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Monday May 1, 2006 - Start the month with a Week

Yesterday (Saturday night PST)I was a bit rushed as I had plans so had to rush posting the site. For that reason, I never had time to post the poll results. Looking at the results and comparing the results with the emails I received, it appears that people want the game to work in their browser. It could also be that people aren't sure what JOGL and LWJGL are. They are Java libraries that allow the use of Open GL which is a way of creating 3D graphics that take advantage of 3D graphics cards. Sadly these technologies don't work with applets, and Sun still hasn't added standard 3D acceleration support into java (including Java 6) . Flash also doesn't support 3D. That covers the common plugins, and I don't want to develop for something that no one can use. So, with that out of the way, lets start the new month with the first episode of Day 3 of One of those Weeks.

Description	Percentage
Browser Playable (Java 1.1) using raycasting (fasted dev time)	50
Brower Playable (Java 1.1) using BSP Trees (slightly better graphics)	44
Download using Java 5 and JOGL open GL library	6
Download using Java 5 and LWJGL open GL Library	0

Tuesday May 2, 2006 - Fixing coffee

The first chapter of the Making of Coffee Quest will be a design/strategy guide but I realized that there the only maps users of the open source version had were the extra maps included with the source release and the construction set. The 3 sets that were released with the original and enhanced releases of the game are not part of the open source release. Of course, the idea was that people using the open source version would release original maps. Still, having the "official" maps available for download is not a bad idea so before I get into the text of the book, I am going to release the official maps. I am spreading this out over three weeks because the later two maps have extra graphics as well as the maps (and I am updating every day now, so I can take my time). When testing the map I noticed that the cq1.jar file was missing from the open source download. While this is easy to create from the provided class files, I am sure some people who downloaded the file and had problems getting the game to run. For this reason I repackaged the open source release to include the jar file.

Wednesday May 3, 2006 - Making Memories

I was going to release this next week, but decided that it would be ideal to release early so anybody interested can start creating their own TftM maps right away. I am not too sure how many people will actually be interested in creating their own Tanks for the Memory maps, but I would love to see any that you do create. For those of you who have not yet figured out what today's release is, it is quite simply a document explaining how to create maps for the Tanks for the Memory games.

Thursday May 4, 2006 - One final point

Tomorrow is the poll for the series to be released on friday's now that the Queen's Challenge series (well, episode) is done. In the future I will have to start grouping multiple related games together like I do with the ultimate retro series. Today is the last episode of the darts series where we release the final play mode. That means that tomorrow's poll will only be six days, with next thursday being a poll for which series will take the thursday slot. The final play mode in darts is my version of Around the Clock. In this mode you have to hit a bulls eye followed by each number from one to twenty and conclude with another bulls eye.

Friday May 5, 2006 - Replacing the Queen

What can I say. Whichever game or article series wins this near-week long vote will get the Friday release slot for it's duration.

Saturday May 6, 2006 - Getting Serious

While I was planning on posting a game related link today (every saturday I feature a third party link), Something a bit more important came to my attention. Today's link is aimed at my American visitors. Today's link is to the Information Policy Action Committee. IPac is a nonpartisan group dedicated to preserving individual freedom through balanced information policy.

Sunday May 7, 2006 -Squeeting along

During my browsing for free RSS readers that I could recommend to visitors, I found a service that will actually email rss to you.. This means that I can now make it easy for people to get my updates even if they don't have RSS software. Kind of a light update today, and the next couple of Sundays's will be given to other things, but I am hoping to introduce a big change to my game lists after that.

Monday May 8, 2006 - Get to Work

Mondays are One of those Weeks days. This series (at least for the current season) is being split between releasing Making of One of those Weeks part 1 and episodes from the third day. Before I release a chapter, I am releasing the open source version of that episode. You can download the open source version and play it offline, put it on your own site, and (as long as you follow the GPL license) even make changes to the game! So, today I am releasing the Open Source Version of One of those Weeks Episode 4.

Tuesday May 9, 2006 - Cold Coffee

Before I release the first chapter of Making Coffee Quest, I am releasing all the maps. The construction set and open source version of Coffee Quest have already been released. As has the original map. Now I am going to release the Ice Map. As a bonus, the ice map includes a new set of images for the environment. You can use these images for your own maps. Details on creating your own artwork for your maps will be provided in one of the chapters of the making of Coffee Quest book.

Wednesday May 10, 2006 - Final Shots

Today is the final release of the Tanks for the Memory Open Source Release. This means that you can now download Modern Tanks for the Memory for offline use or to put on your own web site (preferably with your own maps). This means that next week there will be a vote for which series will replace this slot.. I am currently working on a Real-time version of this game but that game is not near enough in development to be on next week's poll.

