April Fools 2010

Here is the text of the April Fools message that was posted on Blazing Games. Note the first letter of each sentence and the date at the bottom. I (Billy D. Spelchan) am still president of the company, and as this month's release shows, we are still slowly transitioning to HTML 5. Flash will probably be our main development tool for the next few years, though.

At Blazing Games, we are proud to announce a deal between ourselves and Microsoft. Sadly, Billy D. Spelchan has agreed to sell his shares of the company and has terminated his position as President of the company, we wish him best of luck with his future endeavours. 

Part of the deal will require that all of our Java and Flash games be replaced with Silverlight versions of these games. Work on this transition has already begun and the non-silverlight games should be removed from the site by the end of this week.

Rich Internet Media in the form of Silverlight is the future of the internet. HTML 5 features simply do not match the power and potential of Silverlight. Our former president's views on open standards clearly are outdated.

Internet Explorer will become the browser of choice for viewing Blazing Games. While we will not be taking any moves to prevent users of other browsers from accessing our site, testing will only be done on Internet Explorer 8 running on Windows 7. We recommend that visitors upgrade their machines to Windows 7 as soon as possible.

Lots of people, such as our former president, have the mistaken feeling that making a deal with Microsoft is the equivalent to selling your soul to the devil. We hope that crazy superstitions such as that are not going to impact our existing visitors enjoyment of this site.

For those of you who feel you can no longer support the site, we thank you for your consideration for other people by making site bandwidth available for the countless new users we will be receiving from a high placement on the Bing search engine. Clearly Bing is vastly superior to that googol thing that our former president used.

Our open source efforts will continue, though we will be switching from the virus-like GPL license to the much more business friendly Microsoft Public License (Ms-PL).

OSX users do not have to worry about Silverlight as Microsoft has assured us that they will always support the OSX version of Silverlight. While not all the advanced features of Silverlight will work on the Macintosh, OSX users always have the option of purchasing a copy of Windows and installing it on their Bootcamp partition.

Linux users are urged to give up their anti-capitalist ways and install Windows on their computers as that is what their machines were designed for. Those Linux users who are running old, obsolete hardware should do their part to restore the economy by purchasing new hardware capable of running Windows 7.

Small changes to our games, such as changing the One of those Weeks' Blue Screen of Death into the Linus the Penguin of Doom and changing Coffee Quest into Clippy Quest will be done at the request of our generous corporate partner but feel that such minor changes will not alter the enjoyment of those games.

M. Caton
President,
Blazing Games Inc.
April 1, 2010

Making One of those Weeks Chapter 36

Chapter 36 of Making One of those Weeks has been posted. For people who are interested in developing games, it has been fairly interesting as of late. First, the Unity engine (http://unity3d.com/company/news/unity2.6-press.html)has been released for free for independent development. Now the Unreal engine (http://www.udk.com/) has been released for free software. Sadly the UDK is Windows only and crashed when I ran it under parallels. Still, this has me again thinking of developing using a real game engine.  

One of those Weeks episode 36 Open Source Release

The open source release of OotW 36 has been released.  This means that October will not be having an episode of Dozen Days of Words. I haven't even started it, though have a good idea about what will be done. I am focusing on my Christmas game which will be 3 episodes and will probably start being released in November with a new episode every other week just like Vampire Attack 2.

Making One of those Weeks Chapter 35 posted

The arcade based dream sequence that makes up One of those Weeks episode 35 is covered in this weeks posting of Chapter 35 of One of those Weeks. This is the episode where you dream of being in a space ship surrounded by blue screens of death. When you blast them with your laser, they divide into four smaller blue screens. If you blast them until they are small enough, you can destroy them. While the source code was opened up last month, I have had too many other good things to release so the chapter has been delayed quite a while. The open source releases and making of chapters are being used as filler which I will release when nothing more substantial is ready.

It is Thanksgiving this weekend. At least in Canada. While I have plans, I still hope to have enough time to do episode 10 of Dozen Days of Words. If I do finish it, then it will be the game released after part two of Vampire Attack next week. If it is not finished then expect the open source release of One of those Weeks episode 36.

