Spotback: make your own popurls site

Meta! Meta meta. Now you can create your own popurls style site using spotback. Basically popurls aggregates rss info from many sites and allows you to read it quickly on one page. Now you can create your own version of this page with feeds you read daily - which is really an old idea (my yahoo?) but with a more compact presentation style.

Star Trigon (Namco 2002) - one switch arcade game

The only off-shoot game from Namco's Project Driller team, known for their whimsical Mr Driller series of puzzle games, Star Trigon is a deceptively simple action-puzzle game. How simple? It uses only one button - and no joystick - for play. Three characters are selectable at the beginning of the game: Hoshi Wataru (with his cute kitty, Pachee, in tow), Choufuto Bigguban (the token fat-and-slow oaf), and Mr Driller himself, Hori Susumu. The object of Star Trigon is to rescue all of your stranded friends in each level. Stages are made up of a variety of planets viewed from a top-down perspective. The one button used for control simply makes your character hop from one planet to another. As the game begins, your character is put into "orbit" around one planet. He can then hop from planet to planet with skillfully-timed presses of the button. As you hop from one planet to another, a line is drawn connecting the two. Repeat this again and again to form triangle shapes, which encapsulate your free-floating friends and, in turn, rescue them. The triangles drawn can be large or small, as long as they remain a triangle shape. The gravitational pull of each planet - essentially the margin of error, as a larger pull will suck your character in if you send him flying slightly to one side of the planet - decreases as the game progresses, increasing the difficulty. Missing a jump from one planet to another will send you careening off into outer space, though one-hit-kill barriers do line some stages in order to help train you. There is also an air meter (a la Mr Driller) constantly depleting, which can be replenished via pick-ups that are found circling certain planets on each stage. Mixed in with the dozens of normal stages are a variety of bonus stages, in which you must collect as many friends as possible within a time limit. Missing a jump and exiting the playfield instantly ends a bonus round. The graphics and sound are very distictive and unusual, much in the same vein as Mr Driller - the entire game is extremely stylish and unique. Star Trigon runs on Namco System 10 hardware, which is also home to games such as Taiko no Tatsujin, Mojipittan, and Mr Driller G. Taken from www.klov.com

Torque Game Builder

I decided today to get the indie version of Torque Game Builder. I had tried the 30 day version and it was kinda cool - but I really hadnt had alot of time to dig into the features. But today I was reading about Amanda Fitch (creator of Aveyond) and several other indies who've jumped on the Torque bandwagon. I have had a game idea for a long time (basically an action rpg) and GameMaker - while really easy to work with - doesn't have the features I need for this game (basically the ability to commercialize a game). I tried out MultiMedia Fusion (Klick n Play) which also is easy to code for but isnt cross platform.

So, I'm going to start a project with Torque Game Builder and blog about it here. Perhaps if you are considering getting the engine yourself perhaps what I talk about here might influence your decision.

So far the things that have impressed me are the smoothness of the animation, and the niceness (is that a word?) of the folks on the TGB boards. One gotcha if you are just poking around - you cant build a standalone of your game and also run the IDE at the same time - there can only be one instance of torque running at a time.. wierd. But I tried it and was scratching my head thinking "I'm just trying to run one of the demos - sheesh" and it would fail to launch. After actually reading about how to package a game I see in big green letters " ... dont try to launch your game while the IDE is running ...".

Other than that, so far it's very cool! I cant wait to start digging into particle effects, parallax scrolling, collision detection, etc. etc.

Objectifying Javascript

Here's a great article about how to write javascript in an object oriented fashion. I've pretty much radically changed my own coding styles to match this (been doing it for a while).

CanvasTastic - 3D for < canvas >

This is a fantastic new 3d scene generator for canvas...

Aquaria: amazing new 2d adventure from the creator of Eternal Daughter

Eternal Daughter is one of my favorite all time indie games. The creator of this game has returned to game-making with a new shareware title called Aquaria, featuring hand drawn artwork and amazing visual effects. Keep this one bookmarked...

