Hey Interwebs,
Sorry for the gigantic delay. I've been busy with so many things in the last several months that the blog got a bit neglected. Rest assured, I have been working, I just haven't done a good job talking about it.
I suppose I should start with the biggest news. I have a website now. You can check it out here. It's not the most amazing thing ever and there's no backend to speak of, but since all I needed was something to sit there and show off my resume and prototypes, it gets the job done. The most dynamic thing I would be working with is this blog anyway, so all I need to do is link to it. I may try to integrate the blog into the site proper later but it's pretty far down on my list of things.
Next: STRATAGEM UPDATE
I have some rudimentary jQuery communication working and the front end is now returned by the server, giving the 1st contact the 1st player and the 2nd contact the 2nd player. Next order of business is to get the turns encoded and sent to the server then handle the responses on the front end. This involves building an animation system, so it's been just enough work to keep me interested in other projects. However, my hair is becoming problematic again (for those new to this blog, I pledged not to cut my hair again until stratagem saw some form of release), so my motivation to get back on it is steadily rising.
One of my other big projects last semester was developing a Flashpunk game for NEPTUNE Canada that could be used to educate people about the project, a massive underwater cabled observatory that allows hundreds of instruments to stream their readings live to NEPTUNE's archives and the Internet at large. We, my teammates, Tom and Colton, and I, developed a skeletal prototype for the game. You can play it on my website here.
We also had a summer game jam a couple weeks ago, this time with an emphasis on developing games for the new UVGD project, Verb the Noun, a minigame collection in FlashPunk. I brought my contribution, Repeat the Level, to a pretty much playable state, although the game doesn't really end yet and the assets are only standins. The idea is that the level will repeat over and over with the obstacles in the same order each time, however, the assets will get simpler and simpler until some of the obstacles are indistinguishable from each other. Players must remember the sequence to reach the end. I'll get back to this one pretty soon. For now you can play the prototype here.
Lastly, I would be remiss if I didn't mention Jeode. What is Jeode you ask. Well the short version is that it's a templating system for creating programs, games in my case, that I have been developing for my own use. The project is in Ruby and you can find out more here, but I plan to have a full post about it in a week or so, once I've taken care of a couple other bits of work I need to attend to. Suffices to say that I'm excited about it, and I can't seem to put it down. And that's a very good thing.
And that's all for now.
Keep calm, and wait for more news about Jeode.
