Don’t be scared, its not gonna bite

http://www.e-axis.com/ar_halloween_09/

Official site can be found here.

Just doodling today. Last night I was up late playing some TF2 and CSS. After a days work gaming is a great way to unwind. Some rounds (as usual) got pretty tense and the trash talk was extra vicious. Ahhh good times.

The last (could be the 2nd too) horseman of internet apocalypse has rode into netsville tonight. No- not the one that will obliterate porn from the tubes but the one that messes up your twitter 3rd party clients, namely twitterrific on the iPhone. This is referred to as Twitpocalypse. It’s alot like Y2K. You can read about it here.

The Pittsburgh penguins had just won Lord Stanleys mug. Sydney Crosby is the youngest Captain to hoist the cup over his head. So I rushed to my iPhone to tell the world via twitter that the Wings failed to repeat the glory of last year. I squeezed the breaking news that would stun the world into the 140 character limit. I even managed to squeeze in the part about Marian Hossa leaving the 2008 Stanley Cup losing team (the Penguins) for the 2008 winning team - the Red Wings only to get OWNED by his former team (the Penguins) in 2009. Marian Hossa = Epic Fail.

In any case upon hitting the send button I was stunned to see a little blue box pop up informing me that an API error had occurred and my tweet was lost. Also my tweet feed was completely dead. NOOOOOOOOO I cried out to the binary gods. But luckily I’m not the only one who watched the game that night, others got their tweets though and the world sighed. Not via Twitterrific of course.

I’m not sure right now how many 3rd party twitter apps are affected by the Twitpocalypse. But TwitterFon was working fine. So I downloaded, installed the free app and asked the Twitter nation if they were having trouble with Twitterrific. I just kept refreshing the search icon and hundreds if not thousands were experiencing the same problem. Even the guys at iconfactory (developers of Twitterrific) showed up after awhile and were explaining to @individuals that Twitpocalypse has effected the iPhone app and the team was on it’s way back from WWDC. I must admit it was quite amusing hitting the refresh button and seeing the developers frantically explaining and apologizing for the inconvenience to as many users as they could. But their efforts were futile. Wave upon wave of dissatisfied tweeters came in at a crazy pace. The anger in some tweets were insane, others sounded desperate but the majority were just frustrated. A good time was had by all…… well some…… me.

I for one will continue using Twitterrific for my pathetic tweeting fix….once they fix it of course. Till then I guess I’ll tryout TwitterFon. Which for some odd reason can not access multiple accounts. Now if you’ll excuse me I need to get my Facebook vanity URL. Good Night.

But having alot of games to work on, we just never got the time to build the arcade site. It’s a catch 22. The silver lining though it was great practice to create and develop a 3D character and it gave great insight into what it takes to develop one. The character was created in a 3D program from scratch, it was created without any visual concepts or blueprint. Something I have never done since. Drawing out a character prior to development is a critical step that should not be over looked. In a weird way by drawing out you character first you get to know him and discover a personality. Sounds dumb but its true. In this case I really just wanted to teach my self how to rig a character. Now looking back I lacked a proper understanding about modeling for the purpose of rigging. Essentially this character was just a bunch of polys slapped together without looking at the final goal. Much was learned off this guy. Like all characters I gave him a name. Falcotron. Why? Well the word falcon is great but when merged with tron just makes it kick ass. Lolz.

Since then I sort of neglected the site and the emails I got from it. Not on purpose, just got to busy and forgot about it. I tried to cover all the questions on the FAQ but that’s the one thing about questions, you can never run out of em. I just checked my hotmail account after a year or so and there were some questions about the SS there. I felt bad. So if you have any questions about the SS you can post a comment here or even on twitter (www.twitter.com/eaxis) plus there is an open e-axis.com Face book group you can join. That way I’ll never miss a question. No guarantee I can solve your question but at least now I can see em. Which is half the battle.

On the other side the team worked out the look and feel of the actual game. All kinds of ideas floated about, from hell fire to puffy clouds. Like any creative it evolved over time. Bottom line we needed a light clean game area and everything else was gravy. Overall creating an iPhone game was a great learning experience.

You can get the game for your iPhone here.

Many thanks to Top Hat Monocle