Devbump - Digg for game developers

Remember a time when everything was a "flickr for X". Now everything needs to be a "Digg for X". However that's not really a bad thing since Digg's voting system helps good news articles rise to the top. Hopefully something similar will happen here. Props for nice Web 2.0 design - will it get a critical mass of community?

SVG in Laszlo

Laszlo is busy working on a subversive tool that will change the way you do web apps. Right now everyone is playing around with javascript libraries, fooling with browser bugs, or digging elbow deep into Flash code to try to create something cross browser. With Laszlo, you could create a web based app with a few tags, a sprinkling of js, and never have to touch the Flash IDE. Now it looks like they are taking their code abstraction further and demoing another runtime for Laszlo : SVG. I once dreamt of a tool that would let you create some sort of web application and not have to worry about the output format - flash, dhtml, svg, xaml, xul, etc. etc. Perhaps Laszlo will be that tool.

I'm Famouser! Doing reviews for Jayisgames.com now...

Jayisgames is one of my personal favorite sites on the net. Webgames are near and dear to my heart, as you've probably surmised over the years of breathless blog posting over the latest flash game here and there. I'm greatly pleased to be able to begin to contribute game reviews to this fine site and I hope to polish my writing skills as well! If you are web game developer and are ready to start seeing reviews, or if you have a preview of an upcoming game please let me know and I'll have it added to the review queue.

Fixing pc network issues.. WinSock XP Fix

I don't often post about generic PC software, but I ran across an issue recently that forced me to do some serious web searching to try to find a fix myself. My PC was losing internet connectivity in a wierd way at random times during the day. Usually around noon I'd no longer be able to browse the web, though persistent connections were working fine, and I could access sites via IP address. The problem was growing more and more persistent and annoying - going from 1x times a week to once a day. The strangest thing was that rebooting more often than not would completely fix the issue. However the day arrived when I rebooted my wonderful PC yet again and everything was dead. Panicing, I rebooted yet again and my connection returned. I thought to myself "this is it, I have to figure this thing out".

Thanks to several search engines I discovered this wonderful tool: winsockxpfix.exe (I post the filename to further assist you other poor searching folks). It seems to have done the trick of resetting my winsock settings back to factory mode, and so far my connection has remained up and running happily since I've run this tool.

My Big Fish Games!

BigFish has a really interesting new feature called My Big Fish games which allow you to create your own little mini-portal with the games you like featured there. The customizability is pretty limited, but it's nice to have your own personalized game portal. I encourage you all to not only visit it, but become members through my site - and I'll get 25% of the proceeds that come through your portals (and you can get the same when you bring more friends in as well!)

The idea of revenue sharing is not new, but this is like a sort of adsense for gaming on steroids. Kinda nifty, if it actually gains any popularity.

Also note, if you sign up for a My BigFish game portal yourself before Sept. 30th you get two free registered games - which is a pretty snazzy incentive.

Laszlo gets $8 mil to expand its application suite

Way to go Laszlo! Here's to hoping Laszlo evolves beyond its red-headed stepchild of RIA status and folks really take advantage of this great software.

IM Battle Game update

In case you were wondering what is going on here in the AWDC world, I'm working on 3 different projects. 1) A DHTML RPG engine that I hope will be the RPG Maker for the web. 2) Updating and improving the javascript gamelib. 3) A game for Yahoo Instant Messenger (plugin) called Sword Magic Kung Fu. I am using every YUI util you can imagine as well as some other great libraries. I am very eager to get folks to see this game, it's just taking so darn long to make it work well. If you would like to help test an instant messenger plugin lemme know. And those of you you have already agreed, send me an email with your yahoo IM.

Dzone - digg for developers

Imagine if you could use digg to find developer news (php, javascript, etc.) without all the noise of other links and articles. It's basically Digg for developers, but you know it's kinda cool.

TheWebList - a popurls clone for information junkies

My favorite site right now is popurls - but this site is a close second. You can rapidly scan all of the social bookmarking sites at one time.