GameDevBlog

Belated Tournament Results, 2/26/2012

This time I have no excuse for being late, but last week it was jumsimbab87 with 4757973 points - followed by joseph7099 with 3110631.

This week jumsimbab87 doesn't seem to have entered the arena yet - but it looks like joseph7099 already has a lock with (*&^ing 6637309 points! I believe it was Keanu Reeves who once said, "Woah."

 

Belated Tournament Results, 2/19/12 ... whoops

What with President's Day and my wife's birthday totally spaced taking a screenshot of the leaderboards yesterday, but the champion was joseph7099 with 2878781. (I came in second, with my personal best score ever of 2755228.)

And the competition is already crazy this week. I haven't seen scores over 3 million since the last big game-mechanic-tuning-change, but this week we've got 3 and 4 million!

 

Spend a few minutes writing a story today

#saturdayshortshortstory

Something reading Johnstone's *Impro* reminded me of - writing fiction can be fun. And it doesn't have to take forever.

Tournament Results, 2/12/12


justinwyma is this week's world champion!

Man, I didn't even place this week...

How Do Stay At Home Dads Get Any Coding Done?

So lately I've been juggling being a stay at home dad, teaching at DigiPen, and making games. Not surprisingly, my game-making productivity is a lot lower than I'm used to. Kids tend to interrupt your train of thought often and unpredictably, and we all know that coding requires large blocks of uninterrupted time.

I'm wondering if there are any tricks I can use to get crap done, above and beyond the usual productivity tricks you hear about. (Shut off your social media, only check your e-mail a few times a day, track your time, etc.)

I tried googling 'house husband programming' and 'stay at home dad programming' but mostly got articles on how society looks down upon stay at home dads. 

Anybody got anything? If nobody does, I suppose I'll try some experiments and then report back.

Tournament Results, 2/5/12


jumsimbab87 is back, reclaiming the championship title.

Notice those green arrows? You can scroll through the leaderboards now. I had to implement that just so I could take a screenshot of the top spot, because the competition has really picked up, and this was the best I could do this week.

You can't not look at it!

I fairly regularly check the Chrome Web Store to see how high sixty second shooter is in the listings. This is the first time I've seen it like this:

In the large size! Just last weekend, with help from Cathy on the design, I redid my logo art. Looks like it's paid off - there must be an actual human at Google who judges whether these tiles are worthy.

Also, following advice from Lars Doucet (and cribbing extensively from his press release of Defender's Quest) recently did a press release on gamespress.com, a place where anyone can do a free press release about their game. It almost immediately got duplicated on Gamasutra and some other sites, and I saw an immediate spike in website activity and installs. Before that, I'd been cold-calling various game websites and been getting mostly ignored, so. This is something.

Really Cool Game - The Fourth Wall

Just stumbled on this yesterday - it was a free game pick of the week on an indie blog, but I forget which one. http://thefourthwallgame.com/ 

It's really clever. I wish I could erase my memory so I could play it again for the first time.

And it turns out, coincidentally, that Logan Feith, one of the guys who made it, is in my class at DigiPen. What are the odds?