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  • 2 min read

Game Design: Tiled Game Boards

I've spent the last few weeks in dribs and drabs building a new game for Android. Lately I got deeper on what it means to have a 'tiled' game space display where you construct the appearance of the game space by arranging a series of graphic images based on what's needed for a certain level of the game. The idea is that you get essentially data driven graphics.

In my case the game space is a maze, ostensibly a map of a neighborhood. Creating these, still rather ugly tiles, is fairly painstaking both to understand what the tiles are in your vocabulary to be able to create a variety of game levels, and then to do the graphic design and actual image files for these baybies.

Here you can see a basic game space over three generations of my art work, from unrecognizable to simply ugly. You know I like my software to be 'beautiful' so the game designer in me is really disappointed in the good-for- nothing artist in me who is working for the other guy 🙂

If you look closely you will notice that the 'topology' of the game space is the same, just the images in each of the tiles have changed:

First Generation Second Generation Third generation

  • 1 min read

Facebook – Group your Place on a List and Put it on A page … or something

I am a big fan of Facebook. They are doing so many things well. They have become so pervasive that if anyone is doing anything that involves a group of people online the first and biggest question should be, why should we not put this on Facebook? Because it works on so many levels.

Screen Shot 2011 11 08 at 1 14 43 PM

But all is not rosy. I wanted to create a presence on Facebook for a place called Windward Harbor. Should I be creating a Place, Page, a Group or a List? I don't have the time or inclination to try to figure that out. Here's one example where having more than one way to do the same thing is just not that useful.

If you know better, please illuminate me!

  • 1 min read

Welcome to my new blog

So after some trouble porting the content I am now running my blog on Squarespace. My main motivation is to get out of the server management business and also clean up my messier and messier self-hosted WordPress.

Jury is still out whether this will be a keeper but for the moment I am happy and really like the fresher look of the blog compared to the previous incarnation. I will certainly keep you posted!

  • 1 min read

Passion vs. Professionalism: Everyone has to take the garbage out some times

Interesting article with a provocative title: "The Designer's Notebook: Passion Versus Professionalism". This is a topic that interests me. He says:

"Passion" is an excuse used by employers to mistreat their employees. Your passion is supposed to make up for the insane hours and low pay for which the industry is notorious. Many job ads emphasize the importance of passion in applicants; few emphasize the quality of life that the employer offers. (from Passion vs. Professionalism")

Reading the whole article, in the end I don't agree with his argument. I think in general passion is a very important thing, and one should strive for it in your chosen profession. Without it, with just professionalism, I think no matter what your work is, it will become drudgery. I say "strive for it" because it's true that no matter how much you love your job, some days you will really despise it. And as my friend Pat used to say about an unpleasant work assignment: "Everyone has to take out the garbage some times"

  • 1 min read

The Impending Flash Crisis?

An interesting article about this impending crisis. Although it's impending, I had never heard about before, despite the claim that "This impending “flash crisis” is well known in system circles. It’s almost like a mini Y2K." Ok, tell me more…

The core does make a great point:

"What happens when you blow up the “slow disk” assumption is that your entire software stack begins to crumble. When the cushion provided by those 10 ms of seek time goes away, CPU becomes your bottleneck. You have to start rethinking a lot of design choices." (from Impending Flash Crisis)

Interesting…

  • 1 min read

Khan academy to the rescue

If you haven't heard about Khan Academy, let me be the first one to introduce you to its wonders. There is a huge library of 10-12 minute educational videos on high-school and college level topics from matrix math to trigonometry to how mortgages work. You need to read the background, it's an unbelievably prolific individual guy, Kahn, who records each one of these. From what he says, he's not an expert in all of them, he just 'bones up' on the topic and then records the session. The quality of the teaching is really amazing.

Case in point. A few weeks ago I had to recall how and why matrix multiplication works. I knew that stuff cold, 40 years ago. Yesterday I had to bone up on sines and cosines and the simple math there. I didn't even remember that this stuff is called trigonometry (I was looking under geometry.) In each case I thought, oh I will just google it. I will look in wikipedia. I spent 15 minutes without success and then I went to Khan academy. Another 20-30 minutes later and I was up to date on the basic trigonometry and matrix knowledge that I needed.

Amazing. Check Khan Academy out.

  • 2 min read

[GEEKY] Moving away from self-hosted salas.com blog

Running my own Linux server has lost it's sex appeal. Now I am going for simplicity and so I am exploring simply not having my own server but using one of the several cloud services. It turns out that there are lots of little bumps in the road to move from one to the other:

  • I like Tumblr. But there are no good ways to move from WordPress to Tumblr. Worse, when you move from one to the other, you have to deal with images yourself, in other words, Tumblr doesn't let you upload your embedded images into their service. Hence I would not be able to Kill my old www.salas.com server.

  • Posterous looks interesting. That's what you are looking at here. They imported my whole old blog apparently without a problem. But: they don't have an API that BlogBridge works with (yet) and my other favorite posting app, Marsedit doesn't support their apis either.

  • WordPress.com is another option that I am still exploring. They accepted the whole thing on from my old salas.com blog, but then promptly smacked it down because their algorithms decided that it contained spam or other badness. So it's currently in pergatory. Still pursuing that one.

  • SquareSpace: did a very nice job importing my stuff and seems to do a nice job in general. But it is not free. Looks like about $12 per month. Well right now I am paying around $25 per month so it's less but still, not free.

So you see my friends, things are never simple… I will keep you posted.

  • 1 min read

[GEEKY] Possible Decision to move to SquareSpace

I finally got my new blog on WordPress.com working. That should have been the simplest but their automatic spam detector encountered a single post referencing some free iPhone upgrade service I once mentioned. I had no idea that they were not legitimate at the time but anyway, I deleted that mention and all was well again.

So now WordPress.com looks like a good candidate. I know wordpress and I can run my blog, essentially unaltered on their site, for free, and ditch my $25/month server that does almost nothing other than serve up my blog.

Oh but there's a fly in the ointment. WordPress.com does not allow me to keep my TextLinkAds. And I make over $100 per month on those so there goes the 'free' aspect of wordpress.com. It turns out that squarepspace.com has no so restriction, so they are once more in the lead.

Just wanted to update you … and have an excuse to post so I can see how I like this squarespace.com which at $12/month seems like a pretty good alternative just about now. Right now I am waiting to see whether I will be able to import my whole (6 years) of wordpress posts, while preserving the urls so my link juice and ad revenue does't evaporate on me. I am optimistic.