I’ll do it on monday!

Today is almost over but I hope to do a few things today.

• I hope to finish another build for the phone game. The details of which i’m not at liberty to say.
• I hope to somehow get to go on a walk, or at least just to the library. It’s pouring up here in Oregon where I live by the way.
• I hope to resolve the “story conflicts” in Enchanted Lands. I just have too many good ideas to give up on one or the other, so i’m going to attempt to integrate them into the same story!
• I hope to read the rest of the Scrolling Game Development Kit manual. So I can start work on the tutorial and then start working on prototype Hypno-Joe levels.
• Let’s see. I hope to take a simple one paragraph story I wrote for my mad libs type program and actually put it in the program. Then maybe i’ll get some reading in of the next chapter.
• Oh yes I hope to actually get some cleaning in today.
• I will probably get something done with an as yet unnamed video related project. I may or may not divulge that in a little while.
• Do a single math problem from this basic algebra book. I need to get some math “skillz” so I can compete in programming.

I think that about sums it up. Although now i’m really late so it may not be possible to finish all of that.

Keith

Hmm, well i’m back on the case - sorta.

Well before I get to a plan, i’ve got a little story to tell. Most likely i’ll have only one or two people reading this, but that’s ok. It’s a way for me to put down my thoughts related to my work, so I no longer have to think about them. I get motivation from telling people what i’m doing, kind of bizzare but that’s what does it for me. Anyway onto the story.

I finally got my domain name gamesafoot.com - let me tell you how I managed to get it. I used godaddy.com to register games-afoot.com, games-afoot-software.com, and gamesafootsoftware.com, and did that almost 2 years ago (Feb of 2004). I decided to use godaddy’s “Domain Alert Pro” domain name backordering service. Which means it will try to capture and register a domain name for you that is currently owned by someone else when the domain comes up for deletion. 19 bucks (USD) to attempt (keep that word in mind attempt) to capture the elusive gamesafoot.com. It was registered to some person in some state is of no consequence. Of course godaddy said that it would attempt and might not be successful. I assumed that if someone else had done it, a single person or game company, then I probably wouldn’t get it. It was a chance I was willing to take. So here we are December of 2005 and by all luck it happens to be pending for deletion, and then I get an email stating that godaddy will attempt to capture it. So i’m cool with that, and it says “capture failed”. And I’m like shoot 19 bucks for nothing. So when I do some checking as to who got it, it was some company named some such thing, that appearently were buying dropped domain names. This wasn’t a person or game company, this was just an appearant reseller. Which by the way when I went to this company’s website it only had a whois form and an email address. This annoyed me to some extent, so I contacted godaddy about it. Well it turns out that sometimes the domain name does not get released at all, which means I would have no chance of getting it. I mean I understood someone could get it before me, but I didn’t expect it to not even be released. Now I was a bit more annoyed than I was before. I asked them if I could get my money back. Of course I couldn’t but I could “transfer to another domain as many times as needed to get the domain I wanted”. But there was only one I wanted. So then the only thing left to do was to contact this other “company”. I emailed them saying I wanted it. Of course nothing happened for a few days and then on January 2nd 2006, I get an automated email from godaddy saying they had successfully captured it. So the moral of this story is be proactive and you will get results. Actually I don’t know if the emails had anything to do with it, since it was automated. It may be just the fact that I said I wanted my money back and godaddy didn’t want bad publicity. It may be that this other company was not setup right away to handle anything so they released the domain, or it could be any other number of reasons. So the moral of the story might be, godaddy’s domain alert pro might be somewhat of a risk. So if you happen to purchase this service and the domain you want doesn’t get released, don’t say I never told you so.

Keith

Tommorow will be back to normal - kinda. I don’t usually do much during holidays and weekends but starting Monday January 2nd, 2006 i’ll be working and also blogging. So stay tuned if you’re interested in the progress of my projects.

Keith

Was busy with Christmas, that’s why I haven’t been posting. I suppose anyone that did read surely doesn’t read anymore, but I won’t worry about it I guess. Maybe when i’ve got some decent progress on stuff i’ll start “advertising”. Anyhow…

I got a gamecube for christmas with Mario party 7. Which is fun. But it didn’t come with a memory card which is kind of annoying. I bought that and Star Wars : Rogue Leader. Fun stuff. Things will be a bit crazy until after new years.

I should have a regular stream of posts starting January 1st.
For goals this year, i’m going to Finish Hypno-Joe by the end of 2006, i’m going to finish preproduction on Enchanted Lands. That’s the major ones.

Welp have a great holiday season.

Keith

Well it looks like I got to all the items in my list. Probably won’t happen very often. Still I didn’t make any real progress on Enchanted Lands, or Learning C++, or even on Hypno-Joe as all I did was read some documentation. Shoot I didn’t even get to do that much cleaning because the vaccum is broke. So I guess technically today is a failure, officially it was a success.

Keith

In the interests of time I just came up with a quickie short story for my mad libs program. I won’t implement it until tommorow.

Here’s the story:

There once was a Dragon named Flame. Who scared poor villagers and burned down their huts. One day the village hired a Knight named Sir William. When the dragon came out he tried to burn down some huts, but Sir William defended them with his sword and shield. Finally Sir William asked the Dragon why he keeps burning down their huts. The Dragon could only spit fire. Finally Sir William asked the villagers to go to a nearby stream and fill up a bucket with water. He took the bucket and tossed it into the dragon’s mouth. The dragon finally spoke and said, “Thank you, my throat has been burning for ages.”

