New games and improvements

First off, for everyone who had trouble submitting high Meltdown scores, that should be fixed. Note that the little playback gizmo in the Meltdown high score table might be broken for a day or two until I fix that to match, but I figured it was more important to ship the fix rather than frustrate you anymore than I already do with the games.


Second, I have two new games! These are "play-n-share" games, so you're encouraged to add 'em to your favorite blog and/or game portal and/or homepage.

Or you can just play 'em here. They're pretty good.

ConFusebox 2

Worm Sojourn


Enjoy!

RC2

Just minor changes this time

-- One of the dialogs didn't have the text set correctly.

-- Lowered the time penalty. Taking too long penalized you a mite too severely.

-- Added a pause button. The other dialogs pause the timer, but I figured I'd make it more explicit.

http://www.thecodezone.com/games/confusebox2.php


Ship it?

ConFusebox 2 RC1

Okay, I think I'm almost there. Here's the latest (hopefully ready for prime-time) ConFusebox 2.

http://www.thecodezone.com/games/confusebox2.php

Here are the changes from last time. . .

- Moved ContinuityBox to the top because it's the easiest

- Changed easy-medium-hard to small-medium-large

- Made the little 'frames' around the buttons darker so it's clearer that they're just window-dressing

- Added it to my build-chain, which is why you see a real code zone logo in the corner now

- Changed the wires in ConstructBox to blue. I figured since I made orange wires for ContinuityBox, I ought to do the same. Gives it a little more personality and makes it more obvious what game you're playing.

- Tuned up the scoring a bit. ContinuityBox now gets an only slightly higher multiplier for the larger levels. I also reduced the multiplier for the hardest ConstructBox level so the scores wouldn't be so obviously higher. I'll probably clear the high score table because I doubt we'll be seeing any >15,000 scores again.

- Added help. The help is dependent on the screen you're in. If you're in the main menu, you get main menu help, etc.

- Added some sound effects. I eliminated the banjo flourish in favor of three more electronic sounding versions.

- Added some background music, one for the main menu and one for the gameplay screens. The music is intentionally very quiet and ambient. This game is intended to be something that you can play while doing something else, so I didn't wanna make the music distracting.

So check it out and give me some feedback.



Also I've gotten exactly TWO entries in the logo content thus far. Somebody's gonna make an easy hundred bucks.

As another incentive, The Code Zone site gets over 2,000 hits a day and the actual games get over 20,000 hits a day. If I end up using your logo, it'll get a bit of exposure.

Big Bad Bargain Basement Blog Birthday Branding Battle-Royale!

If you look way way back in the archives, you'll see that my first ever post to the Bargain Basement Blog (then known as "John Hattan's Developer Journal" as the term "blog" hadn't yet been coined), you'll see that it was on March 28, 1998.

That means that the Code Zone Bargain Basement Blog is turning Ten Years Old next week. And, as with all birthdays, I require a present.

Specifically, you must make me a logo.

You see, despite The Code Zone existing since the day I left Tandy Corporation to do contracting work, I've never really had a proper company logo. Fact is, I knew too many people who got themselves so wrapped up in the outer accouterments of a company (logo, business cards, stationary, etc) that the work seemed secondary. I decided that I'd concentrate instead on the make-money part and I'd worry about the trivialities of external image later.

Sixteen years later, I still don't have one. While I've thrown together some bits of kitschy clipart when I need it, I really don't have a "blessed" company logo. Of course there's the flyman bitmap that you see up there at the top. Also I have some 50's sci fi bits that I use from time to time, lovingly given to me by Corel's "fifty hundred jillion clipart bonanza galaxy". . .

But I really didn't draw any of it.

So I need a logo. And I'm paying for it in merchandise and in actual cash!

The prize for the winning logo is $100 plus THE CODE ZONE SUPER ULTRA PRIZE PACK THINGY



This prize pack is a pile of stuff lovingly gathered from around the office. It includes. . .

