Regarding this news story:Â http://www.engadget.com/2012/12/04/netflix-strikes-licensing-agreement-with-disney-will-be-exclusi/
I was talking with a friend (Jon Badeen, @badeen on twitter (http://badeen.com)) during one of our NSCoder meetups when I read this news. He brought up an excellent point: Apple’s streaming service must be far away. Unless Apple completed dropped the ball, would Disney be signing an exclusive contract with Netflix if an Apple service was on its way? I really would hope not, considering how close their relationship is. On the other hand different news sites keep reporting on how Apple execs (notably Tim Cook) are talking about how movie/tv streaming is a big focus for them. Maybe they’re more focused on TV shows, but Disney has a decent number of those as well. In any case, I’m not looking for anything from Apple in the near future (although they do tend to surprise).
I found this post in my drafts folder. I’m not sure I ever reached a consensus in my own thoughts on this, but I figure I’ll post it anyway.
I was reading this article linked on reddit from IGN called Playing Games for all the Wrong Reasons by Justin Davis, and the author states that the times in his life where he played videogames the most are times of high stress or difficulty in his life, where he needed to achieve/be successful at something and used video games to do that. Then he questions whether or not this is healthy and whether people use video games to hide from their fear of failure.
I’m not entirely sure I agree with the direction he was trying to take with the article. Videogames, like many other media, are a form of escapism. I know that personally during finals in High School and College I would often end up watching episode after episode of a TV Show on Netflix that I had never cared about before, or reading a couple books I had been meaning to get to, or play some videogames. Everything that wasn’t studying for classes was suddenly extremely interesting! Now was I trying to achieve success with these activities? I don’t think so.
My goal was simple: escape. I was tired of studying, mentally and physically. I needed a break so I would do something that allowed me to relax my brain. Games act the same way. If your life is causing you stress, yes you could spend all day worrying about it, but sometimes you need a break, to refresh, to recharge. The same thing applies to programming, if you can’t figure out a problem, take a break, relax, come back to it fresh. Videogames are just one way of doing that. Do you get feedback in games? Definitely. Is it so bad to leave everything behind? I don’t think so. Now whether or not you can stop yourself from playing to get back to your original problem is something that’s entirely up to you, whether you escape by playing games, reading, or other things entirely.
The more I’m writing this post, the more I seem to be agreeing with the author. I guess my main point is I don’t feel like it’s a negative thing to escape your worries for a while. Going on a hike or a vacation are not seen as negative things to do to escape, and video games allow you to do that even if you can’t take time off.
I find myself often writing a comment on some site like reddit or Hacker News, and deleting it because it doesn’t fit well there or I figure it won’t be seen (any post after 30 minutes on reddit). So I figured I’d start writing those comments here, to at least get my ideas down so I don’t just hit the cancel button. Hopefully I’ll be posting more of those soon.
I spent some of this holiday weekend installing SFML 2.0 from their git repository. The install went fine (I had to remember to install both the Debug and Release versions). The default code displays a nice little image and plays a sound. Looking through their API documentation it looks like a pretty simple and nice library to use for graphics and audio. It’s very easy to create an image, and any number of sprites from that image to manipulate around the screen. All the functionality is there as needed. You can even mix in OpenGL code right with their drawing code if you need to.
Now for the bad. I’ve been playing around with taking simple user input and maneuvering the default image around the screen. However, on my machine, quite capable of this task, the sprite stutters across even though the framerate stays steady. Perhaps I just haven’t figured out some oddness in how the key presses get handled, but I’m following their examples pretty closely. I’m going to look into it more, but initial impression has me frustrated.
Well, after a bit of discussion and testing, we’ve settled on our main libraries for Project Ballersauce (ok, we haven’t actually picked a codename yet). As stated earlier, we need cross platform libraries as we are not all on Mac machines. We’ve currently settled on:
Simple and Fast Multimedia Library for our graphics.
Chipmunk Physics to handle all of our platformer physics and collision stuff.
It’s now time to start playing around with these libraries and figure them out. If any cool stuff comes out of it I’ll post screenshots!
