Yeah... LONG time no see... and sorry, not here to add ghosts to PacMan. I'm actually in the process of updating the 2D game engine. The tile stuff is fine and all, but I'm currently engrossed in a better physics engine. First thing you need to know, Trigonometry sucks. Second thing you need to know is that this update is totally boring to most people... ok to almost everyone. Yet, Its not often that people EVER see the actual development tools and programs that are created before any game is. In essence the program is simply a visual representation of my collision detection process while allowing the various inputs to be changed on the fly. Right... Without reading the code its kind of hard to tell whats really going on. In english, it lets me see if this is working. I can set up any situation to see if my system gets it right. Well, anyway... if you want to see it, go here.

Ok, I said this would be up earlier, but things happen. Shockwave PacMan (32 Kb)
It took about 6 hours to learn LINGO, the Shockwave programming language and about 3 hours getting this to where it is... I had a basic game after an hour, but you know me. It had to be right. So I went back and re-vamped everything. Getting Pac to take corners smoothly was a total pain... stupid tile based games where the character is bigger than the tiles... grrr. It also doesn't help that Shockwave likes to reference sprites by their center and not the upper left like I've been programming for the last 10 years.
I'm thinking that the next game I make will ignore the whole Shockwave sprite format and use good ol' page flipping and hand coded sprite handlers so I can get my upper left corner back :) 'eh whatever...

Ok... the LiveJournal link was a spoof. I threw it up there to see if there was anyone I didn't know who would want to read it. Oddly enough there was. Stranger yet, I knew exactly who it would be. ANYWAY... for those of you hoping to read it sorry. Most of you know I wouldn't put my life out there for the world to read. If I did, it would be as anonymous as possible... ;) Good luck with that, I've said enough already.

It's been one helluv year so far. The rest of it looks to be bloody-spactacular. Some of you know what that means, others should get a blanket. You're going to be out in the cold on that one for a while. However, I'll admit I didn't expect such an odd path.

However, for the few of you not in the loop. Yes, I am back in school. I'm not really trying to make money "just in case" anymore so I can look at my future with a little more determination. This means new plans and new ideas for this site. Sadly what you see here is likely to be dead within a couple months. While I like it and it's all pretty and stuff, it just isn't working for me. The next site will be FLASH based with just about everything I can jam into it.

Hopefully this will become much more of a portfolio of my work than a quick notepad site. Yeah, it really is crap, I know. But doesn't it look pretty? Anyway, it's a nice to look at but not a lot is going on upstairs so it will be leaving. However, don't expect anything soon. I'm trying to figure out how to make 24 hours seem like 30 already... :/ Ta-ta for now. ~ ANDY