Spelchan.com Summer 2019

Blazing Games has been closed, at least the home page has. For the moment I am leaving the other pages up so if you know the link to a game then you can still go to the page. This will be eventually changing but I'm in no rush here. I produced a lot of Games so there is a huge amount of porting work to do. I have reviewed the  results of the poll and as a result have made changes to my release plans for this year.

Coffee Quest was released a month early. My holiday games seem to be slightly more popular than I expected.  For this reason I am going to make sure that I have holiday games ported as appropriate. This decision has me in the process of porting my Canada Day flag game for release this Canada Day (July 1st for non-Canadian visitors). Next year I will release my Independence Day game for my American friends.

I have decided that, in memory of my Mother, I am going to only release Color Collapse episodes on Mother's Day but do plan on creating related games once the remaining two episodes have been released. 

I noticed that the voting list of games missed some of the games that were already in HTML5 so those will become filler for when I am too busy to finish porting other games. The first of these will be Sudoku which will be released in August as my card and dice collection are very low in popularity. A beta of Coffee Quest 2  will hopefully be released this September with a Halloween game for October. November’s release is not yet determined yet and will be dependent on my time in September and October and I plan on creating a unique Christmas game this year.

I am not going to have any official release schedule for 2020 (other than a game every month) but do plan on showcasing the games I am working on in whatever game I am going to release in January. Hint, it will not be an updated Calendar NIM game this time.

So hopefully you will enjoy the site. Next fortnight I will start the next chapter of my Creating HTML 5 Games with Animate eBook so hope you continue reading.

Blazing Games Life after Death

It has been no secret that the Blazing Games site is going away in April. This may lead to the question about what I am going to do with this blog after the site shuts down? I have been thinking about dropping this blog keeping only my Homebrew Gamejam blog but I am slowly porting the Flash and Java games from BlazingGames into HTML5 and hosting the new versions on Spelchan.com. There are a lot of games that I had created on BlazingGames so this process will take a very long time so it makes sense to continue to keep this blog running. Besides, I have to finish posting the chapters from my Making HTML5 Games using Animate eBook.

I will continue posting the sections of the book each fortnight with updates on game ports made between the chapters. In addition to Spelchan.com, I also have my 2600Dragons.com and will soon have TarotRevealed.com which is where I plan on hosting my tarot games. There are a lot of pages that make up the site as well as a lot of features that I would like to add to the site so this is going to be a process that will take a fair amount of time. I am going to spread this work out adding new layouts or features every month with the site being updated on the 15^th of each month.

Right now I am running into some issues setting up the site (adding it to my hosting is still pending) but hopefully the site will show up shortly and I will be able to have the first version of the site ready by the 15^th of this month.

I would like to be porting games much quicker than I currently am but at the moment am working on my Masters degree so my spare time is very little. The few hours a week that I allocate to working on both blogs, porting games, and developing my emulator should probably be used for study but I consider this my time so try to allocate some time for these projects. Naively I was hoping to get ahead of the release schedule so that I wouldn’t need to worry about hitting release dates but that has not been the case. My summer schedule is lighter but as we are expected to work on our thesis at that time I suspect that my tune situation will be just as bad in the summer. The Coffee Quest engine isn’t too bad so I should have no problem releasing content for that series but I was really hoping to do my revamped One of those Weeks and Ultimate Retro Project games.  

Needless to say, my focus for the larger project will be Coffee Quest  and once that project is done I will have to make a decision between Ultimate Retro Project and One of those Weeks. What I want to do with OotW is very time consuming but I should be finished my Masters degree so unless I decide to go for a PHD I should have more spare time. More on this once I have finished posting the next chapter of the eBook, which will be starting next fortnight.

Coffee Quest Trilogy Plans

The Coffee Quest (CQ) series started off as an attempt to create a web-based role-playing game using the then-new Java programming language. Java, while a very successful language in many areas, failed in the browser and has been replaced by JavaScript using HTML5 components and CSS3 style sheets. This tends to be collectively called HTML5. My original plans for porting to HTML5 was to simply use an engine that supported HTML5  and finally get around to getting my CQFS engine working by building off the back of another engine. I started experimenting with the Unity engine but really do not like that engine. Then I remembered that for a game jam I participated in back in 2012 that I started working on a FPS version of Coffee Quest. That existing work, while still in an early development stage, would be perfect for the first three games in the series so I decided I would do a Coffee Quest Trilogy game that would combine the first three games into a single package. As this game is developed, the individual episodes will be released on Spelchan.com giving visitors to my site early access to the game.

