I was going through a tutorial on PlayBASIC, making fun little programs to practice what I was learning, when one caught my attention. It was a simple program that printed out a bunch of random ASCII characters in random colors. From there, it just kept getting bigger and bigger…
So I’m proud to announce and release my first-ever fully coded indie game!
I’ve been developing Nice Outside with Multimedia Fusion. As much as I like some features of the interface, I just don’t think it’s going to cut it in the long run, especially when I want to move on with different games. So I decided to attempt a migration of Nice Outside to an actual programming language for a smaller, cleaner, faster, and, in some cases, much more manageable game. I can already see Nice Outside becoming unwieldy in size, and I’m not even into the first “boss” yet.
The languages I’m looking at are PlayBasic and C#. Since my programming experience is fairly minimal, I will probably devote more time to trying PB, but C# remains an intriguing option. I don’t know much about it or its benefits, but I do know that I would be able to take advantage of a much bigger community. After preliminary searches for resources, it seems most C# tutorials blow through 2D development in favor of reaching 3D stuff, which I’m not interested in right now, so I don’t know. Any opinions would be greatly appreciated.
If I have time and feel the necessity, I might wrap up Nice Outside’s first world in MMF just to have it available for whatever reason. Actually, I’d really like to do that, but my time is always limited due to work, and most of my weeknights will be spent exploring PB (and C#).
All right. Since I haven’t written any poetry since early spring and I have nothing else to blog about, I’m going to use this space mostly to follow the development of the video game I’m currently working on. To make a long story short, I was born the same year the Nintendo Entertainment System hit American shores. My father bought the NES for himself, my brother, and me on release (as well as the SNES when its time came–we were the first on the block to have both systems). You hear stories of children being raised by wolves. I was raised by the blue bomber and Samus Aran, among others of course. Video games, and Nintendo games in particular, shaped me as much as anything else. But I didn’t want to simply play; I wanted to create.
Right???
Every four years, Punxsutawney Phil grants us an extra day of February to honor the scientific method pioneered by Vasco da Gama and DaimlerChrysler. To celebrate this gift, the Whiteman brothers create 29 short films, one per day, during our elongated month. It’s a long-standing tradition established about six weeks ago or something by the boys. The shorts can be followed at their website along with their other films (feature length and shorter), and the brothers’ writings, both fiction and poetry, can be perused there as well. I recommend giving that link a little click.
The nighttime cityscape
That soaks the sun up
Is flushed in cascading light
The stars are gone the moon is gone
The old industrial warehouses
Are now the ashen pearls
Of women with such small dogs
Ah, the weeks pass
In the morning I am all doves
This morning
A juniper rattles
Its thrushlike thicket
Speak unto me
That my heart will be unbent
I once was young
Yet thrice daily I am of lesser youth
The sun appears, doth rise, then sets
And homes along the boulevard
Draw on brittle morning air
I spy them as I ride into the city
Their windows are thick
With the heat of dreamers’ dew
Poems of some great stature,
built by those largely before my time
(they are long dead and forgotten)
have created me.
Was it Abraham or the Son?
Expatriate of that ground,
grounded somewhere else,
I search through remnants of words that
have been translated from texts lost or
battered beyond readability.
My fathers: innumerable, unnamable;
My mothers: they were barely known.
Or was it Abel’s injured brother?
The buildings lit for night
seem to me playthings from a distance,
but amid the city—perpetual wet evenings
pelting runny colors into one another—
it becomes difficult to travel the misty streets,
to make out the names of even the most familiar places.
A man wrapped in several blankets
A blustery morning, coat collars pulled high
Above him the archway of the library
Another man, withered, in the second story window
Below, the library and a man nestled in trash
The library books; pages too cold to touch
Come in unto me,
and make a nation of you
Come in unto me, I hear,
Come in unto me
But for my weary future,
clipped to a generation of dusts,
I cannot tread the sea
Not now, not yet
Oh me of little gall
In the evenings, I fade.
The evenings do not belong to me.
I fade into them; they take me up.
I am another person.
That I could run my fingers through
the hair of nameless women who
will never love me I
would falter,
save for my spirit
…or maybe…
But before the break of sun,
and after those countless lost hours,
there is a fatigue, more or less,
and I am beckoned again to move