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.
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!
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 studios mentioned Perpetual Blaze in his 4th lawlolcast. 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!
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!
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.
