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About a month ago, I participated in the 10th (semi-annual?) Ludum Dare 48-hour game development competition. This time the theme was “Chain Reactions” and I created a fun little game in Python called spaceReactions. The aim of the game is to destroy planets using the pieces/fragments of other planets, which you explode using rockets! Bam! It also features 9 unique levels.

Screenshots (click to enlarge)

Take a look at the full results. All in all, I think I did pretty well. Although I did place 19th overall, (out of 50 completed entries) I did manage to get 2nd place in the audio category! Alright!

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Since my last blog entry, I’ve released a very small update to pillows, mainly just bug fixes and making things a little nicer for linux users.

My friend (and best man!) Jeff Powers recently started a new webcomic called GeoGuys. It’s a funny little comic about three friends who are “nerds at heart”. I think it’s pretty good, so you should go look at it.

In addition, another friend, Dave Butt (a groomsman at my wedding!) also started a new blog, called d:\blog.exe. To be honest, I don’t really know what’s wrong with his old blog, but I won’t ask the hard questions. He recently became engaged (exciting!) and has asked me to be the Master of Ceremonies at his wedding reception (also exciting!). So congratulations to Dave and Ashley!

Oh also, if you’re into game development competitions, the “Ludum Dare X” competition is starting soon! Dec. 7-14th for Registration and Theme Voting, and Dec. 14-16th at 7pm PST is the competition. Of course, see the Ludum Dare website for more information. For what it’s worth, I’m hoping to take part in the competition (if time permits)

Hooray! I’m married!

Yes, it’s true. On Sept. 1, 2007, I totally got married to my beautiful new wife, Kristen. Alright!

Both the ceremony and reception were awesome. We’ve got a zillion pictures to sort through (and thank you notes to write), and I’m considering putting up a gallery of some of the pictures. We’ll see what my hosting provider thinks of that.

Anyways, if you’re getting married in Central Alberta, I’d totally recommend the Red Deer Lodge. Very helpful and accommodating! They were really great about letting us use candles and rosepetals, etc. whereas other Red Deer Hotels were either very strict about that sort of thing, or clueless.
(And no, they didn’t pay me to say that, har har.)

Since I was sick with a cold this weekend, I decided to sit on my butt all weekend and start playing StarTropics. It has always been one of my favorite NES games, ever since I first played it as a child. I didn’t remember actually completing it though, so I set out to do so.

It certainly took a while to complete. Some parts were far more difficult than I remember (I hope I’m not just getting old. Eek!)
However the most difficult section of the game (and rightfully so) was the final boss fight, against Zoda. Man, if he even touched you? Instant death for you. That’s badass.

After a bit of frustration (I only used savestates a couple of times, honest! ) I finally defeated Zoda and went on to experience the game’s ending. Though I found the end story to be a little hokey (some of those Argonians look like elves!), I was particularly impressed by the awesome ‘zooming-out’ effect at the very end of the game. Very cool and not something I expected to see in an oldschool NES game. (I made a quick animation of it. Click here to see it, as I don’t want to spoil it for anyone.)

All in all, I thoroughly enjoyed the game and whole-heartedly recommend it to anyone who likes action/adventure games. I mean, who wouldn’t want to kill stuff with a Yo-yo!

Some cool Startropics-related links:

• One of the best Startropics fansites I’ve seen.
• A social commentary on how Chapter 5 of the game is an allegory to American history.
• A very nicely put together page showing the ending sequence of the game after all the dialogue. (spoiler alert)

Today, in the middle of an otherwise normal IRC conversation, I had the amazing idea of mixing Star Wars character names with programming languages! I could only the imagine the possibilities.

I first enlisted the help of Wikipedia’s Alphabetical List of Programming Languages and Wikipedia’s List of Star Wars Characters and then got to work. I’ve tried to stick to the more well known languages and characters, but there are a few obscurities.
A friend, thinko, also contributed some of these.

Here are my results:

• Darth Ada (my favorite thus far)
• Han COBOL (he flies in his Millenium FORTRAN!)
• Boba Forth
• Luke Smalltalker
• Java the Hutt
• Python Amidala
• QuakeC Amidala
• ChewBASIC (I laughed pretty hard at this one)
• Mesa Windu
• Java Java Binks
• Oberon Kenobi
• Ruby-D2
• CgPO
• General Groovy-ous

Here are some more additions, thanks to some of my readers!

• Py-thon Jinn
• Adakin Skywalker
• Logo-wan Kenobi
• Chancellor Perlpatine
• Java Fett
• dBASE Windu
• Princess Lua
• Erlang-do Calrissian
• Also, Luke Smalltalker blew up the Delphi-star!

If you have any more/better suggestions, I’d love to hear them!