Protest against SOPA

Redesigned my blog a bit to protest the Stop Online Piracy Act of 2011.  This act is horrible and I'm not even a liberal.

Quick outline of some problems:

• SOPA will give copyright holders power over foreign companies.  If there's an organization based in a foreign country that's engaging in illegal online trafficking with citizens in the U.S., the government gets authority to barge in and try to shut it down.  That's like China walking in and arresting the CEO of Apple for threatening its electronics industry.
• Third-party hosting sites are going to be absolutely screwed over.  Sites like YouTube, Vimeo, and Mediafire become liable for what their users uploads, so if someone uploads a copyrighted video, guess what?  They get sued.  Their userbase is large enough that there's no possible way they can control everything that's posted.
• SOPA will actually hurt a great majority of businesses more than it will help.  Companies will have to invest in a bigger legal department to handle lawsuits, taking away from their capacity for other ventures.

ThatSideBlog!

Before the structure of this blog gets shot to hell, I'm making a side blog.

[REDACTED]

Everything I find slightly interesting or cool or neat that's not quite big enough to warrant a full-length post on this blog, I'll post on that one.  Or even just random rants.  That'll be my twitter, so to speak.

I want to keep my main blog somewhat relevant to indie game design or other similar ventures because that's what it was supposed to be about originally.

Also because I'm sure you guys don't want to hear about My Little Pony again.  Be warned, there will probably be a lot of posts about ponies on the side blog, and I'm thinking of commemorating one last thing on this one, so um.  Eat cake.

Small personal blog checklist in no particular order:

• "Atom Zombie Smasher" by Blendo Games
• "VVVVVV" by Terry Cavanagh
• "Portal 2" by Valve (not indie but they deserve a mention)
• "Tower of Heaven" by Askiisoft
• "BIT.TRIP RUNNER" Gaijin Games

A Programmer's View of the Universe

Had an interesting debate with some people on an IRC channel I frequent about universal processes and it was pretty neat so here's my own take on it.

Does true stochasticity exist?
Restated: Is there any element of the universe that is completely and utterly 100% random?

A common task in programming is generating random numbers for things like simulating a dice or generating noise. And really, true RNG (Random Number Generator - I'm going to use this acronym from now on) don't exist. People usually get away with it by making what's known as a PRNG (Pseudo-Random Number Generator) that uses an algorithm that's so ridiculously complicated and nonsensical that the result is pretty much random. Take this for example:

Plotted, it looks like this:

So, given a number from -100,000 to 100,000, the result of f(x) will be pretty much random.  But there's two problems to this approach.  Firstly, this is an algorithm, and therefore, there's a pattern, so it's not real stochasticity.  Secondly, the seed (in this case, the x) itself will have to be roughly random.  No matter how random this function looks, if you put in a 5, you will always get the same result.  f(5) will always be f(5).  Programmers get away with this by using seeds that change each time the script is run, like the system date and time, but even that's not fully random.  Good enough for a dice simulator, definitely, but it's still based on an algorithm that's always the same given the same parameters, and therefore not a true RNG.

Wait, what's this have to do with the universe?

Vince Emerson : Windigo

Just wanted to do a quick feature post for this guy here about this movie here.

I'm always really, really happy when I see small businesses like this go from start to end with a quality project, mainly because there's so few of them and because the odds are almost always against them.  This team of two (plus some supplemental actors) went above the line and created a full-length movie.  A good one.  And they're selling physical copies of it online, the whole commercial pack.

makerofthegames : Gaming 101

The graphics are half-assed, the gameplay is literally impossible, the music is atrocious, and you will love every second of it.

;_;

A brief history: makerofthegames is known amongst the GMC as a bit of a troll (the good kind), consistently hilarious in his antics, from hacking into moderator-restricted boards to exploiting vote systems. His jokes are typically harmless unlike other trolls, and he's gained a lot of respect as a person from myself and many others in the community.

