agrgrggag need clipart

i'm capping myself at two hours each day, including design time and finding/creating resources like sound and graphics, etc. if i don't come up with anything even remotely interesting at the end of that period, i still have to compile it and put it up here to shame myself into doing better next time. which is what happened today. and yesterday. i think tomorrow i'll try to scrape the slate clean, somehow.

not worth the sizeable download
(i should also really start resizing images instead of just importing them in there wholesale)

hi! how are you? myself, i just moved to a new place -- nice enough, but it has a few problems -- and thanks to a misunderstanding with the previous tenant, am stuck without internet for a while. but come hell or high water, i'm still going to follow through on my new year's challenge, which is to make and post a game every day this month.

i'm also trying to expand my game-makin' horizons a bit, especially now that i no longer have a computer that can run klik'n'play.

so, having said all that, here's my first game of the year, entitled: "I Don't Know How To Use Construct, Or, My Fridge Is A Deafening Power Glutton And A Breeding Ground For Spreads Of Ill Repute."

happy new year, glorious trainwrecks!

(in 7zip form to meet size constraints, sorry if that's a problem. uses this newfangled 'mpeg layer-3' technology, is why.)

Merry Kristmas, everybody! This is my Christmas game for you.

Original game idea, and line-art for the title screen by StorybookWeaver, coming-soon game box version by WordRescue (two good friends of mine). I'm pretty proud of this game. It was a really fun exercise in simplified game design, and pixel-art. Personally, I think the main title screen turned out beautifully.

WordRescue will be by in a bit with the "commercial box" for the game. Consider this the shareware version.

I really need a snappy name for this project, so I can register a domain (or at least a Sourceforge project). InfraBaby isn't really doing it for me.

So, since my last update, I've managed to completely decode the V.Smile Baby's IR format. Those last three bits that were so confusing to me were actually a combination of a very simple "repeat" bit, and two checksum bits! Once I figured out how the checksum worked, everything became clear. I've attached a small document containing the complete decoding scheme, which is actually much smaller now since I can take the raw data out for repeat codes and so forth.

The next step is to write a little script to generate the Lirc configuration file.

The step after that is to package everything up into a user-friendly bundle. Even if I don't have a nice menu or configuration method to start, it'd be good to bundle WinLIRC and automatically start it when you boot up. Not to mention building an EXE instead of requiring the end-user to install Python and the various random libraries that I'm using.

As an aside, my son enjoys AlphaBoogie, but so far he still hasn't really made the connection between pressing buttons on the controller and things happening on the TV.

I'm reading Tracy Fullerton's "Game Design Workshop" book. One idea she puts forth is don't worry about playtesters stealing your ideas, your game will be just about as hard for someone else to make as it will be for you, and you obviously have a head start...

Those economics don't quite apply to quick and dirty KotMK-able games, but I'm still a little nervous about sharing because A. i guess i'm "paranoid" about some stealing, but would that be such a bad thing? B. I'm worried I might disappoint people who see this list and what I'm NOT working on

So here is the list from my iPhone "glorious trainwrecks" memo, with explanations, roughly in reverse chronological order

