Gaming Zen

So we left our Journals yesterday with me getting some sweet Leather Armor and a couple of new guns for my trouble. I got a Hunting Rifle from the crony I killed in Killian Darkwater's place (<-- it's Killian, not Killiam - mea culpa) and a Shotgun with 100 rounds for a reward in helping the town out. Pretty fricking sweet. And by this time, I had earned enough money to send a Water Caravan up to the Vault to keep them alive. I made my way back with Ian to the Hub to set the deal up.

The Master Merchant was all too happy to take my 2000 caps, but she advised that, once I sent a Caravan up to the Vault, it would be a short time before someone else in the Wastelands realized that the Vault was still up and functioning – and it might be someone whom I'd rather didn't know about the Vault. That made me stop for a moment. I still have 90+ days to find the Chip....maybe I shouldn't send water until it's a bit closer to the deadline....

I decided to hold off and keep exploring with Ian.

We found a few places in the Hub that I can't BELIEVE I missed. One place was a general store that sold......rope. Well, the first thing I did was buy some rope and head back to Vault 15.

Ian and I dispatched a few Radscorpions on our way to Vault 15; we entered the Vault and headed to the broken elevator shaft. The bottom floor was filled with rats – it also contained an SMG, some ammo, and a Leather Jacket. Ugh. This would've come in handy, like 20 gameplay hours ago. I guess I did things a little backwards. Oh well. I ended up just selling the stuff for fun and profit anyway.

I also found a library where I found a holodisk containing geographic data of a third Vault – Vault 12. This must be the place where I can find the Water Chip. And it's probably also the place where I'll find that robots and mutants that Old Harold was talking about. I don't think I'm strong enough to handle the Vault's security yet, so I decide to explore some more.

I head down the map even further to a place called the Boneyard. I soon find out it's all that is left of Los Angeles. There are two factions vying for control – the Regulators, and the Blades. The Blades sounds like a terrorist group or something, but when I go and visit them I realize that things aren't what they initially seemed.

I think I'll stop here for now. I'm typing this blog entry into my OpenOffice Word Processor, hoping beyond hope that 1) Vox comes up before midnight, or 2) I can legally create a backup blog and post on it.

If I can't, I'm gonna lose the IMBC on a technicality. Well, we'll see how it goes. It's up to Fate.

EDIT: Vox is back up! The Fates have been kind. I did, however, start a backup blog at http://oldmanlever.blogspot.com - if it's not too late, I'll use that blog as my official IMBC backup.

I got a chance to play some Fallout last night, and I actually made some serious headway. I ditched the cool leather jacket for some new Leather Armor, and my arsenal of weaponry has expanded considerably. Here's a brief recap of my lastest adventures in the wastelands.

Ian and I were hanging around Junktown, looking for some clues on where to find a Water Chip or some ways to make some sweet caps. We met up with the guards/police of Junktown, a bunch of guys wearing the same armor and generally saying the same things. One of them does manage to say something unique: he warns me about Gizmo and his cronies.

Gizmo, huh? Well, he can't be any worse than those damn Raiders in the desert. Not long after, Ian and I find a jail with a fellow by the name of Andrew.

My dialogue options are "What are you doing?" and "No thanks." Hmm.......well, "No thanks" makes absolutely no sense, so let's ask Andrew what he's doing. What he has to say may surprise you:

Enlightening. Ian and I go looking for the mayor of town. He's a fellow by the name of Killiam Darkwater, who doubles as the town trader and sheriff. He asks me to help take care of Gizmo and his cronies - apparently, they are running some kind of gang/crime syndicate out of Gizmo's casino to the north. I tell Killiam I'll help him; I'm about to leave when, out of nowhere, one of Gizmo's cronies bursts into the store and starts shooting at Killiam, screaming "Gizmo sends his regards!"

Ian and I had the guy dead before I could get a screenshot of us fighting him. Here's a picture of me and Ian looming over his shattered corpse.

Killing this guy helps me win the trust of Killiam, and I get some more precious XP, not to mention a SWEET hunting rifle which becomes my weapon of choice for the rest of the play session.

