kpulv . kyle pulver . xerus

Offspring Fling Mothers Day Update on STEAM!

pulverk@gmail.com (Kyle Pulver) — Fri, 11 May 2012 13:55:03 -0700

Hey everyone! Offspring Fling version 1.1 is finally here, a.k.a. the Mothers Day Update! What better way to celebrate mothers day weekend with a game all about throwing children around?

As I type this I've been awake for 30+ hours now, going crazy with stress from the Steam release, so I think I'll save a more formal post for later. For now. go tell all your friends to get Offspring Fling on Steam!

Offspring Fling Released!... What's Next?

pulverk@gmail.com (Kyle Pulver) — Tue, 03 Apr 2012 18:25:31 -0700

The past couple of days have just been a complete blur to me and I'm not really sure what exactly has happened between 11am on friday and now. I rolled out of bed that morning and saw twitter lighting up with "#WakeUpKylePulver" and so I quickly updated the Offspring Fling site to put the game out live.

The response has been overwhelmingly positive about the game! There's been a bunch of articles popping up all over about the game that I'm still going through, and some reviews are coming out that are giving the game pretty high marks! People are showing me screenshots of their progress through the game and I'm absolutely thrilled to see them all.

So now that the game is out, whats next? Well, I have some plans for an small update. Some stuff that I can talk about now, and some stuff that will be revealed later. I'm planning on updating the end of level screen a little bit to show some more information. Some people have requested to see how much time they shaved off of their previous best when they score a new best time. I'll also be saving more options from the options screen, such as the screen settings. I also want to make replay opening a little bit easier, so I'm going to try to see if I can make replays auto load from the operating system.

The next patch I'll also be trying to tackle native controller support. I've found some interesting leads on how to get this working and it might be easier than I thought. Along with that I'm going to attempt to do completely customizable keyboard control.

I'm also planning on releasing a short demo soon, so people that have been waiting for a demo to try it out before they buy it out will be seeing that soon.

So along with all of that, hopefully there will be some other updates and additions that people will like. If you want to stay updated about Offspring Fling, then I suggest you visit this blog every once and awhile or follow me on twitter.

With that, I just want to say THANK YOU SO MUCH to everyone that bought the game! I'm super excited for what the future holds! Now back to work, and back to finishing THIS GAME!

Offspring Fling Coming Soon!

pulverk@gmail.com (Kyle Pulver) — Tue, 27 Mar 2012 13:56:55 -0700

Wahoo! I just announced the release date for Offspring Fling! The game is coming out on March 30th, 2012, and you'll be able to get it from OffspringFling.com!

I put together an image to try and promote the game's release, check it out!

I wanted to make something that reminded me of the old flyers that I used to browse through every Christmas to see what awesome new games we're coming out, and since Offspring Fling is so super influenced by games I love on the Super Nintendo, it seems appropriate to market it as a Super Pretendo game.

To see the full version of the flyer you'll have to go over to the Offspring Fling website. Along with the flyer, there's also a preview of the game's soundtrack from Alec Holowka. The soundtrack will be coming out on Bandcamp a little bit after the game's initial release.

The time for throwing children is almost upon us!

Offspring Fling Revealed!

pulverk@gmail.com (Kyle Pulver) — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 14:25:48 -0800

Hey internet! Today I am very happy to show you the official REVEAL TRAILER of Offspring Fling!

Offspring Fling started as a game jam game back in May of 2011 where the theme was motherhood. I was incredibly happy with the way the jam version of Offspring Fling turned out, so for the next several months I slowly picked away at the game turning it into something bigger and better. The game became so big and awesome that I decided to turn it into my first non-freeware game! WHOA!

The game's soundtrack is provided by none other than Alec Holowka who pitched in the original track for the game that was in the game jam version. It's also the same track used for the trailer.

So get HYPE and spread the word about Offspring Fling if you would be so awesome! Oh and also stay tuned for more updates about it. The game might be coming out sooner than you think!

My Anti-SOPA, Anti-PIPA Ramblings

pulverk@gmail.com (Kyle Pulver) — Wed, 18 Jan 2012 13:04:35 -0800

Today is the day of the great internet eclipse with sites like Reddit and Wikipedia going completely dark from 8 to 24 hours in order to raise awareness about two horrible, terrible things that are moving through the House and the Senate here in the United States: SOPA and PIPA. I just want to make a quick post as to why I'm personally opposed to the two acts, specifically SOPA for right now.

SOPA and PIPA's goals are to ultimately stop piracy, and they are mostly crafted through lobbying by companies like the MPAA, RIAA, and the ESA. Do you think your average representative has enough knowledge of the internet and computers to draft something like this themselves? Of course not. To them, the internet is a big truck, or whatever the MPAA tells them it is that month.

The MPAA steps into congress and convinces them that they are in danger of being completely destroyed because of internet piracy. They claim to be losing jobs by the hundreds of thousands, and their profits are dropping, and it's all because of people downloading camera rips of Jack and Jill. (Just kidding, I don't think anyone pirated Jack and Jill.) Oh, and the MPAA's claims are mostly bullshit.

