Brute Force Sudoku Completion

5/8/10

Last Friday I had a very interesting discussion with one of my fellow classmates about the possibility of a brute-force sudoku solver. Assuming that a puzzle might have about 10 preset spaces, we determined that it would take about couple thousand years to search through every single iteration, using modern computers available to consumers. My friend claimed that a brute force solver would not be practical, but having seen others create such things, I attempted to create my own.

Click the icon to download the finished product, which is a PowerPC Mac executable, since I am still running a G5. It was Coded within a span of 6 hours (on and off) as a C++ command line tool, then ported the next day to Objective-C, complete with a halfway decent GUI.

This Makes me very Happy

3/16/10

Somebody created a tribute to Jellyman using MIT's scratch software. A tribute to Jellyman! That's so cool! Somebody likes my game! It has the same basic gameplay, with simpler graphics. Thank you bliff38!

You can play it here: Jellyman Scratch

Firefly/Serenity Origami Part 2: Instructions!

2/22/10

Here are the instructions to the origami model in the previous post as a .pdf. Go make one! Sci-Fi origami is awesome and incredible!

Download

Firefly/Serenity Origami

2/5/10

It's unusual for me to post stuff unrelated to this website or my flash games, but I thought that a Firefly/Serenity origami model would be worthy of an exception. For those of you who haven't the slightest idea what Firefly is, it is the coolest sci-fi television show ever to exist. The model shown above is supposed to be a spacecraft from the aformentioned show.

You can view a gallery featuring this piece of Origami, as well as my crappy photography skills right here.

Lawlolawl

1/17/10

Lawlolawl studios mentioned Perpetual Blaze in his 4th podcast podcast. That made me happy. I'm glad that he also thinks blowing stuff up as a fireball is fun.

You should go to Lawlolawl and check out the amazing flash animations and games, especially Autobox. Everyone loves cardboard boxes with jetpacks!

Another Blend

1/6/10

a cube in the grass

Using the super-fun discombobulator!

Perpetual Blaze Rant Part 3: Aftermath

12/28/09

Perpetual Blaze got frontpaged on Newgrounds. Whoopee.

I am not so grumpy now.

Perpetual Blaze Rant Part 2

12/23/09

Today Perpetual Blaze dropped to a new low. It's score on Kongregate is now LOWER than a game which is just a rehash of the Shootorials, with the same sounds and stuff! BLASFHHFAHFSHFSDHFSDHAFSDHFA! Something IS NOT RIGHT! My game isn't that horrible is it? If it is, please tell me, and tell me WHY. BLAHHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH I'm going insane!

I am grumpy again.

Perpetual Blaze and Grumpy People

12/22/09

Marmphco Productions (AKA me) launched a new game, Perpetual Blaze, last Saturday, and submitted it to the Stride/Kongregate Longest Lasting Game Contest. I thought that it was a really fun game, and it might have a reasonable chance of winning some sort of prize in the contest.

My predictions were off by a long shot.

A couple minutes after I posted it on Kongregate, I checked back to see if people liked it. It was still under judgement, so I couldn't see the rating, but judging from the comments it seemed like my game was doing pretty well. Some examples of said comments: Fun 4/5., so simple yet so well done..5/5 favorited.

After about an hour or so Perpetual Blaze came out of the judgement phase and I checked it's rating, hoping to see it somewhere around 3/5, or at least 2.9/5. I was sorely dissapointed: Perpetual Blaze was rated a ridiculously crappy 2.84/5. To put this rating in perpective, one of my older, extremely horrible games, Saberman, scored a 2.7/5. What the crap!? That score isn't even high enough to get badges, let alone win a contest! Munch munch.

I took a look at the comments for Perpetual Blaze again. A whole bunch of them said I needed better controls. Some examples of the critique: fun but the controls ruins it a bit. Let it be controlled by the mouse instead, Poor control, too frustrating. Too hard to figure out what was going on.. And so, at 11:45 PM, I opened Xcode and went to work on adding the option to use mouse controls. I compiled Perpetual Blaze with the new control scheme, uploaded the new version to Kongregate, and sent whispers to the commenters who had alerted me to the control issues. I went to sleep hoping that this new version would help raise the game's ratings a bit.

Wrong again.

