I just got back from the regional English contest. Sadly enough, I didn’t qualify for the next stage, not because my essay was bad, and to be honest it was one of the best there, since I managed to put a smile on everyone faces, but because of some bad written requirements at which I failed.

As I said, my essay was quite good, and out of the routine, hence most, if not everyone, wrote the same things, like why smoking is bad, and why one should not smoke , and it got quite boring hearing the same thing over and over again. I usually tend to write stuff in a some-how comic kind of way, which usually amazes people, at least a little. Well, my overall score was 84%, which isn’t that bad. 1% more and I would have qualified, but well, as a friend of mine says, “C’est la vie”.

Without any further ado, here’s my essay:

I’ve drawn you a picture of little Timmy. I hope that by looking at that picture you’ve successfully managed to realize that he is smocking. Pay even more attention to my drawing, Timmy is surrounded by smoke, allot of smoke, not from his cigar, but from other people’s cigars. So we don’t just have Timmy smoking, but other people too. Now, let me ask you why is Timmy smoking?

He is smoking because he is surrounded by friends who smoke, and he doesn’t want to feel left out. One way to stop him from smoking is to take his friends away, but doing so, would force Timmy into becoming a lone-wolf, and eventually would get bored of being alone, and decide to use his razor for another reason then shaving. So, separating him from his friends isn’t an option.

We could give Timmy and his friends a lot of sweets so in order to quit smoking, but that would make him get fatter and fatter, eventually having heart problems. We might as well tie him to a rock and throw him off a bridge while we are at it. Again, this is not an option.

And sending little Timmy to a “stop-smoking” seminar would be out of the questions, hence we wouldn’t want him to turn into a mindless zombie who thinks that “birds, nature, clean air, and self-control” is all there is to life.

But what can we do? All out of ideas are we? Well not quite, hence I still have a trump card up my sleeve. We could explain why smoking is bad, show him some severe damaged lungs, yellow teeth, and let him decide if he wants to look like “Paris Hilton” in her 80’s.

After all, it’s his life, and if he isn’t smart enough to decide what’s best for him, then who are we to alter his so called destiny? He will come to realize, in the end, that smoking is bad for him, and leaves him with a big hole in his wallet. Well, let’s look on the bright side, at least he isn’t doing drugs. Or is he?

And that was my essay. Yes, I did drew pictures similar to those above on the same paper where my essay was, and yes, everyone laughed when they saw them.

P.s. I also smoke.
P.s. 2. I know it has nothing to do with coding and game developing, but I did want to share my essay.

Since the beginning of time,
Before the Earth was mine,
Before Heaven was thorn apart
and the angels fell in to the Great Dark,
Another Race was here to rule.

Their name was written in stone and legend,
For they descended from Heaven,
And they resided from Hell,
Seeking to cover the humanity in a dark veil…
Forever lost.

The Hangels as they called themselves,
Bringers of sickness and wealth,
Of darkness and light,
Those made from the mystic might,
Found in the middle of darkness night.
Powerful they where.

But written has been,
A legend as it seems,
That humanity shall prevail,
In a clash of epic proportions,
Putting the wold forever in motion.
Never to stop.

“You, my son, are nothing but a mere descendent,
A powerful one, nonetheless” – said the Human lieutenant,
Known as Rag, the all mighty slasher,
He who defeated the Abolisher…
In an epic fight, in glory, strength and might.

“Those of us who survived the battle,
Those brave enough to withstand the hassle,
Now fight together and honor our lost,
For together we are, and forever we shall be,
The army from the dusk”
An army like never before seen…

“So come with us, let us fight together,
to defeat those blasted Hangels forever.
Pick up your weapon boy, become a man,
It’s time you feel worthy of being in our clan.”
And so the boy fought.

edit: What ever ‘m3xican’ says, don’t listen to him. Hangels actually mean Hell Angels!

End of part I.

While reading some articles on LAMP [dot] ro, I came across an article on how to update your twitter status using cURL. Needless to say I could not stop myself from having some fun with BASH, cURL and Twitter. After about 15-20 minutes of playing around I made the following script:


#!/bin/bash
echo "Twitter Terminal :: Update twitter with your computer data."
while [ 1 ]
do
[ -f /proc/meminfo ] &MEMUSED="$(( ( ( ( $MemTotal - $MemFree ) - $Cached ) - $Buffers ) / 1024 ))"
MEMTOTAL="$(( $MemTotal / 1024))"
MEMFREE="$(( $MEMTOTAL - $MEMUSED ))"
MEMPER="$(( ( $MEMUSED * 100 ) / $MEMTOTAL ))"
echo "Commands: send, send_dm, brake, update.Memory"
read var_command
if [ $var_command == "update.Memory" ]; then
curl -u twitter_username:twitter_password -d status="Total memory: $MEMTOTAL mb, Unused memory: $MEMFREE mb, " http://twitter.com/statuses/update.xml;
fi
if [ $var_command == "send" ]; then
echo "Type jur tweet nao, mortal: "
read tweet
curl -u twitter_username:twitter_password -d status="$tweet" http://twitter.com/statuses/update.xml;
echo "Your tweet has been send"
fi
if [ $var_command == "send_dm" ]; then
echo "Receiver username: "
read receiver
echo "Message: "
read tweet
curl -u twitter_username:twitter_password -d user="$receiver" -d text="$tweet" http://twitter.com/direct_messages/new.xml
echo "Sent"
fi
if [ $var_command == "brake" ]; then
exit
fi
done

