•  Embeded Futura font
• Made physics more ‘fun’ (Fat circles have inertia now)
• Small tweaks to parameters
• Hopefully optimised it a wee bit.

Enjoy!

(Probably the nicest looking thing I’ve made in a long time. That said, the code is pretty atrocious.)

I was originally going to write about all the trials and tribulations I went through this year, but that seemed unsuitable for a blog of public nature and besides, most of you readers (read: the one reader that is reading this right now) come here for subjects less personal so instead of constantly berating you with semi-entertaining filler content or useless teenage, hormone filled drivel, I intent to only post when there is something of worth or of reasonably quality.

That being said, I don’t really have anything of value to say so I’ll leave you with this:

First there was the Canadian internet scare where the CRCT decided to enforce internet metering on their plans. The people of Canada were outraged at such an idea as their monthly usage were several times greater than their new cap (unlimited – 25G is a huge difference). After much complaining, the CRCT realised their mistake and are going back to the drawing board. NB: This may not be 100% accurate, but is roughly right.

This made me want to encourage NZers to pester our ISPs to loosen their iron fist on our internet connections, but a kind redditor pointed out that there is a large difference in infrastructure between the metropolitan Canada and suburban NZ. I guess NZers can only wait for our internet to catch up with the rest leaders of the world.

Then there was Egypt and it’s revolution. For those who didn’t know, Egypt has been in a “state of emergency” since the late ’60s which mean President Mubarak has been in power for the entire time. The people of egypt who sick of high rates of unemployment and a decaying economy, took to the streets on the 25th of January after seeing Tunsinia successfully overthrowing their leader, revolted against Mubarak. Mubarak responded by blocking access to facebook and twitter (and possibly other social networking sites) but soon revoked all internet access within the country. Methods around Mubarak’s blackout were discovered and Egyptians showed the world how corrupt their leader and police was by spreading pictures and up to date information on the revolt. Finally, today Mubarak stepped down, leading (hopefully) to a better future for Egypt.

I never realised that (near) 1st world could have such a government and still remain peaceful enough for the situation to remain under the radar for most people realise. It kinda makes me wonder, what other painfully obvious struggles are occuring in other countries that I’m to ignorant to see.

That’s all I want to talk about interms of world news. I asked some of my friends what else I should post about. Some wanted me to talk about them/school, while others, starcraft. An interesting subject that ties nicely with Egypt is lying. This friend brought up the subject on the premise of Liar’s Game, a drama about a fictional tournament where people are given the oportunity to earn money quickly by deciving others. While the drama focus on morality and game theory rather than lying, it does spark interesting thoughts.

“What if nobody lied in the world”

- An utopic idea is likely pondered by many people. Here are my thoughts: If this rule covered all forms of lying, then couldn’t one argue that art would not exist? Aren’t paintings or drawings merely forms of lying, where you decieve your eyes, your mind into thinking it’s somewhere else, better (or worse), closer (or further) to perfection than where you are right now? Is liteature not a form of escapism, a lie to trick your imagination into painting a world which is not real? Sure everybody might be happy, but the world would be extremely dull.

“All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy”

That’s probably all for today, I’m don’t really want to much esoteric nonsense on this blog, but I’ll make an exception for today.

I’ve been playing a little of this lately in my spare time. Nothing special, just a relaxing time waster I guess.

Shocking news, Crysis 2 was leaked, in a near completed state. Terribly sad news in my opinion, it look to be an pretty awesome sequel.

Super awesome song from VVVVVV:

That’s all for today.

While I’ve been gone, I didn’t really make much. I spent a fair bit of time studying actually, but I’d rather not talk about that. I am starting to learn SDL and as such, C++. I have an idea for a little simulation thing thats kinda like osmos, but probably not as ambient nor beautiful though. I also had an idea for “living photographs”, sort of like in harry potter, only online, though that would require some art skills, which I may consider practising.

If you want some interesting content to fill your time now, check out this. It’s one of those buying/selling, min/game things. The game itself is very, but the art style in my opinion is nice.

Lately, I’ve become a grammar nazi of sorts, but this place is probably going to be my sanctuary where I won’t obsess over every sentence, just be gentle when you find a mistake.

Oh I started using reddit.

I don’t really have much else to say, or rather, I don’t know what else I should say, since this is blog is a weird mix of personal things and technical things…

Oh, I missed the global game jam this year due to other commitments…

I might to a 2010 in review, but it was a pretty shitty year for me apart from a few isolated events.

That’s all for today I think… this song will play me out for today:

To set the mood:

I can’t believe this is just under 30 minutes WALK away from my house, less than 10 minutes drive.

Anyways, today, I added click & drag “painting” so you don’t have to spam click tiles. Oh and I finished saving and loading : )
I also increased the map size to 200×200 for testing purposes.

Left click to toggle through tile types.
Click then hold to paint the type around.
Arrow keys to scroll, hold shift while holding/tapping  keys will scroll faster.
Save using Ctrl+S and choosing anywhere.
Load using Ctrl+L and picking any .txt file (That’s made by this level editor!)

You COULD try using random files, but if it crashes, it’s not my fault.
HINT: Using a .txt file with lots of numbers

First, but this on, I’m listening to it as I’m writing this post.

