When showing someone your start-up/product/service, it’s easy to let them guide your thinking unconsciously. It feels like there’s an inverse proportion of weight given to feedback to sample size, especially if it’s the first time taking the cover off.
Here’s a really great example of why one should always take every bit of advice as advice and not gospel:
I know it seems I’m like 15 hours late to the party, but really I’m not. I’ve been trying to come up with a good idea for my game this Ludum Dare. In the mean-time I’ve been playing other people’s games and chit chatting/lurking on their IRC channel.
Now that I’ve finally got my idea, I’m ready to get down to work.
I’m taking a few hours tonight to go through the archives and put up some of my finished/unreleased/unfinished game jam projects onto github. Ludum Dare 26 is next weekend and I want to have a simple URL to send people to to try out my stuff.
I took a bit of time recently to take apart two of my Atari Jaguar joypads. The rubber/plastic screwhole covers, over time, had disintegrated and melted into a gooey, sticky mess on the backs and front of the joypads. It was gross.
If you’ve got old videogame equipment (10+ years) and you’ve noticed the rubber/plastic screwhole covers on the backs of the units or controllers getting soft, I recommend taking them off and avoiding the cleanup you’ll be facing in the next couple years. Otherwise, you’ll have to do what I did and use Goo Gone. The good news is that Goo Gone is amazing and it’s fairly cheap.
One of the screwhole covers.
Joypad gunked up. Note the cat hair that got picked up along the way. Gross!
Type 1 and Type 2, respectively.
Type 2 (left) and Type 1 (right)
So excited for this.
I’ve been planning out my first game. I’m going to call it Barf. Simply, it will change your view in whacky, unexpected ways whenever you move the headset (and sometimes even if you don’t). Online leaderboards (probably powered by Google App Engine or something of the like [is that thing free still?]) keep track of who has gone the longest before ralphing.
This could be you
I’m up and running with BJL, Linux, and a sample “Hello World” app. Special shout out and thanks goes to JagChris for the handy dandy BJL cable.
Next step: add some animation to the screen to get a handle on how that sort of thing works.
Unity 4 was released three days ago, on the 12th of November. I installed it as soon as I saw that it was available. Unfortunately, it overwrites any previous version of Unity you have installed, so I lost my install of Unity 3. To make matters worse, I could not find any download link on the Unity3d website.
Thankfully, the official @unity3d twitter account pointed me toward the installer for Unity3D 3.5. Here it is.
For PC: http://download.unity3d.com/download_unity/UnitySetup_update-3.5.6.exe
For Mac: http://download.unity3d.com/download_unity/unity-3.5.6.dmg
Enjoy.
I’m not abandoning this blog, not by a long-shot. Still, my current work eats up my life these days.
If you wanna follow what we’re doing at Will Pwn 4 Food (and you know you do, because you like videogames just like I do), then come our first game, DodgeBots, and subscribe to our blog.
It’s 45 minutes late, but the map loader now properly imports a level (converted from a Google Docs spreadsheet) into a Javascript array, then selects the proper tile in the tilemaps image to make the level.
Here’s an image.
Now onto actually designing the level and making the game.
NetHack – Plane of Fire (Photo credit: ludios)
Guelph Game Jam #4 just started. I’ll be liveblogging here, tracking our progress on our Rogue-like. It’s Michael Hoyle and Me, along with a touch of art asset assistance from Amy.
The theme of this game jam is Growth.
We’re still trying to figure out how that will be implemented in our idea for a Rogue-like, but our first few ideas are pretty promising.
It’s going to be a tight schedule because we’re breaking my first rule of game jams: don’t build your own engine. Hoyle and I have been building a small Javascript Rogue-like engine for the past week in preparation but there are still a few things left to do. I’ve come up with the idea of taking the first two hours of the jam to complete the features of the engine that we need today then taking the remaining 6 hours to make the game.
If we’re going to do this, we’ve got to be ruthless and pull the plug after those two hours and switch to the game. If we let it slip and say “we’ll do one extra hour on the engine” we’ve lost.
Wish us luck!