• space war with rotational inertia - I heard Space War originally had rotational inertia, which is an element usually left out. I'd like to find out what it feels like
• space war boxing - thinking of the old 2600 boxing, overhead view, along w/ playing Little Big Planet. What would it feel like to swing big fists?
• like unfinished swan game demo, but 2d... use paint gun to see otherwise invisible area and monsters - most likely next Trainwreck - http://gadgets.boingboing.net/2008/10/30/the-unfinished-swan.html but in 3D. I'd almost like to try it KnP, but I'm not sure I know how it handles "invisible" objects. Also I'm total pants at KnP
• katmatari damacy using sprites - I did this a bit with cosmicarkatamari for the Pirate Kart, I think I would want it with more colorful sprites (maybe Atari?) and having the mass of cuaght things rotate a bit...
• like sperm game but you have to lure sperm into contact with something - Preggers was another Pirate Kart game... just my general love of simple smooth motion physics games
• javascript game library - just thinking about what a generalized javascript game library would look like...
• slingshot - I kind of this OLPC Physics Game Jam - which reminds me, I really should use the Java wrapper for Box2D stuff, one of the maintainers of that port was that the game jam, and it would probably be much more solid than my half-assed "engine"
• pick up the phonebooth and die 2600 - if I ever get around to using Batari BASIC, this would be my first game that about 8 people would find conceptually amusing
• atari basic simulator - Atari BASIC Programming is classically weird and wonky, but I admire the effort a few people have made to make playable games in it-- unfortunately i haven't been able to really see the games, because the emulator support is so-so for the keypads, and the keypads used such a weird ass way of entering commands. But an emulator that could let you type in the code might work...
• cellular automata system CAoleslaw - SpindlyQ would love love love to see this.
• life war, majority wins - maybe glider gunner? - a bit like Conway West, but more Life- centric. I was thinking the player could fight the ghost (or, heh, a 2 player network version... dreaming...) in painting life blobs. Normal life rules, but every live square has a team color, and for birth, the new cell gets the color if the majority of its 3 neighbors. It might turn out painting isn't a good enough game, so another variant would be firing off glider guns...
• atari rips..... - I think this is shorthand for "smash bros w/ atari characters", grabbing the sprites from the game... though the motion and attack forms would be tricky.
• heatseeker via repositioning? - heatseeker is this old C=64 game I might still do a Java processing or maybe even Batari Basic 2600 port of -- here I'm wondering if KnP could do it.
• game where firing is done when you collide with object, like a cannon - if/when I do a KnP game, this is a mechanic I might like to try. Typical "run from the monsters" but with cannons that are constantly rotating (or maybe not) and the player running into them fires... just exploring the indirection
• assemble little robots to do fighting for you -another study in indirection. I love the idea of having to craft an army... one idea I've had for a while, but w/o the right interface or gesture recognition, is rock paper scissors, where you draw circle, square, or x, and then fling what you draw at your opponent who is doing the same. Or the way ASCII bots has 1000 robots based on head, torso, feet, having to put together your minions to do your bidding might be an intereting game. Or snowmen from 3 diff sized snowballs? All of this might be tough to implement, but still, not my worst idea
  

UPDATE Half asleep, I had some more ideas for some of gamebuttons, games where the display and input is all a "normal" HTML pushbutton.

• "Birth control", target little ~o as they come swimming by
• Olympics - archery, hurdles
• slot machine
• Rock Scissors Paper
• some kind of hungry hungry hippo
• sideways lunar lander
• Some kind of RTS gaiden, where your the local commander of a base and just have to press a single button when told to to make a unit.
  

IT TOTALLY WORKS

OH MAN OH MAN OH YES

Eric is in bed now, but I can't wait to let him play with Alphaboogie.

It's going pretty smoothly, actually!

I wrote a little oscilloscope program in Python that interprets the raw pulse/space data from WinLirc (pasted into text files), then gathered the data for each of the buttons. Thankfully the encoding was easy to decipher (each bit has a short pulse to start, and then a short or long space indicating one or zero; a long pulse ends each batch of sixteen bits), so it's just a matter of looking at the picture and turning it into a code. I haven't really looked at how to write the configuration file properly quite yet, but I'm sure it won't be too hard after all.

Important findings for game designers:
- The codes are the same whether you roll the trackball up or down. :(
- The "release" code appears to be the same for all buttons, so there's no possibility of holding down multiple buttons simultaneously.

EDIT! For all the V.Smile Baby hackers out there, I've attached a text file detailing the codes associated with every button. If someone is ever crazy enough to try hacking the V.Smile console itself, knowing these codes could help you out.

So my infrared reciever has arrived! And I can totally read the raw IR coming out of the V.Smile. Unforunately, WinLIRC's learning function is retarded and completely refuses to learn my weird-ass device automagically. The raw IR data that I get from WinLIRC is very unfriendly state; it's not something I can just paste into a config file, or even a visualization program, for that matter.

Looks like there's lots more reverse engineering and learning about WinLIRC configuration files in my future! Yay?