It's HaWT!
Somehow, on August 23, 2009 (yes, the day before school), I got it into my head that I wanted to make a webcomic. I don’t draw very well, but I thought that maybe the regular practice would help me improve, since I would probably never run out of things to draw. Webcomics also allow browsing back in time, which would mean I get to see my art skills improve as I browse through time. Perfect!
As a writer, this is probably one of my less bloodcurdling stories (I’m going more for ‘funny’ and ‘random’ for this work), since it’s a slow paced rambling narrative about mystery, boats, technology, computers, action, and steampunk. I’m not even sure if I can draw all of those things. But everyone, even myself, will have to wait to see how things will end up, since I myself don’t know what I might decide to do after the first few chapters.
Of course, since I’m in school and have a ton of other stuff to worry about (remember, I’m still writing Ripple and do design websites from time to time) I’ll probably start out publishing one page a week, or even slower, though I don’t plan to start publishing for a while, so I have enough ready in case I get a large assignment. (Next year, maybe?)
So keep your eyes peeled. 
Mesh Chat Box
I recently had (or rather, wanted) to make a chat box. I had no idea of how to do this before, so I had to work with what I knew already about chat boxes, which ended up being almost nothing. You type things into a box, and they magically appear in an upper box, where things from other people appear as well — just like magic.
Magic — now how do I do magic?
I had to break down the chat box problem into something more manageable. The simplest form of chat box that exists would be like a message board, or the comments of a blog post. Continue reading Chat-boxing »
Mesh Map
As I stated in my previous Mesh post, Mesh is a browser based RTS game. Or it will be. Right now, I’ve just started, but already I have a side scrolling map where a viewer can move around the map by placing her cursor to the edge of the browser window to make the map move in that direction, just like in other desktop RTS games. I have also made the sides of the screen fade to black (It starts to fade 50 pixels from the edge, which is also the distance at which screen scrolling begins. What a coincidence!)
Through a few simple calculations, I’ve actually managed to make the map scroll faster the closer the cursor is to the edge of the screen. Unfortunately (and possibly, fortunately for people who go away with their mouse cursors at the edge of their screens), the map is separated into different ‘pages’ that I will explain in greater detail in the future. For now, a viewer can switch to an adjacent page by ‘overscrolling’ and clicking on the black gap where an arrow appears. Pages are randomly generated on the client side for now, but the way they are written, it is easy to move the generation (and, in the future, loading) to the server through AJAX.
There is also a space where I’m going to make a menu that may or may not resemble a ribbon. 
Edit: I’ve had to completely rewrite the map, so this no longer applies. 
The very first part of Ripple.
Most of you who visit this blog should, by now, know that I’m writing a story. But for those who don’t, I’m writing this post. (Also, its good to start with an introductory post, so I don’t just jump out and say something random about a project new visitors might not know anything about — and have no way of looking up.)
Ripple is the current (working, but hopefully will be the permanent) name for a project I’ve been working on for a year — and probably will continue working on for longer than that. It’s the story of how a teenage boy must make a life-or-death decision and the consequences that come of it. Along the way, he meets up with all sorts of forces, from CLIMA, his clandestine employer (I completely forgot where the name came from. It was an acronym at some point), to Ashley, a ditzy precognitive teenage girl whose only weakness is her inability to predict his future. (I know, cliché, right? I had to make her fallible somehow without severely weakening her ability…) Continue reading Ripple »
Mesh Concept Art 1
There are a lot of flash games on the internet. They are all fun, but most of them are single player. And all of them require an annoying, additional download – Flash. Annoying.
There are, in fact, a few games out there that are not plugin based. In this realm we have all sorts of games, ranging from text based — get as many clicks as you can games to obscure “read this paragraph about yourself and click these links to proceed” games. There’s a problem with these games as well. More often than not, they’re all text based. If they have images, it’s just a nice picture of little things that never change anyway — some shopkeeper, the enemy thing that smiles at you with crooked teeth, and possibly, if you’re lucky, a picture of your character that doesn’t even show the scar she has on her cheek (you have to read that in your description).
So basically, we have a problem. Web games can be separated into two groups. Those games with pretty graphics that require plugins like Flash and Java (most of which are single player), and those mostly-text-based browser games (most of which are, interestingly, multiplayer) in an increasingly graphical world. (Speaking of which, we need to invent graphical blogging in a fast and easy way.) I was talking with one of my friends, Corey, about this, joking about how someone needed to make a graphical non-flash based multiplayer game.
“Why don’t you make one?” Continue reading Introducing Mesh »