The result is congress drafting horrendous bills that are absolutely overkill, and that miss the point completely. Imagine the problem of piracy being a fly on your friend's face, and congress's response is to launch a nuclear warhead at the fly, thus annihilating your friend, you, and everything within a 50 mile radius.

SOPA, and PIPA, will not stop piracy.

But what they will do is harm people like me. I'm trying to make a living on the internet, like a lot of other people these days. Every day we see new and exciting ideas and starts up emerge right here on the internet because of its absolute freedom and fairness. Anyone can just buy a domain name, rent a server, and launch a website on their own, but SOPA and PIPA threaten this freedom.

For a cooler, more visual representation of the problem, I suggest watching this video.

Essentially SOPA and PIPA will make it so that me, the webmaster and owner of kpulv.com, is responsible for any content that appears on the site, including content that is posted by the users (like the comments section!) In a post SOPA or PIPA world, someone could post a comment on this blog post linking to a DVD rip of Independence Day, and as a result my domain name kpulv.com could be completely blocked by the United States. Note that all of this is without due process. There will be no questions asked, and the domain name will disappear. (Actually, SOPA might only be removing domains of "foreign" sites, but the fact that a internet censoring firewall would exist still remains.) On top of that, I could be sued by the entertainment industry for providing a link to pirated content, even though I wasn't the one that posted it.

The United States has lambasted China for implementing an internet firewall, saying it was a harsh blow to freedom of speech, and now they threaten to implement practically the same thing.

To survive in the post SOPA and PIPA world, internet entrepreneurs would have to go to great lengths to make sure that nobody is posting "illegal" content on their sites. It's not that big of a deal for a simple blog with just a little bit of traffic, but this prospect is very threatening to small business owners and start ups that operate on the internet with hundreds of thousands of visitors, and especially start ups that invite users to create content. Suddenly the cost of starting a business online is rising, and thus we start to see less and less competition as many people can no longer afford to launch their idea due to the cost of patrolling their own site for offending links or comments. If they choose not to take action against such content, they can be reported for not taking enough action, and lose their funding, ad revenue, potentially their domain name, or be sued by the entertainment industry, and with the current abuse we already see from the DMCA, I don't doubt that SOPA would also be abused in the same way.

I love the internet. It is my home. I grew up here, and I don't want to see anyone coming here and fucking it up. The MPAA has a long history of crying about things like Television, Betamax, the VCR, DVDs, and now it's the internet that is threatening to destroy them. It's scary when the world changes, but when you have billions of dollars you can just tell the U.S. Government to cripple the progress rather than evolve with it. Must be nice!

If you haven't yet, please sign some petitions or contact your representatives with your opinion on these two pieces of legislation.

Namiko Quick Preview

pulverk@gmail.com (Kyle Pulver) — Thu, 10 Nov 2011 10:13:32 -0800

Yo! I went to a game jam last weekend at the University of Advancing Technology, and I made a game! (Again!) I'm still trying to figure out what to do with it, but for now here are some screenshots.

The game jam that this came from was also a very competitive game jam. I was awarded 1st place in fun, the audience choice award, and 1st place overall! So not only did I walk out of the game jam with a sweet game, but I also got a big awesome trophy and $175 in Fry's giftcards, yeah!

Stay tuned for more updates on Namiko if I ever decide to finish and release it (I have a big problem with this lately!)

A Month of Paleo

pulverk@gmail.com (Kyle Pulver) — Tue, 01 Nov 2011 15:22:19 -0700

I totally forgot to make any sort of blog post for the entire month of October, but I hope I can make it up by going into detail on what I was up to for the month. While I was doing my usual thing of working on video games, drawing stuff, and playing video games, I also took up a new challenge: Whole30.

This story really begins two months ago or so, when I was getting worse and worse at eating any food that was remotely good for me. I was eating a lot of cereal and whenever I wanted anything other than that it was usually a quick trip down the road for some kind of double cheeseburger and fries or out to indian food for a gross amount of rice and bread, or down to the thai restaurant for a pile of fried rice. My diet wasn't exactly the greatest, but for awhile I felt totally fine so I didn't really see any need to put any effort into changing it.

Then by a combination of working on too much shit stress and eating too much shit I began to have a lot of heart burn and overall stomach problems that were pretty distracting, and I wanted to try and do something about it. My housemates sometime do the paleo diet, as well as a lot of my friends, so I figured it was time for me to try it as well. My girlfriend Corey and I decided to make October the official challenge of Whole30.

What the hell is Whole30? Well, it's like Paleo but with some additional rules and more strict versions of already existing rules, and it's supposed to last for 30 days. Whole30 basically means eating real food, which they define as meat, fish, eggs, vegetables, fruit, and good fats. Foods with very few ingredients. Also no consumption of added sugar of any kind, processed food, alcohol, grains, legumes, dairy, and white potatoes. So my cereal and milk is totally out, as well as my double cheese burgers... no rice means no sushi either (unless I get the cucumber wrap but honestly I'm not too big of a fan of that) and no pizza... fuck.

