Showing posts with label announcements. Show all posts
Showing posts with label announcements. Show all posts
Sunday, July 6, 2014
Monkeys Wave Goodbye (bye, bye!)
It's official: monkeysintheplayground.com is no more! This was, of course, according to plan, but I overlooked one crucial detail: I no longer have a place to host Clueball. I will be rectifying this problem as quickly as possible.
Monday, June 9, 2014
State of the Blog - June 2014
I'm back in class! This, of course, is a double-edged sword, because while it's good news for my career, it's bad news for the projects at this site. Mostly what it means is focusing on the projects that are most important to me and/or beneficial for my portfolio, and jettisoning the extraneous.
Untitled Gaming Library
This is the project I'm currently most excited about. It started as the game engine for Mom I'm Home and then Wizard's Scroll, and then I starting rewriting the engine into small functions that could be used for any project, and what I'm ending up with is a pretty useful library of game-making tools. This is a long-term project, but eventually I'd like to tweak it into something really classy I can release on GitHub.
Wizard's Scroll
My biggest short-term goal right now is Wizard's Scroll. Although my eventual goal a 100-level game with fully functional level editor is still a ways off, the 50-level demo version is very close to finished. I just need to tweak a little code and get it running on JVM. Probably two weeks worth of work, if I had two consecutive weeks to work on any one thing right now.
Clueball
My second most immediate priority is Clueball. The nice thing about this one is the game is already fully functional; I'm just adding a few coats of paint and some additional features. My original goal with Clueball, back when I started it last year, was to implement full Facebook functionality; that's moved to the backburner for now. I'd be more interested in seeing if I could PhoneGap it into running on Android...
Untitled Meditation App
I haven't mentioned it here, but I've been fiddling with an idea for a meditation app on the side. This is another long-term project; the goal is to have something simple running by the time I move at the end of the year. I know a few martial artists in the area that I'm moving to, and my hope is to get some "professional" feedback and suggestions, resulting in a nice little Android app.
Mom I'm Home
The concept of Mom I'm Home was to make a Legend of Zelda-style game with SNES-style graphics loosely based on my childhood neighborhood (a suburb with several nearby forested areas), with the urban parts serving as the overworld and the forest areas serving as the dungeons. I still think this is an interesting idea, but the truth is, this is a project that would take a whole team of programmers to complete, not just one guy. That's why this game (along with Lore and other projects I've mentioned here and there) are going on indefinite hiatus. That's the downside of focusing on the important projects; it means some other, interesting stuff falling through the cracks. But fear not! Things will be resurrected as I find the time slash resources.
Untitled Gaming Library
This is the project I'm currently most excited about. It started as the game engine for Mom I'm Home and then Wizard's Scroll, and then I starting rewriting the engine into small functions that could be used for any project, and what I'm ending up with is a pretty useful library of game-making tools. This is a long-term project, but eventually I'd like to tweak it into something really classy I can release on GitHub.
Wizard's Scroll
My biggest short-term goal right now is Wizard's Scroll. Although my eventual goal a 100-level game with fully functional level editor is still a ways off, the 50-level demo version is very close to finished. I just need to tweak a little code and get it running on JVM. Probably two weeks worth of work, if I had two consecutive weeks to work on any one thing right now.
Clueball
My second most immediate priority is Clueball. The nice thing about this one is the game is already fully functional; I'm just adding a few coats of paint and some additional features. My original goal with Clueball, back when I started it last year, was to implement full Facebook functionality; that's moved to the backburner for now. I'd be more interested in seeing if I could PhoneGap it into running on Android...
Untitled Meditation App
I haven't mentioned it here, but I've been fiddling with an idea for a meditation app on the side. This is another long-term project; the goal is to have something simple running by the time I move at the end of the year. I know a few martial artists in the area that I'm moving to, and my hope is to get some "professional" feedback and suggestions, resulting in a nice little Android app.
