I got an email from a customer who purchased my first indie game Rocknor’s Bad Day from the now-defunct games site Dexterity.com, whom which I had a distribution agreement. She wanted to re-download the full version of the game, because she had lost it. The agreement I had with Dexterity stipulated, as usual, that they got to keep all the sales records, meaning I had no way to tell if she was a legit customer. But I decided to give her a free copy anyway.

Here’s a snippet of what she had to say the next day:

Thank you so much for your prompt response. I can’t thank you enough for your generosity. My son will be delighted! He has Autism and gets obsessed with things for months at a time. He will play the one game for months and then move on to another. Then he will often return to a game he was obsessed with previously. Its so long since we played Rocknor I honestly couldn’t remember when we bought it. Thus far i have managed to keep him away from most of the awful games that consist of killing things.He will be so excited! Actually the whole family enjoys Rocknor and its so nice to have the kids playing something that makes them think instead of just pushing a button.

Once again my many many thanks. You have made one little boy very very happy.

When I hear firsthand how someone is enjoying something I made, it makes it very hard to think of doing anything else as a career or hobby.

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If you’re ever near Alameda, California, stop in at Forbidden Island Tiki Lounge and check out the touch screen jukebox that some bar buddies and I made:

Tell them Hanford sent you.

Scott Lund did the hardware, Matty & Jessica did the case, and Martin Cate organized the content and was executive producer. I did the software and most of the UI design along with the rest of the team.

It randomly plays music from the least-recently played selections on the juke. This was a major beef the owners and staff had about the old off-the-shelf jukebox, which played the same 20 songs over and over.

Here’s a shot of the jukebox’s custom “shipwreck” case:

When you’re a hobbiest programmer, every problem looks like it can be solved with a little scripting. This Holiday season I was working on a for-print art project and I needed some paint splatter for texture. Splattering paint is a great way to get some organic texture into a piece of art, but it’s messy and requires a lot of room. So I decided to try writing a quick script to see if I could accurately simulate it.

The end result is this little web app I wrote. It’s got a little bit of GUI to make it easy to adjust the amount of splatter you need. The end result is an image that you can use in Photoshop.

Here’s a brief rundown of how it works:

+ The canvas is made up of “passes” of paint splatter. You can Add and delete as many passes as you want.
+ Each pass has it’s own set of settings. you click on a pass on the left, then you can change the settings for that pass.
+ double-headed sliders set minimums and maximums for settings.
+ As you change settings, you’ll see a realtime preview of just that pass on the right.
+ when you stop dragging a slider, the big canvas will re-splatter with your new settings.
+ To get the image into Photoshop, you click on the “Copy to clipboard” button or “copy inverted”, which reverses it for better channel creation.
+ You can tweak with a small sized canvas, then when you got it the way you want, make the canvas bigger.
+ There’s no way to save settings yet.

you may need to install the latest Shockwave plug-in to make it work. Enjoy