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New blog engine, now in betaOr: how I wasted a week of "vacation"Jul-27-09, 2:52 am by Hanford | Read full postFile under: tech You're reading the first official post on my new blog -- Actually, it's all the content of my old blog but running in a completely new blog engine. Yes, I decided to ditch Wordpress. I had been thinking about dropping Wordpress for a while. I never felt fully comfortable with Wordpress. I always felt like the path to extending it was a bit more roundabout than I wanted it to be. Just a little bit more indirection (and therefore learning curve) than I wanted. Wordpress always did a good job, and I will still recommend it to others looking for a blog engine. But for me, I wanted to dig a little bit deeper into customization without having to deal with the ins and outs of WP's plugin framework*. And then my blog got exploited by a black hat SEO script.It's completely my fault for not upgrading Wordpress, and I take full responsibility for that. But afterward, my thoughts were not "well, I gotta upgrade", but instead "Now's the time to ditch Wordpress". So what blog engine did I switch my blog to?I wrote my own from scratch. Not even a framework. It's straight PHP and MySQL. It was pretty straight forward, and a lot of fun, taking probably 20 to 30 hours and counting ... it's still not done!The best part is that the end result means I am pretty much in control of every little nuance of the site. It's very basic, but at the same time I have some plans for some special features that will make it more enjoyable to read, and make it easier (and therefore more frequent) for me to post. Beta late than neverAs of this writing, the site is a beta. Things will still be changing, especially the CSS files and little details with the layout. Some things I haven't even started on, like colors of links both new and visited. It typically takes me weeks of tweaking a design before I'm happy with it, so you'll be seeing things change a bit.Also, you'll notice some features are missing, like search. In time I'll be adding those missing features back in, but please let me know if there's something you'd like to see. * I did manage to successfully write a CAPTCHA plugin for Wordpress that my old blog used for several years. But no matter what I tried I couldn't figure out how to get the CAPTCHA gui to appear in-between the comment field and the submit button; it was always below. The end result was that the CAPTCHA gui felt bolted on, and outside of the normal tab sequence. That's a perfect example of what I'm talking about -- I just never quite got comfortable with Wordpress in a way where I felt like I could modify without backtracking or running into walls. More iPhone development strategyMar-30-09, 11:43 am by Hanford | Read full postFile under: Misc., Video games, Apple, tech I came across a blog post from Spiderweb founder/developer Jeff Vogel, who dishes out some thought-provoking iPhone development advice. Here's some snippets: There's a lesson for young developers. Make sure your game fits the way people will want to play it. PC Games = Longer sessions. iPhone Games = Ping. Zap! Done.I feel this sums up most of the reasons why I am not developing iPhone games. I don't want to make games that would play well and/or sell well on the iPhone. I don't want to take an idea I have and say "okay, now how do I make it work on the iPhone?" But my favorite line he bangs out is this: When someone can make a ton of money on an app that makes your iPhone fart, that should be your first warning of unsustainable sales.This is the final strike on the proverbial nail in the coffin for me. Because of the games I want to make don't fit the iPhone, I'd be hopping onto that platform and making a game simply for the hope of "hitting it big", and I just don't want to take the hobby that I love and channel the wrong kind of energy into it like that. Please read his full blog post. It's quite interesting. Unity scripting workflow and app layoutMar-20-09, 2:35 pm by Hanford | Read full postFile under: game design, Unity, tech This post it going to describe how I've transitioned from scripting in Director to Unity. Unity and Director have very different scripting workflows, so I thought this would be a good topic to cover for new users. Application layoutI use a two monitor setup. I have resisted dual monitors for years because they divide my attention, but monitors are so cheap now (I had a small one just laying around) it was an easy to hook one up and use it. Let's call the primary monitor monitor 1, and the secondary monitor 2. You can probably duplciate this setup with only one monitor by dividing your monitor in half for most of this. ContinuedUnity 3D for WindowsMar-18-09, 5:00 pm by Hanford | Read full postFile under: Misc., tech Unity for Windows is now live. It's fantastic; I hope to post more about it here soon. UV modelling tipMar-12-09, 1:31 pm by Hanford | Read full postFile under: Misc., tech UV modeling tip: fuck it and use atlas projection. Unity: Image resizing experimentsFeb-28-09, 5:22 pm by Hanford | Read full postFile under: Video games, Unity, tech I've been creating all my object texture sheets at 1024 by 1024 and using Unity's Max Texture Size setting to reduce them in the game based on quality and memory. I think this is a great technique because it allows you to make quality and memory decisions interactively throughout the development of your project. It's a lot easier to find the smallest texture size that still looks good directly inside of Unity rather than having to bounce between shrinking-and-saving in Photoshop and checking it out in Unity. Beyond that, you can keep them all at 1024 by 1024 during development, then change settings based on your target download footprint for beta. But yesterday I noticed something with a text graphic (warning! programmer art). Here's the original on the model at 1024 by 1024: 
Now here it is with with the Max Texture Size set to 256:  ContinuedTwitter meFeb-26-09, 4:56 pm by Hanford | Read full postFile under: Misc., fun, tech I've been on Twitter for a while now, and if you can't get enough Hanford Lemoore action from this blog, check me out on Twitter. Random textureFeb-6-09, 2:41 am by Hanford | Read full postFile under: Misc., fun Working on some textures for a game, and it accidentally came out like this. Not the way it's going to be when it's done, but I thought I'd post it because I it looks neat.  All the kidz are into Henny Youngman these days ...Jan-18-09, 4:27 pm by Hanford | Read full postFile under: Video games, tech, fun  Randomly found this 80s Congo Bongo commerical featuring a Henny Youngman soundalike(?) telling non-jokes about the game to canned laughter. I totally remember this from back in the day, when isometric graphics mesmerized me. What mesmerizes me now is how anyone, even back in the 80s, could think that Henny Youngman would be a great way to sell video games. Unity: Simple state-save for pick-up objects in gamesDec-14-08, 5:22 pm by Hanford | Read full postFile under: Video games, game design, Unity, tech Now that I'm working with Unity full-time, I'm having a lot of fun learning the system, and it's pros and cons. I'm still unsure of the best strategy to do big save-games, but I'm not too worried about that for my first game. But I want to make save/load data easy to use when building levels. This post will show you one simple way to do that. Continued   |
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I make things. From consumer electronics, to video games, to theme park attractions. Perhaps I can make things for you! Check out my portfolio. When I'm not making things for other people, I'm usually experimenting.
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