Epicer News

Now, you're probably thinking, what could be more epic than me getting Flash CS4 as a Christmas present? Well, here it is. My Halloween pumpkin!


Not epic enough for you? Well how about this? I got Flash CS4 now! After my insane first quarter at school, it was sorta moved up to be an early Christmas present. So I have the software now, and let me say, it is AWESOME! Of course, I haven't really tried anything new, except Bitmap Cacheing, which works great. The large levels I've been working with scroll without lagging at 30 FPS! I can't wait to try out some more stuff.

Besides, it's great to have software that doesn't crash half the time you try to start it up.

Epic News

Wow. Two posts in October. That's IT? And only one of them actually contained something important. Man, this is staring to look like Nyubis' blog. :-D

So, yesterday was Halloween. As usual, we bought loads of candy. Which would have been good like, 7 years ago, when there were a lot of little kids in my neighborhood. Unfortunately, there aren't. We filled half of a cardboard box with candy, and by the end of the night, it barely looked like Halloween had passed. So now we have a big box of candy sitting around that has to be eaten. Poor me.

No, but seriously, I will get sick of candy within the next two weeks.

Next, remember the "6 Tests in 2 Days???" post? (I certainly do) Well, I just had 5 tests in two days on Thursday and Friday. So I guess some things never change.

So you're probably thinking: "Was that the epic news? That wasn't that epic." No, it wasn't. I'm not sure why I titled the post that and then talked about my lack of posting and Halloween. And now you're thinking: "There is no epic news, right? This was all just a scam to get me to read this post." And yet, you're still reading this, hoping that I will say something epic, just so that you feel like you did something useful in your time. Well, if you haven't given up yet, here's the news.

I have FLASH CS4!! Well, officially it's a Christmas present, so I can't use it until then, but still, it's pretty awesome to know that in 53 more days, I won't have to put up with annoying Flash 5 anymore. I consider that pretty epic, anyway.

Also: I've begun a redesign of my site. Don't expect anything that soon (it'll probably take a while, knowing how busy I am), but I am working on incorporating the new logo into it.

End of Summer

I've been dreading the idea of making this post, but I think I will anyway.

Today's my last day of summer, and school begins tomorrow (even though I get Wednesday and Thursday off). Looking back on it, I think I had a pretty good summer. Here are some of the things I hoped to do, and what became of them.

1. Get 120 Stars in Super Mario 64

Done! Took me forever, though. My last two stars were in the clock level. If you've never heard of it, watch this vid: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hg-YIIk5t0k . It's not me, but that was pretty much how it went. I kept almost falling, and I almost ran out of coins at the end. I actually got the 100-coin star while I was falling, so I had to keep climbing back up and trying to land on it.

Anyway, in return for finishing the game, you get to meet Yoshi. He gives you 100 lives, a wing cap to use (only outside of the castle), and then jumps off the castle (suicide, sortof). That's it. No new challenges, no Luigi, nothing. Just 100 lives to replay the whole game. Oh, and you get to race a fatter penguin in Cool, Cool Mountain. I was expecting more, honestly. Oh well.

2. Design 3 Web Sites

Done! Mostly. It was actually quite an interesting time designing these. One actually uses a database to store different items of jewelry, so I spend time learning how to do that. Only one is online so far, and the other two will be online soon. If you're interested, here are the links:
italiancornerrestaurant.com
hairnailgallery.com
dgbeaddesigns.com

Italian Corner was a redesign, and it's the only one up. Hair and Nail Gallery is actually next door to the Italian Corner, and D.G. Bead Designs is run out of HNG. So they were all referrals.

I also did maintenence on another site:
modskinlabs.com

I mainly just did the press page and the home page. I didn't design the whole site, but I did make some important changes for them.

3. Make a Flash Game

Done! I guess I wasn't thinking I would make a whole game, just learn how to, and make an engine for it. And I would say that came out good. My engine is pretty good, and can do a bunch of things. And since I'm in a good mood today, I'll update it. Here is my latest engine:

http://andrewanimation.biz/games/flash/engine5.html

New stuff includes walljumping, improved platform code, new spring code, and an air meter for underwater.

4. Make a Few More Videos

Not done! I don't know where the time went this summer, but I just never got around to doing this. I have a few videos I wanted to make, but I guess I was just too busy with my websites and stuff.

All in all, awesome summer.

First Flash?

Well, not really. For starters, I didn't write the code or anything. And, well...... it doesn't really work.

http://andrewanimation.biz/old/engine2.swf
if you want it

So I'm waiting for a response back on the forum, to see what I did differently. Cuz it worked fine for Nyubis.

The Next Big Thing

For those of you wondering what my next big project is, this post should explain it.
For those of you wondering why I think you care, why are you reading this? Why don't you just go back to where you came from ;-)

Anyway so there's this game I own called Mancala. It's a puzzle game that involves moving little marbles from cup to cup based on the number of marbles in the cup (don't worry, I'll put more rules in the game than that). It's actually quite an interesting game, and I'm worried that you won't really get to experience it with what I'm doing, because of its display.

This is by no means something I came up with out of my head like Maze Adventure. In fact, some historians believe that this is the world's oldest game. How bout that? So I can't take complete credit. I owe cavemen something. This game really is "so easy a caveman could do it"! (If you've ever seen Geico commercials, you know what this is about. If not, I feel sorry for you.)

There's actually an interesting story behind why I'm doing this. See, I got this game about two years ago. Last summer, my dad, who is a database designer (these computer smarts run in the family) programmed it. At the same time, I tried to program it, but I didn't know enough about Javascript at the time. Now my dad's helping me program this game, and this is kindof our way of father-son bonding. Most of the time this involves playing catch in the backyard or something like that, but I guess everyone has their own method.

See, Maze Adventure taught me a lot about the code, stuff like loops, variabes, math stuff, and even some stuff that I didn't even know Javascript could do. Now I have the knowledge to make the game, and make it work right. It actually took me three hours on the train ride home last Thursday (when I went to New York) to get the basic gameplay working. Now I'm spending hours rewriting that code to work in some of the other little rules in the game.

Anyway so the point is that I'm making a small game that shouldn't take me more than a week to do. I'm not going to guess on a release date yet, since I always underestimate, but it shouldn't take too long.

And according to my Flash 5 lessons, I'm more than 11 hours away from the "Advanced" chapter, which is 6 hours long. This is gonna take me a while........