Luckily Corey and I weren't totally alone on this. A lot of our friends in the area often eat paleo with a few exceptions here and there (In-n-Out, mostly) so we started off with a lot of resources. Our housemates usually make a lot of paleo food for dinner so started off borrowing all their recipes.

Warning: This post is going to be pretty long, so prepare yourself. If you just want to skip to the end where the most important stuff will be, that's totally cool.

Intro Level
The night before October 1st which would be the first official day of whole30, I enjoyed my last night with a free open diet where I could eat anything I wanted, and somehow I ended up at some ridiculous ice cream eatery where I ate strawberry ice cream sandwiched between two chocolate chip cookies. That ended up being a pretty bad idea since I felt pretty shitty afterwards but it was fucking delicious, and it was something I could not have for the next 30 days.

Our first week started with cooking the stuff that we already knew about. The go to recipes of our house were pork meatballs, guacamole, yam chips, beef stew, and baked brussels sprouts. We also grilled up a lot of small chicken tenders for snacking on later, and Corey tried her hand at some grilled salmon and tuna recipes. These are all super easy recipes which I will break down at the end of this post with links to their origins.

So far everything was off to a good start, but I could feel myself missing a lot of foods already. No more candy, or cheeseburgers, or pizza, or sushi, or fried rice... this is going to be TOUGH. But... there was something about the whole challenge of whole30 that made it easier to push on. It wasn't just a diet, it was a challenge of my will power to see if I could make it for the 30 days without giving in to generally crappy food. Also having Corey on board for the entire journey also helped a lot. Having another person with you on the challenge just makes your resolve stronger. I didn't want to fail her as well as myself, so I was determined to push on!

Mini-Boss Battle: Restaurants
We were progressing with whole30 really well into the second week of the challenge. We were cooking up a storm a few times a week, filling the refrigerator with goodies for lunch and dinner, and eating some sort of cooked eggs for breakfast every morning. The only problem was that there was an IGDA meeting fast approaching, and we hold the meetings at a local restaurant that serves nothing remotely close to whole30 or paleo, so we would have to find some way to survive.

Our way of eventually escaping the restaurant without completely destroying whole30 was to actually just ... not eat there at all. Before the meeting I ate a huge meal at home, and then went to the meeting. Keep in mind that Corey and I pretty much run the Phoenix IGDA at this point, so we're there an hour before the meeting to set up, and usually the last people to leave at night, so basically we had to sit at this place for about 5 hours watching everyone eat cheeseburgers and fries and other delicious things... it was probably more so a challenge for me than Corey.

So we were able to just select the "RUN AWAY" command at this boss battle and we ended up eating another meal at home afterwards.

We ended up going to a barbeque place with some friends one evening and we had to figure out what to do there. I ended up defaulting to getting salmon and vegetables, which I find that most restaurants serve. I just had to make sure that there was no "sweet glaze" added to the salmon and other sugary stuff that they wanted to include in all the food. The waitress seemed kinda weirded out at all the stuff I was removing from the salmon but it ended up being pretty delicious anyway. I could taste that they added butter but I figured I did the best that I could and it was better than eating a giant cheeseburger which is what I would've gotten if I wasn't doing whole30.

Boss Battle: TIGJam
Right after we started the challenge I realized that TIGJam was going to be in October. Doing paleo or whole30 while at home and completely in control of your environment is actually pretty easy when you just get down to it, but traveling to a far away land (California) and trying to keep it up can be the hardest challenge of them all. When you're out and about with a bunch of people, everyone wants to eat out all the time, and there's not really an opportunity to cook anything awesome when you're at TIGJam, jamming away for all hours of the day, with the only food in sight just giant piles of things purchased from Costco.

I was determined to make it through TIGJam without ruining the whole30 challenge. I ended up bending the rules slightly once or twice, but I didn't completely cave and eat a double double animal style with a root beer float. The first challenge of the TIGJam travel experience was eating at an indian lunch buffet where most of the piles of everything are rice or white potato... nothing whole30 allows.

I ended up scraping together some of the chicken tandori and attempting to eat that, but I'm so incredibly picky when it comes to meat that I didn't really eat much of anything and ended up being quite hungry until dinner that night where we had to meet up with a bunch of friends for a pre-TIGJam dinner then set up.

The place we went to for dinner specialized in serving... American comfort food? Or something? I have no clue what that means. To me it seemed like some place that served food slightly better than Ruby Tuesdays, but with tiny portions so it can seem fancy and charge a fuckload of money. Literally the only thing I could get on the menu was either a wedge salad, or salmon and vegetables. Everything else was covered in pasta or cheese.

When it came time to order, I asked the waiter if I could get vegetables without the glaze of butter and whatever else, and it turns out that it was impossible because almost everything in the restaurant came pre-glazed in butter... so I ended up getting just a tiny piece of salmon, completely dry. It sucked.

