Game Programming with Steve Healy

Alright, I’m kind of a jerk for coming on here and promising a great update and mysteriously stating that I’ve been “working on some things”, but it’s true. All will be revealed soon and unfortunately, this post is not going to enlighten you too much as to the mystery work I’ve been doing, but hopefully it will convince you not to give up hope on me.

I’ve been working on some basic networking programming and setting up my own little client/server architecture. So far I’ve got the basic chat mechanism in place and I’m working on getting the graphical side of things going now. Seeing as how I’ve never made a networked program before, this is a gigantic step for me, one that I’m actually quite proud of, especially since I’ve been working the day job (8am-5pm) for the past 7 days in a row. The fact that I’ve accomplished anything is quite enough to impress me.

Anyhow, moral of the story is, please continue holding your breaths, something good is on the way, I promise.

In the meantime, please check out HopeDagger’s latest iteration of Skirmish Online. He’s redone the whole thing using Java and it’s coming along quite nicely, if I don’t say so myself.

This is not going to be my usual type of post. It’s going to be a post about a game. A really good game. A game that restored my faith in storytelling. That game is Max Payne.

Max Payne, as far as I’m concerned, is one of the best games of the decade. As far as storytelling goes, it’s the best. It’s the only game I’ve played in the past decade, and I’ve played a lot of games in the past decade, that dragged me into the game and left me exhausted after playing for hours on end and not even noticing the time passing. The voice acting, the conspiracy theories, the New York cop grunge comic strips — it all adds up to a wonderfully compelling experience.

And now they’re making a movie. This is what disappoints me. They’re casting Mark Wahlberg for Max Payne. Ludacris is going to be Jim Bravura. These are bad ideas. This is the one movie where I actually want Keanu Reeves to be the main character. His monotonous voice and inability to display emotions are perfect for Max Payne. And as far as Jim Bravura, there are plenty of guys who’ve played mean chiefs all their life, why are we going with a rapper who’s never played a part like that in his life?

I’ve been hoping for a movie since the first game came out and now we’re going on the third in the series and unfortunately the movie is letting me down. I’ll still see it though.

Working on some new stuff and just wanted to drop in and say that if you commented recently, I’m afraid it won’t be showing up. I had to manually use SQL to delete all unapproved comments because I had over 5500 comments to moderate. WordPress wouldn’t even let me bulk moderate, there was too many comments for WordPress to even be able to load the bulk moderation buttons.