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A new direction for Earok.Net?

The other day I happened to stumble upon "Web sites that suck", which has an annual award for websites that are truly, pathetically awful, like this one (Open if you dare, it is safe for work, but shockingly awful in its design).

They also have a list of the biggest mistakes in web design, and, I have to admit, reading through that list has made me have serious doubts about the current way this site is set up.

Not so much with how the site looks; I generally get positive feedback about that, one person going so far as to refer to it as "almost professional" (thanks to the really cool Drupal theme I picked). However I have made some serious mistakes with the actual content and layout of the website.

This website is very "me" centric. The home page of the site is my personal blog. On the menu bar there is a link to both an 'About' page and a 'Contact' page. There are also links to my games, and the image link shows some screenshots and photos of mine.

But it should not be "me" centric, it should be "you" centric. It should provide a service for the overwhelmingly high proportion of people on the Internet who don't know or care about me. The service I can provide is access to the games that I have helped make, so that should be the primary focus of the website.

Also, I think there is a lot of good game-design related content on the site: Advice, reviews of free content creation tools, interviews with Indie game designers, useful articles posted on other websites and so on. But I haven't done many of these sorts of posts recently, and whats more this content isn't advertised or easily accessible (unless you already know about it and go digging for it). It needs to be presented in a logical fashion.

So, I'm planning to have a major re-arrangement of the menus and content of this site to be more interesting and useful in general. I have some ideas, but I can't quite piece it all together yet. Any suggestions would be gratefully appreciated.

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Curly's World of Freeware interviews Earok

Curly's World of Freeware interviewed me about the development of Derelict and my games in general.

Misc update

(Edit - Forgot to put this on the front page. Little bit out of date as I'm already in the South Island)

1. Going to head down to the South Island tomorrow for a few weeks, it's for work but fortunately I'll be able to catch up with family and friends back home, as well as meet my Niece for the first time. I can't wait!

2. Regarding my last post, at the time I felt frustrated with myself over my lack of progress with game development but I'm over that now. Still taking a break from actively programming games but I expect to get back into it within a month or so. Since making that post I received some nice messages from collaborators and the people who play my games, re-established contact with a few members of the Derelict team, and been interviewed by Christian at Curly's World of Freeware (Interview hopefully will be online soon!) all of which helped my confidence. Thanks guys!

3. Just today I was informed about a free Game Design course being run through a blog (Hat tip: arran4). While unfortunately I don't have the neccessary textbooks (Challenges for Game Designers, Understanding Comics and A Theory of Fun) and can't get them on time, I thought passively observing the course and discussions might be a good way of getting me back into making games. There's more info about it here.

4. I have been mentally planning my next game, which will be an anime inspired fun Mecha FPS. Though unlike "Blow Stuff Up" (or any of my other games, for that matter!) it will have an actual plot and the gameplay focus will be on hardcore Robot-on-Robot action. I plan to draft out the story first, and then produce a one level prototype with stand in graphics (The mechas will probably be rendered in Wolfenstein-esque sprites!).

5. Joined Twitter the other day to experiment with it. Though I was initially quite skeptical about it I'm having fun with it and I can use it to advertise my site updates. You can follow my latest tweets either directly through twitter or through the panel on the right hand side of my site.

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Projects

It's been awhile since I made a blog post about my game projects. I haven't actually made progress on any projects either since releasing the Earok Editor.

I seem to have lost both the time and the motivation for making games. I'm getting less and less time to myself where I can sit down for a few hours without distractions or prior commitments to actually churn something out, and my motivation is suffering from a long lack of contact with anyone interested in my projects. Making games has always been my passion, but lately it just feels, pointless.

So, I'm going to go on a hiatus from game development for the time being.

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Uncle Earok

About six months ago I announced that my partner Kirsty had become an Auntie, and what's more I disagreed with her assertion that I was now an Uncle.

It's funny how fate had a way of making her right. A few months down the track I am now absolutely, undeniably, an Uncle. Introducing Elizabeth Lilly Hogan.

Elizabeth was born at 4:16am on Monday the 8th. She is the first child of my brother Philip and his fiancée Samantha. Kirsty and I will be going down to visit them in Greymouth later this month.

I wish them all the best and a bright, happy future together.

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Remember that bonus level from Street Fighter II?

Hat tip The Escapist

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Bug report and feature request flow

This is a sort-of sequel to my post on my theorised Game design stack, covering how I feel is the ideal way to handle bug reports and feature requests during development of a game.

Earok interviews Jonatan Söderström, aka Cactus

Jonatan Söderström, also known as Cactus, is a popular freeware game designer noted for his highly unique and imaginative art games. Both myself and some of my readers are huge fans of his work, so I worked up the courage to ask for an interview, and he was kind enough to provide one.

"Meat Market" by Transit of Venus

Transit of Venus, originally a solo project by Kristie Addison (the composer of Derelict's title song Enemy) has become a band and has released their first EP: Bitter Sweet Love.

Kirsty and I attended their EP release concert at the Dog's Bollix. A great time was had by all, and I got a signed copy of their EP too!

We also had saw the premier of their first music video, Meat Market, and it is now available on Youtube. Check it out:

 

They also have a Myspace page which includes streams of several of their songs, including the commercial version of Enemy.

Skyjump!

I know I said I was going to do this on Monday, but we decided to get it out of the way today.

Kirsty was first:

Despite never having done the jump before, she was far more cool, calm and collected then I was (I was on my third jump).

Next up, was me:

Yikes, what happened to my hair?

There's me, hanging 192m above the pavement, about to scream my lungs out like a girl and start flapping my arms around like a chicken.

You see the Sky Jump now falls noticeably faster then my last jump (2006), hence why they have a big pad at the bottom rather then a glass floor. Incredibly scary, but the rush was fantastic.