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Game Archive: iOS App

I’m back! It’s been quite awhile since I’ve posted on my site, but I finally pulled myself away from work and decided to… do more work! So, I built an iOS App for tracking your video game collection called Game Archive!

The Story:
What made me want to build this was because of a problem I had… I have too many video games on my bucket list (hundreds of video games…), and I didn’t have a great way to keeping track of them all. It started out as a small list of games on my phone using the Notes app. Soon that got too messy to manage, so I turned it into a fancy spreadsheet with nifty colors. After some time messing with that, I finally realized “Maybe someone made an app for tracking my games”. To my surprise, there were a small handful of apps made for tracking your video game collection! SWEET, now let’s find the best one and get my video game list managed, or so I thought…

After downloading and playing around with about 6-7 similar apps. I found that most of them were pretty terrible… bad UI, confusing UX, unstable, etc… but a couple had potential. So I picked the “best” one and starting using it. After using the “best” app for awhile, I found things about it that bugged me. The app would crash every now and then, and I kept thinking of ways to make the app better, but kept saying “I’ll just deal with this for now”. Eventually, I couldn’t take it any longer… I HAD to fix these issues. So I told myself “If I can build a working prototype over this weekend… then I’m going to make this happen!”. After a couple sleepless nights of a weekend Hack-a-ton, I was able to build the first prototype! Game Archive was born!

I was fairly happy with the prototype… but it lacked lots of features and needed lots of polish. So I spent the next month coding in my spare-time, playing around with the app, seeing where improvements could be made. I even had a few friends test it out and give me some helpful feedback. After many revisions and tweaks… I’m finally proud to present version 1.0 of Game Archive!

Currently it’s iOS only, but I may port it to Android someday… If you are a video game collector like me, and are wanting a quick and easy way to manage your game library, check it out and let me know what you think! Screenshots posted below.

About The App:
Game Archive makes tracking your video game collection simple!

If you’re a gamer then you probably have tons of amazing video games across various platforms, but have no easy way to keep track of which ones you’ve played or want to play. Game Archive hopes to fix that problem!

To make it simple, Game Archive has 3 lists you manage.

Backlog: Games you own and want to play, or are currently playing.
Archive: Games you’ve completed or are done with for now.
Wishlist: Games you want, but don’t have… yet.

Notable Features:

  • Quick system for adding Games
  • Rate games you’ve played and mark your favorites.
  • Quickly view “How long to beat?” info
  • Easily pull up Reviews and YouTube videos
  • Nice Dark UI makes it easy on the eyes
  • Import and Export your games as a CSV file

The app is 100% FREE. There is a Tip Jar, but I mostly made this app for my love of gaming! Enjoy!

Game data provided by GiantBomb


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Quintescenic: Roku Screensaver

Quintessent.banner

The Roku is an amazing little device. It plugs into any TV and turns it into a Smart-TV with apps like Netflix, Hulu, HBO, etc, and does a pretty good job compared to its competitors. That being said, it’s not “perfect”. Lets start with the screensaver… The default Roku screensaver is pretty boring, and the other downloadable 3rd party screensavers are nothing to write home about… So lets see if we can fix that problem.

One of the Roku competitors is Google’s Chromecast. The Chromecast is a pretty neat little device too. It basically does the same thing the Roku does, minus some features… But, where the Chromecast exceeds is it’s screensaver. It has a beautiful screensaver that shows the time, weather, and displays gorgeous photography in the background. So why can’t the Roku have something similar? Well, you’re in luck, cause it does now!

Introducing, Quintescenic! It’s a Roku screensaver that is inspired by the Chromecast screensaver. It shows you the time and current weather conditions, all while displaying beautiful photography in the background. Most of the Photography was provided by Shannon Ryan

If you own a Roku, you can find it by searching for Quintescenic  in the Roku Channel Store, or you can click the link below to add it manually.

