TedRoden.com

Craigslist is a good place to kill time. You can read profiles from any number of misguided singles, you can find ads selling last year's guitar or miscellaneous broken dream and best of all, you can enjoy some of the worst job listings in the country. Sure some of them are fine, or even good, but some of them are just jaw dropping. This is a list of some that I've seen. Some companies believe it's 1999... and that you're a puppy.

may want to take a lower hourly rate.. but be a part of something big that could pay off later down the road... idealistic and obedient →

Sometimes they turn off the spell check and just start adding skills they've seen on... well... their DSL modem?

Candidates musty have a high degree of competence with: ... Static IPs ... →

In New York, software jobs are dangerous.

MUST BE A US CITIZEN OR HAVE GREEN CARD AND SOCIAL SECURITY CARD FOR ARMED POSITION.→

They tend to confuse "barely funny" with "mildly insulting."

sociable, for a techie, and you speak in a human voice→

The fine/bold print

Like this? I'll update this when I find more and push it to the top of the blog, so check back if you want updates. Find others? Send them to me, I'll post them. Think I'm being unfair, or are these from one of your ads? Confess. Explain yourself here.

On Friday, I went to the IGDA meeting at the old Hit Factory recording studio in New York. I've never been to an IGDA meeting, but it was a lot of fun. I talked to a lot of neat people about games and making games and was pretty blown away by all of the different games companies located here in the city. It was nice to associate faces and handshakes with names I've seen on mailing lists, forums, podcasts and the internet in general. Anyways, I don't have a whole lot to say on the matter and it was kinda dark, so I didn't get a lot of good pictures... but here is one from the competition, man was it fierce. They also had free beer and snacks, you can't go wrong with free beer and snacks.

I've been working on my game (currently named: Orchard Street) for a while now and I'm trying to write about it as often as possible. I've been showing off parts of it lately and more and more people have been coming here (according the the logs) in search of my little toy. So I thought I'd start really talking about it. Whatever it is. Orchard Street is the name of a game I've been working on for a while now. It's your standard video game with your standard elements. It has some RPG aspects, a really fun fighting system and tons of smaller gameplay distractions. By distractions I mean that the game isn't simply running around and fighting, it's not really that at all. Some levels are more platformer style, some are shooter style, some are side scrolling 2D RPG style, and there are tons of other things to do. For example, one early battle turns into the craziest game of Space Invaders you've ever seen. But, aside from all of that, at the heart of Orchard Street, is a story that is both funny and entertaining. At least I think so, and I've seen almost every episode of Mr. Belvedere... so I know comedy... and entertainment. But, I digress. The entire game takes place inside of a young boy's diorama. Each level is a new lesson for his class and you learn at least one new skill per level. All of the enemies are placed, meticulously & quickly by the hand of this creative young lad, which you may have seen in some screenshots. I'm up past my bedtime, so I'll get around to more details about the player's character and spill some more in-depth information about certain levels in upcoming posts. If you want to know anything in particular, feel free to leave a comment or email me, my email address can be found in the sidebar above the xbox gamercard. Please forgive me for not posting any new screenshots. I understand that a post with no screenshots is a sin for which I shall be justly punished.

Footnotes

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• I have not seen very many episodes of Mr. Belvedere, I was lying.
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• Orchard Street is more than just a game. It's a very famous street in the Lower East Side of New York City. Wikipedia and have a lot to say on the matter.

When I'm not working or hanging out with the lady, I have been writing a game. There are a bunch of different parts to it, but I thought I'd post some early screen shots of a side mission. You can probably guess just how the mission works by glancing at the screen shot. You'd be right... but I assure you, this is no space invaders clone, it's just a bonus level you can find.

I've been using last.fm for a while now. It's great. If you don't know what it is, it's just a simple application that logs the music you listen to and suggests other things based on what other people are listening too. It's incredibly accurate because every song you listen to (on your computer) gets logged. So you can't pretend that you only listen to early 50s Coltrane when you really spend most of your days listening to white man fusion jazz and holiday classics. I'm not sure that the "weekly charts" and stuff are that accurate, but it's close enough to make you realize you're not as indie rock as you think you are. It's certainly close enough to let you know that despite your best intentions, the world IS goth enough to handle you. Anyways, does anyone reading this use that service? If you do, you should add me as a friend on there so I can see what you listen to and steal your favorite bands and start talking about how I've been a fan since way before they got popular. Then after several months you'll realize it was a bad idea to introduce me to new music and you'll start intentionally listening to bad music just so I have to listen to it in order to stay one step ahead. Anyways, you can just keep track of my listening habits if you want... here.

I can't believe that I forgot this on my Wii post: This was from a game I played against my sister. Was fun.

