posted on: 2008-11-06 03:50:17

OpenGL

I just messed around with it a bit more and, in conclusion, Java2D is teh suck. I'm going to make yet another app in LWJGL. Oh well. I think I can generate new textures on the fly to deal with problem #1 that I posted below.

Posted on: 2008-11-05 04:15:25

Retro remake stress test

Well I did a bit of work tonight on my game for Retro Remakes, and basically I've got a very basic game loop running that draws a bunch of randomized pixel images to the screen, rotates them and makes them fly all around. This is put to the backdrop of a screenshot from the original River City Ransom.

I pretty much need to do this because Java2D is just so damn awful at optimization. If you are putting any amount of images out then it will get a really bad FPS. I've got a pretty good machine and I'm getting only around 40 fps when I've got 100 images flying around. With smaller images or less I can get 60, but even so I'm not too happy with what I'm seeing so far. It seems every game I end up making has to be OpenGL.

I'm shying away from OpenGL for two reasons: 1 is that I would like to work directly with image buffers because of one of the more interesting aspects to my game (I won't say what it is yet), and the other is because I want to be able to run this in an applet without forcing people to click a trust button. In the original RCR you would have maybe 10 characters on the screen at once with 10 weapons. That's only 20 things aside from the background, but I'm obviously wanting to add a few more special effects as well as online play (eventually).

So it may turn out that I go to OpenGL. I predict that if I do I see around 200 or 300 fps, at the very least.

Posted on: 2008-11-05 04:08:32

Alive!

Yes, I'm still alive! I'm working in San Francisco as a professional video game programmer, and doing so has eaten up almost all of my hobby programmer time. We're working on a really kickass game which I will be able to announce sometime in the nearish future. Also, the company is called Raw Meat Games, or RMG for short.

I'm still planning on entering the Retro Remakes competition, making a combination of River City Ransom and oldschool 8-bit LEGO games. It should be awesome, although I still haven't started it. I'll light that fire under my butt soon enough.

Posted on: 2008-11-04 14:09:13

2 Entrants

Because of timing, bad sprite sheet, and more, JGO Comp only got 2 entrants. Still, both games are cool and if anything good resulted from it then that's something.

My entry is called A Lasting Impression as previously mentioned, and you know the story. I'll just link to the webstart: Play here.

The other game is called End of Daisies. Play here. "Grow your army but don't get hit by the falling bombs. Click with the left and right mouse buttons to move your troops."

Unfortunately the sprite sheet and timing seemed to put most people off, but it was still a fun time.

Posted on: 2008-08-26 14:29:58

JGO Comp 2008

Well, I started a game competition for Java Gaming and that's been underway most of today. Even though about 12 hours of the 84 hour period have gone by, I've only programmed about 3 of them. Too many things going on today. But, those 3 hours went very well and I've already got the game loop, drawing functionality, and physics programmed and ready to go. I haven't gotten mouse interaction working perfectly yet, but it's almost done.

I've also been very busy on the job front, with interviews from all over the place all of a sudden. It's great to be desired and it looks as if I'll be able to choose from a number of places, which will be very beneficial for me.

Dominux is obviously on hold, but... who cares about it, anyway? I'll finish it eventually.

Oh, and my check out JGO Comp 2008, and take a look at it. If you're a developer, there is still plenty of time to get a great product made. Because the two themes are apocalypse and white picket fence, my game is all about making the best atomic bomb outlines on the side of a lovely pre-apocalyptic suburban neighborhood. It's titled, "A Lasting Impression," and I think it's one of most clever titles and game topics to date. Hopefully the actual execution will work well - I haven't really thought too much about it. I have a general idea and I think I'll just spend the last day tweaking until it seems fun.

Posted on: 2008-08-22 23:51:43

Status

Most of my time has been spent applying for jobs and doing challenge programming assignments for them. I realized during one that I really need to brush up my skills in C++; but that's neither here nor there.

Dominos is at a standstill for the moment, mostly because I am furiously applying for work and also because my mother is visiting right now, and it would probably be rude to start programming while she's here. :-P

I'm anxious to start on Voodoo Vendetta and in order to do that I've got to finish Dominux, so don't worry on it.

