Lo and behold, the new Cynical Stuff design is in place! It may not be the most artistic design ever, but I think it will serve its purpose. The purpose is of course to have a common design for all KarjaSoft pages: KarjaSoft.com, Sheeplings.com, Wildhollow.com…and later also SpandexForce.com. I’ve waited with Spandex Force since that’s the most demanding of the game pages. Demanding because there’s a lot of content there, and I’m going for a “less is more” approach with this new design.

It was surprisingly simple to convert the KarjaSoft design into a WordPress plugin. I feared that it would involve days of strange PHP coding – instead it only involved hours of strange PHP coding. I’d like to mutter some choice words about WordPress, but truth be told the more I work with it the more I like it. The themes are structured pretty logically and the default fallback works great. (I.e. if you haven’t written a special PHP file for, say, viewing a single blog entry then it makes some magical assumptions and displays the content as best as it can anyway.)

You can see the result right now: it’s a lighter, happier blog than the old black Cynical Stuff. Granted, something darker would be more appropriate for the title but it’s my bloody blog so you just shut the hell up if you’re not happy! If I want to have a shiny happy blog I’m damn well going to have it! And either way I actually prefer contrasts. Like the suicide bunnies:

Suicide bunnies rule! Or at least they will when the revolution comes.

By the way, I’ve removed the ugly “Cynical Stuff” handwriting from the logo! An era is at an end. Only yesterday I was convinced I were going to let it remain – but today I realized that it simply won’t fit in with the new design. Oh well.

Welcome to Cynical Stuff v3!

For those of you who haven’t kept up with the important events of the world lately, a game called King’s Bounty: The Legend has been released. It’s not only the best game of 2008 according to my very scientific measure – it’s the best game I’ve played for years! I’m currenty on my second play-through; normally I spend an hour or two trying out a game, but this incredibly addictive game has kept me occupied for ~30 + ~35 hours! Yes, that’s an immense amount of time. It could explain my lack of blogging of late, and the slow progress on Wildhollow.

The reason I’m playing the game through twice is twofold:

1. I played it on normal difficulty first, so I have to play it on hard as well – to see how much harder the tactical battles are.
2. It’s a bloody brilliant game!

King’s Bounty: The Legend is the spiritual successor to the old 1990 game King’s Bounty. I’m saying spiritual since it quite obviously has nothing to do with the original aside from some superficial details. Like the name. And the fact that it’s a tactical strategy RPG. As much as I love the original I must say that it never captivated me to the same degree that KB:TL has stolen my spare time, my free will and my soul.

Why is KB:TL so good, then? Read this Rock, Paper, Shotgun article and tell me that you don’t want to play the game! But, aside from all the general weirdness and strange Russian humor, it’s simply an amazingly good game. You have to play just another battle. You have to see just where the next quest will lead you. You have to collect just another magic rune. The first time I played the game I think I played for 16 hours straight! I haven’t done that since I was a wee whippersnapper!

If you decide to play the game (and you should) I have some sage advice:

• Start playing as a paladin.  Paladins are cool: they have good leadership (which enables you to have large armies) and good magic as well. They also start with the resurrection spell which will help you conserve armies. Later you may want to play mage or warrior too; the playing styles are pretty different and offers varied experiences. (After I’ve finished the game on hard with a mage I’m going for an impossible game with a warrior.)
• Don’t worry too much about money if you start at a lower (below hard) difficulty level. You will have more than a cool million gold pieces to spare toward the end of the game either way. Unless you plain suck.
• People say that you shouldn’t travel too much between continents because it costs game time. They say that you should learn how to play with the armies available on each continent instead. I say screw that: if you find a good army setup that works, play with it until something better comes along! If it means riding the boat a few times too many – so what! It’s just affecting your end game score.
• But on the other hand, if you’re interested in getting a good score you should not only follow the advice above – you should also learn how to not lose any armies in battles. (It’s entirely possible to complete the entire game without losing a single army, but it’s ludicrously time demanding.)
• Complete the king’s quests quickly! And when you acquire the rage box, get the first two rage spirits quickly! You’ll thank me later.
• You can sneak around! You don’t have to fight everything, and it’s often quite worthwhile to grab all goodies before you start slaughtering polar bears and dwarves.
• Read the official forums. There are some great hints there, and also inspiration for different ways to play the game. Not to mention some good ol’ fashioned Internet drama now and then.

