Review: FTCE Flashcards (Android) – Um… Sorry, Words Can’t Describe the Horror

When yours truly is left without a catchy title to plug in, you know we’re going to some deep, dark places.

Welcome to the world for FTCE Flashcards, an Android app designed to help teachers study for the Florida Teacher Certification Examinations. Yep, we’re going to the top of the educational food chain today with a study aid designed to help those who make the kids study study. And if you think that sentence was awkward, you ain’t seen nothin’ yet!

If a picture is worth a thousand words, this may be out longest review yet. Let us join the Mrs. on her photographic safari into the world of FTCE Flashcards as designed, created by, and sold from BH Inc, the folks behind Superflashcard.com!

Remember, you can click on any image to view a larger version or even right-click/save image to create desktop wallpapers to scare away literate folks.

First stop, Google Play where this app has 55 five-star reviews and two three-star reviews.

Let’s Sell the Mrs’ Stuff Back to Amazon!

Not content to merely dominate its retail competitors, Amazon is looking to put the kibosh on local yard sales as well. Yes folks, the titan of e-commerce want your old junk. They seem to have really streamlined the system, too. Just hit up the web site, click a button, print out the pre-paid shipping label, and kick it to the curb. So far the offer is open to select items from the categories of movies, music, video games, electronic gadgets, and THE most expensive commodity in the modern world: Textbooks.

If you can see the above image, you should install an ad blocker ;)

Ooo, I can practically spend that free money now! Let’s see, I’m sure there’s some stuff around here I don’t need anymore. Hmm… Ah! How about that Pacific Rim Blu-Ray/DVD combo pack I got the Mrs. for her birthday! That’s gotta be worth a buck or two! Let’s see… it’s worth… $0.25. A quarter?! Really?!

Okay, time to kick it up a notch! How ‘bout her Nexus 7 tablet. I never use this thing (‘cause she’s always on it), so I guess we don’t need it. Let’s see… It’s not the 2013 model, so… $52.50. Man, I’d actually loose money by the time I got some crappy knock-off refurb to cover my tracks.

Ah! Paydirt! Let’s check out the Mrs’ new Asus S550C touchscreen laptop. Aw, not listed. There is, however, an Asus K55A. Not a bad little machine. Specs are a 2.5Ghz Core i5, 4GB of RAM, and a 500GB hard drive. Still a great system by modern standards. Guess how much? $55. Yup, 55 USD. Man, I’ll take two! I always wanted to mount a PC in the bathroom.

Alight, time to get serious. I’ve had me eyes on that shiny, new iPad Air. Let’s see what I can get for my trusty ol’ iPad 2. This thing’s a beauty! Flawlessly jailbroken, disabled lock screen, default browser changed to Chrome, still running the last good version of iOS (5.1.1), and stylishly decorated with a bloodstained radiation symbol over that ostentatious-excuse-for-an-ad Apple logo. Heck, I bet I could trade this thing straight-up for an Air! Let’s see… 150 bones. No bonus for stickers. Must be an oversight. Still, after the $55 laptop, not half bad for a three year-old tablet.

So, that’s Amazon’s trade in program. As with most programs of this type, prices range from barely acceptable to WTF. Definitely better than throwing it in the trash, maybe not as good as passing it on to friends, family, or charity. At least they pay for the shipping. Check it out for yourself here.

Milestone! The First Prototype |The Brick Dead Project

Congratulations, you’ve made it to the fourth installment of The Brick Dead Project, a series of articles chronicling my experiences while trying to make a video game without so much as two clues to rub together. It’s a good thing you stuck with me this far because today there will be presents! To catch up on previous posts in this series please click here.

I exhaled in exhaustion and slumped back in my chair. I had to admit, it looked good. And it worked!

I had just finished a six-hour marathon of recreating and decorating my first little test scene. Rebuilding the game in a world where up was up gave a chance to rebuild the map on Unity’s Terrain editor, a tool that allowed click-n-drag creation of maps that could simply be painted on with textures and populated with trees with the flick of a mouse. Ironically, it was the map editor functionality I expected when I first set eyes on Unity and mistakenly assumed it to be more of a toy than a tool.

