Why spammers need to pay more attention

I get a fair amount of spam. I've learned to try and look at it as lots of free joke-of-the-day emails. It never ceases to amaze me what sort of crap people will try and hock; sometimes you get really lucky and something truly ridiculous comes through... Today, for example, I received the following at 5:28 AM:

Hi! I am bored this evening. I am 25 y.o. girl that would like to chat with you. Email me at ewjs@anymailonline.info only. Hope you like my pictures.

...the from line read: "Harvey Wyatt"

CuteGod Prototype Release

The truth is, I'm probably too busy to be working on prototypes of nifty games, but don't worry: I haven't let that stop me!

I've been able to add a number of features to the CuteGod prototype:

• Recognition of ground patterns
• Houses (automatically generated when patterns are completed)
• A nifty "pattern holder sidebar-thing"
• Sounds, which I think really spiffied the whole thing up
• Some flashy sparkling stars for effect (and more importantly, a framework for future special effects)

Here's a quick screen shot:

And, happy days for you no doubt, here's a link to download the prototype.

If you want to give it a try you'll need Microsoft's .NET Framework 2.0, XNA Framework 1.0, and DirectX 9.0c.

If you do give it a try, I'd appreciate it if you can let me know if it worked or not (if not, please email me a copy of the log.txt file in the directory you installed the prototype in -- in fact, even if it does run it would be great to see the log file, so I can get a sense of what sort of machines it's working on).

Controls are very simple: click to pickup the highlighted block when your "hand" is empty, click to drop a block you're holding on top of the highlighted block, right-click and drag to pan the map around (be careful with this -- it's not my fault if you pan yourself into oblivion!).

The list of things that aren't done in this prototype goes on for about a mile, so don't expect any miracles or anything. That said, I do think it's already pretty fun to play around with.

Not dead, just still crazy busy

So, I'm still insanely busy, so the blog continues to suffer, but I'm determined not to let it fall completely off my radar. Here's a rundown of the employment changes since my last entry:

Internship with UW
Signed up and started today. Officially I'm a temporary employee, not an intern, but this is entirely good news as it turned into a freebie per-hour pay-raise for me. There's a lot of interesting work to be done here, and huge portions of it will ultimately be open-source, which is a nice ethical upshot.

Freelance Web Development
I'm still doing work for the small Utah company, at a fairly consistent pace.

The work from my past internship is also, only just now, picking up -- I'm not sure exactly what held things up, but I'm not really complaining.

.Net Developer
I've started in on this job, but I have to admit I'm seriously on the fence about it. All my issues and thoughts around this are at least one blog on their own, so I won't get into them now. Suffice to say, I'm not sure how long-lived the job will be, especially with so much other exciting work coming my way.

Squabs
I'm seriously impressed by the convenience of developing with XNA. XNA and Windows Forms (once they started playing well together) made building a basic level editor much easier than the Java alternative seemed like it was going to be.

Twitch
As much fun as I was having with Twitch, I've decided to table it for now so I can focus on Squabs a bit more in the little free development time I have. I'd still like to get a couple of screenshots on line at somepoint though, even if only for posterity.

Cute God
Something new (like I have time)! I read Lost Garden pretty regularly, and every once and a while the author posts some free artwork and suggests a game to design with it. The most recent of these "prototyping challenges" was CuteGod, which had such an interesting and straightforward concept behind it, I couldn't resist giving it a try.

So, after a few hours of coding, here's a screenshot of the 2D presentation of the playing area:


There seems to be a lot of discussion about an orthogonal 2D display not really being very intuitive, so I'll probably try implementing full-3D when I get a chance.