SimianLogic

Not much progress in my little Rails experiment lately–I’ve been coding a Flex-based game for Whirled for the last couple of weeks. Because Whirled is in closed Alpha I’ll hold off describing it further (for now). The game, though, is a pretty simple little card game. The basic idea is that you have four columns across, with each column five spaces high. You draw cards from the top of the deck one at a time. You can place each card at the “bottom” of a stack (the lowest unoccupied row) only if the value of the new card is higher than the value of of the card at the top of that stack. If you can get the stack 5-cards high, the whole column disappears and you get some bonus points. If you draw a card that cannot be placed, all cards currently on the board get cleaned off. There is no penalty for this, but you only receive points for card above the first row. This means that every time the board gets wiped, you theoretically have to drop four possible points to re-fill the bottom four cards.

It’s not a terribly difficult game. It’s really more of a sorting activity, but for some reason I find it pretty entertaining (in the same way that most Pogo games are just time sinks or how BrainAge is fun even though it’s pretty simple). I coded it to be multiplayer, but there isn’t really any interaction. At the end of the game, whoever has scored the most points gets the biggest prize. For single-player, your reward is based on whether or not it’s a good score or not.

In other happenings, I bought a new fishing pole last week. Sports authority had a variety of pre-made “kits” like the “bass-fishing kit” and “trout kit.” I went with the “pier-fishing kit,” which came with rod,reel, and some tackle. Later that week, I went to buy a 1-year fishing license last week. Lacking a California driver’s license, I was refused. There actually is a non-local yearly license, but it’s around $90 instead of the in-state $35. In that sense, I guess I was lucky the fishing shop didn’t sell the non-local variety. That means I’ve got to go sometime soon to get a new CA license.

Finally, I was reading the Wave (local entertainment mag) over lunch today and saw a pretty cool article on something called The TechShop. Basically, it’s like a for-pay version of Georgia Tech’s architecture lab (lots of saws, drills, etc… plus 3D printer, laser cutter, and some other fun stuff). My time is already stretched pretty thin… I’ve been spending it making more casual games in Flex, making a Ruby on Rails side-project (and have another idea waiting in the wings).

I haven’t really worked on anything Machinima related at all since graduating, although I did take the first steps towards setting up a production machine yesterday. I hardly ever use my desktop PC any more, so I had the idea to wipe it clean and set it up for animation production only–Lightwave, Torque, and some basic video/sound editing tools. I separated out everything I wanted to keep, and all that remains is to actually burn the stuff to DVD and reformat the old beast.
And now I can add hardware back to the mix. I built a variety of projects for classes while at Georgia Tech (rigging accelerometers to things like clay puppets or even an Indo Board, building custom game cotnrollers), but never really developed anything in the GT Architecture lab other than the sense that building things with big power tools is very very fun. The pricing at the TechShop seems pretty reasonable ($100 /mo.), but a monthly membership isn’t required. It seems like the way to go would be getting a design ready to go and buying a single monthly pass to get it into working order.