Windy Leaves

Todd and I are competing once again - this time the topic was "wind". I haven't seen Todd's entry yet, but I'm fairly certain mine is much windier than his. If not, hopefully at least my blog post will be.

For "wind", I had trouble coming up with an idea, but finally settled on an online app that showed leaves blowing in the wind. Leaves are a really easy way to show "wind". I played with a few mathematical formulas using cosine and varying constant values until it started looking correct. Once I had the leaves floating convincingly across the screen, I added a barren tree and some background noise to lend a windier atmosphere. The end result seems a bit like a frame from a comic strip.

So, try catching some leaves:


I will also note that, unlike all my other JavaScript apps, I tried adding a little sound to this one and, thanks to Scott Schiller's Sound Manager, implementing sound was rather straightforward.

Seasonal Colors

For "Seasonal", I decided to try a bit of ASP generated CSS. I created a script that, when fed a specially designed CSS file, spits out that same file modified with "seasonal" colors. Depending on the month, it generates certain color sets. I tried using PSP's colors, but my wife said January shouldn't be orange, so between her and I we created this:

Now the Image Game, sociate.us, and this blog all use the new seasonal color set.

Trading in Umbrare

So I didn't quite accomplish what I set out to do on "hidden". I started trying to copy some NetHack code to Javascript to implement my idea, but that didn't get very far. So I started another idea. I completed part of it, involving allowing folks in Umbrare to trade, but I didn't get to implementing the "hidden" part of it, so this is the result.



If you walk up to someone in Umbrare and run into them, it opens a private conversation dialog (they must also run into you, or you will be ignored). Once you start a conversation with them, you can click the "<-- -->" button to start trading items in your bag. It should be straight-forward, but if you run into any bugs, let me know.

Universal Gravitation

For the gravity theme, my ideas kept waxing grandiose, until I only had two days to work on it. So I drew a comic strip. Click to see it larger.

Image Game

Todd and I have been in a creative competition. We pick a topic and than create something with the topic as our... ...topic. Our most recent topic is "star". As I was brainstorming an idea, I thought about how searching on Google Image Search for "star" brings up a lot of pictures of stars. That gave me an idea for a game that had nothing to do with stars and everything to do with Google Image Search. I produced this Image Game. Let me know if it's fun, whether it could use some improvement, or anything else that occurs to you as you play it.

Umbrare - the land of light-hearted living

Umbrare.com is my latest project - It's an interactive game/chatroom/toy that places you on a world with other folks. Once on Umbrare, you can edit your surroundings to your heart's content, go exploring, or discuss the wonder of life with everyone you meet. If you use the link provided above, try going Northwest - that's my brother's realm - he's probably the world's biggest land developer up to this point.

Umbrare is still very much a work in progress - "beta" if you will - so you will probably see a few glitches here and there. Also, comments and suggestions are more than welcome.

(FYI: it works best on FireFox and Internet Explorer 7... ...no news from Mac users, and Internet Explorer 6 is currently treating Umbrare pretty rough.)