Wyvern

This is a great online game in development. It has many of the ideas I want to use in my laszlo game.

From the site:

Wyvern is an award-winning massively multiplayer online RPG (MMORPG) similar to a text-based MUD (or "Multi-User Dungeon"), but Wyvern also has a graphical view of the game.

If you make Wizard, you can create your own mods and game areas for other people to visit. You can use our Map Editor to create new areas, and the game is also fully programmable in Java and Jython. Using the Wizard developer tools, you can create truly unique weapons, monsters, treasures, quests, guilds, and more.

Wyvern is currently in beta test. We encourage you to playtest the game, and submit bug reports and feature requests. Please read the Official Wyvern Beta Test Rules before you log in.

Idea of the day - Cross toy system connectors - Lego meets Tinkertoys

In this world of programming that I live in, it's all about connections. Connecting Perl to Java to Python to SOAP to JSP, etc. etc. It dawned on me that in the world of toys (which I live in at home with my son and daughter) we are still living in somewhat of the Dark Ages when it comes to interop. My idea is this: create a system of toy parts that act as "bridge" pieces - connecting Thomas the Tank engine tracks to Lego to Tinkertoys to any of the other varied building systems. I dont know if you have to get permission from all of these other toy manufacturers, but what an amazing system it would be! Imagine creating something with pieces of Lego mixed with K'Nex or whatever. The child's toybox would become a fresh new canvas to create stuff.

Jay Bibby's Rants and Raves of Flash Games and Gameplay

If you enjoy playing games via the web -- which usually means 2d style games via flash, you'll dig this site. It's a blog from someone named Jay Bibby who posts regularly about flash games he finds.

Mini Game Review - BreakQuest

I've had the distinct pleasure of playing a near-complete copy of BreakQuest from Nurium games. If you like Arkanoid clones, and would like to take a sort of game-based trip down a kind of video game memory lane - complete with Breakout, Asteroids, Space Invaders and many other genre's featured as "levels" you will really enjoy this game. The physics engine of this game is "spot on" meaning you really get a sense of weight and momentum in everything that appears onscreen. The concept of powerups which can either help or hurt your progress is quite a novel one, and you have the ability to "draw" your pellet back down to the bumper - a seemly simple feature but allows you to avoid all that empty time when you only have 1 or 2 bricks left onscreen, and you are waiting for the pellet to eventually get back to you.

If there were academy awards for music in indie games, not only would I nominate this game, I'm sure it would win hands down. The music has mostly a techno - style, but the range of moods, styles, and beats give it almost a personality of its own. I very highly recommend you try this game out. Every so often there comes a game that sort of "transcends" it's genre. This game takes the Arkanoid clone genre and blasts through to something very entertaining.

Idea of the day - magnetic mental marbles

Ok, time for a little more off-beat idea. Imagine if you could take the technology that exists now for quadraplegics - which allows them to do things like move a cursor on the screen, etc. etc. and apply this to a "toy" Imagine you have say 10 - 20 marbles which each have within them a little reciever. You have a headband or something which translates your intentions to each of these "marbles" individually. Each marble could be Positive, Negative, or Off in terms of magnetic (or have sides that could switch). Then , using just your thoughts you move the little balls around the table - pushing and pulling against one another. You might even get good enough to get the arrangement of small shapes or figures - somewhat like those office toys you see where you can "stack" little magnetic pieces of metal.

Anyway - it seems like it could be a feasable thing, and might be quite fun to try to create.

I Love Egg !

Oh, do I have a treat for you. You are about to be infected by the biggest net meme since AllYourBase. Or the Peanut Butter Jelly Time song. It's called I Love Egg, and not only does it have an incredibly addictive theme song, the little flash cartoons you can download are extremely cute and funny. Oh, how I will have the many of you on my conscious having spread this to you :)

Now if you excuse me I'm going to try to get this song out of my head... wiggle giggle, yellow middle...

