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Sneeze's Blog
| 2nd Feb 2012 - 05:35 | Progress | |
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| I told myself last week I'd finish pub crawl off by the weekend; that got put back to by the end of January. I admit it, I'm still not quite done, but my todo list has nothing more than trivial things on it, and given that mochi at the moment has a few problems with data processing, I'm not going to actually release it for a few weeks anyway in case things don't work out for whatever reason. But its as good as done.
So, we're left with a new project to think of. Now, since I'm currently advertising for an artist (and that includes anyone that reads this who is within easy access of Matlock, Derbyshire) I'm tempted to write a point and click adventure. I've always wanted to do this, and I know that while my art isn't great, it's not as bad as I think it is. But it's something a bit more applicable to attract in an artist - they can see easily what needs doing! So that's a possibility. I've also got a game I literally designed in my sleep - it came to me in a dream - which I could do too. Less graphics in that one, but I might as well get on with that if I don't come up with a storyline for an adventure. So there we go. Of course, there's lots of old projects I could revive too - but we'll see where we go first :) | ||
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| 19th Jan 2012 - 13:44 | SOPA and PIPA | |
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| Well, it's nice to see some of the big players have spoken up against SOPA and PIPA (BBC news story, more info,) - I would add my voice to the many that oppose this legislation, although admittedly I'm not a US resident.
However, I am a content provider - albeit a very small one - and I do have a few users in the US. And this law does nothing to help me, yet at the same time gives all the largest competitors plenty of things they can do to hinder me - if someone decides that any part of my site possibly infringes copyright (eg someone posts a link in the forums to a pirated game, or finds a single game on my site that has music for which they don't own a license). And I simply do not have the resources to defend myself - if my sites go down, or my revenue stream is lost, it's over. Unfortunately this seems to be a typical big, old media response to an new media threat. It is all well and good for a hollywood film studio with millions in cash and lawyers on retainer who can deal with these sorts of threats, but the struggling bedroom developer, musician or artist has yet another hurdle, and it's not easy in the first place. Ok, I know this is a little paranoid since I'm probably too small to matter, but I'd rather legislation didn't allow people to bully other people legally. Surely the law is in place to stop exactly that. Anyway, I have to amit some of the comments have made me laugh, particularly the old media comments: Chris Dodd, MPAA's chief executive, described the blackouts as an "abuse of power" - of course the MPAA wouldn't ever abuse their power by, say, speding $420,000 in Q3 2011 lobbying the government. Rupert Murdoch's various comments (there's some in the BBC article above) are particularly amusing - they're all pretty much a pot calling a kettle black. So, this is me, an small independant media creator, posting just to say that I'd very much appreciate it if this sort of sledgehammer legislation wasn't accepted. | ||
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| 6th Jan 2012 - 14:01 | New year... | |
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| So, I've not posted for a while. This is mostly due to lack of inspiration, there's been plenty I should have posted about!
We'll start with Wordstacks. Wordstacks has done surprisingly well, making over $500 in it's first month, which is unusually high. This is in part to being on Mindjolt - the first game I've had on there for ages - and it's doing reasonably well there, slightly better than Qilox at the moment, but not as well as Qilox at its height. I'm quite happy about this! It does mean I'll do a sequel to it too - I have a game in mind for this. The next game in the queue is Pub Crawl. Pub Crawl is probably about 70% complete - the gameplay is there, and some of the graphics, but not all of them. There's a lot more drawing in this than my previous games, and my drawing isnt great, but hopefully it'll work out. I'm quite pleased with it so far, I believe it'll get a bit of a laugh and is more suitable for some of the more hardcore sites although I doubt it's front page on Kongregate material! I still need music, a few more pictures and a few more people animations, plus the various polising things. Anyway. It's a new year, so it's time for me to think about things properly. I've not done a review of the year yet, but Mochi's stats are down so I can't really give a good summary yet. Looking forward, though, I've decided it's time I sorted out my artwork issue. So I've put an advert in my window for a local artist. I think the problem I've had before is that it's hard to get much motivation when you're on the other end of an internet connection, so I want someone who I can actually phyiscally talk to and could do some of the work in this room. We'll see if I get anyone - I sort of envisage a student who's looking to get some experience rather than an established artist, but you never know. I live opposite a school, so that may help. Other than that I've made a couple of new years resolutions that may encourage me to get on with some work properly. We'll see how that pans out though! With a bit of luck we'll have more than one game released this year... | ||
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| 25th Nov 2011 - 13:24 | Blogging | |
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| I've got four blogs - two I dont really use, my book review blog and this one. I've noticed there's a lot of people who go to some effort to advertise to bloggers. For example, on the alphas blog, I get a small but constant stream of people writing "comments" on the blog which are adverts for SEO optimisation or for their own blogs on how to blog. Another thing is that on the book blog, I get a reasonable number of referrals from domains that don't have a link to my blog at all - but if you go to them, they have some advert (I have just watched a truly amusing video advert that was attempting to sign me up to some "money making" scheme or other through scare tactics, it was full of "society is a conspiracy to keep you poor" type lines, very funny).
