Hunt plus plus

Things have been very busy of late. The job search is going ok, had a few interviews and some on going interest. I have also been working on a fair few projects to bolster my portfolio and get ready for anything employment may throw at me. I am currently working on a JavaScript based Text Adventure engine, a website for a youtube channel group called Bubblegum Monsters, a website based around the mixing of cocktails, and a little arcade game for the X-box. The first to be finished will be the text adventure engine which I am hoping to get done in the next day or so. Following that I am going to focus on the Cocktail website.

The Text Adventure engine combines OO-PHP, Javascript, and AJAX to convert an xml script into a text based adventure. The adventure is totally data driven as the xml defines not only the objects, rooms, and interactions but also the verbs that a player can use, any alternatives for those verbs, and a black list of words to ignore.

The Cocktail site is being developed in ASP.NET. Currently I am building the framework to deal with the database and user access. As part of this project I have written a class that partially abstracts the database interaction. I originally started to create this system as a replacement for Linq as it is incompatible with MySql. I quickly decided that partial SQL generation was a good compromise between spending weeks developing a wholesale Linq replacement and hard coding sql statements for every aspect. This system takes in a class with public members and uses reflection to generate the SQL. The public members are used to generate the field names as well as enforce the correct type when getting and setting from the database. The class name represents the table name unless the class contains a public constant called _OVERRIDE in which case the value of _OVERRIDE is used instead. Only the Where part of the sql statement must be hard coded. As you can imagine for a content heavy site this system could save you a lot of time. Once the website is complete and my class has been fully stress tested I will provide a link to it on my portfolio site.

In other news I have created a light version of Grub which can be found Here. I hope you enjoy it

Much Love

-Jon

The hunted hunter

Hello dear reader,

Things are progressing nicely. I have two jobs that I plan to apply for on Tuesday (after Amy has double checked my CV for me) and a whole heap of other jobs to look at when I do apply. I have spent the last couple of weeks working away on my portfolio which is now whipped into shape. I am currently working on the meat of the portfolio, the examples. Right now I am focusing on ASP.NET and C# with a special interest in creating components with a dynamic client side element. I have a week long project planned for next week that is very ambitious but will provide an excellent example of my ASP.NET skills. Thinking about it I should probably spend a little time today working on it so that I have a head start on Monday.

I have also moved in with Amy, we are currently staying with her parents in Hertfordshire. As of next week we are house sitting for a month, this should hopefully give me enough time to secure a job so it won't be too long until I get my first pay check and then we finally get our own place.

I am planning to spend this coming Sunday working on a new random jam called "sparkling clone love". It is going to be a real challenge to get it done in a day but I can't really afford to spend time on something other than gaining employment. I am really looking forward to getting back to work. Making games is great fun and gives me an amazing sense of achievement but is fraught with too many issues for it to be considered as a full time vocation.

Best go design a database

Much love

-Jon

Crafting Content

Greetings fine pre-sopa banned internet users! As you can see from scrolling down a little I haven't blogged in sometime. It seems I have grown ever tardier as the blogs go on. I think the fact that I have been running around like a mad man trying to come up with a plan to put a roof over my head and food in my stomach has been the main factor in my tardiness. My plan of gaining employment this month remains unchanged. I finally got my Microsoft money and my car is on the road. My lovely lady has decided she wants to live with me which is amazing and also means the rent will be cheaper :D. So all I need now is a Job.

To that end I have sadly taken a little break from games to ready my folio and CV for the great job hunt. I should be ready by the end of next week and will be moving to my lady friend's parent's house while I apply. This will mean I am near by for any interviews and of course see my lady friend :D. As part of my push to polish my portfolio I have dusted off some of my other sites and started creating content for them. Doodle Diary is a little site that contains daily doodles. Random Jam is a game prototype site where you have to make games based on randomly generated titles. I actually had so much fun making the game prototype that I plan to do another in a weekend or so. I have also added links to these sites as well as my Art shop and Portfolio site on the right hand column. Below is a screenshot of my Random Jam game Annoying Trebuchet Fishing.

As this is primarily an indie game site I should probably mention games. My plans for Acre went horribly wrong when I realised I spent so long focusing on the tech that I had totally forgotten what I was planning to make with it so I put that on the back burner and started work on a farming game. What I want from the farm game is Harvest Moon without the RPG element and with crafting and greater customisation. After a little polling on Twitter I have decided my farm game will be called Plough Wow! Below is a screen shot. I will sadly have very little time to continue this game until I have a job and have settled in to my new place but I am determined to finish it, even more so as it is a game I really want to play.

A few nights a go I dreamt that I made a Downton Abbey game using the Acre engine and it was amazing. So amazing I have decided I will make a period game based on it. You will play a lady or gentleman of a manor (I haven't fully decided which one yet) and the objective of the game will be to incriminate the other members of the house while avoiding the scandals of your own dastardly deeds.

