The Best FlipBall Demo since the last one!!
In the past few days, since I first unleashed FlipBall on the world, I've received several questions. Like, "It looks so easy, so why does it make my head hurt?" and "Why don't the balls collapse in both dimensions?" and others. However, the one that I'm hearing the most is, "When is the next version coming out?"

Well, I've been stymied for several days, trying to get this difficulty level issue resolved. But tonight, I solved that problem, and put up a new version with all the latest bells and whistles. It has difficulty levels, sounds, new input formats, an "Undo" button, and various, nefarious, bug fixes.

This is really getting cool, because I think there's only a few features left, and an art update, then I'll be ready to send it to PopCap. BTW, if you don't want to wait, you can register Flipball to get the full version by clicking here.

That's really all the news there is for today. I spent the entire day on that.

Oh, wait, I also made a 10% profit on my investment today with LittleTrades.com. This morning, I had $2500 invested, now I have $2750 invested. So that's pretty cool.
- posted by BrandG @ 11:45 PM 0 comments

 
Happy Birthday to Me
Happy Birthday to Me
I belong in a Tree,
These aren't the right words so
You cannot sue me. :)

Long day. I've been working on the difficulty levels for Flipball, and that's coming along (though, it's not quite done). I'd really like to finish this tomorrow or over the weekend. I've got a really great soundtrack, and lots of good audio in the next version, which will hopefully be released soon.

In stock news, I made $50 on a $2,500 stake, which is good by any measure. Then, I held onto a different stock (bad move. I should have honored the dump price), and lost $107. Oh, well. Once I learn to trust Littletrades more than I do my own instinct, I'll be able to start reaping the benefits.

Here is why the internet will come to dominate our lives: I wanted to make a reservation at a local restaurant. I didn't remember the whole name, just that it was Italian, and sounded like Beppo. I found the yellow pages, opened it to restaurants, and couldn't find the one I wanted, I then pulled out the business white pages, and couldn't find it there either. I looked through the phone books for both city and county, but with no luck. Then I fired up Google, and just did a search for "Beppo Austin". The first reply was Google Local, with an address, map, and phone number for the restaurant "Buca di Beppo" (which was, incidentally, exactly what I was looking for). I actually felt stupid for trying a search in meatspace.
- posted by BrandG @ 10:06 PM 1 comments

 
Wanna buy stock in Me?
Damn, I'm in a good mood. Seriously manic mode.

Yesterday, I found out about a website where they rate blogs, and trade fantasy shares in those blogs. It's here if you're interested. I only found out about it because my blog is listed on there. I account for 0.00024 % of the market share. Look upon my blog, ye mighty, and despair.

Anyway, I get a complimentary 1000 shares (20%) of stock in my company (you would think I'd have controlling interest in it) and I used half of my money to buy more shares. I'm listed as as "Stable Blog (HOLD)" and also as "Underpriced (BUY)". How sweet.

Hey, it just ocurred to me, If you guys jump on there, and buy up all the stock, I bet that'd make it split! We'd all be (virtually) rich! And then, you could have controlling interest in the blog, and fire my sorry ass for not updating it enough.

Speaking of stock trading, I took my first big steps into applying LittleTrades today. I used $2,500 of my own money, and invested in two of the top stocks recommended by LittleTrades. At the end of the day, I had made $82.15 profit (after commissions) which is a 3.3% increase. Kick Ass!

Of course, one swallow does not a spring make. I'll have to try it out more before I can call it a resounding success, and start charging people for it. Still, it was a good day.

In other news, I'm pretty much wrapping up the Flipball game. Guthrie pointed out to me a design inconsistancy, in that FlipBall only closes holes in one axis (vertical). I'm in the process of fixing it, and trying to decide if fixing that bug breaks the gameplay. More news as it develops.

You know, I bugged the Ex-Acclaim people for art and sound, thinking that I could maybe get an artist to work on it in his spare time. But when you open yourself up to a mixed group of people, you find those people had skills you never knew about. For instance, a programmer sent me an excellent soundtrack for the game (some of you Ex-Acclaim people might remember Mr. Osborn), and a designer sent me some great art. I'm getting responses from all over, and I couldn't be happier.

Yeah, it's a good day. I'm working on difficulty levels for the game now, and once that's done, I think I'll be ready to ship. I'll probably take it to PopCap or talk to the SPA to try and publish it myself. I'm also thinking of porting it to the PocketPC and offering it to Handango.

In other news, I'm working with the Bastrop Opera House on two radio plays which are to be performed live either May or June. I'm playing main characters in both plays. Rehearsals are a blast.

So, yeah. If I had to guess, I'd say my stock is rising.
- posted by BrandG @ 10:02 AM 1 comments

 
Games are like Icebergs
They both take out thousands of players when they crash.

No, seriously. I was referring to the old analogy of an iceberg being 90% underwater, so you never see it. In the same way, game development is 90% unseen.

As an example, I wrote 90% of the gameplay for FlipBall in the first day (maybe two days). I already knew how I wanted the game to play, so it was just a question of organizing a program to reflect that gameplay. That was the 10% that people see.

