Tag Archives: development

Remastering “The Majesty of Colors”

9/1/2016 Melissa Avery-Weir

Folks probably know that I make video games as part of Future Proof Games, but maybe not what we’re doing at the moment. Many, many (many) years ago, Gregory made “(I Fell in Love With) The Majesty of Colors”, a very sweet Flash game about balloons and drowning.

As the site stats geek for FPG, I can tell you “Majesty” remains pretty damned popular. (Hell, it just got linked by Buzzfeed a few days ago.) It’s an evocative game that continues to appeal to folks wanting to explore the soft feelings of a big, weird, sessile alien. Problem is, Flash is finally actually dying — no phone/tablet can run it, and some browser configurations require user action before it’ll run Flash.

So we’re bringing “Majesty” to modern devices: Android, iOS, and Windows/OSX/Linux. And holy crap, this game feels great on a phone; moving the tentacle with your finger just feels real in a way that the tiny, mouse-controlled Flash version doesn’t. I’m excited to test it on tablets.

Continue reading Remastering “The Majesty of Colors” →

Weekly Linkage

10/3/2012 Melissa Avery-Weir

This week’s internet cruising:

Seriously? – bitquabit –

[H]e identified the Three “P”s of entrepreneurship:

'Profits, people and…you can figure it out.'

[Muttering amongst the audience.]

'Women. People, profits, and women. Or men. Whatever. People, profits, and women.'

No, no. He really means "Profits, people, and pussy." That shit's not funny.
BBC World Service – Outlook, Neda Soltani: mistaken for a dead icon – Heard this story on NPR on an early, early morning drive to work. This was fucked up; it ruined her life in Iran and sent her fleeing to Germany to avoid (further) persecution by the Iranian government. Continue reading Weekly Linkage →

Flaky Fluesday Flinks, Part Deux

9/18/2012 Melissa Avery-Weir

I think the last time I posted a link dump, I was flaking from my new tattoo. This week, I’m flaking from the tattoo’s touch-up! Much less pain for the touch-up, but the itching may drive me nuts if it doesn’t end soon.

Luckily, it’s healing very quickly.

Have some good reading:

Tony and Hilary’s Tiny Loft Apartment – I feel like it's been forever since I read The Tiny Life blog, but what a purdy little house to come back to.
Six Thoughts On The Case Of The Breast-Feeding Professor | Alas, a Blog – "The child was allowed to crawl on a floor! Shocking! She had to take a paper clip out of its mouth! Shocking! Etc, etc. Makes me wonder if these people have ever met an actual infant. Seriously, the things are like a cross between a stumbling drunk and a vacuum cleaner."
Emptyage — Yes, I was hacked. Hard. – The more personal telling of the @mat hacking.
S.Lott-Software Architect: Performance "Tuning": running in 1/100th the time – "The idea of 'tweaking' a working program to improve performance is generally misleading. It might happen, but the impact is minuscule at best. […] Generally, reduce Cyclomatic Complexity." Continue reading Flaky Fluesday Flinks, Part Deux →

The Contortions of a Spell List

11/19/2011 Melissa Avery-Weir

So I’ve been working on the next major release of the D20 Spell Lists app, and have found myself in a code and UI reorganization/refactoring jungle as I’ve refined my feature set and how I want to handle things.

One of the common-enough cases that the current version doesn’t handle well that I think needs to be is multiple spellcaster classes. If I’m a Druid 5/Bard 6, I’m going to want to keep separate spell lists, and will have different DCs, spells known, and spells per day to contend with. With the current version, the best solution is probably to have two different character files, each with its own spell lists.

My attempts to smooth that out have resulted in a lot of UI revisions as I tried to find good ways for displaying and updating all this info without slowing down the UI to uselessness (buh-bye, Table Layout Panel). Here’s what I’m sitting with now:

It’s not pretty, and there are more tweaks in the queue (like just putting the DCs/per days right with each class, probably), although for the moment it works well enough (read: stuff doesn’t end up hidden and inaccessible) that I can get functionality working again.

Like that 0 modifier for a Wisdom of 15. >_>

Continue reading The Contortions of a Spell List →

Weekly Linkage: Grumpy Heroines, CRUD, and Prison Work

8/10/2011 Melissa Avery-Weir 1 Comment

This week’s internet cruising:

Questionable Content – Tool reference!
What does English sound like to foreign ears? – The Blogs at HowStuffWorks – An absolutely amazing song and video by an Italian comedian faking English, plus some adorable animal sounds.
Why CRUD might be what they want, but may not be what they need – Reading this sent me back to an old client’s site (from almost two years ago), remembering the CRUD-based admin console I developed that was such an incorrect way to go about giving them the functionality they needed. Oy.
Renaming Many Files At Once with Pattern Matching in Bash | Andy Regan – This proved very handy in renaming about 40 files quickly at work.

Video interlude! This video convinced me to start playing Mass Effect (the first) tonight.

So far, it’s a blast, and not too chock-full of grumpiness. Just enough to be fun.

Continue reading Weekly Linkage: Grumpy Heroines, CRUD, and Prison Work →

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