So I just finished playing Professor Layton and the Curious Village, and I have to admit the plot twist at the end threw me off guard. Not that the plot had a huge bearing on gameplay, but I did not see it coming that in 19th century England, all the people I interacted with were actually robots.

My sister put together a great video about our family's yearly Thanksgiving Spoons tournament, it captures the mood great. Check it out here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8fmmQzFzBKs

So, I've been working a little bit on BallBounce, although not as much as I'd like to. I would appreciate ideas for Things that can be included in the program. Here is a short video showing a simple gameplay scenario (it's rather ugly right now; I'm waiting to pretty it up until I'm happy with its functionality). There are preset levels that have some sort of goal, like "get to a certain region" or "pop this ball" or whatever. The framework is very flexible, and I wonder what sort of ideas you have for Things that can be on the levels. As seen in the video there are the following Things:

-> balls that move under preset guidelines (minimum velocity, friction, gravity, bounciness, etc.); the color-changing one that starts in the bottom right is the Neon Light Illusion.
-> stationary obstacles (Wall, BUSH, Ball)
-> objects that can only be pushed, like the Boulder
-> user-controlled vehicles like the Bumper Car and Death Cab
-> poppers (right now just the Prowler)
-> size modifiers (Food, Poison)

It's very simple to make new Things, or even modifications on existing Things, it's just a matter of going in there and implementing them. What would be cool in something like this?

I just played Puyo Puyo Fever for the first time in a long, long while. I pressed random buttons and ended up playing the second girl's story mode, and eventually made my way through it, even though the teacher and the cat were tough. They give you purple puyos in that! It basically took luck with fever timing to beat that terrible cat. And the cat just wasn't the same without hearing Alan say "nyuh nyuuuuuuh." And let's not get started with Hoho bird...

Dear McDonald's,

Thanks for the straw! I didn't need it, as I ordered a McChicken and a Double Cheeseburger, but I appreciate the freebie.

Your BFF,
~~*TIM*~~

A small sample of what I've been working on. This was a quickly implemented feature that's sure to please many. It may not be pretty, because I made it in like 15 minutes, but still.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6OKWKRcA8iE

Here's the box cover for a French game I've never heard of, much less played, but it's got some amazingness that needs attention:



Why yes, that's a balloon-powered air pirate ship being attacked by a giant flying octopus. Did you have any questions?

A follow-up to an old entry.

( Read more... )

Again, just a product of boredom.

The other day you told me that you got a great deal on bagels, then you left. I'm still confused. Did you tell me too much?

As I said in my last post, I'm a little rusty with coding, but some of my old habits are coming back to me. Specifically using poor coding practices:

-> I made an abstract class called Thing for the objects that will be in the screen. I wanted to name it Object, but that's taken. I have great lines like:
stuff = new ArrayList<Thing>();
-> Frustrated with the LayoutManagers in Java and just wanting to put things where I want them to go, I gave my frame a null LayoutManager. This has been described by various internet sources as "evil" and "a sin." At least I haven't done any fake goto statements yet.

Also, I was able to code up a working function to test whether a circle and square overlapped on the first try, without any bugs, and yet I spent a long time figuring out why the program was getting false positives with that function, only to realize after a long time of debugging and manual simulations that I was passing in the circle's diameter as the radius parameter.

Last night, frustrated by realizing how much time I've been throwing away playing Bejeweled Blitz on facebook, I opened up Eclipse and started writing some simple program in Java. Despite the fact that I've been working as a programmer for nearly a year and a half and I went to school for four years for this stuff and so on, I was amazingly rusty. Writing new code is a lot different from maintaining existing code (and a killion times more fun, part of the reason I don't like my current job). Even remembering to put braces and semicolons at the proper places was throwing me off after using almost exclusively VB.NET. I had to look up a lot of examples to do what I was doing, a simple 15-200-style Frame that makes circles upon clicking that change size and such. (Oh Pattis...)

I even had the kind of bug that I like. I wanted the circles to grow over time until they collide with another, then they shrink until they hit minimum size, then grow again. The collision detection wasn't quite working right... it was pretty close, but usually a couple "frames" too early or late. I rechecked my simple geometry on paper, and finally realized that I was using my internal x and y coordinates as top-left corner instead of center, messing up the math. So much better than "faulty DLL references" or "another programmer used an inconsistent structure in this three years ago and everyone's just been going along with it and it's causing problems that would require a complete rewrite to fix" or suchlike*.

I'm going to keep working on it and make it some sort of free workshop and/or puzzle game, because it's reminding me that there are parts of this whole computer thing I still like. And because it will let me play less Bejeweled.