The What? I got my Wii on launch day, because I'm a nerd, a nerd who pre-orders. I love it! First up, I'm going to show you some of the stuff I love about the system, then I'll get into what I'm not so rosy about. The Good 1) Miis! Ok, these things are pretty silly. You can make tiny little people that look like you, or Hitler, it doesn't really matter. So naturally, me and the lady made some of them. Here's our Mii self portrait. b) No mention of the wii would be complete without a picture of its controller. iii) The Wii has this whole virtual console thing which allows you to (buy and) download games for systems that your parents were too mean to buy for you. This is nothing new, the xbox can also help you make up for a childhood ruined by scrooge. However, the download screen simply can't be beaten. *) This isn't one of my favorite games, but it's a nice photo. The game is Rayman something something. It contains activities such as squirting (rabbid) rabbits with carrot juice. It's a lot of fun. Lastly) Do you know who this is? The Ugly So what isn't the best of all time? A small number problems are stopping this from being the best launch ever. 1) They have this whole virtual console thing but there simply weren't many good games at launch. This is Nintendo and they didn't have Super Mario Bros. Nothing defines Nintendo like that game. Not "Mario Bros." Not "Super Mario 64." They needed "Super Mario Bros." (the one that came with the original Nintendo available on day one. I'm sure many people have this in other forms, but it needs to be here. It isn't all bad though; a day or so after launch they put up some Turbo Graphix 16 games. I got Bonk's Adventure which seems amazing. I'm sure that "Super Mario Bros." will be out real soon now. 2) At launch you could not buy component cables in stores. You could buy them online, but even those sold out. I called up Nintendo World Store in NYC and they said that the official cables weren't out yet and that I should try Best Buy for third party cables. I just can't wrap my head around them not having those at launch at the NWS. You'd think they would. So many of the words in the name of the store would lead me to believe I could buy these sorts of products at that establishment... Nintendo. World. Store. But nope, try best buy. (Best Buy doesn't have them, at least not around here). 3) Online Games. They should have launched with at least one online game. The DS should have as well, but that is another story. I don't think it's a bad sign that they didn't launch with one (again, look at the DS), but it would have been awesome. Anyways The Lady is asleep, so I'm going to go work on one of my games. Playing games beats writing about them. Writing games beats playing them.

I've done some very basic stuff involving making hardware and making it talk to my computer. I get the parts from destroying other electronic devices and buying them from radio shack. As soon as I get more space, I'm going to play with this kind of stuff again. Here are some early proof of concept shots culminating in a CPU monitor that plugged into the parallel port. I'd never done anything with electronics of any kind before, I was just getting my feet wet.

For whatever reason, I've used a lot of X11 over the years. Here are some little things I've done that I remember fondly. Admittedly, some of them don't 'show' as well in screenshots as the others, but they are all pretty neat. Years ago, I wrote a plugin for xmms (mp3 player) using x11. It did its job as simple eye candy. Here is a demo of a program loading an image and turning it into a box. This is all done with only x11. No image libraries were used other than things written only by me. Here is an early screenshot of my canvas library. It enables programmers to create GUIs without using GTK, QT, or any of those. It's not very robust, but it can handle buttons, images, text display and basic drawing routines. (This is very outdated now.)

Every year or so I decide that I need a better todo/task list application, so every year I look around the internet and try to find one. I'm always disappointed. Either they require me to fill out 20 fields for each task or they don't have the ability to do the simple things like mark a task as completed or any other combination of annoyances. So in early 2006, after looking for a new one, I decided to write another task list program to address my needs. This one was called iDid and was written in Objective-C using Core Data. It can handle rich text formatting, inline images, completed tasks, priorities, due dates and it has no required fields. It's simple, but it's exactly what I need. Prior to iDid, I wrote another similar application. They share no code of any kind, but have similar features. A screen shot is below. It was written using GTK+ (2.0).

I use iTunes. A lot. It's great. Except when you have a laptop and a lot of music. I have an external hard drive at work and one at home. The problem is that iTunes doesn't handle two different hard drives very well. So I wrote a small application that lets you back up your libraries (the configuration, not the music) and swap them out when you switch locations. It also provides a launcher, so that when you start iTunes, it will check to see which hard drive is connected and automatically switch to that library. It was written using Objective-C. Sure, the interface isn't the best, but it works great and it wasn't intended for anyone to use aside from me.