Download Quintescenic

Screenshots:


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NonoBlock

NonoBlock
When I first discovered the logic puzzle games known as Nonograms. I became very intrigued by them and spent countless hours playing them on my phone and laptop. Eventually, I started running out of puzzles to solve… So, instead of hunting for more, I decided to take a stab at building my own Nonogram style game that could generate an unlimited amount of puzzles for me to solve. A few days later, I built my first prototype, and NonoBlock was born. (Click here to check out the prototype!) It was still very rough around the edges and wasn’t the prettiest game ever, but it was enjoyable and I had some fun trying to solve the randomly generated puzzles it created. Till I got bored again…

I wanted to take things a step further. Instead of solving 2D puzzles, I wanted to solve 3D puzzles! Digging around the web I found a few 3D Nonogram style games, but wasn’t happy with how they were approached. They didn’t feel the same as the simple 2D Nonogram games I enjoyed. Then it finally hit me… Layers! Why not keep the puzzles 2D, but make the overall goal a 3D object. So, instead of solving a single layer 2D puzzle, you were solving a multi layer 3D puzzle!

About a week or so later, I had a new working prototype with 3D puzzles. It was fun, and kept the old 2D feel of most Nonogram games. Over the next few weeks, I started to polish out the gameplay. Did a bit of researching other Nonogram games to see what gameplay worked or didn’t really work. Eventually, I had a pretty solid game put together. My only problem… it wasn’t very pretty… So I called up my good friend Cameron, and he gladly gave NonoBlock a much needed makeover. After lots of testing, polishing, more testing and more polishing… We finally had a product ready for public release! Which brings me to the final product. NonoBlock!

NonoBlock is a logic puzzle game designed in the spirit of nonogram puzzles, but in a 3D environment. Instead of solving one layered puzzles, the player is presented with multiple layers to decipher. The reward is presented when the last layer is peeled away, and the completed voxel art is shown.

It has tons of 3D puzzles to solve, as well as an “Endless Mode”, for when you don’t ever want to stop playing. You can also build your own puzzles, then send them to friends, or upload them to the Community portal for everyone to see.

Download it for iOS, Android, Mac, Windows, or Linux at NonoBlock.com!

Thanks for reading, and I hope you enjoy NonoBlock!

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Crayz Crabz… The second game!?

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Just for fun, Eric and I have created a new version of “Crayz Crabz”. This time we have added an entire dimension to our game, making it playable in a 3 Dimensional space!! We are planning on expanding the game over time by adding new levels and new wacky gameplay. Follow us on Twitter for future updates! You can play it in your web browser, or play it on your Android device! (iOS coming soon)

Twitter

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Burn The Lot!

The time has finally come! For the last couple years I have been working on a new game with Cameron Calder and Propaganda3. It’s a 3rd-Person shooter for iOS and Android called Burn The Lot!

You play an intergalactic “Carny Cop”, and your mission is to stop evil carnivals from hypnotizing people and looting planets of all their resources. Travel from planet to planet while collecting bounties and bringing peace back to the natives inhabitants. Check out BurnTheLot.com for more info, and follow us on Twitter and Facebook for updates!

I am the lead developer and one of the game designers for this game. In it I designed much of the gameplay as well as built many custom code frameworks including a custom “Planetary Gravity” Framework, a custom Enemy A.I. Framework, and a custom GUI/HUD Framework, and pretty much everything else code based. The project was extremely fun, and I learned a ton from it. I hope to continue challenging myself with games like this as well as any other kind of game I can think of.

If you own an Android or iOS device, check it out using one of the links below, and don’t forget to leave a review! Would love to hear all your feedback. Enjoy!

Download on Android
Download on iOS
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CrayzCrabz HTML5+CSS3 Game

crayzcrab
It’s been a while since I’ve updated this blog of mine… But I figured I would finally post something. I have actually been meaning to make this post for a long time.

A week or so before July 23, 2011, my friend Eric Bacus and I decided we wanted to try and make a game over a one week period. We didn’t know what, but we knew we wanted it to be a “Side-scroller”, with old-school-ish graphics. We also knew it was our friend Corey’s birthday in about a week. Which was perfect, because we only wanted one week to build this. For Corey’s Birthday, we were all going to meet up at an “All you can eat” Crab Legs buffet. So, why not make a game about our friend Corey eating crabs. We went with the idea and began production. I was in charge of code development and Eric was in charge of graphics and animations.

