Weekly Update #3

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I am terrible at blogging on a regular basis. I blame my daily commute.

I’ll try to keep the update briefer this time:

  • Charlotteville – The website is growing nicely and the game is starting to get to the point where I don’t have to put in 12 hours of prep for a chance at a halfway terrible session. Another few sessions and I reckon it might even start being good…
  • Games – I still can’t talk about a game I’ve spent a fair bit of time playing. No progress on anything else, though I did play a bit of Warlock on Sunday.
  • TV Shows – Catching up on Bones and Castle.
  • Music – Chose my piece for the Christmas Concert. Beethoven’s 5th narrowly lost out. You’ll have to wait a bit to hear more about what I did choose. Guitar is coming along nicely, I think I’ll be at a point where I can play enough stuff at the end of this term that I can give up lessons and maybe claw back some precious free time.
  • City-to-Bay – looking increasingly unlikely, but I’m back in weekly PT sessions with my old trainer, so we’ll see.
  • Uni – I have assignments due starting next week. I should probably do them.
  • Renovations and Project 2011 – No progress

I’ve been doing a lot of overtime at work lately and am in desperate need of a nap. It’s starting to look like I might get one this weekend. If that does happen, then with a little bit of luck I’ll have some news about a couple of new projects.

Before you ask, yes, I know that I’m a masochist and need to take on less things.

Weekly Update #2

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So, yeah, twice a week is totally happening…

Here’s this weeks update:

  • Project2011 – Development still on hold whilst I consider a lot of design issues. Also because the time I have for dev work has been given over to Charlotteville.
  • Charlotteville – The website now allows you to log in & alter character details. There’s  still a lot to add, but I’m fairly happy with how it’s going. The game itself has now had two sessions. The second was a bit of a fizzler due to a few players being sick, my having spent too much time on dev and not enough on prep, and the story being at a point where some characters have lots to do and others have basically nothing.
  • Games
    • Finished my first Civ V Gods and Kings. Really wish I had more time to play that.
    • Deus Ex – I’m up to just before the first boss fight (I think). Finding time has been an issue.
    • I can’t talk about this game.
    • I’ve logged a few hours on BF3 as well.
    • We won’t talk about my installing Peggle the other day…
  • TV Shows – Rewatching Covert Affairs. Catching up on Nikita and Rizzoli & Isles. I’m super keen for Newsroom and Leverage.
  • City-to-Bay training – I am a lazy, lazy man.
  • Music – I’ve been a little slack here of late, but I think a lot of that is just because this week has been crazy exhausting. Hopefully I’ll do better this afternoon and next week.
  • Renovations – ha!
  • Further Education – Uni starts next week. In classic Comp Sci style, no details are available for any of my courses beyond when the first lecture is. Very much hoping they put something online soon, because I can’t make it to the lectures. So, if it turns out that they’re not going to do that, then I may have to drop the courses. I doubt work’ll be happy with me taking an extra couple of hours off a week to go to class.

Later today I want to put up a better post. We’ll see what happens. Curse my inability to move things beyond the draft stage.

Weekly Update #1

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I’ve been thinking about my recent pact with one of my blog buddies that we’d both post twice a week. Specifically, I’ve been considering how I’m going to come up with stuff worth writing about that doesn’t require an excess of research time.

A few weeks back I posted a list of where I was at with the various projects I have on the go. Whilst that’s probably not of massive interest to most of you, it was really useful to write. It helps give me a perspective on my achievements and productivity that I otherwise find hard to maintain.

So, I’ve decided that once a week I’ll post an update on what’s happened with my various projects. There might be some vaguely interesting things in there occasionally (like audio clips of me playing one of the instruments I’m learning) or links to some of the web dev stuff I’m doing. The other post each week will be on a random topic or might expand on something in my current project list – I’ve got enough different things going on at the moment that it’s hard to add extras…

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The Thing About Good Questions

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I just spent the better part of an hour trying to write a good question.

I’ve not yet posted a question on Stack Overflow (SO), though I’ve used it many, many times to help me when I get stuck coding something. Tonight I finally found something that Google and SO couldn’t give me the answer to. So, I decided I’d write a question and see what happens.

Well, I got my answer. But not from the community. I was reminded that two-thirds of solving a problem is asking the right question. Spending an hour writing it (what? I’m paranoid about my writing when it’s not an explicit request for help, it had to be perfect ‘nammit) meant I had to carefully analyse many parts of the problem and find clearer ways to word it. As I did this, being a paranoid nut job, I also double-checked that no assertions of fact that I was making were wrong. During one of the fact checks, I noticed that an example of a line of CSS in my project was done slightly differently in another persons. Voila, there’s my answer.

Ask and ye shall receive. Not because someone will give it to you, but because if you ask properly you’ll probably find the answer out for yourself.

