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.

Pink unicorns

While I did successfully finish a prototype, I decided that it would be best not to release the game so instead of a postmortem this week, I am going to get on my soapbox. Feel free to skip the rest of this post.

I have noticed that there seems to be an ever-growing number of people who don't seem to know the difference between facts and beliefs. I have written the following to help shed light on this issue.

Let us say that I had an invisible rock. It is just a regular rock with no special properties other than being invisible. Let us say that I believed this invisible rock was an invisible rock. My beliefs would be correct but without evidence they would still be just beliefs.

Let us say that you believed my invisible rock was an invisible pink unicorn. Your beliefs would be wrong. If you got together a number of friends who also believed the invisible rock was an invisible pink unicorn, the invisible rock would still not be an invisible pink unicorn. No matter how much you believed that the invisible rock was an invisible pink unicorn it would not change the fact that the invisible rock was just an invisible rock and not an invisible pink unicorn.

Let us say that everybody in the world believed that the invisible rock was an invisible pink unicorn. That would still not change the fact that the invisible rock was just an invisible rock.

Without compelling evidence a belief is just an opinion. Compelling evidence should be focused, as blindly tested as possible, independently repeatable, and statistically significant.  Compelling evidence is sometimes hard to find and some things are simply not provable even if they may be true. If you can not back up your beliefs with evidence, then they are just your opinions.

In other words, when I say I think the invisible rock is an invisible rock, telling me that my denying the pink unicorn means that I am a follower of the nightmare and that will be denied from entering ponyville is probably not a very compelling argument. A rational response would be to provide evidence supporting your view. If the evidence doesn't exist (or worse, exists but doesn't support your beliefs) then the belief may need more scrutiny.