True Valhalla : The Deep Sky

weeeeeeeeeee

A brief not so brief history: As far as fame goes with Game Maker users, True Valhalla is definitely one of the most prominent members, participating in a variety of other events outside the Game Maker Community. He's done Ludum Dare's, where one designs a game from scratch in 48 hours, and runs the tongue-in-cheek HowToMakeAnMMORPG.com (which, by the way, isn't a joke; it actually has some very good advice. Go check it out). His minimal style is what really makes him stand out; there are no complex shapes or designs. A number of his games (including my favorite of his creations, Volatile) feature circles or hexagons, and the atmospheres speak for themselves. But this is getting wordy, so without further ado...

orange + Bret Hudson : Saga Of The Ugly 2

Blood-curling for such a simple style.

GMC Topic Link

As a fellow Zerosoft and GMC member, I've seen a great majority of orange's games, but this one likely tops the list.  Made for the Scary 4 Digits competition over at the 64Digits community, SOTU 2 is a collab between orange and Bret Hudson.

Checklist

I've promised a lot of people reviews here so just a quick run-down of the ones to come. This is just here mostly to say that I haven't forgotten about you guys, it's just I've been caught up with school and online classes and hosting RDC and everything that it's been hard to do much.

High Priority Reviews:
Bred Hudson & orange: Saga Of The Ugly 2
True Valhalla: The Deep Sky
makerofthegames: Gaming 101

People:
Vince Emerson (notably his film, Windigo)

Low Priority Reviews:
Aski: Tower Of Heaven
Blendo Games: Atom Zombie Smasher
Lexaloffle: Voxatron

Likely in that order.  I'd do True Valhalla's and makerofthegames's games first because they're long overdue but I'd rather post those up when the video reviews are done and at the moment I'm still fixing those up.

This post is really just to apologize for not having gotten to you people's games yet, and as a reassurance that I haven't forgotten about it and I'll get to them when I can which is hopefully today or tomorrow.

Jams and Things

Greetings From Liverpool! placed like 18th or something in the jam, didn't expect too much.  I offered a prize of reviewing the 5th place games via blog post and video and two games tied for 5th there, so:

If you are True Valhalla or makerofthegames, I'll be getting to that shortly.  Might take some time for the videos, I already recorded them but the review was horrible so I'm going to redo those and get back to you.  Sorry for the delay.
--
Run down of the past few days:

Skyrim by Bethesda came out, the last of the Elder Scrolls series.  It looks and sounds overrated.  Don't shoot me.

Wow this looks like every other fantasy RPG ever made.

Partisan Religion

Here's something that may or may not be controversial.


BEFORE I START: The best satire I've seen on religion was actually done by My Little Pony (Friendship is Magic).  Despite the total lack of subtlety, it's genius in its execution and clear in its message.  If you'd rather watch a nice cartoon than a ranty blog post then that's the way to go.

One thing I've never really understood about people is why they're so reasonable until the topic of religion comes up.  And then, suddenly, any gray area goes monochrome.  Fervent defenders of their beliefs collide with aggressive atheists, and occasionally the other way around; moderate voices are drowned out and generally we find a clusterfsk of logical fallacies, heated words, and Godwin's Law.

Here's my stance on the issue; take it or leave it.

Greetings From Liverpool!

For the GMC Halloween Jam, made in 72 hours.

"Laws" : 19 hours left

Some more images.

Some guy's house.

Chase with badly-mapped shotgun.

Rooftops.

"Laws" : 18 hours in

Two days, six hours left in the Jam; here's what I have so far.

Map of half of the city (based on Liverpool).

Old screenshot in-game.

New-ish design, might scrap.

Intro, in a train.

GMC Halloween Jam!

Fancy stuff!

The Game Maker Community is hosting another 72-hour Jam that runs through Halloween, so while you social bastards are running around terrorizing households for candy or setting bear traps around your front door I'll be sitting here with a laptop and a lot of coffee.

The jam starts in 30 minutes as of this post (8:00 PM Friday to 8:00 PM Monday) and this'll be great except I haven't prepared for it at all.

The theme is to be announced but from dropped hints it's *a*s, the *'s being unknown letters, and there's an L in there somewhere.  The guy that runs it (Nocturne) half-confirmed my guesses so I'm throwing my vote to "Laws."

