Blogs - part12studios

Our site got hacked (it's ok now)
I just went on vacation and noticed the other night that this site had been hacked! All of the pages were affected. It was concerning and of course an unpleasant experience to feel so vulnerable and exposed. To the hackers credit, they didn't do anything seriously destructive. I can only assume that if they got as far as they did, they could have done much worse. Thankfully Roger, with his extensive know-how,was able to get the site back up and running pretty quick like within 12 hours. It is never clear how information is obtained. We don't have anything private on this site. It is just information. We were not blacklisted and what users saw was just basically a big obnoxious "this site has been hacked" vanity screen from the hacker group. Also, I found that I got a couple of unsolicited emails from a company offering to help fix the problem. It's hard to say if there is a connection there which is suspicious, but I'll leave them unnamed like the hacker. We're back and I'm grateful it wasn't worse.

Now we have ads
If you've been here before, you might also notice that we have some ads on our site now. This is just a small way to help offset hosting costs. We get some traffic, which is awesome to see. It's amazing to be contacted by people who find us through this site and the internet in general. We've made sure they are unobtrusive. Roger has been looking into tweaking things a little to insure they appear in appropriate places. The first pass the other day was not cool, but it has, as of this post been tamed. In a perfect world, I would love to keep the site ad free and perhaps at a later time we'll disable them again, but for now we wanted to try them out and see what it does.

Android vs. iOS (for me)
So after I guess I've had my iPhone 4s for over two years and finally managed to break it. I was disappointed, but I figure I'd dropped it enough times that this time I had it coming though it was as harmless a drop as any in the past, just the perfect angle. I made an attempt to fix the screen and almost succeeded but damaged the new screen cable in my impatience so I decided to just let it go. After all I have this Galaxy S4 and several Windows 8 phones to choose from. I had been over this bridge before, but decided that i'd give it another try. I got my Galaxy S4 up and running easy enough with a simple sim card swap and a call to get the LTE stuff working on it. All of this was great. Then I had to use the phone as my daily phone and this is when things got ugly. I really don't want to get into it, but I will probably, as I get into it... I like Android, I really do, but after having been through it a second time, I really am convinced that as a phone/organizer/information tool, hands down the iPhone runs circles around any android device. Don't get me wrong, there are some really cool things I'd love to see iPhone do that Android does, but not at the expense of the things that for me make it a tool I cannot live without. Here are the big sticking points for me:

- Siri's integration is superior. I've seen some comparisons in the past where they ask certain questions. Those tests tend to favor Android from what I've seen, but it's not those things that I'm not really talking about that. The things I found that were night and day were things like asking it general questions like.. "How many days till August 13th?" (my son's birthday). It just goes and pulls up the info. the S4 didn't even begin to understand what I was asking it. "Play all songs shuffled".. S4 doesn't understand. "remind me when I get home to do something".. while this technically works.. well it will make the reminder, but not tie a GPS coordinate to it.. maybe it "can", but the point is that I shouldn't have to hunt for how to do it.. it should just work.. reminders were an especially annoying sticking point for me too.. it seems that when I ask it to remind me about something -

- Battery life and charge times are so much better. When I went on this vacation I took my S4 as my GPS/Phone/everything. It was amazing how easy it was to drain the battery even when it was plugged in. I found that I had to continuously monitor the battery life (plugged in mind you) to not leave the screen on by accident for too long, otherwise I'd kill the battery and be GPS less while on the road. Now I realize that maybe my usb cords were not top quality, or the charger from the car wasn't producing enough power compared to a wall outlet. Honestly, I don't care about that. I should be able to use my phone and have it charge while plugged in from an car outlet. My iphone 4s never had this problem and my 5s seems to be about the same, though I will say it felt slower than i recall from the 4s.. but i'm coming from a very "gut feeling" which is subjective and this trip was an exhausting one.