The enhanced HTML5 version of the game will be mixed-time combining both real-time and turn-based play. I may make the option of an FPS mode where the game would be fully real-time. Each game in the series will have multiple episodes to reflect the different maps, and possibly a number of new maps, that will be made available. I have not decided if in the final game to lock the maps and require players finish other maps to unlock additional maps or if to make everything accessible. A third option would be to have all the Coffee Quest 1 maps initially unlocked to the player and once they have finished any of the maps, to unlock all the Coffee Quest 2 maps. Once a Coffee Quest 2 map has been completed, then the Coffee Quest 3 maps would be made available.  

My ideal release plans, which knowing history are very unlikely to work out, are as follows:

Quarter 1 of 2019 would be the release of the Coffee Quest release candidate with a new map (or two). The goal here would be to have a better automap, better quest status area, and the ability to click on the automap to bring up a full-screen map screen.

Quarter 2 of 2019 will hopefully be the beta release of the Coffee Quest 2 module which introduces monsters and inventory to the game. The Coffee Quest series uses the concept of conditions to weapons where the weapon deteriorates in quality over time and will break if the weapon or armor deteriorates too much. One change that the enhanced version of the game will have is that picking up additional copies of the same weapon will simply improve the quality of the weapon if you already have that weapon instead of filling up slots in an inventory.

Quarter 3 of 2019 will hopefully be the release candidate version of Coffee Quest 2 with a new map and enhancements/fixes made to the game.

Quarter 4 of 2019 would be a new Christmas game using the CQ-Trilogy engine.

Quarter 1 of 2020 would be the beta of the Coffee Quest 3 game which would introduce multi-floor towers.

Quarter 2 of 2020 will be an easter-themed game using the CQ-Trilogy engine.

Quarter 3 of 2020 will be the final build of the Coffee Quest 3 module.

Quarter 4 of 2020 will be the beta release of the combined game and will have some new maps as well as a halloween themed game.

If I fall behind on one of the quarter objectives then I will release additional maps for that quarter’s release. This would delay the final release of the game by a quarter. If things go smoothly I will finish the enhanced version of the original Coffee Quest Trilogy by the end of 2020 but odds are there will be a couple of quarters that I will miss so most likely this project will not be completed until 2021 or 2022 in the worst case situation. Depending on my situation once this project is completed, I will look into doing a similar project for the porting of Coffee Quest 4 and the final creation of Coffee Quest 5 and 6.

State of the Site May 2018 update

With my being accepted into a Master of Science in Computer Science program I will be extremely busy for the next couple of years. I do want to keep up with my site, which is not that time consuming if I predominantly post ports of the games from Blazing Games so both this blog and my homebrewgamejam.blogspot.ca blogs will continue while I am in university. The frequency of the updates is going to be shifted from weekly to alternating between the two blogs with each having an article posted every other Saturday. If things get too hectic, I may cut back to a monthly update but am going to allocate a block of time towards the site and blogs so that things will continue unless something bad happens.

My Easter Egg generator is not really writing a postmortem for. While I did learn a bit about color filters while creating it, this is not enough to warrant a full article.

This month is seeing the release of two games. The first being the HTML 5 version of Four in a Row which is not a new port but does need to be transferred over from the Blazing Games site eventually and as towel day is so late in the month why not this month. The original version was still rough so I decided to clean up the AI a bit and to add animation to the game. There is still a lot that I would like to add to the game before I would consider it to be complete but not sure when I will find time to do that so it may be a decade before this game is properly completed.

Towel day will be the release of my Towels for Earth port. However, I will be posting the postmortem of the game before the actual release of the game. That will be the topic for next fortnight’s post after which I will start posting Chapter 4 of my Animate CC eBook.

Fleet, which I was planning on posting in June, is not quite ready. If it is not ready in time I may post a different game in it’s place but hope to have it finished. If the game is not ready by the 25^th then I will go with an alternate post. Either way the site will have information about what I am going to post. If the game is delayed, it will still be worked on so will be posted later in the year. 

