It seems my Ludum Dare game Graviton is popular enough to use up all my bandwidth.
My website is now hosted on a better server with unlimited bandwidth.
I just finished fixing everything to work on the new server.

Ludum Dare time again.
The theme was 'Enemies as Weapons'
I decided to go with simple this time as I generally tend to be over ambitious with competition games. Consequentially a lot of my entries are incomplete. I also decided on using flash mainly to be playable online and so be more accessible.

My entry is Graviton. Play it.

I finally managed to enter a Ludum Dare 48hour competition.

My entry is a but unfinished and buggy but many of the core mechanics are there.
You play as a dragon flying around an archipelago of floating islands. The objective is to set fire to as many sheep as possible.

Results: I came 40th out of 204 entries.

Uploaded a new game today: The Alan Massacre. Basically hunt alan clones with a shotgun.
It was written for a challenge set by Alan to make a game with the theme 'Kill Alan', and continued for his later challenge to finish a game. It could still do with more stuff but it is good enough as a quick game.

I also updated my website again - the backend that nobody else will see is now even more slick. The project form now has dynamic link adding, file and image uploading. I can add, remove and reorder the link input boxes. Yay for JavaScript. I also updated my markup that is used for the journal section and the project descriptions to include images and hyperlinks.

Finally got round to fixing the development tab of the projects page to include projects that im currently developing, rather than everything not marked as released. Been meaning to do that since I rewrote the page a long time ago.

Found out about LOLCode yesterday so of course I had to do something with it.
I made a JavaScript interpreter for it, playing around with JavaScript...
It needs some methods of of version 1.7 so it only works in Firefox at the moment.

Its irritating how all the browsers seem to be different, for example: Chrome supports JavaScript 1.7 but the way to specify it is completely different.
Not really sure why but you have to tell the browser specifically to use 1.7 in the script tag. There may be another way but I didn't find one. I have no idea how to get it to work in Opera, and didn't try IE (I'm using Linux). Also the layout seems slightly different in Opera???

I suppose I could just not use the 1.7 stuff as its only needed for pausing execution to wait for input. Using prompt() would work but that is not so neat.

I rewrote the backend of my website again. This is a test message to see if it works.
Note: some of the links in the journal section may be broken as I moved some of the files around.

There are hundreds of webcomics around.
Most of them get updated from time to time.
Only a few of them have RSS, and even that doesnt help if you looking through the archives.

This program keeps track of where you were in each comic, checks for updates, and displays the comics in a way that is easy to read. The program works with most webcomics. It is written in java to be compatible with many platforms.


Uploaded version 1.2. Check the readme for version info.

The download comes with the definitions for some comics to get started. The readme also has instructions for adding other comics. If you find a webcomic that doesn't work, leave a comment and I will make it work. Most problems can be solved by tweaking the comic definition, though some are to do with unforeseen circumstances or program limitations. If this is the case, I will endeavour to fix it for the next release.

Yet another 48 hour competition last weekend, the theme this time was procedural generation. In our entry, you fly down an infinite cave destroying infinite furry caterpillars of doom to get a high score.

The results are in - We won!
More details and download links on the project page.

Like many people, I tend to read far too many webcomics. Keeping track of them all can be annoying so I looked around for something to do that for me. I found surprisingly little. The best thing was a program that did pretty much exactly what I wanted: yawr. There were a few problems with it, the main one being that it crashes ALL THE TIME!

The solution - write my own. This program is written in Java and does everything yawr does and more, for example filters, zoom, error reporting etc...
Get it from my applications page or follow the link above to get it and see the awesomeness, and get totally hooked on some of the great webcomics around.

Forgot to post about the last competition (27/02/2009).
Anyway, I've uploaded our entry to the projects page. The game, Sokoboom, is a physics based game where you use explosions to move objects to a target location. The game is much more successful than some of our previous entries as we managed to get a complete, fun game at the end of the 48 hours.
I started work on a level editor for it after the competition, I will upload that when it is done.

Results are in. We came first place in this competition! Unfortunately there is no detailed breakdown this time.