Joystick Johnny - Beta 2

Tuesday, April 24, 2007 link

I just hit my Beta 2 milestone for Joystick Johnny. Progress has been pretty good the past week or so. In fact, in the right lighting conditions, it could be confused as a half-way decent game. =)

Taxes

Monday, April 16, 2007 link

Just filed my taxes. And the crowd goes wild. I'm getting money back from the government, probably for the first time ever.

It's also the first time I didn't use the 1040EZ or a tax program. I'm stoked about that. I manually filled out the 1040, Schedule C (Profit or Loss from Business), 8829 (Home Office Deductions), and Schedule SE (Self-Employment Tax).

Actually, I didn't have to pay Self-Employment tax because with deductions I was able to whiddle down my profit to 2 dollars under the threshold. I deducted rent, utilities, books, RAM, my text editor, Torque Game Builder, Grey Alien's Blitzmax framework, business license fees, audio files, web hosting, and domain registration. Keeping good records was definitely worth it.

And next year I get to deduct my Wii.

Marquees

Sunday, April 08, 2007 link

I finalized most of the marquees for the current set of games in Joystick Johnny. In the process, I changed some of the names and even the graphics to make for a better total package. I also shelved a couple of games to make it easier to reach that elusive open beta release.

Tree Sketch

Tuesday, April 03, 2007 link

Here's a sketch I did at the park today, sort of rough. I added a bit of red to the final image.

Hurray for Perl

Monday, April 02, 2007 link

I wrote a Perl script for the first time in six months! It parses my media startup log and removes any files that I'm not using any more. A lot of cruft was removed the first time I ran it, to the tune of 8 MB.

It's been a while, but I've still got the magic touch. =)


use strict;
use warnings;
use File::Copy;
use File::Find;

use vars qw(%KEEP_FILE $ROOT $GHETTO);

%KEEP_FILE = ();

$ROOT   = "e:/src/bmx/joystick_johnny/data/";
$GHETTO = "e:/src/bmx/joystick_johnny/util/ghetto";

main();


sub main
{
    read_startup();

    for my $dir ('images', 'sounds')
    {
        find({ wanted => \&check_dir }, $ROOT . $dir)
    }
}

sub read_startup
{
    open(FILE, "../data/logs/startup.txt") || die $!;
    while (<FILE>)
    {
        chomp;
        if (m!^[a-zA-Z]!)
        {
            s!.*/!!;
            $KEEP_FILE{lc $_} = 1;
        }
    }
    close FILE;
}

sub check_dir
{
    if (-f)
    {
        if (! $KEEP_FILE{lc $_})
        {
            my $ghettoPath = $GHETTO . "/" . $_;
            print "MOVE  $_  TO  $ghettoPath\n";
            File::Copy::move($_, $ghettoPath) 
              || die "Can't move";
        }
    }
}