I wrote some image libraries to handle the image loading for my window manager. There were lots of goals, but mostly, I wanted people to be able to compile the window manager without any other dependencies outside of X11. I also wanted to include super fast manipulation and display of images. For example, I wanted to make it so that you could create a close button image for the window manager and the window manager would be able to invert it while it was being pressed so that you didn't have to make two images. I never made it that far, but I did some pretty nifty stuff along the way. The goal of the library was to support most common image formats. At the moment it can import XPM images and SIMG (it's own format). It can convert between the two without any external libraries at all. With X11, it can display both of those types of images on the screen. In creating these libraries, I also created a very basic set of GUI widgets. It included buttons, very basic text display/input, and the progress bar seen below on the loaded images. These libraries were initially developed on Linux, but they work fine on a Mac. With some minor modifications it would work on a Windows system with X11. This first image is simple; I wanted to show the regular image and some modified RGB images based on it. I'm sure you can see what I was going for here. The next test didn't work as well, but I was clearly getting there. I was trying to create a filter that made images look like they'd look if they were printed in comic books or in cheap newsprint. And finally, I wanted the library to be able to quickly load images that would be needed for the window manager to function. Here is one of those.

This thing was great. I say 'was' because I haven't used it in a while, but here is how it works. It's a fully functional window manager with a couple of bells and a few whistles. It handles all of the standard window manager features like maximize, iconify, shade, pagers, multiple desktops etc. But it also has really nice configurable key commands. You can map "Shift-Alt-Left Arrow" to "Move window seven pixels to the left"... or it could have been maximize window, whatever you want. It has root menus, a clock and applets that you could write without compiling any code (I've never seen that anywhere else on a linux based window manager). It also has a really nice I've included some screenshots from throughout the history of slapwm. Including one historically interesting one.

Puzzlar is a game I wrote using the Torque 2D Game Engine (Beta 1.1). It's a fast paced, extremely addictive 'match three' style game. It's pretty simple. Rows of the little balls fall from the top onto the board and you use your mouse to remove any of them by clicking (smashing) them, this causes anything above the 'smashed' ball to fall. If you match three, they explode and go away, causing the balls above them to fall. Rows of new balls fall faster and faster as the game goes on, if they stack up to the stop of the screen, you lose. However, you can't just keep smashing balls to keep them from getting to the top of the screen. You start off each game with a certain number of smashes. If you run out of those smashes, you lose the game. You get an extra smash for every time you line up more than three matching balls. So if you line up four, you get one extra smash. Five gives you two extra smashes, and so on... This game was developed on a Mac, but can run on Mac, Windows and Linux. Videos

• Gameplay Movie 1: Starting a game (4.3 MB, Windows Media format)
• Gameplay Movie 2: Staying alive (4.2 MB, Windows Media format)

Pictures

This is a portfolio of sorts that contains some of the more interesting stuff that I've done entirely outside of my day job. Have a look around via the links below.

• Screep.com (Usenet Binary Search)
• Puzzlar (Game)
• slapwm (Window Manager)
• Slap Image Libraries
• iTunes Helper App
• iDid
• X11 Tests
• Hardware

Sometimes I take time lapse movies from my computer. I generally just start the recording and forget about it for a day or so. I just found a bunch of those old movies. Here is a still from our old apartment. I like this photo; the lady looks great and I look like I've got something great to say... It's a pretty standard day.

While browsing parts of the series of tubes lately, I've started noticing a lot more mistakes and "testing" messages than normal. I even took screen shots of some of them.

First up, at gmail.com got a "test" message advertisement.

This next one is not out of context, the caption is only talking about one person, her majesty, The Boss.

And finally, I'm a Blazers fan. Since I live in New York, I sometimes watch the games by refreshing the stats pages on yahoo.com. This particular game went down to the wire, we were down by two points and one of our best players was on the foul line. He made one and missed one. The time ran out and we lost by one point. Except that we didn't. The next morning when I woke up, I checked the rest of the scores and noticed that we'd actually won. The Hornets never made as many points as is shown in the score below. Makes you wonder how long I was following a game with the wrong scores.