If you want to participate then I highly suggest you do because it's just really pretty fun and the people are great, we'll all be talking on the IRC as usual (#gmc at irc.twigathy.com), worth a visit.

I'm going to be offering a community prize this time around; fifth place winner (and only fifth place -- this should be interesting) gets a review/commentary post here, as well as a Let's Play-style video commentary if my laptop can handle it.

So uhm, this should be interesting.

EDIT OH MY GOD IT REALLY WAS LAWS

Short Update

First off, made an RDC game last Saturday for "Bleeding."  Didn't actually submit it for judging but everyone put it in their ballot anyways so heh.

It's called The Bleed Man.

He bleeds.

It's a piece of crap but I liked how the music came out.

Hrh, smart people.

So I've signed up for a few free online Stanford classes, (on Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, and Databases), and looking through the forums, I am kind of worried.  Here's the intro topic for Machine Learning:

Ahahahahahahah....

I'm not worried at all.

Regardless, for any hobbyist programmers out there, I think this is an excellent opportunity to get some formal training in the field.  Very few of us have the time or money to learn like this, and here's a prime opportunity.

The classes have a Basic and Advanced track that you can switch between at any time.  The Basic track caters to people who don't have time to submit assignments or do quizzes, so it's perfect alongside your normal studies.  The Advanced track, meanwhile, acts like a full online course, which is pretty nice.

I did something!

The Games page is no longer a filthy piece of trash, I made a Flash thingy to list everything.  How exciting.

RDC, Lasers

Forgot to post this.  Last Saturday we had an RDC where we made games in 4 hours.  The theme was Lasers.  The winning game (as per judging by me and a few others) was LASOR DOT MAN by orange08, was a pretty neat thing I guess.

As per tradition, I made a troll entry called GettingShotByALaser which is basically a screensaver with Atom Zombie Smasher's Blue Without You playing in the background.  If you want to use it as your actual screensaver then throw it into C:/Windows and select it in that Control Panel shiz.

Bye.

Mechanical Turk?

I've been trying to make a few bucks online recently and one of the options I came across was Amazon's Mechanical Turk, where you do small tasks like identify animals in pictures and things that bots can't do for a cent per task or so.  Some harder tasks, like rewriting short articles, reward a dollar or two up to about 5 dollars maximum.

Spent two hours today trying it out, doing as many worthwhile tasks as I could.  Two hours in, I have a whopping 60 cents.  That's 30 cents an hour, over twenty times worse than minimum wage.  To be fair, I have $1.71 that's still awaiting approval, so that'll boost me up to $2.31 for two hours of work for a grand total of $1.16 / hour.  Still shitty.

My take on this website: if you really cannot do anything else or you're stuck with some free time and have literally nothing else to do, go for it.  But it's not a serious source of income at all and you'll probably waste a lot more time than worth the money.

Starload : FGL Commentary

Screencast for Starload

The marketing guy (Aidan) got an agent from FlashGameLicense.com to review Starload and help fix up some stuff.  Despite having a lot of negative things to say, I agree with everything he pointed out and sent Aidan the updated version like five minutes ago.

FGL gave Starload a 7/10, which is fantastic because Warp also got a 7/10 and it's got a nice sponsorship now.

Pretty exciting stuff.

hhh : Populace

Say hello.

Starload : Finished

http://www.rypens.be/starload/

Not a fan of the game or the port but it's done and hopefully we can get a sponsor et cetera.

Next thing I'll be working on for them will probably be Kingdom 1420.  Played the game.  Not too fond of the gameplay or the story (to be frank, there isn't one) but it is doable and shouldn't be a problem, and it'd be nice to work on something like this, really.

*hums* ..But in the town it was well known when they got home at night, their fat and psychopathic wives would thrash them within inches of their lives *hard strum* *snare roll* ...

9/11 sentimentality and why it doesn't work.

Warning, here's a rant.

It's the tenth year anniversary of 9/11, the tragedy where 3,000 people lost their lives during the World Trade Center terrorist attack.  In comes all of the memorials from people who lost loved ones, who saw the crash, who were directly impacted; and here comes everyone else.  The moments of abject silence, of Facebook statuses, the "it is such a horrible event look I'm tearing up" type of stuff.

exartech : Developer

The genius that is FWHE?