• One gamedev.net pen with lanyard. Writes in any language in red and black ink (but not both at the same time)
• One deck of Lucasfilm Ltd playing cards, lovingly festooned with characters from Star Wars and Indiana Jones
• One pretentious Moleskine notebook, brand new and still in plastic!
• One audio CD of "Sonic Damn Nation", which is an album of prank phone calls. One of the calls is mine and I got paid in free CD's
• One DVD containing three episodes of Rocky & Bullwinkle
• Six gamedev.net stickers
• One genuine Starbucks Coffee sleeve specially designed to fit a Starbucks cup perfectly and fashioned out of finest composite materials
• One "Poppit To Go" game on CD
• One "Phlinx To Go" game on CD
• One "Arctic Stud Poker Run" game on CD
• One copy of "201 Solid Gold Games" by Cosmi, which is the last remaining place where you can get my original 50-game pack on store shelves (available at Office Depot, buy now)
• One laser-cut snap-together wooden castle model
• One USB LED telescoping light
• One handsome "Batz-Maru" drawstring pouch. It's apparently one of Hello Kitty's pals
• An "I [heart] Craft" and a "Maker" button from Austin's Maker Faire
• A couple of Code Zone Gift Cards

Oh, and also a hundred US dollars (aka 65 Euro. Sorry about that, but I don't control the exchange rate).



Okay, here are the rules. Read 'em because they're important.

I want my logo to have a kitschy sci-fi theme. Something that looks like it's straight out of a cheapo movie from the 1950's. The little bulgy rocketship above is my favorite, so I'd probably prefer something along that line. It needs to be simple enough that it'll look good reduced, so don't get too complicated.

This contest will go on until April 4. After April 4 I will try to post thumbnails of all the entries for discussion. A few days later I'll pick an official winner and send off the stuff.

Any logo you make must be your own work. Don't just grab a sci-fi poster off the net and slap some words on it.

Vector file-formats are preferred, but I can read just about anything. If you need a vector editor, go get inkscape. It's pretty good and it's free. If you need to learn how to use it, go pester Trapper Zoid.

If you're entering from a country where it'll simply be impractical to send the prize pack due to local laws prohibiting ownership of one or more of the prizes, I reserve the right to send the pack elsewhere and just give you the money.

Payment will be via check (drawn on a US bank) or paypal, whatever works best for you.

The winning logo becomes property of The Code Zone, although the winner's name and contact info (studio URL, whatever) will be credited on The Code Zone's contact page for the duration of the logo's use.

Entries should be emailed to john@thecodezone.com with the subject line "LOGO CONTEST" so the spam-trap doesn't get it. You can either attach the logo or send me a URL of a place where you're keeping it. I'll send you an acknowledgment so you'll know your email wasn't grabbed by the spam-filter. Send along your postal address so I can brace myself for how I'll get the prize to you.

If you have any questions, please email 'em to me or post 'em as comments and I'll try to clarify.

I reserve the right to change the rules as necessary. I don't have plans to pull the rug out from under you, but I do need to be able to make changes if something unforseen happens.

Employees of The Code Zone are ineligible, although seeing as I'm the only employee, this shouldn't be much of a problem.


So have fun. I look forward to seeing what you come up with.

Several things tomorrow

Well, in keeping with Drew's new "best of the blogs" news posts for Friday, I'm going to post a bunch of stuff tomorrow. Specifically. . .

1. RC1 of ConFusebox 2 with all the features and music and help in place. Fun time-wasting goodness for you!

2. An announcement for the official Bargain Basement Blog Tenth Birthday Contest tomorrow! That's right folks. The BBB turns ten years old at the end of the month, so I'm going to give you a present. Okay, I'm going to give ONE of you a present.

3. A minor announcement regarding how I'm going to do reviews. It's not really a big deal, but it's an announcement all the same.


. . .okay, I'll post number 3 now. I do occasionally get products for review that have little (and by "little" I mean "nothing") to do with game development. And up until now I've posted 'em to the front page, usually with some mild complaints from the peanut gallery about the products. Now then, it's not like the reviews are kicking out valuable product-space for other stuff, but it does seem anachronistic to post reviews for things like mouse-pads or headphones as featured articles.

