Octopress and S3

I’ve finally moved this site over to Octopress and S3. There is a lot of work to be done, the most pressing of which is fixing leftover broken images, implementing code highlighting, and fixing some theme stuff (like the navigation links), but other than that it’s going ok. The move overall was pretty hassle-free with no real problems. I ended up with the following setup:

• Octopress (originally Wordpress)
• Amazon S3 for hosting (originally Micron21)
• Outlook.com for email hosting (originally Micron21 forwarded to Gmail)
• Amazon Route 53 for the DNS service (originally Micron21)

One Game a Month - 12 games this year

Now, on to One Game a Month. I did a six-month checkin…well…six months ago and now it’s time to put it all together.

I will copy the descriptions of the first six games from my previous 6-month recap here.

• January - Making Alien Tree taught me how to procedurally generate a tree-like structure. It’s also taught me how to simulate simple weather effects and a day/night cycle.

• February - While working on My Mind Is Going I learned about making a rhythm game.

• March - While making Promiscuous Flea I played around with object pooling.

• April - Porting KROOG to the Chrome Web Store taught me about…porting stuff to the Chrome Web Store.

• May - For Game of Snails I learned about Node.js, Socket.IO, Mongoose, and how client-server communication is implemented in general in regards to JS games. I also learned a bit about snail genetics and creating breeding systems. This project was important for me because the idea for this game has been in my head for years and I never had the ability to implement it before. I hope to keep building on the very rough draft.

• June - Here I worked on Interdiction and learned about making a turn based board game using ImpactJS.

• July - For July I added a single player AI component to the June game - Interdiction. Think of it as Interdiction Part 2. I learned about how much of a pain in the ass trying to create rudimentary AI can be.

• August - August was also the month of js13kGames (a challenge where you make a browser games that is less than 13kb when zipped up). I made a game called TSVETT (“Color” in Russian), which got 8th place in the Mobile category. In this game you try to help a little dude named Lucky bounce across the screen as fast as he can before time runs out. I learned all about color matching, conversion, and color difference formulae.

• September - September was a bit of a bust. David and I had a great kernel of an idea, but we kind of lost it somewhere along the way. The game, Circle vs Square was basically about protecting a blue circle while clusters of squares tried to attack it. You did this by shooting them and picking up energy pellets which could then be used to draw walls to block the “squarderoids”. Because the walls could be constructed in any direction I couldn’t use Impact’s normal collision detection and had to hack together a quick custom solution.

• October - Time to Die was my first attempt at a 3D game in Unity. Needless to say I learned a lot. You play as a die and have to try to roll yourself ont the designated side to have good things happen to your set of adventurers.

• November - November was a 2D platformer called 9 to 5. You are a regular guy trying to get through the day. Until…well, you’ll just have to play it.

• December - For the last game I took it pretty easy and made a game called Simon Says (Very original). You have to click on colored circles in the correct order

The game that has gotten the most external attention this year has been my January game Alien Tree. It’s kind of funny (to me) that the very first game was also the one people were the most interested in. It got covered on a couple of indie game sites and YouTube videos, which drove more traffic.