Month: August 2011

Escape Goat Won’t be Featured at IndieCade

I got an email from the jury this morning informing me of the bad news.

They included feedback and criticism this time, which was hugely appreciated.  Since I sent out a very early pre-alpha of Escape Goat as a work in progress, it’s not surprising it was turned down.  Also, it just may not be the type of game they are looking for.  The positive comments were a nice boost though.  (I’ll publish them after the game is done because I don’t want to talk too much about design in the meantime.)

Even though my game’s not in the official lineup, I’ll be going to the show.  See you there…

Chap. V Discipline, Sect. 1

“Remember always to exercise your first severity on poor people’s children, and day-scholars. The first floggings are a perpetual disgrace, and it is but reasonable that they should bear it, by whom you are least profited.”

– Anonymous, The Academy Keeper, published 1770

Inane Comments Spam Attack!

In the past 36 hours, I received exactly 64 spam comments posted to this blog.  They all come to my email for approval first (for just this reason) and I haven’t seen anything like this before.  I’m still trying to piece it together, given this information:

  1. The comments all contain a generic remark that could be used on any blog, such as “wow, cool, i’ve been looking for this info all day!”
  2. Each comment has one word intentionally misspelled, such as “cheeerd.”
  3. I have SI Captcha anti-spam installed here, so this was either a sophisticated Captcha-breaking bot or someone was paid to enter the Captcha codes.
  4. Most interestingly, there is no motive I can find.  They are not linking back to a website selling $18 Nikes.  For the URL, they always put yahoo.com or google.com or something else totally generic.  The email addresses seem valid but don’t have any rhyme or reason to them.
Clearly someone wanted to get a bunch of comments up here, but they weren’t going to drive traffic anywhere and didn’t advertise anything.  My only guess is that this was a recon mission to see which blogs are penetrable.  Whoever masterminds these could just Google the terms including misspellings, and find the blogs this tactic has worked on, and direct the real spamming efforts towards those.
SEO enthusiasts or anyone with knowledge of spam tactics, please let me know what this was all about, because it’s left me really curious.

Escape Goat: Two Development Weeks Remaining

Last weekend, I made a 3-week plan to finish this game.  So far I’m on track with week 1 behind me.  I have a draft of the game that includes about half the levels I need, and the game mechanics have been solidified.  I made a lot of changes along the way to get things to this point.  I wish I could go into detail here, but it’ll spoil the surprise, and the changes will have to be enumerated in a future postmortem-style article.

So what’s left?

  • Music
  • Some of the sound effects
  • Graphics touch-up work
  • Some level design
  • Editor user-friendliness
Over the last week, my list of “done” tasks is about twice as long as the “to complete” tasks I built at the start of the week.  This is because while making levels, I uncovered a few glitches (even in my squish detection logic) and reworked the design of some of the gadgets to allow for more interesting puzzles.  This week I will keep the code and design reworks to a minimum and just focus on content.  Praying for no major bugs to appear.