Ooooh, a new featured game!

Meltdown's the featured online game on Big Fish Games today.

I'm also a proud dad. ConFusebox was featured like a week ago, and it's been consistently the top online game for 'em. It's always at the number-two spot as the new game-of-the-day understandably gets the top billing from folks wanting to try out the new game. The new games, though, always fall below ConFusebox once they leave the top of the page. Witness that "guppy Guard Express" game that was yesterday's new game and is now in fourth place.

So that makes me happy, mainly because that means people are enjoying the games. Unfortunately I don't know how this is gonna translate into money because Big Fish doesn't have an up to the minute "check on your ad revenue" page like Mochiads or Kongregate (although Kongregate's page is down about 80% of the time). I guess I'll see when the check comes in.

So I'm gonna toot my own horn again. It's not often I can do that.

. . .okay, it's not often I can do it for a valid reason :)

Anonymous hackers versus evil cults

Suppose for a minute that you ran a destructive moneygrubbing cult.

And suppose that that cult suddenly found itself threatened by anonymous hackers.

Well, there's a rather well-known destructive cult that recently found itself in that very situation.

And I think you know which one I'm talking about.

And finally they responded.

The response is here

Amen.







(please blog and/or digg this if you find it entertaining. I'm just seeing what'll happen if I stir the pot. No, I didn't make the video)

Another game

Oooh look. Now Brain Bones is the new game on Big Fish Games. Methinks they're gonna have a Code Zone kind of week :)

Hey, it's the 23rd

And I was gonna have a big announcement or something today.

And. . .hey look at today's newest game game-of-the-day on Big Fish Games!

Testing out some avatars

One maxim I've tried to follow regarding thecodezone.com is "don't do something if someone else is willing to do it for you for free". Now then you'd think that such a thing would be as obvious as "assume that zebras have stripes", but you'd be shocked at how many developers do stuff on their own with the assumption that their implementation will be superior to others.

So I have stuff processed elsewhere when possible. My Code Zone News Pod on the front page harvests its news from my blog, which itself is hosted on blogger. The bandwidth for the games is hosted on the Mochi site.

And I'd been thinking about avatars for quite a while. Since I wanted things to remain G-rated (which is why I don't have a discussion forum) on the site, I thought I might have some kind of "face-maker" app, ala that avatar-builder on the Nintendo Wii. While such a thing would probably be fun to write, it would also be a lot of work.

Enter gravatar.com, which is a free third-party avatar-hosting site. It's apparently been around for a bit, but it had bandwidth problems, most likely caused by the fact that there's no earthly way for them to possibly make any money off their service. But now Wordpress owns 'em, and I presume they have the deep pockets to keep the service running even if it doesn't make any money for 'em and doesn't have a possibility of doing so in the future (again, see Google's ownership of blogger/blogspot).

So I figured what the heck. I'll add avatars to the site. The avatars are associated with your email address, so as long as you use the same email for gravatar as you do for your Code Zone Games account, you'll have an avatar.

Also, your avatar must be rated G, which is something you set after you upload your picture. You can have multiple avatars if you just can't bear having something G-rated, but just be aware that thecodezone.com will only display avatars that are marked as G-rated.

And yes I realize there's a bit of an honor-system going on here. You could post a big picture of boobs and mark it as rated G. Please don't do that. I'm not a prude by any means, but I do pride myself that thecodezone.com is pretty safe for all ages (as evidenced by a pal who just set up an account for his four year-old daughter so she could play the launch-the-rockets-with-numbers-on-them game).

I also had the early concern of folks using foul language in their handles, but thus-far I haven't seen one in the tables, so hopefully you'll all be using the same decorum in your avatars.




Now then, I don't have it fully implemented. Thus-far it only shows up in the Stat O Matic page. If everything seems to work well there, I'll probably sneak avatars into the high score tables sometime next week.

Here's my stats page if you want to see what a working avatar looks like.

Game News

I have a new game coming out probably next week. Actually it's a game I started back in 2005 with the intention of possibly selling it as a standalone game, but it really wasn't good enough for standalone so I abandoned it. I just revisited it this week, and it's actually better than I remember. While it's still not standalone quality, it'll work quite well as an ad-supported game. So I'm finishing it up.

