I remember this from a while back, but now it seems to be real and fruiting into reality sooner then I thought!
2012 is going to be an interesting time for game dev. I certainly want to jump on board with it. 
It’s coming up to four weeks since I decided to ditch the Facebook thing, for good. The idea of living aspects of social psychology in virtual space doesn’t really appeal to me. So I don’t have any plans to return to it.
Some interesting things.
But don’t go out of your way, really.Although it could be a good tool to shape your whole ‘image’ to a social mass, in the end it’s better to do this in person. It was fun to explore at the start, and to watch it grow, however I believe it can also be a mass social conditioning tool which will threaten the privacy and individuality of the future, for a lot of people.
The tricky thing is how to incorporate the business aspect of my life into Facebook, when I refuse to make an account. A twitter is fine too. ;o
Over the past yearish, I’ve put a bit of energy into establishing business ventures with my computer skillz. So far so good! I think it’s going to turn into a full time thing, and I’ll look after myself with this.
Although a website to web-ify it all is in the works, the domain is over at http://dreamfast.com.au/ Websites, software, etc
Only last week I made the change to separate all the business / personal stuff. OS X Lion makes that a lot easier, with superior fast user switching! </sellout> Which does help a lot. I recommend this to anyone starting a similar thing.
Good news!
The amazon aws went through ok, and I’ve being trying it out. So far so good. Really has opened up a lot of opportunities to expand out ideas.
One thing I’ve thrown together is a self managed, slowly growing database of music (kirtan). Every few weeks there is some python scriptz on the chron which automaticly crawl certain websites, see if there is new content and downloads them. Then updates an sql database, and the radio streams. Umm, http://kirtancollection.net/
It’s pretty cool so far, but I’m not putting a lot of energy into it. I was hoping to have a torrent of the music as well, then after each update it can make a twitter about any new info.
One thing though is, this kind of thing takes up a lot of I/O requests, which has come to about… $12 on the aws. Which is not SO bad, but moving it to my dedicated host would be better and cheaper.
Once I get the fundamentals out of the way, I’ll expand it out more to encourage people to sign up and contribute and take part. Secret ideas. ;o
Rejected my debit mastercard why don’t you! Not because I have no money, because it’s a debit card. Even though you have accepted payment on amazon store for some things. Wow man. Just wow.
So troublesome to now take over the internet. Time to source some alternatives.
I had an email about the Hospital of Horrors game asking many questions. Since I wanted to release the source for this game after it was done Uni wise, I figured I should get around to it now!
Before you get too excited, here are some things to remember.
To see what it’s all about, you’ll need the following. The addons are included in the package, but if you wanted to know more you can follow the links:
I think the game will open in the Lite version of Game Maker (non paid version) so you can check out the codez (which I really don’t care what you do with), but you wont be able to compile it.
Recently I had an email from someone asking about the Game Maker Text to Speech DLL, apparently it will be used in some educational software in the U.K. Awesome I think! However I haven’t touched this since 2003. After some quick research there appears to be already some other extensions to Game Maker which allow this functionality, but some rely on nasty methods such as calling vb scripts. So with some inspiration I’ve created a package that will allow the DLL to run with Game Maker 8 using the “Extension” feature. To get it to work on my computer I just had to install the Microsoft SAPI 4 (The newest version is 5 though).
The extension, containing an example and (some partially updated) documentation can be downloaded here! Please provide some feedback if you can.
GMTTSExtension.zip (547kb for GM8)
Original DLL (180kb for GM5)
Bellow is ripped straight from the old readme.htm, the links should still work.
Note: If you have Windows Me or 2000 you should already have a speech engine installed. You can however add more engines if you want. Windows XP also has a speech engine, but it’s not compatible with the DLL, so you’ll need to download another engine. Windows XP users also need to install Microsoft SAPI 4 (825KB).
Microsoft Text-to-Speech Engines
Microsoft Engine 4.0 (7.3MB)
L&H TruVoice Text-to-Speech Engines
American English (0.99MB) voices
British English (2.54MB)
Dutch(2.58MB)
French(2.24MB)
German(2.18MB)
Italian(1.97MB)
Japanese(3.00MB)
Korean(3.03MB)
Portuguese(2.39MB)
Russian(2.85MB)
Spanish(2.36MB)
Hospital of Horrors was developed for a University final project. I did the programming and worked with Bettina Walsh, who created all the lovely art work! After 12 weeks of development, the game has reached a playable BETA stage. For now, development will be on hold to focus on another things, but doubtful it will be finished since we’ve both moved onto new things. We have some YouTube videos, check them out! If anyone would like to download the Desktop version, they can do so here. Please keep in mind it’s not a finished product and there are a few things which need improvement, but the basic mechanic of it is there. Remember, you have being warned!
If anyone was interested, the game was developed in Game Maker, since it’s great for sticking together a simple game, and also for prototyping ideas! If anyone is wanting to explore Game Design to create their own ideas, I’d highly recommend this program! It’s a great introduction to basic programming knowledge and design iteration.
From here I’m going to develop my skills further into ActionScript while learning PHP/MySQL so I can create Flash based games and have knowledge on how to build appropriate web sites suited to hold them. But really I don’t think it’d be long before I get into some serious stuff. ;o Anyone want to model some 3D for me? :3