 |
|
 |
 |
The Old Stomping Grounds
I am writing this update from an internet cafe on Whyte Avenue here in Edmonton. For those who know of it they know that it is a terrific place to kill a few hours of the day. Small shops ranging from thrift stores to internet cafes (with everything in between) run the length of about a five block strip. Whyte is young, hip, and old and rustic all at the same time. I used to live a few blocks from here, several years ago, and I hadn't realized how much I missed it until today. The second I set foot on the avenue I felt elated. Imagine if you had been single for two years, and then one day the person who had dumped you called you up and begged for sex. That's pretty much the feeling I get coming back here. Even though many of the shops had changed, and the faces of the panhandlers and busquers had changed, the feeling is still the same.
I stopped by Whyte Knight games and salivated over all the vintage Atari, Intellivision, NES, Genesis, and even Master System games. I spent a full ten minutes just checking their old G.I. Joe action figures to see if they had any of the ones I destroyed with my B.B. gun when I was an angry farm teen. I then head over to Warp One games to check out the new action figures. I hadn't seen the newer StarCraft toys yet, and I have to say that I was tempted by the Hydralisk. Of course, twenty three bucks just seems like a lot of money right now, so I didn't bother.
I also searched through their RPG manuals to see if they had anything that would help inspire me for Xenotrader, but I realized that I still have plenty of unread space game manuals from when I originally started developing Xeno two years ago. I did however see the latest edition of GURPS and realized that it is one of the few systems that I haven't perused, and yet probably one of the most flexible. I wonder if it might be worth checking out just to see if it would make a good base system for building video games from...
Well, I don't want to spend too much money in the internet cafe, especially whn I will be back at my home computer in little less than an hour. I hope that my computer doesn't realize I had this illicit affair with a dirty public computer.
|
|
 |
|
 |
|
Freitag
Well, it's a payday and that means pastry. I stopped at Tim Horton's this morning to pick up a dozen for everyone here at work. Today on my lunch break I am planning on scoping out other game blogs for my links section. I also plan on devouring every doughnut left in the box in the lunchroom, so my coworkers better get their asses in gear if they don't want me to turn into a four hundred pound game playing bean bag chair. I have already found one blog that promotes the sharing of new game concepts, it is the aptly named Computer and Video Game Concepts blog. I might even submit a few ideas myself, assuming I can dig any up that I don't actually plan on developing myself...
These past few weeks I have been going a little bit Flash crazy. I discovered an excellent multiplayer server application called ElectroServer that really seems to make the development of multiplayer flash games a lot easier. I am so excited by the prospect that I have re-opened development on one of my older concepts, a web based space trading game I call Xenotraders. Maybe saying I re-opened development isn't quite the right term, actually. What I did was trash everything I didn't like about my old design, which is everything. Then completely redesigned the game from the ground up and kept the name, which I really like.
Last night I stuck around work for a while because I was hoping to attend the Edmonton Flash User Group meeting. Take a moment to navigate to that page, I'll wait until you get back...
Back? Okay, now here's the problem, when I looked at the date under the heading "next meeting" I saw the date listed as the 19th. The problem is I completely ignored the month. So I showed up last night to find the whole place locked down. Apparently the meeting was on Wednesday, and from what I hear it was a good one. Damn. Well, I'll try to be a bit more careful with dates in the future, I guess...
|
|
|
|
|
|
Scales
This weekend was a long weekend for us here in Alberta, as quite some time back the government implemented a holiday called "family day". Though I didn't spend any of the weekend with family I did manage to sign up for a seven day trial with Horizons: Empire of Istaria. I first became interested in this MMORPG quite some time ago, when the original concept drawings were released and the game claimed that it was going to feature something like three billion playable races, so everyone could be something different. Okay, so maybe it wasn't quite that many, but even so, it was going to be quite a few. Here, have a look at this. I was excited about playing the Ku'Lak, I do enjoy insectoid races in games. However, many of the originally planned raced never made the cut. Instead I started a dragon character. So far I am enjoying the game, but the servers seem pretty deserted.
Of course, I don't know why this bugs me, because in all honesty, I usually find that most people online tend to bug the hell out of me. Today Penny Arcade did a web comic that pretty much sums up how I feel about the subject. A lot of people online are great, but it's difficult to find them amidst all the griefers and smacktards.
As a side note, I have a meeting today to discuss my future with the president of our company. We are moving away from doing development work and focusing more on network administration and troubleshooting. I have some big decisions to make, and a lot of learning to do, it seems. If only I could make three or four grand a month off my website somehow, I wouldn't have to worry about this sort of thing. Ah, well, we all know what happened to everyone who had that idea during the internet boom, they are all cleaning toilets for a living now. Which is kind of nice in a way, because nobody likes a dirty toilet.
|
|
|
|
|
|
 |
 |
|
 |