Also I have a couple of new daily puzzles in the works. The whole ad-supported thing is finally starting to pull in a few bucks, so I'm sticking with it. Like my other daily puzzles, they'll exist in two states. One is a state that requires a login and shows the same puzzle every day and is scored. And the other is an "unlimited" share-able version with no login and is intended to be deployed on every hideous "1001 Kewl Flash Games" site on the internet.

Also I have something big happening next week, supposedly starting on the 23rd. Can't talk about it until then.

And I wrote a book review published Monday.

And I have a product review going up today.

And I have another book review and a product review to write for next week.

And spending an hour every night reading and reviewing every article gamedev ever published (all 2,000 of 'em) so that we can organize 'em better and for something I'm not sure I can talk about yet.

And I dashed off a thousand-word book-report for a local newsletter this morning.


Man I have a lot of oars in the water at any given time. I remember bumping into an old compatriot (David Adams formerly of Klear Games and now with Handango) at the GDC a couple of years ago. He introduced me to a pal of his, saying "you gotta meet this guy, he's a real renaissance man of game programming."

I thought it was a compliment back then, but I realize now that there's not much difference between being a renaissance man and suffering from ADD :)

How to run a hosting provider

Here's a great tip on how to run a hosting provider, courtesy of my new provider, Mediatemple. They wanted to tighten up PHP security a bit, specifically the scope of PHP's internal fopen() command, and the change would conceivably affect anything that called fopen(), including several other PHP commands. So they did the following. . .


1. They emailed me with details of the change and the exact date and time that the change would be happening (two weeks hence).

2. They gave me instructions on how to tweak my php.ini file, thus making the change happen earlier so that I look for breaks on my site.

3. They added a knowledge-base article giving me a couple of alternative methods for replacing any insecure commands.

4. They gave me instructions on how to tweak my php.ini file after the change that would re-enable the insecure commands, just in case I wasn't paying attention to items 1-3 or I wasn't able to make the change in time. Although they state that this change will only be available for a limited time, presumably until they're sure that everybody's up and running again.


So I gave it a try. I shut off the insecure commands. And something did break, but it was pretty minor. Specifically, the google-scraper on thecodezone.com's front page news-pod broke. I then went to the knowledge-base to look at alternatives, and with about six lines of new code the news-pod was working again.

And that means that Mediatemple's PHP security change will now go through without anything breaking on my site.

Gotta tell you, there's little more frustrating than coming to work to find your site broken, and when you get to the bottom of it, you discover that your provider made a couple of changes that you could've handled earlier if you'd only known.

So remember those four steps. Please.

I ask you to lobby for a change

Note that this is largely in reference to gamedev's blogging system, so if you're reading the mirror of this on blogger (and you are), you might not understand what it means. That's because you're out of your element, Donny.

I noticed that we have two recent defections from Gamedev Developer Journals (what blogs used to be called before they were called blogs) to greener pastures (aka Wordpress). And I do understand that. While the Gamedev journals are a good way to give your project a little exposure, it's really let RSS technology pass it by.

Also gamedev has performance and stability problems that may or may not be fixed in the near term.

That's why I've been lobbying for at least a year for a revamp of gamedev's blog system. It'll require three steps.

1. Change the name of "Developer Journals" to "Member Blogs". The word "blog" is now the de-facto standard, and I know the journals have been around since before the word was standard (heck, mine's been around since before the word was even coined), but we do need to keep up with the times.

2. Replacement of the Developer Journals Page with a real blog aggregator. There are plenty out there, but I always use fullasagoog as an example because it's popular and it's well done. Basically it's just a list of hand-picked blogs (in this case about RIA development with Adobe tools). Those feeds are periodically scanned, and updated feeds are added to the top along with a short bit of text. Especially nice is the ability to have a "meta-feed" of all of the feeds (click on the RSS button in your address-bar on the site for an example).

How we actually display this content is really up to us. We could either jump to the blog in question, put the blog in an iframe, or just display the text in gamedev itself. Pretty-much every blog nowadays publishes all of the text in the RSS feed (with the notable exception being. . .us), so making external blogs look like ours (so we could still serve ads) wouldn't be a problem.

