I'm full of content today

I'm Giving Away A Free Book, So Read This Post To The End!

First off, I posted a new review of Musicshake here. Happy reading.

http://www.gamedev.net/features/reviews/productreview.asp?productid=725

Next off, I got the next two gamedev books in the mail yesterday, including my own "Beginning Programming" book. While the original intent was for the programming books to be truly monstrous tomes, it looks like Drew beat me by a few pages with Design and Content Creation, mainly owing to some extensive pixel-art tutorials. Drew also one-upped my extensive equations with a "flip book" animation of a girl kicking you in the head. Good work, kid.

(your humble co-editor posing with over 1400 pages of game programming goodness)

The orange one on the top is my baby. My other baby, Advanced Programming, will be arriving in two or three weeks and has a green cover. On the whole it looks great and I'm proud of it. It's aimed at beginners but isn't so elementary that it'll grow useless after a single reading. Some chapters, specifically the vectors & matrices tutorial, ended up looking quite a bit nicer than I expected. Other chapters that worried me, like Metanet's 2D tutorial, which relied on lots of colorful diagrams, look okay too. Kudos to the Cengage formatting department for being able to make my hours of time with MS Equation Editor and eDrawMax pay off.




And yes, I said I'd be giving away a free book. I plan to make giveaways of any extra copies of the books I might happen to get. And it turns out I have more than one copy of Business and Production For Games (the blue book) here. So I'm giving it away to a lucky winner.

The title of this content is "The Shamelessly Trolling For Twitter Followers Game", and entering the giveaway is quite simple. Just follow me on Twitter. Go to

http://twitter.com/johnhattan

And press the "follow" button under the little bulldozer. Then post an @response like the following. . .

@johnhattan please enter me in the contest to win a free book. http://tr.im/gQnH
(the mini-URL at the end will go to this blog post in case someone else reads your tweet)

On Monday or Tuesday, I'll pick a random user from those responses and mail that person a free book. I'd sign it, but the blue book is Drew's baby and I don't wanna take credit for it since he did the lion's share of the work on it.

If you already follow me, just send me the message and you'll be entered

If you don't have a twitter account, get one. They're free.

Let's do the quiet desperation dance!

Well the recession is recessioning, and this one isn't one of those little "that was a recession?" recessions of the early 90's. You can actually feel this one. Some of you are feeling it pretty hard. Even our own pet recession-proof industry to which Shelly and I have hitched our wagons (energy) is feeling a mighty pinch.

So save save save. Swallow your pride and quit pretending that you need to drink the premium brands of soda pop and you'll just die if you don't spend $10-$20 a week on iTunes. And remember a mantra I use around here. . .

"Need" is a strong word.
A "need" is a sine qua non. It's a thing without which your life would end or be greatly compromised. Recognize the things in your life that are needs (food, furniture) and the things that aren't really needs (eating out, new furniture). And if a TV commercial says that something is something you need, assume that they're lying. Learn to prioritize your spending, recognize deals and take advantage of 'em. Find coupons. Drop your cable TV subscription one tier (or dump it entirely now that the $40 digital gubment rabbit-ears boxes have built in program guides).

And if you see a true need coupled with the word "free", trample everyone in your way to get it :)

On that note, go to www.millionsubs.com and grab yourself a coupon for a free sandwich. Coupons are limited, so go now. Really. Go now. Browsers have tabs, so you can go now and read the rest of this blog post later.





Okay, you're back.

Also grab yourself a free short-stack at IHOP tomorrow (tuesday). I'm not a big IHOP fan, but pancakes are hard to do wrong, so I'll be there early. We did the free Denny's Grand Slam last month at 7am and got in and out in a reasonable time. We tried to hit 'em again for lunch but the line was out the door, so the key here is to get there early.


Another nice tip is the following equation. . .

Any leftover food plus tortillas equals yummy burritos!

We had some leftover chicken and chili from last week, so I bought some canned beans and about 50 tortillas. I also found a cheap fatty roast for $1.50 which I de-fatted, chopped up finely, and fried with some taco seasoning. Shelly and I then spent the next hour making, saran-wrapping, sharpie-ing, and freezing a whole freezer-full of burritos. This'll easily cover lunches and some dinners for the next ten days, and the total out-of-pocket for the whole affair was about $20.

Having lived through lean times before, I can attest that the deal-breaker food-wise isn't a lack of quality food. It's a lack of variety. Eating ramen noodles and balogna sandwiches three meals a day will save you money but will get old fast. Make yourself a list of food that you can make fairly cheaply and makes good leftovers (spaghetti, chili, stew) and give yourself a good variety so you don't feel like you're depriving yourself of the better things.

And you can't go wrong with chicken. A bunch of cooked chicken in the fridge has a thousand uses. You can just eat it. You can make sandwiches. You can chop it up and put it on a salad. You can make soup. You can get buffalo sauce and make spicy chicken.

Whenever I go to the grocery store, I check out the closeout section in the meat department. When they have trays of chicken thighs or legs for cheap (sometimes as low as a buck for an eight-pack), I grab it. You can throw it in a roasting pan with a little salt-n-pepper, cook it, tupperware it, and toss it in the fridge, and that'll give you the underpinnings of a bunch of cheap-n-easy meals.

