It’s a gift.


I think… I think I’m done. It’s a little Vampire Survivor clone (I guess someone invented a genre title, Horde games, for this now) that started out as a one day exercise and grown to become so much more.

You can play it here or in its own dedicated window, if that’s what you prefer.

The initial concept for this game took one day to finish. Getting most of the game mechanics working took about two more weeks. The rest of the minor tweaks and balancing… took a month and a half. All in all, I’m happy about the result, especially since it actually runs relatively smoothly on real hardware once I’ve stripped out and rewritten some of the more computationally expensive components – like per-pixel accurate collision detection. I think I have literally run out of storage space to develop for actual hardware though – any major feature that I try to add would break the build file that I try to create.

This was created for my niece, Sophie, with a small cameo from her cat Jiji. Jury is still out on whether she’d like this or not. Fingers crossed!

Quick Sketch Time

Per tradition, every time I purchase a piece of stylus enabled hardware I’d sketch something on it. In this case, it’s a Lenovo Chromebook Duet 5 – I’m not sure if I’m going to keep it quite yet.

But since I’ve only been doing one sketch per piece of hardware, either I need to get off this habit or my drawing practice is going to get very expensive, and I want neither.

In The Beginning

Wall 2 was one of the first games I created, all the way back in 1996. It’s an unholy mashup of Breakout and Pong that doesn’t quite hold up in more ways than one, but I would occasionally still go back and play through its arcade mode. For one thing… it’s actually a finished game, unlike a few others that I’ve attempted to make in that era.

(warning: there’s a buzzing noise that happens when the game first loads)

I’m still amazed at how far things had come. Here’s a game running inside an emulator of an OS written in an interpreted language running inside a browser application on top of another OS.

Oh yeah, and then the sequel that came more than 20 years later somehow managed to run at a lower resolution, with less colors and features:

But it warms my heart to find a new platform that works for me after the demise of Adobe Flash. It also took far less time for me to complete this “sequel” compared to the original (days versus months).

And in the spirit of Wall 2, this is very much an introductory project for me to dip my toes in the water of a new system and platform. There’s far more interesting thing that MakeCode Arcade is capable of, in spite of its original intent as a simple block based “my first game dev” platform for young’uns.

One last bit of trivia: Wall 1 was the first game I created that used a dedicated graphics mode (13h) as opposed to building graphic blocks with ASCII characters on screen – it was literally just Pong.

This Simultaneously Amuses and Infuriates Me.

I’ve started making games again since Adobe Flash died a horrible death, so that’s exciting. There’s tons that I want to write about in the days to come but here’s a preview of things to come:

It took me a week to kind of finish the thing that I’m working on, and for one reason or another I needed to make a quick and dirty screensaver…

This thing took 10 minutes to make. Tops. And it’s almost as good as the one week long game. Almost.

See title above.

A New Home

Well, after close to a decade slumming it in LiveJournal and another decade stealth posting in Blogger, I’ve finally decided to settle down in WordPress. It took me a while to finally decide to settle down with a pre-made CMS. In the past, I kept thinking that as a prospective web developer, I needed to prove myself and build a blog from scratch…

In hindsight, there’s no reason to reinvent the wheel when there’s so many well rounded and free solutions already available. That being said, this site is obviously looking pretty far from done. In the near future, I hope that I can re-integrate more pieces of my past to build a more complete picture of where I came from, as well as look forward to creating new content for the sight.

There’s so much work to be done. Onward!

30 Pieces of Art: Flight

Well, it’s supposed to be a 30 days of art challenge, but honestly I’d rather have the freedom to complete a piece if I wanted to, and only spending a day is not going to cut it in that case.

Day one’s topic is Sensation of Flight. I can’t say that I’m in a good place right now.

Bonus Art Day: Divination

Over six months and half a dozen painting program purchases later, I’ve finally found a program that’s snappy yet featured loaded enough to take me all the way from sketching to final touch-up. It’s called Leonardo and it’s still in beta – hopefully the future feature bloat won’t make the program go any slower.