All posts tagged Rant

The New GM8 Logo Stinks

 Martin · 15 years

I'm really disappointed with the new Game Maker 8 logo.

Let me preface this entire post by saying up front that I am not mad that I lost, since I had a logo in the running. I'm really just dismayed over the logo that did win, which I felt was one of the worst of the four runners up.

I also want to say that as a runner-up, I will be receiving a free copy of Game Maker 8, and I am grateful for that. I am glad that since YoYo Games has taken over the Game Maker project, they have kept the community involved as much as possible. I think that hearkens back to the days when it was still only Mark Overmars working on the project, and if you'll pardon the pun, it keeps a friendly face on the company.

Since YYG's inception, I've been a supporter of theirs. When questionable decisions have been made, I've tried to see things from their side of the aisle, and most of the time, I've ended up agreeing with what they have done. I've defended them many, many times on the GMC, in some cases above and beyond what I would consider what is "required" of the forum staff.

But this time, for the new Game Maker 8 logo, I strongly disagree with their choice. As both a professional graphic designer and a Game Maker user.

When I was brainstorming for my own logo ideas, I considered using a gear or cog in the image. In the beginning, it seemed a fitting and iconic thing to use in a new logo for game construction software, but as I played around with various other ideas, I began to feel that the gear was too cliched. I also felt that too many other users would enter graphics with gears in them, so I was not surprised to see that half of the runners-up had done so.

Not only does the winning logo contain the over-used cog, but it also makes use of a giant smiley face - which is, at best, a rip-off of other iconic images (Yahoo Messenger's logo, the 4chan C&H smiley), and at worst, a childish and shallow attempt to bring in a young crowd of indie game developers.

Also, it looks like it's crying.

The designer in me cringes every time I see it; every part of the logo is covered with gradients. This ensures that reproducing the logo in print will be difficult, and it makes the design look unprofessional. Not that Game Maker is a professional program, but this point doesn't have to be hammered home at every facet.

And that's the other problem I have with this decision - I understand that Game Maker isn't a professional tool by any means, and I know that YYG wants to convey this to potential users. And maybe they want the program to appeal to a younger demographic as well. But the bottom line is that nobody, new and old users alike, wants to feel like they're using a program that is gimpy or for children. And that's the vibe this logo emanates.

I suppose it's oddly appropriate that a tool for amateur game developers employs a logo that looks like it was created by an amateur designer. I just really feel that YYG took this idea and ran a bit too far with it.

Carl the Cog, from Conker's Bad Fur Day.

I've always said the power in a tool lies in the hands of the person who wields it, and not solely in the tool itself. And while I still believe this to be true, I also think it's important that the tool isn't made to look completely stupid by its manufacturer. Perhaps the many people who claim to be leaving the GM scene over this are over-reacting, but when a decision is made that so negatively affects the nature of this tool in the eyes of others, I can't blame people for being upset about it.

Ultimately, this logo was a piss-poor choice, and that's all there is to it. I leave you with this quote from the logo's creator, Albert Zak (courtesy of Game Maker Blog):

I’m however still kind of puzzled why only 8% picked this as their favorite, but I’m glad Sandy and a few others realized what’s really behind this logo.

Is this what's behind the logo? Maybe that's why the big face is laughing so hard.

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Project Needlemouse

 Martin · 15 years

I SO called this.

I know this is a little bit of old news right now, but I can't help but gloat a tiny bit.

Over a year ago, I posted about Sega's continued efforts to ruin their best franchise, Sonic the Hedgehog. I posted about how the 2D elements of the old games just don't translate to 3D. And I posted about how a 2D game, drawn in 3D, would still likely be met warmly by Sonic fans. This was pre-Sonic Unleashed, and I not-so-secretly hoped Sega would prove me wrong by refreshing the franchise with the it.

If you've played the game, however, you know that this wasn't the case. Sonic Unleashed was horrible. Stanky, even.

