Zzzzz. Is it morning yet?
Archive for April, 2008Things are starting to kick along. Installs working, etc. Yay! Optimism rules I wonder if I should add a plugin to my blog to post my tweets from here to the blog posts. What do you think? Everyone has gone to lunch. The parade is STILL going. Whew Tha ANZAC parade is still going! wow! I wish I could turn on the AC here. *sweat* twittering via GMail’s GTalk ftw The parade seems to nearly be over. Went and got a couple of cheese, bacon and steak pies Just been watching the ANZAC Day parade. Took some photos and a quick video Okay. AmberMacarthur won’t see my @ reply because she has to follow me as well. D’oh! Oh well. I wonder if I’m utilising the @ reply system correctly or not. This is a bit confusing There go the ANZAC day jet planes overhead WOOOOSHHHHH!!! @ambermacarthur great show. Listened to it yesterday This is driving me crazy. I gotta get out of the pc biz. grr Fixed Twitter flash link to point to http://www.twitter.com/WauloK instead of code made by the plugin http://static.twitter.com/WauloK Well I got home at midnight. Now I have to go back again Okay. I didn’t sign up for Twitter before because I didn’t know any friends on there. But, as it turns out I knew someone after all. I saw their Tweet when I was on Facebook so I figured there goes my excuses. You will now see a Twitter shoutbox in my Sidebar with my last Tweets and those of people attached to my account. I don’t know all of them well but I will see if they are worth keeping in my Follow list. If you have a Twitter account and know me, Follow me and let me know so I can reciprocate. OMG OMG OMG!!! Strong Bad’s Cool Game for Attractive People (abbreviated as SBCG4AP) is an episodic series of point-and-click adventure games by Telltale Games based on the universe of the Homestar Runner web cartoon. It will be released this June through Nintendo’s WiiWare service and be available for PCs. The game will take advantage of features on the Wii console, such as WiiConnect24.[2] The first allusion to the game was given in a cartoon posted on YouTube by the Homestar Runner creators called “Strong Bad Gameways”. The video parodies an In-flight safety demonstration, featuring safety tips for the operation of a Wii Remote. A link to this video was provided by an easter egg in the Strong Bad Email “shapeshifter” consisting of the hash at the end of the YouTube URL. The game was later officially announced on April 10, 2008 with a press release and a Strong Bad Email-formatted “trailer” posted on the Homestar Runner site. That’s an article from Wikipedia. Five episodes, coming to WiiWare and PC! Glorious 3Ds!! Had my first day back at work after two weeks off. It was quite quiet today. I got to work a bit early. Started getting ready and after 15 minutes the fire alarm went off so we headed to the coffee shop. This afternoon I popped into the Blood Bank to give another donation. So, there you go Lisa! Hope you are happy about that heheh Just had some pasta for dinner. I made it last night and froze three extra microwave dishes of leftover pasta for some easy meals this week. Sienna didn’t sleep that well last night so I was rather tired when the alarm went off to tell us to get up and go to her swimming lessons. She was still asleep as well so I had to wake her up for once. I dropped her off at her mum’s and came home. I decided to change my sheets and quilt. While looking through the wardrobe I noticed the mess of boxes and bags full of crap I’ve not gone through since I moved into this new place. I got the courage up to tackle it and soon was up to my eyeballs in dust. That set off my damn hayfever so I had another antihistamine tablet (already having had one earlier this morning). I ended up throwing out a huge garbage bag full of crap and filling a pink clothes donation bag which turned up in the letterbox a couple of days ago. That was also part of my motivation. I got out all my winter type clothes now it’s cooling down and put the shirts and jackets on coathangers and packed away other things. The wardrobe is now rather cleaner and spacier with lots of room. I found some things I had ‘lost’ and also put new sheets and a quilt on my bed. I also tidied up Sienna’s bedroom and put new sheets and a quilt on her bed as well as new pillow cases on both of our bed’s pillows. All in all I’m very impressed with this huge effort of the day. I spent the rest of this afternoon updating my “Me, Myself and I” page on this blog. Click the link above to check it out. It details some of the things I’ve done over the years and things I’m doing now. More to add as I think of it. I killed my MySpace account the other day. There’s just far too many social websites around. I think tonight I will relax a bit and watch some DVDs. Tomorrow I plan to tackle the bookcase in the lounge which I started today and also do my ironing and wash all those sheets and quilts, etc. ARGH! It’s an attack of the crazy SIENNA’s!!!
This is a special version of Asteroid Attack I made tonight with Sienna in the starring role flying the alien spaceship. I changed the stars into “Daddies” to collect. She loves it hehe I’ve finally completed my new Gamemaker game. I changed the name to “Asteroid Attack” to make it fit more with the theme and gameplay. It doesn’t have the one-button play system I had originally planned but it evolved into a much better game which I think is more fun. You be the judge! Click on the above link or head to the “Play my games” link at the top of the page. You may even be able to play it directly online without downloading if you are funky enough I’ll post a screenshot below so you can get an idea.
