Ever have one of those days when the status quo just doesn’t do it anymore?
Yeah. Me too. I think it’s getting to be the point where it’s time to shake this shit up.
Category: Site News
Hear that? That was Mayjune.. whoosh.
Where does the time go?
Current development progress… in a nutshell… nonexistant.
On the other hand, paying client work… is through the roof, and it’s actually been a good bit of fun. Lots of high pressure API wrangling, tight deadlines and awesome cool front end WhizBang UI work and some pretty serious SalesForce.com and Convio Luminate integration into a custom data structure.
Good times, and it’ll pay off the new beast of a work PC 🙂
So, Other than that here’s where things stand.
- Irismel – Still running on TGB. basic core is getting there. A little in limbo as I try and tweak the basic mechanic and find out what’s missing
- Barnyard Bonanza – LibGDX android app.. is really close. I just need to implement the bonus games and some animation stuff. However my G2 Fried itself early may… then 4 days after getting a replacement it did the same thing (screen signal breaks.. probably due to that crazy hinge design) Now I’m using a myTouch that seems to work but I havent gotten it to behave with Eclipse and the dev tools…
- However as mentioned above, paying work comes first, and it’s been a really good month for it. I wish I had more time to do more of it. (maybe.. some possibilities exist)
- So in the time I do have, I’ve been working through an anatomy course fromhttp://www.alienthink.com/ And it’s reaaaaally good. and Reeeaaaaally long.. so far I’m at lesson 39.. I’m keeping a gallery of progress here: https://plus.google.com/.…
- Slick2d.com – basic site is up but progress is limited to lunch break sized tweaks.
- Oh and as you can tell… swiftthought.com is Sloooowly getting a much needed update. However the move away from comicpress means that every old article needs to be manually updated… *yuk*
That’s it for now.
Fun things are coming in July/August I think.
Latest Barnyard Bonanza Test Version
[Edit: Fixed the problem with downloads failing for android 2.2 users (stoopid mime types an htaccess) ]
Very productive evening. Fixed the basic timing on reel spin slippage so at the end of every spin things wind up in their proper place. Lines now generate payouts properly 🙂
Looks like the odds need to be tweaked a bit.. more low paying hits would be good,
Have an Android device?
Want to test something for me?
https://drakkheim.com/temp/BarnyardBonanza002beta.apk
Next up:
- Adding bonus calculations (5 in a row with a bonus or more as a wild card kicks off a bonus round)
- basic sounds
- Odds tweaking
- A main menu.. saving and loading games
- Bonus games.
- Animating the icons that hit on a spin. and special FX showing winning on a pull.
Android Deviations
Oops, meant to post last week’s Screenshot Saturday.
As pennance here’s 2 screenshots from the in progress Android game, that’s coming along nicely.
(yes Irismel is taking a little development break while I work on some of the mechanics in spreadsheet and paper form. The RTS elements weren’t working right. Now I’m leaning towards something a bit more Tower defensish)
Moving, Projects, Goodies
Finally closed on a new house so it’s going to be quiet around here until mid Feb when I’ll have settled in.
Then it’s time for a facelift to the site and some exciting project work 🙂
Screenshot Saturday Delayed.
Well Friday the 15th was the halfway mark in the Slick contest.
I was hoping to have a glorious screenshot bonanza after a few more hours of work showing the completion of the core mechanics. I’m that close to having the functional workings of the gameplay.
Then mother nature decided to throw a hissy fit and bounce the power to the house 20-30 times in about an hour. This, it turns out, is bad for hard drives. The surge protector did its job and the only damage was an irretrievably messed up FAT table on the primary drive.
So, time to re-install Vista… followed by 2 days of patching and re-installing applications and now I’m basically back to where I was before..
On the upside, it was a wonderful weekend of just chilling with the family and going to bed early, and I know for sure now that my Backups are working.
So here’s the short list of things for basic feature completeness:
- smooth interpolation of the tick based movement.. there’s hiccup in it currently
- add dialogs for succeeding and failing enchants
- get the ‘record’ mode of the solution to not mis time the first bolts
- add splitters
Time to get to work! well.. after work work that is..