3. In the Gamedev control panel, give the user the option to use gamedev's internal blog system (the existing one) or to link your account to an external feed via a URL field.



I implore you to work with me on making this change happen. I really think it'll help gamedev by driving more traffic to the site (by being able to link to well-entrenched but not gamedev-hosted blogs of gamedev pals like DavidRM), lightening up on our bandwidth (by allowing hosting and possibly rendering of blogs elsewhere), and supporting well-entrenched RSS standards so that we could interact better with cool stuff like Yahoo Pipes.

Warning: Network Solutions steals domain names

Just a warning for you budding dotcoms out there.

DO NOT SEARCH FOR DOMAIN AVAILABILITY ON A NETWORK SOLUTIONS SITE

If you do a domain search on their site and the site is unregistered, they will immediately put a hold on the domain.

This was reported on a blog somewhere else, so I tried it out. Feel free to try it yourself with any nonsensical domain name you want. In my case, I headed over to their site to see if "zontarthethingfromvenus.com" was available.

And it was unregistered.

I then headed over to godaddy.com and whois.net and did the same search. Wonder of wonders, that site is not available because Network Solutions owns it.

Ugh, whatta bunch of scumbags. I dearly hope they're sued over this.

Things I like and things I don't

Well I upgraded my Main Development Box to Office 2007 when Microsoft sent me the update. And I've been happy with it. That's to say that I have no complaints about it. It's backward compatible. It'll even write out PDF files directly (which isn't much of an issue as I have Acrobat, but hey). All in all, it's a pretty capable update. And I do rather like the new ribbon-toolbar-thingy. They managed to package up all the old functionality in an easier-to-navigate package.

But it is SLOW!

Actually it's just slow to load. Once it's loaded, it performs just fine. When I needed some office tools on my laptop, I considered Office for a bit, but then I decided to try OpenOffice again just for snorts and giggles because I shuddered to think how Office 2007 would perform on my cheapo laptop. I'd installed OpenOffice a few years ago to see if it'd be good for the company, and it really wasn't ready for prime-time. It had loads of ragged edges and it had its own weird desktop metaphor that was confusing. And it didn't have an analogue for Outlook. Quite simply, it wasn't as good.

Fast-forward to 2008, and I no longer need an analogue for Outlook, as I use Google Calendar for all my schedules and Yahoo Deluxe Mailer ($20 a year and well worth it) for all my email. So I tried OpenOffice again. And it's gotten quite a bit better. It was actually about as capable as Office and no longer had the ragged edges and it loaded up quite quickly even on my $350 Wal-Mart brand laptop.

Okay, there was one really ragged edge. Upon running it last week, it popped up a box that said "There's a new version out now. You want I should upgrade?". I pressed "yes" expecting a quick seamless Office-esque (or Firefox-esque for you who don't use Office) upgrade process. It then downloaded the complete installer for the new version, uninstalled the previous version, then re-installed the new version (after I re-told it what options I wanted) until it got up to about 80% complete at which point it said that something wasn't right and it was gonna uninstall itself and that I should probably try to run it again.

So its "upgrade" basically consisted of removing itself entirely from my machine. Thankfully I re-ran the installer as administrator and it worked the second time. Still, that's an ugly upgrade process they have there.

So OpenOffice is finally nice. Sorry if I'm late to that party.



Oh, and two pieces of anti-Kudos for Adobe. First is for their silly attempt to prevent Office 2007 from writing PDF files directly. If you remember a year or so ago, they were threatening to sue sue sue Microsoft for putting a "save as PDF" function into Office. Mind you, several other products already had this functionality at the time (including OpenOffice). They just didn't want Office to have it. They claimed it was because Microsoft would destroy their open standard, notwithstanding that PDF is an open standard over which MS has no control.

What was obvious and what Adobe wasn't saying was that Adobe had a nice cash-cow selling Acrobat Deluxe to Office users, and if Office 2007 could save to PDF, that market would dry up.