Anyway, I don't really have a point to all this, but I did find it interesting that people make fake views to blogs to get the -author- of the blog to visit their site. I suppose it points out how many pointless blogs there are online ;) | ||
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| 16th Nov 2011 - 11:43 | Upcoming games | |
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| So, I had a letter from Gamestation today telling me what my balance was on their loyalty card scheme. Nothing very exciting, but in the text there was a bit about the upcoming christmas games. The list is: iRayman Origins, Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn, Happy Feet 2, Alvin and the Chipmonks: Chipwrecked, Mario Kart 7 and The Sims 3: Pets/i. So. We have three film tie-ins and three sequels. It's a sad state of affairs when there's nothing at all original that is worth looking forward to. I may be tempted by Skyrim (which to be fair, is also a sequel) but the game market does seem dominated to the point of saturation with tie-ins and sequels. Where's the next new, original game going to come from? I wonder if we'd even notice a good game now half the time.
Anyway. Not that I'm much better, I suppose, most of my games are quite derivative. And talking of this, I'm some way through my next game, Pub Crawl. It's shaping up quite nicely, and it is quite funny. | ||
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| 25th Oct 2011 - 16:16 | Wordstacks | |
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| So, given a lack of anything too terrible about this game, I've released Wordstacks into the world.
One comment I did have is it's perhaps too hard. When I think about that, it probably is - it could use a tutorial mode with a few cards, rather than lots of cards straight from the start. But I think I need to release something anyway - It's been far too long in the making and I need to work on some new projects. It's also been far too long since I've released a game. So lets shove it out of the door and move on to better things. If you do have any further comments, it's not too late for me to change things, so please feel free to make them! I'm not going to publicise it properly until after halloween, since there's usually a ton of knock-off games around. Anyway, there's two new projects I've got into my head, both of which are quite short and simple. First off is "Pub Crawl", a variety of drunken snake, or at least that's the initial thought. I've got good plans for this in my head. The second project is a mushroom harvesting game that came to me in a dream. This doesnt happen often, but quite amusing to have a useful dream. So there we go. It might be a year since my last game release, but finally I have one. | ||
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| 17th Oct 2011 - 17:12 | Wordstacks | |
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| It has been a long time since I made a new game, but finally I've finished one - wordstacks. You can play it on the alphas blog, and if you have any feedback I would be grateful if you could comment there or here. | ||
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| 18th Sep 2011 - 18:19 | More bits and bobs | |
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| I seem to be on a bit of a website mood at the moment, so I've done a bit of cleaning up in various places - added a facebook page link on the Busy Slacker webpage, and yet more tinkering with QuizQuiz. Still need to find a logo though for the latter, and an icon for the former. Things tick along, I suppose. I'm quite tempted to start running an actual pub quiz, simply because it'll help me write questions. It'd be fun too. | ||
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| 15th Sep 2011 - 19:13 | Bits and Bobs | |
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| I've had a very bitty day today. Just lots of small things I need to sort out - my cardword game needs lots of small bits of tweaking for example. I've put some games on Red Tower. I've written some questions for QuizQuiz. I've been very tired and nearly fallen asleep. I've done the masses of washing up and clothes washing.
It's not actually a bad thing. I feel like I'm back to working again - CardWord (or whatever it'll be called) is closer to finishing, with most of the actual game done, but I've got a very clear image now of what I want to do with this version of the game - I'm going to make a nice simple high score game, with not too many bells and whistles - I've added achievements as it stands, but I think they're going to be disabled. So we're left with just sorting out the reserve cards, and getting some more graphics to make look prettier, and sorting out a title and tutorial. It's within reach :) QuizQuiz also needs some work. I need a new logo and I might do a little bit of graphical and layout rework first, and make it a bit easier to share quizzes, but after that it's just a matter of getting some advertising. So all in all, there's plenty of things to do, but they're slowly getting done. | ||
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| 12th Sep 2011 - 13:38 | Trivia again | |
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| So, I've not talked to much about my trivia site for a while. Over the weekend I decided to buy a new domain, so we've got www.quizquiz.biz. It's not too bad a name, at least it's quite nice to say. So hopefully, that'll work out nicely. I'm not going to advertise it too much yet, because I want to finish off the branding and make it look and feel nice, but Google sent me a £100 voucher for advertising so hopefully I'll use that to get things off the ground. | ||
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