Idea of the day: collaborative old-fashioned radio show / podcast

Tis the day after Thanksgiving and for some reason my brain cells are on full thrusters right now. Here's the idea for the day:

Collaborative old-fashioned radio show / podcast. Imagine if someone created a site where a script is posted of some old fashioned style radio show. Where each character needs to read their lines, someone needs to do the special effects, someone to mix it all together. Now imagine that all of those people are doing this independantly of one another over the net! You basically sign on to the website, find a story you like, "audition" for a part by reading the lines for a given character, or do the sound effects for some explosion or duck call. You can even play the role of "director" by picking some story, riffling through all the different characters in your "cast" and remix your own version of the story! Then add the special effects, then podcast your resulting show. Imagine there could be 20 different remixes of the same radio show, and each one might be unique and special in it's own way. There'd be a contest for the best rendition of a given show, and all those involved in that show get points or kudos, or whuffie, etc.

Yet another great idea, but can I even find time to play Playstation for 5 mins? Nooooioooo

Happy Thanksgiving! And idea for the day - True Fantasy Football

I hope you have a great day today eating your fill of your chosen turkey, pork, etc. I love this holiday as it's the gateway to starting up Christmas. My idea for today strangely coincides with this nice holiday:

You know about fantasy football, baseball, etc. where you (I think) collect an assortment of players across all the teams and accumulate their stats as they play throughout the year and sort of simulate what they would have done if they had played together as a team. [some additional explaination here]

My idea is this: Instead of just picking football players for a fantasy football league, imagine if you also picked a few baseball players as well? And even a few basketball, hockey, and even soccer players. The crux of the idea is to come up with some system by which the abilites and accomplishments of a given player in a given sport could be "translated" to another team/sport. This increases the number of players you could pick dramatically, as well as coming up with some really interesting competition. The idea is of course a soccer player might not be able to play basketball as well as an "official" basketball player, but if they do really well in soccer, that translates to pretty good at basketball somehow. I think this idea could spark whole new kinds of fantasy football, basketball, etc. leagues. You could even have interesting things where you pick all soccer players to play bowling or something :)


What do you think? Has someone already thought of this? I think it'd be really cool!

So while you are kicking back and watching that football game today, imagine if you could mix in a few of your favorite hockey players in there. The trick would be to come up with realistic translation "formulas" - but that would spawn all kinds of programs, websites, etc. etc.

Idea of the day - rankings for del.icio.us

I've decided that I've got so many ideas spilling out of my head that perhaps posting them here will win me points on the blog-o-scale, or at least entertain a person or two today :)

I've got some really fruity ideas, but today's just basically jumped out at me. It's really quite simple. Many folks use del.icio.us - for many things. The ability to tag urls with keywords is really amazingly powerful - especially if you can get a few of your friends to agree on the same tags. My proposal for today is concerning URL "ratings" Basically in addition to all the other attributes you put on a url, add something like this "5:5" meaning you think this site was 5 stars out of a possible 5 stars. If you thought it sucked, it would be "1:5" . And - if you didnt think that 5 stars is granular enough, then simply use "9:10". This is really just a simple idea, and perhaps it needs more refinement -- like perhaps it needs to say "rating:5:5" so that folks can then scan for the ratings and use that in an application or someting.

What do you think? Wouldnt it be cool to come up with some accepted tag system for URL ratings? Then you could have iTunes style ratings for your links.

Desktop Backgrounds

This time of year always seems to be especially stressful - with so many things happening at once, it's as if you had a whole football team decide you're the football and it's time to pile on top of you.

If you feel that way too, you might garner a measure of peace by checking out these great desktop pictures.

IRC Log from Laszlo Dev Chat with Sarah Allan

We had a nice time chatting about all things Laszlo. If you weren't there you can at least read the logs and perhaps stop by next time. I promise to have folks from Laszlo for each session. g'night!

Laszlo Developer chat - today 5-6 pm pst.

Time to fire up your chatzilla's and come to irc.freenode.net for a chat with Sarah Allen from Laszlosystems about building applications in Laszlo.

David vs. Goliath vs. Goliath

Nice article on CNET about Laszlo --- however it was a bit too short.

An IDE for Laszlo!

Those amazing folks at alphaWorks (IBM) are working on an IDE for Laszlo. This is insanely great news. Even more insanely great is that it's based off Eclipse, which I already use on a daily basis (and so should you!). Put on your downloading hat and go grab this.

