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  HappyPonyGate London 02:47 PM -- Fri November 9, 2007  

I recently got the newly released game, which for purposes of this website we shall call HappyPonyGate: London. I like it, I have decided. Here are some assorted thoughts on this game:
  • It's very buggy. They had to hit that Halloween release date, and so they released it with some major issues. That seems somehow familiar to me... but mine's not nearly as bad as what they've got. Lots of people can't even play it!
  • The icons really stand out to me. Or rather, they don't. The icons and whole interface (like your skills and such) are really awful. Very desaturated and blah, and the fonts they use there look like test artwork, not a complete game. This is one thing where I look at it and go "These might be the makers of Diablo 2, but they clearly aren't Blizzard." Blizzard makes awesome icons and interfaces. You look at a skill icon in a Blizzard game and you go "I want that skill! It's so colorful and juicy!" These skill icons are just muddy. Of course, Blizzard also wouldn't have released a broken game. They'd have taken another 3 years to get it polished to utter perfection.
  • The overall gameplay reminds me a lot of City Of Heroes. It's a very different game, but there's all these little things that just feel like City Of Heroes. When you use a skill, it shrinks down and gradually grows back up to size before it's ready again. The maps are randomly generated, but composed of very familiar pieces you quickly learn to recognize. Even the style of the maps themselves feel like ones from City Of Heroes, just darker. Other things too, it's weird. Just a feel.
  • There are moments where I feel absolutely that I am playing House Of The Dead. I was walking up this staircase in a museum and all these zombies were coming down the stairs as I fired away with a machine gun... that was pure House Of The Dead. And that's good, it's fun!
  • It made me jump last night, so bad my hand came off the mouse. There are these demons that can pop up from the floor, roaring as they do so of course. I know they're coming, I met them all over the place already, but my mind wandered and I was thinking about other stuff when one popped up behind me!
  • I originally thought this would play very much like an RPG that just happens to be in the first person viewpoint. But that is totally not true. It really plays like an FPS (depending on your chosen class), and that's what it feels like. But then there's the tons and tons of RPG stuff to it with all the random gear to go through, and the skills to upgrade and all. It's a true blend.
  • There are a ton of really unique weapons in the game. Normally in an RPG, you choose whether you want the sword of fire, or the sword of ice. In this game, it's not just stats and that stuff, your decisions are also based on the actual functionality of the weapon. You can equip a rocket launcher that sets an area of the floor on fire, a gun that shoots a swarm of wasps that home in and gradually devour everything around, a laser beam that does almost no damage but holds enemies in place, a sniper rifle, and so on. And of course, if the weapons are one-handed, you can combine any pair of them. It's like in an FPS where you have an array of weapons to choose from, only you get to upgrade them and outfit them with special mods to do different things. Like I said, a true blend! Sure makes playing the swordfighting class dull by comparison - unlike everyone else, they do the standard RPG choices (at least they can use a grappling hook in their offhand for a little fun).
  • There are 6 character classes, but it's painfully obvious that there were originally only 3. The 6 are divided into 3 pairs, which are basically just 2 different 'builds' of the same character. That really limits your creativity, and you don't have a ton of skill choices. I would've liked to be able to decide how much of the two sides I was interested in and combine them. Maybe find a clever combo.
  • It has "Achievements", like Gallery Goals! For example, destroy 1000 crates (I forgot to mention, there are just hundreds of destructible objects all around the levels, many of which explode. This greatly adds to the fun), or reach level 10 in 4 hours. It's fun to have goals to shoot for.
  • Speaking of goals to shoot for, it also has a 'mini-game'. It shows little icons in the corner of the screen, 3 things that it wants you to do. These can be things like 'inflict toxic damage on an enemy' or 'kill a Beast' (that's beast as opposed to demon, ghost, or undead - different general classes of enemy) or 'get a critical hit'. Each one has a number on it, and each time you do that thing, the number goes down. When you get all 3 of them to 0, you get a prize and a new set of goals! It's just a fun little thing you can completely ignore, or you can get into it and try hard to complete it. Once I finally learned how it works, I started stockpiling weapons that do different kinds of damage, so I could complete those damage-type goals.
  • All in all, it hasn't grabbed me like Diablo 2, but I am really having a lot of fun playing it. Just the general mayhem of running around and shooting everything is fun, so it all works out. It's rough around the edges, but it seems like they're working really fast to get it to where it should've been at release. It's already been substantially enhanced since I got it on Tuesday.
Them's my thoughts. Think I'll go check it out some more.
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  Patchier and Patchier 07:43 PM -- Tue November 6, 2007  

