When I get back from traveling I hope to get a decent computer and finally get back into video game development stuff. I’ve had many ideas on the backburner, so it’s about time they saw the light of day.

2012 is going to be an interesting time for game dev. I certainly want to jump on board with it.

It’s a bit old – and originally I password protected it to protect where I live, but I no longer live or work at these places. So enjoy!

Also trying out embedding video with HTML5, to hell with Flash!

Some interesting things.

• No one remembered my birthday because I had no facebook. Except for three people who don’t even live in Brisbane. Not including family. ;o
• Some people thought I deleted them, and were visibly disturbed when they questioned me in person. (sad)
• My idle time (which was facebook time) is now replaced with more productive and meaningful things. Like work.
• I am now socially dead to a lot of people, even though they have my number and email. If you really want to not abuse the social convenience of Facebook to stalk my life, then you can call or email anytime. 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

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.

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

Also about a year later, turns out that this site will just serve as a torrent of Kirtan, since I’ve always found it tough to find decent Kirtan all in one location. Kudos to the Krishna!

Before you get too excited, here are some things to remember.

• The music and sounds have been removed. Using copyrighted material in a University setting is acceptable for presentation purposes, but not really in any other situation.
• All the graphics in the game were created by Bettina Walsh. Please don’t steal or use them for anything unless you have her permission!

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:

• Game Maker Pro v8
• Extreme Physics 2.0 (2D physics engine for Game Maker)
• FMOD Sound System (Industry Standard Sound Libraries for Game Maker)
• CleanMem.gex (A cheap hack to make the game appear to use less memory then it does ;o, but it’s not enabled )

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.

So download here and check it out! (ZIP 11,124KB)