Mom I'm Home
The concept of Mom I'm Home was to make a Legend of Zelda-style game with SNES-style graphics loosely based on my childhood neighborhood (a suburb with several nearby forested areas), with the urban parts serving as the overworld and the forest areas serving as the dungeons. I still think this is an interesting idea, but the truth is, this is a project that would take a whole team of programmers to complete, not just one guy. That's why this game (along with Lore and other projects I've mentioned here and there) are going on indefinite hiatus. That's the downside of focusing on the important projects; it means some other, interesting stuff falling through the cracks. But fear not! Things will be resurrected as I find the time slash resources.
Tuesday, April 22, 2014
Clueball (beta)
Clueball was created in September of 2013. The object of the game is simple: clear the board by clicking clueballs whose numbers add up to ten. Matching clueballs must be in the same row or column, but do not have to touch.
The current beta version of Clueball is fully functional, and all features work. There's one or two bugs, and it still needs a lot of polish before it's ready for primetime. If you catch an error, please feel free to log it in the comments below. Thanks and have fun!
Thursday, April 17, 2014
Monkeys No More
I've mentioned it here before, but now it's official: Monkeys in the Playground is shutting down. There's currently a link on the main page directing people here, and when the contract expires in August, I won't be renewing. Of the three games on the site, Clueball will be moved to another server and will soon be accessible from a link on this blog. The other two games, an art program and a simplistic platformer, remain unfinished and will disappear when the blog does.
Monkeys in the Playground was created to be a site of educational games that helped kids have fun while learning. The end goal was to have everything on the site, even the link buttons, be fun and interactive. This can be seen in the sites logo, which has two monkeys on a teeter-tooter that you can play with using the mouse cursor. I was very proud of the site at the time, and I still am. So why shut it down? The reasons are three-fold:
1) Getting the site to where I wanted it, and maintaining it, required me to be a full time website designer. Full time website designer is a great profession, but it's not the career I'm pursuing, so it doesn't make a lot of sense to concentrate my portfolio on that.
2) My dream job is to be an educational game designer. To that end, it seemed to make sense to focus my portfolio on designing educational games. Problem is, websites dedicated to educational games tend to focus on small, simple games that teach a simple concept. Those games are terrific, don't get me wrong; my dream job is to design them. But it occurred to me that only pumping out a ton of small simple games probably isn't the best for my portfolio.
3) This goes hand-in-hand with the second reason, but I don't want to pigeon-hole myself. Educational game design might be my dream job, but it's not the only thing I'm interested in. My goal right now is to develop as many interesting applications for my portfolio as possible while I finish school, and confining them all to one narrow category seems unwise.
So there you go. This blog is currently the main headquarters for my programming work, and will soon be home to multiple projects I've completed. Thanks for stopping by, and be sure to keep checking back for news, updates, and announcements!
Monkeys in the Playground was created to be a site of educational games that helped kids have fun while learning. The end goal was to have everything on the site, even the link buttons, be fun and interactive. This can be seen in the sites logo, which has two monkeys on a teeter-tooter that you can play with using the mouse cursor. I was very proud of the site at the time, and I still am. So why shut it down? The reasons are three-fold:
1) Getting the site to where I wanted it, and maintaining it, required me to be a full time website designer. Full time website designer is a great profession, but it's not the career I'm pursuing, so it doesn't make a lot of sense to concentrate my portfolio on that.
2) My dream job is to be an educational game designer. To that end, it seemed to make sense to focus my portfolio on designing educational games. Problem is, websites dedicated to educational games tend to focus on small, simple games that teach a simple concept. Those games are terrific, don't get me wrong; my dream job is to design them. But it occurred to me that only pumping out a ton of small simple games probably isn't the best for my portfolio.
3) This goes hand-in-hand with the second reason, but I don't want to pigeon-hole myself. Educational game design might be my dream job, but it's not the only thing I'm interested in. My goal right now is to develop as many interesting applications for my portfolio as possible while I finish school, and confining them all to one narrow category seems unwise.
So there you go. This blog is currently the main headquarters for my programming work, and will soon be home to multiple projects I've completed. Thanks for stopping by, and be sure to keep checking back for news, updates, and announcements!
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