Thursday May 11, 2006 - Guess what game is coming tomorrow

The poll for tomorrow's game is now finished. I am going wait until tomorrow to announce the winning entry and display the results. As Today, however, is a new poll. This means regular visitors can figure out what the winning game is by simply looking at the poll entries and making note of which entry is missing. That said, here is the poll for the thursday replacement. As with the friday poll, this one is going to be slightly under a week as Wednesday will also have a replacement game.

Friday May 12, 2006 - Squashing a non-bug

When I was preparing today's relase of PHP Dice, which has been renamed Dice Rolling Utility , I realized that the statistics feature could be too cpu bound for being on a third party server. PHP is run on the server (you are only sent the results). Sadly the statistics were the most usefull part of this release. To solve this problem, I am going to remove the statistics from today's release but have the ststistics as part of next week's open source release of the utility. Below are the results to last week's poll.

Description	Percentage	Adjusted
Dice Rolling Utility (PHP Dice) [29% adjustmemt]	67	96
Mr Holeman Strategy Guide [6% adjustment]	22	28
Making Ultimate Retro Volume 1 [No adjustment]	11	11
Java Game Development Part 2 [12% adjustment]	0	12

Saturday May 13, 2006 - Bubbles

No, today's entry does not have anything to do with the Power Puff Girls. Instead, I am linking to a third party open source game as today is saturday and on saturdays I add links to third party sites that I think my visitors may be interested in. Actually, there are going to be two links. The first link is to the original perl game, and because a lot of people don't have perl set up on their machines, I am also linking to a java port of the game. The game is called Frozen Bubbles, and is located at http://www.frozen-bubble.org/. the java version is located at http://glenn.sanson.free.fr/fb/. Due to the long weekend next week, there will be no post next saturday

Sunday May 14 - Mother's Day

Because today is mother's day, I have created a special animation for my mother. I am posting it here so you can share it with your mother. It is a flash animation and is not optimized for slower machines so it may not run very well on lower end hardware (though runs great on my budget brand AMD 64 machine) . There will be no post next sunday.

Monday May 15 - Give me your wallet

What can I say. It is monday so it is time for something from One of those Weeks. At least this week. As many visitors already know, I am a Canadian and as such am going to be taking the Victoria Day long weekend off. That means that there will be no post next Monday. That means there will be no One of those Weeks release next week. Today's release is Chapter 4 from my Making of One of those Weeks eBook. This chapter covers the creation of the fourth episode.

Tuesday May 16 - Beneath the dirt

Here is the final map for the first Coffee Quest game . As with the previous map release, this one includes extra graphics which you can use in your own maps. While I am not taking next tuesday off, I may be really late posting it, though will try to get it up on time. For those of you who are not familiar with the coffee quest series, the third map is the Under Ground map.

Wednesday May 17, 2006 - Worth Voting?

With only half a dozen votes, I am wondering if it really is worth having a vote for the content. My thought is that people just are not interested in the Open Sourcing of the site. I have been moving this site to entirely open source but have so much material to release that it will take a while. So instead of voting for what will be replacing Wednesday's release, I will instead be about how I should proceed with this transition. One of those Weeks will be on mondays and Coffee Quest is going to be moved to fridays starting next week. This leaves Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday. New games and series will for the most part be developed "Live" meaning that they will start out as open source and be developed on the site in the open. What should I do for Tuesday to Thursday?

Thursday May 18, 2006 - A hole in the vote

Yesterday's vote has already resulted in more votes in one day than occurred for the last game vote. When I last checked, all the votes were for voting. What I want to know is why does everybody want the chance to vote if they aren't going to bother voting? The message is clear so I am going to replace yesterday's vote with a new one regarding what will appear Tuesday's. (remember I am moving Coffee Quest to Friday's) . I am also going to shift today's game over to Wednesday and next Thursday have a vote for what will be in that slot (as my dice utility is being open sourced tomorrow). I also updated the coming soon page. The winner of last week's vote was the Mr. Holeman strategy guide (3 votes, 2 votes for my Dozen Days dice series, 1 vote for Part 2 of my Java Game Development eBook) but I am only including the first half. After listening to the Math Grad podcasts, I have decided to simplify my voting system to make it more mathematically correct. Now each vote will only have two choices. Just so we are clear, this is a new vote, so if you voted yesterday you can still vote.

