Keeping busy going forward

Pinky in space

I have been nostalgic for good side scrolling games of the past lately. I don’t know what it is, I’ve just always loved them. It makes me sad that there aren’t very many good ones these days. Seems like everyone’s all into the 3D worlds, but not me. 2D all the way! So I thought I’d try to make my own and I started playing around with making one today:

This is more of a work flow test to see how to get it going, and it’s really quite simple. It uses Power Game Factory which is pretty sweet. It basically lets you design & build sidescrolling games without any code, which is awesome. From the forums it looks like people are mostly making sort of typical teenage boy type games but I think it has a lot of potential and it’s pretty fun. I would sort of like to try making a bunch of different levels in a bunch of different styles. Some clay. Some paper. Some plush. Sort of like my own little big planet, but more customized. It would be nice to be able to work with someone on the level design though. I’m afraid of my game just being terribly boring to play. Of course this is yet another one of a bunch of other projects competing for my free time right now.

I’m taking a break on the comics for a while. It’s hard to keep up once you get behind the days just start to snowball. It also just takes a lot out of me to keep it up for more than a month at a time I think. And there’s too much on my list of things to try on my list.

Arduino Fun

Getting back into playing with my arduino stuff. I have this grand idea to make a networked ouiji board so I can communicate with the ghosts of my past via the internet. I got some stepper motors and got them to work for the most part. And I have a general idea of how to physically build the thing, I’m just a little unsure about getting the right gears set up. It would be nice to have some help with this project too. Also finally sewing my LilyPad arduino into something. Just a basic little plush monster to see how it would work. I feel like this stuff is finally starting to click a bit more which is good since I think I’m going to be doing a workshop in December…

Higher Ed.

And the big project of the season is going to be applying for grad schools. I kept going back and forth about it, but I figure I should just go ahead and apply so I can at least stop thinking about it all the time. I have lots of thoughts on the whole grad school thing, but I’ll save that for a separate post.

I generally just feel like I have to keep my brain learning, because I think it just starts to go crazy with boredom otherwise. I’ve discovered audiobooks, podcasts, and iTunes U have been exteremely helpful in keeping me sane lately.

Or maybe it all just distracts me enough to pacify me.