I had a rather restless night last night. I woke up about 3am and got back to sleep some 1-1.5hrs later. I woke a few times with Sienna kicking the bed (she has a small mattress on the floor next to my bed if she gets scared during the night and wants company. I’m trying to wean her off sleeping in the same bed as me). She somehow manages to roll under the bed sometimes and has this mad leg-kicking thing going on while asleep. It’s not all the time, but some nights. I rolled her back onto the mattress a few times and got back to sleep and woke at 9am when the phone rang. Today we went for a trip on the train into the city. I got paid today so I wanted to pay off one credit card and cancel it. We took the train to Central and walked down to the bank. Unfortunately I forgot where the particular branch was I wanted so we went further down Eagle St to where I knew there was an ATM. Unfortunately again, that ATM was broken so we walked back past the CC bank and found the ATM I originally wanted. We went back to the bank where my CC had come from and paid off the card and had them destroy it. YAY! Score one for me and my savings! I want to get my cards paid off and save money up for my own home, hopefully by the end of next year. I rang Foxtel yesterday to see how long I had left on my contract. They told me (after sitting on hold for about 10 minutes) that it runs out in December. I asked them to check again because I was sure I had signed up not long after I moved out near Redbank. I was put on hold for another 10 minutes during which I found the original work order when they installed it.. June 2006. Finally they came back and said “No, it’s definitely December this year”. I said “Uh no, because I have the workorder here and it says June!”. “Oh! I better see who else they have been stuffing around. We don’t want this happening with other customers. Anyway, they had a look and the computer says you were never put on a contract, so if you wish to disconnect you can do it right now without any termination fees!”. SWEET!. “Yes, disconnect it right now please”. “Someone from the couriering agency will phone you tomorrow to confirm a date when they will pick up the Foxtel box”. And they did.. Tomorrow (Wednesday) between 9:30am and 12pm. Bonus! Yesterday I was searching around yet again for some simple way to create games. I don’t want to spend weeks or months learning a new language and then all the foibles and complex ways to create sprites and sound fx and worrying about memory overflows and crap. I did come across some Python game making libraries.. PyGame and another one whose name escapes me just now.. PyGlet or something I think. Anyway, I also checked Torque, but they all require lots of programming. I just want to create the stuff and link it all together easily. Years ago I paid for the Game-Editor but it never struck me as something I liked working with. Eventually I came across GameMaker. I had seen this in the Game-Editor forums as people trolling or discussing this main competitor, but never really looked into it. I read through the website and saw that it had been worked on for many years and was really well built. In fact, YoYoGames in the UK (iirc) took over support of it from the Professor whom was programming it. They built up the new website, etc and are giving up the LITE version of it for free. It has logos and such but you can put together a game and test it and let others test it really easy. The other thing which caught my eye is there’s a Firefox (and I think, Internet Explorer) plugin to let you launch then play the games directly online without downloading the .exe and installing it. Way cool! I tested a few games which are in beta and really liked the way they were put together, so I downloaded GM7 lite and tested it out. Some time ago when I was looking at programming for the new Google Android platform ( I did write ONE application for it! ) I had designed on paper a game based off rules similar to the Palm game SF-Cave (Wow! It has it’s own website now!). I’m sure you’ve played a variant of it if only in a flash game. It’s really addictive and simple. You only have one keypress which makes the ship/ribbon/whatever go up. If you let go, gravity takes over and you move down. Dodge the walls of the cave and maybe some other things in the cave in order to get the highest score. I had taken this idea and created on paper a similar game but with an alien spaceship flying through the cave, dodging asteroids and collecting stars. Well, I put GM7 to the test. By the end of the day (with interruptions from spending time with my lovely daughter, Sienna) I had created a basic game with some bits of scripting, a static background and random asteroids and stars. I published it on the YoYoGames website as a Beta version of a game and sent it to Chris to try out. It had two midi songs I found on a free midi website and some WAV sound fx I found on various sites. The spaceship graphic I made myself in Paint.Net and found the asteroid and stars on various websites. Today I spent some time upgrading it. I changed the static background for a moving starfield. I made the asteroids appear programmatically instead of randomly and am in the midst of adding a fuelcan to pick up as the fuel goes down, among other ideas I come up with. I also have improved some of the programming. It’s not too bad, actually for a quick first attempt at a game with a system I’ve never used before. It was easy and I just looked up some of the things I wanted on the forum and in the PDF guide. I also got some ideas from demo games included in the main download. I’m very happy with GameMaker and think I will probably pay for the full version (PRO) which is US$20. I might make some games for kids to play. Sienna was bugging me all yesterday to play the “Alien Cavern” game once she saw the spaceship animating hehe. I told her she’d have to wait a while. Now she played it today but she thinks it’s a bit too hard. Since it will be aimed at kids I might make it a bit easier. Sienna has already decided the next game for me to make.. one with a Princess who has a pink wand, needs to collect balloons and stars and kill the “naughty things”. I have some ideas but will see how it pans out. I have yet to work out how to draw a Princess animated sprite to use in a game lol! Here’s the answer to all your movie twists. hehe. Classic! PS: Movie spoilers on that page |
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