News Archive March

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March 2, 2006 - Florida butterflies

I was shocked at the number of votes that I received. So shocked, that I looked at my log files to discover that a good portion of the votes were from the same IP address and occurred within a short time period. These were more likely than not all votes from the same person so I erased all those votes. This may not have been the correct decision, but it is my decision. There are few enough votes that potential cheating has to be taken seriously (not that the poll is for anything that significant, which makes me wonder why someone would cheat). Even with the cheating votes removed, the results totally took me by surprise. This week's release is the Strategy guide for the first set of Mr. Holeman levels.

March 5, 2006 - Two for one

This week I am going to pick the game to release on thursday myself. This week, visitors are going to be voting on two separate issues combined into a single poll. The things being decided are if the weekly polls should continue and what those polls should be for. Quite simply, if you want the polls to continue, vote for the type of poll that that you want and it will count for a poll in favor of keeping the weekly poll. If you don't want the polls to continue, you have no need to vote for the type of poll to have, as if there is no poll there is no poll type. I am only going to count the last poll received from any given IP address, which only means something if you are cheating and voting multiple times.

Vote Choice	% of Vote	Adjusted %
Vote for the projects that you are working on	16	33
Vote for the game about to be released	32	67
Either type of vote is fine with me	48
Don't bother having a weekly vote, people just cheat anyway	4

March 9, 2006 - Opening the door

No vote results to announce as the vote this week is a site decision so voting will continue on until saturday. If you haven't voted yet, go for it. If you have already voted, then additional votes will be deleted (and yes, somebody has voted multiple times yet again). With voting being non-release related, this week's release was entirely my decision. It was a tough decision, but in preparation for one of the potential outcomes of the vote, I picked the release from the story category so that if releases are going to be chosen for the site I can add a new story game (as well as an action release as that category has a slot free from the previous week's vote). In case you haven't guessed, this week's release is the Open Source version of One of those Week's Episode 3.

March 12, 2006 - Whatever

Interesting results Half of the votes were for either type of vote (I removed one of those votes so that the percentage numbers would be easy to calculate because I am being lazy today). Only one IP address had votes for no voting, and that came from the IP address that voted multiple times so I only counted the last vote which was for no voting. Any person now has enough information to take the poll results posted in the march 5th entry and calculate how few people actually do vote. The result is that people want to vote for the actual game to be released rather than the projects. So this week, I updated the coming soon page and added two entries to the vote. I still haven't gotten around to fixing the AI bug in darts, so the 1001 mode release is going to be delayed a while with the walk through of the second set of Mr. Holeman taking the Arcade Game slot. The Story game slot is going to be replaced with episode 16 of One of those Weeks.

March 16, 2006 - One of those Results

First thing I would like to do is a minor change to how I report the results of the weekly poll. Instead of putting the results table in the entry that the poll occurs, I am instead going to start putting the results table in the thursday entry so it is easier to find. While this week's game should work with Flash 7, I only have Flash 8 on my machines so have not been able to verify that it works with the older version of Flash. If you are using Flash 7 and are have problems with the game running, let me know so I can change the system requirements to read flash 8 instead of Flash 7. This week's game is the 16 episode of One of those Weeks.

Note that percentage values have been rounded, so totals for actual % won't add up to 100%

Vote Choice	% of Vote	Adjusted %
One of those Weeks Episode 16 [no adjustment]	71	71
Classic Cribbage alpha (two player only) [+19% adjustment]	12	31
Mr. Holeman Set 2 Walkthrough [no adjustment]	12	12
Classic Tanks for the Memory [14% adjustment]	6	20

March 19, 2006 - One of those Chapters

With the sixteenth episode of one of those Weeks released, I need a new item for the Story category. What I am doing between episodes is having open source releases of earlier episodes followed by a chapter release from my Making of One of those Weeks eBook. How many of these between episode releases will depend on voting and how quick I put together the next episode of the game. This week I am adding chapter 3 from the eBook. This chapter covers the conversation system I am using for the game as well as the walk through and scoring guides for that episode.

March 23, 2006 - Greek Cribbage

As you can see on the results table below, this week's release is the alpha version of Classic Cribbage. For those of you who are not familiar with release terminology, an alpha version is a very early version of the game. I was hoping that I would be able to get cribbage up to at least a beta level before it won a vote, but I have simply been too busy (mostly with non-Blazing Games related projects). The alpha version is actually not too bad, with the only things missing being documentation and a computer opponent. Of course, being an early release means that there may also be bugs and other annoying flaws, so if you find any of these, please let me know so I can fix them.

Vote Choice	% of Vote	Adjusted %
Classic Cribbage alpha (two player only) [+25% adjustment]	36	61
Making One of those Weeks Chapter 3 [no adjustment]	36	36
Mr. Holeman Set 2 Walkthrough [6% adjustment]	18	24
Classic Tanks for the Memory [17% adjustment]	9	26

March 26, 2006 - Spring Cleaning

April is rapidly approaching. As regular visitors to this site may remember, last year I had a poll about how my site should transition to the new look that I have been working on. It was a very close vote, but the majority said I should do the transition to the new look all at once (that way all the pages have the same format). This is suppose to happen on April 1st (the anniversary of when I started the Blazing Games domain) so I have decided to hold off on this week's game. That means there is not going to be a vote this week, but you can still tune in April 1st to find out if I actually managed to get everything done in time.