I’m really regretting NOT taking a more TDD-like approach from the get-go. The tests I’ve been writing have exposed bugs I didn’t even realize existed and have helped me focus on specific bits of functionality vs. chasing rabbits down whichever rabbit-holes seem promising. TDD is awesome! It’s not just about tests… it’s about writing better code and helping see the actual path ahead. What’s NOT to like about that?

Zed Shaw has a great blog post on Hemispatial Neglect which has me doing a fair bit of thinking about my blind spots and acceptance of things/the “status quo.” I really appreciate what Zed has to say, and I think he’s often hilariously funny. The Hemispatial Neglect post, and his thoughts on directions his Lamson project could go are really thought-provoking and interesting. Zed makes me want to learn Python… once I get my game alpha released, maybe. (Or maybe not, ’cause if I dig Python I’ll be tempted to rewrite bits of my game yet again. Re-writing != Releasing!)

I went to Flashcamp at Adobe HQ in San Francisco last night and had a great time. I rode up with Big Badass Ben Floering and got to see some VERY cool stuff demoed. Flash Catalyst (formerly codenamed “Thermo”) is really awesome-looking and I’m going to dig into it super-soon (maybe tonight) and play around. It’s a very cool/interesting/promising tool which will hopefully help bridge the “Designer/Developer Gap” somewhat. I’m definitely intrigued/interested. The new support for CSS Selectors in Flex are very cool too… finally, it’s starting to look more like traditional web development though there’s still plenty of Flex attribute naming weirdness. It’s definitely a welcome step in a more sensible direction.

Personal highlights of Flashcamp for me were more aligned with talking with folks than seeing the demos, though.

I got to say howdy to one of my Software Development Idols, Peter Armstrong (Ruboss Technology Corporation/ RestfulX), who told me that he’d come down from Canada to Flashcamp to catch up on Flex 4 stuff and that he was going to lock himself in a hotel room for four days to get some work done on his book. Awesomeness. I should write a post about some of the reasons Peter is one of my heroes… he’s a really super-cool guy who not-enough-folks know of and are missing out by not knowing.

While I was sitting/blabbing with SILVAFUG South Honcho Keith Sutton Adobe was having a raffle. While neither Keith, Big Badass Ben Floering, or I won anything we were glad that Bess Ho won a copy of CS4 Master edition. I have to confess that I’m a wee bit jealous, but as Keith pointed out “it’s nice to see someone deserving win cool stuff.” Keith and Bess did a presentation at the last SILVAFUG meeting(s) on Designer and Developer Workflow. It was definitely goooood stuff.

Homeslice Carl Tanner (Captain Proton) won a gift certificate for a beer store, which was kinda funny ’cause I think he’s pretty straight-edge… but hey, winning something is winning something, y’know?

I also got to blab with Badass Uberpimps Luke Bayes and Ali Mills (ASUnit, Pattern Park, Project Sprouts, PureMVC Presenters, AssertTrue, and like 95% of all the other cool stuff on the internet) which was, as usual, a good enough reason to head up to the City in and of itself.

Ali and Luke both gave my “new (old) look” a thumbs-up and Luke whipped out a picture of his fantastic mohawk from when he was 17. I had to show a picture of myself from a month or two ago to get a couple of people to be able to recognize me. Sooooo funny!

Luke spent his Memorial Day weekend “making OpenID work.” He forked Bort on github and has a demo version up on Heroku. I aspire to be even 10% as prolific and awesome as Luke and Ali. I find them both to be amazingly cool humans who do amazing stuff. I always feel inspired by those cats.

I also had nice chats with Chris Luebcke, Josh Tynjala, Radley Marx, and a whole slew of other fine folks. One of the ladies working at the event even waltzed with me for a moment!

Executive summary: Flashcamp was good times, fo sho.

Today’s hackfest has been good… less hacking than yacking, but that’s good stuff too! I’ve been having a great running conversation with Stephan Branczyk about, well… everything!? He’s totally my kind of h4×0r… into plenty of interesting things. Our conversation touched on:

QR Codes and scanning UPC/ISBN codes from one’s phone

Nokia Phones:

Stephan’s recently acquired Nokia E71

The very cool Nokia N97, which will run Flash Lite apps (Woo!)

A Flash Lite/Nokia app contest and the Open Screen Project Fund

The Art of Game Design book (non-affiliate link)

Mastery: The Keys to Success and Long-Term Fulfillment (non-affiliate link)

The Unity Game Engine

Uber Game Designer Nicole Lazzaro’s presentation on emotions in game(s|rs).

