Speaking of which, check this out if you like meta-game discussion:
/r/ludology

I’ll post some of the latest screenshots when I get home. They’re similar to what you’ve already seen but there’s been a bit of progress.

A bit of colour and then a city skyline for a backdrop really adds something!

Adding clouds immediately made my game world feel that much more immersive.

The project I’m starting is quaintly called Tiny Ghost Town as a working title. It’s the story of a Tiny Tower “Bitizen” who, after a year of seeing Tiny Towers fall into disrepair as people stopped maintaining them, decides to take matters into his own hands. He sets off on a mission to find out what’s going on, and along the way he’ll encounter all sorts of obstacles and enemies who’ve been allowed to run rampant in the many towers. Armed with whatever he can get his tiny hands on, he’ll advance through floor after floor of each tower, clearing out the baddies and discovering the truth. It’s a side-scrolling, action platformer inspired by the original Tiny Tower mobile game by the lovely folks over at NimbleBit.

I’ve already hired an amazing pixel artist, here’s some of the stuff he’s done!

Pretty fantastic, no?

And a screenshot of the AK-47 prototyped: http://puu.sh/20vWI

if(0)

your MOO code goes here

endif

Bam, that’s all there is to it! I can’t take credit for this, though. It may be obvious to some that this code works (programmers of other languages, for instance) but it hadn’t crossed my mind.

For this entry, we’re simply going to compare two types of coding. And in this particular case, I only have one really good example. I’m sure you could think up hundreds more once you put your mind to it.

Below is an example of code I see all the time:

   1: switch(random(2)){ 

   2: case 0: write(“Random thing 1.”); 

   3: break; 

   4: case 1: write(“Random thing 2.”); 

   5: break; 

   6: case 2: write(“Random thing 3.”); 

   7: break; 

   8: default: write(“Random broke.”); 

   9: }

First things first, remember that random() ranges from 0 (zero) to the integer you specify. People often forget this and don’t include a case for 0 in their switch statements.

The above code is not very dynamic. It’s written easily, with beginner skills (not to say that some experts wouldn’t use it, it has its uses). The trick to this code is that every time you want to add a new random thing, you have to edit your switch statement to increase random(), AND add another case. This code is static. It’s not meant to be easily updated, it’s meant to do its job.

What about this code?

   1: string *things;

   2: things = ({ "Random Thing 1.", "Random Thing 2.", "Random Thing 3." }) ;

   3: write(things[random(sizeof(things))]);

This code is much more dynamic. We’re providing the exact same end result, but now the code is smart enough to know how many items it has to iterate through randomly, without having you add more cases to a switch statement.

We define things as an array of strings. An array is just a collection of stuff, remember. Then we set ‘things’ to be a collection of three strings, the same strings we would’ve used previously. Finally, we write a random member of the things array to the user. sizeof() is used to get the absolute size of an array, so that number will always be the exact number of members in your array, no matter how many things you add to it. You should already know that you can refer to members of an array by their index in that array, so things[0] would return the first member of things. This works to our advantage here, where we pull that number using random() and sizeof() combined. So randomly, things[0], things[1], or things[2] will be written to the user.

Pretty nifty, eh?

I decided to rearrange my laptop’s desktop. I saw these sweet desktop backgrounds on Lifehacker and I figured “Why not?”

As you can see, my icons aren’t organized in any particular fashion that you might recognize… they’re arranged according to how often I use ‘em.

Often-used programs go on the sticky.

“Work” and other things I access fairly often go onto the file folder or the cubicle wall. (What exactly is that anyway?)

Everything else goes around the outer edges of the screen. A digital no-man’s-land of icons. Those who didn’t make the cut, per se.

Now if only it was this easy to organize my house.

I used to use Jing for my screenshotting, and I probably still will use it for a bit longer because I like to be able to save my screenshots immediately, etc. Though I’m sure if I hunt around in Evernote I’ll find all those features that I like about Jing. I already like how Evernote takes over the Print Screen key and makes it a shortcut to Evernote’s screenshotter. One press of “Print Screen” opens an Evernote screenshot box that you can place on your screen somewhere, resize, and more. If you hit “Print Screen” again, you can now add overlays to the screenshot (such as arrows, or handwritten text), finally hit “Enter” and your screenshot is now in Evernote. Cool, huh?!

Man, I can’t wait to paste in some formatted text and collaborate with people on how it should look.

• On a daily basis we receive anywhere from two to three thousand spam emails.
• Of these 2-3,000 spam emails, one or two (per day) are legitimate.
• Every minute (on average) we receive 10 to 20 spam emails.
• Most of the spam (~80%) is legitimate bounce-back emails from mailservers stating that spam we sent couldn’t be delivered. This is because spammers harvest email addresses and forge spam emails using them.

All in all this adds up to a lot of crap. This entire week I have yet to reduce the unread spam emails to zero. Every day I might read through a few thousand, only for that few thousand to be replenished the next day. Currently the spam inbox is sitting at 5604 and counting (I’m watching more trickle in right now). Luckily at night we employ a much more strict ruleset so that the spam is reduced to a few hundred, but just think if we didn’t have that option… we’d have seven or eight thousand spam emails to sift through per day.

If you know someone who has to look through spam daily to retrieve legitimate emails, pat them on the back. Tell them you understand and sympathize with them. In fact, tell me that before I tear my hair out.