Game File: 

nuts.zip

Who says dogs are the only animals that can do this?

Just remembered one thing I wanted to explore a lot when I came here and moved onto smaller more experimental works was multiplayer. I think local multiplayer is pretty underutilised in AAA games. It's still there obviously, but I think it's like... It should be used more, cause it can turn an average game into a very good game, and a short game into a game you play for days at a time. I know I've sunk days into things like Skullgirls, which I otherwise wouldn't if I was playing it by myself.

The other thing I am exploring is multimedia. Games that are like... The stuff you found on old promo CDs or educational CDs back in the old days, and they resembled websites rather than games. I'm not sure what genre I'd categorise them as.

I tried exploring the multimedia genre by looking into long-forgotten genres like "animated storybooks" "activity centres" and stuff like this. I think it's a genre that was always aimed at kids but I reckon you could do more with it. Like that third example is not a kid's game. Anyway I threw this idea for an animated storybook together where I wanted it so there was a room with a few things you could click on.

What I like about these games is it's not clear who the protagonist is or even what the plot is or who you are. Are you playing in the second person, ie A cursor following the protagonist on their adventures? Are you the protagonist controlling yourself with a cursor? Are you just someone reading a book? Are you controlling the reader AS A character? Are you playing in the first person? ARE YOU PLAYING IN THE FIFTH PERSON???

I've been thinking about music too and what I like about the medium of music is that it is THE medium if you want to deal with disparate concepts rather than characters. If you make a song, it doesn't need characters. Otherwise every song would be kind of a novelty song. And thinking about this with relation to video games makes me wonder: Are video games un-evolved as a medium to the point we could be making more games about CONCEPTS rather than characters, but we are still borrowing from film to the point we think they're required?

I feel like... Can you imagine what music would sound like if it only borrowed from literature and tried to tell a story, for example? Is that what we're doing with games right now?

Anyway, I'm thinking of various games that move away from the idea of characters, or even "the player" as a character who exists in a world, and thinking of more weirder structures where it's less clear- using the above examples as my starting point, and I have come up with something. It's something that'll probably be finished just before the year is out- and that's a good time to release it, as it'll be the denoument of the first part of these studies

I'm also not doing it yet- I'm working on a smaller game first, it's called LEGACY OF REALMS I: REALMS OF DARKFYRE and it's as silly as it sounds. It looks like this. I'm pleased with the flat shading it has. I'm also doing music for this game, it's got a bangin' metal soundtrack

Game File: 

TheFarmer.zip

fourth in a series of sonic worlds levels

Game File: 

risfor.zip

Arr Arr Revolution

Hi again, everybody :)

It's been a good four years since I made my last entry on this website, and I decided to pay all of my game making buddies a classic tribute.

Once again I caught myself dwelling about production values, working on larger projects (all of which went into development hell hardy har har) So i stopped dead on my tracks and focused on this little gem of my past.

So here you guys go, it's a game about making laser platforms to get you places you wouldn't be able to reach otherwise. HOW FUN IS THAT!

I worked on it for about two weeks and the best part is that you can make your OWN levels on it! And... [drum roll] ...share it with your friends!

The game comes packed with 10 original levels and 5 pre-made custom levels.

Have fun! ;]

Game File: 

webgangstaz.zip

You are the ultimate hacker on a quest to break into ULTRATRON, the nations most secure maniframe. Do you have what it takes to break the firewalls and get your rewards?

Game File: 

stadiumevents.zip

An unsourced online article states: "The North American, or NTSC, version of Stadium Events is universally accepted as the rarest licensed NES game available for purchase in North America." YOU ARE BIDDING ON THE NORTH AMERICAN VERSION OF STADIUM EVENTS*! Now is your chance -- PROBABLY YOUR ONLY CHANCE, EVER IN YOUR LIFE -- to own a game that is exactly the same as a terrible, extremely common NES game except for the title screen!

* This auction is for the SHAREWARE version of Stadium Events, which is much more common than the registered version since copying was encouraged. The registered version is so rare because it costs $41,300.

So, the site was down for a couple of hours today, and it is going to be acting a little funny for the next little while. You will notice that pages will sit not loading for up to 20-30 seconds at a time, and then suddenly everything will work fine for a short while. This is expected and, sadly, appears to be unavoidable.

Shortest version: PHP is a hateful language and the source of all misery in the world.

Short version: don't try to delete 3.5 million rows from a table in MySQL all at once, especially one that's accessed every time someone visits a page on your website.

Longer version: When someone visits the site without a cookie (for instance, someone visiting the site for the first time, someone who has logged out and back in, spambots, viewing from seperate browsers, whatever), Drupal generates a random number for the client to use as its session identifier. It shoves this number into a database table, along with a timestamp of when it gave that number out. Every so often, it is meant to do a search for old, expired sessions, and clean them out of the database, because otherwise it would just grow and grow forever and become monstrously full of useless data.

This has not been happening. Ever. In the five years the site has been running.

It turns out that the "garbage collection" process controlled via an internal PHP configuration setting, which Debian Linux turns off because the way it works is kind of dumb (instead of being scheduled on a predictable basis, as would be sensible, it happens at random when someone tries to view a page). Unfortunately, the alternative they set up doesn't work with Drupal.

So I turned it on. And tried to load the site. And then it turns out that while it's cleaning up the session table, the site can't access it. And the site needs to access it on every pageview to see if you're logged in or not.

Well, I figured it had a lot of data to crunch through, so I decided to let it do its thing. And I waited. And waited. And 2.5 hours later it still wasn't done. I looked around online and decided that maybe the more sensible course of action was, instead of sorting through and deleting 600mb of data all at once, maybe I could write a little script to just delete a little at a time, and let other things talk to the database once in a while. Like my website.

So that's what it's doing. Unfortunately there's so much data to wade through that even deleting 1000 rows at a time takes like 20 seconds. This process will hopefully speed up as more old sessions get deleted, until eventually, sometime, maybe tomorrow?, there will be no noticeable pauses at all when browsing the site. Won't that be great? I'm looking forward to it.

Anyway, thought I'd let people know what was going on.

Game File: 

Break The Lasers.zip

An attempt to make a Robotron clone to familiarize myself with Game Maker and get a feel for the 2-hour-jam format. Successful in that I'm now a lot better with Game Maker and like the format.

Game File: 

leather.html

Actually made several days later for the Big Trashy Twine Jam, but it can live here too.