You can't get more open than space but watch out for the BSoDs

It has been quite a while since I last posted. I meant to post last week when Crystal Skull was released on Blazing Games, but I forgot. If you missed the release, you can get to it through the archive page or by going to http://blazinggames.com/table/dozenDays/words/crystalSkull.php to see the game. I am going to be updating Blazing Games weekly again, using open source releases and articles as filler, though will be releasing my One of those Weeks source/articles at least once a month even if I have better material ready to post. The open source release of episode 35, where you get to fight BSoDs in space, is the release for this week.

Next week I hope to have the final build of Dungeon Romp 3D. A bunch of new features have been added, though the sound effects don't quite seem to be working right. If I can find the problem there, it will be my next release. As I have talked about before, multiple releases of games, adding features with each new release, is something that I plan on doing. If there is a particular game on Blazing Games that you would like to see overhauled, feel free to let me know and I will consider it.

March has spikes too

It has been a month since the last time I had the chance to post an entry to the Blog. Since that time I have finished posting all 13 parts of the Thirteen Days of Releases on Blazing Games. For those of you who haven't checked out Blazing Games lately, these releases consist of Day 5 of One of those Weeks (all 6 episodes that make up the day being releases as Open Source and the making of chapters for those 6 episodes being released) as well as the campaign mode version of Thirteen Spikes Unlimited.

The next Friday the Thirteenth is quite a while away and will feature a construction set. I will probably do another 13 days of releases that month as well with Day 6 of One of those Weeks being the other 12 releases. This plan is not set in stone and if things continue to be as hectic for me as they have been then this may not happen. It is just sad that so much of the things that are stealing my time are not money making ventures.

I am going to try to get back to posting an entry here at least once a week but can not make any guarantees.

Merry Christmas

Merry Christmas and have a Happy New Year! I am quickly writing this after quickly posting the final episode of One of those Weeks. I am doing this Christmas Morning due to the fact that I have plans this afternoon and evening. I suppose I could wait until tomorrow morning to post this game but figured it would be safer to get it posted early. Enjoy. If you enjoyed One of those Weeks and want to see me create another adventure game (or even a sequel to OotW) then be sure to email me and let me know.

December Scheduled

Making of One of those Weeks chapter 28 has been released as has the open source version of One of those Weeks episode 28. In addition the schedule for the month has been posted. Lets quickly go over the schedule and on Sunday I will start taking a look at my 2009 plans.

Christmas Romp is not the Christmas game that I was planning last year and had to delay. I am going to have to delay that again as I just have too many other things on my plate. In it's place, and using scaled down versions of some of the artwork for that future game, is going to be Christmas Romp which is a new version of Dungeon Romp but with Christmas themed weapons and monsters.

The final Dozen Days of Dice game has not been created yet. I hope to do that this weekend but with other things still potentially stopping this, it may not be created until next weekend or even delayed and done live on the site. I do have a good idea of which dice game I want to do for this game, though may change my mind when I finally sit down to create this episode.

Finally, the month ends with the final episode of One of those Weeks. The game has been worked out but the game is not completely finished yet. In particular the ending sequence has not been finished. It is a bit more extensive than in other episodes so I do hope that I have the time to do it properly and not have to skimp on it. And yes, "The Carmachoc Secret" is the real title for the episode.

Toronto?

With today's release of One of those Weeks episode 45, there is only one more episode left in the series. I am planning on finally finishing One of those Weeks next month, though it will be a while before all the episodes are released as open source and all the chapters from the making of book are released. As those of you who filled out the poll on BlazingGames.com already know, I am considering writing a proper novel based on the game. When you consider that the game is based on an outline I wrote for a novel that I was considering writing, this would be an appropriate end to the series. If I do decide to do this, I would probably not release anything until the novel was completely done and then release the novel under a creative commons license. The time spent on the novel would be separate from the hours I am allocating to the site so don't worry about it taking away from the site because it wont.

This episode is actually rather interesting as it is the texturing version of my ray caster ported to Flash. This could be thought of as a proof of concept that I could get Coffee Quest 5 working in Flash, but now that Flash 10 is out and has some built in 3D support this is probably a moot point as using the built in Flash 3D primitives will probably prove to be faster than doing the ray casting. When I have time this will be something that I will be looking into.

November preview

I have a bit of a confession to make. Most of November's content, 3/4's of it to be precise, was not ready before November. Regular readers know that I finished Dozen Days of Dice on November 1st, but One of those Weeks episode 45 and Ultimate Retro Project episode 58 were still not done. This weekend went a long way towards rectifying this situation, but I am still not in the clear. Of course, the contents for this month are Chapter 27 of Making of One of those Weeks, Dozen Days of Dice episode 11: Everest, One of those Weeks episode 45:Toronto and Ultimate Retro Project episode 58: Modern Adventure.

