Tile-Based Multiplayer Game

A tile-based multiplayer game I worked on for a little while.

Secret Project

I am currently working on a secret project. It involves things I've put off learning for a long time, and it's very challenging. I've found that by not telling people what it is or giving sneak peaks, I'm far more motivated to keep working on it to make it better. Part of that may be that no one will ever care about it as much as I do, given that it's my project. I've also read that talking about doing something great provides enough of a positive feeling that it can actually keep you from doing the great thing.

It's a difficult project for me, at times hair-pulling, but it's really fun. It's always such a great feeling when I finally figure something out. I feel like I'm dusting off some mental muscles I've perhaps had in the closet for a while. I feel like it's really good to struggle mentally from time to time.

I would love to see what types of projects other people work on in their free time, not necessarily just programming projects. What challenges you? What do you work on when you find yourself needing something to work on, or find your job not fulfilling your need to use your skills? If you happen to come across this blog post it'd be awesome if you told me about a personal project of yours.

Maybe when I get a little further or feel like it's to a point where I feel proud of it I'll put up some screen shots on here. Maybe.

JavaScript Pong

It has been a while since I posted on here! But that sure doesn't mean I've run out of projects, worry not. I'm actually working on a couple right now. Until those are ready for public mockery, here's a couple to keep the blog alive:

JavaScript Pong
I felt like brushing up on my JavaScript, so I thought I'd take on a simple challenge. Pong. How much simpler can you get? This is a one-keyboard two-player browser-based (super-hyphenated) version of pong. I actually tried to keep the quality on this one up, i.e. no paddles overlapping the border, no random crashing, and cross-browser compatibility.

Single Player Pong
That version of two player pong is only good if you have two people at the keyboard (or if you really want to test your reflexes by using both hands). So I made this version, for a more independent, albeit slightly lonelier, version of the same experience.

ScreenKeeper

I've never liked the process of taking a screenshot on a Windows machine. My method used to be pressing the print screen button, opening paint, pasting into paint, save the image somewhere, and close paint. It wasn't quick, and you couldn't do it in a situation where you couldn't change what program you're in.

So I thought I'd write a program that made it easier.

Ugly, right? Honestly, the window only exists so the program isn't just a task bar icon. Although it can be.

Basically what the program does is automatically save a screenshot png image into a folder every time the print screen button is pressed. That's it. Just press the print screen button on your keyboard and the image is saved. So if you're watching a full screen movie, playing a game that you can't lose focus on, or just need several screenshots in a short amount of time, it's perfect!

I'm sure there's hundreds of programs just like this out there, and this one certainly has room for improvement. But hey, for now, it serves me well.

Hungry Dots

With this project, I wanted to try a little AI. I'm not sure if I really ended up doing that to any significant effect, but the dots sure are entertaining to watch.

Basically, it's just a bunch of little circles that go around trying to keep themselves full by eating little green dots. If they are full long enough, they will reproduce, creating more dots that have similar characteristics to themselves. If they go too long without getting any green dots, they will die.

Over many generations of dots, their characteristics can change more and more. Sometimes they become very small and fast. Usually they become huge circles. This is especially entertaining because eventually they get so big, when the food happens to randomly appear in a corner, many of them sit in the corner trying to get to it, but are unable to because they are so large.

When I used to work on this while I was living in the dorms at college, people would gather around when they saw it on my screen. They would usually ask "What is that? What are they doing?" and would then start cheering for the dots to live and get bummed when the one they were watching would die. Even in writing this blog post I've had a couple people watch and ask questions, haha.

I've thought about adding more functionality to this little project, like the ability to control the speed of the simulation, and many of the attributes of the elements themselves (starting stats, food reproduction rate, dot reproduction rate, max number of food at once, max number of dots at once, food size, dot fertility, how different offspring can be from their parents...). I think it would be interesting to see what people could make the dots do.

Here's a link where you can see the dots for yourself: http://bradsproject.com/dots/
Try not to stare too long!