Friday May 19, 2006 - The six-million dollar PHP script

This is a really strange post today. While releasing an open source program is not unusual, what is unusual is the fact that the downloadable open source version is actually superior to the version on my site. This is because PHP is a server side scripting language, and I don't own my server, so don't want to have a potentially cpu intensive script on my site. Sadly, only visitors with access to a php server (or those who just want to look at the source as it should be easy to port) will find this post useful.. Here is the Dice Utility download page. As a reminder, due to the Victoria Day long weekend, I will not be posting again until Tuesday.

Tuesday May 23, 2006 - You sunk my source code

For those who have not been keeping up with the news and are here for Making Coffee Quest, the date of that series has been shifted to Fridays. With roughly 70% of the vote, today's release is the Open Source Release of my Fleet game. This game was originally created way back in 1998 and enhanced in 2002. Next week we will actually start the creation of a much more advanced version of this game. I will be posting every tuesday the latest version of the source code and the game with a journal explaining what exactly I am doing.

Wednesday May 24, 2006 - The other half of a hole

Last thursday I had the first half of the strategy guide for the third set of Mr. Holeman. As I said last week, I am shifting the action releases to Wednesdays so here is the second half of the Mr. Holman set 3 Strategy guide. Next wednesday I will try to have the whole set instead of just half of one, but right now the guide is in a handwritten form so I have to find time to type it out and make screen shots.

Thursday May 25, 2006 - A Tough Choice

What's the point of having votes if the outcome is obvious. For that reason, today's vote will consist of two new games (both will be developed on the site). Tanks for the Memory RT has had some work done on it, but as I have decided to port the game to flash, this will only amount in faster initial development. TileDoKu is my own variation on the popular japanese logic puzzle that many news papers publish. I have the plans in my head but no work done. So, what will be developed on thursdays?

Friday May 26, 2006 - Spilling Coffee on Maps

I've had a long hard day and that's not even counting getting this chapter put together. At last, the journey into the heart of coffee begins. Of course it's Friday, which means I am releasing a chapter from my Making of Coffee Quest book. Okay, technically, the book is not really anything close to a book yet and is still being written but as Leo Laporte said, "You don't want to stop a programmer from writing documentation as they do it rarely enough" or at least something to that effect. So, without further delay, here is chapter 1 of Making Coffee Quest .

Saturday May 27, 2006 - Flash without Flash

My biggest problem with Flash has been the proprietary natureof it. Quite simply, Adobe owns it and creates the tool needed for creating content for it. This tool is not free (and if you have a small budget may be considered expensive). I own a copy, but the requirement of having a copy makes my Flash source releases less accessible than I would like. At least until I discovered an open source Action Script compiler that can produce .swf (the applet executable) files. This tool is located here: http://www.mtasc.org/

Sunday May 28, 2006 - Icon do it

The main game index pages now have icons that reflect what type of content a game is and what additional materials (if any) are available. This change definitely shows how PHP is nice to use for web pages, as I was able to quickly write a function that generates all the image tags with alternate text for me.

Monday May 29, 2006 - Guard this source

Even though Episode 18 shouldn't be too hard to finish, I just haven't had time, so I am going to be releasing another chapter from the Making of One of those Weeks eBook. Of course, before I can release chapter 5, I need to release the Open Source version of episode 5. You've guessed it. Today I am releasing the open source version of episode 5 of One of those Weeks. Next week will be the chapter and the week after that I am hoping to have episode 18 ready.

Tuesday May 30, 2006 - Waterproof documents

Not much to see yet, but if you want to know what I am planning to do with the Fleet 2006 game, I have finished a draft of my design specifications. A lot of details about how specific things are going to work are not in the document yet (and possibly will be worked out during testing so may never appear in the document), but I think my plans will at least let you know which direction I am heading in. Making these plans have reminded me how much time actually goes into the development of a game and since I am only working on the site on evenings and weekends, the development may take a while.

Wednesday May 31, 2006 - Losing a hole

I was all ready to type in the set four walk through but when I went to grab my notes, I couldn't find them. The notes were written a few years ago, and I had only gotten around to putting together the first three walk throughs last year but I figured it shouldn't be hard to type out the last two sets. Without the notes, however, I have to re-figure out the best way to finish the levels. This takes a bit longer, and with this site only being worked on during evenings and weekends, I only got a little bit more than half way through before it came time to post (but am only going to post half the guide). I really did want to post the whole thing as I want to finish up wednesday's releases so I can have a slightly different type of replacement vote. This is going to be delayed by at least a week (though I suspect I will be breaking the bonus set walk through into two weeks as well). Oh, I should probably mention that today's release is the first half of the Mr. Holeman set 4 walk through.

Billy D. Spelchan
President, Blazing Games Inc.

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