I don't have screenshots for the battle that ensued, but basically here's how it breaks down. Killiams give me a tape recorder and a bug to try and get some sort of incriminating confession out of Gizmo. (Apparently, the homicidal crony screaming "Gizmo sends his regards!" ain't enough to convict.) So I go up north to the casino and have a little chat with Killiam - after killing two of his guards and stealing their Leather Armor, of course. I pretend that I'm there to offer my services as a hitman, and he hires me to take Killiam out.

I run back to Killiam's store and give him the evidence - and put on my sweet new Leather Armor.

IRL break, more to follow later tonight.

EDIT: It's 11:41pm as of this edit, so I'll save the rest until tomorrow. On the plus side, our house looks great - the only thing left to do is hang some pictures.

I just got back from dinner with my parents and 2 of my 3 brothers (3rd brother is working out of town this weekend) . It was great spending time with family - it definitely lifted my mood. My mother is the best - she barely stands 5 feet tall, and she is the cutest little mother in the whole wide world. My parents just got back from Florida, so they're all tanned up and absolutely despising the cold Halifax weather. Dad's positively brown from all the sun - he plays a lot of golf - but Mom mostly shopped in big, air-conditioned malls, so she mostly just freckled up. She's the funniest - we just got her on Facebook a few months back, and this weekend she asked me what all of those "omg"s meant. LOL

My two youngest brothers, Daniel and Darryl, were also there. My brother Darryl, the youngest, is the most laid-back of all of us. He finished university this year and is working at an NSLC as a manager (NSLC = liquor store, for those not from Nova Scotia) while he decides on what to do. Daniel is working as a carpenter right now and getting married this summer. He and I want to start playing poker at the casino seriously - we want to start a bankroll and see how big we can make it. Danny boy is quite a good poker player - he spent some time dealing at the casino before he started playing poker. He's got a good head for numbers and he's pretty good at reading people too. He figures the two of us can do pretty well if we play smart and enter the sit-and-go tournaments. He's calling it our new business venture.

It was great catching up with the Lever posse. Mom and Dad had a great time in Florida. Dad was happy to report that he had won pretty much every golf game he'd played against Uncle Bill; Mom got to shop to her heart's content. We looked at some pictures of the vacation while we waited for my brothers to arrive.

OK, well, I'm past the 300 mark for tonight, and I actually need to move along. Christine and I are going to finish our office tonight. We've finished the living room, kitchen, bathroom and bedroom: only the spare bedroom and office remain. Christine's office boxes are all in the hallway, so by organizing this we're actually doing two things: the office and the hallway. It's really coming together - I can't wait 'til we hang the last picture.

My lovely computer is back home today. My brother David and his wife Lori (and their little boy Hudson - he's so cute) were coming into town today and were kind enough to drive me over to Greenlyph. My computer has a spare motherboard installed at the moment, and the front USB panel is noticeably absent. Part of me wants to leave it empty.

I have the Wacom tablet plugged in and ready to go. Later today, I want to do some art and animation for the game project, but there is a pile of laundry that needs washing at the moment. I just finished hooking up my computer about 30 minutes ago - I couldn't resist turning on some Fallout and playing through. It was a good 30-minute session - I'll have to write another Fallout Journal soon. I gain a strange satisfaction in writing those.

Today is a grey, rainy day in Halifax. It's the kind of day where you just want to stay in bed. I find it really hard to be motivated on days like this. I don't particularly feel like doing anything much, but I feel compelled to blog to make sure I get this in on time. It's amazing - some days the words just flow out of you, and other days it's a struggle to put together a paragraph. Today is a struggle.

Maybe I'm in too much of a rut. I go to school, come home, get on YTMND for a while, do some housework, eat, schoolwork, YTMND, housework, hang out with Christine for an hour. bed. I need to shake things up a little bit. I wonder how long I could go without clicking on YTMND...you know, I think that would be a difficult challenge for me. I check YTMND like some people check their Facebook page. I think I might just try and do that.

OK, starting now, I'm gonna see how long I can go without checking YTMND. I give myself 5 hours. Well, maybe I shouldn't be so pessimistic - I lasted in this competition far longer than I expected. Yeah, I think I'm ready for a break though. I don't want to be chained to my computer. I spend enough time in front of it for school.