SEVERELY UNDERRATED DEVELOPER ALERT

Blog Updates

Laziness to do homework pushed out the laziness to fix my blog's width problems and I finally got around to it.  No more cramping images and awkward dimensions.

Next up is updating the Games page so it doesn't look like a pile of vomit.

Look mummy.  There's an airplane up in the sky.

Career crisis aaaaaaagh

Okay so it suddenly hit me that I know literally nothing oriented to a possible career except for independent game design, which makes zero money and isn't applicable at all to professional game design, which in addition to making zero money, is completely soul-crushing horrorshow.

So I asked some friends from the game design circle on what they do for a living:

AUGH

And then they started joking about how they're male prostitutes who charge extra from fat girls, like typical IRC people.

--

Now here's a desperate request:
If you happen to be proficient in a subject to a professional level, like medical stuff or chemistry or economics or stock market or something that's not programming, here's a deal.  You teach me your trade, and I'll teach you programming or graphics design or game design or 3D modeling.  Yay/neigh?

hhh : Really Early Alpha

Mr. Chubigans : Kablooey!

Although it's a lot more mainstream and doesn't really need it, I still think Kablooey! deserves some sort of feature somewhere.

messhof : The Thrill of Combat

I remember seeing this back when I first found messhof through Jetpack Basketball but never really found his work impressive. Rewatching it now though, wow.

I'll never understand why companies like nitrome that make generic-ish games get famous and people like messhof go unnoticed.

The guy is most known for Flywrench, but I don't find it that impressive honestly (not that I've played it). The Thrill of Combat, above, seriously looks excellent though. The idea is to control a helicopter and shoot people below with a laser, while dodging missiles and bullets. However, whenever you kill someone, you send down a person from the heli and harvest the organs with a knife that you control while dodging missiles and bullets from your helicopter. How freaking cool is that.

Sad State of Software Engineers

Let's have a little programming lesson, in simple, straightforward Actionscript.

This is how you output some text to the console:

trace("foobar!");

This is a variable:

var number_of_sheep=5;

This is how you make a loop that counts from 1 to 10:

for(var count=1; count<=10; count++){}

Now let's combine these concepts to count sheep.

for(var number_of_sheep=1; number_of_sheep<100; number_of_sheep++)

{

    trace("There are "+number_of_sheep+" sheep.");

}

This should output:

There are 1 sheep.
There are 2 sheep.
There are 3 sheep.
There are 4 sheep.
...all the way to 100.

Congratulations.  You are now more talented than 199 out of 200 people who apply for programming jobs.

This is kind of boring.

Spent this morning working for this housing peoples project organization called Habitats For Humanity under Tzu Chi (both pretty nice organizations that are pretty nice and you should check them out maybe).  Painted roofs.  Well not really roofs more like the bar under roofs.  It was in a sort of run-down black community and there was a bucket of fried chicken on the ground, and koolaid in the houses, and gatorade in a cooler outside, and watermelons for lunch.  Racist senses started tingling.

Cantilever Bridge : Finished

So GMC Jam #3 came around and the idea was to make a game in 72 hours with the theme "Live." Ended up making Cantilever Bridge, which is a generic-ish story-driven game based on two cities and a bridge to connect the two, around the politics and stuff of that.

Tense political action-packed diplomacy efforts right here.

Pannenkoekenhuis Flash : Finished

Never thought I'd see the day.

http://www.mochimedia.com/games/play/pannenkoekenhuis

Booyah. And here's the ad revenue stats report: Linketh. So far I've earned a whopping ONE CENT, at $0.26 eCPM. That means 26 cents for every 1000 people that look at the ad.

I paid my sister ten dollars that I owed her from a while ago. I'll be able to earn that back in...

...20 impressions a day...
...50 days per CPM payout...
...26 cents per 50 days...

That's 1923 days (around 5 years) to earn my 10 dollars back. I'm getting so rich.

Possible job, or something.

