03.31.07

Happy Birthday!

Posted in Personal at 6:07 pm by Jordi Fita

Today is my favorite singer’s birthday. So happy birthday to you, Sakamoto Maaya!!

More seriously (yes, perhaps I’m a fanboy, but not so obsessive to write an entry just to wish happy birthday to a singer, even if she is Sakamoto Maaya ;-)), I’m writting this entry because a year ago I left my previous job. Why it’s this important to me? Because leaving that job changed my life, so simply.

As most people in the IT industry, I started doing technical service. This isn’t as bad as it looks like, but the problem was that I already finished my computer science degree, so my motivation wasn’t pretty high… I continued doing techinal service because the people that managed and worked in that place were (and, most of them, still are) my friends. I really believed that the small shop could be a local success until I got enough and left.

After leaving, I gave myself some weeks to rest and recover. During this resting time I worked on the now forgotten eBlog blogging software and the still maintained PDF viewer: ePDFView. OK, perhaps they aren’t the most exciting projects to work on, but they served to start in programming again (up until this time I spent the last four month without even a computer at home!)

Of course, no one lives from air, so I had to look for a job. Fortunately, I found possibly one of the bests jobs I could. This time I’m working as a full time developer, which is what I like the most, with an small group of really nice people. Nothing to complain about the job this time ;-). Not only that, but since the work’s place is very close to the university I had the opportunity to met again my old classmates. This lead to more projects like Amoebax, our free Puyo-Puyo clone.

Not only that, but since I have to get the train every day to go to work, I also met very interesting people on it. One thing that I didn’t think I was able to do, being a geek, is met people to talk with about non-computer related subjects, but now that I met someone who I can do it, I find it really good, even if it’s only half an hour per day.

Finally, since I now get paid better, I was able to leave my parent’s basement and start to live by my own. This is perhaps the best change in this past year, and I’m really happy about this. Unfortunately, now I live completly alone (if you don’t count the laptop, of course ;-)), but I hope to change this for the “summary entry” I’ll write next year. Only time will tell :-)

03.12.07

Amoebax 0.1.1

Posted in Amoebax, Projects at 5:14 pm by Jordi Fita

Yesterday we released a new version/milestone of Amoebax, our Puyo Puyo free (as in free beer and free speech) clone.

Besides the fantastic graphics of Safareig Creatiu, this version comes with six artificial intelligence controlled players that act as your opponents in what we call the “Normal Mode”.

This Normal Mode is what most games would call it the “History Mode”. That is, you play as kawaii Kim and for some yet unknown reason you battle against six opponents, one after another: from the easy K. Quita (which means “shitty” when pronounced in Spanish) to the thoughtful Pen, the penguin (which also happens to be cute.)

Here are some screenshots (from the GP2X version):

Main Menu

K. Quita versus Kim

Losing against Angus, the second opponent.

This release is also the first in which we give binaries for Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X, and of course GP2X. Since this is a free software, the source code is also available and can be used to compile the GNU/Linux version of Amoebax.

Keep in mind that this release is just the second release of the four planned releases of Amoebax, so it’s likely that there are some rough there in this version that needs to be fixed. But please, if you try Amoebax (and we encourage you to do so ;-)) and find any bug or have any suggestion, don’t hesitate to add a new bug report or send us an e-mail to tell us about it. We’ll appreciate it very much!

03.05.07

It’s getting better

Posted in Amoebax, Projects at 5:11 pm by Jordi Fita

In the last post I talked about the great amoebas’ design that the guys (and gal ;-)) of Safareig Creatiu did. Well, the past weekend we finally got the final graphics assets in SVG format (the previous screen shot was made with some temporal JPEG images exported from the original vectorial graphics) and, as expected, they are wonderful.

See it for yourself:

Losing against Kerberos.

Here we are using a much better graphics for the amoebas and one of the new opponent’s background, in this case the background for Kerberos, the 3rd opponent in the normal mode.

We still have some rough edges that need to be fixed, but if everything goes as we want to next weekend could be the release of amoebax’s next version. This time for GP2X, Windows, Mac and GNU/Linux.

We are really excited :-D