Noitu Love 2 from Konjak is on sale for $2. Go buy it to support the development of The Iconoclasts.
Yeah! This game is great. I got it at the full price and it was worth it. A really pleasant and rewarding action game.
Fuck yes. Konjak is one of my favorite developers out there today.
Sup commodores ‘n amigas
I know I haven’t updated this in fuckin forever, and that’s only because I haven’t done anything worthwhile in as long. It’s been a real weird year, everything’s pretty awful for everyone and I think we’ve all felt the tragic disappointment of the serpent-god Quetzalcoatl failing to destroy the planet a few days ago (Thanks, Mayans.) As for myself, I’ve been super busy over the past year dismantling personal and professional relationships, alienating friends, just barely missing unreasonably lofty goals such as “a bare minimum level of competency”, feeling real sorry for myself, plotting revenge and many, many other beloved American past-times. On a serious note, depression is some real bullshit and nobody should have to deal with that shit. That’s all I’m gonna say about it; it’s not my job to get you all down. Let’s party.
I feel like 2013’s gonna be a pretty good year though, mostly cause I’m bad at recognizing patterns. I worked on some cool stuff while procrastinating about not-as-cool stuff last year, and I’ll probably post some of that for posterity’s sake. Put some work into a couple of game projects but they were pretty shitty and going nowhere… Still, don’t be surprised if you see some code from old projects popping up in the future. I’m gonna focus on just putting some real polished shit out in the coming year. Just like what the old gypsy woman told me when I asked her what my last words would be: “It’ll be really cool, trust me!”
Once you’ve hit rock-bottom, there’s nowhere to go but up.
-Someone who clearly has no imagination
I’m making a note here, mainly for posterity, but also to collect my thoughts for the journey forward.
I haven’t forgotten about the Complex, despite the apparent dearth of recent content. Or any content. When I created the blog, I had a large amount of reserve content to post; in fact, that’s the main reason that I created it. My noteworthy productivity has virtually hit absolute zero since then. This is for several reasons. I just started college. I just moved halfway across the country. I just started a new job. Life’s been busy.
That being said, please don’t think I haven’t had time to work on anything new. I’ve been working on reviving an old game project that got swept under the rug when things started getting busier a few months back. It’s starting to near a testable phase, but I don’t want to put out too much info about it yet; there is still much to be done. I’ve also been reading up on OpenGL… Who knows what’s going to become of that. The future’s so bright, readers, we’ll all have to wear shades.
I wrote a new implementation of Conway’s Game of Life. In the original, each cell follows the three original rules. In my version, tentatively titled MultiConway, all of the rulesets are generated by the user, and different species of cell can be created following different rulesets on the same game board. Cells of different species can interbreed and create hybrid rulesets. It’s also open source! Very cool. Download it here:
CURRENT VERSION: ver 1.00
Alternate download from DropBox public
A few known bugs: The “run” button has been known to not work on machines using an older JVM. Also, cell reproduction rules can potentially have unusual conflicts. These may be fixed in later versions.
Some musings from the creator: I’ve found that successful rulesets that produce stable, interesting constructs are fairly rare. Rulesets that favor breeding tend to create massive cellular storms, whereas sets that favor cell death tend to go extinct quickly. John Conway’s set seems to be in the “goldilocks zone” of mathematical rulesets, although I have gotten a few very interesting stable constructs from hybrid sets.
Play around with it.
Hydra Castle Labyrinth is a really nifty adventure-platformer in the same vein as La-Mulana and Maze of Galious. You can download it from the website of the creator, Buster. (ver. 1.03 at time of writing). Unfortunately, the game is entirely in Japanese. But here’s the good news: I wrote a full translation patch to English! You can download it here:
Alternate download from DropBox public
The patch was written for version 1.00 but should be compatible with all versions up to 1.03 and beyond. Thanks to /r/IndieGaming where I originally posted this and also to DeceasedCrab and /v/ for helping spread the word.
Here’s as good a place to start as any. I wrote a lightweight Mandelbrot set visualizer in Java oh so very long ago. Here it is!
Not fantastically impressive, but it’s finished content, and it’s pretty fun to play around with. I’ve written some pretty neat things that I left sort of half-complete or unpolished, and I’m electing to not post those. Maybe someday I’ll post a big package of half-finished stuff, but for now I just want to show my good side.
So what I thought I’d do is pretend I was organized.
I’ve been producing content for a while now without any central distribution node, by posting creations to Reddit, or Facebook, or Google Buzz, or what have you. Turns out, word-of-mouth is a terrible way for a bedroom coder to generate traffic. What a shock.
But what can I do about it? Web hosting is expensive, and I’m cheap! Well, tumblr seemed to work out pretty well for Notch, so I might as well jump on the bandwagon before it drives itself into the cliff-side of obscurity. Fair warning: I don’t actually know what tumblr is. Just thought I’d get that out there.
I’ll probably pick and choose a few of my more interesting past machinations to post first, just to sow a little seed content. Looking ahead, I’ll be using this to distribute future content to the loving masses. Should the need arise, I suppose I’ll be able to post progress updates on my projects… Unfortunately, a tumblr blog does not a Notch make, and I’m not seeing a torrent of adoring fans in my immediate future. I still think I’m cool ;_;
Stand by for further transmissions…