So now, almost a year after the release of Unleashed, and almost a year and half since my Sonic rant was unleashed, Sega has announced that in 2010 we'll be seeing a new, 2D sonic game via the following trailer:

So, I guess ol' Marty has his finger preeetty close to the pulse of the gaming industry, eh? Now I just need to wait for the downfall of Twitter, and my life will be complete.

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Just Beat It Already

 Martin · 15 years

Almost two weeks ago, I was at work, and had gotten up from my computer to work on some stuff, and the screensaver came on after a few minutes. I prefer my screensaver to be a bit more functional than merely saving the screen, so I have my work computer set up to read the news from CNN's RSS feed and display the headlines on the screen.

After a few minutes away from the computer, I happened to glance up at the screen and see something about Michael Jackson going to the hospital, possibly in a coma. Curious, I flicked off the screensaver. CNN was reporting that Michael Jackson had been rushed off to the hospital, but that details were sketchy. A quick trip to Digg, which had sucked the story away from TMZ, confirmed what I figured must have happened: Michael Jackson was dead.

That night, all the news websites and TV stations paid tribute to Jackson by playing his music, interviewing his peers and his fans, and talking about his life. Pretty standard fare for a celebrity death. As expected, it continued for the next few days.

The problem now, is that two weeks later, it still hasn't stopped. A quick peek onto CNN's website or TV station yields article upon article covering all ranges of the Jackson saga from the smallest, most mundane details of his life to the morbid memorial service.

Seriously. I've had enough. I'm tired of hearing about Michael Jackson.

About the only thing I hate worse than this non-stop smattering of tributes is the fact that in death, Michael Jackson seems to have been excused from every questionable thing he did in his life.

And I'm not saying that to take away from the man's accomplishments. The guy was an incredibly talented entertainer - there's no question about that. In his prime, back in the 80's and 90's, Michael Jackson simply couldn't be beat. But I don't think that, just because the guy died, we should forget about the many allegations of child abuse that were made against him. Or the horrendous mess he made of his face with excessive plastic surgery. Or even the whole baby-dangling-out-of-the-window thing.

We should acknowledge that Michael Jackson was a talented, troubled man, and that to some he will be missed. Now let's move on.

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Swashbuckling Under Pressure

 Martin · 15 years

I'll admit it - I am a former pirate.

Back in high school and college, I traded MP3's with friends. We burned each other copies of games. I was not a stranger to the occasional DVD copy. And I ran an illegal OS with illegal software for years.

Much has changed since those days, however. When I fire up my computer today, I'm pleased to see a completely legal copy of Windows XP appear on the screen. Every piece of software and every game I run on my machine has been paid for. And even though a few remnants of my freebooter past resurface now and then in my MP3 collection, the vast majority of the music I listen to was purchased from iTunes, Amazon, or ripped from a CD I bought.

It makes me feel good. But now, I seem to find myself on the opposite side of the fence from many of my fellow internet users.

Recently, the crew behind The Pirate Bay website was put on trial and subsequently convicted of "assisting in making copyright content available," with a total of $3,620,000 in fines, and each member of the team facing a one-year prison sentence. It's hard to say whether or not the verdict was just. On the one hand, The Pirate Bay is brazenly obvious about the purpose of its site. The pirate theme has been taken on in name and symbol, it organizes torrent files by media type (music, movies, programs, etc.), and a cursory search of the site will reveal that the vast majority of the content being traded among users is not legal. But on the other hand, The Pirate Bay doesn't explicitly host any of the files in question; they merely house the torrent files users download to find peers in their BitTorrent client. So, it could be argued that it is the site's users who are in performing the illegal activity, and not the site itself (dubbed the "King Kong defense").

I happened to read this news on Digg, and many people there disagreed with the verdict. What disturbed me though, was that the majority of these people didn't care about the legal intricacies or implications of the matter. They seemed only to think that piracy should be legal, and that it was in the best interest of everyone to continue pirating movies and music in protest.