I can feel the shakes starting already.

Checking In - Almost Caved

It's 4:39pm - how long was that? No more than two hours - and I almost typed "ytmnd" into my browser. It's a genuine force of habit. I will not cave.

Also, Finished NSMB (<---- any similarity to classic YTMNDs is strictly coincidental)

I just finished New Super Mario Brothers. It was a blast - the ending, however, was pointless. Why don't game developers make awesome endings for their awesome games? I know that gamers often are too impatient to sit sit through cutscenes, but when I finish a game, I like to be rewarded for my efforts. Whatever happened to games like the old school Ninja Gaiden for the NES? That game had a fantastic ending - the Youtube video clocks in at 5:27, and it doesn't show any of the last boss fight. Ninja Gaiden was/is insanely difficult, but the ending cinema definitely made it all seem worth it. I wish more games had good endings.

The in-game rewards you get for completing NSMB are pretty sweet: all of the mushroom houses where you find 1ups and power-ups, become permanent fixtures on the world maps, meaning you can keep visiting them and max out your lives / get whatever power-up you need. You can also save wherever you want on the map, which is a huge blessing for those players trying to collect all the Star Coins. I was trying to collect them all at first, the saving mechanism was so annoying that after a while I just gave up on it. I'll definitely give this game a second playthrough, to get all of the Star Coins I missed.

I can't believe it - Pat is out of the IMBC. I saw him today at school - our teams were having their weekly meetings
with their faculty advisors. He seemed alright about it, actually - he went out with some friends yesterday and it just
went past midnight. I'm kinda shocked - I honestly thought he might take the whole thing. Well, Torbox, it has been a pleasure arguing the merits of power-ups with you on these blogs. Thanks for getting me to sign up with you. (Just remember: as soon as this thing is over, I'm going right back to proclaming the that the leaf is better than the cape.)

The team had a good meeting with Andrew today; we summarized the progress we had made and set out a plan for
the rest of the tasks to be completed. Week 3 is when the art and animation really start to get made. We'll also be
putting together the entire game level and starting up some playtesting. I'm excited; I can't wait to start drawing Lance.
In fact, I think I'll do a little sketching after I blog.

I also heard back about the potential job with Lifeofsports...I got an email saying that the website's backend involved
"PHP, HTML, Javascript, and SQL." Well, I know HTML and SQL just fine - essentially, the trick is if I can learn PHP
and Javascript on the job. I d have some experience with them, and I can program fairly well in other langhuages, so
maybe I can pull it off. I'll have to wait until Wednesday and see what the job will entail. In the meantime, I can try
and piece some things together myself.

I'm getting my computer back tomorrow! Apparently, I fried my motherboard, not the video card. I get a replacement while ASUS sends me a replacement, so I'm going to pick my baby up tomorrow bright and early. It'll be great to have it back; as great as Christine's laptop is, I just miss having old Takuan around.

I don't have much else for today. I'm going to go get productive now.

We had an incredibly productive day today on our team project. By this point, Brandon has become the de facto programming lead, as he has been the only one doing any real coding. Emily and I know enough Flash to make suggestions and provide a reasonably good sounding board for code problems, but Brandon is the guy that ends up writing it. Emily and I will end up doing a lot of level design, playtesting, and art production. The game is really starting to take shape - Brandon spent the day writing code that will allow our hero Lance to move from one room to another. Meanwhile, Emily and I got out the old graph paper and started plotting rooms for the game; by some strange twist of fate, we have exactly 69 rooms to make for the game. Sexy times.

I can try and explain a bit more of the game, which is excellently titled Epic Game of Awesome, at this point: we're creating a side-scrolling game with a level not unlike a typical Mega Man or Castlevania game. Lance is exploring an underground base filled with robot guards, trying to locate a final boss which happens to be based on two of our teachers. (Chris Mogensen and Andrew Mooney, for those keeping score.) The underground base is a series of rooms that Lance must traverse in a roughly linear fashion to reach the bosses' lair. We've designed the level so that Lance must find various power-ups to reach the boss - first, Lance will find a power-up for his hammer (yeah, he carries a hammer as a weapon - he also wears a kilt) that will allow him to destroy robots more effectively as well as break certain kinds of walls. This will allow Lance to reach the second portion of the base, where he'll have to then locate a power-up for his jumping ability, which will in turn allow him into the final portion of the base.

