April 16, 2010

Before the Games: The Site

I've got some things I want to do before I start with my next game and they're all about improving the site. The last week or so has been extremely productive with me throwing out a lot of wasted code, speeding up the site and adding/removing features and I want to continue with that and get the things done now when I'm in the flow.

You can find the whole source for the site, excluding a few security related files ofc, on github where I've also uploaded a small to-do list and some ideas I might want to implement.

Here's a small summary of the stuff:

1. Allow editing all the information pages without doing it through phpmyadmin, merge it together with the post editing.
2. Change the layout of adding comments and it's preview, try unhide it.
3. Fix the layout of search and possibly tweak the inner workings
4. Revamp archive page, maybe use it as a sitemap?
5. Add read next/previous posts on post and older/newer posts?
6. Make comment editing work, for guests too.
7. Statistics!! I have third party statistics but I want stats for the most active commenter and other stuff.
8. A greater 404 page
9. Refactor, remove garbage code and refactor some more.

I'm itching a little bit about a new game, but first thing's first.

April 10, 2010

Widening the horizon

This is a game making site but where are the games? What gives?

I've been slightly less motivated in making games lately and I've been doing different things, just to get my ideas and my motivation up. As I said in an earlier post I wanted a break from Experimental Games and I want to spend more time on each game just to get the quality of the games up.

Lately I've been using vim and I really like it but the learning curve is really high, so why not make a game about it? To make the learning progress easier and hopefully even somewhat fun. I haven't come up with a great idea yet, and thus I haven't started, but I'm pretty optimistic.

I also mentioned Ludum Dare but as the looks of things it ain't gonna happen this time. I've got a massage course the whole weekend timed on just as the 48 hour game making competition is and I don't think I wanna stress myself to manage the both of them.

Instead for a game I've been focusing on learning Haskell and on improving this site. Trying out different stuff like trying a new paradigm and trying out different languages is a really good way of Sharpening your Saw. Yes technically he meant doing things not related to programming, such as math, but I still see it as doing something completely different and improving while doing that.

For example Kohana, the framework this site is built on, has made me think more about tools and frameworks instead of just language features as it transformed my awful, hackish site into this beautiful little thing literally in the blink of an eye. Or take jQuery which took my epic cross-browser checks and transformed it into beautiful code. These two seemingly small changes made the boring web developer process really fun!

Yeah that's what I've been doing; I've been widening my horizon and I've been having fun at the process! Wooo

April 6, 2010

The games that make me who I am

I read an article the other day where he met someone who didn't read fiction:

He suggested that fiction was a waste of his time — he read to learn, not for "mere" entertainment

I don't agree with this view and neither did he:

Fiction allows you to be part of situations that are unlikely to happen otherwise. You can experience thousands of years worth of events by reading fiction. Yes, it is true that what happens to you in real-life — with it’s finality and incomparably richer stimulation – out-weighs that of a book. However, the course altering moments in life are infrequent. Fiction provides a means of accelerating your “personal growth.”

He then gives us a list of fiction characters who has made him who he is, many small pieces of trait that has become a part of him.

Interesting I thought and I began thinking of what characters I could identify with (Lincoln Rhyme and Robert Langdon comes to mind) but then I started thinking of games. What games has made me who I am? It's not an easy answer and it'll never become exhaustive but it's interesting to think about and here's my try:

Worms
I played the demo of Worms 2 to death, I ran to my friend all the time to play Worms Armageddon and I've been addicted to blasting ugly worms with banana bombs ever since.

RollerCoaster Tycoon
I love rollercoasters and I love to build stuff so naturally I played the games a ton... I'm still tingling with excitement when I think of building a super-coaster. The builder that is me was born with this.

Hospital Tycoon
Another constructor game with hilarious humor and I'm still harboring thoughts of resurrecting this beauty as a new game. I think it was one of the first games to make me think about actually making games instead of just playing.

Counter-Strike Source
The best anger management there is. Or well I'm not really civil when playing it but it lets me went out pretty damn good, but don't sit near me when I'm playing - it's not good for your ears.

World of Goo
The game that opened my eyes to the wonders of Indie Games.

Supreme Commander
Introduced me to the world of competitive gaming, or rather the competitive mindset. It also helped me become a better person by helping and being a part of a great community.

Evil Genius
Humor + Base Building = Epic Win.

These are just a few games from the top of my head, some had big impacts and some slightly less so.

We started with a quote and that's how we'll end it:

I am the product of my parents, my friends, my life, my experiences…and my teachers.

April 2, 2010

Death to the Forum

Well it was fun while it lasted, but now it's gone and it'll stay gone for a long time I think. It was mainly a test to see if I could do it and I'm really proud of my styling of it but it's deader than in a grave, which isn't really surprising, and it bothered me that I didn't write it myself - like really bothered me.

phpBB is fantastic in many ways; easy, fast and easily managed but it just didn't feel right as I hadn't done it. Kinda the same as why I'm not using any popular blog tool but I've rolled my own. It feels pretty good to use a site you've written completely yourself...

