Mint 16 - the final update

If you follow me on Twitter, you may have seen the liveblogging of my fight with Nvidia drivers and dual monitor setups.

I'm happy to report that I did fix it in the end, and now I have a lovely 2-screen setup! It's not perfect (resolutions are a bit of a pain to work out with different monitors...), but it works!

Binding of Isaac

I've been playing it quite a lot lately, at least a few runs a day. Progressing quite far now, I'm on 6 completed runs as of last night.

I like games like BoI for many reasons. The morbid, gross humour, the dark story, the simple gameplay, the often-evil levels of difficulty and the massive surge of pride when you're able to survive harrowing boss battles with nary a scratch.

My favoured characters are Samson and Judas, because I'm better at low health/high attack than high health/low attack. I'm hoping to unlock ??? in the next few days, maybe complete the game with Eve and Maggy just to get the achievements.

I'm also looking forward to Rebirth - if just because Flash is a sometimes temperamental medium that has a tendency to overheat my laptop.

Mint 16 - update

It turns out that by default, Mint 16 doesn't have access to the unstable packages. Which is supremely annoying, but easily fixable. So now the only thing I have to make sure works is dual-screen monitors - which should be relatively simple now that the right drivers are installed and there seem to be no major glitches when booting on the video card.

Then again, my optimism will probably be unfounded and I'll have to spend a few hours fixing stuff. We shall see!

Mint 16

This update was fairly smooth, but has also been a pain.

Steam won't install properly because of a lack of curl, and I can't find it anywhere to install it. Will resume search at a later point. In fact, there are a lot of dependency problems that I need to fix, which is incredibly annoying.

Back to it I go!

Feb 1GAM failure/March planning

I'm not going to be able to complete something for February, which is regrettable. I'm struggling hugely with JavaScript, and could do with learning it properly rather than hacking away until something kind of works.

So I'm going to re-focus my efforts on designing a Cyberpunk Visual Novel game for the upcoming Cyberpunk Jam. Hopefully I'll be able to come up with something interesting for that.

Feb 1GAM: Slow, slow progress...

But I'm getting there. Loaded all the assets now, and the scores are up. Just need things to move and things to bounce.

Hopefully I'll have it all done in time, as I have a roguelike to make next month!

The beginnings of Pong

Retro Throwback: Super Street Fighter II

I always knew Street Fighter existed, but never really paid attention to it. I didn't really get into fighting games until I was 12, with Super Smash Bros Melee, then proper fighting games at 16 with Soul Calibur 2 and 3, rapidly progressing onto Tekken 5 and various Guilty Gear games. But Street Fighter I never touched.

Until now, where I decided to try one of the SNES ones. Now I wish I'd picked it up a little sooner. I still prefer Tekken/SoulCal/GG, but Street Fighter can still have a place in my fighting game repertoire.

I also have a growing love of the character design, mostly the female designs. Chun-Li and Cammy both have visible muscles! I'm way too used to seeing the slender-but-strong characters like Tira, Asuka and Millia, that to see a strong and muscled female character is slightly bizarre, but not unwelcome at all.

Long Live The Queen

I got this as a Valentine's day gift from my partner and since I got back, I've been playing it a few times.

You play as 14 year old crown princess Eloise, who's mother has died unexpectedly. She will be crowned at 15, but the player needs to guide her and get her to learn the necessary skills to survive, as well as make decisions that preserve Eloise's life. You also need to manage her mood in order to get bonuses for learning, earn outfits that boost skills and no doubt other things I've not noticed.

It's hard to know what to train up. A lot of skills seem to be mere fluff that add to the presentation of Eloise as a wise and just future queen. But some, like Lumen(magic), Economics, Military, History, Intrigue and Weapons are much more useful and may save Eloise's life and reign.

So far, I've only managed to survive up to half-way through the year. I will persevere though, I want to get her crowned at least once!

A new activity

I've been considering taking up a dance class of some variety for a while now. I'm now looking for a Lindy hop class, so that the next time Vintage Night rolls around, I may be able to dance with a small amount of skill.

Hopefully there's one local to me, otherwise I'm going to have to check in Cardiff.

An idea

I've been thinking of mashup games - the one that's sprung to mind recently is a combination of dress up games and roguelite.

So conducting many dungeon runs and retaining outfits and accessories that you get to dress up in between runs.

It seems like an interesting idea, plus a really good way of upping my art skills. So I may have a go at this.

Cardiff Comic Con: update

It looks like I'll be attending Cardiff Comic Con with my best friend, and we're going as Pokemon trainers! He's already pretty set for an Ash Ketchum outfit, I'm still undecided - but I may go as a variation of a Lass or a Pokemon Ranger.

I've already made one pokeball, gonna make another tonight. My little Pikachu backpack may come out for this as well, just to add a little extra to the outfit.

New Cross-stitch project!

