Archive for July, 2008
Thursday, July 31st, 2008
Got back from Develop just now. EC is still there covering the Audio Track, but while there were a couple of design sessions this morning that looked interesting I decided to get back and jump back into Synapse.
Develop was fun. It wasn’t super awesome or anything, but it had a pretty relaxed atmosphere and I went to some good sessions. EC and I had a lot of useful discussion and I think we’ve found some new clarity for Synapse going forward
Scarily, we have a big DS publisher coming into our offices in the near future to look at Puzzle Catz and to look at us. I have no idea what they’ll think, but our office looks like a game dev company to me so it should be good.
We have an intern coming in next week!
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Monday, July 28th, 2008
I FINALLY own an Oxford City Council parking permit. It feels good. Oh does it feel good.
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Thursday, July 24th, 2008
I really am basically taking a holiday right now, but it’s not an especially good one because I’m stuck living in my office so the holiday is just reading a book while Ying codes and the puppy plays with it’s puppy-sitters.
I’ve been feeling pretty stir-crazy all week and moving out and Develop can’t come soon enough. Luckily one of those things happens tomorrow and the other on Tuesday… but you know sometimes even “tomorow” doesn’t make today any less boring.
I’m also very annoyed that IGC (that’s GarageGames’ little conference in Oregon which is absolutely always brilliant) has been cancelled, which takes away a great excuse to go to America this fall… but I’m feeling more and more like just booking it for three weeks in Sept/Oct and crashing Eugene in the middle of a San Jose love-in anyway. Lizzie won’t be pleased (she probably can’t get the time off and doesn’t like being away from me for more than a night let alone 21)… and EC will probably stress about my absense. Oh dear. But I don’t WANT to get on a plane for less than a three week break.
I can feel my game-concentration coming back today though, I should be raring to go come friday week when I’ll be coding Synapse again.
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Thursday, July 24th, 2008
Continued to enjoy the Slingbox experience a lot last night. There’s something about watching Star Trek Generations in the garden that makes it better!
My mother has employed a several neighbourhood kids to puppy-sit (er… one at a time though). They’ve all been very quiet and polite so far.
I guess I’m going to wait until this evening to watch Batman with Mom and Lizzie (and probably Bin and Burn and Erik too)… but I really seriously want to go and watch it now.
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Wednesday, July 23rd, 2008
I bought a Slingbox today in order to send NASN (the North American Sports Network) to my new flat without having to buy Sky, Sky Sports, and NASN twice. Haven’t got it working over the internet yet (some port problem) and my upload speed is going to struggle but I don’t need a great picture, just something not too jumpy and good sound. I do have it working all over the house and garden on wireless already and it works fantastically well, really amazing product. I’ll be interested to see if I use the mobile phone support much, but with an unlimited data connection from vodafone it might work out pretty well.
I think I exhausted myself with the 2 weeks of intense Guile work I did. I poured a lot of energy and effort into it – and I’m very glad I did; I’m proud of how far I’ve got with it so far – but I’m finding it impossible to work on Synapse this week. So I’m pissing about a bit and doing non-creative tasks.
Moving the day after tomorrow… very exciting. And then Brighton next week!
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Monday, July 21st, 2008
After playing Legions on IA for a while (and enjoying it a fair amount but realising it’s really nothing like Tribes 2 apart from the spinfusor combat) I started thinking about T2 again. Now we have a lovely expensive fast server I can fulfill a lifelong dream of owning a good T2 server (we had one for a long time on Baron but it was a bit slow). I’ve put the files up there but can’t get it running on Windows Server 2003 yet… hopefully I’ll find the answer.
I often forget that I now have six years experience in the Tribes 2 engine… I’m looking through the script files now and some of it is fascinating.
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Sunday, July 20th, 2008
Guile will be going to bed for a little while now. I’m actually very happy with how far it’s come in two weeks of truly intensive work, and that’s good. It’s back to Frozen Synapse now, reinvigorated by my sojourn into deeper indie. I’ll be back to Guile some time soon.
I picked up Boom Blox for the Wii today and I love it. Full stop this is a great game and it’s my favorite on the platform so far.
I move into a new flat in Jericho (Oxford, not wasteland) on Friday with Lizzie. We’ve been living together for the last six months but this is the first time we’ve just lived the two of us. I’m very excited about it.
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Friday, July 18th, 2008
Got up and played some Legions this morning. (Legions is the Torque powered follow-up to Tribes by GarageGames.) I had quite a lot of fun – I still got my skillz – but it’s so oversimplified I don’t know what to make of it. I obviously really hope they sort it out and put back in the three (or at least two) classes and have the ability to Turret Monkey, but I have no idea.
More Guile collision bugs for me today… yay.
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Thursday, July 17th, 2008
Jesus christ man. You take Brett back and you make him the starter and you give him your first daughter if you damn well have to.
If you take him back what exactly is the worst thing that happens? I guess… Aaron Rodgers leaves and Brett retires again in week 3.
They WON’T BLAME YOU. They’ll blame Favre. Your job will be absolutely safe.
I don’t have to list the bad things that can happen if you don’t make him the starter.
This just seems to me to be ridiculously straightforward.
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Thursday, July 17th, 2008
Alpha 3 is available on the forums right now. It’s not very exciting, just some collision fixes really. Hopefully a bigger update on Saturday in time for a big game on Sunday.
When Guile gets to a certain stage – I don’t know what that stage is yet, but I guess I’ll know when I get there – then I’ll put a notice about it in the Determinance launcher screen so that our quite regular new demo players can try it out. I probably need to have AI to get that done, and god knows when I’ll have time for that.
Collision bug fixing was pretty boring today. Tomorrow I’m probably going to add ducking, jumping, strafe attacking. Possibly some amusement for falling off cliffs too… well, maybe.
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