- iCloud / Reminders / etc. This seems to be a no brainer, but for whatever reason the other guys just can't seem to get this right or even try. I'm a Mac user, but I have parallels, bootcamp and heck recently VMware/Ubuntu thanks to my work with Ouya, so I'm by no means in a Mac Ivory tower. The bottom line is that iPhone and all other iOS devices use iCloud and Mac uses it as well so contacts, reminders, calendar events and other stuff is synced continuously between all my devices that I choose to setup. It works and is very transparent. When I made reminders (the S4 would call "tasks") there was no "task" app on the phone to access these reminders and manage them. The only way I could find them was to ask it by voice to list it. It also didn't understand "remind me when i get home" to use the GPS. like I mentioned in the Siri section, maybe there is some way to achieve this, but it wasn't obvious and it should be. They pack enough other useless apps I can't uninstall that making a simple "task" app should be a given, not something I have to look up.

- iOS car stereo support. I thought my stereo said somewhere that it supports iOS/Android, but when I connected my S4 to the stereo it said device error. I'm sure there is a way, but once again, I shouldn't have too. There should be some intelligence there to instruct me on what to do. When I got the error in my car I just switched over to letting it be USB and use the Aux input, but this meant a 2nd cable dangling around. Seeing how the stereo could control the tracks, volume and even Pandora from the iPhone having it all go through the USB is a feature that's tough to give up.

So in short, iPhone is expensive. I had to do the Next plan from AT&T to get my phone which ultimately costs as much as before, but it is a shorter cycle and it got me into a new iPhone faster than waiting another 10 months or so before my 2 year renewal came up.

I'm also not a fanboy apple fan. I find Siri sometimes fails to connect even common messages to the action.. even when I see it understood my sentence and then apologizes that something went wrong.. I'm hoping I get less of this with the 5s, but so far I have still seen it happen so whatever it is, be it AT&T or Apple, needs improving. I haven't tried it recently, but Apple's map app had more than once totally mislead me while the iPhone google map app has been amazing, so understand I'm not here to just bash other platforms. I would switch to them in a heartbeat if they could offer comparable things, but they can't and that's what I don't get. Nothing about these features are hard to do. Maybe Apple is guarding their functionality closely which I'm sure they are to some degree, but there are always solutions to get around directly copying a good idea. In fact, it's been one of the great things that Android and Windows Phone have managed to embrace. Rather than cloning they have gone in fresh directions with certain aspects of the mobile experience, but until they address the really core things that make having a mobile device easier and more effective, they will have a hard time convincing me it's worth giving up so much for so little.

Hard Drive Drama (lessons learned)
So I own several large capacity external usb hard drive which I keep as duplicates to help insure if one were to tragically die, I wouldn't lose everything.. getting ready for the trip I was pressed for time and did what I can now see as a stressing task for a hard drive. So admittedly I can look back and see I was inviting trouble, but I also have to say that I would have thought by now that an operating system like Mavericks would be able to be smarter or even the hard drive itself to better handle a large cue of files to move from one location to another. I ended up crippling my primary backup drive so it would copy things over at a snails pace, then my secondary drive got jacked up at some point while I was traveling with it to help a friend out. How that broke is up for speculation, but ultimately I took it on the road and that alone certainly invited trouble and with my bad luck, it arrived.

So I guess in short, if you're going to have mirroring drives, do it one folder at a time. By folder they could still be big folders like "pictures" or "music" but when you try to move pictures and music at the same time, it becomes much more stressful for the HD because you now have two separate tasks trying to move everything over. I know there is software out there that handles this but for some reason I've just felt it's better to do it by hand, but after this incident I'm going to rethink things and see if there might be some good software out there that might help this in the future.

Next Steps for Part12 Studios Games
The list of things to tackle seems to be unending and constantly growing, sometimes faster than we can tackle them, but at least we're not bored! Roger is going to be trying out one of our rapid games called Zen Hopper: Trials using the Skillz a skill based gambling system which seems promising. I'm sure Roger will have something to blog about regarding this or one of his other projects. Keep an eye out for blogs coming from him as well as more tutorial-oriented posts from me as well. I tend to make blog posts on here that can be more opinion/rant-like and while those won't go away entirely, I would like to see us share more useful information about the tech we're using.

I'm dealing with some latency audio issues with Windows Phone 8.1 and working with Michael from Microsoft on this. I'm a bit OCD sometimes when it comes to making sure every platform we support run well. I want to see if the audio issue is something that Scirra can fix or if it's a Windows 8.1 issue. Either way I'm glad I have contacts in both camps, I just have to get a few more details ironed out to be sure I have conclusive proof the issue is with one camp or the other so they can (hopefully) take steps to fix this for all Windows Phone 8.1 devices.