Here's a few excerpts from the comments section of the submission I read:

Let's all stop going to the cinema for one year!

Truly a sad day...I'm gonna watch a torrented movie now :'(

95% of teenagers generation uses file sharing; they will be the ones in a few years who can vote and be in power.

The majority of people in power at the moment have more than likely never truely used the Internet; for them it's just about profits.

Stopping bullshit.

If you release an album of music, have all the songs good. There is no point in having an album with one good song and the other 50 tracks full of useless songs for padding.

Same with copy-paste Hollywood blockbusters and Video Games.

A real torrent user with pay for anything that is worth of value. Half-Life 2, Super Mario Galaxy, The Dark Knight, these were barely affected by piracy because they were...you know...actually GOOD so people bought them.

So basically, the MPAA and the RIAA are pissed because they will have to get the Entertainment Industry to work harder and actually make a majority good content, which is the exact opposite of their business plan of "take a dump in a bag and net one billion dollars."

And that is exactly the problem with the RIAA MPAA and this witch hunt. All they are trying to do is protect their ability to get money for producing steaming piles of bullshit! Period.

Surely I couldn't be the only person who reads comments like this and just shakes his head in disgust.

First of all, just because something isn't good by your count, doesn't mean that you are entitled to take it for free. In fact, I personally don't understand why you would go to the trouble of taking it for free if it's not good to begin with. But one of the best things about MP3 stores like Amazon is that you can almost always buy individual songs and leave the rest of the album behind, if you so choose. Under most circumstances, that'll only set you back a buck, too.

And if that's not good enough for you, then look at piracy figures for games like World of Goo or Demigod. Both games have gotten good reviews, and both were released without anti-piracy measures in place. At last count, World of Goo had an estimated piracy rate of 90%, while Demigod, after only being out for a week, had hit about 85%. I'm no fan of heavy-handed copy protection measures, but if you think that good content doesn't get pirated, you might just be an idiot.

Secondly, I find it absurd that some people think that music, movies, and art in general should be a free service provided to everyone else. Yes, many artists (myself included) produce work purely for others to see and share with each other. But we also ought to be able to make money from our work, and if the legal system doesn't help protect us, then what incentive do we have to do work? If your passion is carpentry, should I expect you to build me a house pro bono just because you like doing it?

But let's take this idea to the extreme for a moment - imagine that the judicial system has decided that music, movies, and other artistic works should be free for the public to copy and share. Essentially intellectual property, patents, copyrights, etc. would be no more.

Creative work would be pointless, because anyone would be able to take anything you made and reproduce it without consequence. By an ironic twist of fate, large companies, being in the best position to market and sell media, would benefit the most from this arrangement; they would be able to take any idea they spotted among independents and replicate, package, and sell it without giving a cent to the original creator. Where is the logic in that?

Don't get me wrong here; I'm not siding with big business on this issue. I'm no proponent of the DRM schemes they've tried to use to protect their content, typically to the detriment of paying customers. But when I see the ridiculous sense of entitlement people have towards media, coupled with the outrageous piracy rates of games like World of Goo, I can't help but think that there must be some kind of "happy medium" between producers and consumers. And there is, by means of systems like Steam, which seem to be getting things mostly right so far. But we've got a long way to go. It's important to me that we arrive at that destination though, because I am an artist and a creative person, and I want my work to be protected, like everyone else.

For now, I'm just happy to report that despite my years aboard the massive vessel of media piracy, I'm no longer part of the problem.

And it feels good to be a landlubber.

culturedemigoddigggamesinternetmoviesmusicpiracyrantworld of goo
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A Notch Below the Rest

 Martin · 15 years

The other day at work, I wanted to move around some of the items we have sitting on a table at the back of the room I work in. This included a monitor, a small printer, and a large flatbed scanner. The monitor and the printer were easy to move, but the scanner had run out of USB cord length, so I couldn't move it any farther away from the computer it was attached to. Thinking I had remembered seeing a USB extension cord floating around the office somewhere, I got out our box of random computer parts and started digging through it in hopes of finding something useful.

