The default ruby mysql library doesn’t deal properly with > 32bit database ids.

If you want to use > 32bit database primary id’s. Sleep on it. You might not really want to (especially if you get hit by the above point -_-;)

A growing collection of quotes and links about Interzone Games, Big Collision Games, Michael Turner, Marty Brickey and Greg Chadwell.

The summary as I understand it:

This week, Michael Turner from the US office, came to Australia to take the intellectual property for the game. The game would then be finished by another company in the US.

This is while the company has around $1.6 million of Australian debt which includes unpaid Australian business tax, unpaid payroll tax, unpaid employee wages and entitlements and unpaid employee superannuation.

When Mike was met with questions as to how these debts will be resolved, he left the premises. He then came back that night after dark and changed the locks of the building. He barred employees from their workplace (personal belongings still inside).

This was met with peaceful protest and many questions that went unanswered. Then the media were contacted and the police were called by both parties, etc etc.

Most notable was the climax yesterday where employees were ordered off their own workplace by a spokesperson of the Department of Commerce?!

The link above has many links to news reports please check em out if only to bump up exposure
It was quite surreal seeing it laid out on the ABC News last night. :/

We made “Bored Room” it’s available at http://www.globalgamejam.org/2010/bored-room.

How to get slug?

Some things went wrong:

• Tech – We decided before the jam to use flash (without any experience) and quickly found that getting it to do what we wanted (without reliable internet at one stage for docs and tutes) was too much effort. We slipped effortlessly into old habits and used pygame. Note that this decision was made at like 20? 15? hours till deadline :/ Jason did the same but stuck with flash and succeeded with bells on so big props to him.
• Team size – While I think it helped us in the end (we got a lot of work done fast) the team size really caused some slowdown and friction when deciding on an idea. People are different, in a team people need to be unified. Sorry to everyone if I was a main offender in the struggle to get settled on something. I can be a tool like that :/
• Team size 2 – As a large team it felt (at least I felt) like we had more to prove than a smaller team, this further hindered the choosing of an idea.
• Theme - The theme was a bit restrictive and early on we tried too hard to be too clever about it. We should have just used it to get ideas flowing and then been more relaxed about sticking to it.
• Multiplayer – We didn’t want to do a multiplayer game because it’s harder for people to play. I now think we should have said “Who cares? We can play it!” if we really wanted to do a multiplayer game.

Overall I think I took it too seriously and worried too much. Not next time!

I also learned a dirty secret. Non-’programmers’ are making kick-ass games with fantastic tools such as Construct. *Shakes Fist* Put us programmers out of a job will ya?! But seriously I’m all about doing more making games and less making tech so I’ll definitely be checking construct and similar packages out in future. Are there any that can target flash?

I did ended up having good fun in the end and our team did some amazing work in a short time and produced a game that (albeit with some glitches) is fun and funny. Thanks heaps guys and gal in my team! Thanks also to Anthony Sweet who appeared miraculously with burgers and sundaes in our time of need and then vanished into delicious smoke. And thanks especially to Simon Wittber for setting it all up and being the loving father of gamejamming in perth!

Anyway I have some thoughts on how I want to approach it this year.

Make a COMPLETE game. (including engine and tools as appropriate).

I’d love to see and create some games this year that can stand on their own. IE that we could stick on a website (for in browser play or download) and actually say that they are finished products. Games that someone in some universe might spend $5 to purchase or $15 to buy the extended version (more content only).

Games that we can take and extend after the fact.

My own games suffer from this a lot. Ladybug Garden and Troll in particular were both ‘complete’ to the point that I’d implemented most of the features I wanted and managed to tack on 10-15 minutes of gameplay. But I’d rather it was an hour of gameplay, or 20 minutes that left you insanely wanting to know what happens next.

Achieving this level of ‘completeness’ requires a better focus on tools, and a better balance of developing the tech vs developing the game. For example I think having someone in the team actually spending some chunk of time writing story and dialog etc would make for a more interesting end product (If that’s the type of game you’re making). Same goes for tools. If you spend 5 hours hacking in 20 minutes of  ‘campaign’ (with all kinds of hard coding and workarounds) then making the next 40 minutes of the campaign is going to slay you. If you can manage to make a great little suite of tools in 10 hours, and from then on can make an hour of content per hour of dev, that is freaking sweet. Whether there is time for this or not remains to be seen.

If you end up with hacky code that is not extensible (IE our Under One Roof from last years Global GameJam) then the product will end its life there. The prospect of having UOR on iPhone or as a flash game is very compelling to me and it pains me that we haven’t done it yet. But rewriting the game from scratch because it’s utterly unportable is really hard to swallow, especially when there are sooo many other ideas vying for attention and development time.

Basically I think the point I’m trying to make, distilled, is:
Make a product that can have a lifetime, not a something throwaway for the purposes of the challenge.

In order to achieve this I think we should be very wary of feature creep and scope.

The other issue, to confuse matters even more, is that a few of us (notable Kranzky, it was his idea) are planning on learning flash during the gamejam (about time, yes). This means more time scrolling through documentation and less time banging on the keyboard.

