Creating tools for collaboration

For the realization of Blasting Forever I’m going to take a stab at collaboration. As a coder I can make this collaboration go much smoother by providing my fellow non-coder collaborators with tools, so they don’t have to see a line of code.

Blasting Forevers rendering

I found time to work on games again this weekend. Part of that was spent playing UFO: Enemy Unknown (I'll love that game to death) and part of that on how to use Molehill for rendering Blasting Forever. Oh didn't I mention Gunrunner has gotten it's true name? Let's start with that.

Paying rent

Fun experience this week. Since my previous employer ceased doing business I’m currently freelancing from me and my girls new appartment. Sadly enough, it apparently takes weeks to provide an internet connection to a home with all the infrastructure. Go figure. Since not having a decent (or stable) internet connection can be a bit of a drag when you’re doing webdevelopment, so I considered my options for getting some temporary office space.

Well, last time I was Quince (the company my previous employer rented office space from), the joke was made that a case of beer would suffice as rent. Word of advice: don’t make those kind of jokes around someone like me ;)

It was a nice experience: dropping a case of beer on someone’s desk and placing your laptop on another. Did some work, had a few good chats while not bieng associated with my former employer. Fun times.

PeterKerris.nl is live

A while ago a good friend of mine asked me if I could make him a website. I’m more of a developer, but hey: “Challenge accepted!”. I took my time for it and experimented with it. I learned some J2EE, Spring and some Linux administration in the process. The site went live last week and I’m quite pleased how it turned out. Now for a post mortem.

GunRunner: an experiment in UGC and phased release

You know that feeling that you only think of huge projects you want to make, but you never actually get to finish them? I was telling my girlfriend about my latest geeky endeavor GunRunner(working title) and she replied:"But what about that other project you were working on?" Good point. Luckily this time I had given that some thought and could give her a decent reply. My plan is to build the game in phases and present these to the public. A sort of open beta thing. The reason I can do this is because the game is designed around user generated content.

AS3 and social media

I'm busy with a Flash site which gets 99.99% of it's content from social media. The experience so far is really challenging and rewarding as I haven't had a real chance to work with social media yet. For me this naturally brought up that sharing should be included in the site's design. Now most of the Facebook, Twitter etc widgets use javascript and are extremely well protected to avoid abuse. I understand completely, but dropping a javascript button in a stylized Flash experience (site or game) is a pretty big 'no no' for me. The alternative is writing against the avaible API's of the social media. Now there are social media sites popping up every week so that means writing agains possibly a lot of API's. In addition: having to keep up with API changes of social media, which can be pretty extreme, isn't really my favorite passtime.

I was looking for a solution for this and came across the ShareThis and AddThis services. Both offer a javascript button and an endpoint to call the service. As I said a javascript button wasn't really an option, so I looked into the endpoints of ShareThis and AddThis.

VipeSoft > VipeGames

I've been pretty much inactive at this blog. A big part of the reason is that I wanted this blog to be exclusively for my hobby projects, which consisted of games at the time. I've developed from a hobbyist Flash game maker to a profesional webdeveloper. Naturally my available time and interests have shifted. I felt I could write less and less at this blog, as this blog was about games.

That's why I decided to switch the subject of this blog from my game projects to... well any project and subject related to development that happens to catch my interest. So you'll be reading about web development and gui more from now on. Let's not totally exclude games. VipeGames is still here, it has just become part of something bigger. VipeSoft.