Chapter 27 has already been released so there is not much need to talk about it here. Episode 45 of One of those Weeks, however, has not been released. The screen shot probably should give the players an idea of where they have ended up. Those of you who are familiar with Canada may notice that the skyline does resemble the city that the episode is named after. I do wonder if I am about to annoy eastern Canadians, but know that western Canadians will understand the humour of the episode. Of course, that assumes that people actually share my sense of humour which may just be wishful thinking on my part.

Dozen Days of Dice episode 11 has been mentioned before, but it is an interesting game. The goal is to flag all the locations on the mountain first. Flags are earned by combining dice meaning that both luck and strategy play a part in this game. I do wish now that I would have spent the three hours I had remaining fine tuning the game, but with everything that is going on at the moment with me I am finding that I am getting exhausted after only spending 12 hours on the challenge (only 10 of which was work). I really do hope that the majority of people who care about the Dozen Days series want me to spread the hours out as it will result in better games while still retaining most of the spirit of the series.

The bulk of the artwork for the final Ultimate Retro Project episode has been finished by Mary Caton so I just have to do the coding and by the end of the month I should have the series complete. The Modern Adventure episode is the same story as the classic episode but with a graphical user interface. I should point out that episodes 59 and 60 were released quite a while ago and were done out of sequence because that was the game I really wanted to develop. I do still plan on creating a 3D version of Dungeon Romp, but that will not be showing up until next year at the earliest. Also likely to be postponed until next year is the Christmas special that I had to postpone last year. I will not know for sure until the beginning of December, but the odds of me having the time to finish it before this Christmas is very low.

Last, but most important, there is a four question poll that is going to be available until the end of the month. This is to get feedback on the direction the site should take next year. While the final decision for what I am going to do in 2009 is mine alone, the results of the poll will certainly help me make my decisions so it is in your best interest to let me know what you think.

November Scheduled

The Blazing Games release for this week, Making of One of those Weeks Chapter 27, has been released. Likewise, the open source version of One of those Weeks episode 27 has been posted. Finally, the important poll that will determine the direction I take Blazing Games in 2009 has been posted. As it is the first post of the month, the schedule for the month has been posted. I would go over the schedule in more details, but posting took longer than I anticipated and I still have a bunch of other stuff to do so I will save the explanation for another entry which I will make when I have more time.

Episode 44 and the weekend.

Episode 44 of One of those Weeks has been posted on Blazing Games. This episode does require knowledge from episode 43 but should be easy enough to solve. If I get a bunch of emails asking me for the solution then I will know that the puzzle is harder than I think, but I really don't think anybody will have that much problems with it.

This weekend I am going to be attempting to finish my Halloween game so expect an update entry Sunday or Monday. I am hoping that I will be writing to say the release candidate has been posted to the repository, but could very well be admitting that I have to go with my backup plan.

Thanksgiving

Chapter 26 of Making of One of those Weeks has been released. This chapter is a good example of how lack of time can change the direction of a game. This is also part of the reason why I am experimenting with other approaches to getting content for the site. My Game in a Day series (Dozen days of) seems to sort of work as one Saturday a month is not that huge of a sacrifice and the pressure of trying to get a fully functional game created in a single day is somewhat invigorating. I have yet to start on November's dice game and will not be able to do so as this weekend is a long weekend in Canada as it is our Thanksgiving weekend. This thanksgiving is more special than usual for reasons that I can't currently discuss. That being said, I am writing a rather lengthy article that does go over the events of the last couple of months. Hopefully I will get permission to post that article, but if not at least I will have it for my own reference.

The poll results were rather different from what I expected. My guess as to the results of the poll would have been Card being the winner followed by Tile, Board, and closing out with Word. I suppose that technically I got the middle two correct. The fact that there was an interest in the Dozen Days of Words series for next year was a surprise, but I will listen to my visitors and have that as the Dozen Days series for 2009!

For those of you who are wondering, I was personally hoping that Dozen Days of Tiles would be the winner. There are a lot of really interesting games that use tiles. I consider Dominoes to be a tile game and that alone gives me a large number of games. Still, that will have to hold out until 2010 or 2011 depending on the polls (if I have them) next year around this time.

