Ripple (Rough Draft)
I’ve uploaded yet another redesign of my blog. The previous version of the blog was brighter, but I thought that it didn’t really reflect my personality accurately enough, so I made a few tweaks to the coloring. I actually wasn’t going to upload the design yet; I wanted to finish making a portfolio page first, but earlier today I realized that my search form on the sidebar (on the previous version) was very badly broken, so I had to fix it as soon as I could. It is now fixed.
A Rough Ripple
Ripple’s rough draft is now done. In fact, I finished last Wednesday, but things have been so hectic I haven’t been able to post anything since then. The draft is 92,361 words and I’ve saved a copy of it so I don’t lose it. “What do you mean lose it?” you ask? Continue reading Ripple [Rough Draft] is Done »
I finally have it!
I have Google Wave. I got my invite on October 23, 2009, and at first, I had no idea of what to do with it. I signed up for an invite to Google Wave a while ago, and when I wasn’t let into the first wave (no pun intended) of users, I was upset, but I decided I didn’t really need it after all. How do you test a communications platform with no one to test it with? It completely defeats the purpose of testing if the only person you can talk to on Wave is yourself.
And then finally, I get my Wave invite a week ago. I was completely at a loss as to what I should do — I had gotten a Wave invite, one of the most sought after things in the modern world, and I knew I didn’t need Wave. I probably wouldn’t even need it much. (Getting bored? Keep reading. You might end up with one of my 20 invites.) Continue reading Riding on Google’s Wave »
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. 
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 »