After only a minute or two, I came up victorious: one of our Macs had come with a USB extension cord for the keyboard that was about two feet long; perfect for moving the scanner. I put the box of junk away and dove under the table to add the extension cord to the mix of wires coming out of the back of the computer.

The male end of the extension plugged into the back of the computer alright, but then when I tried to attach the female end to the scanner's USB cable, I found that they wouldn't connect to each other.

I checked to make sure the connectors were the same size; they were. I flipped one end of the cable around, thinking I might have just made the mistake of trying to plug them in upside-down, but this didn't work either. Slightly frustrated, I pulled the cable out of the computer and brought it back into the light where I could examine it more closely.

And that's when I saw it. The female end of this otherwise normal USB cord had a small raised notch right down the center of one end.

This slight change to the connector does not exist for any functional reason – it was placed there solely to prevent the end user from using the cable for anything other than what Apple had intended it for. I unplugged the keyboard from my computer and checked the male end of its USB connector, and sure enough, there was the matching groove for the extension cord's notch.

What utter horse shit.

Forget, if you will, that Macs typically cost hundreds (if not thousands) of dollars more than their PC counterparts. Forget that none of my games will run in Mac OS. Forget that Macs have a somewhat limited library of software compared to Windows. Forget the throngs of imbeciles known as Mac fanboys. And, if possible, try to forget all those annoying and factually deficient Jason Long commercials.

This is why I will never get a Mac.

You'd think that a company who charges such a ridiculous premium for their computers would have the common courtesy to at least include a USB extension that follows industry standards and works with other devices, but no. After all is said and done, Apple sticks to its guns, follows the same path it always has, and makes a no-stop trip straight into proprietary hell. At this point, I'm honestly surprised that they haven't started releasing their keyboard/mouse with custom triangular USB plugs, to prevent people from using them on non-Apple computers.

This is the kind of bogus practice that will eventually hurt Apple's reputation with consumers, and they deserve every bit of criticism for it.

And don't even get me started on the new iPod Shuffle, which requires proprietary headphones to work.

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A Response to a Fignorant GamesRadar Article

 Martin · 15 years

If you were asked to attribute a specific name to the shallow, and often ill-conceived articles that appear on game-oriented websites when real news is in a lull, what label would you give them? Would you merely call them 'filler'? Or would you go further and use more descriptive words like 'garbage,' or 'stupid,'?

In the case of GamesRadar's article, The Fugliest Games Ever Made, you'd likely use those words and a lot more, peppered with profanity, and probably with some vague threats of violence. This list of games is so inconclusive and arbitrary, it almost seems as if they were drawn from a hat. Here's the list of the "fugliest" games of all time, according to Justin Towell, the author:

  • Toejam & Earl: Panic on Funkotron
  • Nucleus
  • Streets of Rage 3
  • Earache: Extreme Metal Racing
  • Sabre Wulf
  • Sonic & Knuckles
  • Mirror's Edge
  • Sega Rally Championship
  • Big Rigs: Over the Road Racing

I've only played four of the nine games on the list, but of those four, none of them deserve to be dubbed the ugliest game ever. And looking at the screenshots and commentary for the others, I get the feeling that the other five games are just as undeserving of that title as well.

First of all, I'd like to point out that style isn't a bad thing, and style certainly shouldn't be confused for poor design. Games like Toejam & Earl or Nucleus employed a unique style to make their game worlds memorable, and the designers should be congratulated for that, even if they weren't always a complete success. According to Towell however, we should look down upon these games; in his opinion, we should hold the style of all past games to modern standards:

"We didn't realise how garish this game is until we downloaded it off Virtual Console recently. Squiggly wiggles in scrolling backgrounds no longer say 'cool'."