So what I'm going to do with those products now is to post the reviews to the blog, presumably on Thursday or Friday so Drew can feature 'em in the "best of the blogs" Friday news.

Case in point, last week Razer sent me a couple of their admittedly ostentatious products, specifically a Razer Destructor Precision Gaming Surface With Padded Carrying Case and a Razer Piranha Gaming Communicator. While their products are high quality and are absolutely ripe for snarky commentary (it's a mouse pad with a padded carrying case for cryin' out loud), it's a bit of a stretch to say they're game development related.

So I'm going to write up those reviews here and let Drew link to 'em from the site news.


<chaosmanor>

On an unrelated note, I got Vista SP1 installed. I tried installing it about a week ago just to have the install fail with a link to a Microsoft support page with a couple of links with suggestions that were no help at all.

Fast-forward to this morning and I see a Neowin post mentioning that a couple of old XP-era audio drivers are giving the SP1 installer fits. Noticing that one of 'em is for the Creative Audigy (which I had in my machine), I figured it'd be worth a try to update the driver and see if that'd fix the problem. So I went to the Creative Labs site to get the latest driver. It popped up a list of about 20 Audigy cards and asked which one I had. Seeing no "I don't freakin' know what freakin' version of the freakin' Audigy card is in my freakin' computer" option, I went with just the base model Audigy. Creative's little installer then helpfully told me "You don't have that model Audigy card in your computer" without cluing me in to which one I actually had.

[John is suddenly filled with love for ATI's driver install which does indeed include a "I don't freakin' know what model Radeon is in my computer" installer that figures it out for you]

So I decided to defer the problem for later. I shut down the machine, popped out the card, downgraded to the audio on the motherboard, and installed SP1. Wonder of wonders, it installed just fine.

At this point, I could probably figure out what Audigy I have and reinstall, but I'm in no hurry. The only reason the card is in there is because it's a leftover from another machine upgrade and I'd heard that Audigys are superior to the generic who-knows-what audio controller on my motherboard. I'll probably just leave the Audigy out.

So the upshot is that the prize for the tenth birthday of the blog contest will probably include a slightly used Audigy card :)

</chaosmanor>

Need a little help

Okay, Confusebox 2 is almost feature-complete. The following still needs to be done.

- A little UI polish. Just some checks to make sure you're not doing something you shouldn't
- Help
- Changing up the sounds a bit so it's not just the old ConFusebox sounds again
- (maybe) adding a "lock" mode if you want to lock down pieces that you know are correct

I do need a little help from you, though. I put together my overly-complicated scoring scheme that tries to make a score that's balanced across three largely different games with three different skill levels each. It's done on a combination of the difficulty of the puzzle coupled with your time and your efficiency.

And I just need you to try the game out for a couple of runs and tell me if the scoring feels reasonably balanced. Easier games should score lower than harder games, and better play should score higher than worse play.


Biggest problem I see is that I've been playing the old ConFusebox every day for more than a year now, and I can solve the puzzles pretty quickly now. I don't want a noob coming in and getting a score of zero because it took him ten minutes to solve a puzzle I could solve in one, and I based all the benchmarks off my own play and subjective rating of difficulty.

Anyway, give it a try and let me know. If you have any other comments or suggestions, please please please post 'em.

Thanks!

http://www.thecodezone.com/games/confusebox2.php

Screenshot Goodness

Just because screenshots=hits, here's a shot from the upcoming ConFusebox 2. The game now has three different modes. One is classic ConFusebox that you know n love. The second is called "ContinuityBox", and it plays similarly to ConFusebox but without any bulbs. The wires form a big convoluted loop that ultimately re-connect to the origin. Here's a game that's almost beaten.

Note that the bottom right corner's not yet connected to win the game. That's because I wanted to get a shot before the big "you won" dialog showed up.