This totally anonymous guy told me about this other guy that needed this game ported to this system so I contacted the guy and we arranged this deal for me to port the game within two weeks or so and this is good. Might or might not be a paid job; 40% of ad revenue, which is not a rocks-my-socks financial bundle but can do no harm. Actually that might be 0% because the paid part was what the anon guy said and not my "client" (ooh how professional) which I was stupid enough not to clarify it with.

In other news, the Pannenkoekenhuis port is done, I promise, except for sound effects that I'm too lazy to do. Trust me, it's gathering dust on my works-in-progress shelf but at least it's fully-clothed in possible potential. Like a cactus would be a fully-functional person if it could move its arms.

In more verbally-unfriendly news, this video is pretty cool. I wish I was as insensitive as this guy here.

Artflakes

Got an invitation from Artflakes for a partnership to put some of the stuff from my old deviantART Portfolio onto their website to sell as prints. Pretty exciting I guess, even though none of my stuff is actually marketable.

Artflakes Page

Currently the program is closed to the public (you can only join if you get an invitation) but it looks promising, will see how it goes.

Pannenkoekenhuis Flash : Halfway Point

Since I know you're all dying to know what I've been doing this summer (spoiler alert: eating, sleeping, and pretty much nothing) I'm going to throw a curve ball and announce this SUPER HAPPY AWESOME HALFWAY POINT of a Flash port of a game that's been overdue for a few months now.

Today with the help of a Jan Flanders from the Flash IRC (##flash at irc.freenode.net) we got bitmap masking to work.  Which means all the core features aside from powerups are now in.



Hooo-raah.

Movies?

My dad drilled some holes into a camera tripod and turned it into a movie projector support and now we're watching movies at dinnertime.  Watched two already so here's some thoughts on them.

The Speed Of Thought (2011, Evan Oppenheimer) (4/10)
The idea behind it is that there are people who read minds and work for the government but die at an early age or something.  There's a lack of development throughout the movie until the end, which was well thought out and interesting enough.  The story itself is healthy: Complex enough to not suck and simple enough to understand without killing yourself.

Coma : Finished

Made Coma for the 2nd YYGGMCIRCRDC, which placed FIRST OUT OF SIX HELL YEAH.  Well actually it's not that great because a lot of people came in during the middle of the competition and therefore didn't have a chance to do a full-blown game.  It was a tie between my game and creativebunch's until the tiebreaker judge leaned it to my side.  The game actually sucks a fair amount; my favorite in the compo was by far Goebbels' entry.  He makes a bunch of art games, they're all pretty cool.  That one's his best, easily.

Arrow Keys, Z to do stuff, X to do stuff later.

Coma : Download Link

Films in 10 hours

Yesterday myself and 8 friends divided ourselves up into two teams and made our own films in 10 hours based on the theme "Oh God... What Have I Done?"  For those of you that actually go to my school and are reading this (first off why are you reading this), the teams were decided after several hours of debate over the IRC:

Team 1: Me (head editor), Adam (head actor), Louis (scriptwriter/actor), Eugene (actor)
Team 2: Drew (head editor/director), Brandon (actor), Arthur (actor), Jack (actor), Justin (actor)

The contest started at 1 PM and ended at 11 PM; the full 10 hours.

Programming via Pepsi binge.

The idea was to not sleep until I finished the Pannenkoekenhuis Flash port to release on MochiAds and make some money for a thing at Stanford over the summer.

Lot'so Pepsi

It was fine, the first two days and two nights I made some progress.  Couldn't carry a conversation past "mhmm yeah that's cool ahah how awesome" though.  Then the afternoon of the second day, I almost threw up and the caffeine wore off and almost passed out so I slept for ~11 hours and had some weird dream about being in someone's backyard in the future.  It was basically "wow this garden is awful and unmaintained and the grass is up to my elbows, guess I could sleep here for a while I hope the owners don't mind."

Third morning I woke up, looked at my code.  It was fucking disgusting, and none of it made any sense.

So don't try this at home kids.*

Meanwhile redesigning my blog so it's not so squashed, thinking a bird-themed one this time.

*I probably will again in a few months because above all it really was pretty interesting.