Blogs as conversations

This might seem to be obvious at first, but Don Park's thinking about creating a new category of blogs which surround conversations on a specific topic - and allowing aggregators to pull feeds / info based off that topic. To me, I'd just say use del.icio.us and come up with a mutually agreed upon tag and just go at it - del.icio.us already has the ability to filter or include as you want and has rss already built in. Nuff 'said.

OOPS!

Looks like someone miscalculated :)

Make your tables sortable

Here's a nice demo of a html + js technique for creating sortable tables. Enjoy!

Flash Game: Battalion

Recently I talked about a game called Land of Legends. Here's another Advance Wars style game called Battalion -- basically a type of Advance Wars Flash version plus multiplayer. It's pretty fun so I encourage you to try it out.

How DND changed the world

Here's an excellent article about how Dungeons and Dragons changed the world. I played it a bit before my friends and I created our own derivation which did away with all the rules, dice, figures, etc. It basically became interactive storytelling for us, and it was great fun.

Here's a great quote:

Democrats, you better get yourselves a magic shield, because in Congress, Bush has plus three to hit.

Mozilla Firefox extension - spiderzilla

Athough not as seamlessly integrated as say scrapbook, this extension is great for grabbing sites for offline reading later. That said, I'd really like it if there were greater integration with the browser, such as lists of sites you've already mirrored, selecting ones for updating, etc. etc. It'd be great to have some way of creating your own little "offline web" so you could read things on the train or airplane, however that idea's still in the realm of too many steps to do right now.

Nightmare of Druaga

Good evening. I spent some time cleaning house today, playing with kiddos, and other things. One thing I was able to spend some time on is playing a game called Nightmare of Druaga. If you are a fan of Roguelike games or Gauntlet style arcade games, you'll really like this one. Basically you are crawling dungeons, killing monsters, and leveling up, but the graphics and amount of weapons and armor you can acquire and morph makes it pretty fun! I love games that you can just pick up and continue on even if you've had a stretch of a number of days where you havent played it.

Everything I'm playing I'm absorbing into the ideas around Unlimited Realms. More on that soon...

Flash Game: Forgotten Myths

This game is an excellent kid icarus clone game done in Flash. I have a reason to like flash gaming :) The pixel artwork is also excellent as well. To all you pixel artists out there - anyone up for helping create an (egad! yet another) RPG - only not like any RPG you've probably played... although similar to many games.

Anyway back to this game - give it a try - you know you want to. Go on... click that link...

New Game: Land of Legends

Take a core of GBA's Advance Wars gameplay, add a smattering of fantasy characters and card-style UI, mix in some nice multiplayer scenarios and you might get a game similar to this one. It's refreshing to see flash and flash style games (I have no idea if this game uses flash) starting to pop up. You'll have to install .Net and Managed Direct X just to get the game to play - which might be too much for most folks, but if you are willing - give it a go. Click the thumbnail below to see a bigger screen.

First Unlmited Realms screenshot

Here's the first screenshot showing some UI sketches of the main Unlimited Realms MMORPG screen. Looks exciting right? Well, ok, at least it's something.

Casshern update

Looks like Dreamworks is going to handle releasing this film in the US. I cant wait - it looks to be something like Ultraman meets Matrix with some Brazil thrown in as well.

Philosphitizing and Laszlo IRC meeting next week.

Welcome to a new day. Every day has its own stockpile of challenges
lined up for you to encounter every day. I believe that we are
equipped to meet every challenge put before us - if we are just
willing to believe, and have a little faith. Faith is pretty much
what has been keeping me up and running and the lights on at my
proverbial "store".

Gah, enough philosphitizing. There's going to be a virtual Laszlo
Developers meeting on IRC on the 19th from 5-6 pm PST (California
time). You can hook up with other Laszlo developers and Sarah Allen
from Laszlosystems will be there too to answer questions about how to create applications using Laszlo. You can go to the link above in Chatzilla or just
log into irc.freenode.net and go to #laszlo

ScrapBook - Mozilla Firefox Extension

When I first looked at this extension, I thought - psha - what's so great about something that saves webpages. But then I realized you could just select anything in any webpage anywhere and save it for reading or reusing later - be it images, tables, html tricks, css stuff, and then be able to search all the text of your hoardings ... it's very cool! I think all it needs now is some kind of Wiki style interface to complete the picture. This is one of those extentions that 'grows' on you. Try it out!

