My All Time Favorite Links Series: Grand Text Auto

I've decided to go over my own bookmarks and things I take for granted that just "everyone" knows about that are fabulous links. First out of the gate is Grand Text Auto. If you like your games with a sprinkle of storytelling, and some amazingly cool links to experimental game/storytelling software, then you'll really sink your teeth into this site. Its one of those "hub" sites for me. You go there, read about something stinking cool, then spend the rest of the night following leads from that one link.

Photojojo - stuff to do with photos

Now that you have a snazzy new digital camera, what else is there to do but look through the pictures on your computer? This site gives you tons of ideas on playing with your photos.

Krugle - code search engine

Krugle is a code specific search engine. It knows about many different open source projects and allows you to search across all of them, or within a specific one of your choosing. Kinda cool...

Chaperon Rouge - Little Red Riding Hood meets ICO

Imagine if you took the idea of Little Red Riding Hood, and filtered it through the game ICO (or Shadow of the Colossus) you might get something like this amazing short film.

InfiniQuest *cough* LimitlessQuest Update!

Via the magic of Google Code, I'm going to consolidate all of my various RPG engines under one roof and unify them such that folks might actually find a use for them. I'll be developing further the DHTML one, but the others will be there for folks to help enhance as well. Google code is cool! Its like gmail for source repositories.

Living in the hospital..

Right now life consists of working in the morning on the computer, trying to clean a bit and get laundry done while watching kiddos, then off to the hospital to help my wife feel a bit better as she nurses our premature baby son. I've spent at least 8 hrs a day in the hospital for the past 2 weeks, and I have to say its odd seeing the same nurses, doctors, etc. all the time. They are in the mode of seeing people for a few days at most then moving on. But for us its like GroundHog Day only with a little baby.

Life can be really challenging sometimes...

Adobe's JamJar -- killer app for RIA's?

While many Rich Internet Applications are more or less lipstick on a pig in terms of really adding anything beyond bouncy graphics, folks are really trying to come up with RIA's that are interesting and take advantage of the features that a Flash-based ui can provide. JamJar is one of these experiments which seems to allyou to create a shared space with your friends. It has lots of bells and whistles (and shwooshs!) but the fact that it takes about 5 seconds to load (instead of having to install something on your own machine) is quite attractive. 0 install rich applications. Awesome idea. Now we just need to find an application that lends itself to this new environment.

Amazing new Web Developer Tool - Aptana

Imagine taking one of the best IDE's around (eclipse) - ripping out the non essential stuff like java editing tools - packing in javascript code assist and other snazzy web developer features (like actions) and you get a really snazzy new web developer tool on the scene. I'm really suprised that there is not more buzz about this tool - it really simplifies the task of getting a Dreamweaver like IDE up and going for free!

InfiniQuest Web RPG Update

I've made some progress tonight on my little web rpg. I have a status window now, with such things as score, level, gold, health, etc. I also have a system set up such that the status elements are updated each turn. I also added support for events! You can now specify a tile location on the map and have some event get triggered when the character moves to that tile.
Very cool stuff!

Mini review: DragonFable

Casual web games are hot. Red hot. Bursting with hotness. Did I say they are hot? I first discovered Adventure Quest a few years ago via some flash board which talked about a casual rpg where you basically open a can of whoopass on monsters and other creatures. You basically smak down monsters, get gold and exp, go buy bigger weapons and repeat. You may say to yourself this is extremly cliche' for a game to boil down to the "level grind" but it was the endearing quality of the graphics and whimiscal storylines that kept me logging in and eventually becomming a "guardian" - which is simply short for "I paid to have better weapons and skills".

