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  Oops 11:18 PM -- Fri August 22, 2003  

Wish I had an edit button implemented for these journal entries... try clicking the IGF link in my previous entry to see why. I in fact am entering the Independent Games Festival, not any sort of women's fund.
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  Crunching 06:52 PM -- Fri August 22, 2003  

It's crunch time here at Hamumu. And I mean REALLY. It's not just me, who is crunching VERY hard on Supreme to have something fabulous ready by Sept 1st to enter the IGF, but also Sol Hunt, who has finally been given a classroom, just a few days before school starts. She's been scrambling to get it set up - and it's her first full-time classroom that's truly her own, and it's her first time teaching 4th grade, and it's a combo class with both 4th and 5th graders! Yesterday, she was doing things for it absolutely solid without a break for over 12 hours. Today's not looking too different as of now!

I don't crunch quite as hard she does, because I'm my boss. Right now I'm off to take a break and play some games. I need that to relax. I have been working nonstop since around 8:30 this morning, and I'll probably be back for more work tonight. But I can't keep that up all the time, it just burns me out. Today was extra tricky - I managed to let the Dr. Lunatic Bundle CDs to run out, and so I had to spend the morning making new ones - and fast, since somebody had already ordered one. So that really cut into my work time. And to make it more interesting, I used up the last of my blank CDs, and emptied my last ink cartridge! So I had to order new stuff, and I hope it arrives before I need to make any more CDs (well, I sorta hope not, since that would mean more sales... I'm torn).

But, all the work is worth it! The new stuff in Supreme is kickin' it old-school straight to the curb and back again with no shoes on. You can now not only upload your high scores, but your entire user profile as well. That means there will be a whole different set of records - for instance "Most chinese food eaten", and "Died the most times". It's gonna be fun. Now I just need to lay off the internet features and get back to supremizing the last remaining worlds.
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  Success!? 06:13 PM -- Wed August 20, 2003  

Looks like the online high scores are working! Sort of. There are some issues I'll have to work out, but it's doing it... it sends them to the website, they show up on the website, you can look them up, up it's all lovely! I'm tempted to put a link so you can see it, but there's just too much dust on the construction site. I don't know if it might break stuff still, or blow up all of Lichtenstein when you mistype a player name. But it's a nice system - you can pick any world from a list box (which is a pretty darn long list box, which will only grow longer...) to see high scores and times for that world, or you can click Top Records to see a page I haven't implemented yet which will tell you who has the absolute highest score, who has the most #1 scores, who is on the scoreboard the most, who has the shortest cumulative time records (question is, since only the top 3 are stored, what do you count for someone who isn't in the top 3? I guess maybe double the 3rd place time or something?), and that sort of thing. There's also a box where you can type in a player name, and see all the scores that player has (since only the top 3 are kept, you're not gonna see that player's top 3 scores on every level, but rather a list of all the levels where that player has scored in the top 3, if you see the difference). Good stuff! I'm excited about it. There's even cute little icons to indicate which character the player used to earn the scores. It also stores what difficulty they were playing on, but so far I don't display that... there's not much need, since your difficulty setting actually modifies your score in a way that will hopefully make things fairish! And if they're not fair, well then use whichever difficulty the guy with the #1 score used, you have access to it too, you know.
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  Brain overheat 12:05 AM -- Wed August 20, 2003  

I think today I actually wore out my brain. You know how when you exercise, your muscles get tired? That happened to my brain. I spent maybe 7 hours or so flat out hammering on the online high score situation for Supreme. It's incredibly complex, and I have to work on the game code, website code, and a CGI program for the website, all at the same time, to get them interlinked and working together. I haven't actually succeeded yet, but around 3:30 or so, I just suddenly was so tired, I had to take a nap. My brain was worn out.

And of course, the kicker to it all is that it shouldn't be complicated anyway... all I'm trying to do is store high scores and upload them to the web! But there's factors, people. There's factors.
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  Stuffed Turkey 03:56 PM -- Mon August 18, 2003  

Ow, my tummy. We went to an Indian buffet for lunch. I'm just not good at eating. I do it wrong. My fullness sensors don't work right. I don't know. Ow. Indian food is great, and best of all, as we attempt to be vegetarian(ish), all but about 3 things on their buffet fit right into our diet rules. So eat Indian! I never knew veggies could be so yummy. When I was younger, the only thing I ever ate at Indian restaurants was the awesome rice, tandoori chicken, and of course Naan through the nose (I ate it through my mouth typically, but I was trying to indicate eating a large amount of it - I think I failed and just sounded gross. You be the judge!). Turns out all that other stuff is really good.