Achaea - Dreams of Divine Lands - text based MUD

I've been starting to do some bit of research for my graphical meta mmorpg/mud and ran across this gem of a MUD. You dont even have to download any software to give it a try, and the tutorial levels are interesting so far... it's interesting to see the crossovers from interactive fiction and muds.

From the site:

Welcome to Achaea! Here you'll find an extraordinary, original world of high fantasy, epic conflict, and exciting gameplay. We've been called "the only text MUD that still matters," and one of the co-creators of Doom has said he "doesn't believe there is a deeper game in existence."

TinyWorld Konfabulator widget for windows

Given that Konfabulator has now been released for windows, I thought I'd give my TinyWorld widget a try on the windows side. And - can you believe it - it works!
I included a link to this on my homepage as well.

Firefox - taking the world by storm - releases 1.0

Mozilla.org's site is "refusing connections" - which is tech speak for "melting from all the hits" today. Today is Firefox the browser's birthday - and 1.0 is released. Check out the links via del.icio.us and see if you can find the download link since you'll not have much luck on mozilla's site for a while :)

Congratulations Mozilla - I'm glad to see a project I worked at so hard for so long is prospering, and perhaps will finally get some of the recognition it deserves.

An intense day

Gosh, what a day. I had to take a day off from work to deal with insanely bad tax issues. Believe me, dont ever ever fall behind on taxes or you can have your life, your hope, and your piece of mind taken from you in a heartbeat. I've never had such a sequence of huge challenges in my life as I've had in the past 4 years. *sigh* Yet there are many many good things too. The trick seems to be to not let the daggers of conflict and adversity strike at your heart, but merely glance off of your resolve to find joy in your kids eyes, or 20 minutes of peace on the train. I feel like I've been holding my breath all day - driving down to San Jose in a car that really needs new breaks, and a tune up - then sitting nervously in the tax attourney's office shuffling papers around - hoping I've got the right combination of documents to magically create a finished tax form.... then the tension of coming home, getting my wife's signature and racing to the post office before the cutoff time of the day. Plus feeling ill, achey, and downright spazzed about having your finances attacked. And the worse thing... feeling your creativity trickle out your ears like a boxer that's taken one blow too many to the head. Guess that's why I'm writing this. I'm not expecting anyone to actually read it :)

Look for happy dappy sappy posts about games and stuff tomorrow. Today I have a headache.

Flash MMORPG update - Unlimited Realms

I'm working in earnest to get a bare bones alpha version of this game going soon. Here's some of the thoughts I have about it:

1) MUD - many of the things you might have enjoyed about MUD's will be here, including creation of items, creating your own house/environment, and more.
2) Pets/Golems - one of the coolest ideas so far I've been toying with are Golems. These will be little automatons which will be hooked into things like FOAF, RSS, and more. Youll be able to create Golems to send message to friends, or to retrive news or other information
3) Metadata -- here's one of the BIG ideas for this game --- it will have an open API just like del.icio.us or technorati. YOu'll be able to hook up other services into this game, as well as pull information about your player into other services.
4) Chat - of course, you'll be able to talk to other players - duh
5) Killing monsters - yeah but here's the thing, if you want, you can play the role of the monsters too.
6) Lairs -- if you want to be a bad guy, you'll be able to create lairs which can trap/kill/rob from other players - but only if they want to enter your world.
7) connected worlds. If you want to set up your own world server, you'll be able to, except that you have to leave your stuff behind when you go - no cheaters.
8) Laszlo connectivity -- this game will probably use just about every feature Laszlo has to offer, and probably more.
9) Fantasy worlds -- you will be able to go off and explore worlds of fantasy -- and not kill a thing if you dont want to. Take some friends along with you.

The Incredibles - incredible!

I just got back from watching the Incredibles with my wife and kiddos. I must say I really really liked this movie. It's so past time for movies that are encouraging, promoting family, and are just plain fun. The best part of the movie for me was when the kids start discovering their powers, and are free to use them for the first time. There's just something really great about how the family goes from being repressed by conformity into finally expressing themselves. Anyway, it's fun, and I highly recommend it to anyone, not just kids.