I'm also getting some initially promising progress and support from Ludei regarding Construct 2 to Ouya. I had some initial success, but ultimately audio and visual issues exist, but seeing a response from the Ludei guys, makes me feel optimistic that they want to see it work and if it does, this could be a much easier solution for Construct 2 developers to get to the Ouya. I discovered a couple of games that have made it to Ouya from CocoonJS, but none of them were made with C2, so it's still up in the air.

My wife works at Aveda and later this week they are doing an event that focuses on honeybees and the troubles they are facing. This event is to help raise awareness and money to help with honeybee research and preservation as there are so many thing that Bees help with in nature and also directly impact our own lives most directly when it comes to the foods we eat.

I wanted to make something that would coincide with this event to experiment with making a "game for good". We've done various games that provide some service such as education or entertainment, but not something that was for a specific cause. So I took it upon myself to make something. I didn't have a lot of time. iOS being the slowest of the app approval times, I had to be sure that the game was submitted a week before the event to insure it got approved in time. I started this project on May 9th. So it gave me roughly 6 days to get it to a final state for publishing.

You can check it out here

I actually ended up making this with Construct 2 rather than Unity3D simply because I had little time and I'm a long way from being comfortable enough in unity to make a solid game. Construct 2 was (as usual) a joy to work with and helped me spend more time on exploring ideas than figuring out the technology. I'll be going back to Unity soon enough though as I gear up for an event later this month offering some Unity3D training.

If you want to help out with the fundraising this app is aspiring to drive eyes too you can visit the crowdrise website found here

When the app is on all of the respective platforms, I'll do a postmortem that shares what I have learned from this process and hopefully have some interesting numbers to share. Right now it's live on a few app stores, but until all of the major platforms have been reached, I'm not putting a lot of energy into the marketing.

My wife works at Aveda and later this week they are doing an event that focuses on honeybees and the troubles they are facing. This event is to help raise awareness and money to help with honeybee research and preservation as there are so many thing that Bees help with in nature and also directly impact our own lives most directly when it comes to the foods we eat.

I wanted to make something that would coincide with this event to experiment with making a "game for good". We've done various games that provide some service such as education or entertainment, but not something that was for a specific cause. So I took it upon myself to make something. I didn't have a lot of time. iOS being the slowest of the app approval times, I had to be sure that the game was submitted a week before the event to insure it got approved in time. I started this project on May 9th. So it gave me roughly 6 days to get it to a final state for publishing.

You can check it out here

I actually ended up making this with Construct 2 rather than Unity3D simply because I had little time and I'm a long way from being comfortable enough in unity to make a solid game. Construct 2 was (as usual) a joy to work with and helped me spend more time on exploring ideas than figuring out the technology. I'll be going back to Unity soon enough though as I gear up for an event later this month offering some Unity3D training.

If you want to help out with the fundraising this app is aspiring to drive eyes too you can visit the crowdrise website found here

When the app is on all of the respective platforms, I'll do a postmortem that shares what I have learned from this process and hopefully have some interesting numbers to share. Right now it's live on a few app stores, but until all of the major platforms have been reached, I'm not putting a lot of energy into the marketing.

The Realization
So it's been a long time coming, but I'm happy to report that I'm taking the plunge into Unity3D. Roger and Nathan have considerably more experience with Unity3D than I, so this is by no means going to be an overnight conversion. I figure what I'm going to start doing here is probably sharing some of the progress I make and challenges and discoveries along the way to hopefully becoming an effective game developer using Unity3D.

The Alternatives No Longer Cut It
Up till now I've relied on tools like GameSalad and Construct 2 to allow me to get my ideas up and running faster, which was great and allowed me to make things come to life and learn a lot of important concepts behind programming without dealing with some of the tougher concepts. This was great because for the last few years I've been too busy to really focus on becoming a good programmer.

