Category Archives: Games

My thoughts, reflections and work in the gaming industry and ecosystem.

A Snark By Any Other Name

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Recently I’ve decided playing a most dangerous and unwise game.  A player engrossed in said game may find it so addictive, may throw caution and wise judgement into the wind.  Let me present to you the game of snarking.

snarking (v): (1) The delivery of sarcastic but humorous comments.  The humour may be lost on the recipient of comment.  (2) The humorous practise of using bands small voracious Xen aliens against other Half-Life players.  This humour may also be lost on the recipient.  Still other players will display amusement watching recipient run screaming through a level, followed by a horde of jumping squeaking snarks. (3) The insanely humorous practise of combining practises (1) & (2).

And that is the game I shall play…  Yes, kids this the stuff idle minds come up to keep themselves amused during a workweek.

Mental Shards: Ninjas, Stacks and Menus

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I’m a huge fan of checking out RSS planets, especially with the technologies I love to use.  Now I use Google Reader to aggregate and handle these hundreds of stories.  Every so often, a story grabs my attention and gets me thinking.  I’ve starred hundreds, only to never look for them again.  I found that even thought I can e-mail myself these stories, they get lost in the giant abyss known as my e-mail.  So for fun, I’ll post the blogs that caught my attention in a new section on my blog: Mental Shards.  (Yes, you guessed it… it is a play on the name of my upcoming novel.)

Lydia Pintscher writes about dealing with people who communicate in various forms and degrees.  I’d probably fall into the communication ninjas group.  In fact at one point thanks to my Internet tablet, anyone could reach out and touch me over instant messenger.  This became terribly distracting, and even thought I could the same with my cellphone… I’d rather not.  Well actually in theory if I acclimatized people to the concept of on MSN, but may not respond in an instant we’d be good.  Still it is a good reminder, that not everyone feels compelled to feel embedded into the Internet cloud at all times.

Oops… I forget which KDE developer mentioned the Stack Overflow site.  This looks like an excellent resource for developers, especially when dealing with open source technology.

Richard Dale, another KDE contributer writes about the GCDS talk about Moblin.  Here’s a thought: menus are useless.  I’m a bit reluctant to agree.  Most menus are huge and a pain to navigate around.  I’d prefer a flexible tool/toolbar system.  Maybe not quite a ribbons design though.  I am a strong believer in keeping UIs simple, clear and pleasant to use.  However menus seem a necessary evil, for large complex applications.  However the argument, on why do we need large complex menu-driven applications rather than smart intelligent, flexible ones those hold much merit.

Congrats to Celeste Lyn Paul for winning the KDE Akademy Award for Best Non-technical Contribution.  Her work and writing inspires me to one day get into usability, user interface design and (human-computer interaction) HCI myself.  Once things settle down in my life, I plan on looking into doing a Masters in HCI.

And on Phoronix we have: News of a Game Going Free Culture.  Should be an interesting experiment, I wish the developers luck.

A Tiny Update

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It is Friday.  Feeling tired from the irregular sleep cycles of this past week.  I didn’t move forward as fast I wanted to this week.  I’ve felt distracted, tired and could not focus.  Still the minutae of this week didn’t tie me down.  Thanks to a friend my Polish writing improved in leaps and bounds this week.  No regrets this week, and many things moved forward.  And thanks to the same friend, I can see a positive glimmer of hope in my future.  I plan on focusing on making my schedule sane again, and living a fairly active but normal life.  No updates on the writing past a few notes, and ideas.  No code updates either, aside from a steady tinkering with the justCheckers website.   Enjoying using the new Firefox 3.5.  It feels so much sleeker than before.  Oh and thanks to the fine folks at Fido for having simple and sane contracts.  Guess whose service is gonna get recommended to friends?