I have also been thinking a lot about what went wrong with Love Hurts and I think I have a good list of improvements that I could make. To that end I am considering doing a sequel. Story wise I want to make it about how the first game was so poorly received. Not in an angry way, more about the different stages of grief I went through when I realised it was a massive flop and how I finally realised that it was my own fault it failed. I have also decided to bundle the original Love Hurts with it as it is the foundation of number 2.

Now I best go as I need to add paging to the news section of my folio site.

Hopefully blog again soon

Much Love

-Jon

A bold new plan

Things have been pretty quiet for a while. This has been because I have been dating a lot and have totally run out of money. To try and remedy this I spent the last month trying to earn some money. I did a little contract work and I created Art.Jon-Keatley.com. Sadly I have not made any sales yet but I am still hopeful that things will pick up. To try and attract some business I am currently having a 40% sale on all items and have free delivery within the UK

Considering my failure to gain any kind of decent income I have decided that the best thing to do is to get a job and focus on indie games in my own time. I decided that I will start looking in January so I do not end up with anther depressing Christmas where I have to work because I haven't been at the company long enough to afford the holiday off. I have also decided to move to the Cambridge area as they have a pretty good indie scene and plenty of jobs. Doing so will move me a lot closer to my lady friend which is an added bonus. When I was in Maidenhead I rented a room in a shared cottage and it was utter hell. I was living with two guys in their late 40s and it was truly, truly awful. So this time I want to get a place on my own. After a quick look at rental prices it has become apparent that I will need all my Microsoft money to move and get my car back on the road.

Now that the January deadline is set in stone (as I simply can not afford to move before Microsoft pays me) I have a few months to play with. This means Indie games!! I have decided to make Acre episodic and plan to get the first episode out around the end of November. As it will be episodic I will have to write a much larger story, something I am very excited about. After the November release I want to do 5 more episodes release 2 months apart. I am also tempted to do a tiny week long project just to get a quick win under my belt. I will consider this over the weekend and either spend next week doing that or start writing for Acre if I am unable to think up an interesting week long project.

That is the short and curlies of what is going on with me at the moment. I will try and get back to regular posts from now on.

Much Love

-Jon

Update

Hello! I have been a little absent, sorry about that. Over the last few weeks, wooing has taken over my weekends so I had even less free time to work with. Other than doing amazingly well with the wooing (I can hug her whenever I want without the police getting involved!!) everything has just been steadily moving forward.

Work on Acre has been going well. I now have all the core mechanics in place and just need to add visual effects, sound, and the surround stuff. I also added a basic lighting system. I was tempted to go with a more complex system but I decided it is fine as it is for now. I may add slight light variations just to make things look a little cooler but that is something for later in the project. I have how ever taken a short break from working on Acre which I will explain in a moment. I also rewrote the combat and collision systems and added a weapon mode to the item system. You now have to stand still to attack. This solved a lot of the knock back issues and adds an element of risk to combat. Before if you had a weapon then you where unstoppable. Once the effects and sound is done I plan to actually start on the art work. I think this will give me an extra boost of energy to get the project out of the door. I have a great feeling about this game. I think it is going to be my best game yet!

Sadly the 15th of this month came and went without any of the money that Microsoft owes me. It seems that despite getting them all the bloody paper work they have came up with yet another reason to not pay me. I can not ask them however because they do not entertain 'where is my money e-mails' until the end of the month! Sadly I had plans for that money, most notably eating and starting a company which will have to be put on hold for the time being. The company not the eating! So now I am having to put development on hold while I pucker up and earn some money. I am hoping to do this with freelance work but to be honest I am getting tempted by the guarantied income provided by a job. So for the next few weeks the focus will be dirty dirty money!

With the previous paragraph in mind I am also working on a little art site in order to sell the various paintings that adorn my walls and provide me with endless pleasure. I say this to install due value into them. For those who actually like my art you can buy my art and enjoy it every day. For those who don't really care for my art but hate me deeply (Could it be you?) you can buy my art in the knowledge that you will be robbing me of one of the few sources of sustainable happiness in my life. Sounds good right :D. Anyhow after reading about various payment services I have decided to go with google checkout. The fees are reasonable (roughly £5 out of every £100) and google pretty much own the internet so you know your details are safe because well they probably already know them and they haven't blabbed yet!

So that is what is going on with me! Oh yeah below is a painting I did for my good friend Edmund. His brief was striking and bold. He is also very good at maths so I decided to base my painting on a shape generated using maths. Enter the chaotic attractor . Once I had wrote a little bit of code to generate my own and played around with the variables to make a pleasing shape (I wrote it in html 5 because I am all hipster and cool) I imported the generated image into flash and drew all over it like a 5 year old! Behold its striking boldness!

Now I need to get back to selling my skills on the docks

Much love

-Jon