Back To Torque
It has been a few months of crazy development environment ping-pong around here, but things are beginning to settle down.
Back in November the guys over at GarageGames.com announced they were shuttering the InstantAction team and that generally the outlook for all of Torque seemed really bleak.
So with the future of my development tools up in the air I did some research and started switching over to DarkBasicPro and then in tandem, the day job necessitated a crash course in Java.. which lead me to Slick2d for Java, which I’ve also done some poking around in now.
The problem is that they both (Slick and DarkBasic) seem to magnify the deficiencies of the other.
DarkBasicPro is EASY, and Fast to get prototypes up and running in. It’s also Basic, that means no objects, no event handlers, and scoping variables is fast and loose, ex arrays are always Globals. And no garbage collection, premade main loop or GUI tools, so you’ve got to write that yourself. However the community is FULL of snippets and other pieces of code so you can cobble together a nice utility library in a couple of days. Oh and it supports 3d and shaders etc.. for that reason I may come back some day.
Slick2d, on the other hand, is 100% object driven, with all sorts of good things that come with that. Tightly scoped variables and inheritance etc etc also make it really powerful and clean to code in. It is, however, not easy or fast to throw together a prototype. Especially since there isn’t much of documentation other than the auto-generated API docs. Throw in some of Java’s memory limits and stuff and it gets pretty cumbersome fast. It’s got a nice state-based game core and main loop that works really well… once you find it.
I wasted too much time on both of those only to realize that I miss Torque Game Builder. It’s not perfect, but it is very much a nice place between the two.
So, I’m really happy for the guys at GarageGames.com when they announced they’re Back! And T2D is still alive and kicking.
Now it is time to install the latest version, get tweaking on the Blood Soaked Deadly Dungeons of Doom! and get this whole thing back on track!
I’m still doing the whole Java Android development stuff, and that’s been making good progress as well. Hope to have more details and maybe a screenshot or two by the end of the month. *cross fingers*
Oh and Wenderflonia is going to be getting a minor facelift and its own Online Shop by Mid Feb and a couple more freelance projects should be wrapping up and I hope to be able to refocus my energies a bit more on development.
And to wrap it up I’m going to try and end every post from here on out with….
What I’m Playing:
- Minecraft – indie game, sandbox phenomenon. If you ever wanted to play with legos, build anything, explore a world this is the game for it. We’re documenting our latest travels here http://blocklandtravels.tumblr.com/
- SpaceChem – puzzle game of the year all time. It’s fiendish and guides you into an extensive set and before you know it you’re inventing solutions like this (my you tube video of a solution) The stats comparison lets you know how you stack up to everyone else and is absolutely addictive to optimize your solutions.
Happy Mutant Turkey Day
Have a happy and safe holiday. I’m looking forward to unplugging for a few days.
Not dead, just busy.
Too many things and many small projects being done. I’m looking to get an end of year update up. Until then, its nose to the grindstone and wrap up the last two freelance projects of the year up. Oh and learn android/java in conjunction with the day job.
Which is actually turning out to be fun, but was getting confusing learning on top of darkbasic pro so I had to put that on hold for a bit.
Which sucks. A lot.
All in all the projects and the baby have completely decimated all my personal projects for now… but I’ve got a list and totally plan on kicking butt in the new year. Maaybe I can squeeze out a painting before the end of the year.
Migration
Boring Technical Stuff
So my old virtual server over at godaddy is at this point running a 3-4 year old image with just miniscule specifications and it’s time to switch providers.
I’ve been hosting client sites at media temple for a while now and they’re seemingly rock steady and way more responsive that the mess that godaddy has devolved into. Which kinda seems to be the trend.. the last host did the same thing 6-7 years ago.
So the new account has been purchased, and the great migration is underway. In the process I’m streamlining my internal and test sites significantly so I can provision and deploy client previews much easier. Additionally I’m consolidating my SVN repos and starting them out with a clean slate so I wont have so many indivdial branches and subprojects to keep track of. (YAAY!)