Details on October

Modern Hotdog Stand has been posted to the repository. While there are additional features I would love to add to the game, my current schedule does not realistically allow me to do so. If the game is popular enough, I could always revisit it and add the features I desire but I suspect that will not be the case. The next task in the Ultimate Retro Project is the text adventure game. This would actually be ideal for Halloween as it does have a horror theme to it. Still, I do not know for sure if I will be able to finish this on time, so have an alternative planned out in case I am unable to meet the end of month deadline.

Speaking of October's schedule, I should probably go over my plans. Of course, Dozen Days of Dice episode 10 has already been released. One of the Saturday's in October will probably be spent working on episode 11 so I have it ready for November. I am going to try to keep the Dozen Days series monthly from now on which is why I am having the poll this month. I want to know which series will be following the dice series in case I have a string of free Saturday's and can get ahead in series development. Yes, I know that pig's can't fly but stranger things have happened.

Making of One of those Weeks is an eBook that only a few people read. I assume that most the people who read this blog also read the eBook but really have no way of knowing for sure. Still, Chapter 26 is ready to be released so I don't have to worry too much about it. I think this chapter of the book clearly explains the decision making process that I go through when I don't have enough time to focus on games for the Blazing Games site.

Modern Hotdog Stand was actually not finished before the month started. It was actually finished today, which should be obvious from the first paragraph of this entry. People who know how to compile Java and want to play the game early can grab it from the repository. The best I have been able to do is to finish the game in 7 days. I will be writing an article on how my simulation works which I hope to release shortly after the modern version has been officially released.

One of those Weeks episode 44 is in a functional but not finished state so I am going to have to finish it up before it is released. The neat thing about this episode is that it is simply the application of information the player obtained by playing the previous episode. I am hoping that the clues are sufficient, but because I know the answers I can't properly judge the difficulty. This is a problem that all puzzle designers have to face with the only real way of knowing the true difficulty of a puzzle is to expose it to a large number of people.

The final game of the month has not yet been determined. I probably should have placed some type of placeholder message on the schedule, and will probably do so next time I update the site. As I said above, I am hoping to have time to finish the classic Text Adventure which does have a horror story. My alternative plan is to do alternative layouts for Monster Hunt.

Inside the Secret lab

Well the day seemed to be a good one today which for me is a rare thing lately. I have just posted episode 43 of One of those Weeks on Blazing Games. Only three more episodes left in that series so things are getting quite exciting there. I should, unless something unforeseeable happens, be able to finish the series by the end of this year.

For those of you who enjoy the One of those Weeks series, today's episode is kind of different. The information in this episode will be used in episode 44 and while it is theoretically possible to finish episode 44 without playing episode 43, the odds are quite remote. I was originally going to combine the two episodes together, but I felt that the story worked much better if the events in episode 43 were separated from the events of episode 44.

As for why my day was good, the things I was hoping would happen actually did happen. Of course, these things are part of the family business I was asked not to blog about so I won't. I really do want to write down the things but my family is more important to me so I will honor their wishes.

Finally, for those of you who like having a say in what appears on the Blazing Games site, next week there is going to be a very interesting poll on the home page. You will be able to decide which dozen days of x series will be developed in 2009. Yes, 2009 is getting close. The first week of November and December will also have polls. The amount of responses that the next three polls get will determine if there are more polls in 2009.

Making One of those Weeks Chapter 25 posted

The Blazing Games site has been updated and chapter 25 of Making One of those Weeks has been posted along with the open source version of Episode 25 of One of those Weeks. The family situation continues onward, my deadlines rapidly approach (though I am ahead of schedule so am not overly worried) and today has proven to be a surprisingly productive day.

As promised on Sunday, here is the first half of the Dozen Days of Dice episode 9 development journal. http://blazinggames.com/table/dozenDays/dice/makingPig/index.php enjoy!

September is here

While the family situation is still going on, I am back and have posted the schedule for September, a new poll, and the Billy Spelchan Senior word set for Circle Word. While I would love to be talking about what the family situation is, I have been asked not to and will respect my families wishes. That said, the month does not look too bad (at least as far as I am concerned) though I still haven't had a chance to create the game in a day game for September.