As a present for my partner, I'm making a cross-stitch of Blaziken that will be framed and able to be placed on his desk in work.

Selecting the colours was a pain, but I have them all separated out now and they came with me to Reading so I could get more done while I was away (and show my partner the progress so far)

As I did with the Link/Nayru cross-stitch, I will do a progress album.

Feb 1GAM change

In fact, a major change. I don't feel capable of making a scrolling platformer in any way, and various emotional factors are halting sensible levels of creativity.

So instead I will be making a Phaser-based clone of the Mario Bros game. Not the platformer affair, more like the platformer-battle game. I enjoyed it as a child, and I feel it would be a simple game to clone and implement in Phaser. I may end up making something totally different of course, we'll just see what's implementable without too many issues.

Don't think I will be able to incorporate a loop theme into it, which is a shame...but never mind. Planning for next month's endeavor is far more important, but getting something done for February is essential.

Sewing update: clothes

There's been a bit of a lull recently what with other things going on...panic not! I just finished altering a dress I found in a charity shop for £1. It was a straight clingy stretchy dress - horizontal white and navy stripes with some stenciled on roses on one side. I decided to make it a little more open and versatile...by making two side-splits up to the hips.

It's a small alteration, but has such a good effect. It's wearable with leggings or even jeans - with easy pocket access!

Hopefully I can find a few more dresses to make into this style, I really love it.

Telford MCM

Unfortunately, I will not be attending Telford MCM - I have other things demanding my time, and the one person I was meant to meet at Telford is now not attending - so it's fairly pointless in me going now.

At least this means I can put a bit more time into sorting out a cosplay for the next event (which should be Cardiff Expo next month)

10,000,000

10,000,000 was cheap on Steam a week ago, so I bought it with the last bit of Steam Wallet I had left from selling Trading Cards. I'd looked at the game vaguely a few times, thinking "oh that looks cool, I should buy it sometime."

So when I did finally buy it, I didn't anticipate that I would spend 7 hours on it over a 24 hour period.

It's a little dungeon-running game with the match-three gameplay to do everything. Reminds me a lot of Henry Hatsworth, particularly the buying upgrades bit.

It has really hooked me though - the difficulty of achieving the objectives plus defeating monsters before time runs out is aggravating, however upgrading your equipment and skills gives you more incentive to try again.

...I wouldn't recommend playing it for 3 hours straight though, I lost focus towards the end.

Phaser

I have finally taken the plunge and got back into JavaScript - through the HTML5 game framework Phaser. I did try Crafty.js a couple of months ago but I just could not get used to it. Phaser, on the other hand, is brilliant.

The included tutorials have made it that much easier to learn JS again. Out of all the frameworks and game engines I've looked at over the last 6 months, this is definitely the nicest, with good tutorials and support online and off in the phaser package. I threw it all on Dropbox so I could use it pretty much where ever I wanted.

I hope to make most of my games on Phaser for now - Circular Lockdown will be my first, then I plan on making a roguelike for next month's 1GAM/7 Day Roguelike challenge. Last year I judged, this year I intend to join in!

Dual Monitor setup ahoy!

So a few days ago, my father brought back a 15"6 widescreen Dell LCD monitor that where he works has just had replaced. I'm not complaining - I've been needing a second screen for a while. I got used to having two screens to work on one summer and I've missed it ever since.

I've worked on 2 different computers at the same time for a while (netbook and tower) but it's nowhere near as useful as having a second screen.

Currently, I'm waiting for a VGA to DVI converter plug to arrive from Amazon so I can actually plug this monitor into my tower's onboard video. Then I have the joy of trying to set up dual monitors on XFCE (which is apparently simple but could be a total pain to do)

More usefully, my father already has a dual monitor setup and an edited xorg.conf that he's willing to share with me in order to get it working. With any luck this process will be less of a convoluted mess than expected.

A simple webserver.

Since deciding to use Phaser and needing to host it locally in order to test it, I discovered a simple webserver, which is great for testing without having to setup Apache or Nginx.

I found it through the Phaser setup tutorial - it's a really useful thing to know (and when I learnt basic Flask, I should have realised it existed then). It turns out that Python has a very basic HTTP server included - which Flask uses. This can be set up either just to run on a particular directory or a custom script can be run beforehand, should you require any particular setup.

This is the article I read originally. I'm ridiculously pleased that I don't have to fiddle with proper webservers and just get on with playing with Phaser.

More games to play!

So I recently obtained 10,000,000 in a week-long Steam deal - have yet to try it but it's installed on both my laptop and tower (hurrah for Linux versions of games!). I also caved and bought the Sid Meier Humble Indie Bundle, so I have Civilization 3 and 4 to try, plus the rest of the games in that bundle. Civ 3 and 4 will take priority (and I can't run Civ 5, my laptop is too underpowered unfortunately).

