Ramblings about programming, gaming and other random stuff…

Ok really to tell the truth I don’t like fishing… not at all.  It took me years before I admitted that to my dad and to this day I regret it because of the sad look on his face.  My brother had stopped fishing with my dad a long time before that, so he didn’t have either of us to fish with at that point.

Before you run off and wonder what has happened to me and why am I not talking about gaming I will get to the point.

I am working on a fishing game in metaplace.  It is a clone of the mechanics in the wow fishing game, but in a 2d flash created UI.  So far you can click the bobber when it is under water and you will catch a random object that is given a random weight if it is something that has a weight.

The long term goal is to make this into a fully functional game system with the fishing target, the vendors for supplies, and a scoring system for records and derbies.  So far it has been a blast making it and has used some of the Metaplace libraries for UI that I needed more practice with.

Here are some screens:

What this means is I am working on things again!  After the fishing game I have some other ideas, but I am trying to stick with one idea at a time now.  Oh and I was teaching classes for a little while, I am not doing that any more, which is another reason I wasn’t getting much done.

More to come later as this progresses.

You can even mess with it if you want: http://chooseareality.blogspot.com/2009/08/fishing-game.html

The last chat log post of the day. This time from Winter Mullenix – Transgender speaker, GenderVoice project.

Read the rest of this entry »

Another chat log from a speaker. This time Sara Beth Brooks – Speaker, Executive Chair of the San Diego Equality Campaign

Read the rest of this entry »

This is from the metaPride event hosted by Metaplace in my world the MetaEquality Center.

Chat logs after more:
Read the rest of this entry »

So, I missed the meeting, I was sleeping off some sort of cold that layed me out flat.  Here is the chat log from it though.

Thanks everyone that showed up and extra special thanks to our guest speaker Sara Beth Brooks out of San Diego for leading the discussion.

Read the rest of this entry »

Someone asked for an action in photoshop to help him create a spritesheet.   I figured it shouldn’t be too hard, so I volunteered to try it out.

It wasn’t easy.  In fact I couldn’t find any method that would batch the job, so I started digging around CS3 to see if I am missing something already made for me.  I found the Contact Sheet II automation, and set it up like this.

You are wondering at this point where did I get those numbers?  Well if you aren’t you should be.

Document (We will skip this for now, but don’t worry we will return with values)

Columns:

• I started by putting all the art for each action into a folder telling me how many columns each action has.  So pretty much I mean how many frames are in each animation.  For instance the talking animation had 0-6 images for each direction, so it has 7 columns.

Rows:

• The rows are figured out by how many directions each action takes.  In this case there is 8 directions (n, ne, e, se, s, sw, w, nw) so my columns are 8.

Other settings:

• Turn off Auto-Spacing.
• Set Vertical and Horizontal to 0.
• Turn off Use Filename As Caption

Return to the Document

• The width and the height is based upon the size of one png file from the set.  In this case all the files are 128×128 so to find the width I multiplied 128 x Columns which was 896.
• So the Height is 128 x Rows = 1024.
• I set the resolution to 72 to keep the file size small and kept the default Flatten All Layers.

Finishing it all up

Ok so I noticed that for some reason this leaves a 1px space on the top and the left sides.  So I just selected everything and nudged it over to the left 1 and up 1.  This left me a 1 pixel gap on the right.  I selected the background and filled it with the background color of the sprites.

Now I have a sprite sheet that has all the different frames for each direction of a talking dragon ready to import into Metaplace or any other program you may want to use it with.

It isn’t really a secret that I would love to make games for a living.  I have always said that is what I wanted to do since the days of playing Space Invaders on my Aunts Atari 2600.

Why am I not doing it?  Why do I work as a Programmer Analyst in a state government office making web pages, .NET application, and absolutely nothing that looks like a game?

Well I also dreamed of having a family and having a full life.  I have that.  I have a wonderful partner, two wonderful kids, enough money to go on trips, hold an annual pass to Disneyland, go where we want when we want.  I also only have to work 40 hours per week, with occasional overtime as needed.

That is the trade off.

This blog post pretty much sums up the problems I have always had with the industry I would love to work in: http://videolamer.com/enduring-the-grind-crunching-as-company-policy

As a standard there are too many companies that not only expect crunch, but so many actually require it.  “You can’t do the job if you can’t take the overtime!”  I call BS!  Evidence to the contrary has been around for a long time, I have seen sources in the late 70’s that point out the damage continual overtime has on people.

We just can’t work like that and hope to be as productive.  In the programming and development world, what happens is you hit a point where new errors are being introduced faster than more work is getting done.  The overtime is actually costing a company more for producing less.  That doesn’t even take into account the turnover and subsequent training/recruitment costs incurred because of it, so even the salaried employees have a cost in this situation.

The industry doesn’t want me?  I love games, have played on every system since the 80s, have always wanted to make games.  When I am making things for a game I lose all track of time, I bury myself in the work, and stop and am fulfilled in a way I don’t get at my normal job.  But I don’t count as someone they want?

Something needs to change.  Companies with the idea that they can always replace the burnouts, need to pay attention to work-life balance, they need to wake up and read the reports and research saying they are making a mistake.  People like me that have something to contribute are being missed out on because of these policies.  Who knows how many amazing games we have never seen because a working parent wasn’t willing to trade the kids for a dream.

I know because I am a working mom that is missing out on my dream job for that very reason.

It isn’t much, but the first of many polishing jobs has been done on one of my worlds in Metaplace.  I created a world to act as a hub to all my other worlds that I would actually want to share with the rest of Metaplace.  This has always been somewhat done, but it had holes in it and wasn’t really up to a point where I felt I could stop working on it.

Well that has finally been fixed.  Over the last few days I was able to bring my world up to a point where I am very happy with it.  It has ambient sounds, working objects, places to sit, torches and fireplaces with fire, and links to the worlds I want to showcase.

View while sitting at the tables.

As you can see I have a RPG theme.  The torches and fire are animated using sprites I created with the particle tool.  The picture frames are the links to my other worlds.  The fountain, torches, fireplace all have ranged sound effects, so they fall off as you get further away from them.

All in all I am very happy with it.

My next step is to start on the worlds and one by one make them into complete games vs the demos they already are.  Why would I be doing all of this?  It just feels like Metaplace is really close to a state of open beta, and I want to at least have my home be presentable before the hoards arrive.