Now, I've spent the last few days working on the other 90%. Sound, dialogs, gameplay refinement. This is 90% of the work, and most of it is totally ignored by the player. They just expect it to be there. For instance, I put in a "Resign" button, for when the player feels that they just can't finish a level. Even though it took me time to do, most people will never realize that it was there, or know what the game was like without it. I put in a registration screen, a hyperlink in the main game, and a web page that would let people register the game. Even though that took a lot of work, and won't even be seen in the full version, nobody's going to recognize that work.

Not that I'm bitching about it. I know this is just part of the development process. I just realized how easy it is to look at a game in development and say, "So, it's done, right?" and not understand why the developer says they still need weeks or months to finish it.

BTW, I expect to be finished with this one by the end of this week. All that's left (gameplay-wise) is difficulty levels, and I already have an idea how to do that.

After that, I'm thinking I'll either start on a new game, or port this one to the PocketPC.

Check out the Website! (Work in Progress)

I also figure I'm going to submit it to PopCap soon. Cross your fingers for me.
- posted by BrandG @ 8:55 PM 0 comments

 
Game in a Day? Yes and no.
Okay, I started working on this at about noon on the 18th. It's now almost 9:00 AM on the 19th, and the gameplay is already implemented.

If you download the game, you will be able to move the bars with your cursor keys, and swap rows and columns with the 'A' and 'X' keys. Give it a try!

So, was this an entire game in a day? Not quite. Some things are still missing:

• Automatically collapsing columns horizontally.
• Adding a font to show the score.
• Recognizing an end-game situation.
• Difficulty levels (by changing the number of different colors, the number of balls in a row/column, etc.)
• All the front-end stuff (where I beg for registration money, give instructions on how to play the game, and make a decent loading screen).

Still, all the basic gameplay functionality is there already. Sweet.


game, popcap
- posted by BrandG @ 6:48 AM 1 comments

 
Game in a Day
Okay, maybe not that fast, but I managed to make a live version of the FlipBall game mock up in just about as much time as it took to post this message. It's here if you want to see it. Yeah, it doesn't do anything, but most mock-ups don't.

My point is, the PopCap framework is pretty sweet. It took me longer to make the art than it did to implement it. Wow.

Next step is user interaction. Get those bars moving, get the columns and rows to switch places, and get the explosions to play. Step three, profit!


UPDATE: In, like, the two seconds that have past since I wrote this post, I got the explosion to animate. So, uh, it's not totally sedentary.

FURTHER UPDATE: Okay, I've managed to get keyboard input, so now I've got the bars moving. All I need now is the flipping of the balls, and the explosions working. Hmmm . . . I just might be done tonight. No more updates, though. Not unless I can get real gameplay going.
- posted by BrandG @ 1:16 PM 0 comments

 
FlipBall (Working Title)
I had this idea for a new game, kinda like the PopCap stuff, basic Match-three thing. I've got a basic gameplay mock-up here. The idea is that you can swap columns or rows of a grid, to match like-colored balls together. The goal, of course, is to clear the field.

I'd been thinking about it a lot recently, it's just stuck in my head. Coincidentally, PopCap just released an SDK for writing their games. I figure it should be fun to play with.

Of course, this is on top of my LittleTrades work. Gwen wants me to apply intraday evaluation, so that I can determine whether the buy hit before the sell, or if the dump price was hit. That's a pretty ambitious thing to do, but I think it will improve our validation by showing that you should get out before the cost of an investment becomes too dangerous.

And there are other candlestick patterns that I want to try to implement.

And I'm still working on the Kid's version of GTA.

With all these irons in the fire, I wonder if being employed wasn't an easier life. :)

P.S. If you ever want to turn on a movie to run as background noise while you work, I highly recommend Stanley Kubrick's works. They are so incredibly slow, that you don't really miss anything if you don't look up for a while. And when you hear "Open the pod bay doors, HAL" then you know it's time to look up, because the good stuff's coming. The antithesis of this is the first two Godfather movies. Oh, it feels like it's moving slowly, but it engages you so fully with its consistently great writing, acting, and web of intrigue, that you can't concentrate on your work.
- posted by BrandG @ 11:16 AM 0 comments

 
My LittleTrades
As you may have noticed, I haven't been updating this blog as religiously as I once did. This is largely because I've been working on a project with an equal fervor.

This is something that I developed about a year ago, and I just recently picked it up, brushed it off, and started working on it again. It's a stock prediction system, and it works like this:

It's very difficult to say how much a stock is going to move over a week or a month. Even when you are trying to guess how much a stock will move in a couple of days, it's difficult to accurately predict. However, if you look at the stock movement over a single day, there are a lot of them that will rise and fall as much as two or three percent regularly. If you had a way of knowing how high a stock was likely to rise, and how low it would fall, you could make one or two percent in a single day.

Why should a single percent be worth the risk? Because, if you can verifiably make 1% every day, over the 20 days in a trading month, you will make a 20% increase over one month. This means that, if you invest $5,000, and only make 1% per month, you end up with $6,000 at the end of the month. At the end of the second month, you would have $7,200. And so on.