We had a fairly elaborate plotline developing at one point, but a lot of fat was cut off the project. We don't have time, unfortunately, to fart around with things like cutscenes and narrative justifications for player actions. It's basically gonna be Lance wearing a kilt and wielding a large hammer, descending into an underground base to bring swift melee justice to untold legions of robots. Our primary concern is to make the game fun - and I actually kinda think the game has a shot at being fun. The controls feel pretty good at this point, and I think we'll be OK if we have enough time to playtest the game and tweak the rooms to make them challenging but entertaining.

We still have a number of things to develop for the game at this point. This is a rough sketch of our to-do list:

1. Lance's attack. This still doesn't hurt anything, which makes it kind of a pointless attack, doesn't it? We need to get the HitTest code up and running for this.

2. Lance's health bar. Right now, Lance can take exactly one hit before he dies. We're going to implement a health bar for him so he can soak up a few attacks before dying. (Not that dying will be that consequential: Lance is going to end up respawning in the room where he dies anyway.

3. A few more enemy robots. We have several more enemy robots to put in the game. This will probably be the last serious piece of coding, aside from the boss fight. Which brings us to...

4. Boss fight. This warrants its own bullet point, as the final boss will require a set of graphics and code separate from the rest of the game. We've talked about cutting this part if time gets to be too short. I don't want to cut this, but it'll depend on how the rest of the project goes.

5. Art asset development. Next week begins the art asset creation. In order of importance, they are:
          - Lance: running, standing, jumping, climbing, attacking, maybe wall jumping, maybe ducking.
          - Enemy robots: each robot won't get many animation frames, so this won't be as intensive.
          - Tiles: we're building each level as a 25x15 set of blocks, so we'll need some tiles to draw walls, floors, moving
            platforms, power-ups, etc.
          - Final boss: If we have enough time, we'll need to draw a set of walking, attacking, and injured animations. He'll             need a health bar as well, but that shouldn't be a problem.

Anything that we can't get done ourselves will be represented with free graphics from the Internet. I'm really hoping we can get them all done, however.

6. Sound effects. For background music, we've chosen several songs from Newgrounds that should get us all the way through the game. We still need sounds effects, however, to round the experience out. We've already researched some places to find some free assets, but we still need to decide on which ones we'll use.

7. Title Screen, Game Over Screen, Ending Screen. We need to create the bookends to the game. It's not entirely necessary to have these elements, but I think it would add a certain level of polish, even to something that is essentially a game demo.

If we can all of these things done and end up with a relatively bug-free game, I'll be happy. We estimate that our 5 weeks of work will produce 15-20 minutes of gameplay. That is a sobering thought, indeed. It really makes you appreciate the good games, the ones that entertain you for hours and hours. I've always had great respect for game developers, but trying to make one really sharpens your appreciation for their work.

I Actually Did Play Some Video Games Last Night, Too!

I didn't bother hooking up my PS2 last night; I decided to see if our DVD player was hooked up properly, so I put on The Incredibles special features DVD - I've never watched it before, and my blog post about Wall-E has made me think more of Pixar, the one company I would want to work for if I wasn't going to make video games. The special features were really outstanding. The DVD showed animated storyboards for deleted scenes; it included a few animated shorts made especially for the DVD release; it had a number of interviews with Brad Bird, the director (who didn't look anything like I'd imagined); it even had the short animated feature that preceded The Incredibles during its theatrical release. Sweeeeeeeet. I especially enjoyed watching the part about the deleted scenes, and the reasons they cut scenes that they really liked. Brad confided that he had to cut his favorite shot in the entire film to get the running length down. It made me think of all the cuts we've already had to make to out game project - I guess it's just an unavoidable part of the creative process.

I ended up playing some New Super Mario Brothers on my trusty DS. I'm almost finished playing through it - I finished off World 7, and now I just need to plow through World 8 to beat it. Once I'm done, I'm going to go back and collect all of the coins. Why? Because I'm a 100% completionist retard when it comes to Mario games.