When I learned they were doing a prequel of sorts called DragonFable, I wanted to sign up right away. It plays in a similar fashion but seems to have more of a style of Final Fantasy where you are playing more one vs. many than 1 on 1 battles. I'm not sure what I think of the card-style attacks, and so far the quests seem geared to hard core players who probably are double my exp level, but needless to say I didnt hesitate when they offered up the "dragon coins" level of "pay for more smak-down power". Why?
Why would I fork over money for a flash game that's basically mindless clicking and monster slaying? Well, its for precisely that that I did sign up. I play this game on off hours or between lulls as a sort of RPG equivalent to Solitare. It's fun, you can drop it off and pick it up right where you left off (though it's extremely annoying that you have to re-equip everything between logins) and you can spend as much or as little time on it as you like. It's mindless fun for those times late at night or when you want a little diversion. And it seems totally worth it to purchase a membership when you dont have time to sit around and take 2 years to level up. You can use the tokens you get to buy impressive weapons which act as their own carrot to reward you for getting up there in levels.

All in all DragonFable is a more refined and streamlined version of Adventure Quest. I hardly visit AQ any more since I've been playing DF - but I'm still happy and look forward to all the great monster smakage that Artix and folks are planning for us.

The new baby is here!

After what was probably one of the most stressful events of my life (and I've had some doozies) my new baby son is born! Here's a link to some pictures of the little tyke.

Laszlo - revisited...

I was recently reminded that Laszlo doesnt "need" a server any more. I've been mentally omitting trying things out with it because I've been stuck on the fact that mylaszlo has been AWOL for a while. As soon as I get to my old lzx code I may offer that as an alternative runtime for this rpg...

Missing Mashup Camp...

Well, I was going to go to this year's Mashup Camp. I have some very cool ideas / things to show around but alas it looks like I'll be missing it this year. However, I have an excellent reason not to - I'm about to have a baby :)

My wife's about 24-48 hrs away from delivering a new baby boy. Once baby comes, I'll post pics.

Discovering XAML and XBAP

Ok, I pride myself with knowing alot about internet technologies. I've played with SVG, DHTML, canvas, flash, and a ton of derivative technologies that never go very far. But I have been completely in the dark with XAML and XBAP. I guess since you have to have some runtime or download Vista that I've never even seen demos of what you can do with this stuff. However, I just grabbed the Windows Presentation Foundation libs for my windows XP and looked at a few demos. What's insane is I discovered this while idly looking over at the WildTangent forums hearing that their web driver has been nuked.

I am floored! This is like a Flash/PDF/Widgets/Java killer app all rolled into one. I've seen 3D demos, documents like PDF, games, and tons of stuff. I still don't know how it all works, but it seems to be partially available via just XAML and some scripting. I can see now why Opera and other folks are doing the widget thing big time. If XBAP takes off in a big way - there's going to be some major competition for things like Flash and Laszlo. It's never been a better time to be an HTML/XML person with scripting skills.

Anyone out there know where to start with all this XBAP stuff? I feel like I've entered the theater after the movie's already halfway in....

Hosted Widgets at KickApps.com

Kickapps are hosted widgets so you can add your own YouTube , MySpace or other type functionality to your website. I really like this idea of "viral widgets" where once you post a widget on your site, others can do the same by just clicking the "steal this" button.

JSON for the masses

Great article about JSON from Dustin Diaz. If you've been interested in using JSON in your web applications, this is a good place to start.

YUI Lbraries updated! 0.11

The YUI Libraries are collections of javascript functions that allow you to do many cool things in a cross-browser way. You dont have to worry about low level details of browser incompatibilites and can spend more time doing higher level development. I'm not only using the YUI libraries every day at work but also on just about every other project I'm working on. Leverage the time and skill of some of the top web developers in the world by downloading and adopting these libraries. They are fun to use and will save you tons of time.

InfiniQuest Web RPG update

I've managed to add monsters to our world tonight. They all move around randomly right now, but they dont walk through walls and they look spiffy! Can't wait to start with the monster slaying.

Next up - stats and events!

Alien Shooter 2 - you can't shoot just one :)

Sigma Team has created a larger scale sequel to it's great game Alien Shooter. I downloaded and played the demo and I have to say it's great. If you like your mindless alien monster shooting sprinkled with a bit of storyline and RPG elements, then you'll find it very hard to tear yourself away from this game.