While Eric was figuring out the graphics, I started building the code foundation of the game. HTML5/CSS3 was the “new” thing, so I wanted to test my skills and learn what it would take to build a game in HTML5+CSS3 and Javascript. Since the graphics hadn’t been created yet for our game, I used stand-in graphics pulled from the game “Super Mario World 2: Yoshi’s Island” (one of the best side-scroller games EVER! IMO). After lots of reseaching and using the knowledge I had gained from building games in Adobe Flash. I came up with this Yoshi’s Island Prototype. I even made it iOS/Android/Touch friendly! I was pretty amazed at how responsive CSS3 was on mobile devices. I had originally though about using HTML5’s canvas for the motion, but found it to run like crap on a mobile device. So CSS3 was the winner! Building that prototype had taken a day or two of time. By that time, Eric had some of the graphics built, so I moved on with taking what I had, and began building Corey’s Crab game.

We had the original idea of gameplay just being that you jumped on crabs heads, and they died… But we still didn’t know a good way for Corey to “eat” the crab, and we wanted to make the game have another level of difficulty. So, we added the ability to “eat” the crab after it was “dead”, by standing over it and tapping Down Arrow to “munch” the crab till it was totally devoured. After many days of adding features, bug fixing, and lots of testing. We barely made the deadline… Granted, there are still lots of bugs present, and it’s only really been tested in the Chrome Browser. Playing it on an iPad or Android is still kind of broken too… BUT, having made a playable HTML5+CSS3 game in 1 week was good enough for me. I’d still like to go back and flush out the bugs, and get it tested in all browsers. Maybe someday I will find the time… Till then, try playing Corey’s CrayzCrabz game!

Play CrayzCrabz! (v0.5 beta)
Play Yoshi’s Island Prototype

PS: The game’s title was a mash up of Corey’s alias CrayzBeatz and Crazy Crabs.

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Propaganda3’s Ten Year Anniversary

Propaganda3 is celebrating 10 years of business this year. So P3 thought it would celebrate by taking a look back at the last ten years. Head over to ten.propaganda3.com and interactively find important global events over the last decade. P3 rounded up as many events as they could dig up. Every event has a brief description pulled from Wikipedia, and displays an array of images pulled live from Google Image Search. Some events will even pull your Facebook Wall posts from around the time of the event (if you give it permission). Hope you enjoy the experience!

Big thanks to Cello and everyone at Propaganda3 for making this project possible. Had a lot of fun helping work on it. I was the lead developer on the project. I implemented the Google Image Search API, as well as the “Wikipedia Scraper”. I also built the circular timeline view of the project and the dynamic Event info page.

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P3 Experience Site


P3 has finally launched it’s newest project. The P3 Experience Site! Utilizing Flash and Unity3D, this project is much more then just your basic website.

The story starts at The Corporation. A place where websites are sold as templates, and all the employees are mindless drones. You are the rouge who plants the P3 machine, in hopes to overtake The Corporation and free the world from it’s mindlessness. With the help of Viridian Disciple, you must journey to The Corporation’s main server core and reroute the servers. Go now, before all is lost!

http://experience.propaganda3.com

Credits:
Everyone at P3 and Bazillion!

Cameron Calder – Creative Director / Designer
Dan Long – Unity3D Developer / Game Concept
Jeff Longshore – Flash Site Developer
Joe Baehr – Writer / Story Concept / Project Manager
Dave Stewart – Story Concept
Marcelo Vergara – Story Concept
Jeff Beith – Producer / Art Direction
Noel Selders – Sound Design / Music
Marshall Miller – 3D Textures / Modeling / Design / Animation
Robert Grace – 3D Textures / Modeling / Design / Animation
Tyler Keith – 3D Cinemas / Textures / Compositing
Dave Humunczuk – 3D Modeling
Brian Lynus – 3D Modeling / Textures / Cinemas / Animation

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Android App: Draw(er)

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UPDATE:
Draw(er) ranked 3rd best Artistic app for Android on BestAppEver.com in 2011. More Info

Draw(er) is a drawing and sketching app for Android devices. The various tools in Draw(er) give you a new perspective on drawing. So your basic lines, turn into works of art!

The app originally started out as a way for me to learn Java, and the Android SDK, but it has evolved into a semi-port of Ricardo Cabello‘s HTML5 drawing app, Harmony. It’s not exactly a true port, but it shows off the basics and it was a fun learning experience. I hope to keep updating it, and eventually add more to it. Follow me on Twitter for any future updates.

Get Draw(er) for Android
Also available on the Amazon Appstore