My Background
I've dabbled here and there over the years.. AS3, C#, Java, HTML, and JavaScript over the years, but I never became anything close to a proficient programmer.. and so I had to rely on working with capable developers to make things happen, which is not a bad thing, but it can become a bottleneck when I want to experiment with some game mechanic or effect for example. So while I'm not a total code noob, I feel comfortable in saying that what I figured out almost anyone else who's used to working with computers could figure out.

Unity3D Student
So far my first week has gone well. I started with Unity3dstudent.com This seemed like a very cool site to start out with. It has things broken into nice bite sized videos that explain many of the most important things you would want to do in a game. I burned through the tuts and they all made pretty good sense. I felt incredible empowered, but then as I got into it I saw some of the shortcomings.. For one, all of the tutorials are using JavaScript, which isn't a terrible thing, but from what I've heard from developers, it seems that C# is far better and what folks favor. I don't know really why this is, but it's just been my experience. The other big issue I saw very quickly was when I tried to mix things together, things clearly didn't work right. This isn't so much the fault of the the site, but what first seemed like empowerment quickly dissolved as I realized building up any kind of game using these tutorials exposed vast chasms of knowledge I was lacking to get various objects to play nice together and do anything meaningful.Also it's very old and hasn't had any new lessons in awhile. It's basically a dead site, but the content still works and in spite of my critiques of the site, it's not a bad place to start. It's free and I still learned a lot

Where I'm At After A Week Or So
So yea it's sometimes frustrating to know what I want to do, but just not understand how to tell Unity3D to do it, or in some cases discover how complicated and confusing seemingly simple things (like clicking an object in 3d space and effecting it) turned out to be. This is where tools like GameSalad and C2 are great because you can make things happen very quickly and often find solutions to problems without requiring help, but I've seen their limitations as well and will not change course.

Looking Ahead
I'm now working through some tutorials on Udemy.com and so far they seem good. They cover C# which is great to see. They too have a number of granular lessons which helps keep concepts easy to digest. Hopefully it helps bridge that chasm that I experienced before.. Once I've reached some point well into this content I'll give a more informed opinion of the site and service. Another site I plan on checking out is 3dbuzz.com which I am glad to see is still around. The folks behind this were not far away from Nashville where I lived for many years. I'd had some contact with Buzz many years ago so I'm glad to see they continue to create good content.Code Hero was a kickstarter that I backed awhile ago. They've had some challenges getting it done and at this point I'm not sure it's going to be something useful after all. I really liked one of their previous versions that had a "code gun", but recently when I downloaded what they have made available, its very different and frankly less interesting. Regardless I wish them success in helping teach people how to make games playing inside a game.. which is what it's doing at its core. Playmaker is another tool I look forward to getting into as well. It's a visual scripting tool for Unity3D. It's incredibly powerful and allows you to do many things without ever writing a line of code. This is all true and I have the (not free) plugin found on the Unity3D asset store, however it still has it's own learning curve and sadly the web site's introduction tutorials are sorely out of date. Made with Unity 3.x (we're up to 4.3.3 last i checked) and Playmaker 1.2 (we're up to 1.7) so yea the visuals don't line up and things were simply not working as I got deeper into it.. I have heard from the creator of Playmaker that this is going to change soon as they plan on revamping the entire intro tutorial series with new updated videos for Unity3D 5.. so yea I'm excited to give this another go once the tuts are updated. My hope is that Roger and Nate can find this useful as well for them so we can do more without complex code when Playmaker can simplify things. We'll see.

Last week was another.. "just busy" kinda week so I didn't bother posting anything. Been working on a project that's nearly done, but the pressure is still on to get it done. I hope to have it done this week for sure once I get the necessary feedback. Regardless of that busy stuff that has kept my nose to the grindstone for a bit, a lot has been going on and getting ready to happen as well.

Flappy Bird

What is there to say about it.. other than it just shows how unpredictable, what will be popular and catch on in the world of mobile. I never got to try the origanal, but I liked the Flappy Bird MMO for the idea of taking an otherwise unremarkable experience (to me) and giving it some multiplayer depth. Nate Cope is one of our affiliate developers and he participated in the FlappyJam this month and produced a fun reskin of the idea you can play on Kongregate now.