This is where I turned back to an old friend for help... In-N-Out. Yeah, In-N-Out. You can eat totally paleo and almost entirely whole30 (I think) with a certain order at In N Out. During the course of TIGJam I think I ate at In N Out like 7 times out of a 5 day trip. The secret is: Two double hamburgers, protein style, no sauce, with grilled onions. BOOM! A super paleo feast fit for a paleo king. A ball of meat and vegetables that satisfied my hunger without making me feel like garbage. It was tough though watching everyone else eat huge animal style burgers.

The other challenge at TIGJam which actually wasn't that bad was ... Outback Steakhouse. We somehow ended up at Outback twice during the weekend because there was no other good steak places within a 20 minute drive from TIGJam. Outback was actually pretty easy to overcome because I could actually get vegetables on the side without butter glazed all over them, YES! Both my meals at Outback were a completely dry salad, and salmon with vegetables. Oh and it was like half of the price than the place I ate at the first night.

During the jam, I snacked on any fruits and veggies that I could find on the snack table. Mostly carrots, grapes, and apples. Under whole30 I wasn't supposed to eat a lot of fruit, but given the choice between apples or goldfish I think I was better of going with the apples.

The ultimate final boss of the challenge was the indian dinner that was put on at the end of TIGJam. It ended up just being a buffet of curry and rice and fried potato vegetable things. I actually could not eat a single thing there except for drink the water, so for about an hour or so I sat around with my stomach yelling and screaming at me just trying to survive long enough so that I could go to In-n-Out afterwards for the paleo burgers.

The Final Week
By the end of the month things were looking pretty damn good. Our recipe knowledge had expanded by almost double from the beginning of the challenge, and we were cooking up all kinds of stuff like broccoli soup, spaghetti squash with meatballs and sauce, grilled tuna and salmon, some different spins on grilled chicken, and some awesome breakfast hash things with sweet potatoes and squash and various forms of sausage.

The challenge officially ended last night at midnight, and now... THE RESULTS.

Results!
* At the beginning of the challenge, I weighed 189 pounds. After 30 days of whole30 paleo goodness, I'm now at 174. 15 pounds completely vanished with almost no effort at all!

* I don't feel like shit every time I eat. I used to have this problem of getting all congested and tired after eating food. The classic "Food Coma." But during whole30, I could eat as much food as I wanted and I would never feel the ill effects of over eating. During TIGJam this was awesome, because I was totally lucid and with it all the time (except for the one day I forgot to drink water and had a pounding headache for an hour or so).

* No more weird stomach pains or heart burn issues! Not much else to say about this one. Although, this could also be related to feeling less stressed.

* I learned (somewhat) how to cook. I mean, I'm not an expert or anything, but at least now I have some recipes that I could actually make aside from "Honey Bunches of Oats with 2% Milk"

Questions
Throughout my journey of whole30 I had a lot of people asking me various questions, so now I'll try to answer them!

Why did you do this again?
It was mostly an experiment. I wanted to see what kind of effects, if any, this was going to have on my body, and 30 days seems to be the amount of time you need to spend with it to see any change. Also, my diet sucked and I wanted to see if I could actively fix it. Testing my willpower ended up being pretty fun.

How do you live without bread?!
At first, not easily. The soothing feel of warm bread gently brushing my lips is a feeling that could bring most mortal men to tears... but I had to resist. I love warm bread, it's awesome, but I had to give it up. After a week or so I stopped missing it so much. It was still pretty tough when I went out to eat and couldn't touch any of the bread that was brought out to the table, and it's especially hard at an indian place where I wanted to eat naan so hard.

WHAT? No potatoes? Are you insane?
Yeah probably, but yeah this totally sucked at first. I love french fries. I am a horrible person because a big cheeseburger and fries is probably my favorite thing to eat, but I had to say NO MORE! The great thing about whole30 though is that yams and sweet potatoes are totally fine. Please NOTE that yams are NOT sweet potatoes. Often times when trying to look up sweet potato recipes, I found yam recipes, including this super gross baked yam recipe where they would bake a yam (which is already incredibly sweet and delicious) then dump cinnamon sugar and maple butter on... GOOD LORD.

Isn't there a lack of variety when you do paleo?
Not at all. We probably made more than 15 completely different recipes during the entire course of the challenge, and I never really felt that variety was an issue. Yeah, you are limited to mostly meats, veggies, and fruit, but when you actually go out to the grocery store and look around there are a shitload of different vegetables with a lot of different textures and tastes. For example, I just discovered spaghetti squash, which is this magical thing that transforms into spaghetti after you cook it. When you combine all of the different meats, veggies, and fruits out there, and then combine that with how many different ways you can cook things... variety shouldn't be a problem.

Aren't you hungry a lot?
The awesome thing that I discovered as a result of paleo is that I can seriously eat as much food as I want and I still lost 15 pounds. I guess not eating any grains or dairy at all has that effect. At first I was actually trying to curb how much food I ate because I often felt like I was over eating a lot when I went out to eat or just ate food around the house, but after a week of that I went back to my normal eating habits because I felt like shit. Some nights I ate a lot, like a lot of food. Like two giant helpings of spaghetti squash with chicken and sauce, but somehow I felt totally fine. If that spaghetti squash were spaghetti, I would've passed out from the food coma. So even with some nights of eating insane amounts of food so I would stop being hungry, I still lost weight!

