Disjointed Blog

Whew. Well, it took quite a bit longer than we anticipated, not the least of which because of my new post over at ACen.org. I’m now working on the webmaster team, and helped configure their store for a short merchandise sale for the holidays.

As you can see, we’ve now got almost the full catalog of buttons available for purchase (there are still convention exclusives that are only available in person), along with photo examples of all the options.

If you have any questions, please contact us!

As you may have notice both the disjointedimages.com and disjointedcode.com sites are down for maintenance currently.  We apologize for the inconvenience.  We are in the process of migrating from Drupal 5 to Drupal 6 and also integrating all of our pages into Drupal.  This is taking a bit longer than first anticipated due to minor differences between the two versions of Drupal.  We will have the site back up and running in a basic capacity in the next few days and plan to be fully functional shortly there after.  Thank you for your patience.

Phew – quite the time gap between posts. To quickly fill you in: we decided very last minute to throw together a WEDDING with no budget, little time, and a big dream. That pretty much ate up any spare time we had. It was however a lovely wedding, and everything went perfectly.

Not long after we came back from our honeymoon, it was time to get everything together for Youmacon. It was a great weekend, lots of our fan/customers coming by to see the new designs, and a few new people too. I got to draw a squirrel, a goat with a monocle, a wolf, and will forever be haunted by the epic man nipples. (You had to be there…)

We had an even greater response to the current release of the game, which made me float with happiness. Thank you to everyone who tried, commented, and (yay!) bought a copy!

As Chris mentioned, the next release will be Linux, and shortly after that we will start putting out some of the expanded rewards and tiles.

I am also oh so excited to announce that I have been accepted on staff for ACEN. I will be assisting with both the website and Artist’s Alley. This delights me to no end; as many of you know, I am a people pleaser, and to be part of the workings the make ACEN what it is for so many just really makes me smile.

Of course, this doesn’t give me any slack on keeping you guys entertained with more humorous buttons each year, and fret not, as I am hard at work with quite a few new designs.

Please look for us next at Animarathon in Ohio.

Version 1.6 was launched at Youmacon this past weekend.  It unfortunately did not include the new scripting engine, characters or extra rewards.  As I had posted earlier these additions were going to require a substantial amount of time to code/model and would have pushed 1.6 well past the convention date.  So I had to make a tough choice and move them to 1.7 in order to show many of the other improvements that I have made so far.  I want to thank the individuals who purchased MahJong House 1.6 at the con.  As promised to early adopters I have created a patch to update all previous versions to 1.6, I will be posting it to the website this weekend.

Work on 1.7 will commence as soon as 1.6 is finished for Linux and launched.  This will mark the first official Linux release.  I hope to have it live by the end of next week.

It’s been a while since the last progress post on MahJong House.  This was mostly due to the change in our store software, making the switch meant having to pause development on the game.  Things are now back in full swing however, and there are many new features and ideas coming to the table.  Some of the changes may seem small in the scheme of things, but I think they add to the overall feel of the interface and impressions of quality.  Such as the improved text entry field for creating new players.  In the next update it will now allow for text selection with either mouse or keyboard, not to mention it actually has a blinking cursor now.  Other changes include a vast improvement in text rendering, allowing for proper letter spacing and kerning now.  A recode of the video playback system that fully supports Vista/Windows7 and other minor improvements to the menu.

The big changes will be coming in the form of a remodeled room, several new reward items and most importantly a character interaction element.  This is the biggest change to the game since it’s inception and will bring both meaning and purpose to the reward system.  It will also help to flesh out the house and it’s occupants with story and artwork, which brings us to the current stage of development.  I am currently working on the character design.  This is a slower process than pounding out code and will delay the release of the 1.6 update by several weeks.  I do plan to publish the new version before the deadline for the IGF contest as I will be competing this year with MahJong House.  I’ll make sure to post more updates as artwork and story begin to develop more.

The new store is up and running – and I have to take a few minutes to share my adoration for our new software that is running it: Ubercart.

