GameLog 200 & 201

Was going to do a reflection piece fo rthe 200th GameLog, but it'll have to wait for the holidays, totally snowed under at the moment.

Grepolis (40h) - VRBones, rank 159, 5 cities. Guesstimate at the time as it keeps sneaking a 1/2 hr or hour off me a couple of times a day. Farming is still painful, but the alliance certainly makes it play out longer.

Terraria (15h) - Steam says 35h, but I've left a server up and I think it must have tracked that (or Cam has been sneaking in more than I thought)

League of Legends (5h) - little filler time between the 40 minute grepo farming runs. Record for comp stomp now 15:57

Nothing else to report. Not even a facebook game. Feeling very edgy to code something, so I think oveer these hols in a couple of weeks I might start on Notorious or finish up Factor Friends

GameLog 198 & 199

Grepolis 2 (30h) - Maturing into mid-game. Alliance banter and teammanship is keeping me in it.

Mount & Blade: Fire & Sword (24h) - Present from Greig for my birthday. Plays a little more randomly as one stray bullet can kill you instantly. More like a lottery whether you get through a battle unscathed. Bit more work on the quests and storyline, but it still has a number of times when you know what you want to do, but don't know how to tell the game how to do it. Played a number of characters, but I don't seem to be able to get in on one of the sides. They want me to be more noted, although it feels like I've been playing more than native mode.

League of Legends (8h) - vs AI games go less than 30 mins now; just neatly under a 40 mins grepo farming pass.

Universe Sandbox (2h) - Another steam game for my birthday. Pretty impressive real time gravity manipulation. Might be a good one for Cam, or school science.

GameLog 196 & 197

2 weeks of holidays. Far too many games to catch up on.

Grepolis 2 (65h) - OCD heaven. click, click ... click. New farming system is worse than farmville, but the alliance is worth the hassle.

Portal 2 (12h) - Pretty good single player, but puzzles and a single path means either the story or the puzzles suffer. It's the puzzles.
Multiplaye looks pretty good so far, and hints at a long term release of puzzles (hopefully with a level builder)

League of Legends (10h) - vs AI games go less than 30 mins now; just neatly under a 40 mins grepo farming pass.

Starcraft 2 (4h) - Cam has been playing lots of starcraft, and has recently found 2v2 and 4v4 maps. Played a couple myself and can handle 4v4 mediums vs hards. nice way to ease into a balanced competitive environment. Cam spends most of his time looking at what the other AI's are building though.

Hoard (2h) - LANs a bit.

Warhammer 40K Dawn of War (2h) - Some last stand shenanigans

Dragon Age Legends (1h) - Facebook game from Soren Johnson.

GameLog 189 - 195

Wow, 6 weeks since a GameLog.

Shogun: total war 2 (95h) - Played througha couple of campaigns to get the feel of it, and have just about finished a legendary campaign for the Shimazu. I'm afraid that the Tokugawa are only a couple of turns away from winning though. Plays really well, and feels like a well polished version of the original.

Grepolis 2 (15h) - High Notes alerted me to a new version of Grepolis, but I missed the start due to teaching. I'm 4 days behind, but keeping pce with the leaders. Currently 400th on server. Virus seems fresh and active, so I think that'll make the game stay in rotation for a while.

League of Legends (10h) - Off and on again relationship with LoL. Pretty much only play with brothers or at LANs now. Versus AI has been a nice change and I'm surprised they are offering IP for it.

Hoard (9h) - Been following this for the 360, and it's finally made a debut on steam. A little bit buggy, but an excellent LAN game.

Dragon Age Legends (3h) - Facebook game from Soren Johnson. Plays Ok, but still is a little light on for me to take it seriously.

Minecraft (3h) - Little bit of LAN filler. New versions are coming out a lot more regularly now, so it's good that it's getting more assets and ideas. Feels more and more like Dwarf Fortress ...


Feels like I'm missing a few, but that'll do for now ...

Factor Friends v0.2

Ok, main look and feel all done. If you select any of the cards in your hand it is highlighted in gold, and all possible places where you can put the card on the board are also highlighted. The check to see if one is a factor or not (one of the key parts of the card-based game for year8 maths) is probably going to be the shortest function in the whole program.

Next up, moving the selection to the board if it's a valid choice, then swap the players. All the back end is done for player hand rotation, all I need to do is flip a turn counter and refresh the hand area.

Might even be able to get a quick end-game check in there and have a fully functioning game for next revision (albeit with pre-determined cards).

Factor Friends v0.1

After a couple of days of solid game playing, I feel back to normal. The last couple of weeks have been so crazy marking and preparing for classes that I've hardly played a thing (I guess I should get back into GameLogs too).

I woke up this morning with a hankering to code. Might have been some of the TopCoder vids I found on youTube, or just something in my mind wanting to relax in a different way. Anyways, I've found myself happily coding away for the past 3 hours (with a splash of Grepolis).

One of the students at school is working on developing Factor Friends for the iPhone (or Mac at least), but I thought I'd give it a go too using some stock VB stuff. The aim would be how much of the game I can get done in a day.

Well, so far so good. I have the basic game board laid out using buttons and another set of buttons for the player's hand. The pic to the left shows some test data overlaid onto the buttons (showing the coordinate system used for the underlying array) as well as a sample starting hand.

There are 6 arrays so far that store the data for the game: BoardValue, BoardValueOwner, HandValue and HandStatus for each player. With these in place and the refresh subroutines built, I can now simply call RefreshBoard or RefreshHand to display whatever the game logic dictates.