In other news, I recently discovered that my mailing program is inexplicably no longer working. It's incredibly simple and has worked plenty of times before. I'm guessing that my ISP (Namecheap) turned off the sendmail program again - I had this problem when I first purchased by website. I've sent them an email to fix the problem.

Posted on: 2008-08-18 14:04:49

Resume updated

I've updated my resume, which was long overdue. I was sending out a significantly more revised version to employers but had never updated the website. Now all is well.

Posted on: 2008-08-12 18:56:53

Booooring...

Phew, I never realized how boring it is to program a game like Dominos. All of the technical questions you need to answer are stupid ones, like where and how the user should click for each Domino. Also, because I'm allowing up to 20 or 30 points per side on my Dominos (a user-controlled number, basically), I had to figure out a systematic way to draw the dots. Doing so was surprisingly irritating. I've got that working, and most of the initial source code done, but I still haven't even run it, so I'm sure there's plenty to change.

Posted on: 2008-08-11 19:32:38

Dominux

I started working on Dominos, decided to name it "Dominux" because that sounds sort of cool or something.I realized that I don't really care too much about the game of Dominos, but I'm making it anyway. The potential trap of programming something you don't care about is that you go away from it in order to play Final Fantasy Tactics.

Certainly the game might have certain alluring qualities of its own, but in any case, Dominux will be on its merry way soon enough.

It's also sort of maddening not having a job or school or anything else. I'm very good at getting work done independently, but I frequently have the feeling of, "oh man, isn't there something I'm putting off right now?" And then there isn't. I literally have nothing I need to do. And it's crazy. How do the retired handle it?

Back to Dominux. I decided to represent the board as a linked list of Domino pieces, which have two number values (like an actual domino), and then up to 4 links to other Dominos. I only need to point to the very first Domino, which helps things along. I'm debating on the most efficient way of storing the networked game objects. The only important Dominos in terms of logic are the leaves - that is, ones that don't have a link. The linked ones obviously don't count towards the total and each person's score. I might be able to streamline the process by only sending the outside Dominos.

Posted on: 2008-08-05 02:40:23

Coming Up

As two preparations for getting Voodoo Vendetta fully off the ground:

1) I'm going to make a version of Dominos for Game Gardens, just to really get my knowledge of the API sound.
2) I'm going to make a game like Dome Wars for Game Gardens. This will get me fully polished on the GG API, and it will also enable me to put my bitmap collision system into a game.

The Dominos should take me a day or two (starting Monday), then the tank game should take another few days. Then I'll start in earnest on Voodoo Vendetta. I don't think that Game Gardens will necessarily be able to handle 8 players who are working simultaneously, but I think I can reduce packet size enough that it could work.

Basically, the Game Object for VV would need to have the positions of all the players and their spells, as well as any geometric changes that have happened to the level. The player and spell positions are pretty tiny and not very demanding (probably at most 20 vectors plus 20 ID integers, so like 320 bytes or so), but the subtractions in level geometry could become pretty darn big. As an alleviation, I'm thinking I will have the server send a change for about 10 timesteps, then will remove the change from the list. The clients will copy the changes into their own personal lists. The only risk here is that if a client lags for a particularly long time it can create asynchrony. In any case, I've got to keep the amount being sent every timestep pretty low, because if I try to demand more than around 1kb/sec/client it will be much to large. I might also limit each player to one spell at a time, which would reduce the maximum objects on screen to 16.

So, that's where my brain is going. If all else fails, I can made VV a turn-based game. That would naturally reduce much of its appeal, but you do what you've got to do.

Posted on: 2008-08-02 13:56:00

Back from Costa

I'm back from Costa Rica, I'm planning on developing Dominos or something for Game Gardens to get back into the swing of things.

Posted on: 2008-08-01 18:23:17

Life, The Universe, and Everything

Well, I haven't updated this page in a couple of weeks, mostly because I don't really have a home right now and I'm all over the place with jobs and applications.

I had training for Adventures Cross Country for 11 days, which was certainly an interesting experience. A lot of fun, a lot of good people, a lot of redundant information... it was still a good way to spend the time. I leave for the trip in the near future, so that will be no updates for a month or so.