The Hat Man : Finished

For the first GMC+YYG RDC, set up by zeddidragon, Alti, ShadowLink, Pqp232, and I.  Haven't seen such a successful RDC in so long.

Download "The Hat Man":
Mirror 1: YoYo Games
Mirror 2: UpUrLoad
GMC Link: GMC

Controls are arrow keys.  No, you're not playing it wrong.  Yes, that's supposed to happen.  And no, there is no "better ending."  Hence the actual ending.

Made in four hours.  Landed runner-up alongside zeddidragon and Skarik, behind IQbrew who won with this massive freaking 3D thing holy crap.

Overanalyzing Words With Friends

I just woke up having slept approximately 50% of my weekend (am i dying i'm always tired now is this a sign of dying) and I haven't done anything productive so hopefully this will make up for it.

For those who are total shut-ins and don't know, Words With Friends is an app for iOS that allows one to play scrabble over the internets.

I'll be walking through a game of it to point out some tactics I tend to do.  No guarantees that they work but they seem reasonable enough.

Thoughts on Rapture

So rapture is in three days.  And being the non-Christian that I am (sort of a Theravada Buddhist I guess), I'm going to hell.

Since I love religious wars and I love controversial shit I'm going to write my last words.

Christian ololol:
From what I've seen, Christians are holding this as the "I told you so" moment for them to prove the validity of their religion to atheists.  Which is hilarious, because the whole point of Christianity is to save the nonbelievers before they're eternally damned to hell.  Hence why I think the religion is in pieces.

Atheist ololol:
Even more funny are the atheists that are hell-bent on disproving rapture before it occurs.  Saying "rapture is dumb and never going to happen because it's never happened before" is akin to saying "if I jump off a cliff I won't die because I've never died before."  Not to mention the "atheist Crusade" movement going around where atheists can't say the word "religion" without a derogatory word behind or ahead of it.  I smell self-denial.

TL;DR?  Atheists are aggressively converting Christians.  Christians are aggressively converting athiests.  Neither side has any solid evidence, they're just mudslinging each other.  Neither side will admit they're doing it.

Watching from the sidelines, it's all pretty hilarious.

A Happy Birthday to Orange08!

Happy birthday to orange08!  Here have a cake.

EDIT:

So uh happy birthday banov!  Does he have a blog or something?

EDIT LOOKS LIKE HE DOES YAAY

Diagnosis : Second Place + Updated Version

Diagnosis took second place on the GMC Jam.  Not bad, not bad.

Would write more but I'm out of time for today.  The postcompo version is done.  Bunch of bugs fixed, look at the GMC topic for it in the first link for more information.

Edit hey Blogger reverted my post to an older version what gives.

Anyways shoutouts to zeddidragon and orange08 for their excellent games that placed 3rd and 4th, respectively.

Diagnosis : Updated + Timelapse

Updated version as well as a timelapse.

GMC Link

There's a shitload of bugs in my game that zeddidragon was able to point out, notably Hard Mode being ridiculously easy and Easy Mode being a mindwreck.

Diagnosis : Finished

Ludum Dare Page

My back aches from 48 hours sitting on a laptop eating granola bars and salad and bagels.

The game is about you, a mental patient, going through your mind with a psychiatrist that "helps you out" with your illness by giving you "medication" along the way.

Adding music and shit later.

And polish and shit later.

I wish so many people didn't drop out of the GMC Jam, there's like five of us left.

Man I'm tired.

GMC is the best.

And don't you forget it.

We fugged up the timezones so we accidentally started an hour early and chaos ensued.

lolololololololololololololololololololololololololololololololololololol

Screw thine timing.

The next Ludum Dare (bi-annual), the next GMC Jam (twice since ever), and the next Rapid Development Compo (delayed a ton of weeks) [b]all land on the same weekend.[/b] So what should I do.

Ludum Dare is 48 hours long, GMC Jam is 72 hours long, and the RDC is 4 hours long. What are the odds that I can make a game for each? Is that close to zero?

I'm thinking screw the RDC, and then make one game that fits both themes from LD and the Jam in some screwed-up way. But I mean really. Three compos in a weekend. asdfjkl;

What's sort of disappointing is that so many awesome themes for LD get nominated each time but they're all voted out for something mediocre.

