So Sentimental this computer is.

So inspired by this after seeing it in action I decided to have a go at a bit of textual analysis / sentimental analysis, with visualisations. It has taken about a week in total put together in my spare time, positive words are circles, negative are squares. Verbs are green, nouns are red and so on. The size of the shape is the frequency of the word. The most difficult aspect of it was to get the .txt to parse properly and get rid of all the whitespaces and symbols. I have to trim the text, chop it up in to words, trim them as well. It took a while. Using the word break downs from here, based on the Moby word list and it uses the positive and negative word lists found on this website.

 Homer's Odyssey Book 1 Visualisation.

 Homer's Odyssey Book 1 : Negative words.

Homer's Odyssey Book 1 : Positive words.

Homer's Odyssey Book 1 : Uncertain Words.

 Homer's Odyssey Book 1 : Positive & Negative Words.

Edgar Allen Poe's "Masque of the Red Death" All in, animation.

Each word is an object and it slowly moves around the the screen, I just wanted a nicer way of reading documents all at once, visually.  It was mainly just a test. It was written in Processing and will try and exporting to a webpage so you can have a look at it in motion.

Once Upon A Time.

I can remember clear as day sitting in my Maths class bored as hell, not doing maths. Maths/Math was whatever you call it it was boring, but it did mean I could have graph paper on my desk. Graph paper meant squares, squares meant pixels, pixels meant games and I would quite happily ignore the teacher and draw characters. I love Maths now though.

This is what POGO looked liked albeit with 

far less colour on the ZX Spectrum.

One of the characters I created was "POGO". I loved "POGO" I made so many "games" with him in it. I say games they were more like move a character around the screen and that was it. I was around 14 at the time I had just borrowed a friends ZX Spectrum as I had let him borrow my NES, he was happy, I was happier. I can remember tearing through all the manuals and old magazines learning BASIC, actually programming the graphics with 1's and 0's in DATA statements.

"POGO" was inspired by Garfield the lovable grumpy cartoon/comic cat I had been reading for several years previously, I can see his eyes and nose and mouth in the design of "POGO". But what is even stranger is that I can see how OCARBOT was in part inspired by "POGO" the idea of collecting a key, pushing blocks and getting to the exit. "POGO" went on to "POGO 2" and eventually on to "POGOs 16-bit Adventure" which was released as a PD-DISK on the Amiga 500 so it might still be out there somewhere. By the time "POGO" reached the Amiga I had even learned how to do basic bad guy AI. "POGO" disappeared for a while, but he was always there in my character sketches, and when I was teaching kids to draw he would occassionally pop up.

I've had some time this week before the release of CROSS-SIDE to tinker, doodle and try out a few ideas. So I started sketching.

And there he was again, it wasn't him, he wasn't a blue bear it was just his head a bit more tinkering and shazam there he was. As a bee.

A few "situations" have popped up recently where I have had either the opportunity or the possibility of fulfilling some of my childhood dreams. Things that I wanted to do as a child but didn't have the money, time or know how. Mostly making things or working with certain people.


I am big fan of Randy Pausch although I never had the chance to meet him, I think/hope we would have gotten on as we share a few common goals. Fulfilling your childhood dreams and helping others achieve theirs. I have been working with a lot of kids recently helping them make their games now while they still are children, getting them to realise that "yes, you can make games, and you can make them now" and you can make them about whatever you want.

So I allowed myself some time in the evening after teaching them, time to see where this game goes. I had no grand plan, but everything fell into place and worked first try, all the code worked first try. My friend came round and saw me while I was coding it and I was coding entire classes in one go, hitting compile and everything worked, first try.

I was so pleased I have spent the past three nights building this crazy "BEE BEE THE BEE" game it is a "Endless Running/Flying" game were the levels are self-generative. Instead of making him in hi-res I just doubled the image size so the blocks are even bigger. The game looks beautiful on the iPad with huge chunky pixels and bright bold colours, which makes it even easier to work on. The game will probably be out in a few weeks. I have tried to pitch it at a 7-10 year old age range, so it is fun dynamic, but not too complicated and certainly no IAPs. Have a look and see what you think. You collect pollen, upgrade your bee, unlock new levels and so on.

