My March Post

So, here is the start of my March post. I guess I have alot of cleaning up to do from last month, so let’s see how hard this’ll be. I’ll start with the hard and emotional stuff.

First off, I may get my comp taken away due to grades, so this might be my last post for a month (which would suck) but I deserve it…. I guess. I won’t go into details, but let’s just say it’s a big amount of grounding for something small.

Second, I think I have a problem with BZFlag. I’ll keep it as simple as that, but my ethics and morals on there have been like wiped out. Some of you that are on BZFlag and have seen me recently can probably relate. I can’t say I’m sorry to you guys, because I’m not…I can’t play BZFlag for fun anymore and now I’m going on just to tease people which is jerkish and bi###y, but I just don’t know…I should probably just uninstall BZFlag, forget it for good before I do something horrible.

[EDIT: As of August 2009 The scratched out phrase does not apply anymore. I play the game as-is and have fun. No more worries, sorry about typing that up in the first place, sometimes I hate myself.]

Thirdly, I lost the game.  What is the game you ask? Well, the goal of the game is not to think about the game, when you think about the game, you lose the game, and you have to acknowledge that you lost the game by saying “I lost the game” out loud, or in an IM conversation you’re having with someone. You can never win the game because when you try to make someone think about the game to make them lose the game, you think about the game and you lose the game. And now that you know what the game is, you are playing the game, and you have already lost the game. You then have 30 minutes to clear your mind of the game, before you can lose the game again. Today so far, I have lost the game 14 times including just now, which is typical for half the day gone (I keep records of how many times I lose the game each day). You lose the game more when you play the game.

Fourthly, Fighter’s Field 3D is almost out, but if I get grounded, it won’t be released on April 1st, but on May 1st. :\
Check out http://z-gamers.net and http://forum.z-gamers.net for more info on what’s going on.

Eh, I’ll stop with the starting phrases, but that’s all I can think of. I had alot more to say but I just had a mind sweep. Ugh, writer’s block, now I’m just writing whatever comes to my head. Eh, whatever, I can’t think when I am not in the good mood, so I guess this is it to the post. :\ I can’t believe I can’t think right now, I had this very long post planned out that would take about 10 minutes to read, but now I got nothing. Well, I should stop typing because this is just stupid…Bye.

The PAINT Game

The PAINT Game is a game I made up because I was bored in school and they disabled the games. So I was sitting there, playing around with excel and word, trying to invent some kind of game I can play with the resources I got. I came up with the PAINT Game. The PAINT Game’s goal is to dominate the whole playing field with your color and win. The gameboard looks like this:
 Download Link: http://sigonasr2.files.wordpress.com/2008/09/paint-game-gameboard.png

You can have colored “Teams” and change the colors to reflect those teams. Basically it’s a 280 pixel wide by 290 pixel high image with a vertical and horizontal line that perfectly divides it into 4 squares, and then two diagonal lines coming from the lower right and lower left corners to make the two center areas. Whichever two edges connect the center, the opposite color goes in there. (Like on the left side in the middle, the two blue pieces have 4 sides and one edge is touching the middle, while the red piece’s points only touch with their points. Therefore, red goes in there.

Gameplay: To play, we will use a feature in Paint that allows you to use the image as a paintbrush. The player that goes first presses Ctrl+A to select the whole game board, then holds the shift key and drags the image in one direction, making a copy of the image as he drags the image off. Once the image is dragged off, it’s the other player’s turn, and then players alternate to try to get their color covering the whole canvas. Make sure you only do it in one direction!!! It can be slightly curved, but you can’t turn around or go back! The goal is to dominate the whole board by strategically getting all of your color to dominate the whole thing. Sometimes the black color will end up taking up the whole square, and in that case, the game ends with a tie. If you want to keep a record of your scores/teams using Microsoft Excel (You can keep a winning percentage), download my preformatted document at http://www.box.net/shared/adnh9rq78k. That’s about all for today. Just a fun game to play when you’re bored, especially with friends!