Today at school, I discovered what will definitely be the next game I purchase for the DS - The World Ends With You, by Square Enix.

 

I'll be honest - my taste for Square games has soured over time, but this game looks pretty fricking incredible. This game is a DS exclusive developed by the team that made Kingdom Hearts, a game that looks totally wrong on paper but plays so damn right, and I have to say that The World Ends With You is just as visually appealing as the Kingdom Hearts games. The aesthetic style of this game focuses on real-world Japan: specifically, the Shibuya shopping district, where I used to DJ on the weekends when I lived in Japan. The characters'  designs are based on street fashions prevalent in the Shibuya district, and the music will be heavily influenced by J-pop and electronica. Japan nostalgia for the win.

But the number one reason why I'm buying this game is: the combat takes place on both DS screens simultaneously, and you use the stylus and D-pad to control two characters at once. THAT IS AWESOME. I want to buy games that take unique advantage of the DS, and this is by far the coolest thing I've seen so far. That alone would make me buy this game.

The game has also been met with a favorable critical reception; check the Wikipedia entry if you're intrigued to learn more. 

Man, it feels good to be writing about games again. I'll be sure, however, to post some photos of the new place soon.

Today was spent largely unpacking more boxes and straightening up some rooms to make them livable. I also hung up the last of the curtains and broke down about 1000000000 boxes to be recycled.

Some good news - I got a callback from Lifeofsports Inc., and I have an interview/meet-and-greet next Wednesday. I had a great chat with Chris today - he actually knew that I used to DJ, so we got to talk on a more personal level than just about the job. The job would entail a lot of PHP coding over the summer. It would be the perfect summer job, because I'd be working from home and able to set my own hours. The only restriction on my time would be deadlines for deploying new features. I've never coded in PHP before, but I have worked in C++ and I want this really, really badly, so I'm willing to put in the time necessary to learn it. I already started researching it tonight. I guess I won't be on YTMND much in the next little while. Eh, I could use a break anyway. There have been a lot of amazing sites lately, and I've been gorging on them, feasting like a fat kid in a cake shop. Yeah, time for a break. Anyway, it would great to get this job. I'd be great to know I have something lined up for after the game project, not to mention something programming-related.

On a somewhat more sour note, I haven't heard back from Greenlyph, so I don't know how my baby is doing. It's been hard living without her. You don't realize how much something means to you until it's gone. OK, that's probably a little melodramatic - it IS just a computer. But I use my computer every day. I sit in front of it at least 3-4 hours a day. It's my little corner of the world, my playground, my workbench, my study, my friend.

I actually went so far as to give my computer a name: Takuan, after the famous Japanese swordsman Takuan Soho. He was an interesting fellow. It was said that he remained undefated in combat throughout his lifetime. I believe there is also a pickle or a radish named after him. Anyway, he was also a Zen master, and he wrote a treatise on the art of swordsmanship that is studied my some Zen monks even today. I read about it in a great book called Zen in the Art of Archery, by a German professor named Eugen Herrigel. Herrigel went to Japan in the early 1950s to teach philosophy as the Unversity of Tokyo, I believe, and he studied the art of archery under a Zen Master during his stay. It's an incredible book.

I would love to keep going, but you know what? I really want to play some video games. I'm pretty sure this is iver 300 words - yup, we're around 500 words at this point, so I'm gonna pack it in. I got the living rooma ll set up this afternoon, so I think I might hook up my PS2 and rock some ICO or GTA or something. I'd like to write about gaming tomorrow.

Don't worry, it's not a person....but it is someone very close to me. It's my computer. My computer is currently in the shop - I don't exactly know what happened, but I'm pretty sure I fried something. Let me break it down for you.

