I'm slowly putting the old sections of my site back up. First up is the games section (formerly known as Flash). I'll probably divide them up into two groups on that main page, since a bunch of those aren't actually games, just interactive toys.

Next is probably Big McLargeHuge, since its easy. Then back to work on Progressive Comics 2, which has been in progress for about 5 years or so. The code is about 60% done, but I'm debating whether to scrap it and start over. Recoding it in ActionScript 3 (I started coding it in Flash MX with AS2) would make it quite a bit cleaner (especially the component skinning), but I could very well get sidetracked again and delay it another couple years.

So it goes.

Huzzah! I won the UGOPlayer gamefest. My first dollars (of many, hopefully) in my career in game development.

Here's something else I've put together, a crop circle generator:

About a month ago, my brother sent me a link to the UGO Player Gamefest. I decided to give it a shot and worked my butt off for a month creating a new game for the competition. What I ended up with is SpaceJunk, a asteroidy-flying-around-in-space type game. So check it out and give it a vote. Also be sure to check out the entries...er...entry.

After seeing this talk by Will Wright and Brian Eno on generative systems, I started playing around with Cellular Automata. I remembered this post on using flash's bitmap filters to do all the calculations for Cellular Automata, so I wrote my own version, just for the hell of it.

A couple of gotcha's that held me up:

• When setting pixel values in a BitmapData object with transparency enabled, the color will be set to 0x000000 when the alpha is 0, no matter what color you actually passed in.
• On the other hand, with transparency disabled, the alpha value of pixels will always be set to 0xFF.
  

Alrighty then, the site is finally back up after my former host imploded. I lost about 6 months of data, but since I hardly ever update, that was only like 1 or 2 posts. I'm now hosting with logjamming, who have been pretty sweet so far.

Anyway, I'll slowly be adding the old sections back in. Some of the links in older posts might not work for a while.

This time around, I'm using several libraries instead of building everything from scratch. The site is now built on CakePHP, an MVC framework for PHP. To bring some sanity to javascript, I'm using the MooTools javascript library. I'm also using tinyMCE for rich text editing and reCaptcha for fighting those pesky spam bots.

One new section I've added is CityGuesser, a game where you try to guess the US city based on a satellite photo. It was created using the Google Maps API.