Shotbeak.com

I looove the new Facebook’s design. If I think what I did when I visited Facebook, they brilliantly coerced into one seamless experience.

The first I did was scan through the news feed for interesting things, then read status updates. If I hadn’t checked the groups and photos in some time, I would check that.

Now it’s all been integrated in one easy to navigate homepage. Considering, it is a relatively new “rollout” I think they’ll change it a bit here and there like they did with the previous “big” change.

What do you think?

Because I am venturing into other areas besides game dev (websites and music!), I think it is time for a revamp. Since this blog is pretty much the main feature and not entirely game-related anymore, I am going to get a new URL. Shotbeakgames.za.net will remain as it is (with perhaps a face-lift), and it will serve primarily as a showground for my games.

I will probably lose RoachToaster.com and create a better page for it on shotbeakgames.za.net.

So, yes. When this revamp will happen, I don’t quite know. That is just my plans at the moment. I’ve also realised I’ve kinda been using the blog incorrectly. I have no tags whatsoever, only categories… D’oh.

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My album is coming along really nicely. Only 3-4 more songs to go.

I was supposed to write a RT2 devblog today, but I can’t really remember what I did this week. I think I made 1 or 2 levels. The rest of the time was spent on FF12.

Anyway, on to topic. I have been thinking about the internet lately.

With Web 2.0 we are leaving pieces of ourselves all over the internet. We are posting on forums, and if you are like me, on several of them. We are apart of at least 1 social network and we litter the net with who we are. We write blogs, we upload videos to YouTube. We do countless things. Some lesser known forums and websites might fade with time, never to be seen, except in the Internet Wayback Machine.

But… Most prominent websites like YouTube, and several other social networks will most likely still be around when our children pave their way onto the internet.

With our generation, the only info we really have about our parents are stories, photos, letters and that kind of stuff. We don’t “really” know what they were like a few decades back.

Our children, who will grow up with the internet will easily be able to google us and see what kind of things we said when we were in our teens and mid-twenties for example. We are the first generation that will leave behind a considerable footprint on the internet.

I can only imagine how cool it would be to google my parents and see their MySpace profiles and seeing them act like they were so “cool”. Imagine the videos?

P.S. Hi future kids! Got some dirt on me now?

I finished God of War 1 two days ago, and I enjoyed it all the way through. It is really a spectacular game with great narrative, action and delusions of grandeur.

After finishing it, I was extremely pleased to find the extras. It was awesome (from a game developer’s perspective) to see all the movies of the creation process of a game like God Of War.

It is also great to see the iterative process of such a highly acclaimed game. It didn’t start with a complete game design, but grew along the way, removing the un-fun parts.

Now I really hope that more developers include extras like these in their games. It would be awesome to have “developer commentary” running in the background while you duke it out, don’t you think?

I am going to update my site with a new theme, so if you find anything weird while I do this process, please hide by your nearest bus shelter.

Chances are nobody will even notice, since my blog isn’t that “huge”. Anyway…

I am getting a bit tired of slaving away at Roach Toaster 2. So, I thought I’d randomly try TorgueX today. Browsing around, I stumbled upon DBP 2008! Yes, its time to get cracking again! Last year, I managed to get an entry into DBP. I managed to learn XNA and finish a remake of Roach Toaster 1. Ziggyware has a neat page thing if you want to play it. You need XNA redist and .NET 2.0 though.

Anyway, I didn’t place as a finalist. Primarily I think its because the game was played with a mouse.

Anyway (I should stop saying that), let bygones be bygones. Now I am ready to show my mettle for DBP 2008. With TorgueX’s neat scene management, I’ll hopefully be able to do better in 2008′s DBP.

I have played around with it today, and I am quite liking it! Now I just need to get myself that Xbox-360 controller (teh sex). Hopefully DBP will keep the “make anything” theme.