Order King’s Bounty: The Legend now and thank me later! Or, as it may be, curse me for stealing your precious time. See if you can match my best accomplishment so far: defeating Karador at level 20 on hard. (It’s nothing special, but it wasn’t easy.)

Now sod off. I have to gain a few levels before I can tackle Haas’ Labyrinth and finally get to the last area of the game. Again.

Don’t you hate it when you have a big change planned, and you reason that it’s not worth taking care of the little things before that ginormous change has taken place? That’s what happened to Cynical Stuff. A few months ago I decided to get a new design for the KarjaSoft homepage; a generic design that would serve as a template for all my games – and for this blog as well. It would be elegant and funny and pretty and functional. And it wasn’t worth taking the time to write blog posts before I had the new design in place.

I can see you all nodding and smirking in recognition right now.

I tried to make a feeble design myself, but it sucked. Then I decided to try something new: actually find a web designer to make a brilliant design for me. I won’t go into details, but let’s just say that I spent a load of cash on something that didn’t fulfil my vision.

To make a long story incredibly short, I ended up making a design of my own after all. I can only hope that II have learned a few lessons about how not to suck completely. You can check out the KarjaSoft homepage and the Sheeplings homepage to see it in action – and unless I regret my decision I’ll be switching the Spandex Force and Cynical Stuff designs as well soonish.

I know, I know, there are prettier web pages out there. But I think it’s better than what I had previously, and then it’s a step in the right direction!

Oh… And did you know that I’ve released v0.2 of Wildhollow? Play it and let me know what you think!

I can’t be arsed to read this thesis, but it’s got the best title ever!

Sex and violence in lobsters - a smelly business

Apparently lobsters pee in each others’ faces, fight, and generally behave like dirty bastards. They’d fit right in this Saturday when there’s a ginormous party. I couldn’t find a good picture of drunken debauchery to emphasise the last sentence, so here’s a dead rabbit instead:

While I’m not keeping myself busy with work and more work, I’m writing dialogue for WIldhollow. Wildhollow, for the uninitiated, is my upcoming adventure/management game featuring insane and probably very bad humour. Just to show off my progress in the bad humour department I decided to post some screenshots:

The game starts when our young hero or heroine (screw political correctness – I’m claiming that “hero” is gender neutral) comes back to Spring Valley, the village close to Wildhollow Ranch…

He (in this case) is met by the town greeter who has terrible news! Gasp! Shock! Oh, the horror of non-subtle exposition initiating the main quest of the game!

In town he can meet inept adventurers…

Tell bad jokes to the barber…

And do lots more, like get quests and sell fish to the owner of the Angry Weasel Inn (caught in a minigame at the Pork ‘n Beans Lake) and enjoy lots and lots of strange dialogue! And this is just one of the adventure screens! Wow, isn’t this game just filled with adventure?! Stay tuned for more information. And hopefully a Wildhollow homepage soon, once the re-design is in place…

In all of Linköping there is just one tea store that sells cactus tea. There used to be at least three stores where I could get nicely flavoured cactus tea, but there’s just one decent place left. And I’m talking about the tea shop downtown; I know that there’s a store in Tornby that sells something they call cactus tea, but that’s just perfumed rubbish.

After I stocked up on the good kind the other day I browsed the teapots in the store, and found something really curious:

This picture doesn’t really convey the full extent of the pot’s strangeness. I really don’t see the point of this design – it looks like the shunned lovechild of a hash pipe and a teapot. In fact, I have a nagging suspicion that it would be possible to use this to smoke various things if one did some minor modifications. I’m sure there are more knowledgeable people than me who have tried it already.

I saw another funny thing yesterday when I went to the bathroom at work:

My useless cell cam couldn’t take a sharp enough picture, and it’s in Swedish anyway, so I’ll provide a loose translation:

Toilet Quiz

Q: How many engineers does it take to change an empty toilet paper roll?
A: Apparently many since it never happens here.

Q: What IQ is required to know the difference between a urinal and a toilet?
A: (Can’t remember exactly; something to the effect of “must be pretty high ’cause you people pee on the seat”.)

Tie breaker: What’s the brush in the corner used for?

Yes yes, typical dull humour that nagging bitches find amusing. (Okay, I did smile a little as well.) The really funny part is that someone wrote a reply to the last question:

When there’s no toilet paper left.

