So you thought I was gone…

Hey guys,
Steve here.

Let me compare myself to the Texas weather for a moment. Readers of my blog who don’t actually live here may not understand this, but there’s a pretty good chance you will.

Okay so it’s an El Nino winter here. That tends to mean higher precipitation amounts and cooler than normal temperatures. That’s what we were all expecting anyway. Some took it to mean lots of snow and arctic weather, others thought it would be cool and rainy. But due to the absense of cloud cover, it has been, hot for lack of a better word. And for a reason that I’m not quite sure of, it has hardly precipitated, in any form.

I might be somewhat of a weather geek/enthusiast, but that’s not why I shared that weird bit of Texan climatology. But I’ve noticed something as well. I’ve kept saying, [in my once-a-month blog postings], that I would get back to it, I’d be blogging “next week” or “more routinely”. I haven’t been doing this for too many years but even I know that for whatever reason, I tend to post more at the beginning of the year. On the contrary, I’m posting every 40 days give or take, and sticking to only one subject when I do. Sounds a bit like the dry and hot “El Nino” winter has come to reign over this blog, doesn’t it?

Moving on from that, 2016 has been a success so far, for me at least. Due to complications I may or may not have posted about here, I had to drop my BIM2 class. In its place, I switched to a Web Technology class, where you basically learn to program on the web, at least that’s what I can gather from my experience so far. Despite it being a full year class, (you have to be in there all school year to get credit for taking it), I was somehow able to switch into it for the second semester, and my guess is that I’ll have to finish the class in the first semester of next year.

Despite this not technically being an ideal change, I feel I’ve bennefitted much more from it than the class from which I was pulled. In just 5 weeks of being in that class, I’ve learned HTML, (though I already knew about 75% of it it seems), CSS, though that nearly bored me to tears due to its visually orientedness, PHP, and now I’m working on Java Script, which I find to be the most interesting of them all, due to it’s rather simplistic nature and from what I’ve heard it can do quite a bit.

Aside from school, I’m doing alright. On the coding side, because it’s been so long since my last post, I cannot remember everything, but I did work on S Quad Racing, releasing a semi-major update to my testers on Monday. One amusing bit, however, was the set of bugs that appeared in my crashing code. Firstly, due to a glitch with collision detection, once I crashed into my opponent, the sound played like 50 times. Secondly, when I fixed that and went to go another lap, I apparently spawned at the same spot as an opponent some how, so crashed and burned before driving even commenced.

And to make things even funnier, when crashing finally did work, instead of coming to a stop at the end of the race, for some reason the opponent kept going. I guess I rendered his breaks useless when I smashed into him? No seriously that’s actually never supposed to happen.

I still haven’t fixed the 3rd bug I mentioned, and here’s why. It’s been quite a long time since I played the breakout game I created, and Danny suggested I play it again on Monday night. I did so. And I regretted doing so. The ball movement was all kinds of messed up, so I realized after 3 months of playing other breakout games. So since last Monday, I’ve basically been rewriting the whole entire game. Firstly, it now has missions, and creating new ones is not in the least bit difficult. Secondly, it has paddles and balls which have multiple properties, giving me the opportunity to implement variety when it comes to different balls and paddles sold in the shop. And thirdly, it has forms of currency. Tradepoints, which can be obtained by doing almost anything, and Useless Balls (UB), which can be obtained by completing special bonuses, or with 1000 tradepoints from the shop. And, finally, the ball movement system is fixed. All the above mentioned have already been implemented into the game, and we’re going on 7 days now.

Yes, I know. I’ve gone on ramblings about games before and none have been released thus far. I also know that I have 2 other games in the works. But you’d be surprised how many game projects you can take on when you have no deadlines. Firstly you don’t have to stress about time, and secondly you can stay motivated to work on all three of them because you aren’t working for anyone. (S Quad Racing’s rewrite was a special case, that was mainly due to the entire code base being mangled).

That wraps up tonight’s post. I can’t tell you what to look forward to on next week’s post because I simply don’t know.

Thanks for reading,
type you later,
Steve.