I also adapted Sinuosity to Game Gardens, which you can find here: GG Sinuosity. Unfortunately, I received a very cryptic response from Three Rings when I submitted the game as the challenge assignment. It basically went along the lines of: "Sorry, we don't want you." It could have been a big blow to my programming self-esteem (which it was for a few days), because they had seemed very interested in me until they saw my game. But, I soon realized that the real reason was that I hadn't paid total attention to their directions: "Do something that works very well, not something that works okay and is impressive otherwise. Don't spend time on graphics or polish. etc." If you do check out Sinuosity on Game Gardens versus on my site, you'll notice that the Game Gardens version is clunky and with many little bugs. The reason is that I rushed to send it, spending about a week and a half on making the game, and only two days on adapting it to Game Gardens. Still impressive, in my mind, but I didn't follow the directions. A good lesson.

So, I'm looking for other jobs again. It looks like I'll have one, I've got interviews and all that coming up before I leave for Costa Rica. It's likely I'll apply again for Three Rings in the future, but who knows what will happen.

And that's about it. I'll have one more post before I depart North America, so expect that sometime in the future.

Oh, I also created T By 3, which was what I should have turned in as my challenge in the first place. It's incredibly simple (3D Tic Tac Toe with a modifiable board size), but has no bugs at all. Took me less than a day to make it, rather than two weeks. (6 hours versus the 80 hours spent on Sinuosity!) Check it out if you want.

Posted on: 2008-07-07 15:26:50

Sinuosity!

As a challenge assignment for a job, I've spent the past week and half working on a game called Sinuosity, which can be best described as a sort of dungeon crawler / maze solver game. I took a lot of the code I made for Ah, Maze! for the game, so the mazes are quite complex.


You can see that it's got some pretty cool stuff in it. You're a little guy who runs around and goes deeper and deeper into a labyrinth. Why? Who knows? The image above is a picture of a boss fight, which is a giant minotaur.

I'm adapting the game to be online multiplayer right now, and that should be done very soon!

Posted on: 2008-06-08 17:44:50

Graduation and a bit of Voodoo

There obviously hasn't been an update here in a while. The reason for this is that I graduated college last weekend, and so my life is in a busy state of transition. I donated half of my belongings to Salvation Army and packed the other half away to San Francisco, then traveled by car, plane, and train for about 3 days. Now I'm visiting my family in Connecticut.

But I haven't been doing nothing. I've spent a lot of time improving and rewriting Voodoo Vendetta, and I've actually created quite a few advancements. The stroke system and physics system now work perfectly. Collision is still a bit slow, but it shouldn't ever be noticeable on standard sized levels. You can try out the spell system if you want.

Posted on: 2008-05-31 13:59:16

Piers's Words

I found the student employee of the year nomination form I received last year as I pack all my stuff to move out of Redlands. Reading some of the incredible things Piers Britton had to say about my work made me feel all fuzzy inside. :-)

I decided that, just in case I lose this record of events, I should at least get some of the things he said on the website. So, some direct quotes are now within the Kind Words section.

Thanks, Piers!

Posted on: 2008-05-21 18:01:16

All executables added

I have finally included an executable version of every runnable program or game on the website. A lot of these are Java Webstart, some are simple downloads (resulting in a JAR or some other file), and a few can't be run at all for various reasons.

I'm also in the process of adding more fun features to Agent: 00PK and Voodoo Vendetta. In fact, I'm completely remaking V^2 from scratch, mainly because I think a lot of the functionality I had before wasn't too hot. I currently have stroke recognition working perfectly and physics and collision are on their way.

Posted on: 2008-05-18 18:46:39

Agent: 00PK - Big Update

I should have posted this earlier this week, but better late than never. I gave a big update to Agent: 00PK, which everyone should check out.

Here, I'll quote myself: "Robots added. Homing missiles added. Level selector added. Webstart custom level support added. Webstart save file support added. Bug fixes and tweaks. Sound added. Level loading optimized."

