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Jon Frisby's Blogs

Don't Repeat Yourself, and stealing good ideas from other languages.

In my last blog entry I did a breakdown of the code I had just written by the feature it supported. Two features stood out as needing much more code than the others: Basic movement/jumping (62 lines...

Author Jon Frisby Date 12/17/2006 (10:40 am) Comment 1 comments

A platform game from (almost) scratch in 4h48m.

A couple days ago, a good friend of mine asked me for some help with a game she's building as a Christmas gift. The game is a platformer, and she's having trouble with it. I looked over the code a...

Author Jon Frisby Date 12/16/2006 (9:53 pm) Comment 3 comments

Another drool-worthy skin, and FINALLY, a use for TGB's physics!

My game is not exactly the sort of place you'd expect to see a lot of physics, and in fact I haven't used them at all up to this point. I haven't even used collision detection. A couple days ago, Ja...

Author Jon Frisby Date 11/25/2006 (7:17 pm) Comment 0 comments

Gameplay videos, to introduce the a new dynamic duo.

It is truly amazing the talent that's gravitated to this community! Observe, gameplay footage from three brand shiny new skins from a new art studio I've been working with the past couple weeks: ...

Author Jon Frisby Date 10/06/2006 (7:27 pm) Comment 2 comments

Downloadable goodness for Mac and Windows.

The Road to Demo No new screenshots (see previous blogs for those), just a playable demo. It's been a long long road, but we're getting there. It's NOT done. There's still MUCH to do, but...

Author Jon Frisby Date 09/15/2006 (12:59 am) Comment 15 comments

K.I.S.S.

As an engineer, my first inclination when encountering an unkown is "I don't understand X, so I should abstract X out into a separate layer". Sometimes this is exactly the wrong way to look at a pro...

Author Jon Frisby Date 08/23/2006 (2:57 am) Comment 16 comments

I'm not dead!!!!!!

It's been a LONG time since I posted anything, so I figured that I ought to post SOMETHING. Currently, I'm in the more-or-less final stages of bringing together a demo release. This probably WON'T...

Author Jon Frisby Date 07/17/2006 (9:07 am) Comment 2 comments

Pretty particle effects, and skin transitions (LOTS of pics!).

So after much hard work, and the assistance of Tom Bampton (God of Sarcasm, and Sour Cream), I finally have a version of my game working that smoothly transitions from skin A to skin B. It fades out ...

Author Jon Frisby Date 06/18/2006 (8:22 pm) Comment 10 comments

FINALLY! I'm almost bck to where I was before I started!

It's been a pretty busy week for me. At work, we're on something of a death-march to complete the "Sites 2.0" project -- that means that all teams are working on either Sites 2.0 itself, or things on...

Author Jon Frisby Date 06/11/2006 (6:03 pm) Comment 3 comments

A long grueling road (warning: lots of pics!)

In my quest to update my game to effectively use the TGB Beta4 codebase, I pretty much hit a brick wall. On top of that, there were some things I wanted to do that were proving to be just too difficu...

Author Jon Frisby Date 06/06/2006 (1:07 am) Comment 2 comments

When you hit a wall, you must flow around it -- like water.

Spoiler alert: Downloadable goodies for TGBers at the end of this post. So I had the first 18 hour coding marathon I've had in quite some time yesterday/today. I decided I was going to "rebuild" ...

Author Jon Frisby Date 05/29/2006 (11:29 pm) Comment 1 comments

So very very close!

I am now the proud owner of a 13" MacBook (white -- I like the black, but I ain't paying a $150 premium for it!). In the past I've been a late-adopter with Apple's products and as a result, I've been...

Author Jon Frisby Date 05/16/2006 (7:09 pm) Comment 0 comments

Tom Bampton is a god.

So I've been freaking out thinking that I wouldn't be able to use the "Fractals" skin, or use Theora videos on any other skin because it looked like there was no way to make Theora video loop without ...

Author Jon Frisby Date 05/13/2006 (2:35 pm) Comment 22 comments

You Can't Get There From Here.

First off, a quick update on the game: I just spent an hour playing the "Vegas Nights" skin set to the primary and "danger" tracks that the composer sent me. Absolutely MESMERIZING! Even without th...

Author Jon Frisby Date 05/08/2006 (1:32 am) Comment 6 comments

When milliseconds matter.

At my day job, I am the Software Architect in charge of Business Intelligence. Basically what this means is I gather millions of pieces of information ("facts"), and a count them up. It is very impo...

Author Jon Frisby Date 05/01/2006 (12:33 am) Comment 5 comments

Some quick thoughts before bed...

Most of this weekend and today was spent taking care of my injured girlfriend, but inbetween dealing with incompetent revolving-door healthcare companies I did get some time to work on my game. For...

Author Jon Frisby Date 04/18/2006 (12:34 am) Comment 0 comments

Download sizes...

I had been laboring under the assumption that a 20-40MB download would be fine, but after my last blog entry someone noted that 10MB is the "magic number" after which downloads fall off. All right ...

Author Jon Frisby Date 04/06/2006 (12:42 am) Comment 19 comments

Collaberation, technology, creative vision, and download sizes...

So today I received the final deliverable from Exis Inc for a very tiny project I contracted their services for. Specifically, my designer came up with the idea of having a "fractal"-themed skin in m...

Author Jon Frisby Date 03/30/2006 (11:52 pm) Comment 8 comments

One quick screenshot before work...

I've finally begun work on one of the new skins my designer has conceived. This is the "Fruit Salad" skin of which I have spoken in the past (and on which the screensavers I released a few blog posts...

Author Jon Frisby Date 03/28/2006 (9:50 am) Comment 5 comments

Life, the universe, and everything.

First up, my car: Damages are on the order of $5,400 and it ought to be done in a couple weeks. It's still IN OREGON (my car made it to Oregon, I never did), but I'll probably pay to have it shipped...

Author Jon Frisby Date 03/25/2006 (10:28 pm) Comment 1 comments