Feel free to post any other "belt tightening" tips. We'll all make it together.



On another note, with a little luck Pop Pies 2 ought to hit a million plays by the end of the week. It definitely hit the ground running and is my strongest start yet, which is heartening.

The "Retro Pack" (i.e. 47 of my old 1990's discount-rack games that I regained the rights to) is done and is just waiting for me to come up with a way to sell it. My current plan is to sell it cheap (like $5) and make it free if you buy one of my $10 games. That way I should make a little money off it. The games are really pretty old technology-wise (256-color graphics, MIDI sound), so I really can't reasonably expect to make a pile of money from 'em.

I also had fun playing some of my old games. I forgot how fun a couple of 'em were, so I've decided to "Flash-ize" some of the better ones. I should have something to show off in a week or two.

Distributing things to the four winds

Thanks for the Pop Pies 2 feedback. I went live with the thing and started uploading it to the major game portals in the hopes that it'll be co-opted by the smaller ones. Since the game runs ads before it starts, the key is to get it on every place you can find.

A couple of my favorites are MindJolt (because they have a facebook app that can get your game a squillion hits if people like to challenge each other) and Albino Black Sheep (because they actually do respect peoples' rights to the material they post).


If you wanna get in on the grassroots effort towards spreading this thing far and wide, the actual SWF is being hosted at http://games.mochiads.com/c/g/pop-pies-2/poppies2.swf. Feel free to upload it somewhere, although it's better form to just have the site link to that file if available. That way if I find a bug and post an update, they'll get the fix automatically.

Or if you have a game site that you particularly like, post a link to it in the comments and I'll see about getting it uploaded there. Pop Pies 1 is up to 13 million hits, so it has some catching up to do, but it might happen :)

Big thanks.


And it looks like the next round of gamedev.net books are ready to ship. I haven't gotten the new ones from the publisher yet, but I expect to see 'em any minute now. I just got cover-art for the fourth book (Advanced Programming), and it's sort of a lime green.

And I'm gonna be putting together some kind of book giveaway for all of the extra copies I get from the publisher. Not sure exactly what the parameters will be, but there'll be opportunity for free books.

Casting the net a bit wider

Okay, Pop Pies 2 has been a week in RC status now. I haven't gotten a serious exclusive sponsorship offer via flashgamelicense, so I'm gonna go with my original plan. That's to release the game to the four winds self-sponsored but with ad-banners, grab nonexclusive sponsorships as they come in, and make money from nonexclusive sponsorships and ads running on whatever game-portal embeds the game.

. . .which is pretty-much the plan for all the rest of my games.

This morning I'm putting out RC2 of Pop Pies 2, and I'm letting you play it here:

http://www.thecodezone.com/games/poppies2.php

Thus-far the comments have been promising. And by "promising", I mean that they've been all over the board. Some think the music isn't good. Some think it's perfect. Some hate the sound effects. Some love 'em. Some think the game is worse than the original. Some think it's better. In other words, there's a complete lack of consensus about the game, which suggests that my instincts were sound. Everybody's got an opinion, and if they don't agree, then it comes down to instinct.

I tried all sorts of pie color schemes, but in the end I realized that something tasteful and something with reasonable contrast just wasn't gonna happen. So I went with the old TRS-80 Coco palette which cover the extremes of the RGB additive and subtractive spectrum

Ahem. . .black, green, yellow, blue, red, white, cyan, magenta, orange

(yeah, that's a 9-color palette. IIRC, the non-text modes eliminated black)

I didn't wanna go with pure black and pure white, so I went with very light gray ("buff" in TRS-80 vernacular) for the background and very dark gray for one of the pie colors. It's still a mite hard on the eyes, but your little pattern-seeking higher brain should have little trouble picking out the chains.

Note that the Pop Pies 2 link above is a link to a site-locked version on thecodezone.com. I'm gonna give it until about Wednesday for further comments. Then I'm gonna remove the site-lock, mark the game as "released" on the ad-network and distribution-network, and submit the thing to as many game portals as I can find.

So lemme know what you think until then. Happy playing!

Changes to twitter

I've made a change to the way scores are posted to twitter. One thing I never really liked (and it's really a deficiency in Twitter rather than this site) is that I needed your twitter password to post scores to Twitter accounts. And storing passwords used on other sites is just bad form in general.

So I've made a minor change to things. I now have a new Twitter user named "thecodezone". The bot that tallies the scores will now be notifying any twitterers with an @ response from that account.

So the upshot is, if you want to receive Twitters of your daily rankings, you can do one of the following. . .

- Follow user "thecodezone" from http://twitter.com/thecodezone

- Allow your twitter account to accept @ responses from users you're not following. Setting this up is simple. Just go to your twitter account, go to "Settings", then the "Notices" tab, then choose "all @ replies" under the "show me" section.

The upshot is that you should still be able to receive your daily rankings via twitter, just in a bit more secure way.