My Secret Project – Released!

After several months of development, I’m finally ready to unveil the “secret project” I’ve been working on. Behold, Galaxia!

Galaxia is a multiplayer web-game that takes place in space. The year is 3009 and humans have settled through much of the galaxy. You start off as the Captain of a brand new ship, orbiting Earth. What you do from here is up to you! You can earn an honest living by taking on jobs, earning experience and credits (money). You can also earn riches by buying low and selling high at the hundreds of trade ports in the galaxy. Or maybe you want to take advantage of these honest folks and rob them blind, by attacking them in space. Or perhaps all you want to do is just explore the galaxy and uncover hidden secrets. It’s your choice!

My inspiration for Galaxia comes from several places. Many of the original game mechanics come from an old BBS door game called Trade Wars 2002 that I played as a kid. It also borrows a bit from Facebook games like Mafia Wars too. As for mood and setting, I was influenced by sci-fi shows such as Firefly and books such as Larry Niven’s Ringworld. Last but not least, there’s a dash of World of Warcraft on top too! Galaxia is feeling more and more like an MMO, so it’s no wonder that WoW serves as a huge source of inspiration.

The game is certainly far from done. There’s plenty of features I still want to add, a bunch of bugs I’m sure exist, and lots of little things still unfinished, unimplemented, and unpolished. Most importantly, what’s lacking is the whole fun factor and game balancing. This stuff is hard to do! And as a developer, I’m not very good at it, nor do I have a lot of patience to learn and do it. I just want to code and make things happen. :)

In any case, I do feel like the game is adequate enough to at least show. Galaxia will probably just remain a hobby for me at this point, since I doubt I have the strength to really polish it up. That said, if you really like what you see and are interested in helping out, let me know!

Finally, I should note that Galaxia is just being hosted on my computer at home. Since I’m going to be away on vacation the next two weeks, I figured this was the best time to “release” it, since it won’t interfere with my game developing or game playing. But that’ll probably change when I return. I’m still trying to decide where and if I want to host it externally. I don’t mind spending some money on this hobby, but only to a point. :)

Anyway, that’s it! Let me know what you think. I have a feedback page that you can enter stuff into, and you can also leave me a comment here or on Facebook. Once again, the URL for the game is: http://galaxia.thoughtsofageek.com.

Enjoy!

My Secret Project

For the past month and a half (and why this blog hasn’t been updated in a while), I’ve been working on a bit of a “secret project”. It’s a web game that I’ve been kicking around in my head for quite some time now, and I feel it’s the right time to talk about it now! But first, some background …

As some of you may know, I’m quite happily addicted to Facebook web games such as Mafia Wars, Farmville, and Restaurant City. They’re very similar to the BBS door games I used to play as a kid before the Internet was well-established. Games like Legend of the Red Dragon (LORD) , Barren Realms Elite (BRE), and Trade Wars 2002 were incredibly modest compared to the console games of the day, but incredibly addictive. They all worked off a pretty simple idea: you start off in a small little game world, every day you get some “turns”, and you do things with those turns. Additionally, you share this world with other people also playing this game. That’s it! It’s been great to see this formula return to popularity again, thanks to companies like Zynga and Playfish.

These games seem pretty simple, especially to those used to playing more “hardcore” titles such as Halo, Call of Duty, Madden, etc. but there’s no denying their popularity. A recent article from the New York Times about Farmville mentions that over 62 million have signed up to play the game, and 22 million log on daily! I happily count myself as one of them, and I have many friends and co-workers that do just the same.

So yup, I’m making a game in that vein. Not because I want to “get rich quick” or anything, but because I’ve been in love with this type of game ever since playing Trade Wars 2002 as a kid so long ago. In fact, the game I’m making is pretty heavily inspired by TW2002, as well as other titles that I’ve played since then, including Mafia Wars, and even World of Warcraft. I’ve accumulated a lot of interesting game ideas that I just want to try out and see if they stick.

Also, this has been a great opportunity for me to go back to my programming roots. It’s been very refreshing to be back in a “developer mindset”. I still very much love testing, especially since it’s still my day job, but it’s nice being in total control of my own project once again. I’ll probably be using this space to geek out about a lot of “new” things I’ve learned, such as ASP.NET MVC and .NET’s LINQ.

Anyway, watch this space for more information! I’ve been very happy with the progress I’ve made so far, but I do want to make some more additions before I make it public. And this will likely continue to be a work-in-progress (like any good web game!) for a long time …

Belated Birthday Pics

A little late, but here are a few pictures from a little birthday bash at my favorite Cajun restaurant, Alligator Soul.