GameSalad

While I as really happy to report that the GS optimizations for HTML5 were a welcome sight and fixed some big problems most of my games had, I discovered that most of them still had issues with audio and I simply do not have the time to go in and fix those issues so I opted to pull the games down from the Windows 8 store. I removed Klouds+, WFD: The Game and Cyball. I should have done it a long time ago, but kept holding out thinking any day the fixes would come and I could update.. I tried to update Fishtronaut, but it failed certification for some reason. The update really didn't make any noticeable improvements so I left it alone as we as Not Alone In The Dark, which operated well enough. So yea while I'm sad to see some good games come down, it's nice to have closure for them and know now what shortcomings there are for GameSalad and HTML5 based exports like Tizen and Windows 8.

Construct 2

With Construct 2, Roger and I have had some good discoveries with it although we did have to spend a fair amount of time experimenting till we found something that worked when it came to getting a game successfully on an iOS device. Audio had been problematic as well as memory. There are two projects I'm doing for a client. I will share more about those projects once they are complete and I've been given permission to share more about them.

The first one had a lot of art and it wasn't optimized for mobile. I was overly optimistic about things, but ultimately I'll have to go back and optmize all images. I'm still nervous about it though till I see it working because ultimately the issue is that with C2, exported projects effectively have no memory management. Everything loads in to graphic memory it seems and this was bad for the first project.

The 2nd project was both smaller in scope / media, but also optimized and it has worked great.
We did though have trouble with the two solutions that C2 provides, CocoonJS and XDK, however Roger had come across Ejecta. This took Roger's experience with JavaScript and iOS development to figure out. I'm still in the dark in terms of how it works, but once we get through this crunch phase, I'd like to find out more about the pipeline for it and see if it's something I could manage myself.

Additionally I do think that this latest project that's clearly running well might need to have another pass with CocoonJS. I didn't enjoy using XDA because I just couldn't seem to get it to load the project most importantly and it just required (compared to CocoonJS) more hoops to jump through. So yea I'd like to make another pass with CocoonJS and see how it goes.

Also in other news, I'm encouraged about the news that while official Ouya support isn't there, I did find some insight through a thread I started, in finding out how I could possible make a game for Ouya and sell it. The solution sounds encouraging because someone has in fact released a game through some trickery on the Ouya. The game Sticky Sticky was made with C2 and through the use of "an obscure Cordova plugin" which I haven't looked into yet, makes this possible. Likely to need to enlist the help of Roger again on this one, but that said, I'm very excited about the prospect of being able to release something on the Ouya. So yea at some point I will definitely be looking into this in the future.

Road Defender

I had a good meeting with the artists helping conceptualize and create assets for Road Defender. We were originally aiming for mobile, but as the ideas have evolved and I've found the game to be able to much cooler than what I was attempting to do on my own, we're going to be making the game for PC. I feel like this will give us better headroom to do cool stuff and also give us access to things like Steam (even if we have to go through greenlight) and doing a kickstarter, we can better distribute early access versions compared to the pain it would be doing that for iOS. So I plan on working on update the game design doc while the art assets get reworked to look great on a modern PC.

Quicksilver

This project is very close to being done. We've definitely been guilty of feature creep and adding new cool ideas instead of launching and I'm happy to report that we've run out of any major creep ideas at this point and are focused on adding quest content to give our players plenty of adventures. I definitely see Quicksilver's technology allowing us to develop some really cool new ideas we have in store once we've had a chance to see the Quicksilver technology mature and be put under real stress tests with live players helping us find any bugs.

New Projects

We have a potentially big project starting soon that might consume most of our 2014, but we're thrilled at the opportunity to do it. However it's a bit of a waiting game for us as we see what's going on in March. Everything seems to be good though and we're keeping productive in the meantime. If things don't work out with that client, we'll be able to route more time to our other projects.

Other projects

Unfortunately this kind of large scope game development tends to put our other independent efforts on hold, but none of them will die, they will just move slower. We also have projects like Beatrice and Super Sluggo being developed by our awesome affiliates Nate Cope and Michael Schenck who are not as directly impacted by what Roger and I are doing so those games have their own timelines that are impacted more by those developers schedules, but those would be outside of our hands even if we were not so busy. So games like FredEx and Finger King are works I wish to see finished asap, but right now it's difficult to say when things will resume on any significant level. Hopefully soon.

