Russ at GameTunnel did a mini-review of Joystick Johnny for the November "What's New in Indie" roundup.

Read Review

Joystick Johnny brilliantly captures the feel of an arcade in the early 80s and reminded me how much I enjoyed games like Venture and Twin Tigers when I played them in the arcade.

Mkem has released another total conversion of Million Dollar Game Maker, this time with Duke Nukem graphics and sound effects.

Duke-O-Maker

There's even a YouTube video this time:

I put together an annotated slideshow documenting the progression of Joystick Johnny from prototype to final product.

You can see most of the awful graphics, dead ends, and stupid ideas I came up with along the 10-month development cycle. The pages are arranged so you can easily compare each version.

View Slideshow

I've been sick with a cold for the past week, the longest I can remember being sick in at least 8 years. So I've been using that as an excuse to take a break on promoting Joystick Johnny, though I still have a whole list of things left to do on that. I've still managed to get some other things done, though.

Mainly I've been putting together my portfolio/resume for a job. Right now I'm looking out for a front-end web development job where I can do as much design as possible.

Since a lot of UI positions nowadays are asking for DHTML and AJAX, I figured I'd put together a portfolio piece to brush up on my Javascript, etc. Here's a glimpse of that, which I'll talk more about in the next couple of weeks.



Also, this weekend I installed Linux on my laptop, which is my first time as an at-home Linux user. I just got tired of XP running frustratingly slow, so I went looking for a minimal OS I could put on it.

First I tried a couple of Live CD distros like Puppy Linux and Slax because they are minimal and require almost no configuration. Puppy Linux was almost what I was looking for, but it was pretty rough around the edges and was unstable. I liked Slax but I couldn't get it to connect out to the net. However, using that turned me onto KDE, which I thought was pretty slick, so I decided to bite the bullet and install Kubuntu.

Other than figuring out the right partitions to set up, installation was pretty easy. Out of the box, I could connect to the internet and it even found my Windows network without any configuration whatsoever. It's a nice looking OS, runs snappy on my 1.4 GHz laptop, and has all of the right apps built-in, plus a slick package manager for when I wanted to grab FireFox, etc. The only thing it can't do right now is play DVDs, due to some known bug.

I even did some web development with it right away, making a minimal journal-type web app that I can use instead of messing around with plaintext files on a share, or the bloat of online Office-style apps. I might release that to the public when I work out the kinks.

Hopefully I'll have more things to show off later this week.