Messages

Yes, as far as the fundamental storyline, there is a similarity between Avatar & BZ2 (not BZ1), as I see it, especially when the main character has to make a "choice".  And besides, the Scions and the Avatar aliens are both blue-ish. 

Do the new blue guys have blue moon boots and pants that show off their blue buttocks?

My blast tank is fueled by the tears of noobs.

Score!

Wow.  End of an era indeed.

I hear Austin is really cool.  I'm sure you'll like it GSH.  Just don't let them teach your kids to speak Texan at school.

On the flip side, the value of my two autographed BZII cds has quadrupled at least!

My labor of the last 6 months or so hit the iPhone App Store yesterday, and immediately took it's rightful place as the #1 selling RPG.  Reviews have been very positive, and I'm just afloat on a sea of bliss, having realized a dream I've had for decades:  I'm a real-live game developer now!


Screens, vids, and a link the app store are at http://ravensword.com.  I know you guys don't much go in for the iThing foolishness, but I had to tell SOMEBODY

I think we'll see true AI in our lifetimes, but I'm not looking forward to it.  There's going to be a major upheaval as most jobs are taken over by machines owned by the rich, and the ensuing nastiness probably won't be over in our lifetimes.  Last thing I want when I'm old and feeble is to live through (or not) a revolution.

Oh yes you can, and if your marketing is good enough, people will line up to purchase the resulting s***tty mess.

If it wasn't for Christianity, people would be committing atrocities in the name of some other imaginary omnipotent being.  It's not the mythology that's to blame, it's the humans that make it up to justify their savagery.

Iron Maiden was one of the best bands of the time, and you hear them in other bands music constantly.  There's a Papa Roach song that BLATANTLY rips off a riff from Innocent Exile and uses it for the entire song.  I get mad hearing their emo whinging over it.

Metal bands sound "better" now because you can slap down an out of time, out of tune mess and have the engineers make it perfect digitally. You lose a lot that way though.  There is an emotional component that the performers project through the music that gets lost in that process.  That wave of crackling energy you can sense surging through the crowd at a live show is what gets lost, I think.

It might run under wine if I did a PC port... but I'm not even going to touch trying to support that.  I went Linux for a couple years, and even did a Linux build of M.A.D. that worked fairly well, except for sound.  Sound on Ubuntu and Redhat was a total mess at that time, and I never did get it working well.

I could also do a wii port, but Nintendo wants 10k to publish, so that's out until I make my first million.

I spent a significant amount of time developing a 3D engine on Ubuntu, as I was thinking about making some arcade games and wanted a free OS to go in them.  Sound problems killed that project, too.  It's a shame, too, because I really like KDevelop, and haven't been able to get it to work right on anything but Linux.

Wow... what's the framerate on that thing? 4fps?.  I remember seeing those cases from my early days as an IT guy, and pondering the mighty 133mhz 486 pentium inside.  I think RAM was around $100/meg... so a gig of ram would have worked out to ~ $100k, assuming you could find something to plug all those 4meg simms into.

My $200 iPod (probably $150 then, adjusted for inflation) blows that PC out of the water.  Never in my wildest dreams back then did I imagine such a thing. 

So how did you account for the physics in BZ2?  Collisions in particular seem like they'd totally blow that method out of the water.

Erm. Seems you so excited you forgot to tell us which is yours...

Oh.  Sorry.  It's Ravensword.

And now it's scrolled down a bit on the main page.  So much for my 15 minutes of fame.

Red:  Hold out for a 3rd gen iPod.  Phones are for girls.

Warfreak:  Mac and PC versions are under consideration.   We gotta get the iphone version out first though, or we're gonna starve.

I know none of you has iphones or ipods, but I'm going to subject you to my latest project anyway.  We submitted screenshots to toucharcade.com (they're a major iphone game site) this morning, and they put it up there on the front page, where things like wolfenstein usually are.  We also got over 100 responses on the threads about it, just today, and a couple thousand thread views.  The response has been overwhelmingly postive.

I'm so excited I can hardly keep from wetting my pants and have been prone to fits of tugging on my ears and screaming like a schoolgirl all day, when I should be coding.

Check it out at http://www.toucharcade.com (they have the screenshots), and we also have a little blurb up at http://www.ravensword.com.

The only thing I run on windows is BZII, so I'm not much interested.