We're rapidly moving towards a time where most games are starting to look way too similar to each other, and the best GamesRadar can do is go back in time to trash past games that tried something a little off the beaten path? Forgive me, but that seems counter-intuitive.

Another thing I find particular offensive about this article is that it makes the mistake of equating the technical limitations of game platforms with bad graphics.

Streets of Rage 3 used a dot pattern to simulate transparency. The Sega Genesis didn't have the capability to do hardware transparency, so developers had to find ways around it. This was a common technique at the time.

Sega Rally Championship was a 3D racing game on the GameBoy Advance. The fact that Sega even got a 3D engine working on the GBA is so incredible that I think the low resolution of the rendering should be overlooked, at least in terms of "fugliness".

Sabre Wulf was created in 1984 for the Sinclair ZX Spectrum, the UK equivalent of the Commodore 64, by a two man team. The ZX was an 8-bit system running on a Z80 processor (a slower version of the one inside the original GameBoy), so naturally, the graphics it pushed weren't particularly amazing. They literally couldn't be.

Towell, speaking of Sabre Wulf:

"At the time of the game's release, the screen was so busy we couldn't work out what was going on.

Now, of course, that lushness has wilted somewhat, especially in the face of games like Tomb Raider Underworld, to the point where its colour palette now looks like someone ate a load of cheap confectionery and barfed it all back up in 259x192 resolution."

Apparently, Mr. Towell didn't go any farther than Wikipedia for his "research." Kinda makes you wonder if he's ever played Sabre Wulf, doesn't it?

Of course, there's nothing wrong with finding appreciation for the current graphical limitations of games by playing older games now and then, so long as you remember that most of those games could not have looked better than they did because the technology (and oftentimes the expertise) just wasn't there yet. Context matters!

But now, even as I've gotten past GamesRadar's complete ignorance of context, technology, and style, I find myself asking: why are Sonic & Knuckles and Mirror's Edge on this list? S&K's graphics were good for the time, and are in my opinion, still some of the best you can find in 2D platformers. Mirror's Edge isn't ugly at all. Does Justin Towell truly believe that one psychedelic background effect can ruin a game? If a handful of people get motion sickness from a game, does that make its graphics bad in any way?

"The screen's just a mess of colours and glowing white orbs. But wait… this is the bonus level after all! And it's horrible. Everything's pulsating like the lightshow you get from a migraine."

How am I supposed to take commentary like this seriously from a guy who, only a few paragraphs prior, lavished Geometry Wars with praise ("bonfire night explosions of colour and joy")?

Maybe I shouldn't expect so much from GamesRadar, but I can't help it; articles like this give me the feeling that they simply don't care what passes for content these days. Or perhaps this is merely the result of a lazy viewership who never questions the veracity of the articles it consumes. But how is it possible to publish an article like this, without harboring at least mild contempt for your site's viewers?

It's truly a shame when articles like this, which contain nothing but dopey opinions and half-baked zingers, make the rounds and generate ad revenue for sites like GamesRadar. I just hope this model of online content-sans-content doesn't become the norm, especially with many major news publications taking their magazines onto the internet and leaving print behind. There's enough garbage online as it is.

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Comcast Ruined My Night

 Martin · 15 years

Okay, so maybe they didn't really ruin my night — but they did make me quite angry.

I'm not really a huge TV guy. I only have one or two shows that I watch religiously. The Office (the American version) is one of the few shows I look forward to watching each week, and I reserve time every Thursday night to watch it.

This night was like any other night, except for two things. The first being that I missed the first few minutes of the show, because my girlfriend and I had gone out for dinner and barely made it back in time. The second being that after watching about two minutes of The Office and sitting through a commercial break, my Comcast cable stopped working.

My cable never blacks out when I'm going on my third hour of watching Lost re-runs or when I'm stuck in the hell of an endless array of Rachel Ray's 30-Minute Meals. But after waiting the whole week to watch one of the few shows I actually enjoy, I am instead treated to 40+ minutes of a black screen.