I clicked play and cracked a wry smile as I heard my video card’s fan crank up a notch for the first time since I had started this asinine project. For a plebe aspiring to be a noob, it was a magical moment. The greenish light of a night sky tinged with undeath drew long, ominous shadows through the graveyard fence and across the playfield. The old, neglected cobblestone path that led here petered out amongst the overturned earth of the graves and the inexorable encroachment of nature. On the right, a large willow leaned over the fence, cementing a connection from the meaningless yet picturesque environment to the artificially constrained play area. On the left, a dying tree nestled a clutch of fireflies in its branches as it both added some much needed environmental variation and blocked and easily exploited side shot. The mana-dispensing statue in the back shown brightly under the blue hue of some cleverly faked God-rays.

Math is hard. Life is Harder | The Brick Dead Project

Welcome to the third installment of The Brick Dead Project, a series of articles chronicling my misadventures to create a video game from scratch in the Unity 3D game development engine with no prior knowledge, experience, or clue. To catch up on previous posts in this series please click here.

Disclaimer: I am not the guy to learn this stuff from. These are the real, no BS adventures of the Starship Grandpop as I attempt to decipher the infinitely complex art of video game creation with no preparation or thought. Anything I say can and, probably, will be wrong. Enjoy the show!

Little did I know when I embarked on this little journey that I would not be learning not just one language (Unity), nor two languages (Unity and C#), but THREE languages (Unity, C#, and Math). Everything a computer does is math. We all know this yet we take it for granted, especially in this ooey-GUI world where every value and command is obfuscated by a dozen pictures. Computers are math. Video games are math on top of real-time math. 3D video games are math on real-time math on three-dimensional math. It can not be understated the shocking scale of the math involved. We’re talking Big Math. Hard Math. Big, Hard Math that will do unspeakable things to you in the shower if you drop the parenthesis. Now, you don’t actually have to solve the Math, but you do need to know it’s there, know when to use it, and know how to best leverage it. It is one thing to know that speed=distance/time. It is quite another to be staring at a ball on the screen and think about how your going to measure all those values yourself in a world that doesn’t really exist.

 How bad does it get? Let’s start with the very basics. A vector looks like a point in 3D space defined by an X, Y, and Z coordinates. Except it’s not actually a point. It’s a direction. A direction from the origin of the world to your object, more specifically. It also has a magnitude, which isn’t actually one of the three numbers that defines it, but a whole ‘nother batch of Math altogether, possibly Euclidian, which sounds like a delicious flavor of ice cream. Anyway, you’re usually going to ‘normalize’ the magnitude of your vectors to be 0 or 1 for movement and… Video Games. Also, ‘normalize’ is a really hard thing to Google. Alternatively, you can ‘lerp’ or ‘slerp’ it which stands for ‘linear interpolation’ and sounds like a great thing to do to Euclidian ice cream. I do know that you can subtract the vector of your thing from the place you want to get to and it’ll automagically go there thanks to the power of… Confucianism, I think. Then, of course, things don’t just exist, but they’re facing certain directions. That brings us to ‘quaternions’ which are somehow fourth-dimensional, describe a rotation, and Wikipedia defines as: “Look, kid, you don’t want to know.”

Let me bring this back down to Earth for a moment with a little example: When you fire a gun in Call of Duty and hit someone to make red pixels fly out you are, quite literally, invoking Math on par with what was used to put men on the moon. This, more than anything else, is the reality of video games. So… Yeah, Call of Duty is rocket science.

That said, you can go surprisingly far while knowing little to none of this. I mean, once you get that blood spray in your modern military murder manager pointing the right way, you’re just going to cling to that one equation for the rest of your life. The really nasty stuff mostly comes into play when developing AI or ways to keep the camera on your player. Or vehicles. Or physics. Or… Okay, it comes up a lot. Still, Unity is jam-packed with little ‘helper’ values to demystify some of the math if you can crack Unity’s code. For example: “Vector3.up” always points up in the world where as “transform.up” points to what an object thinks is up. There’s even Quaternion.Identity which is shorthand for “I don’t give a s—t about rotation.” Additionally, a chatty Internet coupled with Unity’s buy-in investment of free means there’s a lot of help to be found out there and a lot of code snippets to copy.

