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Well it’s been more than a year since I’ve posted. I’ve been living here in Hawaii for that time and I am loving it. There’s always something to do or something to see.

I don’t think I’ll get back to game progamming anytime soon. Originally, I started out doing it because it was fun but the more I got into it, the more time consuming it became. I remember spending hours every day working on Aliens over Hawaii or Auction Poker while still holding a full time job.

In addition, the more time I spent the less fun it became. It was always fun to come up with new ideas for games but working out all the insane little bugs was a major chore. I wasn’t trained as a programmer so I definitely know that the games I programmed were nowhere near optimal.

Still, I have quite a few ideas that never made it to Whirled and if I’m between jobs with a little more time to myself, I’ll definitely make an iPad game or two.  We’ll see what happens.

In the meantime I’ll enjoy my weekends on the beach:

Well I’ve been living in Honolulu for almost three months now and I am completely loving it. The weather is absolutely fantastic. There hasn’t been a day that’s not T-shirt weather. The mornings are absolutely beautiful with the sun rising over the clouds and mountains instead of meekly breaking through a layer of fog like in Oakland.  Mid-day, the sun can be a bit harsh. However, under the shade, the temperature is just perfect for being outside.  Rarely does the daytime high reach over 90.  Evenings are just as perfect as well, nice for being outside but not too warm. Nights, with overnight lows in the 70s would probably be considered muggy and hot back in Oakland, but over here it’s perfect.  I haven’t needed a jacket to go outside at night.

But Honolulu is still a city and has its share of urban problems.  There’s urban blight throughout the city with decaying and dilapidated buildings next to some pretty swanky hotels. There are more than a few homeless people but it’s definitely not as bad as San Francisco.  I haven’t seen any aggressive panhandlers or anything unusually gross, like two homeless people doing the dirty deed ( I’m sure that’s only the tip of the iceberg of what happens around the Powell St. BART station back in SF.)

I splurged a bit and bought myself a new camera- basically the cheapest DSLR out there. It took me a while to get used to a lot of the settings and the first few pictures that I took were not what I expected. I also learned a lot of about white points and white balance.  I wonder if the Daylight white point setting is geared towards the sunlight of more northern latitudes since every shot I took with that setting came out decidedly on the blue side.  But I also learned how to use a gray card and fix the white balance in post-processing so I’m really having fun learning a lot of new things. Most of my Hawaii pictures are here.

As for Whirled, I haven’t really logged on in quite a while and honestly, I haven’t been playing that many games since I got here. However, we’ll see how things go once I’m all completely settled in and doing the daily grind instead of exploring new places every week.  

Well I just finished my last trip for work for quite a while.  It also looks like I may not be moving anytime soon, so it definitely seems like I’ll have a bit more free time! I still have a few things unfinished with Aliens Over Hawaii so I’ll get back to the sound effects and music for it. I’m also going to include a Very Hard difficulty mode and a few new trophies. Now that YouTube now allows us to make captions for videos, the “Making Of” video will be a lot easier. Once that is done, I can put it out of my mind and focus on revamping the graphics for Paint Factory. After that, it’s all about making new games.

I haven’t been on Whirled much either so I have to catch up on all the new releases and games. I still don’t know exactly what Whirleds are all about but I’ll test them out and maybe make something.

And for no reason, here’s a picture of a one-legged seagull I took yesterday on the central California coast:

I haven’t had much time to work on the games at all this month.  I’ve been kept pretty busy planning some pretty significant life changes - plans upon plans upon contingency plans.  Anyways, I have a slight break coming up at the beginning of July so I’ll devote some real hard time to cranking the games out. I’ll also have a much shorter commute! I orginally meant to publish the three updated games at the same time, but I think I’ll do a slow rollout to make sure all the trophies and cookies are working correctly.

I spent a short time yesterday updating some things around the site:

*The favicon is no longer the ugly Yahoo one.
*The game pages go directly to Whirled.
*Added pages for Auction Poker & Aliens Over Hawaii.
*Updated the Coins Bar Data Page since I noticed the gadget stopped showing the updates after April 14th.

Anyways, while updating things around here I noticed that Paint Factory needs a big graphical update. I’ll be doing that after finishing up some minor stuff for Aliens Over Hawaii and listing Blackjack Square.

As for the Aliens Over Hawaii video - that’s about as complete as it’s going to get unless I somehow have a lot more free time. I storyboarded the whole thing out so maybe in the future I’ll finish it up. (Just like the Auction Poker AI posts..ha!). In this economy, however, a lot more free time might be coming sooner than I want.

Just came back from an extended trip to St. Louis, Seattle and Las Vegas! I’m back home for a couple of days before heading to Honolulu for a week! I’ll be done with all my traveling by mid-September.

I’ve been updating things here and there. I’ve created two new pages. One for Paint Factory. (Yes, you can play it outside of Whirled!) The other page is for one of my Whirled Rooms where I test stuff out.

Even though I haven’t finished Auction Poker or started Poker Square, I’ve already started writing notes for a Blackjack-type game. I have notes for other games too but I’ll probably get the cards games done first, they’d certainly be easier to code than a space-based gravity game or a plant breeding game.

Welcome to my first post on this blog. It’s a bit empty right now but I’m planning to move everything I had from my freewebs account to here. Then I’ll update the look to something besides the generic WordPress blog.

Anyways, I’m planning to write mainly about making new games for Whirled but I’ll probably chime in about other stuff too.