July's game will be released on the 13th of the month as that month has a friday the 13th. It is going to be 13^2 Spikes. August is String Along, but I may substitute it for Fleet if a delay is required.September is when CQ is finally suppose to appear but if things go as planned there may be a bit of a surprise with that release.

Calendar NIM Review

Normally I like to have a postmortem or a making of article about the games that I have just released, but the nature of my Calendar NIM game makes an explanation of the twelve months a bit more appropriate. Each image represents a game that I am hoping to release during the year, though it is subject to change. The games chosen are not the only games that I will be releasing, but are simply the ones I am positive that I can finish though are subject to change and unexpected delays. Still these games are pretty certain. For those of you who haven't looked at my Calendar NIM game, it is located at http://spelchan.com/games/y2018/calendarNim.php

January is a 2018 New Years image that was released by LMoonlight for free and is used to represent the Calendar NIM game itself.

February is Video Poker, which was a game that I created for my original Flash Game Development book which is in the process of being re-written for HTML5 development which will start being posted on this blog next week. This game has already been completed so this is a guaranteed release.

March is when I release my Easter game which is the egg generator. While this was really low on the vote, the generator is used in two other easter games so I am going to port the generator first. This will be challenging as the masking technique I used is  not supported in Create.js so I will need to come up with a different approach. As this game is not going to be released until the end of the month, I will probably take the opportunity to release my NIM game as a bonus.

April 1st is Easter so my April Fool games will have to wait until next year. The thirteenth of April is on a Friday so the original version of thirteen squared spikes will be the choice for that month. This game has already been completed so it is a guaranteed release.

May 25th is towel day so it makes sense to release Towels for Earth. I am not sure why this game is so high on the voting chart but this is the most appropriate day to re-release the game. I have not done any work on it at all but it is not a difficult game (it was created in a game jam after all) so this shouldn’t be a problem. As this is late in the month, I may also release Pent Up Anger which I have already finished.

June is really subject to change but I am planning on porting Fleet to C++ and using emscripten to convert it to asm.js or to web assembly. I started playing around with emscripten for my 2600 emulator project but pretty much have gone the Kotlin route with that project so this would be a good project.

July is another month with a Friday the Thirteenth in it so the Thirteen Spikes Unlimited (TSU) port would possibly be ideal. The current version of TSU was written in HAXE and compiled to Flash as there were issues with the JavaScript compilation. I will see if things have changed with that and if so this is simply re-compiling the project. If not, I have the core of Thirteen Squared Spikes to use as the base of this so it should be a very quick port.

August has String Along set up as it’s game which has already been completed so is guaranteed.

September is Coffee Quest which will be a WebGL game. As with Fleet, I will likely port this game to C++ and use emscripten to convert to web assembly and Asm.js. The construction set will not be part of this, but the extra maps may be. At the moment I am thinking of going weekly for september releasing a new map each week. This is just speculation at the moment with a final decision on what I will do to be made in September.

October is Nightmare Maze which happens to be the first episode of One of those Weeks. It is being referred to as Nightmare Maze as it is part of my book. I have big plans for One of those Weeks so there will be additional news about the project later this year (I hope).

Let’s face it. Coffee Quest was a very simple game, with the series only really starting to take of with the release of the second game in the series. This is why November will be Coffee Quest 2. It will be built on top of the Coffee Quest code base so will be in whatever language Coffee Quest ends up being released in. Again, I may release the extra maps every week but that is not certain yet.

Finally, also likely using the Coffee Quest engine, will be the high-def version of Santa’s Snowball. Higher resolution, better graphics, better sound, and 360 degree movement with an automap will make this Christmas game what I wish it was in 2017.

There may be additional surprises throughout the year, hopefully one involving One of those Weeks, but even without the extra releases I don’t think the year is too bad.

Return of the Games

It has been a while since I last wrote a post in this blog which makes sense as Blazing Games has closed. The site still remains up though it has not been updated other than adding a poll to determine which games are worth salvaging. The idea here is that the poll will be periodically checked to see which games visitors are most interested in so that I have a better idea of what order to port games in. While the larger games I created are positioned near the top as I expected, there are a few games that I am questioning why they are doing so well. Fleet I can sort of understand as Java applets are dead, but why is Towels for Earth so high up?

