I've done a little bit of housekeeping with the header of this journal, shortening it down to something a bit more manageable (and updating my Invalid Tangram high score).

I'm also heading home to Melbourne for a few days to meet up with family and deal with the usual admin that builds up over a few…

I've made a few more minor improvements to my game engine, but nothing earth shattering. Progress is actually quite slow as I get bogged down with planning the GUI improvements to come. However it's got to a stalemate where I think I've fallen into the classic trap of featuritis; I'm planning for t…

Time for a coding update. Amongst all the other things I've been doing lately I'm also currently upgrading the internals of my sprite engine, Diagonal. In the creation of Brixtar and the aborted attempt at a MAGIC game I've pinned down a number of architecture flaws that needed fixing.

Firstly, I've…

I apologise for the lack of updates. I've been procrastinating more that is healthy lately. I've been putting in a reasonable amount of time to my projects, it's just that most of that time appears to be spent blankly staring at a piece of paper lost in my own thoughts. Before I know it the clock h…

Given there's been a lot of support for the idea of a contest based around a fixed set of sprites, I think I'll use this as an opportunity to work on my own art skills. I haven't done that much in Inkscape recently, so I need the practice. While my game library is being upgraded I think I'll try an…

I'm dedicating this first paragraph to a general whinge about winter. It's cold, wet, there's very little sun and I have a constant urge to sleep all the time. Winter, I'd hate you with a passion if I could muster up the energy to do so.

I've been meaning to post a wrap-up of the MAGIC contest for a…

It was a good Queen's Birthday holiday for me, with most of it spent playing games about towers. I have a preliminary score sheet written up for all the entries in the contest, so the judging is partly complete. Unfortunately I ran out of time and energy to make a final decision, so I'll have to do…

As of now I've received emails for two MAGIC games, so it is now officially a "contest". I haven't played more than a couple of seconds of each one to make sure that they work so I can review them all on an equally fresh basis, but I'm looking forward to playing them all tomorrow.

For me tomorrow is…

After scratching through a few designs for my MAGIC game this morning, I'm rapidly coming the conclusion that this game is unsalvagable. Unfortunately my original plan, a kind of cow balancing game based on cartoony physics, doesn't seem to be workable as a game. Every attempt to rescue it by eithe…

Behold the Tower of Cows!
As fun as simply stacking cows sounds, I've got plans of turning this into a simple puzzle game. Unfortunately the code is currently as buggy as hell and I've screwed up the cow data structures by working things out on the fly. Furthermore I'm not sure from this initial sta…