Here’s just an image of it during play. Red vs. Blue

Z-Tower Defense Progressing

Computer Game Creation News, I have been working on Z-tower Defense and have now created 3 towers and 10 different types of enemies. Although the game goes a little fast, it is playable right now, and there is a demo at http://sigonasr2.servegame.org/zgamers/ztowerdefense.php. I recommend you start with creating 4 basic blue towers and experimenting from there. The enemies are pretty basic right now, but I plan on improving them. I have included a screenshot below.

Please comment on it and tell me anything to improve on. Right now this is only version 0.02, so any ideas and comments would be appreciated.

I am starting to work on a random teleporter maze generator, which will contain paths to choose from, and then you go through teleporters trying to find the exit. This is for BZFlag and I think it will appeal to the audience of BZFlag once I release it.

Pumped Day

Today was a fun and crazy day. I had to prepare for today’s spirit day, so last night I went outside and spray-painted a few wax paper sheets with blue spray paint. That was my main goal for the spirit day, so I made a few of those so we can put them on the school roof lights to show blue light through it. We had two fog machines, music, a guitar, the band (I play E flat Alto Sax), balloons, our school’s mascot, streamers, glow sticks and much more to make it all so glamorous. I did get my face painted half blue because our school colors are blue and white. So after the judges scored our stuff, we visited some of the other classes to see what they did. We seemed like we had not much competition, but the judges said there was a three way tie! My best friend was in a different class and he was competing against our class for the tiebreaker, but it was cheap because we didn’t know at our pep rally we were gonna do a 30-second moment on the gym in front of all the students in our school to show them how much school spirit we got! So we just sung a lame song that didn’t work too well. Unfortunately we lost, so we did all that work for nothing, and we didn’t get the pizza party as a reward for winning! Ah well. The face paint took about 10 minutes to wash off completely, and then I went to our “Smash League” group to play some Super Smash Brothers Brawl. I like that game and my character I use on that game is Pikachu. I do not use any other characters though. Why not? Everybody thinks it’s strange I always use the same character, and they say it gets boring to use one character. For me, it’s actually much more fun to use one character instead of many different ones. All the players I verse in there, I’m about in the middle. A decent player, but nothing to be shocked about. I go by the name of “Pino”

I am now continuing work on our game Z-Tower Defense if you want to see http://zgamers.selfip.com on what that is about.

In BZFlag news, I became the co-owner of Cruelmania. A group that hosts BZFlag servers and has a nice staff. Nothing too big, but I got plans to change Cruelmania’s current server to something possibly better. I am glad to help. Today the BZSoccer League got a few matches going. The BZSoccer league is basically a place where you compete against other players on a soccer field on BZFlag, and capture the green flag on your base. It is very challenging and competitive and if you ever play BZFlag you should come watch sometime. I added in a BZFlag video of me playing if you care to watch how I do on it.

I can’t wait for Ubuntu 8, it looks great and will improve on the already great system. If you haven’t seen any of the updates yet, check it out at http://www.ubuntu.com/testing/hardy/beta#head-e55186d5d312cfd6b8d74a407dbef271a1edfc46.  I am especially fond of Wubi, which will allow users to install Ubuntu as an application in Windows! No need for a new partition, and you still have Windows XP, so people worried about problems with dual-booting won’t need to worry anymore. All this is to improve on the easy user interface for casual users.

Today I went to my friend’s house after school and went stumbling on http://stumbleupon.com again. StumbleUpon is great! It allows you to select topics of your choice, and then start stumbling websites. You can go to http://sigonasr2.stumbleupon.com to see my profile on there and click Pages I liked to see stuff I recently stumbled upon and liked.

I recently set up a comment system for the Z-Gamers site so people are going to be able to post comments on the games we create. It is a PHP script and I will be adding it to the site tonight.