While Blazing Games is closing in 2019, I will slowly be porting the games and posting them on Spelchan.com. While I was using my homebrewgamejam.gamespot.ca account to cover the games as they were released, I really don’t like interrupting my emulator project especially as there is so much material that needs to be covered there. I have decided that for 2018 I would keep homebrewgamejam focused on the homebrew emulator and the construction of 2600 dragons (also surprisingly high on the list) while my game releases will be covered on this blog.  

I was in the process of rewriting my Flash Game Development book changing it to HTML5 development with the plan to break the book into two books. The first book would be about creating HTML5 games using Animate CC (which is the “successor” to Flash) while the second book would bypass the expensive Adobe software and create the games using the open source Create.js library that Animate CC itself uses. I was trying to see if I could publish these but some deals I was working on fell through. Since the point of the blog is to detail the making of the games, and the books are a glorified form of this, I am thinking that the first book will slowly be released on this site. Each week I will release a section of a chapter. When a chapter is finished, I will cover the making of and postmortem articles for the games that have been released to Spelchan.com while I was posting the chapter sections.

Next week will be a review post that will cover the game I will be releasing for January which due to the nature of the game that will be posted New Year’s Day will cover some of my plans for 2018.

2013 Plans

I am sure that anybody who regularly reads this blog already has a good idea what my plans for 2013 are, but I figure I should go over them anyway for the record. While I was originally planning on developing Color Collapse Plus over the year, that was before I actually started participating in game jams. I may still work on that project as it was my mothers favorite game, but my priority for 2013 will be on a number of larger commercial projects. As I want to have regular content for the site, I am planning on participating in game jams such as Ludum Dare. The games developed during these challenges will make up the bulk of the site game releases, with the remaining releases being updates of already existing games until I actually finish one of my larger projects.

My larger projects will be targeted towards tablets and possibly smart-phones. The target platforms will be iOS and Android, though I may also port to Windows 8 tablets/phones if the effort will not be too great. Once the tablet releases are done, I intend on porting the game to the browser (probably Flash but HTML 5 isn't inconceivable). The browser versions will be broken into a number of episodes and released in installments.

My game jam work will initially be done in Flash but as my GameJam library reaches maturity (hopefully by this summer) I will port it to HTML 5 and transition to using that if the performance is adequate. While ActionScript and JavaScript are very similar, I am just way more comfortable with ActionScript as it has language constructs that make it much nicer for working with larger-scale projects. Still, JavaScript is quickly becoming the language of the web, though a lot slower than the experts predicted. I personally think Flash will be viable for at least another 3-5 years. If Adobe gets their head out of their butt and create an ActionScript to JavaScript compiler it may be significantly longer though the resulting Flash programs would be "native" HTML 5. Sadly I suspect that Adobe will let Flash whither away and instead try to turn their new Edge Animate software into the replacement for Flash.

I have not decided which games I will be updating, so if anybody reading this feel free to email me with your favorite game and I will put that game on the top of my update list. Updating will include cosmetic updating as well as (for Java and Flash games) porting the game to HTML 5.

The future is collapsing.

When I wrote my original version of Color Collapse last millenium, it was in C++ for Windows 95. At that time the shareware scene was still strong and I had noticed that there were a lot of Tetris and Columns clones appearing. My personal design philosophy is that if you are going to "pay hommage" to a game, you should always have something original or new to add to the game. Obviously, there are exceptions to this rule (such as for existing card and board games) but I've always tried to put my own twist on any game that I am developing. With Color Collapse, that twist was to have the game board filled in at the start and the goal of the game was to clear the board.  I don't know if I was the first person to come up with this idea, probably not, but I was not aware of any other game that did this when I originally created the game.

When I finally decided to play around with web development a few years later, I ended up having to port the game from C++ to the then relatively new Java platform.  Last year I was going through the games I have created for the BlazingGames site with the goal of seeing what games could have enhanced versions created for it and came up with a lot of new play modes and special tiles that could be added to Color Collapse so decided it would be a good upgrade candidate. Unfortunately, before I got that project started properly, my mother was hospitalized and later died of cancer. The fact that my mother really enjoyed this game both has me wanting to finish this enhanced version while making working on it emotionally hard. The fact that the 2012 meme can only be exploited once dictated my plans for 2012 so this years releases are pretty tied up.