I’ve got 16 domains and about that many subdomains to shuffle over and so far the process has been running smoothly. Wenderflonia.com and swiftthought.com (and their related client pages and subdomains) are going to be the last things punted over before pulling the plug.
I’ll be notifying clients indiviually with the new name servers they’ll need to point their domain registrations to over the next couple days or so.
I’ve also shuttered Drakkheim.com for the time being. It really deserves to have it’s own special purpose and until I can do something with it It’s going to re-direct here. The performance increase is really noticeable over at www.beautifulbasics.com (our food and healthy living community site) which has been re-opened for registration btw! So pop over and tell us about yourself.
Ok 7 domains moved.. now to get some rest.
Don’t look now, but that kinda resembles progress
Ok so it’s not the groundbreaking massive “woo it’s done!” Kind of progress, but it’s a start.
Quake con was a great fun filled event, with me and Parker spending 2 long days blowing stuff up to our hearts content. We’ll be heading back next year for sure.
So that progress thing? Swiftthought games is real now, has all sorts of business stuff and is paying for it’s own hosting etc… I’ve got a handful of jobs wrapped up or 90% there, with hopfully a couple new ones (potentially including an actual web game) coming down the pipe.
And! I’ve got some progress on the Mutant Sheep Eat The Earth! made as well. several new cards were finalized, text revisions made, and the website is getting there. Also thegamecrafter.com has updated their production pipe so soon they say they can offer tuck boxes and full color instructions.
And all the meanwhile, I’m discovering that playing dad is a lot of fun and continually exhausting.
This weekend promises to be quite productive and the future remains as unpredictable as ever, which is half the fun.
Reboot
My how time flies when you’re busy!
In fact it’s so easy to forget to keep updating the blog when you’ve got real projects that need to get done. Luckily I’ve got a good pace of things going and seem to have settled into a nice routine which keeps GFW from going insane and keeps the freelance work getting done in a timely fashion. However it hasn’t exactly left a lot of time to spare for pet projects.
I need to get back to doing what I need to do. I need to make stuff. It has been too long since I’ve made something. (and I’ve got to finish those dang oil paintings!)
What Have I Been Doing?
So for posterity’s sake let’s do a quick re-cap shall we?
- Consulting work = good. Got a nice workload of it that’s just about ready to wrap up.
- Swiftthought Games is now a real entity (ooohh!)
- Banking stuff is set up.
- Mutant Sheep Eat the Earth! is down to 40 illustrations to go. Then a get a new proof set to do a couple rounds of playtesting.
- Baby is cute and a handful.
- I wish I had time to paint!
- Wenderflonia’s store is almost ready to go.
Time to get rolling! First priority, finish the MSETE! website and illustrations.
I’ve got an Idea percolating for a smaller board game that I need to make a quick playtest mock of.
Oh and if you’re interested in game design in general you need to see this http://www.gdcvault.com/play/1012259/Train) (you might have to register but it’s free)
What I’ve been Playing
- Starcraft II – so apparently has everyone else on earth. It’s very good if a bit old school.
- Elemental – been playing the betas, it’s come a long way in a very short time and the release version promises a nice Master of Magic type fix.
- Minecraft – highly addictive and still early in development. Mining and building and monsters. There’s a couple free old versions available to play, but the latest alpha builds are only available if you buy it (around $13 but going up soon)
- Bejeweled Blitz – 60 seconds of crack in a pretty match 3 shell.
But first
Quakecon! this coming weekend. Me and Parker are heading downtown for 2 days of massive lan party goodness and whatever else there is to see.
Old Wars and Putting the Sheep in Gear
Well summertime is here and that means it is time to kick things off and do stuff.
No Really..
I’ve been pretty stuck in idle for a while but a couple little things have started getting some traction. Granted the freelance design work has been pleasantly steady which helps alleviate the guilt. 🙂 But really there’s been two projects that have gotten me going again. (ok, that and the baby finally deciding on a sleep schedule so there’s actually a couple hours that are useful on a regular basis doesn’t hurt either)
First http://www.beautifulbasics.com is up and running. It is still in its infancy but between me and GFW (whose site recently good a lovely makeover) we’re hoping that it will grow into a thriving community about family,tradition, and living a simple healthy lifestyle.
