Hey,

So .. wow!  I won the IGFM Innovation in Game Design award!  Craziness!  Anyway, I’m pretty excited about it, as you can see from this picture.  So excited that I figured I’ll try and ride the press buzz around the IGFM up the charts a bit by putting Galcon on a crazy sale for $0.99 for the rest of this week!!  Get it while it is hot!

My acceptance speech was something like: “Wow!  Thanks!  And thanks to my wife Nan for managing the community, my brother-in-law Tim for making the music, my goat Cuzco for keeping me entertaining and pulling me in a cart and to the whole #ludumdare community for helping me learn how to make games!”

Yeah, you’d think I’d just go and go about my blog like normal .. but .. I can’t bare to do that!  Instead here’s some blog Q&A.  What do you want to see on this blog in 2009?  What don’t you want to see?

Web comics | Political commentary | More python dev | More game dev | Stories about life | Stories about business | Drawings | Podcasts | Religion commentary | Videos | Music | More games | Photos of stuff

Boy, that’s a lot of choices.  For the past 1.5 years I’ve kept it pretty focussed on python/game dev.  But I figure I can ramble about all sorts of other things.  So tell me which bits on that list sound interesting and which parts sound like they’d be totally awful.  No promises I’m going to change what I’m doing, but I figure it’s late and I try to make one post a week, and this is what came out 😉

Oh yeah, I’m going to be at GDC all week.  I’ll be hanging out on the Indie Summit track Monday and Tuesday, then Wednesday thru Friday I’ll be hanging out by the IGF Mobile booth.  Look for the guy in the Galcon shirt.  Loud expo halls make me cranky, so if I’m sulking stop by and tell me to cheer up 🙂  If I’m not sulking, just stop by!

-Phil

P.S. if you didn’t catch it in the replies to my last post about flash/Galcon – I did get tinypy working under flash 10.  But not many people have that yet, so I think I’ll save launching a cool tech demo till sometime later.

P.S.S. Potato soup with cheese and crackers is great!

So .. who thinks flash + Galcon = win?  I don’t know yet, but I’m giving it a try.  I’m not actually developing the flash version.  An awesome friend of mine has been doing the time on this one.  Though I’ll probably be doing the LAMP end of the deal.  At present the game is non-networked, but we’re been considering the possibilities.  A TCP/IP edition of the game could be made, but I wonder if that would end in tears.  TCP/IP isn’t ideal for gamedev IMO.  Flash doesn’t support UDP as-of-yet.

This isn’t the first time Galcon has reared it’s head from within the browser window.  (See my earlier blog posts …)

I haven’t decided exactly what I’m going to do with this once it’s completed.  Probably a few things.  Throwing it on facebook is an obvious one.  Throwing it on galcon.com is another one.  Maybe mixing it with something like The Maze of Madness is another one.  Or maybe something else!

One idea that I have that would be really cool would be if the tinypy vm were ported to ActionScript using Alchemy* .. and then somehow people would be able to script Galcon on the web and share it with their friends..

*I don’t know if you caught that .. but I think my weekend just got booked 🙂

So I noticed that I haven’t written a blog post for about one month.  There’s a correlation between that and trying out twittering for the last two months.

The questions I have are:

– Which is better?  My blogging or my twittering?

– Should I do both?  Why?

– Do you follow my blog and my twitter feed?

Thanks!
-Phil