For this reason, I have decided that 2013 would be the year I really focused on properly enhancing this game. My 2011 plans were to write the game in Flash. Now that everyone is writing Flash off, even though I personally think it will be at least until 2016 that Flash will remain strong, I am thinking that HTML 5/JavaScript is probably the route to go with this game. The game is not overly complex so there should be no issues moving the game to JavaScript.

The sad thing is that even that decision is not a straightforward decision. I can use my existing (BGLayers) library for the game. I can switch to another open source library which would probably provide me with better performance and more already implemented features. I could also wait and see what Adobe's Edge tool does. From the tiny amount I have played with an early demo of the tool it does seem like a JavaScript version of Flash but different enough that I would probably have a lot of re-learning to do. All this is assuming I want to write JavaScript using JavaScript. As it turns out, that is not the only option.

Alternatives to writing native JavaScript is Google's PlayN which converts Java into JavaScript and has a game library as well. Also from Google is their Dart language which is in early stages. Then there is CoffeeScript which seems to be gaining a fairly large following.

This is one case where having too many options is just as bad as not having enough. About all I can say at this point in time is that the Color Collapse Plus project will be the site focus of 2013 (subject to change due to unforeseen factors or the incredibly unlikely event that the world really does end) and will be in HTML 5. The how is the tough question.

Adjusting Blazing Games Plans

Sorry for the long delay between posts. I will continue my series on the creation of Dozen Days of Tiles episode 3 next week as this week I am going to discuss the changes I am making to Blazing Games. With the added responsibilities that have come after my mother's death, I have been forced to rethink my plans for Blazing Games. This may be a good thing if I can stick to my new plans, but as I have a habit of falling back to my old way of doing things only time will tell. If you have visited the Blazing Games site, you may already know that I am switching the updating of the site to every other week. Quite frankly, once a month is just not often enough for what I want to do yet weekly is just too frequent. The games and open source releases that will appear on the site will be smaller games for the time being as I am going to start focusing on one large scale game at a time and that large scale game is going to be small enough that I should be able to complete it in a reasonable period of time. To prevent other people from stealing my work, sneak previews of my bigger project will either be older builds of the game or will have large chunks of the content omitted.

Right now Blazing Games is more of a hobby that just happens to earn enough to cover it's costs, unless you count my time in which case the books would be well into the red right now. Now that there are some, albeit a small number, of indies who are making a lot of money and many more who are making a living off of their creations, it is probably time that I focus on turning my hobby into a real business. While I happen to be in a good position at the moment, my mother's bout with cancer has been a brick to the back of the head reminder about how quickly things can change.

My spare-time playing around with the creation of a larger scale game (and my own Fantasy Combat game Engine) has taught me how much different it is developing a large scale game than the simple games I tend to have on my site. This has caused me to rethink my plans for my first larger game and break the development of the larger game down into a number of smaller games that will lead to the final game. As Blazing Games simply does not have enough visitors to justify exclusivity to the larger games, I am going to be experimenting with releasing the game on various game portals as well as experimentation with porting the games to the various phone platforms and their respective stores.

I do plan on continuing my open sourcing of older games from my site, but some of my favourite games will be upgraded and enhanced. Some of the tools I am developing for my larger scale projects will be released as open source as will some of the libraries that I am developing. Full games will probably continue to use the GPL license while libraries will use the far-less restrictive MIT license.

While the site will be updated every other week, this blog will be returning to a weekly release again, if only so I can get caught up with my making of DDT series. While I do hope I can turn Blazing Games into a real company, I know the odds are against me. Still, it is worth a try and right now I have the motivation, it is just a matter of finding enough of that elusive thing called "time".

Easter 2011

First, happy Easter everyone who celebrates it. While I was originally going to post a sneak preview of my Sudoku Generator (yes, it is in a functional state though as usual I am behind in writing the articles related to the development), the Easter bug bit me and I simply had to quickly make an Easter game. This was actually a fairly quick development as I took my Santa's Search game and my Evil Eggs games and simply merged the two. As I am the copyright holder for both games, I have no need to release the source code though plan to in the future.

