Just a quick update that the Extra-Life 24 hour game challenge was a huge success. The charity in total raised over $1 Million dollars, and I heard that even afterwards they still were gaining more. The goal has now been set to $2 Million and it sounds like a reasonable goal. I was glad to be a part of it and managed, even after the fact, to end up raising $172. That means I hit 172% of my goal for the event. I would like to thank all my sponsors and everyone out there that gave money to a fantastic cause. I can’t wait to do it again next year. Hopefully the IGDA Twin Cities chapter will band together and get a team going so we can get some real fund raising efforts going.

I have recently signed up for a great event for gamers, or people that just want to help out a great cause. The event is to play video games for 24 hours for charity. You can learn more about the event itself at ExtraLife.org. The simplified version is you sign up at the site as a team or an individual, tell all your friends to donate money, then you play games for 24 hours. I love the idea because I love video games. I also love that the entire thing is pretty laxed as to how it all works.

You don’t really have to do a straight 24 hours and you can even put in time before or after the October 15th date. It is all kind of on an honor system, the most important part is that you are earning money for sick children. What more do you really need?

As I mentioned earlier I am participating in this so if you would like to help me out by donating some money, or want to join a team go ahead and either shoot me an email or go to my profile page to donate.

If you want to sign-up and participate as well you can visit ExtraLife.org or I have also put up an ad bar on the right side of the page. It is pretty large…I’m sure you have probably glanced at it as you were reading through this.

Thanks in advance and I hope I inspired a few others to join up.

At work all day I tinker on websites and fix common cross-browser issues. Any web designer will gladly tell you that these are the most annoying problems to run into especially when trying to support older browsers like IE6. This just don’t work as well but we aren’t quite past that point in current web design where we drive people to new browsers so they can see the latest and greatest. Businesses in particular suffer this curse because of massive amounts of testing that needs to be done and red tape that needs to be cut through to get changes in motion. Since I can’t break out the latest and greatest new supported CSS tags because of these legacy browsers I am forced to ignore them for now. I decided today to bring these to my own personal site for a fun change of styling pace.

First out I dropped the Javascript corner rounding script for the border-radius property (and of course the web-kit friendly version too). Not only have I just saved a script from running, I have a much more flexible way of changing the corners. Of course you say, “What about previous IE versions, even 8 didn’t support that!?”. To that I say, “So”.

– RANT BEGIN –

I’m going to break into a small rant here. One thing that irks me is how design is not helping to drive browser advancement. I am also an avid gamer and one example of this in the game design field is Crysis. Crysis is a series of games that has been pushing the graphical envelope on the PC. This is one of those games that you build a computer around, and if your old one is too slow, you buy a new one. This is how many ground-breaking PC game releases were. They were driving graphics card companies to make faster and more powerful graphics cards. They are games that are making 8 gigs of RAM a minimum in a computer these days. Yet the one industry that is not following this is the browser business.

It has taken this long and countless years just to finally get a round corner in a browser without annoying amounts of programming. The products being created are not driving the browsers to be better, the browsers are holding back what progress we are making. Now, of course, I say browsers, but I am of course referring to one in particular. Though one of the most widely used browsers around IE has taken the longest time getting its act together and now that IE9 is our, I’m going to take full advantage of it for personal projects.

If you come here with older browsers, you won’t get the full experience, I am going to admit that right now. If that irks you, tough. It is a very simple and easy process to upgrade your browser to the latest version. People don’t mind having to update a flash player because they wan’t to see dynamic content, but to view pretty stuff in a browser people just aren’t willing to go that far.

– RANT OVER –

Also you will notice some text-shadowing going on to help some of the text “pop” (which is a word that means absolutely nothing in the design business). Those changes plus a few tweaks to my post layout are all and I already like the look a little better. I also threw a shadow on the boxes that incorporate the blur effect.

Round corners…drop shadows…all I need are some gradients and I’ve hit the design motherload.

In the end this will probably be all scrapped for a whole new template, but since my life is pretty busy this will make it more manageable for the time.

Plus I got to have quite a bit of fun learning the ins and outs of CSS3 stuff.

Tweaked a few colors on the design as well as updated the header to pop a little more. Next up is to create the missing pages on the site and start uploading some of my graphic designs and artwork. I will probably get the fun of creating a custom post type to take care of that artwork and such. FUN FUN!

I updated the page a little more with a new widgetized sidebar for the page. It isn’t much to look at yet but it represents a registered sidebar for the theme that I built into my own theme here. As I pick up more and more I really enjoy all of the abilities that WordPress has built in. To get a sidebar that I can fill with stuff direct from the WordPress backing was only about 15 lines of code (not counting CSS). I can now drag and drop whatever I desire from the back end portion and it loads it into the sidebar. This of course brings with it many new styles for me to CSS and prettify (which is an eventual goal of mine. I will of course also be making a nicer looking header and footer eventually. All in due time. I have been absorbing all the WordPress and CSS tutorials I can to try and broaden my horizons. (more…)

This site is now running WordPress as the back end (as it once had before). I have gotten a job recently that has me working a lot with old Cold Fusion sites as well as a large amount of WordPress sites and templates. As such I have decided to develop my own theme for the site to help keep my updates easy to do while still maintaining the look.

I will also begin updating that look as well but it is all a learning experience at this point.

Okay, big update. A few things happened over the last few months. I put a game into the Yo Yo Games game design competition titled After Death. I ended up only getting the last month of the competition to work on it (better late than never). This ended up making it a much shorter experience than I had originally hoped and I had to end it in a terrible “To Be Continued…” screen. I hope to make this another project of mine eventually. After Death II.

I was just about to get back to work on Stranded when I ran into another small competition for the month of September. The Experimental Game Project. This competition is much less restrictive and gives you seven days out of the month of September to make a game that follows the supplied theme. This months theme was “Neverending Game”. I am just posting this one today. Hot off the presses, go enjoy it.

Lastly, with these two games out the door I will take what I have learned and apply it to Stranded to make it a fuller experience.