 

This morning started normally - I walked to school and greeted Brandon and Emily in D309 - one of the few classroms at school that has Flash installed on its computers. We normally spend the first hour or so of the day just surfing, finding random stuff to show each other, like new YTMNDs to laugh at (OK, that's usually just me) or new Digg articles to read and ponder. Jeff Greer came in to class this morning and showed us some trailers for a couple of new movies coming out:

 

Wall-E: The geniuses at Pixar are releasing a movie this summer that they've been planning to make for years - this little robot has been in their plans since they released Toy Story. I don't know all the details, but Wall-E is a little robot that is charged with cleaning up garbage on planet Earth (it looks like the humans have taken off to go and pollute some other planet). Over the years, little Wall-E has developed a personality, and he starts to long for something greater than the garbage-collecting life planned out for him. I don't know much more than that, and frankly I don't want to know more than that. I didn't know a thing about The Incredibles before I saw it, and I was glad to have had such an unspoiled experience. (The Incredibles is easily my favorite Pixar movie - the subject matter was right up my alley.) Pixar can do no wrong in my eyes - I've enjoyed every one of their movies. Even Cars. And I hate cars. I can only imagine how awesome Wall-E - by all accounts a labor of love for the studio - will end up being. It'll take a lot to supplant The Incredibles, though.

 

 

 

Hancock: Will Smith plays an alcoholic, homeless superhero. Do I need to go on? Well, alright, if you insist. This movie is a no-brainer for me. Will Smith is God, and it is only fitting that he take on a role that befits his omnipotence. I'm glad to see him heading back to comedy as well. I tried not to watch the whole trailer, because I've managed to not even hear about it until today, and I don't want too may preconceptions going in. Jason Bateman is also in the movie - I think he's some sort of PR guy that tries to help Hancock out. I linked to the trailer for you if you're curious to see more.

 

 

 

So, after that we walked to my place to work on the game. Brandon was working on a piece of code - I was trying to help him, so I suggested he put the Flash file on a USB memory stick so I could put it on my computer.

 

Now, before I continue, I need to tell you a little detail from yesterday's work session. I had the memory stick plugged into my USB port yesterday while working. Brandon and Emily were working on tables behnd me, so I was frequently swinging around back and forth, to talk to them and then return to work. Well, on one of those occasions, I swung around a little too quickly and my knee caught the memory stick. It went flying out of the USB port, and the piece of plastic that holds the metal connector pins inside the port snapped off.

 

I was pissed, but I shrugged it off and simply plugged the USB stick into the adjacent port. Within an hour or two, however, I did the exact same thing and snapped the exact same piece of plastic in the second port. The USB stick was remarkably unscathed.

 

So now I had two broken USB ports in the front of my PC. One of the ports, however, looked less damaged, and so I hesitantly tried to connect my memory stick into the USB port. And, lo and behold, it worked!! Ah well, I thought - , at least. I can get the USB ports fixed any time.

 

Fast forward to today. Brandon hands me the memory stick, and I unthinkingly plug it into the broken-but-as-far-as-I-know-still-functioning USB port.

 

As soon as the port's exposed connector pins touched the pins in the memory stick, I heard a loud PHOOM - like the sound you hear when you turn off speakers and they're turned up loud - and my monitors went black.

 

I stared dumbfounded at my computer for a few seconds. The lights are still on, the fan is humming away - but there's nothing on my screen. OH SNAP. I turned my computer off and on. Still nothing onscreen. The horrifying realization slowly crept into my conscious mind - I just fried the insides of my computer somehow.

 

I'm pretty sure that one of the pins from one of the broken USB ports was touching the case, and when my memory stick touched the connector pins, it completed a circuit and the current was able to jump through my case and cause a ruckus. I suspect I killed my video card, but I'll find out tomorrow for sure. All of the components are still under warranty, but I dunno for sure if it'll cover this particular bit of stupidity.

 

So, after two days with my baby back in action, I killed it. And that's pretty much how I feel - like I accidentally stabbed my child in the stomach. I got my fingers crossed for good news tomorrow.

 

Oh, on a lighter note, I may have a job lined up for the summer that doesn't involve the military, and Christine and I are much closer to finishing the unpacking. Which reminds me: I should probably get back to it. In the meantime, please pray to whatever gods you believe in for my computer - that it'll come back to me good as new, and that it won't cost me too much.

 

Oh Will Smith, please hear my prayers.

 

 

I had a great day today. The only thing that would've made it better was if I had gotten a job, but I'm sure that'll happen in good time.