Of course all the knowledge in the world won’t help if you don’t know which way is up.

Blog Template Updated to Remove Third Party Tracking

Just a quick heads-up: I did a little hack-n-slash on GUO’s template. I’ve removed all analytics and ad tracking. The result should be a kinder, gentler browsing experience.

Sadly, there are two exceptions. The first is YouTube. You kinda get stuck with it every time a YouTube video is embedded. The second is a wee bit more sinister, but no more harmless.

The page header has a callback to Google’s Ad Sense network stuck in it. No matter how many times I remove this function from the template, Google puts it back in. Welcome to life of Google’s Blogger platform! It’s not actually displaying any ads, but it is going out and grabbing The Big G’s advertising code. This means, much like the rest of the Internet, it’s probably tracking you.

As always, we encourage everyone to use ad blocking plugins, enable your browser’s do not track function, and use some kind of basic online security such as HTTPS Everywhere.

While the load time of GUO should have decreased, I know that we do run a media rich show here. Actually, it’s usually that silly Facebook button slowing us down, but whatever. Anywho, if GUO doesn’t load in an acceptable amount of time I’d encourage you to update your bookmark to use our mobile template: http://www.growingupotaku.com/?m=1

Oh, and let me know if something broke. I get chills every time I touch the blog template.

Moving Beyond the Pale | The Brick Dead Project

I now had a goal. This was something I wanted -needed- to create . I had a rough concept. The fleshing out of setting and mechanics came together easily enough. I needed a character that could create a ball and a platform to bounce it on. Wizards and spaceships are the standard video game fallbacks for these kinds of impossible feats. I opted for the former as most of the modern brick-breaking games I had played featured spaceships or Tron-styled digital doodads.

The theme helped me more than I ever could have imagined. Suddenly I had a fiction with decades of fan expectations to fill in the gaps. My planned energy system became mana. The player controlled paddle became an anti-magic shield. My balls became magic (Hey! You in the back! Stop snickering!). My concept of removing the paddle to launch a new ball mid-game now transcended a gameplay mechanic and was practically taken as a given. Of course a mage stops casting one spell to pop off another! The theme and mechanics meshed perfectly.

The ball tracking problem was handled easily enough by bringing down the ‘house lights’ and adding lighting to the ball itself. Tack on a stylized trail and you’ve got a fast object that’s not only easier to follow, but easier to predict. The final piece of Operation: Keep Your Eyes on the Ball concerned the style of the bricks themselves. The long, monolithic walls of a traditional brick-breaker would have to go. In its stead would need to be a softer (visually speaking) brick that could still form a wall but allow for gaps of transparency. I tried a few different shapes and a few oddball tricks to no avail. I’ll have to come back to that one. Breakout wasn’t built in a day. Well, I built Breakout in a day, but I’m sure that the original… Grr, maybe it’s better not to think about these things too much.

Anyway, this place could use some dressing up.

The role of art is to make a world which can be inhabited – William Saroyan

So, we’ve established that art is not my strong suit. Fortunately, there are a great many other folks who do not share my artistic deficit. Even better, the Internet gives us all a place to dump the latest fruits of out hobby.

There are a HUGE number outlets jam packed with assets freely available under public domain or various flavors of Creative Commons (I’ll put together a wall of links for ya later). Specialty sites like texture warehouse CG Textures and collective resources such as OpenGameArt.org hold treasure troves of game pieces waiting to be played with. Unity themselves even chip in to get enterprising game makers on their way in the form of their own free asset packages. Of course, if you’re willing to spend some cash, your options increase directly proportional to the amount of money you’re willing to hemorrhage. An entire cottage industry has sprung up in the wake of the modern Indie game movement for selling all manner of game components and licensing rights. Heck, there’s a bloody App Store style shop built right into the Unity 3D application offering everything from a $2 3D modeled kitten to $475 water effects to $10 walk animations to magic snake oil that promises to let you create the game of your dreams without ever touching the keyboard for $100. It is a bizarre bazaar that shows just how far video game design tools have come to where it is possible to generate income just from playful hobbyists like myself. Check it out for yourself on the web here.