Biggest hurdle so far has been attempting to use pointers. I wanted to store a similar sized array of pointers to the buttons so that I could refactor the refresh code into a simple loop rather than having many repeated lines of code for each array position matching up to the correct button. Wasn't a big deal at the start, but once there started to be 7 or so lines per button, the code looked pretty unmaintainable. Searched around for a bit, but nothing seemed to allow me to reference the buttons using a stored pointer or the like. I eventually came up with a new subroutine that accepts a button, and the current staus and value to set it to. Worked a treat and much neater.

With the board in place, the next thing to do is to get the player interaction working.

Looks like I can bind multiple buttons actions to the dame subroutine, and I can also reference the sender to the event handler as the button clicked. That will make the hand and board UI pretty easy.

I'm also hoping to have the clicked card eventually track to the clicked board position (if legitimate, need to get a validation routine working too), then disappear from the player's "hand". Should be pretty easy using a timer and some slide-in, slide-out animations. Not sure what happens to the button when it's in transition though, can I lock the whole UI down until the animation is finished?

GameLog 187 & 188

Champions online (10h) - Just gone F2P in time for the Saturday LAN. Plays a lot like City of Heroes, and seems to have enough to play without bouncing off the paywall.

Football Manager 2011 (7h) - Currently ~10th in Conference Premier with a fairly good run under our belt. Team is confident, but a mid-table or slight chance at playoffs could be all that's achievable this season.

Shogun: total war 2 (2h) - Played through the 5Gb(!) demo

League of Legends (1h) - LAN starter

GameLog 185 & 186

Football Manager 2011 (30h) - Steam reckon's 70 hours this fortnight, but I know there was times I left FM11 going while I did other things. I'd even had it going in the background as Cam played Civ, so I'm thumbing about 30 hours of actual play time.

Finished Conference South in 2nd and managed to claim the promotion spot. Now with 18 new signings we're settling into a mid-table position. Hopefully there's some extra spark to take the team further, but even a year in conference won't be too bad as div2 looks a big step up indeed.

Dungeon Demo (2h) - Played the demo to see how it compared to notorious. Couple of interesting takeaways:
- They have an avatar in the game constantly
- area is controlled instead of assuming it is yours
- Heroes are encouraged to take treasure to mak them happy, then you bleed them of happiness to power spells. A somewhat convoluted way of converting money into mana.
- Instead of blocking off dungeons ala TD, dungeon structure is more about enticing the heroes further in.

Rift (2h) - New MMO I'm betatesting.

Vintage display ensures Woking victory

Woking 2 - 1 Dover Athletic (Blue Square Bet South Playoff Final)

Woking taught Dover Athletic a lesson at Kingfield Stadium this afternoon.

Striker Leighton McGivern gave Woking the lead with a real poacher's effort in the 21st minute. An error from Dover's Tom Wynter allowed centre-back Adam Doyle to score a good header from just inside the six-yard box. Striker Adam Birchall had a chance to score from the penalty spot for The Whites on the 38 minute mark but missed his spot-kick.

He was able to make amends for his miss however by scoring an accurate finish after 77 minutes.

Talented manager Veeyar Bones has been at Woking for 7 months, having joined them in October 2010.

Attendance: 3,705

Bones praised by Woking faithful
Fans of Woking were justly proud after the team gained promotion from the Blue Square Bet South.

Fans and pundits alike were unanimous that the person responsible for the team's success was Veeyar Bones.

One fan commented that with Bones at the helm he felt that anything was possible.

Starting unemployed, I joined Woking at about October with the promotion candidates languishing down in 15th. Cleaned up the Back-room staff and brought in one or 2 players to turn the season around, with a comfortable 2nd in the league and an easy 5-2, 2-1 finals campaign to get the promotion. Now to clean house with the players to get the finances back on track.

Teaching week 2 & 3

It seems like Friday of week A has enough spares that I can set time aside for reflection, so a bi-weekly summary might be enough until I can get everything else under control. Hopefully this will be a couple of updates a week once I settle on a format I'm comfortable with.

With week 3 done, most classes are now firmly into the topic for the first term. I've had to take a reality check with most of the subjects, as I'm simply unable to implement all the changes I wanted this year. For some classes I might have another opportunity to get stuff ready by 2nd semester, but for now I'm a little disappointed that I have to 'lean' on textbooks to get through.

The reason for the cutback is pretty simple. Time. My initial intent was to stay back after school and prepare everything for the next day before heading home. I seem to work well in a work environment, even if it means working until a problem is complete rather than working up to a certain time. When I used to work from home as a contract programmer I found it hard to get going (too many games?), but once I'm in the zone late at night, I'd work into the wee hours of the morning. With a rigorous timetable, the late nights will need to go...

Time. The first couple of weeks were pretty crazy with a lot of extra time devoted to getting changes to the work program in place, but I was expecting it would settle down by, say, about now. It doesn't look like it's happening though. Most nights I'm still here after 6pm just covering the basics for the next day or responding to issues or emails arising from the day. I need to bail by then so that I still get to have Dinner with the kids, but even that's been missed more often than not. I'm left with an option I wanted to avoid, take work home. Recently it's also been exacerbated by meetings for school council and youth ministry cutting short the preparation time at the school. There's more meetings on the horizon too, so it's only going to get worse.

All the new teachers to the school gathered on Monday to discuss any issues, and although there were a dozen new teachers to the school, only 2 of us were first year teachers. The prognosis about the workload seemed to be confirmed: Yep, that's natural when you're starting off. You will get better at it, but it might take a couple of years. Probably 5. Holidays also came under the firing line and it was revealed from long-time teachers that only the Christmas holidays allowed you to actually relax. The other times you're still in 'teacher mode'.

Getting used to this 'teacher mode'. Always a teacher. Always...