The next day I woke up and once again looked over Perpetual Blaze's gamepage on Kongregate. It's rating had now DROPPED to 2.8/5, but the comments didn't seem to indicate any specific problems with the game. As a matter of fact, the comments were quite nice: not bad at all, switch to mouse control by clicking screen. 4/5, Bumped my rating up. Mouse control makes it more interesting. And, kudos to the developer for taking comments as criticism and not as attacks. Nice whispers and nice changes..

At this point I was quite grumpy (what a cool word), since I had spent a majority of the past couple months creating it. I still wanted to improve the game, so I asked a couple people I knew to play and rate Perpetual Blaze, which didn't really help. Thus (also cool word) I gave up trying to win the contest.

Even though I had given up on the contest, I occasionally checked Perpetual Blaze's Kongregate page. At about 10 PM on Monday, after the contest had been closed to further submissions, I noticed that Perpetual Blaze had 2 new comments. This is what was stated:

This game is pretty good, I'm surprised it hasn't rated higher (perhaps addition of mouse control will help). I particularly like the graphical style, good job :) -squidsquid

Graphical style is really cool. The rating on this makes me distrust about every rating on the site, really. Theres just no way you can justify this at a 2.8 with some of the games up at 3.0+ -damijin

I thought that was kind of cool, since squidsquid (the creator of that cool squidsquid website), and damijin (a moderator) both entered games to the contest themselves. This lifted me out of my grumpy mood. I am happy now. Wow, what a crappy conclusion to a long post. I guess I'm to lazy to write anything better.

1,000,000!

11/29/09

Jellyman has reached over 1,000,000 plays! One million! 1,030,803 plays to be exact. Too bad I don't get some sort of trophy or award. That would be freakin amazing. At least now I'm a member of the uber-cool 1 Million Players Club, and I get a fancy membership card. By now my horrible writing has probably bored you to the extent that you are no longer reading this post, so I'm going to add in a couple of meaningless sentences to fill in the extra space. Rusty likes lemons. He ate twelve in a row. There will be no more filler sentences, I promise.

You can view Jellyman's mochibot stats at https://www.mochibot.com/shared/?key=f87e3de1a63e6ffcef02993c97f1ab38.

Funny

11/8/09

The video speaks for itself.

EDIT: Took out the video because it was screwing up all of my awesome valid xhtml... and it would not want to be seen.

Jellyman Finally Completed!

10/2/09

After more than a year of procrastination, I have finally finished Jellyman and am now releasing it with help from Ninjakiwi, who is sponsoring Jellyman. Yeah! I wouldn't have been able to get Jellyman sponsored if it weren't for the fine folks over at Flashgamelicense.

You can play Jellyman on NinjKiwi now!

My stuff in Softpedia?

10/2/09

Today I got really bored, so I decided to check my Marmphco email account. I had forgotten about it because no one really emails me at that address, so I only check it once every couple months to be honest.

It just so happens that my inbox contained two emails, both from Softpedia, both dated September 26, 2009. They said that they added some of my Cocoa/Mac application stuff to Softpedia. I think it's kind of cool that they found my site and put my software on Softpedia, considering the (in my opinion) dismal quality of my programs. Another interesting part of the emails:

To assure our visitors that Grade Calculator is clean, we have granted it with the "100% CLEAN" Softpedia award. To let your users know about this certification, you may display this award on your website, on software boxes or inside your product.

Apparently my software doesn't contain malicious code either... you can find them here, or in my Stuff Section.

FTP FTW!

9/17/09

I've just discovered how to use FTP to upload my html files directly to the server hosting my pages! It makes updating my site a whole lot easier, which means that I'll be posting more trivial things like this on the blog. I no longer have to go through a horrifically slow webpage uploader. Another great thing that I discovered was Coda, which is a really wonderful web developement IDE. These two things combined really streamline web development. :)

More Blender Things

9/13/09

It's been about two months since I've posted anything, mostly because school started. That's not really much of a problem though, since I doubt that anyone other than myself reads this garbage.

Anyway, Here are a couple more renders I cooked up in Blender. Click them for higher resolution.

Plates

MasterLock

Mac Tablet

7/2/09

Tablet Mockup

With all of the stupid rumors and mockups flying around teh internets ~~(misspelling intended)~~ about an upcoming Apple tablet device, I decided to make my own. Created using Blender and Photoshop.

Click here for higher resolution.