After a random instant message from DingoEatingFuzz, I found out that one of my games, Parachute Retrospect, had a cameo in a Yahoo! ad running in the Mail center. After furiously refreshing the mail page to try to find the ad, I gave up and went to bed.

It is quite an honor already having my work up on the Yahoo! Games page, but having them do an ad of my game? That was definitely an honor!

I’m working on my Missile project all of today, trying to get the final engine done by this afternoon. The game is small and pretty, but I have to be careful to squeeze as many particles in without spilling the CPU and graphics. I still need to come up with a name for this game… any suggestions?

A few weeks ago Me and a couple buddies decided to ride our bikes from Orange County to San Diego (Roughly 150 miles via the route they had mapped) It was done to raise money for MS, and was the most physically exhausting thing I’ve pushed myself to do. Here’s a photo of us crossing the finish line.

-Daniel

Ab Lincoln “And in the end, it’s not the years in your life that count. It’s the life in your years”

The website is making great progress. If there’s anything you’d like to see in the new site, make sure to leave your comments!!

-Daniel

Adventure Log: 11/5/2007, 4:11 PM: The past two days of coding have been fast and swift again, as I move towards another game being created. As you may (or probably may not) know is that I am a retronaut when it comes to video gaming, loving the classics such as Donkey Kong or Centipede. In this case, this game is a remake of the Atari classic Missile Command, which I have yet to see a good rehash of.

The idea of the game is simple: Protect your land from missiles raining down from the skies above. This is made possible with your own weapons. The game revolves around faster and faster gameplay, and the addition of new enemies and obstacles. With mad skills comes more settlements and more ways to take down the missiles.

It will be similar to Missile Command, but I want to really put my own spin on this game. There has been an overabundance of defense games, and I really think this game can change it up a bit from the “Round 1 - Buy Stuff - Round 2 - Buy Stuff” scheme of things.

Should be done by this week!

The game I’m working on at the moment is a game concept of Daniels, involving a Bull being catapulted around a china shop, smashing dishes/otherthings. Its going really quite well, today I’ll be working on the Level editor, and it just felt right. A while back I made a game for Newgrounds called Expgen, which allowed the player to make their ownplatform game levels. My lack of skill at the time shows through slightly, by the way I perform simple tasks with a sledgehammer, but I’m still quite proud that I managed such a complex level editor in such a stable, almost bug free way. It made me feel good. I’m getting the same feeling right now with this editor - as my first proper AS3 project, I know I’ll be making some major errors with the way things are done, but in the end I’ll have it working. For people to be able to expand on the original content of the games I release is an amazing feeling. Level editors just add so much to a game for me, I hope the players feel the same. It also means I can share level design duties with other people, to speed up the production process.

Fun times

Also, I’m hoping to call the game CattlePult - as you may have noticed, I love cheesy game names

I’m not a very good programmer.

It’s not that I’m a bad programmer. I’m just not a very good one. And what can I say, I’m rather new to this. I’ve worked in animation and design since I was 19, and it’s only been within the last two years that I’ve had to shift from a life of abstract thinking to a thought process of logic, reason, and consistency. That’s a rather sudden change, and I’m far from bridging the gap.

It’s been rather entertaining to see how ‘geeks’ think. I get to witness this cross section of society on a very personal level while I attend the University of California here in Irvine. They have a strict attention to detail. Almost fanatical at some points. They also become amused by some of the most benign subjects. Like throwing off the order of a 128-bit encryption key. (???)

There is also a rather rigid approach to process simulation. Ever since I started venturing into more and more complex game design, I’ve found myself stumbling into this thought process. How DO you tell a computer to fire a laser, then have it bounce off of a mirror, then have it check for collisions, then have it turn off after two seconds.

Procedure is a rather difficult concept to master when programming. Contingencies often throw a wrench into the works of an otherwise solid algorithm. Not anticipating something can take a long time to accommodate it later on. Since I lack the ‘geek-thinking’ needed to make that aspect of software design easy, I do what comes best to an artist like me.

I draw.

Flowcharts are my new friend. Every aspect of my program is broken down into some sort of visual element. Level mock-ups, character control sheets, controls, you name it. John has been kind enough to take pictures of my production whiteboard, and I plan on posting every one of them. I envision some senior level programmer spitting his coffee all over his screen when he realizes how noobish it looks. I’d totally deserve that.

Will I lose this trait as I become a better programmer? Will my ‘geek brain’ hinder my visual creativity… or will it augment it? Who knows. Until then, I get to draw more trig diagrams.

Sad panda.

I am normally quite a happy-go-lucky guy. I am usually never angry or ever upset, but there are some simple things I ask for that do not happen. One of them is my parking spot at work.