I tried to make it look a feel like a NES game because that is what was what I was playing at the time of coming up with POGO and what I had hoped to make "POGO" on eventually. Although this is not strictly a "real" "POGO" game, it is certainly made up of parts of him. Who know maybe "POGO" will be made into a game eventually. Fortunately you won't have to wait too long for "BEE BEE THE BEE" it should be done and out on iOS, Android, osX and PC in a couple of weeks.

It is strange this game came out of nowhere and yet I feel it has been with me for a very long time.

Sorry

I has been a long time since I updated this, I have been working flat out to release five games this November. Just to make things slightly harder i have decided to also learn flash programming as well.
I have included some example here just let you know how far I have come in one day.

Admittedly I have been following online tutorials, but the code makes sense even if the syntax doesn't. So back to it, folks.

Always, learning.

I decided to take the plunge, I am awful with computer graphics, fine with a pencil and paper but never really got on with computer graphics, hence, pixelh8.

But I am trying out new graphic software to see what all the fuss was about and it is incredible I am only on day four of using it, I have been spending about an hour a day working through some internet tutorials and / or just picking random pictures from the net to vectorize, it is simple to use, but difficult to master but I really enjoy it.

There has been loads of, oo0O0o00oo that is how they did that moments and that is quite nice.

This little guy was found on the net, so I copied the style using skills I had learned over the last couple days.

This was a tutorial I found on the net, this is what I made from it.

This zombie was originally sketched out on paper and was then converted to vectors.

I don't profess to being a graphic artist by any stretch of the imagination, but using vector art software is great fun, so it is time to start saving my pennies for when the demo runs out!

Enjoy.

Pushing Notifications, Pushing Myself

A lot of people know I make games, I do an awful lot of coding, but I don't do Internet stuff, I just don't until now. The mysterious, or maybe now so mysterious tweet. "Is this working?" via iOS on my timeline signifies this change, as I have just implemented the Twitter API in to "Cross Side" allowing people to tweet me for help and tweet their achievements in the new game due out shortly. It is like a 3D OCARBOT, but perhaps even more infuriating.

Now all I need to do is bring in Game Center and Facebook and we are ready to rock.

He is his fathers son

My 10 year-old-son son came running out of school today, and very excitedly explained to me he had been learning Scratch at school. He explained on the bus ride home what he had been learning and what he would like to do, so as soon as we got in we loaded up Scratch and started a new program. He did say "but it is not real programming is it?" because we were using Scratch which I explained "no, it is real programming, it is visual programming" and he was happy with that, I think it maybe validated what he was doing, not that it needed it.

He knew how to make a Sprite move around the screen but not how to control it, so I simply took him through controlling the sprite using ifs and sensing blocks. Needless to say he was ecstatic, he knew from that moment on he could make a game. If he could control it, he could give the character a goal.

We also added a key which when you collect it, it dis-appears and re-appears randomly on the screen. We decided that we needed an obstacle so we decided that it needed a timer. So that is what we will do tomorrow, I am really pleased he has taken an interest in programming and really pleased I can be there to help him.

To AR or not to AR?

Here is the final video for a Augmented Reality (AR) project I have been working on with a local school, it was good fun, hard work for me having to build 4 game engines, but it was worth it.

I have been a bit ambivalent towards AR as I have often seen it as a imagination destroying prescribed narrative driven product placement entity, I didn't like it. I kept seeing toys that came to life and interacted with other toys in the "product range" to force children down a specific narrative, which usually lead to the purchase of more toys to continue.

When I was a lad I made up my own stories, a Stormtrooper was once a giant city destroyer, destroying the LEGO peoples towns, who then had to take refuge in the giant "Millenium Falcon" city. With several AR toys this type of scenario would be an "incompatible experience".

So AR, I didn't want to be a part of it, until, I learned I could use it so the children I was working with could create their own narratives/games/ interactions. They were now the creators of the story, using technology to tell it, instead of being told it. I like AR like this, well in all fairness I like all technology to be like this.

I am glad I did this project and tackled an area I didn't particularly like the idea of, as we have achieved some great results, now what should we do next?