And of course, within a few hours of the patch release, people were already reporting more issues. So I'm working on that. And, hush hush, I'm working on a super awesome bonus for this new version. A whole new gameplay element that I have been enjoying today while I test it, and 5 more goals (not 5 more comics though, but there are ... things to see as a reward. They're ... informative?).

I don't know when I'll release this patch. That same balance thing I talked about yesterday comes into play - the longer I wait, the more bugs get reported, but also the longer the game is imperfect so people can get into trouble. It's a tough call.

One word, people: electrofishing.
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  Patchy Pants 10:59 AM -- Mon November 5, 2007  

Get the Sleepless Hollow patch if you own it!

I hate having to patch games. It always happens... Inevitably, when you open the game up to a wider audience (from the select few testers it started with), you've got tons more eyeballs and fingers crawling over it, and they end up getting into places none of the smaller group ever did. If I had vast riches, I could hire hundreds of testers, and I'd be simulating that wide audience to begin with. But on my budget, a few is all you get! Of course, in this particular case, it didn't help that we were under an extreme deadline. From start to finish, this game took 2 months, all testing included. The testing actually went on while the game was being developed, which was another tricky aspect. Still, it worked out really well (guess it helped that it's a modified version of a game that is known to work well!). Except for one issue, which I still can't figure out the explanation for (the missing yellow key - I played this game to 100% completion without cheating, so I don't know what that's about! Well, I made some changes while I played, so it must have been somehow in there), it's all just ways to mess up the puzzles that I hadn't accounted for.

I'm sure more will be discovered over time, but I had to balance between waiting until a good proportion of the issues were discovered, and getting it out quickly to save people from the pain. That's the balance you have with a patch. If I had shot it out right away as soon as the first bug was announced, I'd have patched it daily since release! That would drive people nuts (me most of all), and just complicate matters, not to mention being a whole lot of work on my end.
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  DumbWords! 10:09 PM -- Sun November 4, 2007  

Hey, if you haven't seen it yet, you need to get in on DumbWords. It's the latest game here, and it won't take up more than 20 seconds of your time once a day, so come by and do it every day! You will win Yerfbucks and trophies, and it is fun to do. The rules are very simple, so go check them out! You of course need a Dumb Account to play. You'll always find it on the Dumb Folks section of the site, so just hit it every day, and see how you are doing!

It's the first of the web games to grace Hamumuland. This one is designed for everybody to just casually drop by each day, but there will someday be others with different concepts, like ones you sign up for a specific session, or drop in and play real-time. More games, trophies, avatars, and other fun stuff will continue to appear on the site. I hope you like this game though, and I hope you get hooked! A game like this is only fun when lots of people participate.

On the more tragic side, we've got our new Chatroom available now, and really it's not working so well. It kicks people out a lot, and sometimes locks people from getting in. It's all we've got for the moment, but hopefully someday we'll have something better or it will get upgraded. In the meantime, come visit - it's connected to the forum (you can access it from the Quick Links menu at the top of the forum), and so you are automatically logged in when you enter. I may actually end up having to shut it down, because I've been having some real issues with pages loading today and I'm afraid it relates to the bandwidth and CPU time that the chat is using up, but we'll see. I have problems with the inernet occasionally!

And hey, bookmark DumbWords! You've gotta hit it every day.
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  Driving Through The Apocalypse 11:28 PM -- Mon October 22, 2007  

As you've probably heard if you are an Earthican, Southern California is currently vaporizing. I was actually away in Chicago this weekend when it all went down. We flew in this afternoon, while half of the state was disabled, and people were being evacuated left and right. In our quest to learn which parts of the freeway would actually operate, we ended up getting directed to a refugee shelter in the airport. We could've spent the day and the night right there, with free snacks and blankets and pillows, but from what I heard, not necessarily a cot. There were only about five people there at that time. And a drug-sniffing dog (not sniffing for drugs, just hanging out and whining to go outside). Instead we spent about half an hour there watching the news and looking up google maps (free wifi in the airport!). We finally decided on a route we could probably use to get to our house. Our house was not in the line of fire, thankfully. Still, we didn't have any proof that all the roads involved would be open, but we gave it a shot!