Now, as you may remember, I participated in the global game jam way back in January this year and made this. During the jam, I actually cobbled together a rudimentary level editor just to make level design easier. The tool was alright, but lagged ALOT, it was because I was lazy and made Flashpunk process 1000×500 or so entities. Sweet. Another problem was scrolling, to cut some more corners, I didn’t scroll the grid and just moved the “view” block by block. this was pretty terrible since if you were viewing empty space, you had no idea if you were moving or not. This time round, I’ve already got those problem completely sorted, it’s much more efficient and doesn’t lag at all AND the scrolling is pretty sweet.

A positives of the old level editor was that it loaded and saved levels quickly (I think) to files. This greatly increased our productivity as I programmed a “quick load” button which when combined with drop box meant near real time level testing across multiple computers, it a pretty awesome setup.

Something I’d like to differently is to load a list entities/blocks from a file rather than hard code them. I’m not sure how I’m going to allow for unique properties with it being safe (I don’t want people being able to load malicious code through the blocks definitions). In the old editor, it was hardcoded through a series of switches which was alright.
Another thing is layers. Layers are one of those things adds alot of eye candy like running behind walls or clouds, grass, or even props, layers bring alot of depth (hur, hur unintentional pun) into the art.

Intermission, STYLE CHANGE! HADOUKEN!

Then big thing I’m planning for this project is exportation [sp?] to a zip containing ALL the assets ie. art (inc. sprites?), entites, level script data and of course the tileset. The huge upside to this is that on an already established platform such as Kongregate, I hopefully should be able to implement their API which will let people create, share and play micro games all in one place. The thing is, I’m a little hesitant to carry on that path. Things like knytt have pretty rich level editors and aren’t exactly wildly popular even with awesome “release titles”. I think I’ll also be treading on the territory of Game Maker, which is also a very rich “level editor” though it’s more geared towards actually coding. I’ll probably implement some kind of packaging system just for the sake of ease of use though…

I’d really like to try adding scripting capabilities but throughout writing this post, I’ve realised that this really suitable for my project. I think I’m aming to make, at least a simple level editor which outputs the data to a raw text file and ideally I’ll make a complex, feature rich, platform “maker”. The closest thing to scripting will probably adding “properties” including physical properties: restitution (“bounce”), friction etc. “magical” properties: Ice (slippery/freezing), Poison (damage over time), Insta-death etc. There will definately be end points, respawn points, items which you can pick up, “message” scrolls and enemies.

I’ve yet to make the other half of this project which is the platformer/engine part, but I suspect that I’ll just be ripping it from parts of old projects.

Here’s what I have to show of the level editor so far:

Left click to toggle through tile types (Quartz underground, Quartz surface, empty).
Arrow keys to scroll, hold shift while holding/tapping  keys will scroll faster.
Map is 100×100. No saving/loading capabilities yet.

Finally:

PS. This post probably would’ve been up 2 hours ago if I wasn’t fiddling with Foobar2000 and last.fm scrobbling…

The lyrics in the video description makes no sense though…
In case you’re wondering, it’s from the movie Paprika which is surreal to say the least. If I had to describe it in a words, they’d be childhood dreams vs reality, inception? I can’t describe, the movie is just really good. Watch it!

In other news, I had KFC a few days ago and a friend suggested I blog about.
I was pretty hungry that day and decided to have an early dinner at around 3:00pm. So I drive to KFC after agonising over which fast food chain to go to. Once I arrive there, I remember that same friend suggest I try the Hot and Spicy chicken. I, liking both hot chicken and spicy foods followed her suggestions and also bought this burger, the “Super-charged tower Burger”:

Looks delicious no? 2 chicken patties, TWO! CHEESE! MYSTERIOUS SAUCE! Wait… what is that sauce… Mayo? No.
It was something like Curry/chilli sauce. The first bite I took was a HUGE surprise, I was expecting some mild flavours, not a curry burger. Don’t get me wrong, I love me a good curry, but this thing totally took me by surprise and kinda ruined my meal. After finishing the burger in 4 mins max, I proceeded to work may way through the 6 pieces of chicken I’d bought. Wait…SIX you say? How big are the pieces of chicken? The same size as the original recipe ones. *FACEPALM* I’d thought they were wicked wing-esque sized pieces of chickens. No, I’d thought they WERE wicked wings. After eating about 3, It was too much and I left the table a failure, deciding that I leave the rest for tomorrow.

Funny thing is, I got hungry at ~10:00 pm and decided to heat up two more pieces of chicken. BIG mistake. Though they were fairly delicious, I now had scent of *13 original herbs and spices* stuck in my nose. I literally could not get the smell-taste out. Also the smell of chicken stained my hands like that of chain smokers hands. Bleugh, needless to say, I had trouble sleeping that night. In the morning, my stomach didn’t feel quite right, nothing terrible, just… unsettled.
I think I swore never to KFC again.

I had KFC yesterday. I had a regular old burger and 3 pieces of wicked wings which I ate in the following manner:

Tastey :3

Lesson learnt here? Eat KFC in moderation.

Things I now do:

• Starcraft 2 (ID:YagerX Number:[830] if you want to play). More on this as I get better..
• Reddit. The community is AMAZING.
• Level Editor project that is some what underway.
• More starcraft.
• Eat chicken.

I’ll end this post with something pretty awesome (wear headphones/earphones!):

Seriously, the use of timpani’s there is AMAZING.

This guy’s pretty baller too:

Though I do not appreciate youtube breaking my site :/

Completely procedurally generated, should make 1 revolution in 6 seconds.
Definately not the final concept. Simply work in progress