And no I don't want to write my own forum now, for now I'll stick with a tweak here a tweak there on the site.

January 18, 2010

My Dream Game: The RTS

Even if there are a million great games there's one that has a very special place in my heart: Supreme Commander. It's not the game I've played the most and there might even be games which are better and more fun but supcom was the game that introduced me to competitive gaming and it made it me feel like no game had done before. I took gaming seriously for once; sure I had played online with cs but I was never serious. I did nothing to improve myself, I didn't really care - as long as I didn't have 1-10 or a silly just-beginning-stat.

Before supcom I always cheated my way through an RTS game (I still remember that pepperoni pizza gives food and quarry gives stone in age of empires) or just gave up when things got rough. Now I'm happy to give it my best just to beat guitar hero on expert and someday I'm sure I'll do it! Getting beat down by a lame rush? Before I would just whine and shout "lamer" and throw out the game but instead I saved the replay, copied his moves and presto! Now I got to be the one who got shouted at!! And I can tell you - it felt a lot better...

All this effort I put into the game really got me involved on a very different level than in any game before. I'd never even thought that SimCity, the great 4th edition, was imbalanced. But when I think about it: the huge apartment-building with a couple of thousand inhabitants it always, always without fail clogged down all the transports even when I dedicated everything around it just for transport. Later I found out it was bugged and there's a fix, somewhere, to download which will fix this and some other bugs. Now I started to find things I didn't like in supcom, things that was... wrong. No matter what you did, and no matter what the really good guys did - you couldn't beat a certain strategy. It ended with everyone playing the same faction, spamming the same units in game after game... Not really fun. I participated in discussions and believe it or not I think that I was right more often than not. I was improving!

But hey! Why did they do this? What if they had done this instead? If I had made a game it would have done this and thus been a lot better...

And here I am. I have this dream of making the best RTS game ever... Staying true to my play style from supcom: copy the good things from others, improve them and make them my own, my plan is to mix in the great things from all the RTS games I've played throughout the years. Obviously the most prominent would be supcom but also StarCraft, kknd, TA and CnC among others...

December 21, 2009

Now we have a Forum

In a burst of random energy I made a forum for madeoftree. Well okay I just made an awesome style for the awesome phpBB - the forum itself was up and running in say 10min and the rest of the latest days has been all about customizing. Now it's finally kinda complete so here it is!

Making it was the easy bit - now we need to generate some content! Where is the almighty sundb00m when we're in a desperate need for spam?!

November 2, 2009

An invisible Remake

What does a guy like me do when not working on a new game? Except living my life, being a coach for my little brother's hockey team and eating strawberries? The last week or so I've been working hard with my webpage, yes this page. If you've visited my site before today you'll know what I'm talking about.

NOT

There's practically zero visible difference. You might notice the 'Quick n Dirty File Download' or the little line of text towards the bottom of the page, or even the ability for multiple tags! That's kinda freaky stuff eh? And only +1 week to do that! :D

The big thing was actually a complete rewrite of the whole site. From really bad and random spaghetti code I managed to produce some half-nice code. I wrote the site with Kohana which was a blast to use! If you're making a page of some sort I can heartily recommend to give it a try.

Soon it's time for some game making again, I just need a good idea... hm.

September 28, 2009

Why make games

Why did I start making games? Because I like to play them of course. Think of all the fantastic games; Super Mario, Lemmings, Tetris, GTA, The Sims, Counterstrike, Theme Hospital, SimCity and Rollercoaster Tycoon... Damn - when you count them like this you'll see how many great games there are out there. And I can honestly say each and every one of them has inspired me and made me wanna create something similar. No - something even better!

I also like to program, that's almost a must if you should make a working game from scratch, so I figured why not use it to make something productive and hopefully something fun?

August 25, 2009

Going into Being Busy mode

I'm in the civil service atm and, sadly, we're going to be extremely busy the coming... two months or something? So I can't promise a game the next two months. Kinda beats the point of this site doesn't it? I'm really sorry and that's all I can say really...

Hopefully I'll get a week somewhere with enough spare time to create something. It's a damn sure I'll have to make a game about submarine warfare!!

July 21, 2009

The first (worst) post

Well, here it is: The opening post. What will come here? Here's where I'll outline what the blog will be about and maybe, if I'm dedicated, it won't die before Christmas you think.

And sure, you're right. I will run away to the corner in about two and a half months crying I never got the traffic I'm fantasizing about but I can try to summarize the site in one sentence: I'm going to make a themed game every month. There, I've said it. Tired and scared of wasting my time with a monster-project I've decided to use the experimental project model. Basically I'm going to make a game in 7 days, kinda like God made the world. And I'm alone making these games, all the gfx, the sound and the code.

If this got you interested check back regularly for some cool (I hope) games and read my about section.