Hi everyone,

It's been a few weeks since my last post. The week before I was under some crazy deadlines to get some work done and it had consumed my time so there wasn't a whole lot of news to share other than "I'm busy".

Then last weekend my youngest son gave me a nice chest and sinus infection which I'm still recovering from. I'm not sure if it's because I was a smoker for a number of years, but it seems like when I get lung / sinus problems these days, they just linger longer than I would expect. I really wish I had recorded my breathing last week. I was making some really gross sounds which would have made for some great monster sounds, oh well.

Things are still pretty full-on right now with a 2nd project that came up and I'm working hard to get it setup so the artist involved can create the needed stuff for me to assemble the next project. Like the last one, I'm using Construct 2 for it.

I still love many things about GameSalad when it comes to making games, but C2 had the HTML flexibility I needed to give the client what they had asked for. Like anything, be it mac / pc, Max / Maya, or C2 / GameSalad they are all tools and like a carpenter, knowing which tool to use for which job is really important.

On the C2 side of things, I was excited to see how effective the Node-Webkit was. I was able to very painlessly and on the first try export the clients project to Windows, Linux and OSX in one process. Performance and stability were fantastic. I had some trouble with the project exporting over to iOS through CocoonJS. The XCode project that I was given seem to deploy right. Roger though with his knowledge of XCode was however able to get it to at least generate the IPA which I could then load, however it also crashed on my iPhone. He hadn't included my iPads in the provision so we were unable to test there. Additionally I was telling the project to fill the screen, but for some reason, it seemed to do a kind of scale fit so that's another uncertainty. We'll come back to it soon but right now time isn't on our side.

Looking back at the C2 project I just did, I learned a lot about organizing. I tried to be organized going in and I was for the most part, but one big lesson I also learned after it was too late is how cool it can be to attach layout sheets to a scene. I was putting all of each stage's logic in each scene. This is fine, but there were a number of things that appear in numerous screens. like next and back buttons that all had the same rules to them. Had I used attached event sheets I could have kept things cleaner. The next project will definitely make use of this.

On the GameSalad side of things I'm super excited to see they finally got the Tizen optimizations they did applied to Windows 8 projects. This is something that should have been done when Win8 support was added, but it wasn't, but that's behind us and now we're looking at a better system. I tested out WFD: The Game and could tell response time was what it should be. I need to try a few other games and get them re-compiled to improve their performance. I did notice that at least one thing didn't get fixed though. Audio controls that GS has such as pitch and such are not seen by the HTML5 export. It's a minor thing, but something that GS developers should be aware of. So yea that's very exciting. I have 4 games on Windows 8 that all could benefit from this new optimized publisher.

So yea these GS updates will be coming in the near future.

Lastly, things are picking up over with the Boston Festival of Indie Games. I'm not volunteering this year, but I will reach out to the fine folks over at the festival and find out more and keep folks in the loop this year. I'm not sure I'll have something to submit or not. We have some big things coming up that are going to probably demand more time than I'll have to spend getting an indie game ready for the festival. But we'll see.

Well I have to admit something. My partner Roger dug around and found www.wow-one.com, the free World of Warcraft Vanilla version of WoW. Vanilla referring to the original pre-expansion WoW that many of us got hooked on so many years ago. I played semi-hard core over the years. usually I'd play an expansion, get my favorite rogue to the level cap and get bored and quit.. this usually lasted for awhile, but Mists of Pandora was the last straw in terms of the continued simplification and devaluing of prior efforts in previous expansions..

So I thought that's that. Blizzard had managed to drive the game into an completely unenjoyable experience in spite of my hope to continue sinking more unproductive time into it and feed my addiction that over the years could see a pretty much proportionate increase in playing and decrease in productivity.

So that's been my story over the last few weeks. I tried to keep up appearances of productivity. I did get client work done, but I have other projects going on that I've been teaming up with folks to develop on the side and those projects just didn't get my full attention that they deserve and for that I apologize.

Yesterday, I uninstalled my Mac WoW client and I gotta tell you it was incredible. I didn't like the person I was having to be in order keep on my computer to finish that Scholo instance or UBRS run. closed out a few lingering auctions, I have 1100g on my mule and bam, in the trash. I could tell an incredible difference in my ability to refocus and get some much needed work done.

