Finished my alien decoder puzzle game

The link to the game is below:
http://wayneroseberry.com/Apps/alientileslider.html

You slide tiles with symbols around inside an alien keypad. The symbols are alien letters that correspond to English characters. The keypad is hooked to a decoder that says if you have managed to form a word with the symbols.

Below the keypad is a series of English words written with the alien symbols. Based on the word combinations matched above you have to figure out what the matching words would be below. Not all of the symbols shown below are guaranteed to be on the keypad, so sometimes you have to use some logic beyond the obvious to figure out what the words are.

I've been distracting myself with game programming

Somehow I got it in my head that I wanted to do javascript programming. I also had a game idea that was stuck in my skull and I needed to see it done.

The game is based on sliding tile puzzles, except that instead of the tiles containing parts of a picture, they contain letters. You get points if you form words out of the tiles. The longer the word, the fewer the clicks. The words go left to right and up to down. You are constrained by number of clicks.

I wrote the first game in C# as a Windows application to get the algorithm down. This is just because I am more familiar with Windows programming than web programming. The game was really ugly because actually making an attractive UI in Windows takes a lot of work. Once I got the basic logic down I stopped.

The javascript version of the game is some seriously sloppy coding. This is through pure lack of knowlege about javascript. I would want to do something a certain way, but not know how to do it (what syntax, command, object) so I would do it the stupid way. I also immediately introduced browser bugs (won't work in FireFox), which really annoys me. The problem I have is that getting it right is a matter of arcana. My opinion is that if the underlying technology (i.e. HTML, Java, etc.) were GOOD there would be no such thing as browser incompatibility. But no, its a loosey goosey form of programming that requires developers to memorize all sorts of detailed facts to get everything right. Fooey. Yes, I know... read, read, read.

Anyway, the javascript version is far more attractive than my original. This is because layout, and graphics are easier to tweak on a web page, so I was able to make a UI that looks more like a physical puzzle. Fun!

I then got an idea for doing the same thing, but making the tiles non-alphabetic like some sort of substitution cipher. The problem, then, would be to figure out what the letters were by accidentally forming words and then using logic to determine exactly which tile made the word. So, I modified the game - I took away the click limitation, changed the puzzle to look like some sort of alien hardware and changed the letter tiles to look like some sort of bizarre alphabet (I took one of the fonts that is all diacriticals and rotated the letters... they started looking latin and wound up looking totally alien).

The games are located here: http://www.wayneroseberry.com/apps

Almost have a review... and more sales

I almost have a review from the blogosphere - this finally got crawled hit the search index on live.com: http://poseysessions.blogspot.com/2009/01/mailbox-monday_26.html. There is no actual post of a review of the book yet (these people are busy...) but she at least liked the cover illustration (I worked hard on that thing, so I am glad she liked it).

Also, two more sales via the display in Borders down at Westfield mall (SouthCenter to any real western Washington natives). Yippee!!

First real sale...

Not that sales of my book to people I know don't count, but they don't count. I mean, if I know you and you bought the book, that's not exactly the same thing as somebody who has never heard of me seeing the book in a store and buying a copy.

My sister-in-law is a manager at the Borders in Tukwila, WA. She got them to carry Millicent Marbleroller on consignment, and she put up a table display with a poster and everything. You just cannot beat the family connection. Anyway, I just got an email back from her that a copy actually sold. Wow... sold to someone I didn't know. Sold to someone who wasn't under pressure to be nice to me.

I haven't gone out and bought a boat yet with the profits (fwiw: the profits on that sale might buy me a burger at McDonalds), but the experience is sure fun.

Cardboard Tubes, Samurai and the Differences Between Men and Women

Today, at work, one of the guys had a shirt with the phrase "Cardboard Tube Samurai" on it. Apparently it is a web comic. I tried an experiment - I ask all the people nearby what the phrase "Cardboard Tube Samurai" brings to their mind. All the women looked at me like "what?"... some guessed... "So, a samurai made out of cardboard?" All the guys said the same thing "That is when you take a cardboard tube and use it like a samurai sword" - some would say it, some would pantomime it, but every one of them had an immediate visceral reaction to the phrase. Not only that, but everyone when asked affirmed something I suspected - they had all DONE it. Not only could they immediately imagine the same thing, they all had personal experiences they could relate to it.

Is this cultural? Are we socialized into this, or is it biological? Is the physical wiring of the male mind different from female in a way that immediately causes the male to recognize that the primary purpose of a cardboard tube unadorned with wrapping paper is to be a sword?

I wish Joseph Campbell and Carl Jung were alive today. I believe they would have an answer. I am afriad to ask what Freud would have said.

Got a reply from a reviewer, and more on sequel

Reviewers
I heard back from two reviewers. One who said their focus was more on young adult literature and not so much middle grade, but from that I got a referral from a reviewer that is interested in reading the book. I sent a copy in mail on Saturday. I was told that maybe they could manage a review by late February.

Am I nervous? A little bit. I am getting nothing but positive feedback from friends and family, but of course, that is friends and family. They are normally nice to me anyway... and given what I know about what it is like to live with me that puts their feedback in a very suspicious light. Still, no risk, no glory. Besides, with the POD self-publish thing, revisions are pretty cheap, as opposed to having to do a complete reprint of a run you did 100k books of.

Of the other reviewers I sent email to, none of them have replied back. My assumption is that blogging and book reviewing is not their day job. No worries, the list of reviewers is long. I am patient. Besides, I sort of want to see what the first reviewer says first anyway.

The Sequel
I seem to have no problem right now with writer's block. If I am having any problem, it is writing too much story. The book is about 160 pages right now and the main conflict with the primary protagonist has only barely started. Meanwhile, I am doing all these other side stories, plot devices, gag bits, back stories and character development parts. Each piece individually feels good, but I am worried the whole is getting lost in the shufle. Still, I am writing so smoothly and freely that I think I will be better off letting my mind just go with it until I finish and then go mad with the revisions.

Writing and impact on my day job

I am finding a new sense of creativity at work right now. Part of it is just necessity - the job demands it now, but part of it seems to be the writing I am doing at night. There are a number of really large testing problems I have struggling to understand over the last nine months now. I am now faced with the moment where we must transition to dealing with precisely those problems.

I was really intimidated during my break in December, worried that I would just freeze and not know what to do or how to do it. Instead, I found that ideas started coming to me very quickly and naturally. Problems that were really hard to figure out in Fall were second nature this week. Seemingly massive, intractable problems (how to get approximately 20 different product groups to do cohesive performance testing of capacity, impact on resources and load, reliability, page latency, etc.) began sorting themselves out in mind into smaller numbers of categories of problems that could actually be described in a much simpler way.

Maybe it was the extra vacation time forced on me by the snow, but I believe that forcing my brain to exercise by writing more often is also contributing to the flow. I really do feel very different right now than I did just one month ago.