For those who are curious, there are some more details below the fold.
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Twice A Week? What Am I? A Printing Press?

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I sort of agreed with a friend today that I’d update this blog twice a week for the next, erm, forever.

Having done that, I’ve spent a sizable portion of today sitting here having no idea what to write about.

I read an interesting piece recently by a twitter acquaintance. She wrote about the fear of imperfection and the impact it had on her attempts to blog. It struck me as amazingly similar to my own experiences (except that she can write better than I can). Certainly the part about the overflowing drafts folder that will almost certainly never get done.

I think a lot of the trouble with those posts is that they tried to address factual topics that were not my area of expertise. A lot of the hesitation represented a lack of time for full research. So, I’m going with a new approach.

I’m going to try to focus on writing about topics that can’t be objective or factual. So, maybe we’ll some some reviews, reports on things I’ve done (I’m buying a guitar tomorrow), notes from my new fortnightly World of Darkness game, or some more creative writing (if you’re really unlucky it might even be another poem).

So, now that I’ve copped out on my first post of this new challenge, I’ll leave you all in peace :p

 

PS: According to WordPress’ Proofreader, most of the things I say fall in to the category of “complex expressions”…

Blog Changes & Projects!

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I migrated the blog from a server running in my spare room to a Rackspace server today. As part of the migration, I also performed a long overdue upgrade from the 2.9.x WordPress series to 3.4 – if anyone encounters any problems lemme know.
I also took the opportunity to import all the posts I’d written at my earlier blogs – Imaginary Ripples, Divided Answers, Integrated Questions, and Magnesium Games. So everything I’ve ever published online (including the infamous lettuce essay) can now be found here!

Below the fold, I thought I’d also take the time to update you all on my various projects at the moment.

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So. Many. Projects.

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So, I’ve been thinking about this blog a bit. Currently I update only when I have enough time to put some thought in to a semi-serious topic. This is a rare occurrence. An original part of the motivation behind this blog was to write more regularly & thus improve my writing skills.
Clearly, that is not working.
So, after Sewnerd suggested to me a few weeks ago that we be “Blog Buddies”, I came to the conclusion that maybe I should stop trying to be so serious all the time and let the blog just be about what I’m up to at any given time.

I’m sure I’ll still write the occasional serious piece, but hopefully there’ll be more “Hey, I saw this cool thing” sort of blogs in the near future.

So, I thought I’d start by listing all the things I’m currently working on.

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Games of 2011

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It would seem that in 2011, I bought (or was given) over 30 games on Steam, plus at least another couple off-Steam & a few mega-awesome-packs on Steam… So, I figured, given that I must’ve spent well over $1,000 on games, I should write about the highlights, lowlights, and such. So what follows is my take on the best and worst games I experienced in 2011. It’s not a Best-of-2011 list. For a start, plenty of the games weren’t released last year, I merely happened to play them last year. More importantly, there are some games that likely strongly deserve a position amongst the best or worst that I simply didn’t get around to playing & thus can’t comment on. Continue reading →

Project2011 is a No-Go

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Sadness!

It’s become increasingly apparent to me with my current level of knowledge it is impossible for me to get Project2011 to a playable state any time in the foreseeable future. I’m not even sure where to start with some of the key skills I’ll need to learn and others I just have no desire to learn (e.g. anything that would normally be the purview of an artist).

So, I could keep bashing my head against Project2011 and make a game that’s no fun and barely even playable or I could take an entirely different route.

In many ways, Project2011 has already met its goal. I wanted to learn Java well enough to pass the SCJP exam to improve my ability to get a dev job. I’m confident that I now know Java well enough to do that.

So, I’m putting Project2011 to the side for the time being. I love the game concept and will return to it in the future, when I know more about games development.

To that end, I’ve downloaded Unity and started learning it. I plan to complete at least two games between now and the New Year. These will, of course, be quite small games using whatever art assets I can get my hands on for free. The idea being that they will be a bit of fun to throw together and will teach me a lot about Unity and the common approach to games development.

I’m also going to start looking for some other Adelaideans interested in games development, especially of the arty variety. If there’s one thing that Project 2011 has taught me, it’s that games development is a team endeavour. Hell, I already knew that. At the very least, you need someone to actively bounce design concepts off.

Anyway, that’s enough rambling.

I’m spending three days next week working on a short, not-at-all-shiny, somewhat-shabby game. I’m doing this as a 72-hour challenge, so all I’ve done thus far is think about some possible game concepts.

Today, I’ve been working on the 3D Platformer tutorial that Unity make available. Given that next week’s challenge will be my first actual game, I’m leaning towards sticking somewhat close to the principles covered in the tutorial and making a 3D Platformer. Ideas are welcome…

Oh, and next week’s game will feature a troll…