What do you think, could that work as a madlibs type of story?

Keith

Hopefully this will be the last in posts showing no progress. Essentially I had went through several of my older stories which were related to this project, each have variations that don’t gel with each other. In one instance we have an opening that shows a young man open a portal to another world after living in our world for his 18 years. Another one in which a young girl who is his girlfriend was thrown into a portal to our world and then somehow is united with him, with the special fact that she’s from his world only 100 years into the world’s future. Another part in which was titled “The 7th Gem” has our main character actually be one of the “7 gems” which is essentially a prince (the only one to return) out of 7 brothers. There’s another backstory where the King and Queen have a daughter, and in turn who has a suitor, a Knight, who appears to be good but really is in it for his own nefarious purposes. The Queen becomes deathly ill and the King searches for a magic fruit to heal her, only to be ambushed and killed. The Queen dies but not before she consents to the princess and the young knights betrothal. Eventually the princess and knight get married, but the new king is unfaithful and uncaring. He enslaves people to work in his quicksilver mines (a special mineral with magical properties which runs the world) and he carries on with the female help. The Queen broken hearted, kills herself by jumping off the highest tower in the castle. Now with nothing to stop him he seems bent on conquering different worlds that connect to his. The kid is the offspring of these two and she hides him by putting him into our world, however that seems very Star Wars, and I didn’t want to copy it deliberately.

Now when I re-read my intro to the 7 gems story, I like it alot. In the current enchanted lands story however, our main guy goes and sees our world, eventually forgetting who he is. When he comes back the world is in trouble. So i’m really trying to — Dang it you know how you try to remember a word that describes what you want to say, and it just won’t come into your mind, even if you think of the word alot, that’s happening here — Basically i’m trying to mesh the story ideas, till their cohesive into one story.

I have another story which isn’t exactly related but it has the main character being thrown into our world to protect him (again like star wars, I dunno I just may go with it because I like my intro so much), but where time passes slower in our world, so he lives 18 years our time, and it’s hundreds of years in this magical realm. But then the people that have made this possible might have been long dead. So I don’t know what i’m going to do.

I’ll post that intro that I think is so good maybe tommorow, if I don’t come up with a reasonable idea, and see what you think.

Previously: Enchanted Lands Resort - Design progression.

Keith

I ran across a thread on the Indiegamer forums entitled Tips for starting, developing and actually completing. Someone with the name of zKing posted what I consider to be the most useful comments in this particular post.

Of particular note:

3. Always have a list of the top 5 or so things that are the most important things you are going to do next to improve your game. Always be working on these items. If you get frustrated or board with one of them feel free to do one of the others since they are all important, but DON’T get off this list.

4. Set goals about 2-5 days out. What is going to better about your game in 2-5 days? Set an exact time and be as concrete as possible about what will be better. These goals should be relatively easy to make. Its is far more important to have constant progress (and not quit) than to try to do as much as possible in the next 3 days.

For Hypno-Joe with #3 I don’t really know 5 things i’ll be doing at any one time, as i’m sort of figuring this out as I go. I have ideas for what I want to do in the game, just I don’t know how they fit into the overall picture. But i have a feeling that once I figure this out, it will be smooth sailing. For #4 this is a bit easier, I know I need to read the instructions to the Scrolling Game Development kit and I know I need to go through the tutorial. And even to start animating the main character walking (or running depending on the case).

For Enchanted Lands it’s a bit easier. At one time I was trying to learn the process of design documents, then I read about the Cerny Method which emphesizes a rapid prototyping model over design documents. Well I was thinking that I should do Hypno-Joe this way, and so I shall, but for Echanted Lands i’m realizing that adventure games need a design before working on the game. Prototyping wouldn’t work for this kind of game. (Yes it would work if I were writing an adventure game engine, thankfully there are already prebuilt ones, of which I’m using the Wintermute Engine.) In any case thinking up 5 important items on EL is easier than Hypno-Joe because I know what I need to start. A Story, characters, etc… #4 is good too because I can break down EL into things I can do in a couple of days. (IE. Finish the backstory which coincidentally i’ll be using for a game to learn c++ with, Finish the character arc for the main character, etc).

Well now i should actually get back to making a little progress on Enchanted Lands instead of typing in this blog.

Keith

Well I did accomplish something today. I decided before going through the tutorial, I would instead read the help file (documentation). I only got as far as reading about creating an editing tilesets. Tommorow i’ll start on map editing, maybe even finish the regular documentation there. And then I will read through the tutorial, before finally going through it again. So I guess i’ll work on my next thing. Which is I believe is Enchanted Lands Resort.

Keith

Welp unfortunately the vaccum cleaner no longer works. I’m real sure it has something to do with the contacts in the cleaner itself. The battery was warm, and I had no problem yesterday. Well not entirely true, it sometimes doesnt’ work, and only took me smacking it a couple of times for it to make contact, but now it seems like it can no longer do that. Although I may continue with my desk and the coffee table and some dusting and such, it won’t be as clean as I’d like. Oh well I guess, in any case, I’ll probably get on to the next thing in my agenda, which is Hypno-Joe.

Keith