Category Archives: Projects

Where Is Forgbook Going?

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Of my large (and still growing) handful of projects that I’d like to be working on right now, Forgbook is taking up most of my attention. Hopefully I can get some kind of super-early release out in a few weeks, but until then it’s worth noting a few shifts in focus and philosophy.

As much as I love the Web, I find it hard to submerge myself in Web development due to the chronic pains of browser incompatibility, and perhaps the need to be constantly responding to user experience. Once a product is released, I feel an obligation to keep it updated, which can at times conflict with a desire to put a project to the side for a while. It’s much safer in term of user response to work on a project privately until it’s complete and polished before releasing it rather than releasing pre-alpha kind of work and iterating consistently all the way through to a final release. I guess I value my flexibility pretty highly, because after all this work is effectively my free time.

Forgbook is (or will be) my largest, most ambitious project in functionality terms, and I believe it will be of the most value to myself and others, so I want to get it right. I’ve been thinking about what I want it to offer for some time now, and I’ll be updating the project page with more details as I solidify them. From a technology perspective however, the interesting decision I’ve made is that I’ll be switching from a relatively unambitious attempt to combine Flex and PHP to a Web-native Django application leveraging the Dojo JavaScript toolkit for the more flashy UI components. This means however that I have to familiarise myself with the environment Django offers; it’s immediately clear that it’s extremely powerful and scalable, but the decoupling that is its strength results in a variety of idiosyncratic idioms that will take some time to adjust to.

Why the switch? One of the requirements I’ve come to be very passionate about is making Forgbook accessible from any common device – PC, smartphone, tablet, perhaps even consoles – so that it feels more like an encouraging companion rather than a chore you must log into every day. This is best achieved using a native Web interface (HTML, CSS, JS) over something requiring a plugin (Flash, Silverlight), as it should at least be accessible by any device with a Web browser, in the scenario that I don’t/can’t customise an interface for that device. It would be suicide to jump into creating a sophisticated Web application without a framework, and my love for Python (and mere tolerance of PHP) combined with the popularity and support for Django make it a perfect choice. The integration of Dojo via Dojango is a big bonus too.

I’ll document the progress I’m making with Django in the next couple of weeks, and hopefully get a stripped-down-but-working version (basic user and task management) out in the wild before March. From there, I’m hoping the development efforts will feel more rewarding, and I’m sure there will be many more fun things to handle (feedback and reflection followed later by advertising and analytics). I’m looking forward to it as much as ever.

P.S. If anyone can think of a quality name for a sophisticated event/task management application (Forgbook is very much a working title), let me know (comment or contact). If I like it enough that I decide to use it, I’ll be happy to give you free access to pretty much anything I release forever. Hopefully one day that’s worth something significant.

Announcing: RailRunner!

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Apparently I felt that I didn’t have enough projects underway yet, so here’s another one: RailRunner! As usual, that’s the working title. You can read (a little) more about it on that page, but in essence it’s Railroad Tycoon 3 made more accessible and actiony/competitive. I’ve got a few ideas that feel like they’re pretty original and they’d work well together, but we’ll wait and see.

In other news, Hario is coming along nicely, and you can pretty much run around the level, jump on enemies and die. There’s all the classic terrain types, though items don’t really affect anything yet. Most of the movement and interaction is there though, so the foundation is solidly down for us to start building on. Despite being a ‘practice’ project, I’m starting to think that maybe it won’t be the worst game ever! It’s a very encouraging feeling, and I’m getting increasingly obsessed with working on it, so expect some decent releases soon!

Still Alive

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Just in case someone happens to read this while there’s nothing much happening, I’d just like to say that there is A LOT happening, just not on the site. Work is getting increasingly important, and Christmas (among other important dates) is coming up faster than I might like.

I haven’t had much change to work on the projects I’ve had listed all this time, but there is a new project under way, with the working title of Hario. Not surprisingly, Hario is something to do with Mario; it’s a little more than something to do with it though, since it’s basically a clone. I’m working on making a very simple game with The Artist Currently Known As DK, just so we can settle into actually trying to work on something together while simultaneously learning about all the tools we’re using. Hario is being written in C++ using Haaf’s Game Engine, and after a pretty full day of smashing against a wall, we’re set up and ready to code!

I get the feeling that actually working with someone will significantly increase my own productivity, especially once work my internship is over and done with. I’m going to be doing a whole more personal work next year so this blog should get much more of a workout. For now though, rest assured things are turning over behind the scenes. There will be results! Eventually.

Taboo Is Here

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I just finished moving my Taboo content over from the old piemaster.net, while simultaneously filling in the blank pages. To find out what on earth Taboo is, you could do worse than to check out the Overview page. In short however, Taboo is a drum tablature editor designed by a drummer for drummers who are sick of hacking around with Word and Notepad to put their tabs together. It’s intended to put the relevant tabbing commands at the user’s fingertips to allow fast and easy transcription. It is however still very early in development, and there are plenty of fancy features planned for the future. Just as soon as I get some time…

It’s also free (and super lightweight), so feel free to download it and give it a spin. Bear in mind it will probably throw a few errors at you since I haven’t fixed it up for a while, but it’s safe to ignore them all. Restarting after opening it for the first time helps.

Anyway, it’s just another step towards filling this site up with content which is a little exciting. I’m also transferring the piemaster.net domain over here as we speak, so it should hopefully be much easier to get here in the near future. Hooray!
EDIT: Scratch that, the domain is still registered at GoDaddy for another year, so I’ll just try and get the DNS info to redirect. Same result, $9 cheaper.

The Apps Cometh

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So I figured some things out, and I can now host all my stuff on here! Unfortunately WordPress doesn’t want to let me embed things in pages, but I can happily store them just off to the side, leaving them accessible from a nice, static URL. I’ve quickly put up two examples to show them off before I get down to business, which you can see in the Projects menu above, but just briefly:

Forgbook (working title) is my primary project at the moment, though it doesn’t get nearly as much development love as it should. It’s the result of many factors, the main one being when I decided I had stop leaving loose ends everywhere and actually DO those little things that make the big things come together. It is in essence a glorified to-do list (especially in its current form), but it has a very exciting future ahead of it. It’s still in a very early alpha stage, but it’s at least fairly usable. Check out the version roadmap for a preview, and hit up the feedback form to land yourself in the credits!

Treetris (also working title) is something new that I came up with yesterday while waiting at Parliament Station. The idea is a survival-strategy game based on growing out tree branches, inspired by Tetris and another game I failed to coalesce a while ago. I want to keep it simple in rules and mechanics, but have a bit of depth in how it’s actually played. The Java applet I’ve got up is just a couple of hours of work and is more of a teaser than a preview; it’s just a tree that keeps growing out until your computer grinds to a halt :). It should give you some idea of what I’m going for though, and me something to work off.

It’s exciting enough at the moment to just see these two out in public on a decent web host, but there will be plenty more to come now that the foundations have come together. If you’re even a little interested in any of this, you can subscribe to any (or all!) of the RSS feeds up the top-right corner there to hear about future developments, and I promise there will be plenty. I rather like this site, and I’m itching to dump my mind on it as soon as I get the time!