Paydirt! Look at all this great stuff I found! I got some trees and some ground textures and a pack of graveyard models and I even sprung for a four-pack of wizards that was on sale. Speaking of which:

if (gameBudget>0) pimp Amazon shopping link to support GUO Crazy Projects

I gathered up all my new goodies and eagerly threw them into Unity.

It was horrible.

Grandfather With No Programming or Art Skills Decides to Make a Video Game | The Brick Dead Project

Lol Wut indeed!

That’s right, folks. This latest endeavor in a long line of Growing Up Otaku Crazy Projects sees Grandpop a’goin’ codin’. I mean, everyone seems to be making their own games these days. How hard can it be? (Spoiler: Very, very hard!).

As this may very well be a long, fruitless journey with nothing but sorrow at the end I thought it might be fun for us to take it together. Misery loves company after all. Buckle up! We’re not simply going inside the sausage factory, we’re going to make our own sausage from scratch.

Let me come clean about my experience level before we get started. I’m not completely without l33t skillz. I know my booleans from my integers. I know my way around an If-Then-Else statement. Heck, I cobbled this site together from bits of code I found lying around the Internet. I mean, yeah, it runs pretty bad, but look: Rounded corners! ROUNDED CORNERS! Bah, you kids take everything for granted these days. Let’s see, what else… I made a few Doom and Quake maps, created a mod to bring El Puno from Anachonox into Freedom Force, and… Oh! I took a couple programming classes in high school. Everyone still uses Basic and Pascal, right?

At least I’m a little more prepared from a design standpoint. I’ve always had a bit of a critical eye for game systems. It’s something you learn when you spend you evenings hanging out at a hobby shop debating with the ‘rules lawyers’ of miniatures wargames. I’ve even taken the occasional stab at creating my own tabletop system or board game. I’ve spent tons of hours with pre-made game construction titles like Bard’s Tale Construction Set, Unlimited Adventures, and The War Engine. Many times I find the act of dissecting game mechanics a great deal more enjoyable than playing the games themselves (As GUO’s reviews section can attest). While I can appreciate the spectacle of modern games, if you really want to get my interest show me an interesting risk/reward loop!

And as for art… Well, you remember my encounter with 123D Sculpt?

 

Believe it or not, those took a while. Also, there’s a reason I used GoAnimate to create the GUO comic.

The final piece of the puzzle is sound. Previous GUO Crazy Projects have given me a leg up in this area. I’m light-years away from anything vaguely resembling professional, but at least I have some tools and a bit of modern knowledge. I also have a home theater connected to my PC, so.. Yay!

Anywho, that’s where I am. Let’s see where I’m going.

This isn’t exactly a spur-of-the-moment decision. I’ve had a hankering to check out the Unity engine for a while now. Not to fulfill any kind of ‘Dream Project,’ but just to see what’s up on the inside of my video gaming hobby. As I said before; To see how the sausage is made. The Unity 3D game engine has really come into its own over the past couple years, growing from web-based novelty to mobile platform powerhouse and now making inroads on my home turf of PC gaming. And it’s free which is the price range I’m looking for. There are a couple other options like Game Maker or Unreal, but I figure, “Why not go with the new hottness?”

A word of warning before we get started: I’m not the guy to learn this stuff from. Anyone with any amount of real knowledge is going to be raging at the screen as I call functions classes and classes subroutines as I happily butcher the lingo. These are my real, no BS experiences while attempting to crack an infinitely complex code with no preparation or thought. Anything I say can, and, probably, will be wrong. We’re here to enjoy the ride, not learn about the birds on the way.

