The general idea of the Project of the Month is to donate some money to an open source project and write a blog post about it. Everyone knows about the major open source projects, such as the Linux kernel or Firefox, but there are plenty of examples of open source projects that impact you […]

Linux Game Development, POTM, General | 2 Comments »

For this week’s Thousander Club update:
Game Hours: 262.25 (previous year) + 86 (current year) = 348.25 / 1000
Game Ideas: 616 (previous year) + 32 (current year) = 648 / 1000
Monday: Increased challenge gradually by adding an extra bomb for the aliens to drop each level. Now level 11 doesn’t look and feel like level […]

Personal Development, Game Development | 2 Comments »

Last night, I loaded up Killer Kittens from Katis Minor on my laptop and brought it to my local LUG meeting. I had almost everyone at the meeting try out the game, and I watched them as they played. I already knew that I should just watch. If they get stuck due to […]

Game Design, Game Development | 6 Comments »

Steve Healy wrote Programming Your Mind to Think About Programming, which gave me a few more ideas on how to convince myself to work even when I don’t feel like working.
He mentions feeling motivated while listening to certain songs, reading select articles, or watching a certain television show. I know that whenever I hear certain […]

Personal Development, Game Development | 5 Comments »

I haven’t been keeping up with the blogs I normally read, so when I read the first line of Martin Fowler’s blog entry NetNastiness, I had to look into it.
Somehow I hadn’t heard that Kathy Sierra, of the Head First books series and Creating Passionate Users blog, has had death threats made against her. […]

Personal Development, General | 3 Comments »

Thanks to GameDaily, I learned about a British Board of Film Classification report about the reasons people play video games.
There were a number of findings that surprised me:

There is a sharp divide between male and female games players in their taste in games and how long they spend playing. Some of you […]

Games, Politics/Government | 6 Comments »

For this week’s Thousander Club update:
Game Hours: 262.25 (previous year) + 83.5 (current year) = 345.75 / 1000
Game Ideas: 616 (previous year) + 24 (current year) = 630 / 1000
I managed to get some time in this past week despite the day job. I picked a title for my Space Invaders clone as […]

Personal Development, Game Development | 5 Comments »

I originally talked about the dangers of working with existing protected works as an indie developer. Having the means to afford a legal team isn’t a guarantee of immunity, either.
In the Gamasutra news entry Ghost Rider Creator Files Suit Against Take-Two, Others, it seems that Gary Friedrich is literally suing Marvel, Take-Two, and others for […]

Games, Marketing/Business, Geek / Technical | 3 Comments »

For this week’s Thousander Club update:
Game Hours: 262.25 (previous year) + 76 (current year) = 338.25 / 1000
Game Ideas: 616 (previous year) + 24 (current year) = 630 / 1000
Crunch time at the day job is still taking its toll, but I think I’ve learned a few things about increasing my productivity in general. […]

Personal Development, Game Development | No Comments »

Recently, Jay Barnson wrote RPG Design: Quest Abuse in which he details the problems with the quest system in CRPGs. Some of his comments sounded familiar, and so I looked back through the archives of Gamasutra until I found what I was looking for.
Back in 2000, Ernest Adams wrote A Letter from a Dungeon […]

Game Design | 3 Comments »