*I was surprised to learn that spellcheck was fine with "suchlike," and surpriseder to learn that it was a real word.

I'm influential. Two of my coworkers are planning on dressing as Vince Offer on Friday. One will be sporting the ShamWow ensemble, the other armed with a Slap Chop.

Clearly, I need to plaster more people's cubicles with pictures of smarmy infomercial stars.

I enjoy low-tech things much more than the newest, coolest stuff. I especially noticed this when watching some Muppet stuff recently. The sorts of effects that they were able to pull off just by creative angles and the occasional chroma key is just outstanding. As one "behind the scenes" clip I saw said, they basically had about 18 inches of filmable area, but they were able to create the illusion of full-size characters and a full set. There's just some "magic" that half makes you wonder how they manage to show Bert "Doing the Pigeon" and half lets you not care and just enjoy the moment. Of course, all this is in addition to giving such LIFE to what is just some felt and some guys with funny voices. There's a warmth that seems tough to replicate with anything CG'd.

Other interests fall into this sort of bucket. 70s and 80s game shows managed to do a lot with pretty low-tech equipment and methods. From the moving set pieces of Password Plus to the slide projectors for Press Your Luck's big board to making the tiny Bob Barker Studio look huge on The Price is Right through creative directing, they had this great atmosphere and did a lot with what today is a little. I'd much rather see them spin a trilon in the The $100,000 Pyramid Winner's Circle than have them just change the graphic on an on-set plasma screen.

Board games have a lot of that same analog charm. Moving around HeroScape units beats moving around Heroes of Might & Magic units any day. Playing board games over BSW (the online board game server) lacks a lot of charm that the original has, even if convenience is added. There's just that tactile sensation that draws you into it more, makes you feel every gain and loss by having it literally pass through your hands, rather than just seeing a number change on a screen. Even if the game's the same, it's just more satisfying.

This weekend I'm seeing Colin Mochrie and Brad Sherwood (of Whose Line is it Anyway?) perform live in Atlanta. So far, this and the upcoming Styx concert are the main benefits of having moved to South Carolina.

Today I received a package from home containing everything that I might have even the slightest potential attachment to from my old bedroom. Apparently I didn't throw much out, since I have everything from old name badges from working at grocery stores to old birthday cards to an advertisement for Looney Labs games to a broken Beatles-looking robo-hamster that tries to sing It's Your Birthday. You can see an array of some of the contents here, but I'll be going into more detail in the future. Today, I will focus on a card given to me by my sister Laura. I wish I knew a timeframe, but it's from when I was in high school or later, since Strong Sad is mentioned:

( Picture of the card )

Here's the text.
Yo timmyyyy!!!
Waz up? Im an idiot y did I ask a quest to u if u cant answer it. Well ne ways I rly don't no wat to write. Mom just told me to write something to u, not that I dont want to but I just don't no wat to say. Umm yea ur a cool bro + the best in The world Yessoo. I <3 ^{<3 sry computer talk} ur hair now its awesone and kool. Yea pretty coors!! =-) I used a face on Im and it looked like Strong Sad its this (-_-) doesn't it or am I just stupid. Yea this has no point to it but mom keeps on cumming in heer so she can retrieve it. I want a slushie, do u remember thouse good times w̄ slushies. Well yea ur awesome and I miss u and playing DDR w̄ u. I cant fit ne thing else so bibi love <3 Laura :) :D

For reasons unknown to modern man, I looked at the Skip-Bo Wikipedia entry. There's a section labeled "Interesting Fact" reading:

"Andrew Basaraba, won the National Skip-Bo tournament in 1996 making him the declared best Skip-Bo player in the world. He died two days later from choking on Skip-Bo cards in an attempt to perfect a way to cheat."

It includes a link to an obviously fabricated blog featuring this same info. I was about to delete the Wikipedia section, but then I wondered why. The entry evokes some bizarre imagery, making the reader wonder how one could conceivably store playing cards in one's throat, besides the difficulty of effectively cheating by doing so. Did he win the tournament by cheating? Or did he have a legitimate victory that he needed to preserve at all costs? Should we cheer or bemoan the loss of "the declared best Skip-Bo player in the world," knowing his methods? And just two days later, at that!

So I left the section there, because it keeps the world a slightly more interesting place to keep that intact.

I took photos around downtown Charleston of things looking like every letter of the alphabet. Enjoy.

From Abecedarian

We were supposed to cover Matt's cube with photos of ShamWow Vince today after Matt left, but Harsha and Tim bailed on me, saying they'll do it during lunch tomorrow instead. Come on guys. Guess you just can't trust web designers.