Problems
* Cooking kind of feels like a pain in the ass sometimes. I used to go out to eat a lot because I just didn't want to cook and then have to clean up the giant mess that results in cooking, but on whole30 going out isn't usually an option. It's not so bad though, cooking a few days worth of meals and cleaning up is usually a 3 to 4 hour ordeal.

* Going out to eat does kind of suck when you have to do it. Most places glaze a lot of their food in butter, salt, and other things to make them taste better, and sometimes you just can't avoid it. A few times when I had salmon while I was out to eat, it did taste a lot like butter, but I figured I tried my best and at least I'm not eating a giant cheeseburger and fries.

* It seems a little... expensive. Buying high quality meat and vegetables to cook definitely is a little bit pricier than buying junk food, but in the end it's probably worth it. Definitely less expensive than eating out every night.

Pro Tips
* Cook as much food as you can at once. If you can cook a couple of days worth of food, and store it all in glass saver containers, then you'll be set for more meals during the day. Lunch is probably the hardest meal to keep paleo, but if you are eating delicious left overs for lunch every day then it doesn't matter. We usually went to the grocery store, bought everything we needed, and then cooked it all immediately so that it doesn't sit around at all.

* Crock pots are amazing machines that will make a lot of delicious paleo things. The crock pot in our house is constantly in use since the beginning of the whole30 challenge. At one point we were even considering getting a 2nd one so we could cook twice as much crock pot recipes.

* Don't weigh yourself or think about the results of the challenge until the challenge is over. In fact, on the whole30 site itself it tells you that you can't step on a scale at all during the entire 30 days. The point is to not feel discouraged if you're not immediately seeing results, because you're not going to immediately see results. The impact of not weighing myself for 30 days and seeing that I went down 15 pounds is way more intense than seeing my average weight slightly go down every day for 30 days.

* Use online resources to help out with recipes and what to order at restaurants. Something like Foodee or Primal Meal Plans can be pretty helpful. Honestly the internet in general was pretty helpful to us throughout the challenge with just google searches for whole30 or paleo recipes. Meal plans can be the best resource out there whether you're just getting started or a few weeks in.

* Have someone else do it with you! Having Corey by my side in the field of paleo battle was motivating and immensely helpful. I think doing this by myself I probably would've given up, but having someone else to keep tabs on you, and you keeping tabs on them, is a great help for a willpower challenge.

* Get one of these things. It's probably one of the most useful things ever. Spraying oil down on a sheet and spraying it over other things is awesome.

* Also get one of these. You can harness the power of the Mandoline to make all sorts of sliced things, like yam chips.

* Get some glass tupperware containers that seal up nice and tight. We have a set of glass savers in the house that keep guacamole from turning brown, YEAH, that's how good they are.

Yo, Wrap it up!
Alright! Overall the whole30 challenge and being paleo turned out to be pretty awesome. I used to think that it was pretty dumb to eat paleo since the idea of it is to eat like our ancient ancestors and they only lived to be like 30 years old, but after seeing the results of doing it for 30 days I can see why it totally makes sense.

I've already loosened my restrictions on my diet a little bit since the challenge is over (I ate some halloween candy) but I think I'm going to keep going with it. The food is actually quite delicious and I wouldn't mind eating heaps of spaghetti squash and tomato sauce for a long time, but I dont think I can completely resist the urge to eat non-paleo food forever... but with the results I've seen so far I definitely want to stick with it!

I think November's experiment will be 30 days of paleo with intense Dance Dance Revolution sessions. Time to dust off the pad...

The Recipes!
Here's a quick guide to some of the recipes we ended up using a lot during the 30 days. Not all of these are in too much detail but hopefully its enough to get someone started. GOOD LUCK!

Paleo Czech Meatballs (Link)
This one is so easy and was a staple for a lot of our meals early on.
What you NEED
2 pounds of ground pork (Get good quality meat, it's worth it!)
1 tablespoon of sea salt
1 tablespoon of caraway seeds
1 tablespoon of black pepper
1/4 cup fresh parsley
1 tablespoon grainy mustard
What you DO
So whenever I make stuff I don't really measure anything. For this one I just get a big bowl, put in some sea salt, caraway seeds, black pepper, chopped up parsley, and the grainy mustard, and I try to mix that all up. Then I get out a big baking sheet thing and put some foil on it so I don't have to clean it after, yeah! Spray that down with some olive oil or whatever in preparation for the meatballs.

Go set the oven for 400 degrees and then dump the 2 pounds of pork into the bowl with the other stuff. Mix it all up as best as you can, and then start chunking it off into meatballs and put them on the cooking sheet thing with the foil and oil on it. Now put them in that 400 degree oven for like 25 minutes and they should be good to go. DELICIOUS!

Baked Brussels Sprouts
So easy!
What you need
A lot of brussels sprouts
What you do
Cut all your brussel sprouts in half and get out that big baking sheet thing and put foil on it if you want. Spray it down with the oil stuff, and put all the brussels sprouts halves onto the sheet with the flat cut side facing down. I think we sprinkle some rosemary on them most of the time.