The random egg generator from Evil Eggs was used to replace reindeer but this actually proved to be more difficult than originally anticipated. The difficulty came from having the inventory eggs match the pattern picked up. This resulted in a clone feature added to the egg generator. When designing the map, I opted for a much smaller 16x16 map as I felt the 32x32 map made the game play too long.

Still it is amazing how quick I was able to get this game finished despite unexpected problems. I think a lot of the speed has to do with familiarness with the source code.

Mythical Man-Month

One of the more interesting books that I read when I was in school was "The Mythical Man-Month" by Fred Brooks. This is the book that resulted in Brook's law, which is "Adding more programmers to an already late project will result in the project becoming even later." The point was that more people results in more overhead which results in diminishing returns so at some point adding more people to a project will actually increase the development time required to complete a project. Being a one and a half person team working part time, this isn't really an issue for me. What got me thinking about the book, however, was my looking into the indie development scene and noticing that small teams are becoming the standard.

It is interesting that in the early days of commercial game development (actually, pretty much all early software) was a single person working on the project. Slowly that changed to small teams. The team sizes began to grow, and now we have AAA commercial titles that cost hundreds of millions of dollars to create and have team sizes of hundreds of people. I don't think indie development will require that large of teams but I honestly never ever expected game teams to grow so large.

When you hear about a team putting together a game in 6 months, that is the time the team takes. If the team is 4 people, then a single person should be able to do the same thing in 2 years. But, that does not take the overhead into account. As I have the tendency to take on far larger projects than I should, this is actually scary to think about.

Still, I think watching a project evolve can be interesting and has the potential to improve the project if there is feedback so the larger projects I am working on will start to be posted to Blazing Games as sneak previews. Hopefully there will be more feedback than there was on my recent poll, but time will tell. If I find returning to a weekly release format is too much of a hindrance, I can always cut back to monthly or quarterly again.

Decision 2011

For the first few days of April I am having a poll on my Blazing Games site to determine the future of the site. Right now the ad revenue on the site covers the costs of running the site but does not earn enough to actually pay me for my time or effort. For that reason I am trying to focus on some larger projects which can either be put on other portal sites or possibly sold commercially as indie titles. Phone platforms are definitely being considered. This leads to the question of what should be done with the Blazing Games site. I was thinking of returning to a weekly format, with sneak previews, betas, and incremental upgrades to existing games on the site being the focus. Alternatively, remaining monthly puts a bit less pressure on me so I can focus on my larger scale games. Perhaps the best choice, however, would be to go quarterly with the site updates and just focus on the larger scale games.

I was originally planning on posting the results of the poll today, but so few people have voted. Worse, half the votes have been for the non-committal whatever choice. For that reason I am going to leave the vote up for a few more days before making my decision. If you are reading this before April 7th, 2011 and haven't voted yet, please do so.

Thirteen Spikes Unlimited 1.0

Thirteen Spikes Unlimited is now finished and has been on the Blazing Games site since Friday the 13th. As I have mentioned before, there was some plans to port the game over to HTML 5. ActionScript and JavaScript are very close as they are both variations of ECMAScript. This makes the game logic very quick to port, even if JavaScript does not have as nice of class or variable support as ActionScript. The other thing that ActionScript has that JavaScript lacks is the Flash library. Because Flash was created as a streaming vector animation system, this library is greatly tied to graphics and animation. The HTML 5 Canvas simply does not have these classes, but there would be very little stopping someone from writing them. In fact, to implement Thirteen Spikes Unlimited, only a small subset of the class library would be needed.

This would require a bit more time than I have, so the port to HTML 5 didn't happen and instead themes, campaigns, and sound were added to finish off the 1.0 version. This does not mean that the next Friday the 13th won't have a HTML 5 version of this game. That would be May of 2011, so depending what is happening with my current projects (one which may be doomed) this might be an interesting project. So, while Thirteen Spikes is finished for now, it may resurface in the future.

Plans for the remainder of 2010

I am about to embark on a rather interesting third-party project while continuing my own project so the amount of time that will be dedicated to the Blazing Games site will be reduced in the short term. The third-party project will probably appear on Blazing Games once it is done as will my own project but as both of those are large-scale projects. Thankfully, 3 of the 5 months are mostly done, one of the months can be done in a day, and the final one can be reduced from 4 layouts to 2 layouts.