Flashback to the Best of Growing Up Otaku

We’ve been hanging out here for quite a while now. Four years at GrowingUpOtaku.com, five years since I started calling this blog GUO, and seven years from its original inception as da Toad’s Pad. Every once in a while I get a creative bee in my bonnet and surf off across the tubes of the Internet in search of some new endeavor only to report back after a couple moths with a new project and a fistful of links showing you where you can try it for yourself. These are known around the GUO homestead as “Crazy Projects”. I thought it might be fun to take a look back the booty yielded by my previous voyages. If you ever wondered where all those pennies you kindly donate to the site by using our Amazon affiliate link go, look no further. I thank you.

Growing Up Otaku – Obviously the earliest Crazy Project here at GUO is GUO itself. This humble little blog has worn many faces over the years. From personal journal to family communications hub to baby blog to mini-IGN, GUO has worn a great number of masks and fulfilled several different roles over the years. Many of those gems from before we were all about smartphones and interactive entertainment involved baby poop. The standout from this era is would probably be Jumping the Pig.

Still, there’s always been one underlying mantra: Share the love. Love is cheap and easy to mass produce, so why not give away as much as possible? It may not always be obvious but remember: We don’t complain if we don’t care.

Baby Pic A Day – Think they group up fast? Sometimes. Here we gathered together photographic evidence that kids only grow fast is short, sudden bursts. Back before the Giant Fire-Breathing Robot Baby became the GUO mascot, we had a much squishier masthead. Taken on the best webcam small amounts of money could buy, this feature chronicles about 400 days in the life of then infant Baby Girl. The album, while still online, is a bit of a wreck owning to Google dumping everything you post to Blogger into a single folder and lacking any automatic sort functions. Still, if you’re looking for baby pics (really? still?), here they are.

Click on through as we discover YouTube, create comics, and attempt journalism.

Hackintosh Thrown in Trash Can Yields Hackintosh Pro

  Hackintosh (noun): A non-Macintosh computer running Apple OS X. – The Online Slang Dictionary

There are always great PC case mods popping up on the ‘Net, but this latest one takes the cake. And throws it in the trash. To spectacular effect.

There’s no doubt that Apple’s latest Mac Pro is a real head-turner. While the 6-core Xenon processor boosting up to 3.9Ghz and dual AMD FirePro video cards are enough to get this ol’ techno-geek salivating, it is the unique cylindrical styling that has garnered the attention of the masses. Of course the $4,000 price tag of this lil’ beauty places it far outside the range of most computer user’s justifiable budgets.

Enter intrepid DIYer sascha288 and his quest to place a power packed pill of a PC on his personal pedestal. sascha288 assembled an arsenal of modestly priced components including an Intel Core i3 processor and an AMD Radeon 7750 and, quite literally, threw them in a trash can.

Alright, maybe “threw” isn’t quite the right word. This brilliant ‘case’ has been extensively overhauled to allow for the computer’s I/O ports and fitted with custom fans and vents to mimic the vertical cooling solution seen in the new Mac Pro. It is an inventive reimagining of Apple’s revolutionary new form factor.

Check out the full build and tons of great step-by-step pictures (as well as a little Internet drama from the moderator of the forum where this build was originally posted) over on tonymacx86.com

Minecraft Sales Hit 14 Million on PC, 10 Milion on Xbox 360, and A Whole Bunch More on Mobile

So… Minecraft. You might have heard of it. Seems to be popular. Since its alpha debut as a java-based browser plugin the survival-adventure-LEGO set has sold 14 million copies for personal computer systems. This is especially astonishing when you consider that the creator’s own minecraft.net remains the only place to purchase it since the original release in 2009.

Furthermore, a port of the game to the Xbox 360 by 4J Studios has sold another 10 million copies in 2013. A PS3 version was released in December of that year and sold one million units in its first week. Adding to the already incredible sales number, Minecraft Pocket Edition has racked up another 11 million on iOS and Android back in May of 2013 when the company stopped giving out sales figures. Still, Minecraft Pocket has never left the top paid charts of either app store since release.

Don’t get Minecraft or just want to gush along with the masses? Below you’ll find Minecraft: The Story of Mojang, the feature-length Kickstartered documentary of the Minecraft phenomenon by 2Player Productions.