Highscore Underachiever

In case you haven't figure it out yet... Highscore Chronicles in done!
Hopefully in another decade I'll have another battery of images from
odd projects to show you. Until then, you'll just have to do with the
following news:

Attack of the Blue Stickmen remake is coming soon. Details are on their way.

This is a reduced-resolution version of the cover of a book I wrote
last year, a rule book for a pen-and-paper RPG system called "Mune"
(pronounced 'moon'). I was planning on publishing the book through an
on-demand publishing service, but some things came up and I ultimately
decided to withhold the book.

The purpose of Mune was to serve as an introductory RPG -- something
younger kids could play, and something you could enjoy over beer and
pretzels. In fact, the original name for Mune was "BNP RPG" --
Beer-N-Pretzels.

The book clocks in at about 200 pages or so, and most of that consists
of a walkthrough and an example scenario (complete with maps).

This is my "Big Black Box of Game S***". It is not a women's makeup
case. Not anymore, anyway. No makeup here -- just several decks of
standard playing cards; rule books of miscellaneous card/dice games;
and a bucketload of dice of various shapes and sizes. Who needs a
"manbag" when you have one of these bad boys?

Today's image (which would have been yesterday's image, had I not only
just awakened from an epic 24-hour 'nap') is an 'updated' version of
the map editor for a game (which was previously featured in Highscore
Chronicle 8 -- Watch Your Step) I wrote in college.

This is the first map editor I'd ever written. Every different tile
type could be given special attributes to affect how they worked (the
Teleporter tile, for example, could be set up to take you to any floor
in the game based on its settings).

The maps could be explored using the 'DX' version of the game player
module, which was similar to the previous one shown in Chronicle 8.
(As a bit of extra trivia, the name of this series of map-editing
tools, 'FabMap', is short for "Fabricator of Maps".)

Being that I slept through yesterday, and am only posting yesterday's
Chronicle today, I will wait for tomorrow before posting the Chronicle
for today. See you tomorrow for today's Chronicle!

This is my first game (that wasn't a class project) written in college
when I was taking my first programming class. The game is a play on
the classic "Pong", with some added spice: With each hit against a
player's paddle, the ball speeds up, until the trail behind it catches
on fire, as seen in the image.

The first game I wrote in class was an actual assignment where we were
to create a simple three-digit slot machine. Of course, by the time
I'd finished the project, I had made the end result look like an
actual slot machine, with light-up animations, an arm you could use to
pull the slots, and even a secret cheat panel.

The first game I *ever* write was a simple text-driven adventure game.
I wrote it on a Commodore 64 when I was probably eight or nine, in the
BASIC programming language.

This image depicts two scenes related to my first-ever Web comic,
called "Silhouette: Web Noir". On the left side is a flavor scene from
the promos, while on the right is the last frame of the first (and
only) episode, which I believe was released in 2001.

The basic idea: Jake is a denizen of a city shrouded in a fog that
obscures people's faces, as well as their intentions. After being
dumped by his girlfriend (who took his beloved cappuccino maker
along), Jake wanders off to a bar to get some liquor (all his was
taken by his ex), and ends up dodging bullets just before becoming
involved in a conspiracy that has kept the city darkened for decades.

Silhouette was intended to have a sort of "Cowboy Bebop" sort of style
as far as the main character was concerned, and the story itself was
to carry itself out in a sort of modern Film Noir style.

This image pairs two views of a 3D landscape program I wrote in 2009.
The top half of the image shows the landscape (generated from a
height-map -- which is kind of like an infrared image, but for land
height) from afar. The bottom half shows the landscape from close up.

I didn't get to the point where I could add things like water to the
scene and so on, unfortunately. If I recall correctly, this was the
last project I was working on just before my old laptop kicked the
bucket. It was going along well until then...

This collage of sorts represent two scenes constructed in a simple 3D
engine I was working on back in 2008. The name of the engine was
"Brickhouse", as it basically worked like LEGO bricks -- you specified
what kind of block to put where, and that was that.

Today's image is of a tattoo I designed back in 2001 as a favor to a
college friend. The tattoo I designed was to have a Yin-Yang symbol
with some simple (but still stylish) markings that could go around the
arm like a band. This is what I came up with.

Superimposed in the image is a photo of the actual tattoo as it
appears on my friend's arm. The band part of the tattoo had to wait
until after the picture was taken, I assume because he needed to
gather the rest of the money to complete the design.

This is a screen shot from one of my more recent games, Spacite. It is
fully HTML5-powered, allowing users of modern Web browsers to play
without the need of plug-ins -- just JavaScript.

This is actually my first 'real' HTML5 game, and took me a couple
weeks to finish. It basically plays like classic 'Asteroids', except
there are no big space-rocks -- just different types of ships that
shoot various projectiles at you.

The game is still available for play on my Web site:
http://theraje.camendesign.com/webgames/spacite/index.html