It took 3 hours, and it really felt like the end of the world. Only a couple of times we saw fire burning off on the hilltops in the distance, but driving out there in the gathering dark, into a wilderness we didn't recognize, with the radio droning on about evacuations and shelters... it felt like we were driving to our bomb shelter after WW3 (which is probably a bit late to be heading for a bomb shelter). We ran across (but not into) one roadblock along our way - we chose our route well! Just skirting the blocked roads, we swept around the endangered zones for 3 hours and ended up at home. It was a long trip, but a great relief to get home to our happy and healthy animals, and not see any fire or even smoke in sight (well, it was night time). Let's just hope the winds don't turn things around and bring it all back here.

There is still concern to be had - my parents' house, and my cousin's house, are both in areas that have been evacuated. So we don't know how those houses are doing. The people who occupy them are safely out, though.

What a weird day.
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  The Wonders Of Vista 05:29 PM -- Sat September 29, 2007  

Not enough people singing the praises of Vista, so I'll drop a quick note here to do so. I was working on some code today, and I tried to save my work, as I so often do. It gave me an error saying I didn't have permission to write the file. I thought that was odd, and tried a bunch more times to no avail. I checked it out, tried copying the file, and changing the properties. Nothing would let me mess with the file. One thing I certainly did NOT try was deleting it. Because that would've been stupid, of course. I needed that file. Badly. I tried shutting down any programs that might be using the file, but nothing worked. Finally, I figured I should reboot and see if it is usable then, but I took one last look in the folder first. And what do you know? The file was GONE. Deleted, I guess. By Windows. That is definitely a first for me. I rebooted and looked again, and it is very very gone.

So for the past couple of hours I've been messing with undelete programs to absolutely no avail, and then I checked my backup drive (checked it last, since I knew it had been weeks at least since I had done that), and I've never backed this file up. So here I go, off to rewrite the file (not actually from scratch - this project is a modified version of one of my earlier games... but there were some major changes to that code!). Let's see what I can remember, and what strange bugs creep in from things I forgot I modified.

I really didn't need to have a big delay in this particular project, for reasons you can guess. But the lesson is what it always is. Back up, back up, back up. That lesson will stick for a week or two, I guess.
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  Bodging's Hard, Everybody 01:03 PM -- Wed September 26, 2007  

Progress on the website front... as of sometime last week, I am officially now the hold-up. I have my merchant account fully set up and working, I just don't have it implemented into the site yet. But as of today, I almost have that too! We will have NEWMUMU sometime in October, for sure! I've also gotten lots of CDs shipped direct to me, for future shipping out direct to you. So CD purchasing shall return with the new site, and it will be efficient and cheap, with no nasty surprises. I like being back to having an office full of CDs, it feels so much more Hamumuey.

And sorry about the Dumb: The Game thing... still waiting for a reply on that, but fingers are crossed. Worst case, I'll just have to empty it out and let you start from scratch. Not so bad with that game, you can just remember what the answers were and get back to your previous place. But hopefully I can get the backup restored.

And of course, work continues on my Best Halloween Ever surprise. You better be working on yours too! Mine will surprise you with surprisitude. And while you're at it, work on a Halloween Horror 8 world too. Don't neglect those duties. Feel free to neglect your non-Hamumu duties.
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  Apple Update 09:43 PM -- Sat September 22, 2007  

Relative success! Would you like to make Apple Fries? Since no one else on the internet actually has a recipe for these, I will provide one! Here's some keywords to help searchers end up on this page, so they don't suffer like I did: Legoland, apple fries, Granny, vanilla cream sauce