New Site for justCheckers

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I’m setting up a new site for the justCheckers project.  The only real good reason for my working at all on this project, is simply to build a portfolio.  As a software developer, I want to show to others that I can code.  And that my code is clean, elegant and professional.  I also want to show that I can write my own web applications.  So I am writing the justCheckers website as a PHP, MySQL DB enabled application.  All using proper XHTML, CSS and a touch of AJAX.  The site is a work in progress.  I’m not planning to build an entire flexible CMS, rather I plan on building a custom site.

Crazy Busy

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I’m going to have to keep these next upcoming posts short.  I am a bit overwhelmed at the moment, with the sheer amount of things going on at the same time.  I still want to try to keep going forward on the projects already in progress.  But I will not add anything new to my plate for the next few weeks.  I’m seriously planning a trip to Europe this year.  Planning this trip will take quite some effort.  Still a short update is in order.

I got meet up my university friend Rob yesterday.  Have not talked to him in ages.  I did spend a long time with him.  But it was great to talk to him again, and I needed someone in a similar position to my own to bounce ideas off of.

I started to compile some notes for my novel.  I wrote down most of the background of the novel.  Now I plan on completing my notes and sketching out the plot.  Then the serious work writing can begin.  As for programming, I’m working on a PHP powered website for justCheckers.  Also I am slowly reading through a book on coding C++ and Qt, along with a silly application I plan on writing to learn the Qt framework.

Rolling a Katamari

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I had a great weekend.  I got to meet a few new people.  Made quite a few people jealous by walking around with some quite attractive ladies.  No, I am not suddenly dating multiple girls or anything crazy like that.  Just made a few friends, and went for a few walks with them.  Them being attractive in my case was only a bonus.  Even thought I feel kind of dirty for thinking this… but… I had fun making other people that I have something that other’s want, even if I’m totally just posing. 😀  Sometimes I like being perceived to being on the other side of the equation.  Whether or not the perception is real or not doesn’t matter, at least not in these cases.

That aside, I’ve recently become addicted to a game for my cellphone.  Rolling with Katamari is ridicilously addictive.  I know the game does not break any new ground.  Katamari Damacy exisited for quite some time.  But I like the concept of growing a rolling ball by consuming larger and larger objects.  The beginning of each level starts off slowly.  You can’t absorb all the neat big items.  You have to start small and build up.  After a while you become a massive rolling, all consuming ball of goodness.  This seems analogous to life.  Start small, accumulate, save and with some patience, effort and good tactics, you too can become unstoppable. Just like the Katamari games luck and positioning help you achieve more in less time.

Kicking Tires

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This week, I’ve started working on my delayed projects again.  I feel exhausted from the week.  But I also can not wait to play around with my projects.

Learning Qt

I’ve always admired the KDE and Qt developers.  They make some of the most innovative and interesting technology in the consumer-desktop-mobile land.  I’ve decided to pick up learning Qt and C++.  So far I’ve read the beginning of C++ GUI Programming with Qt 4 (1st ed).  I need to play around with C++, which I plan on doing it while using Qt Creator.  One of my first major Qt experiments might be getting the TEA text editor working on my Nokia 5800 XpressMusic.  I know that Nokia just released the tech preview  of Qt 4 for S60 devices.  But I’ll give it a shot.  Hopefully the GUI will port over nicely.

Completing justCheckers

Yes, the project that I left for dead still lives.  I want to work on it, as portfolio material.  I first plan on building a website in PHP (or maybe JSP?) that renders beautiful CSS and XHTML.  And then I need to give the project much love.  But I owe it to myself to finish this application.  I won’t build any crazy game servers.  But I want to make something totally configurable and fun.  And in the process I want to create something that proves that I am a strong Java developer.

Writing A Collection of Shards

I am going back to writing.  Unfortunately I need to start almost from scratch, since many of my written sections simply will not work.  The ideas are there.  I just need to get them down on paper.

Driving License

This one is the ultimate in the tire kicking sense.  I plan on getting my driver’s license really soon.  Aside from parking, I feel comfortable driving.  Once I figure out all this parking stuff, then I’ll be ready.  I’m exciting since this will give me a lot more mobility and flexiblity.  I’ll be able to solve a lot of problems and have even more time to do things in the day.  And I’ll be able to sleep and live in normal time periods.

