Lugaru is the sort of action/hack-and-slash game I wanted to play when I was younger. There’s a little bit of a story (if cliched) and complicated key combinations that remind me of arcade fighting games. Yet, this is not the game for me now.

I mentioned previously that PHP has always felt like home to me. My webhost is PHP-based, a lot of my side projects involve PHP, and I have a Ubuntu virtual machine that I use for sandbox development before deploying it on my webhost server. My first job used classic ASP and .NET. I learned a lot. Microsoft products always have its quirks and the little habits I used to have (like muscle-memory shortcut keys) have been long forgotten in the few years I’ve been away. The plus is it’s not entirely new and old bad habits, if I can identify them early enough, are easier to fix. That said, I have a growing list of small habits to reform and wanted to document them here. I also wish to keep a documentation of the topics I am re-covering and quirks I have questions about, but need more time to explore later.

Gish is a complete opposite of last week’s take-your-time game. Gish is also reminiscent of the “old” game design targeting gamers who defined themselves by their prowess rather than attempting to appease a large crowd of casual gamers. There’s a bit of a learning curve, even for the simplest of actions (jumping) but the challenge is what makes it desirable among traditional gamers.

The naive solution I wrote for using jQuery’s deferred objects was bugging me so much yesterday that I was hacking away at it last night. A revelation didn’t occur to me until almost 11pm (nearly 8 hours after I started). While my code looks more like how I want it, the concept of using a reference to set the properties of my weather and time objects still makes me uneasy. Perhaps it is because my first “real” programming language was Java in which everything is passed by value.

I played Splice this week. I gave a non-gamer a list of 3 games and asked her to pick one that sounded the most interesting to her without explaining what the games were about. Splice is another puzzler from Cipher Prime, the makers of Auditorium and Fractal. Unlike Fractal, Splice is more about tricky puzzle solving ala Auditorium. I played through the Sequences but didn’t go through the Epilogue.

I had a job interview yesterday in which I demoed one of my works in progress – a Here/There app. I haven’t added it to my portfolio yet because it’s far from finished in terms of customization and display, but the basic premise is there. The app is written in HTML 5, uses canvas, a couple of AJAX calls to retrieve weather information and time, and is currently made for the iPhone 5, hence the odd resolution. A future goal is to properly resize the canvas for a wider variety of mobile devices.

One of the problems I ran into was it’s nitpickiness at having two AJAX calls having callback functions that updated the canvas. At the time I was working on it (last week), I wasn’t running Firebug so I was doing a lot of manual tinkering and generally getting my hands dirty to see what code orientations would cause which results. I eventually got the app working by essentially chaining or nesting the AJAX calls, saw that it worked, and set it down. Fast forward to yesterday, I am explaining the problem I ran into and am advised to look into jQuery’s Deferred Object. I’ve only spent an afternoon poking at it so my understanding isn’t fully there, but I feel the resulting code that I have is much messier and less elegant than my original solution. Which is better?

About two weeks ago, I turned in my Code School 48-hour hall pass and proceeded to cram in as many courses as I could. Before turning in the hall pass, I first tried the free Try jQuery course to get an idea of how long the courses would take me so I could plan out my 48 hours. I managed to finish jQuery Air: Captain’s Log, CoffeeScript, and Real-time Web with Node.js. That’s 4 courses in 3 days. I was definitely burnt out at the end, but I’m considering paying $20 (normally $25, but finishing courses give rewards like a $5 coupon) for a month of access to explore the other courses when I get the chance.

I’ll go into some detail of how the courses are laid out and my impressions in more detail.

This week I sampled and completed Braid. It was a game I’ve been meaning to play after reading an article on its creator (Jonathan Blow) nearly a year ago. I’ve been hesitant to play the game for reasons unknown to me but perhaps I just needed to be in the right mindset. Braid is an excellent game and the level design is definitely something to be appreciated. However, while it is a bit of a puzzler, some skill is required and may not be for the impatient and unskilled.

Runespell: Overture (RO) is an interesting blend of RPG, collectible card game, and poker. The core part to the gameplay is largely the poker aspect which can become frustrating. On the other hand, I’m becoming better at recognizing the different hands.

Really Big Sky (RBS) is a modern, arcade-like shoot-em-up (shmup). The space graphics are colorful and crisp with some cartoony-like sprites that manage to not look out of place. The soundtrack is trance-based and gets you in the mood of wanting to defeat your enemies without blowing yourself up from running into a planet, enemy lasers, or other environment obstacles. RBS is a fun game and play sessions can be made to be long or short depending on how skilled you are.