WHY WHY WHY WHY

Look at all of that green ;_;

Cactus : New Mondo Game

Holy fucking shit.

I think I've talked about cactus a few times here before.  He's probably one of the few indie game designers that I really respect, mainly on his game design philosophy rather than his actual games.  However, his newest Mondo game is pretty badass:

Haunt you in your dreams and then some.

Seriously what is that oh shit.

I'm very rarely excited for the release of games, with the exception of Super Meat Boy and Portal 2 (the former wasn't disappointing at all, the latter I've yet to play).  But this, just wow.

So yeah, for what it's worth, if you haven't already, go check out his running Mondo series.  I can safely say both have been the most terrifying gaming experiences I've ever had.

I don't want to hotlink them and I can't find his blog posts releasing them so you can find them here.  The first is Mondo Medicals, the second is Mondo Agency.  I prefer the first but that's my cup of tea.

Now for a lesson in interaction.

Goodnight.

~Your Local Fuckup

Real jobs can go suck a fat one.

Well this week I've been feeling pretty shitty about nothing really.  Side effect of feeling shitty?  Programming productivity shoots through the roof.

Fixed up my old PC and I'm dualbooting Macintosh onto it via VirtualBox to start some XCode and hopefully make a game for the App Store sometime.  Fixed a few major bugs in the Pannenkoekenhuis Flash port which is really coming underway pretty well.  Replaced all of my dead hardware.  Most of all, cleaned my desk.

Yes, that's a keyboard on a keyboard.

Think I'll finish the Pannenkoekenhuis Flash port, and if it does any good on MochiAds I'll move it over to XCode and try to push it on the App Store.  And then my freelancing empire begins, muhahahahah.

Who needs life when you have none?

Short Film - Diabetes

Short film about diabetes via my friend Nigel's suggestion.  Took longer to render than to make.  Ending got cut off in the render so it ends abruptly.

Song is "Music for Airplanes" by Marko Ahtisaari.

Obligatory Minirant

First off, links are blue now.  It's uglier but more visible.

Secondly, "environmentalists" can go kick a bucket, I can sit around and "spread the word," and then pretend I did something to make myself feel better too.

Thirdfully, I made this shitty Whack-A-Mole machine with a friend (Adam) with a gory mole-killing game to go with it.  Might upload a screenie or something.  Or the game although it's not playable just nice-looking.  The actual machine was cool-ish, we took apart a keyboard and rewired it through the mallet and it totally failed and we ended up just using the mallet to hit the wires instead of the actual mole.  And there were four moles but only one motor worked and it was going at 18,000 RPM according to the box so it just sort of vibrated in place and it was stupid.

Oh and lastly I'm going to finish an animation about diabetes later today probably hopefully because Nigel was stupid and suggested I do that.  Blaaah, Nigel, blaaaaah...

Shit Video

Challenged my friend Drew to a speedmaking of a video based on the theme "Diagnostic Youth Tunnel" (output from a random word generator); 30 minutes to make the video. I went over slightly due to render problems/music/generally being worse at movie design than Drew.

Here they are, anyhow.  Mine and Drew's.  Drew's is the one that isn't crap.

Ohey everyone.

I haven't had the motivation to do anything recently. Spring break's ending. It was dumb and I didn't expect any more from it.

I made a really racist game for mini-Ludum Dare 25 but I didn't want to submit it in case stupid people would complain about the racism in it, ignoring the "Send Hate Mail" button that I planned to put on the main menu directly under the Play button to show how I was mocking them and not the actual ethnicities. Regretting that decision. Wish people weren't so goddamn sensitive.

The Werewolf game is going great on the contrary. I wasn't expecting it to blow up like that at all. Networks forming/reforming, some fantastic bluffs and long-term strategic plans going on. Crazy stuff. If you want to join the next round, make an account and sign up here. I won't be hosting it though; my friend Drew will.

Meanwhile met someone at my school that specializes in Flash animations, which is great because I can't animate to save my life. Kuph, if you're reading this we have to do something before the break ends.

