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posts tagged with: yay!

I Defeated King Yama

I Defeated King Yama
Inspired by the wise Paul Hubans I finally picked up Spelunky for the PC. I played the XBLA version for a little while but I never got very far past just beating the game normally without shortcuts.

At PAX I witnessed Spelunky Video Armageddon in which Colin Northway unleashed secret technology involving robbing shop keepers. His technique has spread like wildfire and it was just the spark I needed to get back into the game.

I've always played the game by not robbing shop keepers because I feared them waiting for me at the exit of each level, but little did I know all it takes is a day's worth of practice to develop some shop keeper murder methods. With my new knowledge on how to viciously murder every shop keeper in the black market, I finally made it all the way to the end of the game and defeated the king of hell after just starting to play the game again 2 days ago.

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I even did it without sticky bombs!

Anyway, that was a much needed break from constantly coding and working on stuff. Another reason I started playing Spelunky again was to study how they did tiles, because I'm discovering once again that making tiles in a high resolution is a giant pain. Back to work!

Dev Log: Squishy Platforming

Dev Log: Squishy Platforming
I've been at Indie House Vancouver for a couple days now and my main focus is working on my C# framework with SFML. I'm working on a little example game that will hopefully show people enough stuff on how to get started with the framework and use it. When the example game is totally done I'm going to release it along with the framework all 100% open source.

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Right now I have some neat little platforming going on involving running, jumping, wall sliding, wall jumps, and a special skid jump technique sort of like Mario 64 but in 2d. Also to make the game more fun with rectangles I added a lot of squashing and stretching to the player rectangle with tweens. I am planning to do a full set of graphics for this game, but right now I'm focused on getting the whole thing playable before I tackle any art.

Today a whole crapload of people are coming to Indie House so hopefully I can make some more progress before the entire gathering turns into a TowerFall tournament.

PAX and Stuff

PAX and Stuff
PAX has come and gone like a cool breeze on a mid-summer's day (not an Arizona mid-summer day, though.) It was as crazy as I expected it to be and a little bit more. Everyone was prepared for the madness to last four days this time, so every Indie Megabooth member had ample supplies of hand sanitizer, vitamin c powder, and various types of medicine in stock.

I was just at PAX floating around which was pretty fun. I filled in at the Aztez booth from time to time, and also helped out a little bit at TowerFall in the PAX10. My awesome laptop was used to demo Scale, but beyond that I had no real responsibilities, yay!

I stopped in for the Spelunky Video Armageddon challenge which turned out to be pretty awesome. Colin Northway destroyed all his competitors with a complete Hell run of Spelunky that actually went quite late since the Video Armageddon lived up to its name and started late after 30 minutes of struggling with laptop video out.

PAX Eve

PAX Eve
I made it safe and sound to Seattle after nearly losing my mind to the anxiety of flying and traveling in general. I usually like traveling when I'm actually in my new location, but the entire process of getting there makes me pretty crazy. The packing before the trip makes me freak out as if I forgot everything important, the airport security makes me freak out with the weird x ray scanners and pat downs, and the act of flying in a plane is probably the worst since I get pretty bad adrenaline rushes from the turbulence which causes me to panic...

But hey! Here I am in sunny Seattle, Washington getting ready for one of the craziest events of the year.

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Behold the beautiful view from my friend James's apartment. We're only 10 to 15 minute walk from the actual convention center where PAX is, so it's a pretty good set up for 4 days of madness. I'm taking every precaution not to get sick, but it really does seem to come down to luck of the draw (but your odds of sickness increase based on how little sleep you get.)

If you're out at PAX then I hope I get to see you and or meet you! I'll be hanging around the indie mega booth or the PAX 10 for most of the time, so if you see some dude with blue and blonde hair you should totally say hello.

I hope everyone has an awesome and healthy PAX! LET'S DO THIS.

Gravity Ghost Website!

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Gravity Ghost is now up for pre-orders! A lovely game by one of my house mates Erin Robinson. She needed a fancy pre-order page so I returned to the war zone of HTML and CSS to make some magic happen.

The big screenshot of the site is a little wacky because of some of the parallax scrolling and background positions that I used. Certain elements stay in place when scrolling, and some scroll with some parallax, it's very fancy. I also made use of a lot of the artwork directly from the game for a majority of the elements on the site. I think it turned out pretty well! Check out Gravity Ghost!

Dog Face No Space

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Oh my GOD I am now a Twitch emoticon! YEAH! If you type DogFace into any Twitch chat you get my beautiful visage.

Why DogFace? Well, it's a pretty long story, but it has something to do with me adding a tribute to FrankerZ on Steam. When I added trading cards and emoticons to Steam through Offspring Fling, one of the emoticons I added was a tribute to FrankerZ, a Twitch emoticon used heavily by the speed running community. I added it because I love the emoticon as much as the speed runners do, and since Offspring Fling had a speed running element I figured it would be awesome to reference the speed running community with an emoticon. (Also, I chose :dogface: for the Steam emoticon because a lot times people in Twitch chat try to troll new users by typing "FrankerZ = Dog Face (no space)")

At first there was an issue with me using an emoticon that looked like FrankerZ, so I had to remove it, but then after some more communication and help from a Twitch admin, Horror, I was able to get the okay to use it on Steam. After the dust had settled and the twitter outcry to free FrankerZ was over, Horror figured it would be pretty funny to wrap up the story with putting me on Twitch... so there I am! DogFace on Twitch is me, and :dogface: on Steam is my tribute to FrankerZ and the speed running community. All's well that ends well!