I haven't been blogging as much as I used to, so I decided to give Plinky a try to try and get some ideas flowing. They might not be gaming or tech related but it will at least keep some content flowing. Thanks goes to my friend Trapper Markelz who I noticed was using the service, and I decided to give it a try.
I honestly cannot think of something I would take back. Don't get me wrong I have made mistakes in my past – who hasn't? However I think every one of those mistakes was one step on the journey of who I am today. You can spend your life wondering 'what if…' and try and figure out what would have been different or you can learn from your mistakes and use that knowledge to continue to take that next step forward. Always remember – if you actually could go back and fix a mistake, that doesn't mean that your new path won't have different, possibly worse mistakes further down the road.
Well this isn’t my normal blogging material. Normally I post about programming or gaming in some way shape or form, and rarely I post random things about whats going on in my life in general as well I guess. Though most of that’s things we are doing as a family and I post it over there.
However I recently tipped the scales at 190lbs, which is probably the heaviest I have ever been and decided I was going to try and thin back down. My game plan was to eat a bit healthier and at least try and exercise a bit more. I decided to try out running, because my wife has been a runner for quite a while, and I have never really been able to much of a runner.
After I ran today I wasn’t sure I had made much progress. I still don’t think I am adding that much distance or speed onto my running – but I am making pretty good progress on my original goal. As of today I am down to about 170. So that means i shed off 20 pounds this month (possibly 25, i really cant remember if i started at 190 or 195).
I signed up for a 5K race in October – I surely won’t win – but with luck I will be able to actually finish it. Will I ever be a marathon runner like my neighbor? (hes running his 13th this year) – probably not, but I guess you never know…
Anyone that actually knows me, knows that I have never been much of a reader. However because of our recent trip to the Turks and Caicos, I figured I would pick up something to read for the flights – as well as possibly while relaxing on the beach. I picked up a copy of The Zombie Survival Guide: Complete Protection from the Living Dead by Max Brooks. It was probably the first book I have finished in any recent time.
The book is a pretty comical read – and quite detailed. At times it seems a bit repetitive, but it kept me interested enough to make it to the end. If only a zombie invasion did take over while I was away – I would have totally been prepared. Well I guess not, as I would have been landing without any of the proper tools – but I might have been at least been able to leverage some of the survival skills provided.
Is this the start of reading on a more regular basis? That is reading things other than programming and tech books for reference. We’ll see, I am all ready keeping an eye on World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War
by the same author as it was suggested to me by a friend after he saw me mentioning the other book.
Well I haven’t blogged anything in a bit – so might as do one of my famous “i haven’t blogged in a while, how about I just do a brain dump of information going on right now in my life” kind of posts. I spent a good amount of the night playing around with some new technology that I either haven’t used much, or at all. Not stuff that just came out mind you (again late to the party!). Just working with a git repository and a ruby on rails project I picked up – which I always like to get my hands on some RoR.
The title is somewhat fitting, it came to me as I just finished my first night playing the Starcraft II Beta. I finally decided to pre-order it like most people I know. I always liked playing starcraft, mostly the campaign because I just get SPANKED when playing multiplayer. I just don’t dedicate the time like most of the online players – this is true for most online games (COD, Halo, etc). However there is probably a bit of the ‘I am not really that good either’ mixed in there as well, lets be honest.
Speaking of betas I also played only a handful of the Halo Reach beta so far – one game made me laugh because one of my team-mates gamertags was ‘TheBetaSucks‘. This made me laugh for a number of reasons
First he went through the trouble of making said gamertag
Second possibly paying for said gamertag to play as gold status (though probably a free card
and finally if you feel that strongly, why are you still playing it?
Either way my hat goes off to you for giving me a chuckle that night.
In any event here is when I turn the tables on you – my loyal readers (assuming you do in fact exist and are not ALL web crawler bots…). Leave some comments on the following questions I post to you.