Ka-ching!

In the beginning of the summer I posted an ad where I asked for web designers interested in having a go at integrating all the KarjaSoft pages into one logical unit. Essentially, what I want is a unified presence in order to explore synergies between my different projects – e.g. Cynical Stuff, the KarjaSoft company webpage and the different game pages. Yes, you may now slap me in the face for using both “unified presence” and “explore synergies” in the same sentence. Either way, I got a couple (as in two) responses…that somehow missed the mark a little.

What I desperately need is a designer. Not a programmer (I can code PHP myself, goddammit!) or an artist (what good is a pretty logo if it’s just sitting there like a bloated toad?) – a web designer! But somehow the word design gets lost when one mentions web design. Web design almost inevitably gets interpreted as either “make a logo” or “do a customized content management system.” Design is of course present in both making a logo and writing code, but my needs were for a person more keen on usability and design in the classical sense.

To make a short story long: In the end I sighed and shook my blonde curls in dismay, and decided to have a go at it myself instead. Hey, at least it’s a learning experience, right? Here’s what I ended up with as my first concept:

This is supposed to be the Games page; a list of all KarjaSoft games with easily accessible links to each game. Clicking a game logo leads you to the specific game’s page. The color scheme and the logo is modified for each game, but the main design is kept in order to give a sense of unity. Also, the navigation buttons in the top right are present on all pages. As you can see I’ve used common terms instead of titles. If someone sees a button with Cynical Stuff it is probably hard to guess that it leads to this blog, but by typing out Blog everyone will instantly know where it leads.

And yes. If I adopt this design, it will mean that Cynical Stuff will be redesigned according to this as well. As long as I can make a decent WordPress template out of it, that is.

Any thoughts? Does it look like cat vomit? Does it look okay?

As a wee kiddo I used to play a lot of adventure games. First text adventures like Scott Adams’ Pirate Adventure, and old Infocom classics. Then I got hold of Maniac Mansion for the C64, and I was completely hooked on graphical adventure games. Prior to playing that game I had only stayed up all night reading books (ah, Dumas, how your stories caused me to lose my well-needed beauty sleep!), but I vividly recall being physically unable to quit playing Maniac Mansion. The clock struck midnight, and I desperately tried to escape the prison. The clock struck 2 AM and found me finally figuring out that the rusty key opened the car’s trunk. And so on.

After that point, having to write text in an adventure game seemed like a giant step backwards to me. That’s probably why I never was a big fan of the Sierra adventure games. I’ve played my fair share of King’s, Police and Space Quest, but they never captivated me the same way that Lucasarts did with their magnificent opii. (Did you know that I’m trying to be ironic with my misuse of the word opii, and that the plural of opus is actually opuses or opera? And did you know that opii is the genitive form of opium in singular? Sweet mother of crap, I’m pretentious today!)

Still, I tried to enjoy Quest for Glory (or Hero’s Quest as I knew it) because I loved the idea of mixing an RPG with an adventure game. I never got very far, though; it was too cumbersome to type everything. So my fascination with the QfG series died in its cradle.

Boy, did I miss out.

Check this out. One guy is attempting to play all Quest for Glory games completely through, and is documenting it all on YouTube. (This is the very first one; he has over a hundred more clips.)

This has to be one of the coolest things ever. Evah! It’s thanks to his efforts that I’m rediscovering the QfG games, and its wonderfully witty punny humour. I don’t really do puns myself but I thoroughly appreciate reading the plethora of witticisms in the Quest games. “I forgot my Visa in the desert.” “We don’t take Dinar’s Club here.” …Just awful. In an awesome way.

For many years I’ve been in no rush to make something of myself: I’ve dabbled in writing some Windows applications, small game experiments, and lately casual games. I’ve also started writing a fantasy novel, written and performed humorous songs at university parties, written punk songs, metal songs, pseudo-baroque songs, and tried to learn how to draw better. But this year I’m turning 30. I still have long hair and dress all in black; I really should grow up and start doing some worthwhile things.

