So I created a game club account with BigFish Games today because I really wanted to play PuzzleQuest. Which is an unusual match3/RPG.

Yes, you heard right! A match3-RPG, who would have thunk it?

Not wanting to pay full price for the game, I thought I’d check out their game club. Which basically means if you join you only play $7.99 US for any game in their catalogue provided you buy at least one game per month for the next 12 months.

Now, I’ve bought quite a few games online before, but never from a major portal, so I wanted to see if there would be more on offer than the usual fare of casual-cutesy-crap.

Luckily, Big Fish actually do have a reasonable collection of games that I would actually pay money for, if you like point-and-click adventure games (and I do) then they have a number of them. But for some reason they put them in the puzzle->simulation category?

It’s a pity that the arcade->shooter category is looking pretty scrawny, but than again there are a few other indie game surprises scattered about throughout the catalogue.

So all in all pretty happy as $8 per game is pretty darn cheap.

Surprisingly this list was pretty easy to compile. I think it took me about 15 minutes and a cup of coffee to come up with 10 things that I want to do next year.

So, in no particular order.

1. Finish Caverns of Underkeep!
2. Revamp the Peachysoft website, which means brushing up on some ajax and php.
3. Get an A- average at uni, it’s my last semester so I might as well try for a reasonably high grade.
4. Find a Job after uni with a software development company, Ideally with a $NZ 45K+ starting salary.
5. Create ‘vBass’ a vst plugin for emulating a ‘real’ bass in audio sequencing software such as cubase or fruity loops. A friend of mine has been nagging me for such a product for a little while now, and it should be quite fun (and challenging.)
6. Start work on a new game or game related project. Possibly in collaboration with others?
7. Learn to draw. There are some interesting looking books on drawing fantasy characters and other things on Amazon, I think I’ll get a few of these and have a go at improving my drawing skills.
8. Learn to play the drums.
9. Have $5,000 in my savings account.
10. Update this blog at least once a week.

I’m pretty confident I can get everything on the list done, that’s one of the reasons why I limited myself to just 10, there are a few other things I’d like to do, but I think I’ll just focus on the above for 2008.

Happy New Year everyone!!

So the year is coming to a close, and everyone who has a blog (which is probably everybody in the world by now) is doing end-of-year summaries and posts on their predictions for 2008.

I thought 2007 was a pretty solid year overall – Choosing to return to university to add a computer science degree to my math degree was the right decision. I’ve learnt quite a lot, even though I thought I knew it all already Guess what I’ve learnt most of all is to be a little more humble… And although I won’t be finished by mid 2008 I’m alright with living on a student income for another six months.

Around this time last year I posted my goals for 2007 which where:

1. Release a Freeware “Mini-RPG” – Approx 2-4 hours of gameplay.
2. Find funding for a much larger RPG to start work on in 2008.
3. Make a new and interesting blog post at least once per week.
4. Maintain a B+ average at uni.

I didn’t get around to releasing a freeware mini-RPG, but I did get an alpha of my roguelike game Caverns of Underkeep out. So I’ll give myself half a mark for that one. Which I think is rightly deserved as I canned my freeware RPG without actually having a backup plan early into the year.

I’m not so interested in pursuing number 2 anymore. I do have more projects planned for next year but none-of-which require huge amounts of funding. So that’s not really something I considered much this year.

According to wordpress I have made a total of 66 blog posts. Which exceeds my goal of once per week. As for new and interesting content… Well, there are a few posts I think people could get some value from. My favorite post for the year was written way back in January Why I’m choosing 2D – I think the reasons I outlined still hold up, and why for the near future at least, I’ll be looking at 2D related gaming projects.

I’m pretty sure I got a B+ average at uni – or very close at least, so check for that one.

Now I haven’t worked out my 2008 goals yet. But there will probably be a lot of them considering I’ll be finishing Uni and getting on with the next major part of my life – A Career

Heroes of Might and Magic III is one of my most favoritest games ever. But the series really went into a tailspin around about when Heroes IV showed up – Which I own a copy of but haven’t been able to play for longer than 30 minutes for some reason?

When 3DO filed for bankruptcy in 2003 who would know what would happen to the series?

Well, Ubisoft bought the rights for $1.3 million dollars (peanuts) and outsourced a bunch of work to “Cheapest Bidders Incorporated” and produced Heroes V, in 3D. Reviews were mixed, and they released alot of patches.

Now I haven’t played Heroes V so I’m not going to pass judgement on it. It’s been out for long enough now that it’s probably stable. So I might see if I can pick it up at retail if my crappy old video card can support it (probably not) – There’s a demo available but at 660mb, who can be arsed?

However, this is all just background information to what I really wanted to say, as not one, but two pieces of Heroes related news has come to my attention.

First of all Heroes of Might and Magic Kingdoms has been announced, a massively multiplayer strategy game played in a browser. It looks interesting for sure, but I dunno? There’s an interesting beta-sign up process where you have to enter the barcode on your boxed copy of Heroes V

As well as that a remake of the game that spawned the entire series is in the works – That’s right a sequel to King’s Bounty, entitled King’s Bounty Legends. Some screenshots available at gamespot. And a trailer here. The game looks quite good, and even though it’s in 3D, the art is quite stylized – I just hope I can speed up the attack animations, which probably look cool the first time but really, really get on your nerves after the hundredth.

I just purchased a copy of Eschalon and I’m going to be spending the weekend playing. It’s a 100MB download so I’m going to go out and get some pizza. Let the geekend begin!