Thanks, Comcast Comcass Comcrap.

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I Got God Damned Malware

 Martin · 15 years

And I'm almost ashamed to admit it. My various Win XP installs have been virus free for about 7 years now, but now the streak has finally been broken. The strange thing is, I'm still not entirely sure how, or where, my computer got infected.

I've looked back on the events that have led up to this unfortunate incident, and I have pieced together what I think has happened, which I present to you below.

Two nights ago, I was browsing the net with Google's Chrome. I had a few tabs open, and I was bouncing back and forth between them. In one of them I was working on downloading a file from a file-sharing site, kind of like RapidShare, but not quite as official (if you can call RapidShare "official" by any stretch). I had jumped through all the rings, skipping two ads and waiting 60 seconds for the download link to appear. Once the link was ready, I began downloading (it was a RAR file).

About 5 minutes later, while the RAR file was still downloading, I noticed that I had left the tab open with the file share site on it. With no reason to keep it open, I switched to it to close it, but as soon as I selected it, Chrome became unresponsive. Not wanting to cancel my downloading file, I let the program sit, hoping that whatever was slowing down that page would resolve itself. After a minute or two, the tab finally showed up, but the whole browser was acting slow and slightly unresponsive, so I closed out that tab and a few others that I wasn't using anymore.

I turned away from the computer for a second to look at something, but out of the corner of my eye I saw the screen change. I looked back at the display, and it took me a moment to realize that Chrome wasn't on the screen anymore - not in a window or on the taskbar. So I opened it back up, and began trying to restore the tabs I had open. About 30 seconds into this, all of my tabs (even those that had already loaded and stopped), switched to show the Chrome error page. A minute later Chrome disappeared from my screen again with no warning or error message. Opening the program again resulted in a similar outcome.

By this time, it had gotten pretty late, so I attributed this to Chrome's beta status, turned off the computer, and went to sleep.The next day I got home from work and fired up the computer again. I browsed around the web a little, got up to go eat dinner with my girlfriend, and later came back to the computer to play some games. I noticed that FireFox (my default browser) had opened a window in the background - an ad for some idiotic anti-virus program. I assumed I had overlooked it from using FireFox earlier in the evening, and closed it. A minute later it was back, and this time I was sure that I hadn't initiated it's arrival.

My troubles with Chrome the night before came back to me, and instantly, I suspected something might be wrong.A quick look through the computer's running processes yielded nothing. Everything that was supposed to be running was. I checked the startup folder in the Start Menu; still nothing.

Finally, I opened up msconfig to check and see if anything had been added to my list of boot items. Sure enough, there were four oddly named dll's there that I did not recognize. I unchecked their boxes so they wouldn't be run when my computer started, and immediately went hunting for information on the problem.

I found out that my computer was infected with a few pieces of malware, all of the same origin, and all of which had a nasty habit of renaming themselves and latching onto legitimate processes to run. I wasn't entirely sure if their only function was to show me anti-virus ads however, so I figured the best course of action would be to remove the infection and then re-install Windows, just to be safe.

I tried to start up AdAware, but after waiting a few seconds, a cryptic error message appeared on the screen about a server error, and the program refused to load. So, I looked up NOD32, an anti-virus program which I've heard about on "The Tech Guy" radio show, installed it, and ran it. 10 minutes later, after I'd watched the program cycle through all the known areas of the infection, the program reported that it had found nothing. Lame.

A quick Google search returned a few more promising pieces of software; upon further investigation, I decided to try out a program called Anti-Malware by Malware Bytes. This program zipped through my drive and found about 14 infected files and registry entries. I quarantined and deleted all of these, restarted, and ran the program again. The second search turned up nothing. I checked msconfig and my processes list for similar results. I made a mental note that I should purchase the full version of Anti-Malware when this was all over with, as a token of my thanks.

