Minalien.com » Programming

Web experiment: ASP.NET MVC 3 vs Rails 3.2.3 vs CakePHP 2.1

Ken — Thu, 19 Apr 2012 00:02:46 +0000

At the moment, I’m still waiting on my computer equipment to make its way across the country to reach me at my new apartment. In the mean time, I’ve come up with a new experiment to play around with – this time, in the web development department. In this experiment, I’m going to take three popular MVC frameworks and pit them against each other in developing a feature-light Message Board system.

Each system will use the same logic behind the application itself, varying only in language (C#/Ruby/PHP) and convention where needed by the framework. Each site will be deployed and tested on two servers:

1) Microsoft IIS 7.5 running on my desktop computer (when it arrives).
2) Debian 6.0 running on my Linode.

Each will use MySQL 5 for database storage, gravatar for storing off-site user avatars, jQuery & jQuery UI, Sass stylesheets and will focus on a completely RESTful execution style. I will be discussing the effort involved in establishing development tools for each of these, their execution speed, ease of development (with regard to how intuitive working with the MVC framework is), and ease of deployment (to both Apache 2 and IIS 7.5). I will also be making the source code for these projects open for scrutiny – so people a little more familiar with each of the frameworks can yell at me about what I messed up that caused their framework of choice to fair worse than the others. :3

Gameplay Experiment: Attacking

Ken — Thu, 12 Apr 2012 12:21:48 +0000

Just as a little update on the Gameplay Experiment, I’m currently working on implementing an attack system. Mitsu’s given me the first of the attack animations, so I’m working on how best to implement them into the 3D Sprite system, as well as building toward a more Paper Mario-like “flip” when switching from left to right and back. Even though I don’t move for another couple of days, I’m shipping the majority of my stuff off tomorrow – so I probably won’t make much progress until after I get to my new apartment. If I get anything new ready and working, I’ll try to get it up before I tear my computers down!

Gameplay Experiment progress

Ken — Tue, 10 Apr 2012 13:17:22 +0000

For anybody interested in my gameplay experiment (http://minalien.com/experimental-gameplay-paper-zelda/), I’ve completed the sprite animation component and fixed up the movement scheme. Mitsu from Zelda Fan Game Central is doing a great job of providing quality sprite art for the project, and progress on the experiment should pick up a lot after this week!

Looking for 2D Artist for Experimental Gameplay Project

Ken — Sun, 08 Apr 2012 12:20:46 +0000

While crawling across the great Interwho, I started watching a few gameplay videos for Super Paper Mario on YouTube. While I haven’t played the game itself, the three-dimensional gameplay looks like something that would be interesting to play around with from a design and development perspective.

What I’m looking for is a 2D artist capable of knocking out a small sprite sheet for a Link-like character (Legend of Zelda) in a Super Paper Mario graphics style for use in an experimental gameplay project. If it turns out to be entertaining enough to begin development beyond a simple gameplay experiment, I’d love to play with the idea as a small adventure game- but at the very least, it would make for an interesting addition to a development portfolio for anybody involved in the experiment.

If there’s anybody interested, I’m mostly looking for the following:

Movement animations (back/front view). I’ll leave it to any interested artists to decide whether or not they want to include a sword/shield.
Attack animations to match with movement animations.
One minor enemy sheet, I’m not too concerned about the complexity of its animations – something along the lines of Super Paper Mario‘s goombas will work wonderfully.

Until I can find an artist, I’m going to push forward with the experiment using graphic rips from A Link to the Past or Minish Cap, but I think having appropriate graphics would do much more justice to determining the feel of the gameplay.