And Adobe succeeded. Okay, actually they didn't. They were successful in preventing MS from installing PDF support from the install CD. That means that if you install Office, you still have a "PDF" option in the save-as menu, and when you choose this for the first time, Office says "Oh, that didn't install by default. You mind if I run out to the website and grab the PDF-saver-thingy?" and then it pops up a loading box, downloads whatever PDF DLL it needs, and from then on you can save PDF files just fine.

So, in short, Adobe succeeded in preventing Office 2007 users from saving files as PDF for about the first two minutes of their first attempt to use it. Quite a victory there.


The second anti-Kudos for Adobe is that Fireworks CS3 is now the only piece of software on my machine that is STILL incompatible with Vista Aero. Mind you, they've only known about this problem since Vista was in early beta, and Fireworks CS3 has only been on the market for almost a year now, so it's understandable that they couldn't fix the problem yet.

Not. I'm now using Paint Shop Pro 5 for most of my image editing. It loads quickly and works with Aero. Amazing, eh?

Quoth The Tick, Evil is a foot

This is pretty funny if you haven't seen it. Even though he's the most evil corporate villain in recorded history (quoth Linux Fanboy Magazine), evidenced by his new intention to spend most of his time and money in an effort to eliminate malaria from the planet, he put together a pretty self-effacing video for CES (motto: we're like Comdex, only we still exist).

And it's funny. I LOL'ed a couple of times.

http://gizmodo.com/341472/this-video-makes-bill-gates-look-cooler-than-steve-jobs

Good cheapie

Not a freebie, but still quite a good deal. This month's 3D World magazine (issue 100) has Carrara Studio Pro 5.1 for free.

http://www.3dworldmag.com/page/3dworld?entry=b_3d_world_100_now

Note that this is a UK magazine, and it usually takes a couple of weeks to arrive in the states. Still, the US newsstand price is around $14.95, and that's a pretty outstanding deal. Barnes & Noble carries it.

If you don't know what Carrara Studio is, check out a review I wrote a while back here.

Oh and school

Oh also Maggie's back in school for the rest of her third year at Clariden. The kiddo's still a learning sponge, and she kept declaring throughout the holiday that "today let's do something with science, daddy".

Last night our science experiment was to put a bowl of water on the porch because the forecast was for freezing temperatures overnight. I guess we ended up being a little above freezing because all we had in the morning was a bowl of really cold water. Still she thought it was cool.

Maggie declared that today she was gonna try to get a lesson in the "Decanomial Square". Googling for it, I found one here. It's pretty scary the higher math concepts the Montessori people teach kids at an early age, but I guess I can't much complain. It's worth it to see the looks on my relatives' faces when a five year-old declares "I'm learning how to multiply".

Also she's enjoying going to the school library once a week. We had a bit of a problem with her getting intimidated by the books and then checking out books designed for kids way younger than her (i.e. books with no words and cardboard pages). This morning, though, she declared that one of her classmates read Black Beauty, so she can read it too. I think it's above her reading level, but if she wants to give it a try, I'll help her with it. After all, it's just part of the job of being the best daddy in the world.



Oh, and another funny aside. Maggie's OLPC laptop still hasn't arrived, but I told her that one of the things she can do with it is read a cool encyclopedia called "Wikipedia". She was excited about the prospects of this Wikipedia thing, and she declared that the first thing she would look up when she got her laptop would be "Mickey Rooney".

Why Mickey Rooney, you ask?

Well, I guess it's just an affect that's creeped into my vernacular, but whenever I am asked about how small something is, I tend to say "about as big as Mickey Rooney". It's actually a line from a really great Animaniacs song, but Maggie never understood the reference, so she's eager to figure it out.

Ahh Wikipedia. In it you can learn about Mickey Rooney and eight or nine other things :)

Reviews reviews reviews

Yerg, I am so friggin' behind on reviews.

Actually I'm way ahead of where I used to be, when I had 15 books waiting to be read and a half-dozen pieces of software sitting around doing nothing. Of course, that was in the less organized days of gamedev where the policy was "oh just post it when you get it done".

Now we have an actual calendar and actual deadlines, so I can't just let things sit around forever. I really had plans to get about four things reviewed over the holidays and I actually managed to do. . .well. . .none of them.