Our team had a meeting today with our teacher/project mentor, Andrew Mooney, and he seemed fairly positive for the most part. We really need to get together a more solid plan of action and a serious amount of documentation, but I think things are really coming together well as far as the game itself goes. Problem is, we're not neing graded on the final result. No, we're being graded on a pile of documentation that we need to generate for the project. That sucks - but I guess it;s also good in a way, because it means we don't fail if the game doesn't work.

Brandon, Emily and I worked on our game at my new place, and we were approximately 500% more efficient and productive than we usually are. We got a lot done, actually - we finished today everything that we wanted to have done by Friday. YAY! I'm pleased with the results we've achieved so far, and I expect we'll have a solid-feeling game demo at the end of this. Maybe not solid-looking, but I'm confident it'll play well.

After we fiished work on the game, my brother Daniel came over and helped me fix my bed - part of the bed frame cracked, so we made a brace for it. It's as good as new, but it's not as pretty-looking as it once was. Ah well, the brace is on my side of the bed, so Christine never has to look at it. We also made plans to play some poker soon. I can't WAIT to play some cards. It's been so long since I sat at a table - but, unfortunately, poker is one of those games that requires money to play.

Christine got home an hour ago - she had a seminar with a philosophy professor named Dr. Spencer. She loved it and had a million observations and insights to share. I was only too happy to indulge her; it's not every day I get to put my degree to good use!

I also discovered a cool feature on YTMND - YTMND Spy. It's a page that shows you instant updates on how people vote on sites. It's not actually linked anywhere on the front page, or on any page as far as I can tell - it;s like an Easter Egg for the website. Cool stuff. I'd tell you how to find it, but I'm you're smart enough to figure that out on your own.

OK, time to do some more unpacking. Pictures of the new place will be posted once we're moved in completely.

Ah! A day that didn't centrally revolve around boxes. Bliss.

Christine had to work today, so I was all alone in the house today. I won;t lie, I spent an hour or so this morning on YTMND, but most of the sites were pretty crappy today. There's nothing there I would recommend that you go and check out - oh, actually, there is an old one on the top of the Top Viewed list today. I have a problem with it, but it has a theme relevant to the usual theme of this blog:

Do you see the clever gaming reference? If you don't see it just watch the YTMND for a few seconds and the music will probably fire off a few gaming-related synapses and give you the "Aha!" moment you're looking for.

My only problem with this is that the user didn't actually make any of the pieces he used to create this YTMND. He simply took a picture from Threadless - a very cool website for T-shirts - and added two bits of audio from other YTMNDs. So he actually produced nothing. However, he did combine them all into the final product - so is that worth a high average rating and over 100,000 views? I'm still undecided. I'm leaning towards no.

Regardless of how I feel, someone over at Kotaku thought it was a cool YTMND and decided to link it to the front page. This site has now received 35,000+ views  in the last two days. Damn. All I need to do is make a videogame- related YTMND and I'll be set.

Fun With Flash - Lights, Camera, ActionScript!

The majority of my day has been spent learning about ActionScript. Our team found an excellent tutorial on how to make a side-scrolling game, so I've been reading the ActionScript for it, trying to wrap my head around it. I like to comment out lines of code and then run the project to see what changes - it helps me to understand more directly how each piece of code affects the game.

The code is really quite clever. It builds a level by breaking the screen up into blocks. In this case, there are 15 rows of 25 blocks on the screen. In the code, a set of 15 arrays is created, each holding 25 values. Depending on the value in each array position, a certain kind of block is placed in the level - maybe a wall, a floor, a ladder, or a trap. The code also handles the movement and behavior for the player's avatar. A number of variables are created that handle its walking speed, climbing speed, and jumping power. I had fun changing the values and watching the character suddenly be able to jump and touch the ceiling or inexplicably find himself unable to turn left.

The only problem I'm having is that there doesn't seem to be any variable types explicitly declared, so it makes the code a little harder to read. Keywords, however, are helpfully highlighted in blue, which makes it easier to know what to lookup.

What we need to do this week is add some moving enemies into the mix. We also need to implement some kind of attack for our hero and give him a health meter. Brandon seems pretty comfortable with Actionscript already, and I'm sure Emily spent all weekend studying and using Flash. Didn't you, Emily?

Christine should be home soon. I think I'll play a little Fallout before she comes home, because I know tonight will bring more boxes to unpack with it.