As you can also see, the game gives you a running total of how efficiently you've been playing. If you rotate a piece more than the minimum necessary, it'll ding you for it.

Scores will be based on some byzantine combination of time, efficiency, and difficulty. ContinuityBox is actually a little easier than "classic ConFusebox", so you won't get the really big scores in this mode.

My hacker daughter

Yeah, it's a personal update, but there's also some game development related goodness in there.

First off, just took Maggie in for her six-year checkup. She's still over the 97th percentile in height, but she's down to about the 90th percentile in weight. In short, she's becoming the extremely tall gawky kid that we all knew she'd become. Most girls don't see that phase until seventh grade, though. She's got a great self-image so I'm not too worried.

On a related note, her OLPC finally arrived! We ordered it back in December as part of that "donate a laptop to a kid in a third-world country and we'll let you buy one for yourself" program. So there's a kid in Mongolia with one of these now, which gives me a warm fuzzy feeling. Here's Maggie getting her first impressions of her favorite new gizmo.



On the whole, it's a pretty impressive little gizmo. It has plenty of USB ports and it's all very well engineered, especially given the low price. The flip-up latch-antenna-port-protectors are very clever. The keyboard's pretty awful for touch-typing but is great for kids who tend to type while eating jelly sandwiches. The screen is much better than I expected. The resolution isn't great, but it's very clear (especially in its little B&W non-backlight outdoor-ebook-mode), and the software all works very well with the small screen.

As for the software, it's definitely more hacker-aimed than other kid-friendly technologies I've seen. Other kid-based computer tools of this ilk seems to be very locked down and kidproof. On this thing, you can open a Linux terminal right from the main menu!

The UI as well as the bundled software take a little getting used-to. Its little windowing system and main menu are pretty easy once you get your head wrapped around its UI metaphor.

The bundled apps and games and such are not at all what I expected. I expected to see something akin to what you get when you buy a new PC, only kid-friendly -- things like a little word processor and spreadsheet and a couple of cute twitch-games, but things were quite a bit different. The system does come with a rudimentary word-processor, but all of the games and activities were intended to be further explored and extended. Even the bundled flip-the-cards memory game had a mode where you could modify the cards and the gameplay. While the music app comes with a "choose the instruments and bang away at the keyboard to make funny sounds" mode, it also came with an editor with a timeline so you could build your own compositions. The built-in camera and video-recorder dovetails into an animation program so you can make your own presentations.

And there's a logo-esque turtle graphics program that's based on that "build programs out of puzzle pieces" metaphor. Maggie first declared it boring because all you do is move a turtle around with the arrow keys, but I think she'll change her mind when I show her how to make the turtle draw pictures.

All in all, they really did a good job making a little computer that's built around exploration rather than just completing canned tasks. As an example of that, this morning Maggie was playing with "Pippi", which she declared to be a program that helps you learn how to type. Looking at it, it was actually the Python IDE, and she was practicing typing phrases into the editor :)

My only "want" for the curb-appeal of the system would be a little better way of ushering kids into the system. Maybe a little tutorial that takes kids through the simpler non-extensible tasks (like the draw program) so they're not starting out bewildered because they have no idea what to do with Pippi. It's really not clear what's a game and what's not.

Although this is really intended to fit into a classroom setting, so I suppose the teacher could fill that role nicely.


If I had any complaints, it would be the following:

1. The built-in Flash player is pretty sad. In their aim to make everything about the system open-source, they bundled Gnash (Gnu's clean-room Flash player knockoff) with the web-browser. While Gnash does fit in with the open metaphor, it's really not ready for prime-time. I could find very little Flash content that it could actually display. One benchmark I use for Flash players is my own site. It's all based around Flash 7 (aka Flash MX 2004), and it's compatible with just about everything out there. Even rudimentary Flash runtimes like the PocketPC and Nintendo Wii can run my games. But Gnash won't run 'em.

And that also means that a lot of great kids' websites like Noggin and Nick Jr won't work either.