Thankfully Kelly Murdock's been a reviewing fool, so I can always patch the holes in the calendar that I leave with his reviews. Still, it's not fair to the publishers to let things sit around, so I'm gonna spend as much time as I can for the rest of the week and this weekend writing up some content.

Anyway, here's what I have on the horizon to review (keeping myself organized).

Books:
Microsoft Visual Basic Game Programming For Teens Second Edition
Awesome Game Creation No Programming Required
Beginning Game Programming with Flash
Torque for Teens

Software:
Swift 3D version 5
FileHamster

Yeah, that doesn't seem like a very huge list, but bear in mind that everything but the Flash book was scheduled to be posted in December.

And December is over. So the pile isn't that onerous, but it does need to get done.


On the personal front, I finally got a chance to read Flatterland by Ian Stewart and I'm about halfway through Citizen Tom Paine by Howard Fast. Both are well-recommended depending on your mood. If you're into recreational mathematics with a Lewis Carroll twist (minus Carroll's penchant for basing characters on contemporary politicians who are now dead and forgotten), then check out Flatterland. If you wanna read a rum-soaked novel about an important rum-soaked rabble-rouser in the rum-soaked time of our rum-soaked founding fathers, then check out the Tom Paine book.

Predictions for the year TWO THOUSAND

First off, I know that the Daily Puzzles are having intermittent submit problems today. I'm not yet sure what it is. It's intermittent, so I can't really debug it. Only error I've seen has to do with a version number conflict somewheres, so I'm wondering if somesuch PHP library got updated without my knowledge. Anyway I'm working on it.



Okay, holiday's officially over. The rugrat heads back to school tomorrow and is climbing the walls today for something to do. Five year olds are fun, but they don't deal well with the whole "why don't you just quietly read a book" thing.


Plans for 2008:

1. Development and release of a new premium game. And it should come as no surprise that this game will have the word "Bulldozer" in the title. Bulldozer's my own little teeny tiny franchise, and franchises are no fun unless you can drive 'em into the ground. Much of the development will be on a Flash-based level editor with a database back-end, which will dovetail into a contest in which I give away a really cool prize for the best level.

2. Discontinuing the premium puzzle-pack. It was a cute idea to try to "upsell" the puzzles as premium titles, but I make way more in ad-revenue from the puzzles than I've made from selling full copies, so that'll probably just fade away. If I make more titles for the web, they'll be ad-centric. Puzzle games will exist in a "double life" as competitive puzzles on thecodezone.com as well as non-competitive versions that I'll release to every hideous "1001 Flash Games" portal I can find. If you don't like the ads, you can still empower yourself to buy Bulldozer or Duck Tiles or UberBulldozer to shut 'em off. But I won't have a premium version of Zombie Kitten Attack available. There's just not enough money in it.

3. Development and release of more "viral" games, including new daily puzzles and some arcade games.

4. Development of a blue-sky project that's been rattling around in my head for a year. My blue-sky projects tend to come to nothing, so that's gonna wait until after UberBulldozer.


2008 New Year's Resolutions

1. Devoting exactly one day per week to viral games. That includes promoting the existing games (i.e. submitting 'em to new portals) and modifying games to work with "premium" portals that support things like global high score tables. Mostly grunt-work.

2. Better scheduling for my projects. I needs a plan!

3. Not paying interest for anything except the house. Every other debt-system I have, from my car payments to credit cards, is on zero-percent interest. I did well last year, but I'm going to be even more diligent this year at gaming the debt system so that I'm not paying interest. I pay off the balance on all short-term debt cards each month anyway, so that's really not a problem, but I'm making it a stated goal for this year.

4. Pay a big chunk of the principal on my house. I know that every fast-talking financial planner will call me a fool because his magical green-light stock system will make money way faster than my home interest will lose money, but those systems will, by and large, be going to hell in the next two years. And if the economy goes to hell I want to be in a position to continue to do well with less. And if the economy doesn't tank and somehow manages to stay strong, well then I guess Shelly and I will just have to drop ourselves to a four-day workweek to keep pace. Call me a fool, but I ain't seeing the downside :)

5. Lose some weight. That one's obligatory.