Wednesday, 4 March 2015

Life Post #1

Just a quick post this time. It's just gone 1am and I'm in the library working on a PHP project to create a user registration system and blog for people to use. Pretty exhausted and annoyed after spending ages ironing out a few bugs on my localhost server. Ugh. But hey, this is the kind of stuff that really interests me - web stuff.

It's the first time I've ever created a user registration and login system so I didn't expect for it to be finished in a short amount of time, but this is taking much longer than I thought for sure. On the up-side I've learnt a tonne about PHP and MySQL.

Anyway, I just thought I'd start a 'life post' series of blog articles so I can moan and mumble about stuff that's not entirely work related, and/or things that I don't have a clear enough idea to write a proper article about. Like in this one, where I'll be moaning about not having enough time for everything (you can leave).

Basically, I've got to the stage in the academic year when work stuff starts piling on. Really piling on. I have four projects to work on, and exams just around the corner. But there's also a lot of projects that I really wanted to do through my own design. I've not had much of a chance to finish the 'boxes' project, and I really wanted to get working on a (possibly) mobile based game called 'Depressed London.' It would be a game in which you control a small character on-screen (go see this little guy - http://www.kongregate.com/games/Moldinator/block-out-the-darkness?acomplete=blockout+the+darkness for reference), that would go through a few cycles of walking down and using the London underground. And then one time everything would be different, the place would be deserted and you become locked underground. You then go through a series of puzzles, or an adventure in which you interact with a series of characters with different mental conditions. The character you have has depression, you may come across others with anxiety or bipolar etc. and have to interact in a certain way. I came up with the idea when I was on the tube myself, you really do see what seems to be an infinite number of gloomy faces around.

I was thinking on making it in Unity, I have next to no experience here but it would be a great project to really learn as much as I can. If I can't start that soon (if I'm too busy trying not to drown under coursework... if that's even possible) I'll definitely be starting in Summer. In addition to this there's some music stuff I'm doing with a friend and possibly something else happening musically too - more on that later.

In short, I'm just a bit miffed about spending all this time on my work, and not getting very productive results. Loads of stuff to do, not enough hours in the day.

Alex.









Saturday, 21 February 2015

Boxes!



Over the course of the past few months I've been developing this idea, a little web game called Boxes. Basically, I saw some cool looking CSS3 buttons on a site with a nice transition upon hovering so I decided to make some myself. And then that turned into a grid of divs, and then that formed the idea for the game. I have working code (not finished, of course) for the game but I've been making a cleaner site to stick it on from scratch.

The main game mechanic is the use of a timer. Well, multiple timers actually. All the player will see is the timer in which they must try and find all 'happy' boxes to succeed. You see if a box is happy from hovering over it, but for the most part the boxes will either be empty, or have an instance of an unhappy character lurking inside. Clicking on this resets the your progress.

I've written an initial description on the 'rules' page as follows:
"Welcome to Boxes! In this little web game you must try and save all the little happy boxes, as quickly as you can. As you hover over the different boxes you'll be able to to see if they're happy or not. But hey, don't click on the sad ones! Remember, once a happy box has been clicked, it won't stay up forever and it will surely move."

It'll be a lot easier to see what I mean when I put it up online, but I'll throw in a screenshot of the initial version of the working code. Oh, and I'll be using a global scoreboard to see who can get the fastest times!

The tagline to this little project is, 'A good ol' time waster', which got me thinking about possibly creating a series of these time waster projects, or games, or whatever they'll be. I'll put one or two follow up posts to this when I'm nearer to finishing.


Alex.

Monday, 16 February 2015

My Blog

Hello, welcome to my blog! And all that jazz. Here's where I'll be posting updates and random ramblings of what's going on in my own little world. I'm currently a second year on (Bsc) Creative Computing at Goldsmiths, University of London. What does that mean? Ha! Everyone asks and no-one knows. The main gist is one of studying programming, alongside with some arty stuff (graphics and audio) to make other cool stuff. I'm mainly interested in web apps, creating visual content and get excited as a toddler at Mr. Blobby land (long lost reference) with anything musical (I play drums, bass and love writing).

So as you can imagine in the midst of my second term in my second year, I have quite a range of stuff going on. Some of which might even captivate your attention for a bit, much probably won't. However there's some things going happening on the side that interests me more than this, personal projects. My ideas. Therefore much of the content here will be me getting thrilled to pieces that I've made any break-through with my university work, and a lot of personal projects. You'll see the occasional music post too.

Thanks, and happy reading!

Alex.