The poll on the site will run until the eleventh and I urge all my visitors to try out episode 42 of One of those Weeks and let me know if a more elaborate version of Solid Light is desired. In addition to the poll, three sets of words for Ultimate Retro Project's Modern Circle Word have been created. These word sets are dedicated to my Father and are themes based on his interests and life.

One of those Weeks has episode 43 as well as chapter 25 of Making of One of those Weeks coming next month. The rather interesting twist has it's foundations in this episode. The twist might be a bit too obvious after this episode is played, but the twist is actually the whole point I am trying to make with this story.

Finally, Dozen Days of Dice needs a ninth episode. I am hoping to do this episode on the 6th or the 13th but if I am unable to do so then I may do the episode live on the 20th. If that is not possible, then I may reluctantly release the bonus episode that I created but felt was not fun enough to be released.

An early update

I am releasing the final game for August a few days early due to the fact that a family situation is going to be taking my time for the next few days and I may not be able to update my site or even have time to check my email for a while. The final game this month is One of those Weeks episode 42: Solid Light. At one time I was going to do a more elaborate version of this game and next month will have a poll to see if there is any interest in me doing an extended version of this game.

Weeks like this inspired One of those Weeks

Not a good week for me. Though I have posted the open source release of episode 24 of One of those Weeks. I have also posted the Making of One of those Weeks chapter that covers the creation of this episode. As the title of todays post suggests, I have not been having a very good week. This streak of putrid awfulness started on Friday when something really bad happened that I was asked not to blog about happened. To be honest I really wanted to write a post about what was going on just to get it out of my system but it is not programming or game related so perhaps it is for the best.

Needless to say, Saturday was a perfect day to do a Game in a Day challenge, but due to what happened on Friday I knew I would not be able to concentrate enough to do the challenge. Perhaps this weekend, but I kind of doubt it.

Monday through Wednesday were not bad, other than continued worrying about Friday's event, and with all the phone calls and company and other tasks I was unable to get any work done on any site games. The rest of this month is pretty much ready to go, but next month might be lacking in content. I know some of you are saying, "You mean the other months weren't lacking in content!" I am trying to keep the content levels up but running a game site in your spare time when you are developing the content yourself isn't the easiest of challenges.

Today I somehow managed to post the content, and considering that I am still alive I should actually consider today to be an exceptionally good day. Step ladders can be very dangerous things. This is especially true when you have placed them in an unsafe position due to the fact that it happens to be the only position where you can reach the area you need to reach. After finishing what I was doing I went to climb down the ladder and somehow lost my balance and fell off the step ladder. Nearby were some cement stairs which I then proceeded to fall down a couple of steps of. I don't know how I managed to stop myself from falling down the rest of the steps and breaking my neck but I did. The pain I felt in my right leg made me immediate think that I may have just broken my leg. After sitting down for a few minutes the pain subsided. There is no swelling or bruising but it is still sore especially if I try to turn my leg. Walking on it doesn't seem to bother it at all, however. If it is still sore tomorrow I might see my doctor and have it checked out.

August 2008 Blazing Games Schedule

Sorry for the delay of my monthly preview and notification of Ultimate Retro Hotdog Stand being posted on the repository. My ISP problems still sort of continue. The status page says I have a lot less bandwidth than I am suppose to have but I am being told not to be concerned that it is a web site issue and that the correct information is in the billing computers. Still, I am going to be very careful with the amount of bandwidth that I use until my bandwith limit numbers are correct and have the feeling that this is not the last technical support call that I will be making. It is sad that there are so few broadband choices here. Bandwidth caps suck but I don't have much choice so am stuck with them.

Of course, One of those Weeks episode 41 has already been posted. It is the start of a new day so it is a dream sequence. I think I did a good job on the penguin, but am sure most people will disagree with my self-assessment. As there are five fridays this month, episode 42 will be released at the end of the month. I am withholding the description and screenshot for a few weeks, partly because I want to have another pass at the artwork. The middle of the month will have chapter 24 of Making of One of those Weeks.

The Dozen Days of Dice episode has already been sneak-previewed to readers of this blog so I don't think I need to go into further details here.

Finally, the classic version of my ultimate retro project:hotdog stand simulation will be posted. For those of you who don't want to wait and know how to compile java classes, the source code has already been posted to the ultimate retro project's subversion repository. This was a fairly substantial update and probably should have been posted as a number of repository updates but I just kept forgetting so ended up with the complete game before I finally got around to posting it.