It’s going to be a blur.

Well I hope some of that made sense. Have a great Jam everyone!

This means searching for things such as “ruby .one?” or “ruby ||= trick” etc are much less helpful than they’d otherwise be.
(Side note, “.one?” is an array instance method that returns true if the array has exactly one item in it. Ahh ruby, you so crazy.)

Every few months this really pisses me off.

Here is a line from google’s basic search help page:
With some exceptions, punctuation is ignored (that is, you can’t search for @#$%^&*()=+[]\ and other special characters).

And if you follow the link the most interesting of the exceptions is:
Punctuation in popular terms that have particular meanings, like [ C++ ] or [ C# ] (both are names of programming languages), are not ignored.

Well thankyou google! For some reason this annoys me even more. There is someone who every now and again (every few months? or maybe they’ve only done it once when google first added punctuation rules?) goes in and adds “popular terms”. Well most of my terms aren’t popular! That’s why I’m searching for them!

I just checked Bing and notice the same problem. Anyone know a more thorough search engine for special use cases? (Don’t get me wrong google is great for most of my searches.)

This is mostly for sustainability reasons (Many animals cost like 8 times their weight in crops, ie if we ate the crops instead we could feed 8 times as many people.) with some humanitarian reasons thrown in (usually after watching a documentary or reading about it

Anyway we’ve set up a blog called Pumpkin Crumble where we’ll post thoughts and photos of stuff we’ve cooked or ordered at restaurants etc. It’s a little bit more interesting and tricky to come up with tasty meals when all the best ingredients are off limits so it should be funtimes ><;

Wish us luck and checkout the blog if you feel like it!

The game is called G.Rid and is just evolved from the idea that with 1 button and timing you can position crosshairs on a 2d playing field. It is a strange input mechanism but becomes strangely intuitive after a while.

Check out its majesty!

The gameplay could use a lot of tweaking and focus testing to get the difficulty and scoring right. I’ve also had some good suggestions from other rockethands that might improve the fun factor, but I think I’m about ready to wrap it up, submit it and move on. I’ve spent probably around 12-18 hours on it on around 4-5 sessions over 2-3 weeks (I should really track my time better).

Anyway I’m just waiting on confirmation that releasing the game to the public ahead of time isn’t against the rules, then I’ll stick it up here for people to get and have a go. I might also upload the source code for your perusal seeing as it’s ‘neatly’ (lol) in one big file (FYI the source is nothing to write home about, it’s interesting what corners you cut in a project like this.) It’s all python and pygame, as usual, bleh. Note to self, use new tech – excuse this time was that I had no internet for a lot of the time and pygame’s what I had handy.

PS: Would anyone here be particularly grateful for an osx or linux friendly version of the game? The built version is currently for windows but I should be able to knock something up for other OSes if people need.

We haven’t lived that central before and are really looking forward to the change it’ll have on our lifestyle.

I’m mostly looking forward to rolling out of bed at 10am on the weekend and strolling down to get some full English breakfast from a nearby cafe.

Only problem is it’s right near Member’s Equity Stadium so we’re hoping we can deal with any volume problems that might bring On the upside we can watch lots of Perth Glory games.

Also means a fair bit of downsizing and de-cluttering. Stay tuned and there might be some fire sale action on here

Anyway, more about the Blur Concert (might bore people who don’t care much about Blur):

Firstly, they were really good, Really energetic and seemed to be genuinely having fun and moved by what they were doing. Also excited about the show(s) after being away for so long.

I really liked the selection of songs, there was stuff from all their albums and stuff that might be deemed less popular or well-known.
Setlist: http://ping.fm/7qtzV

So the main notable exception was of course Charmless Man which was nowhere to be heard. I was sure it’d be their last song but I’m really glad it was The Universal instead.

I think the setlist was pretty great. And paced really really well with amping up and cooling off. You could probably draw the tension curve and talk about it in English class (not Lit.)

The atmosphere was awesome (after the pretty boring support bands were done). There seemed like a lot of people our age which makes sense seeing as they’ve been split up for like 8 years and out of the spotlight for longer so people younger would have no idea who they are. Also just a heck of a lot of people there, I heard 55k.

I got a shirt!

So that was last night. Tonight we just got back from seeing the Lion King on Stage so I will round this out into a post about ‘Live Entertainment’ And say some stuff on that.

It was great and really worth seeing. From a nostalgia and experience point of view (it’s a good story with great songs), but also from a technical point of view. It had some fantastic costumes (or you might even have to call them suits and vehicles) and really nifty scenery stuff involving complicated moving stages and fancy light projection.

I was really impressed, after going in slightly sceptical ><; My favourite was the giraffes

PS, at some point (perhaps only once we're back) there will be a flood of photos on some social network or image sharing site or other, we haven't had any time to do it as we go along. Sorry!

On steam it is described as “a relaxing, yet intense experience for people who like soaring through the sky.”  Sums it up kind of well.

Official Site
On Steam