Look out for reviews of 10,000,000, Civ 3 and Civ 4, coming to a blog near you!

Feb 1GAM - design document

The design document for my February 1GAM entry is up on my site now - so check it out.

As for actual code, still trying to work out which engine to use - leaning towards Phaser currently, but I may yet change my mind again and go towards Craft.js.

If anyone has any other HTML5 web frameworks they'd like to recommend, let me know on Twitter - I'd love to hear from others on this.

CVs

I've been mildly foolish in my job-hunting. I've tried to use the same CV for my wildly different career aims and it's really not working. So I'm going to seperate out my technical skills and make a web-based CV for the tech jobs. As for everything else, I'll just reduce my current LaTeX CV to contain everything relevant for everything else (retail, administration, etc)

With any luck this will generate more success - and if not, then at least I get more experience in web development when I make this CV.

Honest Android Games

Honest Android Games is a list of games on Android that come under one of three categories:

1. Completely free with no advertising.
2. One time up front payment for the full game.
3. Or a one time in-app purchase for the full game without adverts.

It's a brilliant list - containing some very beautiful games that otherwise would probably be neglected or buried under the ad-filled clones.

A few I knew of, like Ridiculous Fishing and Super Hexagon, and a few more I did not - like  Hell, the Dungeon Again! and Fiz: Brewery Management Game (which seems incredibly entertaining)

Having a list like this creates some positive feelings about the mobile game market - that it isn't all disasters like Candy Crush Saga, Dungeon Keeper and anything else that uses free-to-play mechanics to near enough cripple games until people pay money into the game.

Netlabels

In the interest of seeking out legal, free and open music, I've recently been turning to looking up netlabels that feature free music.

My current favoured label is Dramacore, established back in 2006. They're always looking for more music - and everything they have under their label is under creative commons

The music that they have has lead to inspiration, in fact this track inspired the ideas for my Feb 1GAM.

A little utility

Since writing Resurrection, I had a thought. I made the word puzzles by hand in that game - by getting various phrases and words that were relevant and scrambling them by hand. But I'd like to create a word puzzle generator for the future to save me having to scramble by hand and come up with themed words.

So I have a plan to make a script that takes a file of words, a single word or uses a pre-made dictionary, scrambles the letters and generates a file that contains the original word plus the scrambled word. Or in the case of a single word, just prints out the single word plus scrambled word.

It shouldn't be too hard, but my focus at the moment is on my Feb 1GAM. I'll be developing this as a side-project, but it would be really handy for making up content and puzzles for a roguelike or anything that may be more text-orientated.

Feb 1GAM Concept

So the theme word is loops.

I've had the last few days to think about it, and I've finally settled on making a little platformer that has looping levels. To complete the level you have to find four pieces of the exit door. Until you find all four, you keep looping round the level.

Hopefully I can make it fun and not -too- irritating. I want to start making my games web-based (purely to make them that much more accessible) so it may take a while to learn JavaScript and Phaser/Crafty (because frameworks will make this so much less painful).

I'll keep you all updated on my progress - hopefully I'll have a second game to submit by the end of the month!

Lacemaking

My grandmother, who died recently, used to be very good at lacemaking. Learnt it at an evening class in Dartmouth when my father was young, quickly churning out very beautiful pieces - some of which I remember hanging up in my grandmother's house.

There's a little collage of her smaller pieces in a frame hung up in my house right now, which is good to look at every now and then as inspiration. She made flowers, animals, motifs - all sorts. She learnt the method of lacemaking with bobbin pins, which I now have. Including a tiny collection of vintage bobbin pins. Along with that I have a huge reel of lacemaking thread, a magnifier, lace pins and two very tiny crochet hooks used for tatting (lace edging)

I bought a book recently that has a section on learning lacemaking, so I'll be trying it out when I make a board or cushion to work from.

VVVVVV

I got it cheap (39p) during the last Steam Sale. I'd been looking at it for a while - clever/evil indie platformers are one of my preferred genres.

So far, I've thrown about 2 hours at it, and got to the point where I'm trying to guide Victoria out.

Oh man, it's such a painful game, but so rewarding when you get past a particularly horrific section. The level design is incredibly well done - and I consider it a blessing that you have infinite lives. I probably would have given up a lot sooner if I didn't have unlimited chances to screw up.

It also has a brilliant soundtrack. I'm a sucker for a good chiptune track, but holy wow I got addicted to VVVVVV's soundtrack. I may end up buying it so I can have it everywhere (and support the artists)

So yeah, if you like evil platformers I fully recommend putting hours into VVVVVV.

Mini Cross-stitch kits

So last week I bought three mini cross-stitch kits from Hobbycraft - they were going cheap, and there were some quite cute Spring-themed ones so I though "Why not?"

I've been completing them in between working on other things, it's a nice break.

Check out the two I've already finished. I'll be working on the last one throughout the next day or so.