I really don't like posting my release plans as things have a way of changing quickly causing my plans to be altered. Still, I suppose it won't hurt as long as it is clearly understood that these plans are subject to change without notice.

The August game will not be released until the 13th as it is the 1.0 version of Thirteen Spikes Unlimited. I am thinking of porting it to HTML 5, but am not sure about that plan now that my time has been reduced even further. September will be the final episode of Dozen Days of Words. October will be the Vampire Attack 2 open source release. Thoughts of porting to HTML 5 are there but again I doubt there will be time. November will be a couple more Tarot layouts. Finally, Dungeon Romp Christmas Edition in 3D will finish off the year.

A sneak peak at May 2010

Next month is going to be interesting as Blazing Games will be updated daily for 27 days. Sometimes a project turns out to be far larger than it seems. Other times, as is the case with the project that will be revealed next month, feature-creep causes a simple project to balloon in scope. There is an easy way of accomplishing this project, and then there is the more thorough way which is the road I foolishly decided to take. In the past, I would have taken the easy road with the idea of having regular content appearing on BlazingGames.com but my more relaxed release schedule and willingness to release projects iteratively, I have no hesitation in building this project to the more ambitious specifications. The scary thing, is even when I have reached all the development targets for the 1.0 release, there is a lot of room for expansion so this new project may be revisited many times in the future.

The version of the project that will be released next month is the 0.1 version, as it is not close to the final goal of the project. This is really about a quarter to half the way towards the project completion, but the remaining portions of the project will be posted in three other months. While the second month of releases will be June or July, the other two parts that lead to the 1.0 release may be delayed by a number of months. This is being done so other stuff (hopefully stuff that people not interested in next months project will like) can be released.

From a programming perspective, next month's release is very simple. From an asset creation point of view, this is a monster project. This is actually a rather nice change for me as I am spending a fair bit of time doing creative writing. Still, I want to be coding and am hoping that a third-party project that seems to be in a perpetual delay loop will see the light of day. If the delay continues, I will probably re-start my equivalent to Duke Nukem Forever. The difference here is that my DNF project hasn't been continually in development but simply continually goes through fits and starts then gets shelved when paying work or other crisis happen.

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

Negotiations are a gamble

JavaScript and the HTML 5 canvas are the things that were going to be discussed yesterday but too many other things prevented me from writing the post. I wrote an interesting email today. The contents of that email was "I did not authorise or send any press release as the project was still being negotiated and is currently in an impasse. I assume that this press release was sent by my potential client prematurely, for which I apologise." Perhaps it is best that my "weekly" post was delayed as I have a different topic now.

There is a song about poker that states "you have to know when to walk away, and know when to run." This applies to negotiating as well. There were many warning signs that should have been picked up on, but I don't enter negotiations very often so never acted on them. The problem is that the project sounded rather interesting and if successful would have really given a boost to Blazing Games. When there were more and more misunderstandings, I should have walked away. The problem appears that I came at the project from a web developers perspective while the potential client was looking at the project through a commercial game perspective. Our assumptions simply did not match.

While it is possible that things could have been worked out, this morning I found some strange emails about a press release that I did not send. Worse, the emails were to my private email address that I rarely give out and would never use for a Blazing Games related press release if I ever made a press release.  The press release was about the proposed game. It is possible that this was a mistake and that whoever issued the press release did so by mistake. The cynical side of me, which sadly is right far too often, thinks other things. Too many false assumptions when combined with this premature announcement clearly are telling me it is time to run.

Sadly, the only time negotiations are worth-while is when they end in a deal. The rest of the time they just waist time. Time is my most precious resource so it is truly a sad day today. At least Penny Arcade cheered me up.