Do you have the Starcraft 2 Beta? What do you think of it?
Do you have the Halo Reach Beta? What do you think of it?
Considering my lack of posts, do you have anything that you would like me to throw out there? Maybe some sort of blog posts showcasing some (probably relatively simple) XNA things? Maybe some random jQuery things that I have done recently for work? Or something else completely random – like a daily digest of what I had for dinner (tonight it was home made honey mustard chicken wings for the record).
Well most anyone that reads this probably all ready knows that I like to dabble with XNA. A few guys at work wanted to get together and enter the Dream Build Play contest this year, so we are giving it a shot – however time is running out!
Here is a short clip of the state of the game not long ago, just so you can actually see what I have been up to. I cannot take credit for the art or tunes, that’s all Mr Tim Castagna over at www.tk-games.com (well except the fancy smancy star cursor – I did that!).
For those of you chomping at the bit, here you go I present you with a few moments of Megacosm. Hopefully look for a more polished video, and state of the game soon!
The game I have been working on lately had a need to select multiple items at one time. Something pretty common in the RTS world, especially on the PC platform. It’s almost second nature to simply click and drag to select multiple items on the screen in those kind of games – and in everyday computer use I suppose.
So I wanted something similar, however for the most part the game is targeted for the Xbox under the Xbox Indie Games umbrella. That is not to say that the same functionality couldn’t be driven by the controller of course. Or you could go the direction of something like Halo Wars – which had more of a larger selection bubble that you just spanned over the units. Either way it got me thinking, and realized that at least at first glance I wasn’t exactly sure how they even accomplished this kind of thing in games like stracraft, etc. I still don’t know exactly how they do it, but after toying around a bit last night I got what I think is a pretty good representation of it.
On the surface it seems simple enough especially to a user that is just used to the ability to do such a thing – but it probably made me think a bit more than anything I have done recently in XNA.
It feels like ages since I posted (yet again). Actually about 2 months – which is quite a while really. I don’t have any real excuses either, just nothing really going on that’s super amazing to post about I guess. Christmas has passed, the kids really loved it this year, and my son is getting to the point that he really likes playing games with me. So I picked up Super Mario Wii a week ago or so. We have been playing most nights, usually quitting when ever we got to a castle, or at least a save point and picking up the next day. Granted he really still hasn’t gotten the wii mote controls, so its mostly me playing and him falling and dying….alot, but hes having fun doing it, and we are having some quality time together – so thats all that matters in the end.
Work has been pretty busy, nothing out of the ordinary since I started there I guess, but definitely keeps me busy most of the day. At night I am doing the same as I have always done, messing around with code – sometimes its ASP.NET MVC, sometimes it’s just playing around with the new features of Windows 7, sometimes its some work for some of my consulting clients, but most of the time its probably been XNA – a few guys from work actually want to work on an indie game for the Dream Build Play 2010 contest, so giving that a shot, the games that are entered in that each year are down right amazing, so it might quite a task to win – but its fun to give it a shot, and who knows it might better prepare for the development of a new game.
Well I guess this will qualify of my obligatory post to keep this blog alive for now, I might have to work on something new to keep things fresh here….
Well this time around I actually found the time to join the XNA7Day challenge. Since the challenge was to make a game that only renders text, I went with the first thing that came in mind when dealing with ASCII only output – a roguelike game. There was a few things that I would have liked to have included – but this week and weekend ended up being pretty busy, if nothing else I at least finished the task, not 100% sure how balanced it is (some games i plow through everyone, some games i get destroyed right away) but it was a fun little challenge at least.
Granted if this was a competition rather than a friendly challenge – I would probably be blown out of the water – one of the other participants threw up some screenshots of their game in progress an ASCII FPS – which makes my silly roguelike look like childs play.
In any event looking forward to seeing what everyone comes up with, and hope I have time and ideas to enter future challenges.