From Casual Content:

Nicole Lazzaro, founder and president of XEODesign, is an award-winning interface designer and the leading authority on emotion and the fun of games. Her seventeen years of research defined the mechanisms of emotion that drive play and reshaped the fun of over 40 million player experiences including Myst, the Sims, Diner Dash and smart pens. She has helped clients such as EA, DICE, Ubisoft, Monolith, Sony, Playfirst, and Maxis explore new game mechanics and audiences. A frequent speaker, she enjoys sharing her research on why people play. Prior to founding XEODesign in 1992, Nicole earned a degree in Cognitive Psychology from Stanford University and worked in film.

Testing Frameworks:

Selenium

Windmill

The hipness of Moo Cards

Stephan is demanding that I publish something… and demanding that I sling some code… so I’m hitting “publish” and will clean this up when I get home.

I also had a nice chat outside with a couple of dreadhead kids while I was feeding my monkey… so many interesting people.

While the music they play at Hydration is a mixed bag (literally… they mostly play mix-cds) they were playing a great song by Jason Mraz (feat. Colbie Caillat) which I rather liked:

It’s been a good couple of days… now it’s time to get back to my tests. I’m down to 13 failures (out of 160 tests), which are all mostly related to some changes I made to the way ship inventories work. I’m getting kinda sick of thinking about ship inventories but I’m getting close to having them WORKING with TESTS, so of course that’s a thing of beauty!

I started working on some new bits last night and am expecting to spend most of this evening working on getting warp functionality happening, which will work a little bit differently from before. I’m trying to focus on keeping things relatively simple for now. I can always tweak/enhance ‘em later.

It’s really good to be back in this saddle.

I’ve been bolstering convictions to commit to writing status updates on my space game more often. Let’s start with a “State of the Union.”

There’s a version of the game which is nearing Alpha. I’m both excited and nervous about this and have been battling FUD. FUD sucks and it’s gotta go. I’ve had a number of folks offer me positive encouragement about some of the ideas I have for the game, etc., and that’s been really motivating me to get the ball rolling again.

I’m having trouble deciding on milestones for the Alpha. With something as wide-open and blue-sky as being the wearer-of-all-hats of a game’s design and implementation it’s really challenging to know when I’m doing something amazingly great that adds tons of fun or if I’m just down a boring-simulation rabbithole. Sometimes it’s both at the same time, sometimes neither.

I’m hoping to run some thoughts by the folks at tomorrow’s hackfest. They’re a smart bunch and are usually quite willing to help so I’ll ask the smarter people in the room (aka “anybody but me” ) and hopefully get some good direction from that.

Along the personal issues department line I’ve been physically sick for the past couple of weeks and that’s drained my energy tremendously. A few weeks ago I found myself whistling at women on the street and saying rude, suggestive things to them. Apparently I picked up the chauvinist pig variant of the swine flu. Fortunately, I was able to overcome it and am back to my previously sincere and charming self.

I’m approaching “fighting form” again and am getting gung-ho about getting back into the code-slinging saddle. Please feel free to nudge me (actually, please feel *encouraged* to nudge me) if you don’t get a game status update soon. I’ll leave it up to you to decided what “soon” means.

This checkin also includes a nifty Rails plugin called “Manage Fixtures” which, quite unsurprisingly, helps one manage one’s fixtures.  It’ll take a current table (or a set) or all of your tables and convert them to YAML fixtures. Quite handy!

I ran rcov on it and I feel ok about my test coverage, though there’s definitely more to do.

For the first time ever I’ve written custom Rake tasks thanks to the Rake Tutorial written by Gregg from RailsEnvy. A couple of things that I think I “figured out” (meaning “I’m not sure this is the orthodox way to do this, but it works…”) are:

1. An example of creating a rake task that calls other tasks and also allows use of the application’s models:

   task :do_this => [:a_subtask, :environment] do
   …
   end

   That calls :a_subtask and also allows use of the application’s odels in the rake tast by specifying the environment.

2. This is a way to call multiple subtasks:

   task :do_this => [:a_subtask, :another_subtask, :yet_another_subtask, son_of_the_second_cousin_of_the_son_of_subtasks, :environment] do
   …
   end

The intent of this blog is to share progress towards making the actual game and to share lessons learned while using Ruby on Rails, AJAX, Flex, AIR, and other cool stuff I get interested in… though hopefully don’t end up in deep rabbit holes because of. 

It’s likely that it’ll contain RPG/ Web Game/ and other Misc. content too since there’s a lot of cool stuff on the internet worth sharing.

I’ll get around to installing a cool WordPress Theme soon… right now I’d rather get back to workin’ on the game.  Thanks for your interest!