Playing Scaler

Good morning! Just spent some time playing a pretty fun game called Scaler on XBOX - think Jak and Daxter, only... you're just Daxter... and ... you're blue. Anyway if you like platformers, and enjoy playing something that's NOT just a rehash of an existing franchise, give this game a go.

OpenLaszlo Roadmap

From the site:

Welcome to the first version of the Laszlo development roadmap! This document describes the short-term strategy, and the long-term vision, for the Laszlo open source platform.

This document, like OpenLaszlo.org itself, is a work in progress. Over time, we will move our project plans to a place where you can see them. For now, here's a sketch of where we are, and where we're going.

Not at BloggerCon

Hello there, my name is Andrew Wooldridge and I'm not at BloggerCon today. Why? Well let's see there's work, family, lack of time, blah blah , yadda yadda. When I discover events like this, where I just know that cool things are going to happen, and I know my participation in them will consist of reading random posts from various attendees, I get that same feeling I had when I was a kid riding in my parents car on a long trip. Do you remember pressing your face to the car window, seeing some fair or carnival pass by on the side of the road, and just knowing that you'd have the time of your life there, but as you turn to your parents they say "sorry, we have important things to do". You slump back down in your seat, bottom lip out, and dream about the day you can grow up and get to do the things you want to do. Hah :)

Well, it's not that bad. I'm sure if I had wanted to, I could have upheaved my life and made a way to be there. Instead, I'll take the time I am given and try to build some cool things of my own, then when it's time for the proverbial "show and tell" for me, I'll have more than just a GI Joe action figure to show...

LaszloMail -- Oddpost killer?

Laszlosystems is kicking butt and taking names lately - and this is yet another great move on their part. I've seen a demo of this application, and it's sweet. It behaves like you would imagine a mail app should, and it's free from all the browser incompatibilites. What's even sweeter is any ISP or net provider can get a version of this and resell it as a feature of their service... Look out Oddpost, here here comes LaszloMail.

A plug for RealBasic

I really like RealBasic - I've been toying with this IDE for years, and for a while I was seriously developing apps on it. Since then, the web has sucked away all my time, with it's HTML, JS, and CSS - however whenever I get back to building a standalone application, RealBasic will be the IDE I pick up. The fact that I can create something on my Windows XP box, try it out on my OSX box, then send it also to my Linux friends is pretty powerful. This is a tool that is super easy to use, has alot of power, and is simply well designed. The code hints it gives you as you type is simply awesome and I wish I had that feature for my other tools. I created a few RB projects in the past, and I always mean to start up development again... but meanwhile you should give it a shot, if just to have fun with the great interface. Plus you can have an app up and running in minutes.

Mini Game Review - Frenetic

It took me several hours to find this game. I had played it about a year and a half ago and promptly forgot about it in the crush of "the next great link". However, I always come back to something good eventually, so here I am. You start off appearantly as somone who's survived a spaceship crash and you have control minimally over a set of robots which you have to take into battle and basically shoot everything that moves. It's pretty brainless fun, and there's options for beefing up your robot's weapons and armor that is somewhat interesting. One note for you in terms of gameplay, once you discover that you can strafe via holding the shift key, the gameplay improves quite a bit - simply get the enemies in front of you and shoot like crazy...

I encourage you to try out the other game there as well - aptly called Fenix Blade - it's a wonderful home-grown rpg.

Game Preview - Outpost Kaloki

Ok, first off, I dont dig resource management games like "sim theme park" or "zoo tycoon". The idea of juggling resources and trying to handle many elements at once just doesnt do it for me when playing a game. Booring. That said, this game is refreshing, fun, funny, and downright addicting. You are a dashing space hero who is helping save the princess while running a space station. I guess this could easily have been named "Space Station Tycoon" but it would probably be misleading. If you enjoy easy to pick up games which you can learn in 5 mins but still feel challenged, I encourage you to give this one a try.

Using the laszlo framework as a standalone application

There's alot of buzz about the effort going on to get the results of your Laszlo development working as a standalone app. Here's one article I found recently about one person's efforts to do just that. Give it a read...

Bouncing back

Life's bouncing back in many ways, including the traffic on this site :) I had an all time high back in January, and I bottomed out in September down to like 1 hit a day. I fully intend to reverse this trend in a big way with games, web design stuff, ideas, and other fruity goodness. No more silence for me.