A few years ago my dad was using a really archaic method for keeping track of what vehicles he was in charge of. Like… where they were stationed. He wrote the vehicle number down on a magnet and placed it on a white board and moved them from square to square depending on where the vehicle got shipped. So I wrote him a digital version of that and since he struggles with computers, I totally mimicked the look of a board with magnets on it. Except you could double-click any “magnet” and open up extended information and tools on it. Needless to say this worked many times faster and he instantly fell in love with it. I spent loads of time in the UI so it was extremely user friendly.

Well he has since left that company and moved on to bigger and better things. Little did I know he continued to use that program and one day his boss saw him using it and one thing lead to another… next thing I know I’m in a meeting talking business for writing this company a custom software tool. So a lot of our time is being dedicated to that…

BUT THEN…

Garry decides that he wants to start a Fretta gamemode contest with some high dollar incentives. So now we’re working on THAT at the same time. Our goal is to submit two gamemodes so we really gotta bust ass on everything. We’re not going to sacrifice quality though, so its just time dedication.

BUT THEN…

All these new games have come out/are coming out and ahhhhhhhhhh. I’m deep into Fallout 3 right now, I’ve got Borderlands to focus on, Left 4 Dead 2 soon… Modern Warfare 2– fuuuuuuuuuuuuuu–

AND NOW FOR SOME COMPLETELY UNRELATED MEDIA

Awesome:

Anyways. I while back I was introduced to a game called Infiniminer. I think I’ve mentioned it on my blog before but I don’t remember and I’m too lazy to search my own blog and find out if I blogged about what I’m blogging about… which is Infiniminer.

Okay enough of that. Well I stumbled across another game called Minecraft which is pretty much inspired by Infiniminer except its currently only a sandbox and is a java application embedded in a webpage– which is really sweet because its self updating. So long story short I didn’t pay much attention to the game but was always inspired by the awesome artwork people manage to create (mostly pixel art, but also other cool 3D shit).

So one day I get a wild hair up my ass and decide to try some servers… which was totally boring because 90% of servers have “jailspawns”. Those are areas where you enter the game and you’re trapped in a tiny ass area made of adminium… a block that only admins can remove. Its pretty much pointless. You can’t move, can’t spawn, can’t do shit except beg for an admin to let you free. I understand why people use these– to protect their work. But whats the point of a public server if you don’t let public people join?

So I went ahead and created my own server but left it private. I announced it on The Arcadium Forums and no one really paid much attention to it for a few weeks. After convincing a friend to play with me for a bit, we found ourselves genuinely intrigued by the game. Its pretty much like virtual Legos but with square blocks. We started out making random stupid shit then decide to start a new map and build a city.

Holy Shit.

It turned out to be a huge undertaking that other people started joining in. We tried to make the city as realistic as possible. Soon there were 5 to 8 of us in the server at a time and all in Ventrilo discussing what buildings we were going to do next. I played this game too damn much I started dreaming weird dreams about blocks and shit. I know I know, I’m lame… anyways eat a dick.

So after almost 2 weeks of work we’ve got a large majority of the city built. I decided to do a simple walk through of the city record it. There’s so much more to it that isn’t shown in the video, but enjoy anyways.

Everyone loved how it turned out and asked me to add more of a “game” to it; which I eventually did. There are several puzzle-quests the players are put through (yes its multiplayer), but I didn’t spend any time in the video demonstrating them. Maybe I’ll show them in another video (if anyone is interested)

P.S. Click here and watch it in HD

Sauce

Just found this app for my phone… its still in alpha testing, but its pretty sweet. I can stream live video to the internet with minimal delay, then it saves the videos.

my profile: www.qik.com/foszor

Tomorrow I’ll talk about my trip to the Jimmy Kimmel show.

I had to give up my PS2 this evening… why? It’s all about growing up.

No no no… you got it all wrong… I’m not growing up, silly goose. My son Aidan is growing up. Seeing as I have an Xbox 360, Dreamcast and 2 laptops in my garage, I figured I could spare the hardware (well not really, but I’ll find a way to cope with my loss). He’s 3 1/2 now and we’re trying to find ways for him to become more independent.

First thing first is getting him out of our bed. I totally blame my wife and she takes full responsibility, but he’s used to sleeping in our bed. It all started when he was really young and I worked shitty hours. My wife didn’t like sleeping alone so she brought him in bed with her. Now that’s all changed and its becoming really annoying waking up in the middle of the night with a sharp pain in your back because his elbow or knee is digging in. So how do we solve this dilemma? Bribery. I told him I would give him the PS2 (along with the Guitar Hero controller) if he started sleeping in his bed… then after a solid week of doing so he’ll get a new game.

I’ll report back in a week and we’ll see how it went. By the way, while searching for the PS2 logo I came across this image. Holy fuck.

Video unrelated…