Web RPG progress...

I've made quite a bit of progress today on my little web rpg (currently called InfiniQuest) -- I've gotten the engine to render any tile configuration I like, I can create maps with collision detection, I can move my little fighter character around and bump into the walls. Plus, it works on safari, firefox, opera, and (even) IE. Here's a rather uninteresting screenshot.

Community sites as games

The idea of using gaming concepts in community sites is a growing meme. Many of the successful sites like MySpace are using these very concepts to gain and retain users. Hmmmm.

Widge-ups? Widgets meet Mashups

What an interesting idea - take the concept of mash-ups and smush them down into widgets that are more interactive than just "show me the weather". How about games+widgets+mashups ? :D That's what I want to create.

Designing a MMORPG for the Casual Gamer

Interesting article about what is a casual gamer and how to create an MMO to accomodate that style of gamer.

Idea convergence

Gee, I've been blogging alot lately about my own projects. I'm sorry that it's not really ready for general consumption, but rest assured that eventually you'll see a nifty 2d tile based rpg engine that not only can you have interesting adventures in, but you'll be able to create your own and share them with other folks. Using a simple JSON script, you'll be able to post a "world" on any server and point to it from the game to play. You'll even be able to do "linked" worlds - from server to server.

I'm trying to figure out how to do multiplayer - with one idea being adapting this engine to the Yahoo plugin architecture. This is why it's suddenly making sense to do this in HTML - I can create an Opera widget easily, and most likely the Yahoo IM plugin would be pretty trivial (but Sweet!) to do as well. Imagine clashing swords with your buddies via IM and pillaging their stash of gold and weapons...

I'd give anything to have a few days off from real life to get something pulled together quickly. Between work and a baby on the way its basically nights and weekends when I'm not exhausted :)

Why did I title this "idea convergence?" Because there are so many things going on with casual games, mmo's , web 2.0 stuff, and ideas I've had for a long time that are coming together with this little silly rpg engine.

progress on rpg engine

I managed to make some real progress on my new rpg engine. I'm able to create a field of randomly generated tiles, which are all objects in my game world - the cool thing is it looks the same in FF, IE, and Opera (even widget version!). This shows some promise as something I can finally invest some serious dev time into and make it something more than just a test demo that all the other platforms turned into.

Joel's Thoughts on Casuality 2006

If you didnt get to go but wished you had - or if you are working on "casual" games - this is a good read.

working on an rpg engine

I've talked about MMO's for a while, and I've created simple rpg engines for XUL, Laszlo, Canvas, and even Konfabulator and I've always run into a "dead end" in that I've been creating this code for a very small audience. This time, however, I've realized that I can take what I've learned in those areas and create a good RPG engine using plain old HTML and Javascript - using the YUI utilities. This will be the platform which I use for my MMO as well as several other interesting projects. More news as it develops.

Flash Game: Block Action

From JayIsGames comes a very interesting flash game. The levels are generated by other players which makes for pretty much endless variations. Very interesting idea! :)

15 Things you can do with yahoo ui

From a fellow Yahoo! employee comes a great article about the kinds of things you can do with the Yahoo! UI libraries.

Eclipse 3.2 (Callisto) is out!

I used to be a die hard(est) dreamweaver user. I've used many text editors, ide's etc etc. and I've settled on Eclipse. For a while it was a hard sell, because eclipse has been kinda slow and didnt really have much in the way of tools for HTML developers. In the past year or so that's changed with third party plugin stuff like MyEclipse. However with the release of the Eclipse Web Tools I've finally reached editing heaven (well not quite yet, but at least at the pearly gates :) ). Callisto is Eclipse 3.2 and if you havent tried Eclipse now, its never been a better time to download it and try it out. It has a bit of a learning curve, but once you get over that - its very nice. I love the autocomplete --- you can autocomplete on CSS HTML and JS all in the same file. Great stuff!