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

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

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.

More Blender

5/31/09

I made more models in blender. You can see them in full resolution here and here.

Blender and Xcode

4/23/09

I've been messing around with Blender lately. Blender is a computer graphics program for modeling and rendering 3D images using raytracing. I don't really like Blender's internal renderer (no Global Illumination), so I downloaded the free (and outdated) Yafray renderer. I put a couple of my recent renders in the Stuff section.

Today I also set up Xcode as an IDE to code and compile my AS3 projects using mxmlc, so I don't have to everything by command line anymore. :D

Complete Redesign

3/26/09

I completely redesigned everything on this site. The layout is now much, much cleaner and the markup is actually readable.

More Physics Experiments

3/5/09

Elastic Collisions! Today I made a simple ball vs. ball elastic collision demo in AS3. It's basically a simulation where there is no loss of kinetic energy. You can see it here.

More Verlet

2/6/09

I have changed the collision response code in my Verlet physics engine so that it is now more stable (No more exploding objects). The updated demo is here.

EDIT:2/9/09 The engine has been updated again with increased stability and textured objects.

Verlet Integration Revisited

2/1/09

This past week I've been trying to create a simple physics engine that I can use for my games. So far I've made it so that you can add polygonal bodies with simple constraints (no circles yet). It works fine most of the time, but the collision response is a bit unstable. I made a small sandbox app that you can see here.

Future Game Engine

1/19/09

Lately I've been procrastinating on Jellyman, and working on creating an AS3 Bitmap blitting engine for my future games. So far it works pretty well, it can sustain 50 fps with a 600+ sprites on screen, with a relatively slow (by today's standards) G5 processor. In the engine I've also implemented a camera system, which will allow me to scroll the screen simply by saying screen.camera.x++.

The engine works by using copyPixels to blit sprites onto layers, which are then blitted (is that a word?) onto the main canvas, which is a Bitmap instantiated on the Stage.

Soon I will add in support for using flash filters on specific layers. I will also put in functions for special effects such as screen shaking :D.

Happy New Year

1/3/09

Happy New Year! Horray. Now what?

Game Progress

12/8/08

Jellyman still isn't complete, even though I set the target release date to be somewhere in August. This is due to my bad procrastination habits and excessive schoolwork. If I'm lucky I should be able to get it out by Christmas.

Major Site Update

11/15/08

I have finally updated this site after 3 months. I now have a top-level domain (marmphco.com). The experiments and stuff sections have been consolidated into one section and the blog section has been added.

XHTML

8/14/08

I've been ignoring the fact that I haven't put a doctype tag on any of my webpages. Today I finally did that. Yeah... that's it.

Site Update

7/31/08

The navigation bar got changed. I also added a "Get Firefox" button.

EDITED 8/13/08

Why Firefox? Firefox adheres to web standards much better than Internet Explorer, which forces developers to resort all sorts of weird loopholes in order to make their sites look right. This site is a good example of that. It does not render correctly on Internet Explorer.

Development Update

6/25/08

My game-in-progress Jellyman is coming along fine, I think it woud be safe for me to set the "release" date around early september/late august. Meanwhile, I'm planning on getting a top-level domain soon.

Changed to PHP

6/25/08

All of the HTML pages have now been switched to PHP. This allows me to use PHP includes to lower the amount of time it takes me to make sitewide changes (like the Navigation and stuff). On another note, the PC with all of my AS3 projects stopped working because the hard drive died...

Added more Stuff!

6/11/08

The design of the Stuff section has been updated and I added more stuff! Yay for stuff! On another note, the school year is almost over, which means this will be updated more often.

Reduced Javascript

May something

The amount of javascript on each page has been reduced. Page loading times should be really fast now.

Improved Navigation

4/30/08

I improved the navigation bar (shown above).

I Almost Got Died!

4/24/08

Today I almost got died! Spread the phrase around! It doesn't really mean anything, but it sounds cool!

IE Bugs Fixed!(Mostly)

3/27/08

I fixed all of the rendering issues with Internet Explorer. Horray! The page should center correctly now and there shouldn't be any major problems.

Another Design Update

3/19/08

I took out the left column and extended the center column. I also fixed some of the css code so that it renders a little better on browsers other than Firefox.

IE Problems

3/9/08

Internet Explorer has problems rendering this page. The main shell doesn't center. I'm working on the problem right now. Sorry IE users!

Layout Update

2/22/08

There has been a layout update! Yeah!

Grasped has been Released!

2/15/08

I have just released my new game, Grasped! Click the link to play it! Oh boy :)

New Games

2/10/08

New games are coming soon! (within the next week to be precise)

ActionScript 3

2/2/08

This week I've attempted to learn AS3, using FlashDevelop and the Flex SDK. It's coming along kind of well, but every now and then I come across a problem (How do I add sound without external files?). Oh well :)

School!

1/29/08

Today is the start of a new semester, so the increase of time spent on schoolwork means that I have less time to work on stuff like this. Oh well :(
EDIT: I can't believe that I learned all this HTML and CSS in ten days...

Design Update

1/27/08

I polished up the design a little more, added a few drop shadows to the side bars.
EDIT: I wonder why I am writing this stuff even though it is currently not on the internet...

Design Update

1/21/08

Today I finished updating the design to make it look a little less tacky. :)

New Site

1/19/08

Today I put up this site! I am going to transition off of googlepages now! Yeah! I think i have to do the dance now... (just kidding!). Anyway, I just recently learned how to write basic HTML and CSS, so dont criticize my design skills to much. CONSTRUCTIVE feedback would be helpful!