Then Roger, my developer partner found Freenix, where some folks had figured out how to get original wow servers and clients working. I was reluctant at first, but seeing Roger get into it and my own fond memories of pre-expansion wow lead to me getting into it. I did and it wasn't long before I was hooked a few weeks ago. I mean really. No subscription fee, no client cost. Hard to resist trying it out. I still don't know they managed to pull it off. I can understand how they could crack a client to work, but servers are not something you just download and tinker with.

I know no one from Blizzard reads this, but I understand they've made attempts to shut this down and they have every right too, however the servers are very unstable and there are a lot of frustrating moments. Many players I've chatted with would be glad to pay to play official Blizz servers of vanilla and for that matter any variation. I know I enjoyed Tanking with my DK in WOTLK.

I realize they might be concerned of splitting the user pool but they could just make it an added feature for current subscribed members to encourage and require expansion purchases if they really want to push the money angle although I think that might do more harm than good. However I think what they would find is that the people playing these servers were lost a long time ago. Its the hard core fans that first made the game the hit it became. It was the gradual changes and pandering to more and more people to keep subscriptions up that drove many players away never to return.

However, for the sake of my productivity, I hope Blizzard never does it :)

In other news I'm continuing to work in C2 and find it a joy. I've had to wrestle with a few concepts to work as I like, but I get more and more comfortable with the environment and am able to make some really cool things happen. I found it interesting that you can even open up Game Maker and GameSalad project files to get objects from the game. It's not that big a deal though as I could see it was a very hollow port of one of my existing projects, but it was still cool to see the scenes so I could see a game with lots of scenes might find it helpful.

Some of the big successes I had over the last week in C2 were things like getting Masking to work properly. it took more time than I would have liked to spend on it, but understanding it now, it's really great. The other big was the ability to make a custom mouse cursor and mouse over cursor change.

Quicksilver is also shaping up nicely. The one good thing that came from playing WoW again was that Roger and I realized that we really need some kind of crafting / professions made available to allow players to create / sell things / Auction House for income and upgrades. We came up with a good system that's not nearly as complex as WoW and other MMO's yet it still has a feeling of something organic. Now it's a matter of getting more time into Quicksilver to get it polished up a bit more. Most of the functionality is in place, the biggest issue is getting all of the views to look right on iOS and Android devices.

I'm hoping to also do some tests with the Midi plugin someone made for Construct 2 to see if I can make a World's Fastest Drummer Drumometer app for iOS/Android and others through C2. I won't do this till February though as I have some client work I need to get completed first.

Also my last GameSalad game that isn't approved for the Tizen app store has been resubmitted with a video link to demo how the app works. I'm not sure that 3Start Trainer was understood by them. Either that or there is an issue with the accelerometer which, if that's the case I can let GameSalad know to look into it. I suspect though that the way the bug read, they just didn't know what to do with the device when the go gun fires.

Looking forward to the week ahead. I have some good assets to work with to get this client work complete. Once it's done I look forward to share it with the world, assuming the client doesn't mind.

My wife has been kind enough to let me slip out for a few hours this morning before she heads off to work. Holidays usually mean good news for most, but being someone who works from home, when holidays happen it means no school or sitters so I'll be full time dad today and this evening. Tomorrow will be business as usual and I look forward to that.

I love spending time with my boys though, especially now that I don't have the urge to get that next tier item or chance for epic loot. It's nice to be back.

First of all I wanted to mention an exciting partnership with the creators of the Quantum Frame comic and video game. The game is a side scrolling shooter in the vein of R-Type and other similar games with their own unique power ups and setting. You can learn more about it here. In the near future we will have a product page on the Part12 Studios page.