Turn your oven machine to temperature 350, and put the sprouts in there. After about 15 minutes or so you probably want to check up on them. There's not really an exact time that we have on this one, we just pull them out when they're starting to brown from the cooking. Take them out of the oven when they looked cooked enough for you. That's it! EAT THEM.

Baked Yam Chips
Yam chips are awesome substitutes for regular chips that are terrible for you.
What you need!
Some yams.
Sea Salt (OPTIONAL)
A mandoline, or some patience.
What you do!
Use the mandoline to slice up all them yams into slices. They should be a little thick, and not paper thin slices. Then dump all the yams into a bowl with just a little bit of olive oil and mix 'em all up so all the yam chips have a coating of olive oil on them. This part can be kind of a pain so you might also want to try using that oil sprayer thing that I told you to get.

Now through a lot of experiments of making yam chips it's been discovered that a low temperature for a long period of time is the right way to go. A high temperature for shorter results in soggy gross chips, so set your oven baking machine to 275. Put as many yam chips as you can onto some kind of baking rack. I think we actually use cooling racks now that I think about it, but we probably shouldn't... but the point is we don't want to use the regular sheet but something that's more of a grate so that the chips are more exposed on both sides. I wish I knew the names of these things.

Now they're going to have to be in the oven for probably an hour, but make sure to keep a careful eye on them towards the end of this time. It takes awhile for the chips to become crispy, but right after they get crispy they'll start to burn and I don't like burned chips (although Corey does). When they're all done you can sprinkle some sea salt on there if you want.

A lot of recipes for yam chips seem to suggest baking at 400 degrees for 25 minutes but we have never been able to get this to work. Usually the chips come out all weird or soggy and not very good, but the 275 for an hour method has proven quite successful for us.

Super Guacamole
Are you ready to have your mind blown and replaced with guacamole? GOOD.
What you need
8 or so avocados
1/2 to 1 White Onion
1 Tomato
1 Jalapeno
Some garlic cloves
5oz Pomegranate Seeds
What you do
Cut open them avocados and get all the good green mush out of there and slap it into a big bowl. Then you can cut up as much white onion as you want and throw it in there too. Then dice up your tomato all nice but you can probably throw out the gross innards unless you're into that. Mince up the garlic cloves and toss that in too. While you're at it, cut up the jalapeno and don't put the inside of it in there too unless you want things to get really spicy (I don't.) Now for the super special secret ingredient. Put all the pomegranate seeds in there, and mix it up real nice like.

The pomegranate seeds that we use for our guacamole are from Trader Joe's. You can just buy a little plastic sealed container of pomegranate seeds and its 5.3 ounces or something like that. If you don't have access to that, then you can always bust open a pomegranate yourself and get the seeds out, or just... skip that part.

The yam chips combine with the guacamole for ultimate deliciousness.

Beef Stew (Link)
This is one of the house favorites and is pretty easy to make, and it makes a lot.
What you NEED
2 pounds of stewing beef
1 can of tomato paste
1 rutabega
1 sweet potato
5 celery sticks
3 carrots (or a bunch of baby carrots)
A lot of garlic
1 red onion
1 cup of chicken stock
1 tablespoon oregano
1/2 tablespoon terragon
1/2 tablespoon thyme
Some black pepper
2 cups of boilin' water
What you DO
The overall process of making beef stew is just taking a bunch of stuff and throwing it into a crockpot for 7 or 8 hours. First, chop up all your stuff. You got celery, sweet potato, carrots, rutabega, and the red onion. Chop all that stuff up and just dump it into the crockpot. If you have the small carrots just leave those whole. Put the stewing beef in there too while you're at it.

Then in some kinda separate bowl you can dump out the tomato paste and all the spices. Also mince up the garlic and put it in here too. Add the cup of chicken stock and mix it up. Dump it all over the contents of the crock pot and mix up a little bit if you so desire. Boil your 2 cups of water and dump it in there too, trying to get it all mixed in. We actually don't put the 2 full cups of water in because it would overflow our fragile crock pot. After that, cover your crock pot and set that baby on Low for the next 7 hours. If you over do it, that should be fine, I think once we accidentally cooked our stew for 12 hours, but it still tasted GREAT.

Honestly this recipe is open for any experimentation. You can pretty much decide how much of anything you want to put in there and it will still most likely taste amazing. It's pretty easy to make, and it makes a crapload of food.

Delicious Spaghetti Squash
I really wanted to eat some kind of pasta and sauce while on paleo and I was able to discover the magical spaghetti squash that let me do just that.
What you neeeeeed
1 Spaghetti Squash
What you doooo
Preheat the oven to 375. Take a giant knife and stab the squash a few times so the squash doesn't explode when it gets super heated to 375. Then put it in the oven for an hour or so, but check up on it to make sure it's not overcooking. When it's ready, slice it in half and dig out all the nasty parts in the middle and the seeds and all that gross part.

