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.

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.

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!

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.

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.