Steve Forde

Hike up Mount Monadnock

admin — Sun, 29 Apr 2012 19:08:03 +0000

We had our first hike of the year up Mount Monadnock yesterday. We took the the Spellman trail up to the top, which was nice and quiet compared to the more popular White Cross and White Dot trails which were a little busy.

As nice as the weather was, we didn’t stay too long up at the top because of the cold and the wind; went down a bit to find a ditch in between some rocks to eat our lunch. There was still some remnants of snow and ice at the top, mostly in places that are out of direct sunlight.

Also got to try out my new trekking poles. First time ever hiking with trekking poles, but they were definitely nice to have, especially on the way down.

This evening, I drew stuff.

admin — Mon, 20 Feb 2012 02:46:13 +0000

Behold, some new art for the Main Menu:

Also posted to DeviantArt: http://fav.me/d4qbehv

Zombie Pong – Feb 19 Update

admin — Sun, 19 Feb 2012 18:53:46 +0000

New screenshot! Just up’d the game’s default resolution to 1280 x 720, and with that, fixed-up and updated a bunch of the game’s assets.

Other new updates include:

High score system is 90% functional: you can enter your initials after you get a Game-Over and see if you made it into the top 10 – just need to make it write out the new score list to a text/xml file.
Pause Menu now has Resume and Quit buttons.
Main Menu has some new temp art – still would like to try to come up with a better name for it.
Some zombie skin and type variations, including a large zombie that takes multiple hits to kill.

Features features features.

admin — Wed, 15 Feb 2012 07:14:42 +0000

This little zombie pong game is coming along nicely. Yet despite being a rather simple game, there’s still tons of work to do on menus and non-gameplay related stuff. Also, all kinds of crazy ideas like an unlockables system for earning new paddles and powerups, more zombie AI behaviors, zombie bosses, a million different powerups, and the list goes on.

For now, I’m keeping all these ideas and notes stored in Trello to help me focus on the essentials and just getting it “finished”. Can always add more frivolous stuff later, but the game should at least have a solid base first.

Tonight, I worked on one of those stupid little polish things that has a big impact (at least I think so) on how visuals feel: when the ball hits a paddle, the paddle bounces back just a eency weency bit. Just helps give a little more life to them.

Also, still need some sort of title for this game.

Wizard WIP

admin — Mon, 06 Feb 2012 04:59:27 +0000

Yeah… on a bit of a LOTR kick as of late…

Brews for the Game Today

admin — Sun, 05 Feb 2012 18:22:01 +0000

Football-shmootball. But that doesn’t mean I can’t enjoy hanging out with good friends and having some tasty beer and food

Shipyard Brewing Co. – Applehead
Cambridge Brewing Co. – Bannatyne’s Scotch Ale
Wachusett Brewing Co. – Larry Imperial IPA
Last bottle of homebrew – American Cream Ale

Guess it’s time to start making more homebrew soon. Got any suggestions for a late-winter/early-spring style of beer? (Since it’d probably be ready to drink around the middle of March).

Bootstrap, from Twitter

admin — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 15:52:55 +0000

“Simple and flexible HTML, CSS, and Javascript for popular user interface components and interactions.” Looks neat, might have to try it out.

“Old Bilbo called them Goblins.”

admin — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 06:57:35 +0000

Started working on a drawing based on the goblins from the animated 1977 animated movie The Hobbit.

Also posted to DeviantArt: http://fav.me/d4obwgg

Updated, Feb. 3rd: Updated line work around the edges of the face. Drool.

Functioning Menus

admin — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 06:37:37 +0000

My zombie game now has a functioning menu system. Granted the code for it is a huge mess and really, REALLY needs to be refactored… for now, it works, and has some button art:

Right now it just uses the keyboard Up/Down arrows to cycle through the options. I’ll probably also add mouse and controller support for it.

Zombies, now with 100% more swagger

admin — Sat, 28 Jan 2012 20:07:36 +0000

Finally got around to recording a short video of my zombie pong game!

This week I separated the zombie sprites into two layers: the head and the arms. This way they can rotate and move independently to give a little bit of animation to the zombies’ walk.