I'm also excited to mention we'll also be adding one for our game jam projects as well. I didn't feel a full page was good for individual game jams games as it could clutter things, but collectively they are worth mentioning, even if they are a bit unpolished and short.
I've been using Construct 2 a lot this week and one of the things I noticed that was missing from it was a something I'm used to having in GameSalad that GS called the interpolate behavior. I did some forum searching and got a lot of very helpful feedback and all of it ultimately lead to two soltutions that I thought were worth sharing:
1. LERP is a function you can access. This isn't really a tutorial post, but in short, you would in "every tick" when you want the object ot move, Set X and Set Y to "lerp(sprite.x, destinationX, 0.05) and the same for Set Y with the respective changes. The 0.05 is basically your speed. This is very much a simple interpolation with some ease in and ease out.
I could have made things work with just this for my immediate needs, but then someone had mentioned LiteTween which is basically or those of you who work in HTML5 or Flash have heard of TweenLite / TweenMax.
2. Basically LiteTween is the equivalent of TweenLite for Construct 2. It gives me access to a large number of interpolations as seen here. This is a bit more involved at first getting used to how things work with it, but its definitely worth pushing through the slight learning curve. Now I can have things "boing", fade in/out, move around in much more interesting and fluid ways than straight linear A to B type of situations.
I'm still surprised this isn't something that C2 would have built in as it's very helpful and very common to need this kind of scripted behavior, but that's why plugins are so great and having a helpful forum community makes it all good.
By next week I'll probably be doing a fair amount of practical work with C2 and while I've dabbled in it before, I've never used it with a specific goal in mind so I will likely share my experience with particles in C2 next time.

Ok so yes just when Jan 2nd seemed like a magical day of new beginnings and hit the ground running, we got hit with tons of snow, near zero degree weather, treacherous roads and school closings. So now it's January 6th and things are back to normal. Lots of catchup to do with everyone and realign with everything we have going on around here.

Not really a lot to report this week other than resuming development on various fronts. I'm looking forward to doing a lot more work in Construct 2 this week on one of my projects. I hope to have some interesting news or insight to share about what I learn there.

Tizen publishing went well with GameSalad. I have two games left to get 100% approved. I submitted them but they were rejected for good reason. Also, it's interesting that their Icons are circular rather than square. It's an interesting idea. I didn't adjust my icons to reflect this change, but I suspect I'll want to update this in the future. Really just waiting to see if the money comes through from the port promotional offer first. Also I suspect most of the icons will look ok still, but a little touchup might be in order.

So yea that's it for now. This isn't one our more exciting posts, but man if you knew all the great stuff going on behind the scenes.. I plan on sharing more about everything as things gel a little more. Some projects are kinda hush hush because we want to be the first to get them out there and others just need a little more time to really show the potential of them. 2014 is going to be really awesome and I'm so proud of everyone working on Part12 Studios stuff, I can't wait to tell you more! :)

So yea this week has been pretty slow on the development front. My oldest son has been out of school all this week. It's been nice to spend more time with him, but between that and my wife's busy retail schedule it has meant long stretches of me with my two sons (2 and 5) so I decided to embrace the chaos (even this blog post is a day late from my normal monday ritual) and let Part12 Studios stuff go on the back-burner till January 2nd when things normalize.

I was however able to make some progress in the porting process for both the Samsung Android app store and Tizen app store. I had a few rejections for some minor oversights on my part, but those have been resubmitted. Samsung's testing process is pretty intense. You can have up too 117 devices test the app which naturally takes a little longer, however to my surprise several of them made it without a hitch!

A few got snagged so I'm looking into what changes are needed to fix those. It's looking like GameSalad might be the issue for some of them (music not stopping when you exit the app) and the other is more if a misunderstanding for Klouds. Fishtronaut is the other that got snagged so far and that has the same music still playing after you quit the app. Sadly those issues are not something i can control so I'll reach out to GameSalad and see if they can do something about it.

I'm happy to report that come January 2nd later this week things will get back to normal. We have exciting client work starting up so this may end up slowing down some of our time spent on FredEx and other projects, but we're excited because like every prior client project we've done, it will only make us stronger developers when we come back full on with our own work. What's also great is that several of our internal projects are in collaboration with developers unaffected by these gigs so good things will continue to come from Part12 throughout 2014 both for our clients and our own projects.

More details will come as things develop and finalize by next week. Honestly I'm just looking forward to the holidays to be over so I can get back to work and focus on the tasks at hand. I'm excited to get into 2014 and make it awesome!

Happy new years to everyone, see you in 2014! :)