The largest Mac Game Programming contest ever is officially announced. It begins July 1st and runs for 3 months. There’s going to be plenty of sweet prizes and I’m definitely excited to enter. The last uDevGames was in 2008, I believe I started a couple entries but never got very far. This year I’m going to be working with a couple of my coworkers at VOKAL to try to make a competitive entry! Our team may be a bit bigger than I’m used to, but it should be quite awesome. More information about uDevGames can be found at http://www.udevgames.com
I’m going to write more about our entry as the contest approaches and once we start. No code can start until July 1st, but we’re definitely planning out how we want our game to be. Our initial idea is pretty cool so we’ll see how it goes! Currently we’re looking into a variety of cross-platform 2D Graphics libraries to see which will fit our needs best. Our current list I’m looking into are here:
http://www.libsdl.org
http://www.glfw.org/
http://www.sfml-dev.org/
http://love2d.org/wiki/love
Ideally we have it narrowed down by next week and a greater design document for our game as well. I’ll be posting tidbits from it soon I hope!
I’ve decided to get into web development a bit. I figure it’s a good way to start utilizing my python knowledge in a more constructive manner. I started off playing around with Google App Engine, which was really neat in a lot of ways. It made it easy to quickly publish it, which was pretty neat, and their database management was quite cool. However, I have this domain and software hosting, and I wanted to start with development that I could use in a couple of different locations. That reminded me that I’ve been meaning to learn how to work with Django. I went through their basic tutorials as well and I’m starting to quite enjoy it. It relaly allows for rapid development, which is great. Hopefully there will be some updates soon with different projects I’m working on. Maybe I’ll get around to making my homepage!
It’s been a week of school, and I never really ended up posting any more over winter break. I was pretty busy with work and all, so not much happened. However, back at school now. I do, however, have a minor rant about this whole Facebook issue (where they were going to let Web Apps that use facebook access to users’ phone numbers).
Facebook reminds me of one of those pre-school bullies. They poke and prod you, to see how far they can go before you call the teacher. Then when the teacher yells at them, they claim they didn’t do anything, and they’ll never do it again, and go right back to it. It’s always the same with these privacy issues. They slowly give up more and more of our information, then suddenly all of our purchases are appearing on our wall, and users finally realize that something bad is going on. They complain, facebook apologizes and provides some new security toggle hidden amongst all their other security toggles, and then a couple months later, our phone numbers are being shared. Users realize this is bad again and complain, and facebook apologizes again. But in the meantime the friend feature has become a follow, advertisers have everything, and the user-base only complains about what they can actually perceive as invading their privacy. Everyone knows what happens when their phone number becomes wide knowledge (telemarketers anyone?), but not the rest of the privacy concerns that pop up in between. Â I do have a Facebook account still, because it doesn’t actually matter if I delete it or not, the data is still in their system, but I very rarely use it, and do not use my Facebook account to log in to any other website. I hope I never have to. It just tires me to read every couple months about another outrage from Facebook, and wonder when anyone will ever learn.
Back home in Chicago for winter break and doing a bit of dev work. I’m working at the same iPhone Development firm I have been for the last couple years for the few weeks of break. I’ve been meaning to work more on the Octopus recently, I just can’t seem to find any motivation. Was catching up on lack of sleep and stress from finals this weekend, and now regular work has started. Hopefully will find motivation soon.
I’ve been thinking of making a level editor, it would be something new and cool to work on and could be helpful to extend the play-length of the game (yay 2 levels so far). But that may just be procrastinating from adding new things into the game itself. I guess part of the problem is while the game is kinda fun to play, I don’t really enjoy it. It isn’t nearly as enjoyable as I want it to be. I do have some highly reusable code so I may scrap the current gameplay and start over, but i don’t know if that’s a better idea. I know on the one hand sticking to it is good, but there’s no point working on a game you don’t like as it won’t be enjoyable. Or I could just be being lazy and making excuses :P. I’m looking forward to having some more time as break continues.
So, the school portion of my game is now complete! Four weeks of pretty steady work does not, unfortunately, yield a complete game to me, but I think I have a pretty good start and a lot of code that I can work from. Luckily early weeks I spent on making reusable classes like my Image class (which wraps the Texture2D class) for drawing images easily and efficiently, an Animation class to hold any sprite animations I have, and others. The past two weeks, Thanksgiving break included, have been spent working on the Entities of the game (player, enemies, objects), and collision detection. My collision is still a bit ugly, but I can work on that more. I do however have Keys the player can pick up, which can open chests or doors. (An idea I came up with while designing the levels, is not to let the player have enough keys to open all doors/chests, so trial and error is required to find the best routes). Portals transfer the user to another level. All level objects/enemies are defined in the map file, and there’s even a simple menu. Overall, I’m excited to have some time over winter break to work on the game with the base I have right now. And of course, more screenshots!