So, by looking for regular, daily fluctuations in a stock rather than the overall movement of the stock, you could make 1% a day, which could make even a modest investment turn into a profitable venture (notice, most day traders start out with about $25,000 for trading. This system can work with investments as modest as $1,000).

But can we make those guesses? Can we know how high and how low a stock will trade on a given day? That's the crux of the matter, and that's what I've spent about three months working on.

I've developed a website that takes historical data for every single symbol in the NASDAQ, NYSE, and AMEX markets, evaluates them for trend, average delta (high to low), and other factors, then creates a list of the "best bets" for a given day. So, if you go to this website, it will tell you exactly where to buy and sell stocks to make that 1%.

And I don't take the easy way out either. Each recommendation is evaluated after the day is done, to see if it was successful or not, and the main page of the website tells how many made money, and how many lost. Right now, I'm hovering at about a 35-50% accuracy rating, and I'm working on that. But if you think about it, out of 7,700 stocks, I made 35% of my predictions accurately. When you consider only the "best bets" the numbers get exponentially better.

Anyway, once I get up enough money, I'm going to start putting it into this project. For now, though, I'm just playing on paper. I'm doing pretty well on paper, though.

For now, this website is provided for free. If I figure that there's a whole lot of people interested in it, I may require paid membership (to feed my trading habit).

If you're interested in seeing it in action, it's at http://www.LittleTrades.com


stock,
day-trade

- posted by BrandG @ 4:13 AM 2 comments

 
Treading the boards
So, I had my first professional audition in 21 years today. I know, "Brand, You're a programmer, not an actor!" However, in reality, I've been acting for most of my life.

When I was five, I was the youngest person ever to play the lead in my school play (a kindergartener outshining the fifth graders was something of a coup). I played an acting lead all through my school years. When I was nine years old, I had a leading part in a feature at the San Antonio Little Theater, and I was in a couple of episodes of Sonny Melendrez's Disney channel exercise show. In High School, I entered in the UIL one-act play every year (some years, we nearly made it to state). In college, I took acting as all of my electives. While working for video game companies, I did voice acting for every project I was working on. Basically, if it wasn't for computer programming, I would have been a starving actor a long time ago.

So, now that I'm unemployed, I'm taking the opportunity to rekindle my passion for the theater. I checked on open auditions near me, and went to the first one today. I had to present an audition piece, and since I couldn't find one I really liked, I just turned one of my blog posts into a monologue, and presented it.

You know, there's a feeling I'd almost totally forgotten about. I'd forgot what performing in front of people does for my metabolism. It might just be me, but I don't think so. What happens is, I get really nervous before a performance. That's normal, and everybody gets that. When I try to talk through my monologue, I get it wrong every time. I'm always skipping parts, dropping parts, adding unnecessary ad-libs, and (worst of all) stopping dead in the middle of the performance. I pace, I crack my knuckles, I can't sit still.

When I walk on the stage, though, that all stops. As soon as I have a group of people with their eyes on me, I totally cool off. Suddenly, all my speech is smooth, measured, correct. The fight or flight instinct floods my body with adrenaline, my eyesight gets better, my concentration is razor sharp, and every word comes to me with ease. Even though I'd spent the previous few hours sweating out the details of the performance, when I get up on stage, I feel totally cool, like my blood has turned cold, and every muscle motion is a calculated effect. I have complete control of my body and mind, and I feel so cold, I have to suppress a chill. I feel happy and excited, full of energy and ready to bounce off the walls. Then, when the performance is done, I'm on a high that lasts for hours. I feel like I can do anything, I sing along with the radio, I dance in my car seat, I generally make an utter fool of myself.

I'd forgot how great it feels. After the audition, they asked me if I had any questions, and all I could think of was, "When's the next audition? When do we start filming? Christ, put me back up there!"

I know it's because of the manic depression. In fact, once it wears off, I crash hard, and nap for hours. But I don't care. All I know is that I want that feeling again. I want to do that as much as I can, and for as long as I can.

I figure, that's the way all actors are. It's not that we're looking for fame or attention, it's just that we thrive on the pressure of having tens, hundreds, thousands of eyes on us. That kind of pressure triggers the adrenaline and endorphins. That pressure makes us perform better than we ever could without it, and we just want to hold that feeling for as long as we can.

Somehow, I could see how this ties to actors with addictions, because when you walk off stage, you feel so good that you just want to go party. Now I am not the most wild party animal, but when I walked off that stage, I wanted to go dance. I wanted to go party. I wanted to spend time with friends, do exciting stuff, and live life large for a while. I guess, if I was a popular actor, who does this all the time, I'd spend a lot of time partying, and I'd probably be weakened in the face of a lot of the partying temptations (sex, drugs, drinking, etc.)

Don't get me wrong, I'm not trying to look forward to an addiction (I could do that without acting). I'm just saying that I can empathise with how so many of these people fall into such traps.


acting
- posted by BrandG @ 12:57 PM 3 comments