Adolf Hitler? That guy was such a Deutschbag.

Yeah, it’s pretty much all downhill from here…

I had this as my gtalk status line for a while, too.  A co-worker was a bit apprehensive that I’d have the insensitivity to use “Hitler” in anything remotely visible and associated with me from work.  This confused me on several levels, since this wasn’t exactly “Wow, Hilter was a swell, upstanding citizen,” and for the fact that, well, as an engineering-heavy organization, far, far worse things exist in our codebase.

I have yet to meet a codebase that didn’t have colorful language in comments, variable names, and commit messages.  Sailors have a thing or two to learn from engineers!

Another day in the red tile factory...

This week’s advancements in the field of gruedorfery mainly lie in the iPhone side of things for me. Rusty and I creep ever closer to the end goal of shipping an iPhone game. We’re working, if it’s not clear, upon a sokoban clone to start with, and will progress to add features to our engine with progressively more complex games.

Of course, this may all be in vain if a verge 3 port to the iPhone comes out. Not that I’m one to start rumors…

Gruedorf turns one, starts teething.

This marks the first anniversary of my first gruedorf post, when a humble Grue and a pompous Dorf first shut up, threw down, then started swaking again.

It amuses me to see that since it’s inception, twenty competitors have joined our unwinnable contest. As of this writing, 6 are in a state of “not losing”, 10 are in a state of “losing”, and 4 have defunct sites. All in all, the contest is serving some of it’s purpose, keeping some chatter and activity constantly going, but I’d like to see it grow in the next year.

I’d also like to see Overkill and Toen stop failing so much, since both have made pretty awesome things in times past.

What is Gruedorf again?

Gruedorf is a simple contest between myself (McGrue) and Kildorf designed to promote activity in the amateur game creation community over at www.verge-rpg.com.

There are but two rules:

1. If you do an hour of work on a game and post to an RSS-enabled blog about it, you are not-losing.
2. If you fail to do work and post about it, you are losing.

It is important to note that nobody can win Gruedorf. It sure is nice when you ship a game, but doing so doesn’t free you from the eternal geas of a minimum of one hour per week. After all, we are people who profess to enjoying development.

So what got done this year?

I’ve lost a few times, but kept up a whole bunch of progress.

• Made progress on my game project that’s older than Duke Nuke’m Forever…
• Made significant progress towards finishing The Sully Chronicles, including finishing the implementation of the Battle System to a testable form.
• Made improvements to verge 3 on an engine level.
• Started work on a new verge community site, fully test-driving the process.
• Worked on and am shipping an iPhone game, using work done solely on weekends.
• Created a spike of a web2.0 sprite editor over a weekend

And that’s about it. Moving forward I’ll be focusing on Sully, http://beta.verge-rpg.com, and v3 for a bit. Whee.

Oh, and new site.

As a gift to y’alls, I ditched my old cakePHP spike of a blog and ported everything over to wordpress. I couldn’t justify working on the egometry source to do things that other packages did better. Leveraging other people’s work sometimes takes priority over having fun hand-rolling it, especially when you have limited free time.

So, yeah. You all can now comment on my blog finally. Whee.

The trick, as with any framework, is familiarity.

I’ve mainly been learning cakePHP to finally finish Breadbros.com in proper form. That’s progressing well, although I’ve now taken several days of diversion for this and/or recreating.

As is usually the case, moving environments from my dev box to the server here ran aground of mod_rewrite issues. However, I’m pretty sure the rewrites themselves are correct, and that the shortcomings are with my understanding of how cake handles it’s webroot. With time and tenacity will come understanding (then, death).

The meat: Canadian Bacon

The main reason I’ve been pushing this through is the friendly little competition I find myself in with Mister Shamus “Kildorf” Peveril. Ostensibly we’re both amatuer game-making enthusiasts, but in practice we’re mindblasted code monkeys who whine about “oh how wonderful it would be if we made games” and then don’t. Because not-doing something you want to do is the logical course of action.

So my challenge was as follows: we work on our respective games at least once a week, and post the WIP with the new work at least once a week on a blog with an RSS feed so we can keep easy tabs and make third party applications to mock each other later. Actually, I was hoping for a bit of WWF-style showmanship, but Kildorf’s a gentle soul who would claim to’ve helped your mom across the street, and nothing more.

A boy can dream of a theatrical scene-chewer arch-nemesis. A boy… can dream.

assminr.com was taken

Also in other news, I’ve launched the emptyish shell of an inside joke. We are looking at the beginning of a Social Shitfucking revolution. This is bleeding edge here, folks.