Second, I finally cracked open my tubes of winsor newton water soluble oil paints, they dry like oils but you can thin em with water instead of turp. It is a nice change from the usual acrylics and I absolutely love the drying time. The only downside so far is the color change while the water evaporates is going to take some getting used to. So the paint seems to dry in two stages, first the water evaporates leaving the darker pure oil color behind, which then takes the usual few days to dry. Oh, and the cleanup with soap n water is a snap and the fumes are nowhere near as bad as old fashioned oils.
Distractions and Games? I’ve got plenty, but primarily playing Red Dead Revolver on the 360 and the indie strategy game ‘Hegemony, Phillip of Macedon‘ are tying up most of my mental breaks. That and I’ve got to get a full day to get some people together and play a full game of Arkham Horror. I will say that the Hegemony game is a wonderful new addiction. It’s an absolutely massive undertaking for a small indie game company to make. While it’s got some clunky features, it more than makes up for it in innovative new features that are sure to be copied by everyone else (Total War guys I’m looking at you) . Unlike a lot of other Real-time Strategy games there is an emphasis on maintaining supply to you cities and units on the march that makes for a good time.
So, how does this lead me to getting my backside in gear and get cracking on the damn sheep you ask?
As luck would have it, GFW is taking the kids and heading west for a week come this Friday. That’s going to leave me with a lot of downtime and I’ve got plans to make the best of it.
In theory, a bud will be coming by for some programmy consultanty help and if that happens that’s cool and that will probably take a couple hours every day but hey money talks 😉
Other than that I’m attending Akon (as a guest this year) Saturday; building an initial pass at a joomla website for a client; and designing a 1 page sheet, hopefully all this weekend.
So in theory, that leaves many hours are available every night next week for some serious sheepage! Oh, and I plan on blogging more (daily?) updates.
Let’s see how things work out, but hopefully there will be a ton of progress to report very very very soon.
On the road to nowhere
Well. So according to “the plan” By now I should have had 28 sheep wrapped and packed.
Turns out it’s more like 4, well.. not like… it’s exactly 4.
On the other hand, though, I do have 20 sheep drawn, inked and scanned ready to paint, and that’s good. That was all last week but I’d qualify that as keeping up on the schedule.
So this week just didn’t lead to any real work getting done. Worked on some freelance stuff and started messing about with what will be the marketing site for Mutant Sheep Eat the Earth! Which I’ve the photoshop files all ready to go on. And ninjababy has been taking up all the time that’s more or less left over at the end of a work day.
So, I’m not gonna fret. Just buckle down and give it another go. And I’m gonna be a better blogger and actually post on a semi-regular basis, there’s actually a series of game related things I’ve been meaning to get put down.
For now.. It’s time to crawl into bed and plan to assault next week with renewed vigor.
Firing up the ol engines of creation!
So now that Jude
has come into our lives things are slowly settling into a routine (granted it’s one with less sleep than we’d like, but it’s a start). That means there is starting to be some periods of non super stressful time where freelance work and pet projects can once again start to flourish.
On the freelance side of things, things are picking up nicely with more design work for KELL
And the Big paintings were a big success and look beautiful on Jude’s wall.
So that leaves the much neglected games projects, and the sheep are getting hungry.
So starting tomorrow it’s time to take a good hard look at where things stand and what still needs to be done. I have a sneaky suspicion that it will involve spreadsheets and maybe even some project planning stuff.. YAY! And more playtesting. I have an XML based card shuffler program I whipped up to teach myself Python that will let me run a couple hundred pulls of the decks and see how things work mathmaticlly so I can see if I can find some solution to the whole endgame issue where players don’t have enough clout to affect the outcome.
Lots to do, and it promises to be exciting. Oh and I’ll be blogging more, and possibly adding some more game industry ramblings / reviews n commentary.