With that, the pre-re-install process began: check, backup, delete, and restore. I checked the software on my computer to make sure I had all the install files I needed and read up on how to properly save my email and saved games. I copied everything from my main hard drive to the (much larger) second hard drive. I uninstalled everything that pointed to files on the second drive, and then rebooted with my trusty Windows XP disc in the tray.

About 30 minutes later I found myself staring blankly at the rolling green hills of the default Windows XP wallpaper. I turned off the machine and went to sleep.

Now it's time for me to get all my programs, games, and files back in their rightful places – just what I wanted to do this weekend.

Thanks malware. Thanks a lot.

chromefirefoxmalwarenewspcrantsoftwarewindowswindows xp
2012 118 22

Too Many Fall Releases

 Martin · 16 years

I logged in and updated my games list to represent my recent game-buying spree. I added the following games:

  • Audiosurf (only $2.49 this week on Steam, thanks for the heads up, Xot!)
  • Command & Conquer: Red Alert 3
  • Commander Keen Complete Pack
  • Fable 2
  • Gears of War 2

I've still got one or two more I want to pick up, and like I've mentioned before, a couple others I'm putting on my Christmas list, but I'm really starting to get progressively angrier at game publishers for this mess. Seriously - I know everyone wants to have big sales for the holidays, but pace yourselves please! We can't all go out and buy a dozen games in one month, and many great games are going to suffer from poor sales because of this ridiculous overlap.

Penny Arcade summed it up pretty nicely here. It's eerie how similar this comic looks to my Google calendar where I've marked all the upcoming games I'm interested in.

Oh well. That's all for now. I'm feeling a bit under the weather and I need to recover... which means less time spent blogging, and more time spent laying on the couch, complaining to my girlfriend, and of course, playing games. Just gotta make sure I fit some rest in there somewhere!

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899 110 3

Time Keeps On Slippin’

 Martin · 16 years

October is drawing to a close, and I'm questioning the future of my newest project, as far as its status as a YYG Competition #4 entry is concerned.

I'll be the first to admit that this is not an entirely unexpected outcome - my project was a bit ambitious. I still want to complete it someday, as I think the game concept is a good one, and I really liked the way the game was turning out. Unfortunately, with my trips to Vegas and BlizzCon, and lots of my free time being spent with my girlfriend as we search for a place to live together, I've not been able to devote the necessary time to Game Maker, and I don't want to be stuck trying to rush the game out, since it is still going to require a lot of artwork and programming.

Not all is lost, however.

A few days ago I came up with a decent idea for a smaller game, and if I have the time, I'll throw it together for the competition.

Since only a handful of people got a chance to play the other game, I'll post a demo here later for anyone who's interested in trying it out. It's nothing more than a driving engine with some simple collisions currently, but as I mentioned, I would like to expand on it eventually.

The whole year of 2008 has been like this for me, actually. I've begun (and continued) many projects, including the site update for Reflect, a new version of the Reflect system itself, a few games, and some paintings; disappointingly, hardly any of it has gotten finished. I suspect that much of it has to do with my limited time for personal projects, an issue that's been troubling me for quite a while now.

I don't blame most of my day-to-day obligations, however - I enjoy spending time with my girlfriend very much, and I waste a lot of time playing games and surfing the web to wind down, which is absolutely necessary to my continued sanity.

Other things though, like my daily commute, are increasingly annoying to me - I lose almost two and a half hours per day just driving to and from work. It's quite frustrating that, as a creative person, I have such sparing time for actually being creative.

Ugh. I hate that feeling I get when I have a project I've worked very hard on, but which I won't be able to finish for now. It's all part of the process, I know, but that doesn't make it taste any less bitter.

Anyway, I'll be posting updates on my competition #4 work as (and if) it progresses. Thanks to everyone who has supported me in my work thus far, and thanks for reading the blog! I shall find the time to finish some of my projects - it just takes time!

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