Making Space Station Defence

The Space Station Defence game that has just been posted on Blazing Games is not the game that I planned to release in March. I was actually planning on releasing another episode of Dozen Days of Words, possibly both of the final episodes. After just starting work on episode 11, I came up with a concept for an arcade game. I figured I would take a few hours and build a quick prototype of this game. While assembling the prototype, I realized that the game would simply not be fun. Before dropping my prototype, I went for a walk as in the Okanagan Valley we are having an unusually warm winter with all our snow melted already. While some people may blame our warm weather on global warming, I know that the real reason is because I bought a bunch of exercise games for my Wii. While I have lost a lot of weight, I still have a way to go. My own long history of dieting has taught me that the only way I can lose weight and keep it off is by exercising. Now that I have audiobooks and podcasts to listen to while walking, I have drastically increased the amount of exercise I do. While this might not seem to have anything to do with game development, walking helps my mind sort through it's myriad of thoughts. A simple change turned a dead prototype into a released game.

The original concept was a shield game. The player would have a shield around their space station. This shield would slowly recover but could be rotated. As the player took damage, they would simply rotate the shield. In theory this sounds interesting. The problem is that actual game-play isn't much fun.

During my walk, I came up with two different solutions. The first would be to have a non-destructible shield but one that only protected a small portion of the space station. The other method was to slow down shield recharging and give the player missiles to shoot back. As the later idea sounded more fun I went with that. The game lasted too long with recharging shields, so in fine tuning I removed that feature. As I already had three different shield levels, I also opted to have three different difficulty levels. I think another pass or two would have been nice, but I simply have not had the time.

Does this mean that the eleventh episode of Dozen Days of Words is going to be released in April? To be honest, I don't know. I do want to start experimenting with HTML5 so I hope to have a game that takes advantage of the canvas element. This feature is already supported by most browsers, and there is a JavaScript library that adds canvas support to Internet Explorer. Microsoft seems to be exceedingly slow at adding HTML5 features to their browser. I suspect they are trying to shove Silverlight down everyone's throat. HTML5 would make Silverlight mostly irrelevant. To be honest, I am starting on my HTML5 migration much sooner than I ever anticipated largely due to Mozilla, Google and Apple's push for HTML5 features.

Is Trivia Trivial?

The enhanced version of history bomb has been posted on Blazing Games. My rant on efficient programming will continue next week, this week I am going to talk a bit about trivia as the game just releases is a type of trivia game.

On the surface, trivia games seem to be something that is easy to create. As someone who has written a fair number of them, some for third parties, my knowledge of the subject is fairly high. Programming a trivia game is in fact very simple. The game logic for a trivia game is in fact trivial to write. The server-side database/score handling and the user interface were what took up the vast majority of time. This makes sense when you think about it as ultimately trivia is just a variation of the simplest of all computer games. That game being the pick-a-number game. The difference is that the numbers are answers and random numbers are used to scramble the potential answers. There is one thing that makes the trivia games on my site different from the third-party games that I have written. For the third-party games I wrote, I didn't have to come up with questions.

Coming up with the questions for a trivia game may sound simple but it is a fairly time-consuming process. First you need to come up with a subject that you think that the people playing the game will be interested in that you also have some knowledge of. Next you have to come up with a question. This would be similar to writing a question for a test, except the question has to fit a particular format. In Trivia Bomb it was a simple multiple-choice question. History Bomb, on the other hand, is a sorted list. I will say that multiple-choice is much easier to come up with questions as one only needs to make sure his or her answer is correct then come up with wrong answers. Sure, it is time consuming, but it is very flexible. Lists requires finding something that has a distinct order to it. Then verifying that order. In some cases, this meant not only researching the subject, but then having to do additional research on each item on the list.

The bright side, though, is that the extended version of History Bomb has no time limit for its development. When the game-in-a-day pressure is removed, researching questions was much more enjoyable though probably even more time consuming. What trivia-question-writers probably don't want you to know is that just diving into a subject to verify facts often leads to much further exploration of a topic. I suppose there is the obvious "looking for other potential questions" excuse.

While coming up with questions is not hard work, it is time consuming work. Still, when creating a trivia game, it is probably best to remember that the questions are going to have to be created (unless you do the low-life thing and steal questions from other people). When I play a trivia game in the future, I am going to remember that each question probably took far longer to create then I will ever spend answering it.

History Bombs a couple days early

It has been a while. My plans were to continue posting every week or so, but things are busy here so I kind of kept forgetting. Things may continue to stay busy based on how well a proposal I am working on goes but I will try my best to post at least a short article every other week if not every week. To make up for my delay, here is a sneak preview of February's game. http://blazinggames.com/table/dozenDays/words/historyBomb.php.