Hey,

Sorry no posts for a while!  Been out of town for a month!  Anyway, here’s a really swell interview with me by AppGamer about innovation in game design.  

Enjoy!
-Phil 

So, a user was having some issues with their ranks being calculated totally wrong.  They were seeing numerous games against themselves.  Turns out this was the issue – MySql treats varchar() text with trailing spaces the same as varchar text without trailing spaces.  So the name “philhassey” is the same as “philhassey ” or “philhassey     ” in a ‘select * from ip_stats3 where name = ?’ type of query.  Here’s a MySQL session below to demonstrate.

mysql> describe ip_stats3;

+———+————-+——+—–+———+——-+

| Field   | Type        | Null | Key | Default | Extra |

+———+————-+——+—–+———+——-+

| name    | varchar(32) | NO   | PRI | NULL    |       | 

| data    | longblob    | YES  |     | NULL    |       | 

| s_rank  | int(11)     | YES  |     | NULL    |       | 

| s_win   | int(11)     | YES  |     | NULL    |       | 

| s_value | int(11)     | YES  |     | NULL    |       | 

| s_total | int(11)     | YES  |     | NULL    |       | 

+———+————-+——+—–+———+——-+

6 rows in set (0.00 sec)

mysql> select name from ip_stats3 where name = ‘philhassey ‘;

+————+

| name       |

+————+

| philhassey | 

+————+

1 row in set (0.00 sec)

mysql> select name from ip_stats3 where name = ‘philhassey’;

+————+

| name       |

+————+

| philhassey | 

+————+

1 row in set (0.00 sec)

mysql> select name from ip_stats3 where name like ‘philhassey’;

+————+

| name       |

+————+

| philhassey | 

+————+

1 row in set (0.00 sec)

mysql> select name from ip_stats3 where name like ‘philhassey ‘;

Empty set (0.00 sec)

mysql> select name from ip_stats3 where name like ‘philhassey%’;

+————+

| name       |

+————+

| philhassey | 

+————+

1 row in set (0.00 sec)

Hey,

So I finally got a new game out!  Yay!  And here it is:

www.cosmicnitro.com

“The end of the world is nigh!  Defend the world from the onslaught of an unfeeling universe!

“In Cosmic Nitro you must blast through nine different invasions.  To play merely touch the invaders to blast them, but when things get too tough you can swipe the screen to launch a shield.

“Designed by award winning game designer Phil Hassey winner of the IGFM Innovation in Game Design award.”

So check it out, the game is only 0.99 and totally worth every penny!  Be sure to tell your friends about it!

Cheers!
-Phil

P.S. I just submitted an update to Galcon to the App Store .. so keep an eye out for that in the next week or so!  🙂

Hey,

So I finally got a new game out!  Yay!  And here it is:

www.cosmicnitro.com

“The end of the world is nigh!  Defend the world from the onslaught of an unfeeling universe!

“In Cosmic Nitro you must blast through nine different invasions.  To play merely touch the invaders to blast them, but when things get too tough you can swipe the screen to launch a shield.

“Designed by award winning game designer Phil Hassey winner of the IGFM Innovation in Game Design award.”

So check it out, the game is only 0.99 and totally worth every penny!  Be sure to tell your friends about it!

Cheers!
-Phil

P.S. I just submitted an update to Galcon to the App Store .. so keep an eye out for that in the next week or so!  🙂

So .. After recovering from GDC, I’m working on wrapping up my “new game” .. Which is in RC1 tonight.  Hope to package it up and ship it tomorrow with a hopeful launch date of next week.  I gotta get all my press materials together tomorrow so that when it does launch I’m ready.  Here’s a checklist of things I need to get together:

• Website ?
• Game page
• More games page (linked to from game)
• Newsletter announcement
• Blog announcement
• E-mail announcement for reviewers
• AdHoc build with comments for reviewers
• Get a banner ad ready & pay for ad slot
• Description, title, screenshot, icon for AppStore
• Game assets / screenshots for reviewers
• YouTube video of gameplay
• YouTube video trailer

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 

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.