This week I guess I’ll be adding tags to the site, and fixing the ugly informational thing that appears at the bottom of my posts.  With all the javascript I’ve been doing over at CotT Games, I need to do a bit of PHP to keep from getting rusty. If you were sitting here beside me you’d hear me laughing — I’ve been writing PHP since the early 90’s. If I forget it now, I’d be surprised.  Actually, if you were sitting her beside me, I probably wouldn’t be laughing. Probably greatly depends on who you are. Anyway.

Update: tags are appearing, evidently.  But it’s still ugly.

Update2: Title of the post is because we got a metric buttload (over 6″) of snow this weekend. I meant to mention that, but I forgot, so, err. Yeah.

I also want to do a few more demos and things on CotT Games.  I need to get a map editor working, and tiles. I spent some time last week learning Canvas, and some of it’s limitations.  One thing about writing games with a target of HTML5 is that there’s a huge library of animations and effects that don’t all have to be reduced to graphics and blitted to the screen — the browser or operating system is going to do all that for you.  So don’t move things around an arbitrary screen when you can update their CSS properties.  And don’t write that yourself, as someone else has done that, too.  I’m using Prototype and Scriptaculous on the games site, and generally liking it.

This is interesting in it’s own right, but is part of my plan for the Klik & Play event at the end of the month.  Because I would like to target the mobile touchscreen market (iPhone/iPod Touch and Android), most of these game designs will need to be one-button, or one-click/touch designs.  That is, the interface has to be left-clicking the mouse, and pretty much nothing else. Click-drag doesn’t work on the smaller screens, as that’s how they move the viewable area around. Click-select-click works, and context-sensitive clicking works, as well.  You could also draw an interface of buttons, and use that, I guess, but I hate those.

(Yes, I know that the touchscreens are multi-touch, but then the PC user has another interface. One-click/tap is the common functionality here.)

Also, VGHVI is doing a single player game + discussion on skype thing this Thursday, this time with SW:KotOR.  I’m not sure how this would work if I were on the consoles (which is part of why I didn’t play the BioShock one), but I KotOR is one of the many RPGs I picked up in the Steam Sale over Christmas.  I’ve played some of it (years ago on the original Xbox), but not in a while.

Speaking of BioWare RPGs, I’ve stalled my DA:O playthrough until I can write a couple of character journals. I don’t want to get to far ahead of myself.  I wasn’t home for most of the weekend, though (and the weekends are the best time for me to play games), so it’s probably for the best anyway.

I did play a bit more Oblivion, this time trying a no-armor wearing mage — something I’d do in Daggerfall back in the day (but then I could make a character who could not wear armor in exchange for lots of magicka).  I’m kind of enjoying not worrying about weight, which a mage would normally have to do — but I don’t have armor so that weight is gone.  I also spent some time playing Steam games, replaying COGS again, and working through the original Dawn of War (also picked up on the Christmas Steam Sale).

DoW doesn’t like my widescreen very much, and it’s affecting the UI display in the bottom left, which is hurting my ability to move around the map a bit. I need to fix that if I’m going to keep playing it.  I’ve also picked out the games I’m thinking of playing next form the GBox.  We’ll see what I get when I go on Friday.