Project 1: Third Season of The Blog

Happy Birthday!

Well, not birthday. Happy Project Ending Day and Happy Project Start Day. More precisely, Happy Blog Start and End Day!

Today is the last day of the Second Season of the Blog. Today is also first day of the Third Season of the Blog.

The Second Season of the Blog was not all I'd hoped it would be. I wanted to be really good about regular updating, which I haven't really been. I've managed to post in every month of the second season, ranging from 1 post to 11, but not as regularly as I'd hoped.

By far and away I've been best about posting my "favourite YouTube videos", managing 27 of them in total. I've also managed to post 5 "Thoughts on Games", which is fewer than I'd hoped. Finally I tested out "Cool Things of the Week", before deciding that it would be better served living on twitter.

I'm glad I've managed to post as much as I have, although I would like to write more and more regularly. I did manage to finish my PhD coursework and my candidacy during that time, which certainly has more priority.

That being said, I've managed to keep up with the blog for a whole year and for that much at least I'm pretty happy.

The Third Season of the Blog starts now. I'm not planning to change my content that much although I'm hoping to change my schedule/quantity and improve my quality.

Ideally I want to post twice a week for the foreseeable future. This would mean one favourite YouTube videos post, probably on Friday and one other post sometime during the week (hopefully on Tuesdays, but no promises). This other post will be thoughts on video games or something else, if I happen to have a project update (and ideally I'll have more of these than I have so far) then that will count too.

As far as quality, I'm hoping to spend a bit more time writing each post. I also hope that my quality will naturally improve simply by getting more practice.

Hopefully I can keep this up for another year. So the third season will last until August 1, 2014.

Thanks for reading, and keep getting excited and making things.

Blog: Favourite YouTube Videos (Volume 35)

In this volume of my favourite YouTube videos we get the chance to talk about creativity, hats, story telling and bowser's arms.

• The first set of videos are from Charlie McDonnell. A while ago he decided (if that's the right word) to have a "YouTube Midlife Crisis" and he talked about some of his creative stresses. He also talked about some of his rules for YouTube videos, which I think are also interesting rules to look at for any creative endeavour. Interestingly I didn't favourite Part 2 of his rules, but had to watch that video immediatly after I watched Part 1 so I decided to throw it in as a bonus.
• Next, did you know that Team Fortress 2 has a story? Well now you do, and it only took a minute, thanks to the Lore Team.
• For all that I like Belated Media, I wasn't exactly sure why I'd favourited this video ... until the last 5 seconds. Stay tuned kids. Stay tuned. (Although it is a bit spoilery for A Cabin in The Woods)
• Finally, we have the kick off episode of Chuggaconroy's Let's Play of  Super Paper Mario. As with most Let's Play's I tend to favourite the first episode if the whole series is worth while and this one is. It's a lot of fun and is apt to keep you distracted for a while to come.

Project 4: A Further Surprise Snake Update (Version 0.2.0)

So it seems I still have a lot of procrastinating to do. I've managed to turn out another version of Snake. (This time version 0.2.0).

This version introduces:

* Awful Sound Effects - it's weird old beeps, that kinda appealed to me
* Mute - press 'M' to turn off the awful sound effects (this doesn't preserve between games yet)
* Scaling Snake Colour - now as the snake grows it fades to grey towards the end of it's tail. This makes it easier to see which way you're going (especially when coming back from pause).

Please play and let me know in the comments if you run into any problems or bugs or any thoughts at all really.

You can get the game from these links:

• The Windows 32-bit version and the Windows 64-bit version
• The Mac OSX version
• The Linux 32-bit version and the Linux 64-bit version

Thanks as always!

Project 4: A Surprise Update on the Snake (Version 0.1.0)

Again, my skills in procrastination have allowed me to get things done. This time, now that I don't have it as an active project, I managed to put out a revision of the Snake game.

This version introduces a couple of new features:

• Pausing! Now you can press 'p' to stop the game whenever you want. To resume the game just press any of the arrow keys and start going again. 
• Bouncing Scores! I'm sure I'm the only person who cares, but now when you hit a target the score bounces up and down a little bit. It's not amazing animation, but it's something.
• Proper key handling. This doesn't change the game at all, but I was able to apply a lot of the things I've learned about Processing.org and realized that the tutorial I'd followed way back in the beginning had a strange way of handling key presses (relying on the main loop of the program). Now I've updated it to use proper event handling. 

You can download the update:

• The Windows Versions (32-bit, and 64-bit)
• The Mac OS X Version
• The Linux Versions (32-bit and 64-bit)

If you'd care to beta test this for me I'd really appreciate it. Leave me your thoughts in the comment section.