Happy Holidays

Tomorrow I'll be driving back to my parents' place in Kalamazoo Michigan. Yes, it's a real place. My holidays are typefied by eating far too much, seeking refuge from an overblaring TV, suffering my two hefty siblings for extended periods of time, and almost invariably getting sick from overexposure to allergens. Ah yes, the holidays.

Despite the fact that I've unilaterally failed to get anything done in the time I've spent at my parents' place, I'm bringing my laptop in order to get some serious work done on this month's game. Given that this month I've been overworked and sick as heck, I haven't gotten much of anything done. So if it's going to get done within the allotted amount of time, some serious work is going to need doing in the next week. Barring any unfortunate mishaps I'll be back home a couple days before New Year's so that the remainder of my sanity might, er, remain.

Here's wishing everyone out there a happy holidays.

Security and Firewalls

For the last few weeks, someone has been trying to break into my firewall machine. The obvious clues that I've been left are that this guy is trying to log in unsuccessfully through SSH as "root", "spam", and "webadmin" which is more than a little concerning. So far as I know, they've been unsuccessful but I'm not enough of a hacker to be certain. My firewall machine is pretty good--it's an obscure operating system that's pretty secure on its lonesome and out of the box it will foil most attempts. Even then, it's low power, isn't connected to anything remotely interesting, and exists on a consumer line. Still, it bothers me that anyone would even attempt to break in for any reason, nefarious or otherwise.

I tightened things up a bit yesterday but I doubt that will deter them. I'll probably buy the latest version of that OS and get that all prettied up. It makes me glad that I had the presence of mind to use a real operating system for a firewall.

A New Tack

Tacking is a maneuver that sailing vessels do to put the wind on the other side of the boat. This is often used to move against the direction of the wind.

My new tack then, is to build a bunch of simple games and then release them for free in an attempt to improve my skills. This obviously isn't ideal since I'd still lose out on learning about all the marketing things and project->product transformations. This does, however, seem to be OK in the light of the corporate copyright law under which I toil.

This guy tries to do a game a month. Gamasutra has some info on how to prototype in under a week (with additional bonus track commentary at Lost Garden). These guys make a game in a day. Kloonigames in that top link has a couple great posts with links to other rapid prototyping resources.

I'm going to try to prototype something each month and post it somewhere for free. I hope that this will get me some of what I'm looking for. It might not be pretty and almost certainly won't be polished but it'll be something which is better than slacking off.

So for my first game, I'm going to rebuild this:
This is GWAGL, the example game I built when exploring the info in
Scott Bilas's GDC Talk in 2002 about data driven game objects. It's even a rebuild of the arcade game I did in college for the one games class I took (I can't post a screenshot of that because it doesn't run anymore). I'm going to pretty it up some, make it a single player game, and bang it out before the end of this year barring any unforseen badness. I might even post updates on how it's going here (but don't hold your breath).

So here we go.