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Wednesday, November 30, 2005

Hello From Over Here

Ever had one of those days where you realize you're just completely distracted ... no matter what you're doing? Jon o The Game Chair was actually kind enough to email me and ask if I had anything for the upcoming Carnival of Gamers ... which I swear I had actually remembered to remember this time. But obviously, no such luck.

By the by, they are doing a sweet ass Bounty Writer Contest whereby writing a story explaining what the hell Samus is doing in that pinball machine could score you a Nintendo DS, Metroid Pinball and the oddest bragging rights this side of the meridian. I would definately enter, except, well, see above.

Some times it's just good to take stock. Here is a current list of side projects I'm either working on or staring at on the shelf.

Moonstone Serenade
My iTunes arcade project. After a lot of success, this is tabled until GarageGames fixes a couple of OS X related bugs in Torque 2D.

Atlas
My Torque 2D asteroids style "wandering" space game. Basic arcade framework of controls, collision, rock creation, and the like is working peachy. I was designing the buy system when last I checked. After Cathan, this is probably my next priority.

Cathan
AJAX powered interactive fiction. Cathan is the story of a stranger who washes up on a mysterious island and finds it beset by demons ... and the decade or so that follows. Or so it might be, should I ever get past the first night. The basic parser is there, now I've just got to stop complicating it so much. Ever wonder what might happen in interactive lit if you have two characters who look exactly alike, but are completely seperate people? Multiple introductions, etc. Argh. I am my worst enemy.

I should be working on this right now. Right as I type this. I shouldn't be typing this, I should be typing "inserting the iron key into the lock secures the front door" or "the dark hand plunges fully into your stomach as if it were no more resistant than jelly" ... but I'm not. Although that jelly line isn't bad, I might steal that.

Problem is, I work on a web site for eight hours a day. Sometimes HTML or Javascript is the last thing I want to see.

Thanks goes to Corvus for some classic IF hookup.

Untitled Groupware Software
Just something I started playing with during compiles. I've been toying with various asychronous methods lately, like AJAX. This actually explores dynamic javascript, which creates AJAX style transfers without molesting any XML or transport object, just DOM and standard Javascript. AJAX without AJAX, so to speak.

It works. It's ugly. I haven't decided if it's any good.

Of course, this list ignores Unreal Defense Squad or the other handful of mod project still on my Windows drive.

Argh,

Tomorrow, I talk about The Maxx. Be warned.




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1 comment:

Josh said...

Yeah, I was utterly unaware of this even being on the table until that guy put such a demo together. It will be very interesting to see what can be done with it.

Some of interest w/ Cathan was just to play with HTML orientated AJAX, rather than XML flavors. So far, it's worked pretty well ... although the "non AJAX" methods I'm using for the Untitled Groupware might offer me some insight into how to "secure" the IF to be played online (so that someone couldn't just download all the javascript and figure out the different angles)