The Realm of Blog

At Inversion Coffee today, one of the Baristas (who's band I have adoringly seen a few times) made a remark to me about programming... and then said, "That's what you do right?" "Well yea, I do.", I replied. "Yea, you make Apps right?" :) Apparently my facebooking/tweeting/blogging or other social media addictions have earned me .00001% of quasi-fame status here in Houston!    Hey!  I will take it!  Of course I was talking to a guy whose band has been featured in Pitchfork.com, NPR and has recently done tours all over the United States!  So it felt more like a scenario of a much more quasi-famous guy re-inducting what used to be a quasi-famous guy back into the fold. Something Fierce Play this while you read!  Get pumped! Luckily it has been a very rainy morning so their power had been out.  It was quite slow, I realized what is usually a very busy coffee shop became a good opportunity to show a quick demo of my game. So ...

Graphics were pretty tough in the 8bit Atari days.  It took a lot of work to get things rolling, a lot of plot and drawTo and Player-Missile graphics.  That is until I discovered the method programmers were using to re-define character sets and create graphics using extra characters in the fontset.  The only way to do this effectively was to use a program that reordered the bytes for you, saved out that data and loaded it back in.  One such program that would load and save fonts was called Superfont. This program allowed the user to edit characters of the font in the checker board area and then save out the font to be loaded into a program later. These programs came from BBSs(dial-up online bulletin board systems, pre-internet) and in magazines like I have mentioned previously in my Gamasutra Blog, Compute!. Needless to say, I spent   mountain growing amounts of time making my own fonts and experimenting with fonts and creating my own.  Duri...

And the best way to move forward is to learn new things!  Found this a gem of a website called  Codecademy.     Seriously fun and easy way to learn Javascript and it feels like one of those old Atari 8bit games that trick you into Basic programming by making you feel like you are playing a text adventure. I really recommend this to EVERYONE.  Even if you are not really a code person.  You can collect awards, score points and even log in with Facebook.  The company is hiring right now, so if you are good at code and good at explaining it, go check it out!  Who knows I might be doing a tutorial you wrote in the near future!  I sure hope so, it is addicting. I really hope someone rights an Objective C tutorial.  One thing I have learned, JavaScript is very similar in syntax to ActionScript!  :D