No Name Games

Ok, so my Arkanoid wannabe obviously isn’t anything fancy, but I had a little fun with it last night. I got a particle system functioning (somewhat) for when the blocks break, and added gravity to the particles and the ball.

Also added sound - although I’m recycling sounds at the moment. Maybe one of these times I’ll actually make the thing available, if I put in enough effort on it to make it more interesting anyway.

Seriously, I think I’ve been doing too much of it lately. Every day I’m feeling my brain expand a little bit more and a little bit more. Every day I’m reading hundreds of pages and every day I find myself wondering what to do when I run out of pages to read. Then I start going back and trying to write down tidbits of information from what I’ve been reading to use for later in… whatever.

Today I read a book about Ninjas (lossa nifty information). Yesterday I read the entire series of I Luv Halloween (in hardback edition - with a bonus comic). Day before that I read the entire Silent Hill series in an omnibus edition. Friday I killed off a 1062 page book, which was a collection of books written by Charles Fort that were release between 1919 and 1932 - so many awesome tales of bizarre happenings in real life, good times… Before all that I read a book called Energy Work that was all about raising your spiritual energy levels and crap like that, a book called ‘Your Inner Fish’ (details physical evidence of human evolution down to basically pond scum - though not everyone agrees of course), a book about plants and the various reasons people grow them along with how the plants seem to be manipulating us (it’s not as whacko as that makes it sound).

Seriously… I’m running out of stuff… tomorrow I’m gonna be killing off a book about ancient egyptian myths. I’m reading ghost stories on the side. If I don’t find more to read, I’ll be stuck with ghost stories and programming manuals from classes I took like 6 years ago.
So… anyone have any suggestions? I’m almost scared to think of what insanity I shall pick up next…

Btw - if anyone can stand a book that’s over a thousand pages, Charles Fort is DEFINITELY worth it. His theories are outlandish, and very outdated concepts by today’s standards (not to mention, kind of laughable sometimes) but the points he makes are absolutely spectacular, and the stuff he found through research is simply unbelievable. You will find no better collection of strange, inexplicable, sometimes macabre, events than that book. It’s called the Book of the Damned - the Collected Works of Charles Fort.

I’m hoping to get a book on XNA, so I have something to follow along with that I can have in my hand I guess. Maybe that’ll stall out my book binge for a bit. >.>

*sigh* Thank god Barnes and Noble keeps doing these weird massive price reductions on books they haven’t been able to sell…

I am pretty much addicted to podcasts, and a large portion of them deal with either game development or just games in general.  Thought id sure some of the ones I listen to

The Penny Arcade podcast
Cheap ass gamer
Gamers with jobs
Kropotkin uk gaming news
PC gamer podcast
Sacrcastic gamer podcast
Totally rad show
XBLA insider
Giant bombcast
Video gamer podcast
The geek box
All IGN gaming podcasts
Rebel FM radio
GDC radio
OXM podcast
Top seceret podcast
Bungie podcast
The hot spot
Gay gamer podcast
Blizzcast (Blizzards offical podcast)
Podcastle
Insomniac podcast
Indie game developers podcast
Not another gaming podcast (The gaming podcast I am the host of :-D)

I listen to more, but I believe this is a big enough list for now Enjoy, I know I do!

The creator of a bunch of really cool Indie games like Chalk, Noitu love and recently Noitu love 2 has created an arcade style game with a Zelda theme.  It’s pretty darn fun, full of lots of fast paced action tons  of explosions and has gamepad support (Xbox 360 controller!).

Download here

So make sure to check out the game and if you like this sort of stuff (can’t see how you wouldn’t) go to his website and check out all of his stuff.

Was looking around the internet for some free games to play, and came across these games…  It seems that you can make some pretty decent games using Javascript.  Interesting how this whole area of web game development is pretty much left in the dark thanks  to Flash.  Still pretty cool that you do not require any sort of plugin to play these games, just click and play