Unfortunately it appears Windows doesn't like my file save system (I assume it has something to do with invisible directories), but Mac OS X and Linux owners are in luck. Windows owners can still play the first level, which has all the new features.

Posted on: 2008-05-16 13:37:06

Site Finished

Well, everything is finished, except for a few nitpicks and downloadable versions of some games. However, I made small stub banners to the right (as you can probably see) for some of my more important or better built endeavors, I created the Spacebar/Time Continuum developer's video, and I updated my resume.

The resume update is mostly to improve its readability as well as its accuracy. In a few places, I was even sounding a little bit pretentious, probably. I think it's a lot more professional at this point, so that's very good.

So, a few more webstarts and everything is done. From there, I'll finally be able to get back to what I love: programming my games!

Posted on: 2008-05-05 19:01:39

Portfolio Up

I created the portfolio just now, which was nothing more than copy/pasting half of the apps and games (the better half) and changing the formatting a bit. However, that marks off the last offending section of the site that has absolutely no completion on it. The bar to the right needs to be complete and I need to create the video for the Spacebar game, but pretty soon the site will be complete enough that I'll be able to focus entirely on improving my games.

Posted on: 2008-05-03 02:48:04

Apps Done!

The apps section is finally done. I still need to provide Webstart and downloadable versions of a lot of the games and apps, but I've finally got all the individual page links created.

It occurred to me after making this countless number of separate web pages that I should probably have written a script and made a MySQL DB to handle all of them. After all, the format for each page is incredibly similar - I'm thinking that at some point I'll make that functionality, but for now be content with the fact that everything works. Getting the other stuff done first is a lot more important.

Posted on: 2008-05-03 02:23:59

What I've been doing...

There have been a couple days of silence here, but I've had plenty to do and I've been doing it. I was looking for a screenshot of my maze solver application, and in doing so I ran the code I had. I wasn't impressed. The program was buggy and didn't work well. In order to have something worthy of putting on my portfolio and also to satisfy my thirst for a hack, I reprogrammed the entire thing.

My old version of the maze program required you to create a maze via a text file, and then would solve it (sometimes). My new one creates a random maze using the Drunkard's Walk algorithm, then solves it via either A* or backtracking. Backtracking also can be done recursively or iteratively. Finally, you can hover your mouse over a point and have the path to that point instantly solved. It's all very fun to play around with and worth a look.

In other news, I added a kind words section to the website. It includes direct quotes from people, detailing some of the incredibly endearing compliments I've received. Thanks, everyone!

Posted on: 2008-05-01 22:33:07

Wikid Fun Search and Jario

I added a Webstart version of the Wikid Fun Search, and I've been happy to say that it runs smoothly with little to no issues. There are potential problems with bad socket streams if you play with a lot of players, so I'm adapting it to a massively online MySQL version. That should be done sometime soon, but until then you can play with sockets.

I also added Jario... sort of. I went to create a Webstart for it and discovered that through computer swapping and whatnot I've lost the newer version of the source code. So what I do have is incredibly buggy, and the most recent build of the game sort of works, but has plenty of interesting issues with newer versions of Java. Many sounds, for example, play over and over again in an incredibly painful way. Also, the Level Editor doesn't draw correctly - normally a resize would fix that, but for some dumb reason I decided not to allow resizing in the build I found. So anyway, it's playable, but I've definitely got to spend some time filling in holes to get it back to the point it was.

Hmm, plenty to do, plenty to do. I'll continue putting up Webstart versions of things, and hopefully these next couple of weeks will lead to fixes of these problems I'm encountering.

Posted on: 2008-04-27 05:40:15

Games up

I've just finished putting all of the games up in the games section. Only Agent: 00PK is playable at the moment, but that will soon be remedied when I've exported all those games to Webstart. But hey, it takes a while!

Anyway, I'll be adding the apps tomorrow, and there will probably be two or three games that are webstart-able.

Posted on: 2008-04-27 02:45:38

Welcome!

Here's my first blog post. This is sort of testing out its functionality, but also it's a general welcome to the site. Cross your fingers the programming works, but I think it does. Hmm, should I test posting an image in here?

Zipideedoodah, zipideeday.

Posted on: 2008-04-26 20:33:39