The Quixotic Engineer

The game project that I’ve been quietly working on this summer is finally ready for release! It’s a rhythm-based shmup inspired by the Beatles song Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown). You can download it for PC, Mac and Linux on the game’s website:

Norwegian Wood – No Fun Games

I have more to say about the game’s development process, but I’ll save that for a postmortem post later this month. For now, enjoy the game, and please leave your feedback and suggestions in the comments below.

This week I’ve been eating up all the coverage from GDC, scouring blogs and Twitter and attempting to live vicariously through the writers in attendance. The dozens of fantastic presentations have given me reading material for weeks, but I was especially blown away and thoroughly inspired by the Indie Games Summit. Jim Rossignol described 2008 as the year indie development “was confirmed as a vital, valid movement within the world of gaming”, a statement that is strongly supported by this year’s presentations. The excitement, potential and innovation coming from small development studios is simply staggering.

Inspired in part by Petri Purho’s “5-minute game” magic trick, I decided to see if I could put together a small functional game in the scope of an afternoon. I didn’t quite meet my time goal (for reasons I’ll explain below), but finally did put together a small game called Rockwell, Papyrus, Skia.

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Although I’m not taking part in this year’s Global Game Jam, I coincidentally decided to also put together a small game over the last two days. It was a feat only made possibly by the friendliness of the LÖVE 2D engine, a free weekend and several pots of tea.

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I was originally introduced to Markov chains by Josh Millard’s Garkov, a project that applies this mathematical model to Garfield comics. I thought it was an amusingly random idea, but didn’t fully appreciate the concept until Jeff Atwood wrote a post detailing how Markov Chains work.

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For a long time, one of my secret shames as a programmer was that there were parts of this website held together by some rather shoddy code. Writing this blog has been a great learning experience, but as a consequence I’ve often accidentally done things the “not quite right” way. Armed now with a better understanding of XHTML and CSS, I thought it might be a good idea to fix some of that spaghetti code and bring my blog up to at least XHTML 1.0 Transitional.

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