A short tune that Mark and I made back in 2004.
Here’s one from the archives; the “Fat Cat Stomp,” thanks to Cakewalk, the Disney Afternoon Songbook (for easy piano), and a dull afternoon back in the early 2000s.
I attended an iPhone Developer’s Meetup group earlier this night (well, it’s 3:10 in the morning now, so maybe I should say “last night”) with two of my former coworkers. We had been talking about starting a small game, just for the fun of it really, for the iPhone. Never mind that none of us currently own an iPhone or iTouch (doesn’t that sound like cause for a harassment suit?), but the artist of the group mentioned that he would be looking at getting one soon.
The meeting was of no help for me or Mo, not surprisingly, as it dealt with the coding side of things, of which neither of us have no training in; instead, we took the time to doodle and sketch. Our programmer, however, also didn;t really get much from it, because despite him not knowing the codebase, he was not only able to follow the discussion, but even correct the speaker on a few points because, as he later said, “the topic was really pretty basic stuff.”
Afterward, we had a nice brainstorming session in the highly-overpriced atmosphere of Starbucks, and came up with an intriguing idea.
The bad news is that a few hours later, we got an e-mail from the programmer saying that he was going to have to back out. The problem is that while he could pick up the code, it would be the 4th code set that he would be juggling at the time, and since he programs on a PC, he wasn’t keen on installed Mac OS just for iPhone development.
So, the options now are:
1) Change the platform from iPhone to Flash. I have no issue with this, but since the artist was the one who started this whole thing in the first place, I would want him to make the call.
2) Continue the search for a iPhone programmer who would be willing to, basically, work for free. Which is not that difficult, but I suspect that finding programmers in this sense is just like finding roomies through Craigslist — it’s a total crapshoot.
Either way, the programmer and I were already talking about collaborating on another project, and since I’m not employed at the moment, it’s easy for me to load up on projects. The sad thing is that I was actually getting interested in the game idea, and while the artist and I can carry it forward, it would be sad to do so without the programmer.
I think I’ll ping the artist tomorrow and let him know that regardless, I’ll spec out the game idea, and we can make a decision in terms of staying with the iPhone platform or moving to Flash.
Regardless, it’s something of a bummer.
This was my final project in the Digital Boot Camp session that many of my fellow students and I were required to take before we started Grad School proper. We had about 2 weeks to put it together, and you can see a lot of influence from my earlier work, “Road Stop.” The biggest difference was that here, the player sees all scenes, as very short 10 second snippets. Again, though, the idea is to let the user figure out what had happened.
This is an Interactive Narrative piece that I made in 2004, partly just to teach myself a bit more about Actionscript, but also because it was an I idea I had back during my undergrad years that I never got around to fully exploring. (I am the type of person you hates to leave ideas on the table; even if it means hanging on to it for years, I will eventually get it done.) The goal behind it was that the user would actually go through the story a few times, choosing different conversations to listen on, and be able to piece together the actual story on their own. There are actually a number of plotlines going on, as well as some red herrings.
There — I finished uploading all of the images from the old website to the new blog format (and some “new ones as well). There are still more that I will likely upload as time goes on, which I have done a while ago but never put up online, but at least I have caught up on all the files that were previously online.
I do like that now people can search for images/videos/etc. by means of the actual search engine, tags, or categories. Each has it’s strengths, so it’ll be easier to find stuff as more gets added. Likewise, the ease of updating means that I can start uploading things (esp. photos) much faster.
I have to be honest, as well; I’m almost thinking of this as my own para-dial-a-song. Now that I have an easy way to share stuff with others, it could very well prompt me to be more creative; and since I’m currently out of work, I certainly can spare some time for that.
Poor Pam had to hold still for like a minute.
Columbus at night, looking over the river to downtown. Pam agreed to pose for me for this shot; good thing she’s my friend, because she had to hold still for several takes, and it was quite misty out at the time, so it wasn’t the warmest weather. Or the driest.
Looking from the deck of my parent's house.
Like I said, we can get a lot of snow in Wisconsin. Funny, huh?
Looking down into the quarry lake.
Taken from the Error-09 field trip to the old quarry.
Looking at my parent's house from the backyard.
My parent’s house makes for a great photo-op; I love that I can isolate it within the middle of the green fields and blue sky.