Sending off Simoebic Dysentery, preparing Wholesale Hero

That's right, King Thor and I have kind of half-assedly assembled Simoebic Dysentery in preparation for a run at the GameStop Indie Game Challenge, which is by far the most mysterious contest boasting a $100,000 prize I've ever seen. The rules range from inane to nonexistent; for example they define an age range for contestants but never mention how far into beta/production they want this damned game, and they provide special rules for iPhone games yet not for any other platform... I hate to be a curmudgeon, but designing a complete working game for iPhone is a much different process than designing for something like the Wii -- how the hell are they going to judge one next to the other without categories? And how will they select which is better? Originality? Something that may have an original interface for a platform but has been compiled for PC (another rule that applies to everything but the iPhone) may seem hackish and boring compared to the same game running with the controls for which it was designed (have you ever tried to play Super Mario Bros. with a keyboard? What a pain in the ass. No one would have put money behind something so frustrating... But with a carpal-tunnel inducing controller? Amazing.)
Long story short - I just sent these jokers 100 moist simoleans of my own hard-earned cash so that they can gaze long and hard at the hopefully-seizure-causing, horribly-edited monstrosity of a video that I sent to them in hopes of "them" playing, enjoying and voting for our still-far-from-finished game thing. We don't even know who "they" are, and for all we know the judging will consist of someone installing our game on a virus-ridden 486 running OS2, attaching a monochrome 80-column screen and throwing the whole fucking thing in a gorilla cage with everyone else's terrible virtual LARPing, antelope racing, and zombie hentai games to see which one gets shat on first. Wish us luck!

In other news, Wholesale Hero continues to develop -- I've got a ton of new features, including live updating to the Mojiferous Industries website, multiple different game options, and some added bonus blocks for both the manufacturing and shipping phases. There is still a whole lot of work to be done, but maybe, just maybe, I'll run the damn thing for some other contest coming up... However, I do need beta testers for the damned thing -- so anyone willing to spend a little time with what amounts to Motor Pants Double-Plus Size, just shoot me a line.

--Admiral Mojiferous J. Colossus

Wholesale Hero videos, more work on Simoebic Dysentery

King Thor and I continue to slave away on the latest version of Simoebic Dysentery, and I must say that I am confident that the newest beta build will be better, stronger and faster. I have changed the inner workings so that levels are procedurally generated, which gives us the ability to have an ever-expanding game without the headache of building every damned level (which is just too much work for a couple of guys busy with school, work and antelope wrangling.) We will also soon be filming an informational video for the game which is planned to involve jungles, witch doctors and hopefully evil robots.

In other news, I made some rather surreal little commercials for Wholesale Hero... Watch them here:
http://www.youtube.com/mojiferous483

First Wholesale Hero screenshots!

 That's right... I've been hard at work building the first working parts and pieces of Wholesale Hero, details of which are still murky and being figured out, so I can't say much about all the hows and whats quite yet, but I do have these rather lovely looking shots of the game in action. Nothing is necessarily set in stone quite yet, but don't worry -- soon enough I'll have something more meaningful to tell everyone.

Updates, or the story of what Mojiferous is wasting his time on...

 There isn't much going on here at Mojiferous Industries, just the slow trudging drudgery of work while I yearn to be outside enjoying the summertime. King Thor and I still have yet to really finalize any kind of evil plan regarding Simoebic Dysentery, but I'm still confident that eventually we'll get organized and finish something.

I've been busy with a few projects that are more like actual programming work and haven't been able to focus as much precious time to making incredibly pointless games, but rest assured there are still evil projects coming down the pipeline.

First amongst those may be the LAMP Motor Pants, which is still early in development, but the puzzle portion is entirely playable and I'm still trying to decide if it needs anything more than that or if I want to devote the time and resources to make it multiplayer aware, or if I should just finish the thing off for now, make it a Facebook app and then maybe decide where to go...

I've also begun work on another puzzle game concept called "Wholesale Hero", which is kind of a Motor Pants offshoot- more puzzly, less confusing racing BS. I have a working engine and some great concepts, but scheduling time to work on it has been harder than I thought (July seems to be full of birthdays, tiresome holidays, and days spent outside and away from my coding lair.) Eventually I will post some pictures and more information, but for now this tiny blurb (and probably a mention on the forum) will have to do.

--Mojiferous

FontUtensil released...

 Lo and behold! That's right, there's a new piece of Mojiferous Industries software, and it isn't a finished version of Simoebic Dysentery (quite yet)! I have just built an early beta of my latest um... "thing," which I have taken to calling FontUtensil.

What is it and why, you may ask?
FontUtensil started as an educational project and quickly turned into something that I could see myself using fairly often, because I'm too cheap (and not a graphic artist) too pay more than nothing for a font utility. I had a particular need that none of the current font utilities filled, namely the ability to quickly decide on a font for a project without endlessly scrolling through a billion menus only to forget what the name of the font was that I wanted to use… Let's be clear here though- I am not a graphic designer, nor do I claim to be, and FontUtensil is not designed with the designer in mind- it doesn't do font repair (yet), it doesn't give you tons of info about the fonts (yet), and it probably will be laughed at by the typographers in the audience, but I didn't design it for them…

I built in some features/future bugs that I don't exist (at least to my knowledge) in a free font utility program:
Firstly, being a game designer, I don't always use "safe" fonts that would satisfy the editorial staff at the New Yorker… No, instead I sometimes need a medieval typeface, or something that conveys "wacky", or a single word in three different sizes and 5 different colors. So I gave FontUtensil the ability to "lock" a piece of formatted text into place- Now I can compare and match an "ojiferous" against different M's.

Secondly, I may be good at visualizing something, but black text on a white background doesn't always give me a good feel for what I'm doing (which has been the main drawback of using something like Font Book,) so I built in the ability to load a background picture, set a type origin, and compare my ever-expanding font catalogue against the image that I'm actually working with.

Thirdly, I plan on keeping this project free, so that cheapskates like me can benefit from a (hopefully) useful utility program for the Mac- there's never enough freeware or Open Source software!

That being said, everyone should download the damned thing, try it out and let me know what you like and dislike, what crashes (I tested fairly thoroughly, but you never know) and what I should add as FontUtensil progresses on towards a viable program!

--Mojiferous

Download it here , or go directly to Mojiferous Industries and get it there

The website is finally updated!

That's right, she's up and ready to go... New look, all pretty and fresh, check it out and let me know what you think!

I'm rebuilding the Mojiferous Industries website...

In preparation for future releases and my annual digital housekeeping, I'm busy preparing a new look, feel and smell for mojiferous.com. Right now I have the PHP innards of the new site built, I just need to decide on a visual theme... Stay tuned!