I’ll Be Right On It

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It is a bit early in the morning to come up with material to write about.  And I did not get much sleep this night.  Today I probably wouldn’t be able to stop yawning.  And insane amounts of coffee will only keep me from trying to take a nap on the new office’s couch.  All that said, I am on track with my current work: personal, professional and long-term.  I’ve even managed to get to those much delayed tasks.  Yesterday I restarted my coding projects.  Today I will dedicate some time on building a portfolio: in writing, graphics and coding.  And I really need to clear the dust off my resume too.

The key statement for expressing the feel of these past few days should be: I’ll be right on it.  And I will.  Things get done and on time.  The only thing missing is sleep, but I’m sure that will return if I keep at it.

As an aside, I played Alpha Centauri this morning.  What a difference lower the difficulty a single level makes.  At the moment I’m kicking ass and taking names.  I can also verify that what they say about state theory is true.  It is all about power and domination over a territory.  It takes incredible restraint to not exercise aggressive military power, especially when you know you can get away with it.  Hmm… that should prove a great uncurrent theme in my novel.

Final aside: I have to rewrite the first chapter of my novel.  I can’t adapt any of my previous writing to it, in any real degree.  I can use some ideas and elements here and there, but regretably it looks like the first chapter needs a rewrite.  The overall plot and characters feel strong.  The setting needs some thought, since the terrain in reality does not work a 100% with my idea.  Anyways, I plan on just writing the rough drafts first.  Then I brace for painful edits later on.

Running Along the Mirror’s Edge

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I apologize for not posting anything yesterday.  For once I could not write anything useful, incitiful or positive.  So I decided not to write.  Or rather my inaction made it so I didn’t.

Today is different.  Emotions now ran their course.  Tranquility.

This morning I decided to try something different.  I bought a copy of Mirror’s Edge a while ago.  However life and other things took precedence, while gaming took an aside.  Also when I originally first started the game, I turned up the graphics.  This reduced the performance and made the game less response and harder to play.  An interesting level difficulty mechanic you say.  Still I put off playing for a while.

Today I turned down the visual effects and graphics.  And I started playing.  Now I know why I fell in love at first sight with this game.  Atmosphere.  Ambience.  While at first the screen effects seemed odd, once the action really started, it all made sense.  I stopped being Dorian sitting in front of a laptop.  I was Faith.  A Runner in city just running, trying to survive as the odds stacked against.  Running from the assaults of men chasing a girl whose only crime was her being there.

It is a beautiful story.  And one that strikes accord with me.  Everyday the city, the world I live in slowly slips ambilavence to an easy life.  While men with evil intensions destroy civilization and society for their own selfish gain.  And yet for all that I know, I can do very little.  So I too run.  And yet this reality is not a dream.  It is real.

Spring Weather Motivation

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I am enjoying the spring-like weather of the past few days.  After the harsh cold of winter, sun and warmer air are weclome reliefs.  I get to spend more time outside.  Not as much as I’d like to, but still.  The weather not only motivates me to exercise more.  I started yesterday with a short inline skating run.  The weather also motivates me to work on my personal projects.

Please excuse the recent short posts.  I am suffering from a kind of blogger’s block.  While many interesting and wonderful changes are happening in my life, I can not openly discuss them.  At least not yet for various reasons.  I am hoping I can discuss things more in the next few weeks.  And I am too busy to write any articles for now.

At the moment, I am working on a number of different things.  The justCheckers project needs a temporary website.  I barely scratched the surface of that task.  Also I am still writing my novel, with fairly slow progress.  I have a good idea of the plot and characters already.  All I need to do is to crank out the chapters.  Everything else I’m keeping under wraps until I am ready to announce any real news.

I want to wish everyone a Happy St. Patrick’s day.  I guess today everyone gets to celebrate their Irishness or their desire to be so. 🙂  Cheers!