Archive for November, 2006

As Promised… UGH!

Thursday, November 23rd, 2006

The one reader I get on this site may have noticed that I posted a screenshot for a game. One might be inclided to deduce that it was a screenshot of a game I was working on. Sadly, the reader would be wrong as it was only a mockup, an image done in a paint program to show what the game is supposed to look like.

“Gasp,” you say, “a deception!” Fear not, gentle soul, as I am not walking the path of the charlatan. The mockup was used by me to figure out the hows and the whys of the game. It was a tribal guide in the jungle of game development, if you’ll endulge the analogy.

The game is called UnderGroundHeroes, UGH for short. It’s built using the XNA framework thereby allowing be to create a game that runs both on Windows as well as the Xbox 360.

Prepare to feast you eyes on real screenshots! This first one was taken after I got the random dungeon generator working. Behold! A random dungeon that will surely spell your doom!

This other was taken some time later, when I go the UI overlay, player, and input into place. The more astute reader may notice that the player is actually in the wall… I never claimed that everything was put into place right.

As a delightful surprise somone even offered to help me in this endeavor. Who is this saint among mortals? CipherXor, proj, Hardcore, he is known by many a name.

More pictures as more progress is made!

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What is this?

Tuesday, November 21st, 2006

Here’s a little something I’ve been working on. More details tomorrow, I promise :)

UGH thumbnail

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On Vacation

Sunday, November 5th, 2006
When your computer starts to run slower than usual or when programs that were once functional are trying to convince you otherwise, the first line of defense is  usually to reboot the system.  On Windows PCs, this seems to fix about 90% of the problems.  This works so well that any tech support goon you speak to will  ask you if you’ve rebooted your computer regardless of the problem you’re facing. “You say that the hordes of hell are escaping into our world from a portal in your computer?  Did you reboot?”  Sure enough, it works.  There’s a KB article about that somewhere.

If rebooting works so well for computers, why don’t we do it to ourselves?  I’ve been under a lot of stress over the last several months so I’ve decided to take a two week vacation.  It’s now the last day and as I look back on it I find that I feel as if my RAM is unfragmented, no rogue processes are running, and processor consumption is in the single digits.  It’s great!  I highly recommend it.

Over the course of these last two weeks, I got to hang out with some people that I haven’t seen in a long time, I’ve attended what was possibly the best Halloween party ever, spent some quality time with my free therapist a.k.a. my brother, slept as late as I’ve wanted, went “paintballing” for the first time, and had my ego stroked quite a few time — nope, that’s no euphemism.   Oh, and my hair is blue now :) Thanks Ubernerd :)

The vacation’s going to end very soon but I feel recharged for the Zune Launch on the 14th.  Zune is, of course, Microsoft’s mp3/video player.  I hear Apple has something similar.  Speaking of music, have you heard of nerdcore hip-hop?  Basically gangsta rap sung by geeks.  It usually about computers, scifi/fantasy, video game, you know? The stuff that matters.  For a really large repository of nerdcore, you should look at Rhyme Torrents, which has 6 albums made by various of the (I assume) big names on the nerdcore scence.  Some of songs are better than others, but the good ones are really fun.  You can rest assured, dear reader, that these will make their way on my Zune device :)

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