Radical Face is fantastic. Listening to their album Ghost via the mini-intercom system in my house.

Flash version of Pannenkoekenhuis is underway. Slowly.

Bye.

Werewolves?

Hosting a game of Werewolves at this forum here. If you are unfamiliar with the game, it's basically an organized minority of people against an unorganized majority, full of trickery and deceit and backstabbing and paranoia. We need 32 people, only have about seven or so so far, so if you're interested go ahead and join.

Busy Month

Sleep levels are at an all time low.

Finished Mono for the YoYo Games Rapid Development Competition, where you make a game in 4 hours. Theme was "Black and White." Landed 5th place.

Also finished a game called Neo-Retro for another Rapid Development Competition, with the theme being "Retro." It sucked. Sucked so much that I don't even have a YYG link to it. It still placed in 2nd, somehow.

Pannenkoekenhuis tied for 5th place with a grand total of one vote in the GMC Jam.

Entered Pannenkoekenhuis and Retroplat into the Team Dark Tomorrow Contest, Retroplat placing 4th. Was originally going to polish up Camp, but it was way too buggy and I quit.

Also made a half-game called Quasifluid for the Game Jolt Inventions Competition but I got bored halfway and stopped.

Currently prototyping a procedurally-generated SHMUP where bullet patterns are randomly generated. Looking sort of stupid, in a glitchy, hey-I'm-a-program-and-I'm-going-to-hijack-one-of-your-system-functions sort of way.

Phew.

I think I'm going to lay off indie game design for a while.

College Emails Spam

Well I'm getting spammed with college emails. Rather than inb4rage on them I'm picking out their subject lines out-of-context.

Most likely to assassinate me: "You're on my list, Roy!" (Fordham University)
Most melancholic: "Trying to reach you ... please respond?" (Swarthmore College)
Stalker much?: "Since you're online, please read" (Drexel University)
Most likely to be a line from Watchmen: "They are people who deal in big ideas..." (Lyle School of Engineering)
Most... what?: "Our alums show up in a big way to help you succeed" (Colgate University)
Best attempt at a guess: "How are you mapping out your search for a college home - on a napkin?" (University of Chicago)
Most openly racist: "Be Decisive. Choose Rice." (Rice University) (Yes, I am Asian).
Most confused about Darwinian theories: "Roy, Your Evolution at Rutgers Begins Today." (Rutgers University)

Good night.

Pannenkoekenhuis

Finished a game for the GMC Jam: Pancakes. The title means "Pancake House" in Dutch.

Download

Made in 72 hours. Scrapped two projects until I managed to get to this (was originally a SHMUP, then a 3D city destroyer, then this). First time trying to make dubstep music and I'm pretty proud of that.

Here's a timelapse, though it's not very good:


Meanwhile, going to fix up the Games page of this blog sometime later. When I feel like it.

Let's play a game. "How long will it take thatsnail to finish updating the games page?" Place your bets.

Film - "Gifted"

Finished a film for school, thought I might as well post to it. The assignment was to make a film about being "gifted", interpreted in any way you want.


And here's the timelapse for it. 13 minutes of watch-how-fast-my-motivation-drops.

New Design

SEE I TOLD YOU. I TOLD YOU I'D GET AROUND TO FIXING IT BUT NOOO YOU DIDN'T BELIEVE ME!

Well here it is. Still sort of choppy on some fronts but it beats that frackity (new word nominations) green alien thing.

Ludum Dare results and a really shitty film.

Ludum Dare results came out for my game Trip (n.). Broke pretty much even, no highs or lows (though I haven't scored lower than 2.5 in any categories, which makes me happy).

Think I'm going to do mini-LD #23 in a few weeks or so.

As I'm writing this post I'm waiting for this dumb film to render. It's this video I have to make for high school about being gifted. My retarded self decided the best thing to do for such a video would be a surreal, silent indie film.

Have been working on this for two weeks straight.

If I had a time machine, I'd go back in time two weeks and punch out my former self for doing something like this.

PS - have a web template made in Photoshop but am too lazy/busy right now to import it, am sorry. That dumb green alien is annoying.