Oh man, nine months since my last post, that is incredible. Not sure why I keep this thing up here.

What have I been up to? I said in my last post that I was hoping to get back into XNA, I fiddled with it for a while and wrote a prototype game that used the Guitar Hero controller; it was a hybrid sh'mup slash rhythm game, but I couldn't quite get it to be fun.

I've been working hard on Ready To Ship, the new application I've been developing at work, and that's kind of kept me from wanting to do anymore coding at home. I did have an idea for a collaborative web game thing, kind of inspired by Real Lives and Kudos, but with user created events and a paper doll avatar system. I still hope to get it going at some point because I think there's potential there for a lot of funny stuff.

Kurodust is gearing up to record and release their second album, so that's been my main creative outlet for the past 6 months or so. We're working on finding an artist to do some cheap work for us so we can redesign the website and figure out the album art. If we can't find anybody I guess I'll just pass myself of as an artist again and come up with something.

Things I was hoping to do but haven't got around to: redesigning this blog, taking piano lessons, actually finishing another game. I guess that's a short list, so that's not too bad.

Until June!

Where's my jetpack already?

4 months since my last post, that's just inexcusable. I suppose I haven't been focusing much on my game development after the WiggiWorld contest, though I got 75% of the way through a contest for the JayIsGames contest and then couldn't make the final stretch. It's a shame, because I think the game had some potential; perhaps I'll finish it one day.

Sometime early this year I want to redesign this site and get back into game development, I'm thinking about going back and working in XNA again though, now that the new version is out. Man, I'm so finicky, I can't stay put. Anyway, I want to go back to my AI experiments; I was thinking of doing a side scrolling dungeon game that played itself (partially based on some of Squidi's ideas), but the more I thought about it the more ambitious that sounded, too ambitious for an early experiment. So I think I'll try to create my sheep/wolf/shepherd ecosystem experiment again.

I don't think I've talked about it here before, but it's pretty much just a simulation of sheep (flock together, find and eat grass), wolves (chase and eat sheep), and the shepherd (protect sheep from wolves). I started it a while ago in XNA and hit problems with the sprite architecture, but I might give it another go. I still haven't actually decided whether I want to do this in Flash or XNA.

Anyway, happy new year everybody, and hopefully you'll be seeing more from me on this site in the coming year.

I find it interesting the way children's slang has changed due to the influence of technology and the Internet in their lives.

We had my family over for dinner last weekend, and whilst we were eating my 12 year old sister Priscilla decided she wanted some more Coke. By way of asking she poked Dad and spelt it out for him:

"Hey Dad. C-O-K-E."

Dad picked up the bottle from the table, but before handing it to her asked:

"Where are you manners? P-L..."

Read the rest of this entry »

I was excited to go to a special Q & A preview session of Knocked Up last night, thanks to Village Movie Club; I loved The 40 Year Old Virgin, and we've just recently watched all of Freaks And Geeks and Undeclared, so I'm throwing around a lot of Judd Apatow love. Unfortunately, the Q & A session turned out to be a nervous cinema employee asking lame generic questions of Judd, Seth Rogen and Paul Rudd with no audience participation. Lame.

The movie, however, was not lame. The opposite of lame. Hilarious. Very much on par with The 40 Year Old Virgin, if not better, so I'm glad we got to see it a couple of weeks early. Seth Rogen seems like the guy I could hang out and play video games with (I wonder what his GamerTag is...)

Great, my theme has broken because I've got too many items in that sidebar. I'm getting kind of sick of this one anyway, I think I might have a play and come up with something new.

Hrmm, my XNA links are quite outdated too. Revamp time.

...and it's made it a lot harder to get out of bed in the mornings. I've still been managing to do a bit of work on all my projects though, despite all the games I have to play and comics I have to read and TV shows I have to watch. I'd be able to get so much more done if it weren't for work and sleep.

Trevor and I have started messing around with AGS and are working on a Kurodust adventure game (the beat 'em up is still coming, eventually), which has been fun. My spriting skills are improving so I'm hoping the graphics won't turn out too bad, and we've been able to come up with some funny ideas for puzzles and storylines.

Speaking of Kurodust, we finally had another band practise! After 2 years Jay, Rob and I, with the new addition of Trevor, are back together as a band, and with a gig booked at the end of August (Jay's brother's 25th) we'll be working hard to remember how to play our old songs and hopefully will even have time for something new!

I've had another couple of ideas for small games I may want to try in future, either in XNA or flash. No idea when I'll get onto those though.

And through all this I managed to 5 star all of Hard Mode in Guitar Hero 2! Bring on Expert and Guitar Hero 3! (which is looking cool)

Just seeing what happens when I have more than one blog entry in here....

(You know, the word "blog" still bugs me, when I first starting "blogging" the word didn't exist, and all we had were "online journals". There's something about the word "blog" that just sounds... obscene. Still, it's part of the language now, and has a different meaning than online journal nowadays, so what choice do I have?)

First post! I'm not sure what I'm going to end up using this blog for, I just thought it would be good to have someplace to show off my hobbies to friends and family, and maybe a place to store ideas when I come up with them (rather than scattering text files around my hard drive). Plus maybe one of my ideas will get seen and used by someone, which would be cool (as long as you credit me!)

So I'm using Wordpress, which I found out about when setting it up for somebody at work, and found it kinda cool. Quite funky how I can make all the modifiications I like, and my PHP experience from the last 2 and a half months at a new job are coming in quite handy (though I'm used to PHP5).

So, the place is still under construction, and this first post is really just so I've got something to compare database entries against between posts and pages, but I thought I'd make it the real first post anyway.