Alien Game Prototype

For one of the Ludum Dare mini competitions a few months back I started hacking together a simple arcade style game.  The human race is being attacked an eaten by a vicious alien species.  You play the role of a benevolent alien who comes to the rescue of the helpless humans.

Originally the only defence the hero had against the invading aliens was going to be a tractor beam — where you must grab and throw the aliens to get rid of them.  After showing it to the Pipe Cleaner Man he insisted that I added lasers and homing missiles, so I did.

I’m not certain what I’m going to do with this project.  As it began as a quick hack for a 48 hour competition, it is not very well designed.  It would need a considerable amount of rewriting before being able to transform it into a real game.

For the time being I think I’ll hold off before posting the actual game for download.  I would like to add at least a simple scoreboard and actually being able to win or lose before sharing it.

I haven’t been very good at keeping this blog up-to-date.  A few things have happened since some of my previous posts, so I decided to try to bring this site up to speed.

The following posts will show off a few of the things I worked a little on in the past few weeks.  Most likely many of these projects will not amount to much in the future, but I thought I should share them anyway.

I’ve been meaning to write about pretty much everything I had worked on irregardless of their likeliness of completion.  Some things are simply done for fun without any real future plans for them.

I am now going to begin writing about the stuff I neglected to write about earlier.

I just validated my theme and I’m proud to say that it checks out as valid XHTML and CSS.

Now, I have to decided what I actually want to accomplish with this site.  I was thinking about playing around with some low-to-no commitment projects.  Things that could be done just for fun.  These projects may include programming experiments, such as simulations or implementations of algorithms, or I could just have a little fun with random sketching, drawing, and simple 3D modeling.

One possible course of action I thought about was creativity and inspiration exercises.  These will include drawing and writing a lot of random garbage to help get me going.  The goal is not so much to create anything good, but instead to get myself into the right mindset for being creative on something later.  Since most of what I make will, undoubtedly, be not so great, only a very small subset of this work might actually be shown.

I added some pages and links to the blog.  Soon I’ll be actually adding some content … I hope!

I need to think about doing the following:

• Creating pages so my links do not result in 404′s.
• Tweak a few parts of the theme that could stand to look a little better.
• Thoroughly test the theme to make sure the format always looks good.
• Customize my blogroll with my own links.

I have my new theme up and running.  There may still be a bit of debugging and other tweaks, but things seem to be looking nice.  I’ll have to run a few tests before anything is really finalized.

Of course, I would greatly appreciate any comments on how to make the site look and function better.

I started hacking together the html for my blog theme.  It still has a long ways to go, but I’m somewhat satisfied by how it’s turning out already.  Maybe sometime in the next few days I will be able to replace this theme with the one I’m making.

A few days ago I started to work on a custom theme for my blog.  At the moment I just have a mockup in The Gimp, but I’m beginning to like how it’s comming out.  It still might have a little ways to go before it’s internet ready.

I just got my website up and running.  I have wordpress and a theme and I’m about to get going.

I’m not certain what this website will have in store for it.  I do know, however, that I need it — especially while participating in programming competitions.  I cannot put files just anywhere!  I need a permanent home for my projects.