For Caverns of Underkeep I’m trying to do as much as I can with ‘programmer art’ and artwork thats in the public domain. For me, it’s more important to get the functionallity correct and in place before the game gets dolled up.

If you’re developing a Roguelike, or maybe an indie RPG and want to get started with some art content you can use The RL Tiles a free set of tiles and monsters.

Well one of them anyway.

1. If we take into account the entire population of the world there exists a great number of programmers out there – So when I have an idea for a small but useful tool there is a good chance that it will already exist.

Just like tonight when my thought process went something along these lines:

Ya know, Im sick of looking at that black screen with the windows logo when my computer goes into screen saver mode…

Maybe I should download a screensaver – Just a simple slideshow of nice images. Maybe pictures of animals or something…

But eventually I’ll get sick of the images and I’ll need to go and download more to add to the slideshow. And that’ll be a pain…

I could probably get them from google image search or maybe flicker?

Wait a minute – flicker has a webservice API…

That means I can write a Screen Saver that pulls images from flicker based on a search query – That wouldn’t be very hard to do as Visual Studio 2005 has a screen saver template built in.

And from our first premise we can conclude that someone has already made such a tool. And you know what? A quick google search revealed that someone had. You can get the flicker.net screen saver over at codeplex

Now I can have an unlimited number of images of dromedaries on my desktop. What will I think of next?

Yesterday I found out Windows XP has a built in FTP program.

It’s simply called ‘ftp’ and is accessed via the command line and it’s become one of my most favoriatist tools ever. Previously to update my website I had to use my browser to access cPanel and upload files one at a time – ugh.

The alternative is to use an FTP program such as cuteFTP to login and upload files that way. CuteFTP is a great program, but it’s not free, and I’m on a university student budget here.

The best thing about ftp (the program, not the protocol) is that you can create a script file with all the commands you want to perform, which means that I can create a batch file to call ftp and deloy work from my local machine to my webserver in one click.

My batch file is called with “ftp -i -s:ftp.config peachysoft.com”

Where ftp.config is the name of a text file with all the commands for logging in, updating etc..

Here is a webpage with the documentation for ftp

http://www.nsftools.com/tips/MSFTP.htm

One last thing: If you are uploading binary files make sure you set your upload type to binary, it took me about an hour to work out why my Java Applet game I’m working on was not loading correctly.

I spent a long weekend visiting my family and it was an interesting experience to see how people manage to live without internet access. Neither of my parents are technologicaly inclined and it was a sweet reminder of just how many chores are solved almost in their entirety using the internet. For instance, I can’t see how people can live without internet banking and whats more, banks are charging ridiculous fees. $3 to make a deposit? And I had to come all the way down here. I’ve never had to write a cheque before, because bank transfer is quicker and easier.

Part of my long weekend involved two 6-hour bus trips. Thankfully I had picked up an MP3 player before setting out on my journey and loaded it with a couple of shows from dotNetRocks It’s only a cheap 1GB flash memory thing so I also put half a dozen music cds on it.

I really like the fact that it just plugs in to a usb port and you can copy files over just like a standard USB drive. Even though its a cheap thing there are two fundamental flaws with it. A) It has no clip to attach it to my clothes, which means I have to put it in my pocket. But the headphones that come with the unit are not very long, which means I can’t put the unit in my jeans pocket without pulling the cord tight. If it where made another 6″ longer, or included a clip to attach it to my clothes it would be much better. B) Theres no shuffle function** which is not such a big deal for me as I like listening to albums in order, but I’m sure its a turn off for some, and I doubt this feature would be very hard to program.

So two very minor things that wouldn’t cost very much money at all would make the unit a heck of alot better. But hey, I only paid $40 US for it, maybe I’ll upgrade to an iPod or Creative Zen at some stage but for now I’ll just keep my cheap unit – And buy some longer headphones.

Because of the bus trips I managed to get some reading done. I read two books, both of which I’ll recommend. Freakonomics which proved both interesting and entertaining. Topics were varied but mostly revolved around cheating and/or maximising incentives. An easily accessible book, much has been commented about it in other blogs, or amazon reviews. Particularly concerning the legalised abortion/low crime rate co-relation. I’m just here to say its a good book.

The other book I read was The Long Tail which I’ll also recommend. Again plenty of others have reviewed/regurgitated the content of this book so I wont do so. Wikipedia has a great starting point.

If you are thinking of offering some kind of digital or aggregate service (web 2.0 anyone?) Do yourself a favor and pick up this book. Most of the case studies are from the Amazon business model, or from online music services but there are a whole number of other areas where the long tail appears, infact it’s almost everywhere. As we become more and more niche in our interests and as the ability to find what we want becomes more ubiquitous, more opportunities start to present themselves outside of the so called mainstream (Also refered to by some as the “lowest common denominator”)

** EDIT : Looks like there is a shuffle function, but it was embedded deep within a whole bunch of menus – If you can’t find something in 2 minutes and its not in the manual then as far as I’m concerned it doesn’t exist.

Working on a new game that’s what.

Something a little retro with some modern sensibilities, I’ve been saving up my pay from my day job so I’ll be able to hire an artist and a musician to work with. It’s not going to be a huge project, more like an “in-betweener” job. Just to increase my portfolio of completed works. Because in the indie world, its not the starting that counts, it’s the finishing.

More details as I have ‘em.