My Work

I’ve decided to take the jump and enter the Seven Day Roguelike (7DRL) competition starting next month. The challenge? Write a complete “rogue-like” adventure game in just seven days. The additional challenge is that these include WORKING days, so there’s far less time in which to do it. My first inclination was to do it in Python with the PyGame SDL libraries on Linux. Trouble is, nobody will ever see the game that way. So while talking with Kasul last night, I decided to reach deep into my past and write it as a Java applet. ...

Yesterday, Bear was caught in a bind because he didn’t have a computer to run the Champions Online beta. He didn’t know that he was standing on a computer – the Monopoly board itself. Before World War II, computers weren’t machines, they were a profession. Rooms of people-computers, usually women, would perform calculation after calculation with mechanical calculators (that could only add and subtract) and paste the results in huge books, which would be shipped to military bases and used to calculate firing solutions for weapons of war. ...

Announcing the XFire Stats Wordpress Plugin. This plugin adds a widget that you can place on the sidebar of your Wordpress blog to show your gaming stats for the past week – the title and time spent, sorted by decreasing time. This is the very first release of this, my very first plugin, and feedback is definitely encouraged. To install: Right click on this link and choose “Save Link As…” and name it ‘xfirestats.zip’. ...

… if I could draw your attention to your right, especially you Wordpress bloggers … I’ve written a Wordpress Widget that shows your gaming (via XFire) for the past week. It still has one or two bugs issues challenges before I can release it publicly, but if anyone has any ideas of what they would like to see in such a widget, like sorting, or yes for times/no times, or live information or whatever… let me know.

Step 1: Start browsing the games Xfire claims are installed on your system and come across a children’s version of that old game, Mastermind: Step 2: Spend 15 minutes writing a program in Python to solve it for you. Step 3: Suddenly realize you missed the point of the puzzle in the first place :P We had to do a version of this game as a programming assignment in Pascal back in college. It took a lot longer than 15 minutes back then. Python > Pascal. That’s all.

Raph Koster today posted an article proposing that the reason people flock to games similar to ones they have already played is because they have no easy way of finding the alternatives. I agree! That’s a HUGE problem! How can I convince anyone Pi Story is a good game when they assume all MMOs must be 3D? How can I convince myself that oh, I dunno, Age of Conan is a game I’d like without going to the effort of buying it and installing it? ...

I spent hours last night running around Norrath on Test, killing stuff and doing quests, just so I could write about the Void Storms coming in EQ2’s Game Update 46. Is the next expansion The Void? Or is this just a red herring? Regardless, the appearance armor and weapons are kind of cool and there are a lot more benefits besides, and you can read all about it over on Massively. Fair warning: You will be doing a LOT of cleansing to earn the nicer rewards. ...

I can’t be a full time raider, perform my day job competently, be a professional blogger, play the wide variety of MMOs I need to play to do my job, participate in the two betas I am in (don’t ask), and also sleep. The past couple of weeks, sleep-debt has been killing me. Simple fact is, I need to be in bed 11PM each night. Staying up until 1, 2 or 3AM writing after raids is killing me. ...

I wrote a piece yesterday about MissBimbo.com, a game that teaches young girls how dieting and boob jobs are the path to a successful and rewarding life… and on the way to work, what drives by but a truck full of Bimbos… or something :)

Came across this Python sprite package, Rabbyt while looking for Python gaming development sites with searchme. The current game I’m writing (when time permits) doesn’t use sprites, but some tech demos I wrote do, and this looks like a pretty darn amazing package, able to do rotation and scaling and handle thousands of moving objects and collisions at incredible speed. My PyGame-based tech demos were struggling to get 60fps out of just forty or so sprites – and I wasn’t even testing collisions (well, they were supposed to be avoiding each other anyway). So I may have to revisit those demos and maybe there will be a game in there, after all. ...