Chat Projects

bpChat
One of the features of bradsproject (mentioned in my previous post) was a simple little chat room. It was originally just one of the dozens of features I wanted to make just to see if I could, but people started to like it. It started to get use regularly. So I started spending more time on it, and made the code and functionality better and better.
I then decided to try and enter the world of Android development by creating an Android app that could interact with the bradsproject chat room.
bpChat Android App

Now, of course mostly just a couple of friends of mine and I use this, but it's still a fun toy.

Eventually, after the death of bradsproject, I separated the code out into its own entity. Now it has a separate online presence.
bpChat



bpIM
After the code from the chat room had been improved a great deal, I started looking into more convenient ways for the members of bradsproject to interact. I started working on an instant messaging bar, similar to what Facebook used to have. I eventually had a very nice chat bar on every page of the website. It worked well, it worked fast, and it was fun to use. I worked very hard on it, and it was my proudest feature of bradsproject.
Unfortunately I don't still have a screenshot of this in action. Some of my screen shots disappeared when the hosting company I used to use had the machine I was on fail.

An important part of this (as well as all of bradsproject) is that I very stubbornly refused to use any libraries or frameworks. I insisted on building everything from scratch. It didn't seem as fun to hobble a few pieces together into a working system that I didn't know much about. By building it myself, I knew how each and every part of the system worked. It's not the fastest way to do something, but I learned a lot more doing it that way, and the system feels more like its mine.

Stranger Chat
This was mainly just done out of curiosity. It's just a chat room you can use without registering or logging in to anything. You are assigned an ID when you go to the web page, and you chat as that. It's a little buggy, but it's produced some entertaining results from time to time.

In my next post I'll probably be talking about some of my smaller projects. Some are just proof-of-concept, and some are simply entertaining to watch. Now I'm just hoping I can locate them all...

Let's do this.

All right.
I love projects. They're one of my favorite things to do. School and work have really taken me away from them lately, but I want to get back to them.
So, the purpose of this is to get back into that, and to revitalize the ones I've already started.
To begin with, some of my old (edit: OLD) projects, recapped:

Solidude: Day 1 - Flash Animation (completed December 24, 2006)
My foray into learning flash, and first Newgrounds submission.
I spent a long time on this sucker! Surprising given its quality, but still.
I really wish I'd continued with this, I had the next few episodes planned out in my head, and about 70% of Day 2 was actually made. But eventually school took over.

The Abyss - Flash Game (completed January 27, 2007)
After completing Solitude: Day 1, I wanted to play with ActionScript a little. So, I made this quite pointless flash... "game". Don't expect to enjoy it. It has no purpose.

Gamer Time Radio - Podcast (April 20, 2007 - October 31, 2007)
Ah, Gamer Time Radio. This was fun to make. A couple of friends and I would get together and record talking about gaming news, and what we'd been playing lately. Had some guests, an interview, a contest, website, forums, voice mail, fun stuff. Took a lot of work, it would take me about 5 hours to edit a 30 minute show, but it was awesome every time I released the episode. I couldn't wait for people to listen to it. Lasted about 6 months, and eventually people didn't enjoy recording anymore. So, I figured it wasn't worth it if we weren't having fun.

bradsproject - Social Network (November 2007 - November 2010)
This has been my largest, most complex project ever. I started with no knowledge of web programming or technologies (besides a little HTML and CSS), and ended up learning PHP, MySQL, JavaScript, AJAX, XML, Apache, Linux server management, long polling AJAX (which I've seen called Comet), database management, and on, and on, and ON... So many new things to learn! I got to make TONS of features! Login/registration system, forums, profiles, blogs, messaging system, photo uploading, JavaScript-based game, chat room, IM system, search system... I can not tell you how much I learned from this. I also met a lot of cool people, and made some new friends. It also got me my first college job.

Well, that's all I'll cover for now. I'll bring up some smaller projects in future posts, and maybe talk about some that I've thought of starting.
I like this.