I've been playing tons of video games lately, because I'm kind of a nerd. So, I thought I'd write a few reviews of them. I'm new to this whole reviewing thing, so I'm just going to get started. If you're not interested in these types of things (me, video games, 3rd grade level writing skills) you should stop reading this now. Otherwise, here goes. What is it? In Okami, you're this wolf, who's this chick, who's this god, of the sun or something. For some reason, the world has been cursed and I've read "the world has no color," so you're supposed to help restore it. That thought always turned me off and I think it's a bit misleading. While you do restore color to it, it never really seemed lacking in the first place. And restoring color tends to be more along the lines of watching flowers bloom. Whatever you're doing, it looks incredible. Not with any qualifiers such as, "it looks good for a PS2 game." It just looks good. What do you do? You spend most of your time running around and fighting people with one of any number of really sweet necklaces. Seriously, you press some button and your necklace whips them, or shoots them, depending on which necklace you have on. I guess that the necklace is technically a rosary, and you're probably not actually whipping them, but who the hell can tell what is going on. All that matters is that it's fun when you're doing it. So anyway, you run around and have to gather up over a dozen brush techniques. Each one gives you pretty neat powers that are controlled with one of the neatest gameplay mechanics, since... well... ever. One technique is the "power slash," which means that when you press L2 (or something), the screen turns sepia toned and you can paint a "slash" across an enemy. Another one let's you draw a bomb in same way. It's a whole lot of fun. This game is supposed to be a 30 hour game. When I finished it, it told me I'd been playing for 48 hours. I'm 100% sure that this game keeps counting time when it's paused, and I tend to leave games paused for dinner, movies, short naps, and trips to the store to buy more string cheese. But cheese trips or not, I still played this game for more than 30 hours. Probably late 30's early 40's. Is it worth my money? As I've mentioned before. This game is a lot of fun. I actually bought this game on the day it came out and I don't regret it at all. I can't see myself playing through this game a second time, but you never know. It was less than $40 and will probably long be considered a classic. What is wrong with it? The worst part about this game is occasionally agonizingly slow scroll speed of the text that you need to read. For example, sometimes when someone is telling you something you are unable to speed it up. It forces you to read it at whatever speed the game makers think you should read it at: slowly. However, most of the time you can get out of those conversations or at least speed them up, but sometimes you can't. I am making this clear to developers all over the world. No matter how funny your cut scene is, not matter how important it is to the story, you should never ever make me sit through it without giving me the option to skip it. I'm not always good at the games that I play, so sometimes I have to sit through some stupid scene 30 times in a row because I keep dying directly after it. As a side note, pausing and rewinding these cut scenes would be nice too, but I'm sure that is pushing it. Tell me something I don't know. If you pay attention to these sorts of things you may already know this, but I'm going to tell it to you anyways. This game was developed by the game studio Clover. They're owned by Capcom and apparently operate totally inside of the Capcom building somewhere in Japan. They did some work on the Viewtiful Joe games, which bear a striking resemblance graphics-wise to this game. They made this game and another game called "God Hand," releasing them both in North America about a month apart from each other. Okami got consistently great reviews while God Hand had them scattered all over the place; Gamespot gave it an eight out of ten, while IGN gave it a three out of ten. Everyone I've spoken with has told me that God Hand is a great game, despite some problems with the control. What is my point? Well Capcom closed the doors on Clover just days after the release of these games. I'm sure the producers will go on to make neato games somewhere else, but it's sad to see them go and almost certainly means there will be no Okami sequel... which is probably a blessing (and a curse).

Most of my weekends involve awesomeness with my lady and then in our down time doing nerd activities (ok, so maybe I'm the only one involved in the nerdliness). Anyways, this weekend was a blur of guests and video games and dressing up our home. And there are pictures prove it.

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So, this weekend we had a visitor (Jack) who brought her DS Lite. Not only did she beat me in some Mario Mini game, but her DS even says she's a winner and I'm a loser. Her DS Lite is also about ten times sexier than my DS, it's also got a way better screen.

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After losing with my DS, I became determined to have some video game dominance and finish a game that I'd been playing for way too long, it's called Okami.

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Beating that game didn't happen as quickly as I'd hoped. During that time the lady did some sewing... lots of it. She made the curtains we've got in our apartment a few months ago, then yesterday she was working on hemming them (or something like that). Needless to say, they look great.

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Finally, after days and days and months and months. I finally finished Okami. (It was totally awesmoe). Here are a few shots of that. And I'd like to say for the record that were it shows the amount of time I spent on this game, it actually counts the time when I've got the game paused. So, while I did play that game forever, it wasn't nearly as long as it looks because I pause it for hours at a time.

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My Xbox has been acting up. So this morning I turned it on to see if it was working at all after their big update... sadly, it's not working... at all (hint: it's not supposed to have all those red lights).

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Also, on the walk in to work I noticed that thing in Union Square was smoking! Does it always do that and I've just never noticed? It was neat either way.

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Ok Ok Ok. So this is an old photo that I took of the lady when we went to Asbury Park. But I love this photo so I thought I'd post it today.

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And some flowers in our apartment. They look pretty good, if you ask me.

The lady and I went to that show. Was great. Here's the proof.

I'm going to see TV on the Radio tonight. I'll be sure to take some pictures in person, it's sure to be an awesome show. I guess Grizzly Bear is opening up, if they're not too sleepy.
I have nothing to say, I just wanted to make a post and post a picture... so here it is:

The lady and I went to see Okkervil River last night. It was pretty good. We saw them several months ago on the first show of this tour and again last night, I couldn't believe the singers voice has held up all that time. Also, we're having our Halloween Party on the 28th. So you should probably come to that.

We went to the Cloud Gate (The bean) in when we visited the family.

Hello. You've come to my personal website. You may be here for my thoughts on game development and experiences developing games. You may be here for to looking for some old program I wrote... but chances are good that you're my mom and you are just trying to figure out why I didn't call today. I'm going to go with: "You were right, Kraft singles may be delicious, but it's not dinner."