Posts in November, 2007

I'm going away for a week on holiday. I will be back on the 24th. All mail, death-threats, wealthy Nigerian widows and Viagra special offers will go unanswered until then.

I got a bad review of my book on Amazon.com. I wanted to post a comment to address his points, but Amazon told me that I must have purchased an item to post -- which I have (many times)! So I thought I would post my comment here (below).

I'm the author of Beginning Game Development with Python and Pygame. Let me take a moment to comment on your scathing review.

1) As the title of the book indicates, the book is intended for beginners. As such there is an introduction to Python in the first two chapters. A total of 30 pages out of approximately 300. I don't think this is unreasonable. continue reading…

In 2005 I released a fun little puzzle game called Ping Ball. It took me 9 months of spare time to write, and I did all the coding down to the hand tuned assembler code for the blitters, and even render the sprites myself with Povray. It was the first project where I used the sub-pixel sprite technique, that I recently replicated in Python. The resolution is only 640x480, but you would swear it was a lot higher. I thought it was a great game, I enjoyed working on it, and I loved playing it. So I assumed I would do well selling it. I was wrong! It sold very few copies, apparently it was too hard for the casual games market, and didn't appeal to more dedicated gamers. *sigh* Here are a couple of screenshots... continue reading…