Thankfully the evil-empire closed-source Flash 9 player from Adobe works just fine on it. And the OLPC wiki has exactly the instructions you need to replace the workers-of-the-world-unite player with the evil-empire player.

I'm all for openness, but a browser that can't play Flash games just ain't right :)


2. Their bookmarks/favorites metaphor is weird and I don't think I'll ever like it. The built-in web browser is based on Firefox and displays content very well. But Firefox is just used to render pages. The external UI is based on their metaphor so bookmarks actually live outside the browser. Everything you do with your OLPC is stored in "the journal", and if you see something you like (like a website), you can give it a name and the journal will keep track of it. Then you can go to your journal and launch your named entry.

It's rather neat in that rather than saving your latest turtle graphics creation, you just name it in the journal, it does make the process of web-surfing cumbersome because you need to go to the journal to find your favorite websites. On Maggie's desktop computer I have the little IE bookmark window set to always display as a sidebar pre-populated with kids websites so she can just click on a website when she wants to play. And I'd like to do the same with this, but it's more difficult than it should be.

I noticed that Opera's available for OLPC, and it supports conventional bookmarks. I might give it a try.

Or I might just replace their little canned homepage with a custom Google homepage for Maggie. That way I can just slap up a bunch of Maggie-oriented bookmarks on it.


3. It's slow. I'd heard that the performance wasn't great, and it's not. It's okay for simple stuff, but things like booting and app-launching are pretty slow. Also, they need to tighten up their app-launch metaphor a bit to accomodate this. Things really start to bog down if you're running three or four apps at a time, but it seems like things could be smartened up easily.

For example, Maggie doesn't really grok the whole "running tasks" thing, so sometimes if she wants to go from one website to another she just heads to the main-menu, clicks "browse" and types the website's name into Google. That seems simple enough, but if there's already a browser running with her previous site, it's still running. And once you get 2-3 browsers running kids' websites, your performance drops to zero.

Now then, mom and dad can show her the importance of only running one or two apps at a time and that she should just use the same browser to go to a new site rather than opening a new one, it seems like would've been a simple matter to have a setting that only allows one instance of each app at a time and a certain number of apps to run in total (like two).

That way she could say "oh, the system won't let me run the match-game. I should close the draw program". It's not a great solution, but it's better than "oh, I tried to run the match-game and the system's locked up for a solid minute because I have three browsers running. Time to reboot." And if she goes to the main menu and chooses "browse" and there's a browser already running, focus that browser and send it to the homepage rather than launch a new one.


In closing, I present you with Maggie's first ever email. Rather than an email client, the OLPC folks recommend you get a gmail account, as gmail works great in their browser. They even have an "email app", which is an icon that just launches the browser and sends you to gmail.

So I present you with my six year old's first ever email.



Or should I say, her first flamewar :)

It's chapter 11 week!

Lessee.

SCO files chapter 11. No surprise there. When your main competition is as good or better than your product and is free, you're not long for the world. Solaris is equally doomed and for the same reason, but that's also no surprise.

Sharper Image files chapter 11. Again, no surprise. When your flagship product is an air-cleaner that doesn't actually clean air, then you shouldn't have long-term plans. They should've taken a cue from those diet-pill commercials on teevee -- sell your fake product for a few months, then disappear before folks realize that your product doesn't actually do anything.

Ziff Davis files chapter 11. Thirdly, no surprise. Computer magazines have been on a long slow decline since the early 90's. PC Magazine used to be the size of a small-town phone book. Now it's thinner than TV Guide.


Interestingly, I just bought a subscription to Craft magazine for Shelly. We opted to save $5 by purchasing the non-paper version. Online magazines have their own problems, like dirt-simple piracy. PC Magazine has gotten around that by going with a DRM-laden online magazine reader format (that apparently stops piracy for about eight minutes if the torrent-searches for PC Magazine are any indication), but it apparently wasn't enough.

I wonder if they'll go the way of Dr Dobbs and Game Developer and just start giving the magazine away with the hopes that they'll make money on advertising.