I picked up a few games recently, and upgraded to Windows 7 which so far I have been pretty pleased. I might be an easy sell though, I am one of the few that didn’t really hate or complain about vista. Speaking of games though Modern Warfare 2 is calling my name – I know everyone has been playing it nonstop and has all ready hit level 5 billion or whatever, but I just picked it up earlier today…so the adventure begins.
Well as I posted before I have had a bit more spare time lately – and with it I have been playing some new games (Uncharted 2 is a beauty, and starting to get into Borderlands) but also playing around with XNA still – I just can’t seem to let the dream die I guess. Last time I played around with XNA i created a pretty basic game of Solitaire. Nothing to write home about really, but it was a fun little adventure. I never got to the point I would have gone out and distributed it on Xbox Live or anything, but I somewhat considered it. Ironically before I ever got that far, I was stopped dead in my tracks, granted there was nothing stopping me from continuing to release my game even though there had just been a Solitaire game added to the marketplace, I mean just look at how many vibrator….er Massage games there are out there, but I would rather build something unique that wasn’t all ready available – if at all possible.
I had a few more ideas, and I started to notice a bit of a pattern. I started a project similar to Battleship – not long after came this, I thought of making a card battle type game something like pokemon, magic etc – and then this came out. I thought of making some sort of pumpkin carving game for halloween – and quite of few of those popped up. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t think these are ground breaking nobody could think of it ideas or anything, it was just somewhat comical the track record I was having. Finally I thought of something that I thought was somewhat unique and a little less likely to be released before I could get to it, a gunner where you play with both thumbsticks each thumb controlling a different ship. I cant find the article now, but sure enough two guys where working on the same kind of game and had a news story about it. Finally I saw the videos of the Dream Build Play contest this year, and my jaw dropped, it’s unlikely I could ever compete with some of those awesome looking games – and yet I still carry the torch continuing to dabble – and who knows maybe one day actually release a game for you all to play. If anyone is an artist the chances of that might get higher because I pretty much suck anything artistic or design
For the past month or so I picked up a new project, another one that probably wont ever get to the point of distribution, but just to keep my appetite wet, and my skills at least somewhat sharp in the XNA world. I started recreating a board game that I used to playe quite a bit as a child ‘Stratego’. Again not being graphically inclined at all, i started with what I did know – code, numbers, and logic, and the results of that is the image you see here, the beginning stages of my game. Maybe not the most logical way to start the game, as I am no game developer to say the least – but it worked so I went with it.
The most interesting thing about this image is – in this state the game was 100% playable. The rules were enforce -pieces could only move the places they were allowed to move, when two pieces touched the winner of the battle would stay, the loser would leave – and you could even win by getting your enemy’s flag. Not much to look at, and no AI at all, but functional.
Over time I have continued to tweak that starting point, throw some graphics on it, build an AI engine (to which I have to admit I had not a single clue how I was going to approach such a thing when i decided to tackle that task), and make things like pieces actually moving instead of a square changing from one piece to another. I have tweaked it a few times for performance, not that it was performing badly but I found that if I changed up a few lines of code, I could get it to perform even better, etc. In any event for those of you interested, here is a little screen capture video of the game in its current state.
Be warned, I know its not perfect, amazing, ground breaking, or any of those things – so dont bother clicking play if you are expecting to be amazed
I don’t know if I would call the game complete, I don’t know if I will ever complete it – however it definitely is the furthest along I have gotten when playing around with building a game completely from scratch to date. As I sit here I can continue to name things I could add to it – like make the AI MUCH better (its functional but pretty dumb at this point -but to be fair it did beat me a few times so far), fix up a few nuisance type bugs, add some sort of scoring mechanism, update it to be a 2 player networkable game….and on, and on….and on. Will I ever do those things? Perhaps, because its been a fun time thus far, or I might migrate onto one of those other projects I have in mind (that so far have not been released) and use what I have learned in this adventure towards the next.