Legolandesque Apple Fries
  • 3 Granny Smith Apples
  • 1 Egg
  • 1 1/2 Tablespoons butter
  • 1 1/2 Tablespoons flour
  • 1 1/2 Tablespoons sugar
  • Milk of indeterminate measure
  • Cinnamon-sugar to sprinkle
  • Lots of vegetable/canola/peanut oil (whatever you like to fry in)
Peel the apples and core them. Slice into small, fry-shaped pieces. This is easiest to do the way we did it - with one of those apple coring things that automatically cuts it into 8 or so slices and removes the core. But you will definitely need to cut those slices each into several smaller ones. You want small, McDonald's-fry-sized pieces. You can also do steak fries, but I found them best when smaller.
Melt the butter in a bowl in the microwave, on low settings so that it doesn't actually get very hot, just melted. Then mix in the egg, flour, and sugar. Get it all mixed up nicely, and add milk until it's a nice thin pancake batter consistency.
Heat up some oil in a pot. In order to not have a huge mess to deal with, I used a really tiny pot, and didn't even fill it very deeply. It's quite possible to deep-fry in just a little oil as long as you do a small amount of food at a time, and use a small container so it actually stays deep! I've done a lot of frying, and if you haven't, don't be afraid. It really is a very easy way to cook, if very unhealthy. The only downside is the huge pile of dirty oil you end up having to throw away at the end (and usually dredge junk out of several times during the cooking). Now you just dip the apple slices in the goo (a few at a time), drop them in the oil and fry until they're a nice golden brown. Take the slices out and let them drain on paper towels. Sprinkle the cinnamon-sugar on them while they drain, so it will stick. Delicious!
Now, for "vanilla cream sauce", I don't have a very precise recipe for you, but it sure was yummy: cream cheese (block, not spready), warmed up so it's mixable, mixed with a couple drops of vanilla and some powdered sugar. Not too much powdered sugar, or you've made cream cheese frosting! Stir it up good, and dip your apples in it, and enjoy immensely.

These fries don't seem to be as crisp or as thickly-coated as the Legoland ones, but I sure enjoyed them.

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  APPLE FRIES 05:26 PM -- Mon September 17, 2007  

HAMUMU SOFTWARE IS PLEASED TO ANNOUNCE...

APPLE FRIES!


Now, Apple Fries have nothing whatsoever to do with Hamumu Software, but we are still very pleased to announce them anyway, because yum. What are apple fries? Well, they're like fries, only they're APPLES! And they come with 'creamy vanilla sauce' (I think that means cool whip with vanilla mixed in), and are rolled in cinnamon sugar. You probably have never heard of apple fries, and you know why not? Because you'd have to pay $57 to get in to where you could bear witness to their wonderment! Yes, Apple Fries are available only at Legoland (as far as I know). Worth their inflated $5ish price? Absolutely. Worth paying $57 to get to? Well...

Anyway, we went to Legoland yesterday on a whim (the plan was to go to the beach, but Legoland was right there). As you may have surmised, we discovered the amazing world of Apple Fries while we were there. I also discovered how evil corporations can be as I paid $57 (each!) to get into a "park" which was nothing but an advertisement for a product. We had fun, though. Not $57 fun, but fun. We looked at lots of intriguing sculptures, and ate apple fries, and that's all. The only ride we did was a boat ride that takes you around to see intriguing sculptures. We got in line for a roller coaster which I was excited about, but we got out of line when we watched its entire run take place over the span of no more than 20 seconds, and I am so not exaggerating. I didn't even know you could make a coaster that small.

And yes, I bought legos at an exorbitant price. A remote-controlled dinosaur that I am hoping will frighten/amuse the cats when it is done. So the propaganda worked, and doubled the amount we paid overall. It's sad. Oh, besides sculptures, we did get to see lego factory thingies, which were interesting. Seeing how they make them, a bit. There's a lot of stuff there that would be fun if you were a small person, like rides for the wee, and a driving test, and the coolest was a room where you build a lego car, and then run it on a track (downhill - no power involved), and see how you stack up. But still, don't bring your kids there... save your $57 and buy them some legos!

Note: You are supposed to refer to legos only as "Lego bricks or toys" (probably with a little circled R at the end of Lego). I ain't doing it!!!

Note 2: I want more Apple Fries, RIGHT NOW.
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  Just a note 12:53 PM -- Wed August 29, 2007  

Now all Sneak Peeks are contained here, in the Journal! They're also still in the Sneak Peeks. Just doing this for the new site. Since the Journal and Sneak Peek are actually the same thing in almost every way, and neither gets posted in often enough, I'm merging them on the new site. Let me know if you spot anything that went wrong with the merge!
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