My professional life is going well: I like working with embedded software development and my current Field Applications Engineer role could be a much-needed spark of inspiration for me. But that’s not enough – I need to have more entrepreneuring projects for my spare time! I have a nagging suspicion that I’m far from the only one in a position like this, so for all our sakes I’ll make a short list of my current thoughts. With some luck they might give you inspiration to start something new:

1. Continue with casual games development. Well, this is pretty much a given. I love making games and I have loads of ideas: Spandex Force 2 with multiplayer support, a puzzle game based on Norse mythology, a free Flash verison of my old Word Mahjongg game, an abstract strategy game based on the dawn of civilization, an archaeology adventure/puzzle game, humorous adventure games based on old public domain stories – and so on. I’ll definitely keep this up. Especially since Spandex Force has given me funding for both Wildhollow and much of Spandex Force 2.
2. Import and sell items. I love weird cool stuff, and I’d love to find something obscure that I can sell in Sweden. I like the idea of a DIY thing with a small stock in my apartment and online distribution. Still haven’t found the Perfect Cool Thing(TM), though - a big part of the problem is that I don’t have a lot of capital to invest in a project like this.
3. Attempt to make one of these cool Web 2.0 places. (Well, it ought to be 3.0 by now.) Maybe “World Party” – a community-like site where you can have both world and city maps, and add locations where there’s good nightlife. “Go here, the beer is cheap!” Others can comment on your suggestions, and you can either use it as a personal “I’ve been here and done that” thing, or search for good places when you’re travelling. Whatever, there are probably places like this already. The idea itself is just a minor thing IMO - the concept is what’s interesting from a technical/design point of view.
4. Use my irreverent sense of humour to make posters/plaques/t-shirts with interesting prints. This would be pretty cool since it would involve taking studio photos of people posing with the products in question. See how much your pretty face is worth now! I’m the one hiring your services, and you’re dependent on me! Was it worth it, being one of the Beautiful People(TM)? We hatesss you… Seriously, this option would be risky since everyone and his dog can make prints these days, and everyone thinks he’s a bloody comedian. Just like me.
5. Investigate the market and try to find a simple product that’s missing. Browse, look around, do a heap of research, and finally decide on something that I can get an investor interested in. I.e., do something on a bigger scale than any of the other projects.
6. Finish my book. I think I could put together a decent fantasy novel, and I love writing…in theory. Okay, this is no entrepreneurial enterprise, but it would still be interesting.

What I’m going to do now is print this page, hang it on the wall, throw darts to select three of the six items…and ignore all of this for now, and have a cup of tea and a slice of pan pizza instead. I need to re-design my websites and finish Wildhollow before any of this, either way.

After a short vacation I find myself filled with energy and inspiration, so what better way to spend it than to improve Wildhollow, the strange adventure/management game I’m working on? The general game code is pretty solid by now, but I’ve had some really irritating issues regarding the GUI art.

1. My placeholder GUI art has been atrocious, which makes me unwilling to work on the GUI parts.
2. In order to improve the GUI art I need to find an artist for all the general design/icons/buttons details.
3. But in order to show artists what I need, I ought to have a working game with placeholder art that they can improve.
4. Which I’m of course not keen on doing since it looks like crap.

Now, this is a nice pickle! A pickle of the catch 22 flavour.

Sooo, what would a sensible person do? Find an artist that one can have an open dialogue with, in order to build the GUI alongside the GUI art?

Hell no. Why take the easy route when one can spend an unnecessary amount of time on making slightly-less-worse placeholder art in order to get inspired enough to work on the GUI! That said, I’ll just show some work in progress screenshots from the game:

Look! A title screen! With lots of sparkles that aren’t very visible here. And some weird buttons. I was going for a “semi-bark-looking” theme for the interface. Meh. I’ll dig up some wood textures and see what else I can come up with later.

Our hero is about to finish the first quest: find and bring back Barber Jack’s glasses that he dropped at Zachary’s place when he was trimming some animals. Oh yeah. A sweet $20 reward awaits…

Wildhollow Ranch is destroyed! Solve quests in order to collect cash; after rebuilding the ranch you can buy and breed animals. My goal is that the player should be able to solve some quests, do a first repair of the ranch, and crossbreed his first set of animals within one hour. Why one hour? Because that’s where the demo time limit will run out, and sneaky me thinks that this will be enough of a teaser to make people want to play more…

I’m the first person to admit that this is all very experimental. I have no idea if this concept will work, or if people will shun the game. Shun! Shuuuuunnnnnnnnnnnn…..