In an effort to keep my brain from leaking out my ears any more than it already does  I’ve decided to take some proactive… err, action towards building my game development/programming/design skills.

Enter the best flash game of all time, Curveball: http://www.curveball-game.com/

Curveball was one of those games that got me through my Senior Year (aside from WoW, which I couldn’t exactly play in class.)  The goal is simple, engage in a game of 3d pong against a computer opponent who grows faster with each round.  The twist is that if the paddle is moving when it connects with the ball, the path of the ball will warp like you’d expect a real object to.  (think four-square or pool)  Points are scored for the amount of curve applied to the ball, the accuracy of your hit, and for getting it past the computer’s paddle.

This is the first problem with the game. It would be possible to stay on level one and get an endless amount of points for curving the ball at slow speeds.  I think there should be an exponentially increasing point cap to the level.  For example on level one you can either get the ball past the computer’s paddle three times or gain 1500 points to move to level two.

Problem two: zee scoreboard, eet does nothing!

Problem three: while I can certainly appreciate the “Tron” aesthetic, in an effort to showcase my uber UI design abilities, I’ll be updating the look a little bit.

First and foremost however, I need to get a working game.  Here are my steps:

1. Player paddle movement

2. Ball movement (straight lines)

3. NPC paddle movement

4. Ball physics implementation (curves, increasing velocity, friction?)

5. Scoring

6. Level gating (3 rounds or X number of points to advance)

7. increasing “intelligence” of NPC paddle movement (faster reaction time to ball position changes.)

8. Central scoreboard

9. Art/UI update

10. Evaluation

I’ll post updates with a current build of the game as I progress.  I’d welcome all your comments along the way.

…All the better to spam you with!

Exhibit A:

note where the delete button is here

 Exhibit B:

Now where is it?

So we have a delete button that starts on one side of the “action bar” and migrates to the complete opposite side once I’m in my spam folder?

Who signed off on that one?  Its bold and big so I’m supposed to read it, I guess–but I don’t.   This results in me constantly moving messages back into my inbox that are about all sorts of things that would make my grandmother blush.

edit: ok, I thought about this for a little bit longer and it looks like they’re equating the act of archiving an email message to deleting spam permanently.  They assume that these are the default actions that you’re going to take in each separate view.  However, most people I know function out of their inbox.  The archive is great, and is certianly one of the best features of gmail but I think that of all the inboxes I’ve seen the email just stays there.  I myself had almost 18000 messages in my inbox until but 4 or 5 months ago when I set it to archive anything that got downloaded by my computer.

In this light, I think the move makes sense, but assuming that people would rather archive than delete as a default action in their inbox should be the subject of a lot of study and scrutiny.  I suppose I could archive the 6 emails I got (and are displayed above) from the freecycle group that I signed up for.  Or I could just delete them and check the website if I needed to refer to anything in them again.  Same goes for my daily emails from graphjam, storypeople… etc.  The rest can just sit there, I can search through them so effectively that I find no need to archive them or move them around.