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 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 

Hey!  We got a new game for you to check out!  It’s called Beast!  Beast is a really cool re-make of an old MS-DOS text-mode game that I used to really like.  (It’s similar to Galcon in that sense.)  It also has a slick retro-graphics feel to it that I’m pretty happy with.

Buy it now – Only $0.99!!

One of the most fun things I added into the game was the beast images.  They are based on creations by the Bungled Jungle which is located in Salida, CO.  This store sells amazing monsters that they create in their studio.  If you haven’t seen their stuff before, be sure to check it out.  Tell ‘em “Phil Hassey” sent ya

P.S. If you are a software developer, or are interested in knowing more about the design decisions that went into this game, check out my dev blog.

Today marks the release of my first iPhone game release in five months.  It’s about time I got going on dev again.  I’ve been in the midst of many transitions in both of my businesses, so I decided to start out with something short-n-sweet.  The game is called Beast.

Beast is a re-make of an ancient MS-DOS game that I played ages ago (and I’ve re-made several times).  The original is here.  You may have followed my progress on twitter.  Here are some interesting “factoids” about the game dev.

The original game is pretty tough to play, if you have dosbox and have all the proper slow-down settings going, you’ll find it can be a challenge to surround the beasts and crush them with blocks.  The iPhone doesn’t have a D-Pad, so moving a character around the screen is a bit tricky.  I had to make several modifications to the original game so that it would work with the touch interface:

• You can move the player around the screen by pushing your finger around.  However I had to make the player unable to move diagonally as I found the resolution of your finger movement made it near impossible to play and quite jumpy if I allowed diagonals.
• You can touch any point on the screen and warp to that location.  The controls were still a bit tricky, so I had to add this feature so you could do quick movements to escape from a beast, or to attack it quickly.
• I disabled the beasts so they can’t move diagonally, made the super beasts spawn into only 4 instead of 8 normal beasts, and slowed down the beast movement by about 50%.  These changes were all required to make the game playable.

All these changes turned an impossible to play on the iPhone into a reasonably fun diversion.  I also added a notable element of speed into your score.  This gives the player a good bit of replay value, since even after they beat a level, they can try again and try and “master” a map they are playing.

Overall the main point of this whole exercise was to get myself back into iPhone dev.  Really last year when I worked on Galcon I threw myself violently into that project for 3-4 months and came out a bit burnt out.  I knew this time I needed to do a small scale project to get going again.

I’m pretty pleased with the results of this project.  For some more interesting factoids about the game project, check out my game blog announcement.

Excuse to post this to the python planets: I actually made a python version of this game a few years ago.  It contains some really bizarre pure python sound-synth for both the music and sound effects.  Check it out.  Not only all that, but the whole game is a single 18k python file!  I ported from this code for the iPhone version.  Again, another great example of python prototype -> C++ final product!

(Silly side-note, actually the python code was a port of some C++ code I made ages ago.  So this is a great example of C++ code that was ported to python and then later ported back to C++.  I won’t bother you with details about my even earlier Java and C versions of the game.)

While I’m complaining .. the other big one I have is synchronizing our iPhoto and iTunes collections between two computers.

I want to be able to say “I want these two computers to keep each other’s iPhoto and iTunes libraries in sync.” And have it do so.

What I don’t want:

• Use a shared disk.  This is pointless because these two machines may not be connected to the network, so they need to have local copies of stuff.
• Use rsync.  This is what I’m doing, but again, this is not how things should be.  This is 2009, things should be easier than breaking out cron and command line utilities to get things done.  Not only that, it only HALF solves the problem, since now we have to decide that one of the laptops is “the master” and the other only receives updates.  Lousy solution, but it’s the best I’ve got so far.
• Use some 3rd party utility.  This should be built in.  (From what I found, there were no real solutions out there anyways.  Just variations on the rsync theme.  So I figured I might as well use what I’m used to.)
• Excuses about how syncing is complicated.  Yeah, I know.  That’s why I want YOU to fix it, not me.  Really.

Well, I’m still quite enjoying my Macbook.  The biggest complaint I’ve got so far is the inconsistency of the file pickers.  These are things where my wife has said, “This isn’t working, look.”  And low-and-behold, due to some coder out there being too smart for their own good, have broken the file picker in various unusual ways.

• When uploading a file to a website, the file picker that pops up does not let you navigate into your iPhoto Library.  The only way to get a picture out of it appears to be to open up iPhoto and drag a picture from iPhoto onto the Browse button on the website.
• When changing your desktop background, accessing your iPhoto Library requires clicking on the little arrow to the left of the words “iPhoto Library” .. The whole word should be clickable.
• My wife was confused by this and didn’t click the arrow and gave up.  Instead she tried last night’s work-a-round and loaded up iPhoto and tried dragging pictures from iPhoto into the “Pictures Folder” area.  This didn’t work.
• Since we have 10,000 some odd pictures, the mini iPhoto Library browser that appears when you click the arrow is pretty much useless.  Especially how it removes the year from the listing.  So the only reasonable way we could figure to get a background picture chosen was to open the Finder and attempt to drag pictures from iPhoto onto the Pictures folder.  Talk about taking the long way.
• When selecting a photo in the Finder and then pressing Delete, it doesn’t do anything.

Hey folks!  There’s an exciting update to the web-game I put together a couple weeks ago. “The Maze of MADNESS” is a “point-and-click text adventure game” .. Where you get to create the game! It must be seen to be believed.  You can even create your own new adventures! So far people have created over 400 rooms!  A few days ago I upgraded it to v2.0, meaning now you can start your OWN mazes!  There are already several new cool mazes being built.

While I’m at it, the holiday season is upon us!  So for the end of this week, I’m going to put Classic Desktop Galcon on Sale for 50% off regular price!  You can buy it at that price by using the promo code “TURKEY” when you checkout. (And remember — you save even more if you buy in BULK!)

Also, just to give you the heads up I’ve finally gotten myself onto a real mailing list service (The thing I was using before just wasn’t cutting it!) This is much more convenient, and I don’t have to sit around sweating hoping that all the e-mails are being sent properly anymore.  If you aren’t on the mailing list, now would be a prime time to join.  Just create a user account, select “Yes, send me e-mail updates” and confirm your account.  Or if you already have an account just click Edit Profile on the top right corner and then Newsletter Preferences.

Have fun!
-Phil

Here it is!

Starring:

• Cuzco the Goat as Mr. T as B.A. Baracus in The A-Team Van
• Nan as H.M. Murdock as “Captain Cab”
• Phil as John “Hannibal” Smith as “The Aquamaniac”

See ya next Halloween!

-Phil

Hey, I attended PAX’08. It was a pretty crazy ride! I gotta say, if I go again, I’m going to make sure I get more than 4 hours of sleep per night though 🙂

Some of the highlights of the trip were:

• Stacking cans for the Brawndo booth
• taking pictures of costumery
• Listening to the musicians panel
• meeting Mike and Sol of hamumu.com fame
• watching and hearing some gameboy street musicians

I’ll let you work out which pics go with which highlight.