Just change ‘twitter_username’ to your username and ‘twitter_password’ to your twitter password, and you are ready to go. Type send, press enter and then type your message. You can also send Direct Messages by using send_dm and update your status with data regarding free, used, and total memory available.

My summer holiday is about to end, and my last year in highschool is about to start. So, I decided to put an end to my holiday by turning the weekend into something special. So, I guess that tomorrow I’ll be off at a friends house playing all those beautiful SNES games, searching for inspiration for future projects, have fun and extend my horizon regarding games. Here’s a list of games that I’m dying to play:

• Chrono Trigger
• Earthbound
• Final Fantasy VI
• Mortal Kombat 2
• TMNT: Turtles in time
• Contra 3
• Gradius 3
• Illusion of Gaia

I’m still open for suggestions regarding what games I may add to my list. Can’t wait for tomorrow. I didn’t get to play many of this games back when I was a kid. All I had was a ‘chinese’ version of the SNES called “TERMINATOR” and the only games you could find for it where the following:

• Super Mario Bros
• Duck Hunt
• Doctor Mario
• Breakout
• The Olympics

Later on I got my hands on a sega genesis, which had the following games:

• Sonic
• Fifa ‘97
• Urban Strike [if I remember exactly]
• Indiana Jones
• Micro Machines
• Terminator 2

I did get my hands on a SNES later on, but for an odd reason, I don’t know why I didn’t play it. I guess that it was when I received my first computer, and decided that all the consoles are “just games for the TV”. Men how dumb I was…

Negative Space is a topdown, 2D, SHMUP made for the GDRo Contest
(Romanian Game Development community contest). I have worked
on it for several days. Total time spent developing it: Around 30 hours.
It only features 3 levels, including an Ending Boss fight. The gameplay
is overall simple.

Controls:

- Arrowkeys or the D-Pad to steer your ship.
- Space or gamepad button 1 to fire.

Levels:

The first 2 levels can be considered quite simple, hence the enemies don’t
actually shoot you. You can consider them as being kamikaze-drones.
You goal is to kill as drones much as you can in order to boost your warp
drive, while trying to avoid getting hit and loosing life (you will sooo
need it for the Boss). The are no power-ups in the game, so don’t try
and play chicken with the drones, expecting some magical box-like
thing will drop out of the… um “window” and heal you (HAEL ME!).

The 3rd level is the Boss fight. Keep in mind this is my first SHMUP.
I don’t know if it is hard enough or not. It’s not quite an Ikaruga-like
bullet Hell, but that’s what I could do. Maybe I’ll enhance it later if you
guys get to beat it without problems.

Credits:

Bacioiu Ciprian (Twitter / Blog ) – Coding

Victorovschi Victor (Twitter / Website ) – Graphics

Mihnea Avram (Twitter / Website) – Storyline

Dragan C. – Audio

Download: Link 1

Link 2

I initially started this game as a challenge, to develop a game in 8 hours. Everything went extremely well in the first half of the production, as you can see here. But, when I almost finished it, I decided to improve my timer based movement function, and broke the bullet shooting code. When I saw that almost 9 hours of dev passed, I decided to drop the shooting idea, and just changed everything to a shield that recharges when you are not using it.

Download: Click here

Seems that I managed to ‘almost’ finish one of my games. Almost, because it’s not yet polished, but I’m releasing it hence I do not want to spoil it by trying to improve some things. It’s barely a game, it has minimum graphics and gameplay, thus it’s perfect, I think, for this months, August, experimental gameplay project’s theme: Bare Minimum.

Grandpa told me to go and play with my tiles

The idea of the game is to lower or raise the tiles in order to reach the exit. You can do that by eighter pressing left or right mouse button. You can move your character using W A S D and rotate and zoom the camera with the arrow keys. Press SPACE to make your character jump.

Screenshots:

• Screenshot 1
• Screenshot 2

Download:

• First Link
• Second Link

Prologue:
Well, I did it! I deleted all my old blog posts, and decided to re-start my blog, this time focusing on indie game development, showcasing projects and prototypes.
About me:
For those who don’t know me, I’m Zapa, an 18-year old Romanian student who happens to love game developing, and french fries. I love working on games, implementing lots of neat concepts and pretending to know what I’m doing(where I am indeed an expert). I can’t say I have a big background, hence almost everything I started till now has yet to be finished.