Then take a fork and watch the magic happen. Just scrape the fork through the squash and the entire contents of it will turn into big spaghetti like strands. If the squash is turning into mush, then it's overcooked but it's still yummy so don't worry, but if you did it just right then you'll have a giant bowl of spaghetti by the time you're done. AWESOME!

Awesome Marinara Sauce
This one goes pretty well with that spaghetti squash thing.
What
2 28 oz. cans of organic peeled tomatoes (with juice)
1/4 cup olive oil
1 yellow onion
4 cloves of garlic
bunch of basil
1 tablespoon oregano
salt and pepper
How
Take the two cans of tomatoes and the basil and put them in a blender. Pulse it up until its smooth and then forget about it for now. Dice up your onion, mince up your garlic, and put it in a saute pan with the olive oil and cook it on a medium heat for about 10 minutes or so. Cook it up until the onions are translucent and soft. Then add your tomato sauce from the blender, along with oregano and however much salt and pepper you want. Bring it to a boil on medium high heat.

After its boiling bring the heat down to low and just let it simmer for awhile. Basically how long you simmer it for will determine how watery or thick it's going to turn out in the end.

This is another one where you can feel free to add or subtract whatever you want. This turns out pretty delicious every time and we end up making it twice a week now.

Super Chicken Meatballs
This is the final addition to the spaghetti squash for a delta attack of destined deliciousness.
Need
2 pounds of ground chicken
1/2 white onion
1/2 cup basil
1/2 cup parsley
1 cup loose leaf spinach
1 tablespoon dried oregano
4 cloves of garlic
salt and pepper
Do
Remember the paleo czech pork meatballs from earlier? This is a lot like those. Get out a big ole bowl. Dice up your onion, chop up the basil, parsley, spinach leaves, and mince that garlic up. Throw it all into that bowl, and add the dried oregano along with some salt and pepper if you so desire. Now before you get your hands all messy with raw meat, preheat the oven to 400 degrees and get out a baking sheet with foil on it.

Add the chicken and mix it all up with the stuff already in the bowl. This one is pretty hard because the vegetable to chicken ratio in the meatballs almost seem like its 50/50, so you'll have to mix it up really well to avoid getting all vegetable meatballs sometimes. Chunk your mixture into meat balls and throw them onto the baking sheet. Stick em in the oven at 400 for 25 minutes or so and you should be golden.

NOW take your spaghetti squash, put some meatballs on it, and dump some of that sauce on it and you'll be riding a wave of deliciousness all the way to healthy town.

Creamy Broccoli Soup
This is another easy one that tastes pretty delicious, and you can have creamy soup without ingesting any dairy at all!
What you need
2 pounds of broccoli heads
2 cans of coconut milk with full fat
1 small white onion
some terragon
2 tablespoons of minced garlic
1/4 cup of coconut oil
pinch of seasalt
some black pepper
1 cup of chicken stock (optional)
What you do
Dice up that onion, and mince that garlic. You can chop up the broccoli to whatever size you want. Now put that coconut oil in a large sauce pan and turn up the heat to medium high. Add your chopped onion, garlic, and some terragon to it. Then add some sea salt, and some black pepper. The actual recipe here calls for 1 tablespoon of black pepper but that is waaay too much for me so I add just a little bit.

Now saute all of that until the onions are looking nice and golden brown. Add your two cans of coconut milk, and turn the heat to medium. Right after this you want to add your broccoli to the soup, and then simmer it on medium low heat until the broccoli is all cooked and soft. This should take 15 to 20 minutes. If you want the soup to be ultra creamy, then stop here, but if you want it to be slightly more soupy then add your cup of chicken stock.

Now take about 3/4 of your entire soup and put it into your blender (or however much will fit.) Blend it all up until its a nice puree of broccoli deliciousness, and put it back into the pan with the rest of the soup. Boom, you're done.

Alright, you're going to have to search the rest of the internet if you want more than that. Thanks for tuning in!

What I'm up to: September Edition

pulverk@gmail.com (Kyle Pulver) — Sun, 04 Sep 2011 12:52:13 -0700

I just got back from PAX Prime up in Seattle and I'm realizing how little on post on my super fancy blog, so this post is going to be an attempt to fix all of that. I've been up to a lot of various things in the last couple months and I'm going to try to sum them all up in a single blog post, YEAH!

PAX Prime 2011
I just got back from PAX last week and I'm still feeling exhausted in all dimensions. Retro Affect had a booth in the expo hall to show off the latest build of Snapshot, so once again I got to go to a really cool video games conference thing with an exhibitor badge and feel all super cool and important. On top of that, Snapshot was selected for the PAX10 which means we got a second booth to manage.

We ended up bringing a total of 7 people to PAX in order to help keep up with the insanity of running two booths at the same time for 3 days straight. It was pretty intense but somehow everyone survived, and we got a handful of press mentions about Snapshot during and after the show. A lot of people are really excited about it, which makes me excited (and nervous) about it. Special thanks goes out to the Closure dudes, the PAX enforcers, everyone that played Snapshot, and our very own gold enforcer assistant for the weekend, Andrew. This guy went out of his way to get us headache medicine, eating utensils, and lunch throughout the weekend, so mad props to you dawg.