Powered by Drupal, Ubercart is a free, open source e-commerce solution that allows for endless customization and integration with nearly any site. Even better, it requires little knowledge of php or sql etc to implement. Granted, I do know some of this and that only made the setup faster and even more fluid.

Prior, I was working with OsCommerce. A nice cart to be sure, but just way too code heavy, and requiring massive amount of rewriting of full php pages to make even minor changes. After over a year of having it up, I still felt I wasn’t close to having it look or act how I wanted. It wasn’t that it couldn’t be done, it was that I couldn’t afford the time it would take to do it.

So for anyone venturing into the online market, I highly recommend this piece of software. It will save you time and aspirin!

I recently heard about a new social site specifically geared to gamers: http://raptr.com/

After poking around and signing up, I found I was pleasantly surprised. It’s a very well made site, and shock of shocks, it works as advertised! You can find me at: http://raptr.com/disjointedimages

One of the downsides to developing a game, is that actually getting to play any is difficult. I’ve got quite a few recent and/or soon to be released games that I’d love to sit down with. Hopefully you’ll see my status update as I get that chance, along with further reviews here. Here’s my short lineup:

Tales of Monkey Island – C’mon! A new Monkey Island game?! I love it right there, at the title. Seriously, though. It looks like a great setup, and nice to see developers from the previous games on board. Even better…

The Secret of Monkey Island – Special Edition – A revamp and release of the original “started it all” Monkey Island game.

The Beatles: Rock Band (9-9-09) – This just goes without saying. First, it’s the Beatles. An amazing selection too from the Abbey Road album. By far, Rock Band has been the best return for my money hands down. I have the ION drum kit, and a lot of DLC music too, and even with that extra investment, I still find it worth every penny. So I have no qualms picking up a standalone game to be able to have that kind of fun with some of my favorite music.

Forza 3 (10-27-09) – A really nice looking game, and it’s been a while since I’ve had a new racing title. I look forward to this one.

I added the iTunes widget on the side, because nothing gets done in my office without music. I’ve always been a music lover, one of those choir geeks since elementary school, and yes, I can’t resist belting it out along with the singer.

As you can guess based on the list that’s there, I’ve got some wide ranging tastes. One of my favorite radio stations is CBC Radio 2. Though, with the format change, I don’t get to listen to enough of it when I’m on my way to work these days.

It’s a station based in Canada, and covers every possible genre over the course of the day. Tom Allen delights me with his personal chatter in the morning. Tonic has some great jazz (responsible for the Oh My My on that list), and Nightstream is like your subconscious playing DJ. Some of my favorite songs started with me staring at my radio wondering what the heck was playing!

Got a favorite song that I have to hear? Post it in the comments.

We have a new store! This one is much cleaner and easier to check out. For anyone who may have had difficulties before, I invite you over to the new shop.

Grand Re-Opening!

We have a new account system too! Now you can choose an easy to remember username.

You do not have to create an account to make a purchase, but by doing so, you will be able to save your shopping cart, and have all of your billing and shipping information pre-filled whenever you come back. You’ll also be able to receive exclusive updates and discount specials.

I’ve completely lost track of how many hours Melanie and I have spent on coding the new site and shopping cart system.

The good news is that all of our pages should be updated soon, including the launch of a new store front powered by Ubercart (review coming soon).  The bad news is that by working on the code I have renewed a burning hatred for Internet Explorer 6.  It’s complete inability to render even the simplest of CSS properly is enough to make me and the vast throngs of web developers spit fire!  That being said I believe we have fixed all of the things that are broken in IE6 (as long as you have javascript enabled) and can now claim full cross-browser compatibility.

I can’t wait to go live with the new shopping cart system.  It is a vast improvement over our current osCommerce based site, and allows for easy customizability.  Best of all it will now carry the same look and feel as our main site, a feat that would have taken untold volumes of effort and possibly a ritualistic sacrifice in osCommerce.

Now that we are close to finishing up this overhaul of our sites I will be able to get back to improving MahJong House!  We have lots of updates planed for the game, but I’ll leave the specifics on that for another post.