2009

Happy New Year!

It’s a time when a lot of people will be thinking about what their New Year’s resolutions should be. But keep in mind: New Year’s resolutions can be bad for you! Whatever you decide you want to do this year, I wish you good luck and success all the way.

These aren’t resolutions, but here are just a couple of things off the top of my head that I’d like to get done this year in no particular order:

• Write more interesting stuff for the site
• Finish Dalyn’s Quill
• Enter a competition
• Release a 3rd game
• Learn how to use 2D physics
• Get 30,000 unique visitors to Zolyx during the year (yeah, right!)

Last year was disappointing in one way (with the cancellation of Mordor: Return to Dejenol) but good in another (the really positive feedback I got from Millenipede, especially from v1.2.0). Although Firestorm Productions did its job well, the move to Zolyx was worth it, and there are fewer artificial hits coming to the site every day. Yep, even now, the fallout of the collapsed Binary People publishing deal for Poing! PC is still being felt - but not for much longer I suspect.

Anyhow, have a jolly good 2009 and comfort yourself in knowing there are only 358 shopping days til next Christmas…

Although the coding has been fun, it’s also been really nice not to have Millenipede-related problems or ideas nagging at the back of my mind for the past couple of weeks! There’s a never a “perfect” game and I can still think of other things to add, but I think it’s okay to call Millenipede done (barring future bugfixes, of course).

So now it’s time to think that dreaded question… what next?

I’ve pretty much already decided! The project I have in mind should be quite short but at the same time big enough to seem satisfying. Most of the important coding is already done; it just needs to be repackaged a little.

What I have in mind is Dalyn’s Quill, a re-release of the old map editor I’d originally created for Mordor: Return to Dejenol. It had the option of also working with dungeons of the original Depths of Dejenol, and was pretty intuitive to use. How much demand there will be for such a thing, I don’t know, but it’s a loose end that I’ve wanted to tie up for a while.

After that, well, who knows? I’m busy doing some writing for… well, I can’t really say just yet, but it’s retro and games related. And I’ve got a growing desire to make an 8-bit exploration platformer of some description, but that’s a deceptively difficult thing to do alone. For the time being I’m taking it one step at a time. Let’s see how the future flows!

World of Warcraft’s second expansion - Wrath of the Lich King - is out!

The servers are trembling with fear as legions of Death Knights start tromping around the Eastern Plaguelands and boats from Stormwind and Menethil groan under the weight of thousands of adventurers heading out to the new continent, Northrend. The Horde’s zeppelins are loading up, too, though not quite so heavily here on Terenas-EU.

Yes, I’ll admit, I’m one of them…

Next stop - Northrend! Stormwind disappears into the distance as the Kraken leaves dock for the icy north

Good grief, it sure is chocka out there! There’s nothing quite like the first day of a major new MMO episode. The “buzz” is palpable - everyone’s excited about doing new stuff, finding new shiny loot and exploring cool new places. Literally. It gets cold in Northrend… damn cold

There are a few who are frustrated, or who just downright enjoy making trollish comments, but that’s to be expected. And truth be told the atmosphere just wouldn’t be the same without them. Getting to level 80 is going to be a fun ride, I think

I got a few things done last month but didn’t manage a clean sweep. I really should stop setting myself deadlines since I never seem to hit them on time!

The place is looking a little nicer and a couple bugs got squashed while I was tweaking the theme and adding various stuff, but two of the major items on my August to-do list didn’t happen. Who cares, you might say… well I do! Rather than bemoan a lack of success, though, it would be a far better use of keystrokes to look forwards instead of backwards.

I’ll get right on it, then…

Things are kinda-sorta on track but some technical complications have put me on the back foot.

Remember those OCZ solid-state hard drives I mentioned a while back? Well, I decided to splash out on a 64GB version as a birthday present for myself. Unfortunately, getting it set up and working is turning out to be less straightforward than I expected

Hopefully the nice people at OCZ tech support can point me in the right direction, else I really will end up tearing my hair out (especially with Millenipede’s release date being just days away)…

Pinch, punch, first of the month!

August is going to be a month where a lot will happen. Yes… a lot is going to happen, ‘cos I’m damn well going to make it happen, oh yes. With a capital T, here is a list of Things that are on the to-do list for the month:

1. Improve the Zolyx site theme. Lots of CSS fiddling is required, I suspect - support should be added for Wordpress 2.6’s image captions in a way that’s friendly on the editing side, for example, along with changes to make the place feel less stuffy.
2. Fix various site bugs. Such as a further quirk of the 2.6 upgrade that’s made finishing a paragraph with a smiley destroy the vertical spacing to the next paragraph. Maybe this existed before and I’d adjusted the WP smiley code with a suitable hack… bah, been to sleep since then, can’t remember!
3. Write at least one unique article. This might be a game review, coding tutorial or some other writeup on a particular subject; anything upon which I can expound a clear opinion or relay some personal experience. More keyboard exercise for the win!
4. Release Millenipede 1.2.0. The first beta release went smoothly enough, but as I said before, there’s a keyboard-meltingly large amount of coding left to do before a general release. Regardless, this is the one target I really want to scratch off the list this month.
5. There is no item #5.
6. Add Zolyx project pages for Millenipede and Poing! PC. And maybe some details of other super neato stuff too! Bits of this are already done, hidden away behind the scenes and not published yet, but the whole thing needs to be tied up and revealed to the world.

Oh deary me. And why on earth did I use a different line spacing for the bullet points? It looks bloody horrible, I say!

*/me throws a random stuffed toy out of his pram*

Onwards and sidewards, then…

Finally managed to get my hunter, Mirranda, to level 70 in World of Warcraft Woohoo! Next target, if I get chance before Wrath of the Lich King comes out, will be a druid.

Have to say that I’m starting to prefer playing hunter over my mage any day of the week. Less downtime is especially nice, and having a pet makes soloing things that much easier and quicker

From here it’s time to finish up the quests in Nagrand, then hit Blade’s Edge Mountains, Netherstorm and Shadowmoon Valley with a healthy dash of instances in between. Just 4000 gold to an epic flying mount… *groan*

And in case you were even vaguely interested, the server I play on is Terenas. Look me up if you’re bored!

Wall of text alert! Don’t panic!

After three weeks of running the site hasn’t really moved forward by much - the place is still as disorganised as ever Sure, there’s been me blathering on more than usual with occasionally interesting outbursts and regular highlights of tidbits taken from the cutting edge of IndieGames and TIGSource, but I’d quite like to do more than act like a parrot, if you see what I mean. There’s no unique content here at the moment, and that’s what I would like to change.

Up til now, I’ve not really done anything resembling frequent “personal” blogging as I get very easily distracted by other things which don’t really seem worth mentioning. That’s a habit I’m trying to change - writing about any little thing, just like I’m doing right now. As far as coding progress goes, like in Millenipede’s case, I’m reluctant to spill all the juicy new feature beans as they’re added into the game because that strikes me as spoiling the surprise - but to do that, you first of all need some visitors to surprise! I sense a vicious circle going on here.

Anyway, this somewhat random post was just to say that I am trying to spend a bit more attention on the site than I did with Firestorm. In the future I’d like to think there will be some interesting articles, game reviews, personal top-10s of various things and who knows what else. Things don’t happen by themselves so I’d best start flexing the ol’ brain and keyboard a bit!

Oh, and to inject a bit of colour, today’s random picture is a marmot, because frankly, the internet simply doesn’t have enough pictures of marmots on it. Maybe I should start a marmot awareness campaign? Yes! If you’re reading this, put a marmot on your website, too, and I’ll laugh and maybe even link to you in my next post!