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 
Archive for April, 2008I’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 Sienna and I are back home again after our trip to see Nonna and Poppy about 650km South. I was going to go after swimming last Saturday but I couldn’t sleep. I woke at 3am and couldn’t get back to sleep so packed the car ready for our trip. After putting it all in and remembering all the stuff to add I hadn’t already packed, having a shower and getting ready then carrying Sienna into the car while mostly asleep we went to the local Post Office to check my mail and came back to pick up Sienna’s spaghetti and off we left. We eventually left around 5am. By the time it was after lunch we had arrived. My friends Brad and Cassie phoned to meet up. We met them at McDonalds and I had a coffee while Sienna played with a group of kids there for a party. We chatted for a few hours and left to get dinner for us all. Sunday we drove to Forster for lunch and to do some shopping. It was raining. In fact it rained every day we were there despite poppy saying they’d only had hot sunny days until we arrived. Mum bought me a cappuccino maker machine with some ground coffee beans. Sweet! I always wanted one Monday we took poppy out Geocaching. I found one cache but while looking for the other down the bottom of a crappy overgrown track it started raining and Sienna needed to go to the loo, so we headed home. Tuesday we went to Port Macquarie and did some more shopping. Mostly nonna and poppy shopped while we tagged along. Wednesday I went to see Brad and Cassie for a few hours to catch up. I do miss seeing my friends and had a nice time chatting and watching TV. Yesterday while nonna and poppy were busy we went to the shops and bought some things from BIG W. We bought nonna a mood egg which charges on a base and emits colours, slowly changing through the rainbow. She loved it. We could leave it in the hallway at night time and when nonna went to the loo she could see where to go without turning on the bright hallway lights. She wants to get another one. We got a game for poppy’s pc: World Snooker Championship 2004. It was the only game I could find to work on his old pc. We also picked up The Demolition Man dvd for poppy. While looking for the last one Sienna decided to find something for poppy. She skipped into a shop and went right up the back and picked up a set of Pepper and Salt shakers. I told her poppy wouldn’t want them and we looked around until I found the above DVD. Well, last night poppy was looking through a catalogue and said “These pepper and salt shakers are nice. I wish I had them since my shakers are broken”. So, Sienna was right hehe. Today we drove back home again and only got in about 7:15pm after picking up a couple of things from Coles so we’d have dinner and breakfast. I will go back again tomorrow to shop for the rest of the week. I don’t think I’ll be up too late tonight. So exhausted. Poppy is looking after a friend’s home while they are away and the alarm went off at 3am so he was called by the security place to go check it out. I woke up with the front door opening and closing so got up to see what was happening. I went to check on poppy and came back and we all had a cuppa tea. Not long after I finished and we were all having a chat Sienna woke up and couldn’t find me so started crying. I went back to bed to comfort her but neither of us got to sleep for about 1.5-2hrs and she woke up again at about 6:30am. I didn’t get back to sleep after that so got up at about 8am after lying there for a while. I was tempted to leave driving until tomorrow but don’t want Sienna to miss another swimming lesson plus the fish needed feeding so we came home. I’m to exhausted so think I’ll be going to bed quite soon.
OMG OMG OMG!!!!!#!@*(&^@&*(#^(@*&#!!!eleventyone! I was just at Oporto for lunch (suct in Chris!) and they now have the chilli sauce in BOTTLES TO BUY!!!!I think I need a towel.. Only prob is it’s $7.95 per bottle. ACK! Normal sauce bottle size too. Damn! Today at lunch time in Queen St mall in Brisbane there’s an event featuring Stormtroopers and Boba Fett. Unfortunately I think they are exactly one month EARLY as Star Wars day isn’t until next month! It’s getting far too complex and the scripts are timing out and going slow so I may have to move over to another blog. *Sigh*. IE and FireFox keep locking up every time you try to do something. This happened two days ago and I wish I had known about it but I was down in the Valley doing work. Not THAT kind of work in the Valley Oh this new version of WordPress is going to take some getting used to. I’ve become deeply interested in Boulderdash again. It’s probably my most favourite game ever made in the whole of forever! I’ve just downloaded a remix :
I’ve always wanted to rewrite Boulderdash for another platform. When the Gameboy Advanced came out I even designed all the graphics ready to go. Then my interest waned. Seems to happen a lot with my hobbies. My Cafepress page has not had updates in quite a while, but there’s another reason for that. Freakin awesome!!! It’s now my Ringtone The last couple of nights I’ve been watching some comedy. Father Ted, Austin Powers and now Jay & Silent Bob Strikes Back. Hey! As an idea of what to do with your mobile phone camera… When you go to a really big car park and want to remember what level and section you are parked in.. take a leaf from my brainfart: Take a photo of the landmarks provided. When you get back 2 hrs+ later and forget where your car is.. just ask your fone Hope everyone is doing well. I got a phonecall from my sister last night. I haven’t heard from her in months so we had a long chat. It was really good and I enjoyed it. I will have to stop being slack and keep in touch dammit. Hmm. This Wordpress is getting a bit annoying since the Autosave pauses typing for a second or two.. and now the Write Post page comes up slower as it tries to load up all the data. I wonder if there’s a low-fi version of the Write Post page. Oh good, the Image Upload functionality is broken. *Sigh* Keep smiling and bye for now..
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They also bought Sienna some shoes.