Working on the online high score system... it's really turning out to be a bit of a nightmare! Right now it just plain won't connect to the server, even though it's the same exact code I just ripped from Stockboy, which works perfectly. So some more tweaking is in order (even though I already hacked stuff all the way down to the very core of the Supreme code!). Off to tweak.
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  Gesturing politely 10:35 PM -- Sat August 16, 2003  

I'm having fun! I'm trying out out a program called StrokeIt. What it does is make it so that when you draw gestures with the right mouse button held down, things happen. For instance, I drew a W on my desktop to make my web browser pop up! W=web, of course. While on the web, a quick gesture left means Back, right means Forward (how often do you use that? Man, I never do). You have to be careful though - C is close, and Q is quit (no real difference), in any program, and it doesn't ask if you're sure! But whee, it's fun.

I'm also listening to the new Dishwalla CD I got today. It arrived along with the 3 games I recently ordered online. So you can guess today was unproductive. Now let's see what I can get done before I fall asleep!
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  Musical madness! 01:38 PM -- Fri August 15, 2003  

Hah, I'm being amused by the stupid little thing I just implemented (well, with lots of help from free code on the internet!). See above? It tells you what song I'm currently playing on Winamp. So now you know. I also implemented a basic bad word filter, because I listen to some dirty stuff (not that the lyrics are gonna show up, but sometimes the titles are dirty too). But if you ever wondered what kind of weird stuff I listen to, it shows up here. If I'm not running WinAmp, it will just keep showing the last song played, so don't be concerned if you see me listening to the same song for 14 hours.

What a complete waste of time that was... but I'm always amused by new ways to interact on the web. Now I can't remember what sort of vital Supreme code I was actually looking for help with when I found that stuff. Oh well!
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  Hmm 07:11 PM -- Thu August 14, 2003  

I want to write often, but there's nothing exciting to say. I have finished Supremizing the Icy Mountain, and have now begun the last original world, the Asylum. It too got a major hub facelift - it now is designed to vaguely resemble what you see in the little movie ("Go Away" or "Welcome"), you know, a spooky old asylum on a hill. That's very boxy and odd.

I'm also working on the online high scores at last. That's a task I've been procrastinating on for months, but now I'm finally doing something about it. There's been a crash bug somewhere in the score system for a bunch of months too - my solution so far has been to implement a config file you can use to turn off high scores completely. Not the most elegant plan. So I'll be fixing that somehow during the process of making the online high score system.

After the Asylum is supremized, I still have like 5 or 10 MORE worlds to supremize, though less drastically - all the other add-ons I made. Let's hope I can squeeze all this in before Sept 1st!
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  Developer's Prerogative 01:14 PM -- Tue August 12, 2003  

I'm still working on Icy Mountain (what can I say, it's the biggest world in the game now! Plus I lost all of yesterday). I came across a situation I couldn't resolve using the existing game features (I wanted to force the player to lose his Mini-Sub that he may or may not have equipped - but just dropping another weapon on him wouldn't work, since the Mini-Sub, like Power Armor, won't switch to other weapons)... so I invented a new special effect to force the player to whichever weapon you want. And that, my friend, is the game developer's prerogative. Something isn't set up to do what you want, you can change it or add more. Hooray! Sorry to you people who are stuck with using the editor as I designed it for my purposes. It's fun to be me though!
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  The Case Of The DVD 07:38 PM -- Mon August 11, 2003  

Hooray!!! I just finished printing up my first ever DVD case for a game. It's Pumpkin Pop. You see, until last week, we didn't offer Pumpkin Pop on CD, only as a download. But with the new site, I have set every game to be available both on CD and as a download. And suddenly, without the slightest warning, someone ordered Pumpkin Pop on CD! I knew the day would come eventually, but I didn't know it would be so soon. So I had to invent a brand new case design for it right away. Frankly, that's a lot of work. But I did it. And since I plan to move all our games to DVD cases as soon as I run out of jewel cases, there was no point in designing a jewel case for it, so tada, it's in a DVD case.

And holy buckets, DVD cases are SO much easier to make!! None of that fancy back panel folding nonsense. Just one big sheet of paper shoved in the front, and a one-fold manual to put inside. So I'm very happy with this. I'm looking forward to all our games being on DVD, except for the fact that I'll have to redo/modify the artwork on all of them to accomplish it. Especially the manuals, I guess they'll have to be pretty much redone. Maybe I should develop a standard Hamumu manual style, sort of like old Atari games did. Something to consider.

Anyway, if you're the person who ordered Pumpkin Pop: that explains why it's shipping out tomorrow instead of today. I just blew this entire day creating the design... there goes Supreme!
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