Focus is intense, but short lived

http://apps.facebook.com/pdg-feed-the-fish/

As usually, I’ve switched what I’m doing again.

Facebook is primarily filled with pointless diversions, much like television, podcasts, the internet in general, and all of the other various forms of mass media.

So I decided to contribute with Feed The Fish!

I originally started out with an idea to make the simplest, most inane, pointless, fluffy “game” I could.

Text based virtual pet fish was the best I could come up with.

I started it out with simply feeding your fish, and having the fish die or starve depending on the amount and frequency of the feeding.  The fish are theoretically immortal (although due to limitations with PHP, living past the year 9999 will be something of a problem).  As the fish corpses pile up, this is tracked and reported to the player.

After showing it to my wife, she had a couple of ideas to refine and improve the game.

I will mention the ones that I have already put into the game.

First, I had no indicator as to when the fish was last fed.  This has been fixed.  Previously, the only way of knowing the status of your fish was to overfeed it slightly until the description of the fish changed.

Also, one can now name any new fish, although I realize now that I have no way of letting the player name the initial fish, so I’ll need to fix that.

I personally have overfed 8 fish, mostly to test the various code paths.

Javascript is written in  an especially convoluted mix of FBML, HTML, Javascript, php, using Ajax and JSON.  It is also especially un-secure, so for future things I’m starting to look into FBJS.

At this point, I’m attempting to do a couple of things with FTF:

1. get to five users on  facebook, so that I can submit to the directory(currently have 4, only need 1 more)

2. get some cheesy art for the icons and in-game fish status visuals (my wife has volunteered)

I aspire to be a counter-culter game artist, who deliberately writes awful games and gamelike applications in order to point out the futility and stupidness of writing awful game and gamelike applications.

Either that, or I just write awful games.

That’s part of the beauty… no one can really tell the difference!

Hunt The Wumpus, Take 2

The widgetbox widget is still in process of being approved.

Also, I only just today realized that widgetbox cannot make facebook applications at the moment.  Fortunately, my two fb apps though there are still alive and well on fb.

So, I have moved HTW to a place on playdeez.  Likely, I’ll just facebook-ify it myself, since I have spent the 15 requisite minutes learing FBML, which is an awful like HTML with a number of “fb:xxx” tags replacing the otherwise well known tags.