Snapshot!

So on the subject on Snapshot, a lot of what I've been up to lately is working on, and hopefully finishing Snapshot. (I'm linking to Snapshot every chance I get to help our search engine ranking, YEAH!) We've been always making progress with the game and we're always going further and further with it, but sometimes it feels so endless, but recently it doesn't feel that way! The three of us working on the game recently sat down and played through the entire thing (or what we have so far) and assembled a list of things that need to be done before the game can be shipped. The list ended up being pretty massive but we're already making pretty fast progress cutting it down. We're looking at getting Snapshot into the public's hands by early next year!

Offspring Fling

One of my side projects has evolved into a pretty huge game over the past few months. What started out as a simple prototype at a game jam over Mothers Day weekend has evolved into a 100+ level puzzle platformer that will take the world by storm.

Offspring Fling is a super awesome flash game that I'm working on solo, with assistance in the music department from the lovely Alec Holowka. I'll be posting some more info and sweet media from the game as it gets closer to being finished, but for now just enjoy these sample screenshots. (Oh, and I might be looking for a sponsorship for this game at some point, so we'll see how that goes!)

Return to DeviantArt
I've been drawing a lot more recently, and I wanted a place to just throw up all my random junk that I doodle from time to time. On my site I like to keep only the images that I think are the best of my work, and I have a whole lot of stuff that I just never show except to just a handful of people, but now I think I want to be a little bit more public with all of my art and not just the super "finished" looking stuff.

So with that I've reopened my old DeviantArt account that I haven't used since ... high school, I think. I'm still not sure if I'm going to stick with this because sometimes the deviant art community scares me a little bit, but we'll see how things go. I'm going to be uploading just a few images at a time from my current archive of stuff, as well as mixing in new stuff, so if you want to keep up with anything that my wacom tablet generates then do one of those +watch things on me.

Phoenix Arcade Cabinet
About 2 months ago the IGDA Phoenix chapter got their hands on an arcade cabinet that will be re-purposed into some sort of local developer game showcase. Well, it's either going to be that, or be turned into a Winnitron... I'm still not sure. The Winnitron is pretty awesome, and showcasing a lot of indie games would be a lot of fun, but at the same time I also want to make something that brings local developers more into the spotlight.

Currently we have all the parts and pieces that we need, but we still need to cut up some wood and assemble some things together, as well as get a PC to run it, before it becomes totally operational. Right now it resides in a living room surrounded by a bunch of boxes with parts in them, and a super old Windows 2000 computer that can barely manage to run MAME and not much else... the computer also had a Gorillaz CD in it for some reason. Someone is probably looking for it.

TIGJam4
I've added a new website to my design page! A lovely little site for the upcoming TIGJam, which is a game jam that is held to celebrate the TIGSource Community! It's going to be chaos and mayhem and maybe at the end of it I'll have yet another new game prototype... or maybe I'll try to finish one of my many lingering prototypes that are super cool but I still haven't shared them with the world.

Jottobots
Many years ago, June 2009 to be precise, I made a little game called Jottbots with an artist by the name of J Otto. The game was made for the ARTxGAME collective, and a gallery opening at Giant Robot over in LA town, and the game has never been available to the public... but that's all going to change SOON.

I'm currently working on getting a public build out soon, complete with music and sound effects. Hopefully within the next month you'll be able to play the elusive Jottobots that has been in hiding for more than 2 years.

Flash Game Port
And last but not least, one of my older and more popular games is being ported to Flash as I type this right now. I've already hinted at what it was, and a few people already know, but for now I'm going to leave it as a SECRET... until someone just guesses and figures it out.

---

So that's about it! As September gets rolling out I'm going to continue to have my hands full with a billion things, but hopefully I'll find some more time for my precious neglected blog. Until next time!

Goin' to the PAX10!

pulverk@gmail.com (Kyle Pulver) — Fri, 08 Jul 2011 14:41:19 -0700

Earlier this morning me and my crew at Retro Affect finally got the green light to finally announce to the world that Snapshot is going to be in the PAX10, YEAH!

Check out all the games right here. There are some good ones in there, so I am super excited that Snapshot was able to squeeze into the selection somehow. Snapshot was also featured in the Boston Indie Showcase back at PAX East, so it also being in the PAX10 is some sort of back to back penny arcade super game selection combo, I think.

So now it's back to work on Snapshot to make sure it's looking good for the showcase!

Cool Arts!

pulverk@gmail.com (Kyle Pulver) — Thu, 16 Jun 2011 08:00:17 -0700

Hey! I haven't been posting a lot of entries in the old blog but I have been posting some new stuff in my art gallery thing. Here are some rad previews, but why don't you check em out RIGHT HERE!

I don't really get a lot of time to just chill out and draw, but lately I've been trying to make more time for it. Most of my time now is spent with Snapshot and other side game projects, and the occasional marathon of Starcraft 2 laddering or Super Street Fighter 4 Arcade Edition online matches. Hopefully I'll have some cool stuff to post about in the coming weeks regarding one of my games, but for now this is all I got!