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I forgot these had been sitting in my camera (as I prepare things for my impending trip to L.A., Disneyland, and BlizzCon!).

And yes, it’s from my 30th birthday. Or 29th-part-two. Or whatever else folks my age like to call it. (Admittedly, I still have a hard time saying th-th-thirty, blargh)

#13 – Pork Fried Rice

FYI, these last two dishes were made quite some time ago. But I forgot to post them, whoops!

Anyway, this is another leftover-inspired meal, using the last of the pork shoulder. It’s just pork fried rice. Nothing fancy!

• Cooked rice
• Mixed vegetables (frozen is fine)
• Green onion
• Cilantro
• Leftover pork, chopped into smaller pieces
• Soy sauce
• Salt and ground-black pepper 

Cook time: 30 mins

This is basically my standard fried rice recipe, only with pork. The super simplified steps: stir-fry the vegetables to cook them through, add the meat, and then finally the rice itself. Make sure you actually fry the rice with a little bit of oil and heat. The brown should come from the cooking, not massive amounts of soy sauce. Making fried rice is pretty easy for me, but it definitely took practice.

Results:

Meh. I much prefer the fried rice I make using my secret ingredient: Chinese sausage. :)

#12 – Pork Noodle Stir-fry

Seems like a lot of my meals have been inspired by the idea of “what do I do with leftovers?”. This one is certainly no exception! But this is one time the “sequel” ended up being better than the original!

Basically, I wanted to do something with the massive amounts of pork that I had leftover the night before. And, for whatever reason, I was in the mood for noodles. Thankfully I have a huge stash of various Asian noodles in my pantry.

• Asian yellow noodles (although you can probably replace this with almost any long, thin pasta)
• Green onion
• Cilantro
• Leftover pork, chopped into smaller pieces
• Sesame oil
• Soy sauce
• Salt and ground-black pepper 

Cook time: 30 mins

First, I stripped and chopped the leftover pork shoulder into smaller pieces. Then I reheated the meat in a medium-sized pot, along with a handful of the green onion and cilantro.

Meanwhile, I got a large pot of water boiling and then added the noodles to it. The ones I had didn’t take long to cook, only a few minutes. Once they were done, I strained and moved the noodles directly to the other pot along with the meat.

Next, I added the rest of the green onions and cilantro. Finally, I added various amounts of seasoning to taste, and then tossed and mixed everything together.

Results:

It’s surprising how the easiest and simplest dishes are often the tastiest! Well, I guess braising the pork for a long time definitely helped. I can see why my parents, back when I was a kid, always found new and interesting ways to reuse leftovers, often in great ways!

#11 – Cider-braised Pork Shoulder

Yet another meal, courtesy of Epicurious. I was basically sitting outside the grocery store, trying to come up with something to go with the mounds of leftover sesame soba noodles that I still had. I was in the mood for something especially meaty, and I had time for a slow roast/braise as well. So, I typed in “pork shoulder” and this is what I got!

Recipe: Cider-Braised Pork Shoulder with Caramelized Onions (Epicurious)

This was a very simple and straight-forward recipe. The only problem I had was that Albertsons didn’t have a large bone-in pork shoulder that I could use. So I settled for four smaller, boneless pork shoulder pieces instead.

The result was still pretty good! While a larger cut probably would have been much more flavorful, I still got some nice tenderness out of the meat. Also, caramelized onions are always a good thing. The only downside is that it didn’t exactly pair that well with the sesame soba noodles, but oh well, it was still tasty!

#10 – Sesame Soba Noodles

Here’s the first of many meals to come, thanks to the Epicurious iPhone app! Erica and I were looking for a nice summer meal to make last Saturday. After adding in the keywords of “summer, noodles, cucumber” … voila!

This is also the first one I’ve made with Erica that I’ve blogged about. Huge thanks to her for helping make it! :)

Recipe: Sesame Soba Noodles with Cucumber, Bok Choy, and Mixed Greens (Epicurious)

We pretty much followed the recipe straight on, with two exceptions. The first is pretty simple: we added some diced chicken just to include some protein. The second exception is somewhat major … we used twice as many noodles. That was due to a bunch of suggestions made by various reviewers of the recipe, and I can easily understand why. You end up making a lot of sauce; so much so that it can definitely overwhelm the rest of the dish. I would actually suggest carefully mixing the noodles and greens separately, and adding in the sauce bit by bit.

Anyway, the dish was quite good! Cool, fresh, and light … just perfect for a warm, summer day!