Woes of the Rating Model

We've seen this sort of thing happen with too many of our favorite tv shows (you know the ones with which I speak, since we all loved them). These are the sorts of shows that we love every aspect of and use as a conversational piece via "did you see the new episode off Netflix/Hulu?"

Notice the conversational piece didn't mention the tv? That was on purpose. Rating a show's success or failure on the ratings of *when it aired* is a dinosaur model that needs to be banished. The alternative is to get all of the previous generations that still watch television into the shows that we love, but I really don't think they enjoy the same things we do based on what doesn't get cancelled.

Also notice that "we" describes my generation, which is also on purpose. We love "Fringe", don't we? I was just getting done reading about Joshua Jackson trying to garner support by getting the populous to watch it when it airs on Friday. It appears the ratings haven't been doing well lately. Fox doesn't have a good track record when it comes to keeping shows out of the goodness of its cold, black heart, but then it is a television station. I'm also looking at a different station (is it CBS?) with disdain for cancelling my previous favorite show "Legend of the Seeker", but the box art for season 2 says "and Last Season," so there isn't any hope of that one being revived...

Artistic Endeavors

If I want to strive for some of my more ambitious project ideas, it occurs to me that I need to be an artist. Not that I couldn't pull in, say, an artist friend to help, but I don't wish to feel indebted to someone for their help. Besides, I'm a loner when it comes to my own projects, and this tends to be because I don't want someone else's creativity melding with my own. So, I have begun some artistic endeavors.

When most people say they can't draw, they usually mean it by admitting they can't even draw stick figures. My personal version of "I can't draw" is more "I can draw, but I'm worse than both of my siblings." Which is to say that my two sisters have some amazing artistic talent that scared me away from furthering my own, as I wanted to focus on something I wouldn't be 3rd best at in the family.

Something interesting about the artistic style of both my sisters is that they both started with a very cartoony style that developed a much more realistic shift over time. My younger sister's talent still varies, but just to give an idea of a 1-hour pencil sketch she did in 2007:

Perhaps if I had a whole week, I could accomplish what it took her an hour to do, but I'd still be wasting lots of paper to the trash.  In comparison to that, this is something I drew:

Completely different, cartoony style that may have taken a minute or less, but it still required lots of redos beforehand.

I think that sort of style is what I'm going to go for, though. I was originally trying to draw in arms, neck, and legs, but those were the parts that were causing me issues. Different artists have different quirks with their characters, and I think I kinda like the no limbs look. Very Rayman-like (though even he has hands). There's still lots of perfecting needed, but at least the face is really easy for me to recreate without thinking too hard.

Plus, if I go for the hand-drawing and scanning approach, I may have to tweak how I go about that, too. The contrast with the pen I've used is a bit funky. The images will also have to be colored, though that is also dependent on the contrast issue (using the paint bucket tool as-is results in a few off-pixels here and there).

I'll discuss more about the specifics of this project perhaps when a few more sketches are available. Also opening up my bookmarks on DirectX tutorials again. Brushing up on some C++. Ah, and there is this matter of a website I need to revamp. And beating Dead Space to unlock its hardest difficulty so I can start my next video capture on the hardest difficulty project... So much going on, but I gotta love it. Minus the actual job, of course.

Idea Guy's Head Explodes

An image that is just text in my own handwriting.

I was just going to leave this post at that, but I suppose that would be an inaccurate depiction of how my freetime has been lately. I just realized today that there's so much I want to do. If I stop to actually think about all of those things, though, I really won't get around to accomplishing any of them.

This last week, my phone game did get published. Working on the Android version now, but I've been kinda winding down a little, so I don't know how long that process will take to get finished. Whole new language, whole new learning curve, and all that jazz. And my dad is going to be here this next weekend, so I won't be able to accomplish any work then. Trying to finish up Hard Mode of Half-Life 2 before then... so close...

Freakin' Out?

You know when you get an important email that says you just failed at something but tells you to check your account directly on "x" website to find out why, but you're already beating yourself up over being a failure? No? Well, I suppose that was oddly specific... This happened to me today.

So I revisited the idea of working on mobile games recently, and I decided to choose the Windows 7 Phone as my poison. Why? Well, it was the only language by default that wouldn't require massive amounts of learning to tackle. Sure, I could have gone the route of BlackBerry again, but I sort of cheated that one by choosing a wrapper language around Java. That ended in failure, as what appeared to work on the emulator didn't work at all in production.  Windows 7 Phone: you've got either Silverlight or XNA.

I use Silverlight on a regular basis at my job, but I've also used XNA in the past and found it to be easy to learn *and* it has awesome documentation (one might argue "it's Microsoft" here, but I would argue that the person who says this has never used SharePoint -- another language I use, unfortunately, on a regular basis at my full-time job).

I used XNA to create a simple enough puzzle game.  I did a Google search for "Grid Bouncer" and couldn't come up with any matches. Maybe not the best sounding name in the world, but my creativity for names is limited.

The idea is to select an adjacent grid to move forward the indicated number of spaces. Each time you do, the value of the selected tile decreases by 1. As the player, you have to decrease all possible movement across the board to 0 (what the non-numbered tiles are in the above image). You can lose a game by landing in a position where all adjacent spaces are nothing, making you incapable of moving.

Anyway, so I finished up the process of getting the game to where I want, and I submitted it for review on Saturday. I received an email today saying that the app failed along the process, which had me playing worst-case scenarios through my head. When I checked the App Hub site to view the error report, I laughed at the reason for failure: a support email is not present in the App. I have since added the support email into the app's About section and reviewed the rest of the requirements list to ensure there wasn't any other asinine requirement I may have missed.

*Phew* Here I was, getting worked up. I've started to port the code over the the Android SDK now, but I realize that the differences between the two languages are enough to where calling it a "port" wouldn't be accurate. Talk about complete overhaul. Still, I'm looking forward to doing actual tests directly on my phone.