I get to work around 8 am every day, and like to park in the same parking spot every morning. It’s the best spot on the lot for several reasons. For one, the parking spot is in a perfect 12-5 pm shade spot. It gets hot in Southern California, and having a place to park my car in the shade is amazing. Especially right in front of the office… it minimizes the little time I can catch all those UV rays, and doesn’t cause me to feel terrible getting into the car after work.

Second, the spot is a perfect place to get out. You are not getting out onto a hard cement, oh no you aren’t! You are getting onto a lush mix of soil and gravel, that supports the feet and makes it a dream to get out of the car. It’s like stepping onto a soft bed of grass! Really!

Additionally, your impact chances are reduced by 50% for car door dings and scratches! There are these terrible car accessories that go for about $50 each to protect your car from door scratches, so really, I feel like I am saving $50. That’s like 5 free lunches. And I feel much better going to lunch in a car with no dings on my left side.

I also like the idea that I can see my car from my workspace. I can supervise my car to make sure nothing bad is happening to it, like people swinging their doors out and hitting the unprotected side. It’s like 100% protection with that in mind! Bam! 5 more free lunches!

Now here’s the kicker. I park there every day of the week, but people still go out of the way to park in my spot! There is a small pain every time I have to park somewhere else. It just means that I have a much higher chance of getting dents in my car, it overheating, or having to get out of the car into a puddle of oil.

The entire parking lot is shared by several offices, so there are a lot of people I do not know in this parking lot. But all-in-all, we are all drivers in this parking lot and we see the same cars. So we should really know where we usually park, right? I think so!

But for the third day in a row, someone has taken my spot. It’s like people know it frustrates me. I am just hoping that next week will be a better week, for better parking spots that suit my needs and wants.

Or maybe this week is the week I put a cone in my spot when I leave. I genuinely think people would be too lazy to move the cone, and get back in their car to park. I actually think that could work…

So moral of the story… pick a parking spot and stick to it.  Everyone will be much happier, knowing that they have a spot reserved just for them!

I don’t care if you hate American Idol or Country Music, go pick up Her new CD titled ‘Carnival Ride’. The album is full of hits including ‘Flat on the Floor’, ‘The More Boys I meet’, and ‘Last Name’.

-Daniel

I remember bawling over my trigonometry homework about 4 years ago. For some reason, the laws of cosine, sine and tangent didn’t stick no matter how hard I crammed them into my skull. There was a time when it comforted me to know that I would probably never need to remember any of that hellish subject matter. Ah, how inexperience makes us naive. It turns out that trig is everywhere in programming, and especially in game design. Easing, trajectories, rebounding angles, physics, and more all derive their characteristics from trig. There are ways to cheat your way out of it, but it ends up limiting your code in such a way that bites you in the end or makes your game design look bland and elementary.

My current game “Space Lasers” utilizes a lot of trig in order to perform its core Laser Beam management algorithms. In my previous games, Flash’s API would generally take care of all the trig related stuff that I needed. Ah, those were the halcyon days. Not so much anymore.

ActionScript 3.0 may know when a collision occurs between a line and an object, but not WHERE that intersection takes place. Therefore, trying to program a laser to understand when it’s hit an interactive element, then bounce off at a different trajectory at that specific impact point has been aggravating and very time consuming.

I’m 90% complete in implementing this feature, but it’s been quite a journey. I’d like to thank Colin Moock, the author Essential ActionScript 3.0, Kieth Peters, the author of Foundation ActionScript 3.0 Animation: Making Things Move. Last but not least, special thanks to my good astrophysics friend Mike for being a handy consultant.

The remaining game engine features are all ‘easy-peasey-lemon-squeezy’ (as John would say). Soon, I’ll be back into creating artwork and sound, a much more familiar and comfortable realm of creativity for me. Until then, it looks like I need to study up on Arctanget in order to get the beam reflection angles correct.

Man, not much time between game releases. But TBA is here!

“TBA” doesn’t stand for anything. It started as a joke on the front page of my old website, when I left the “Next Game” notice to “TBA” and people started asking me what kind of game “TBA” is. I just left it that way, and the game is being released as such!

The game is simple, requiring only one button! Just hit the space bar to work your away around the screen. As you get further into the game, you’ll encounter much more difficult arrangements and goal puzzles.

There are 25 levels to keep you amused. To keep you even more satisfied, there are par times to meet on each level and random, useless trivia to keep you going.

I went back to my old style for this one. ZeRo-BaSs is back for Atomic Trigger 3, the theme to the game. The particles are running rampant. The colors are explosive, and there’s ton of clouds. So if you were depressed by Dark Cut 2 (which I hope you weren’t), you’ll love the fall back to my old style.

So enjoy! This eight day project was definitely a breeze, hopefully you’ll enjoy it :). -John

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