Mojiferous Industries
Screenshots from my latest oddity…
Jul 3rd
Presented out of context and cropped! The game is slowly emerging, like some kind of slimy, bug-eyed thing out of a primordial ooze. Thus far it is chock full of cacti, catmoose, airplane-riding cowboys, laser dinghies, and angry yeti.
What should I do?
May 2nd
Whoa. It’s already May… It seems like forever ago that I was releasing Wholesale Hero to the public (okay, so it’s only been 3 months, but it seems like forever.) I’d love to say that I have a whole bunch of new and exciting projects in the works, but that would be a blatant lie. I’ve been up to my giblets in work – because of school and freelance BS – and for once I don’t have a million projects in the works, waiting to be unleashed on an uninterested public. So I need a little guidance folks, a smidgen of public input to figure out what crappy project I spend my free time on for the next few months…
1) I have a working iPhone version of the shipping game from Wholesale Hero – it functions just peachy and is nearly ready to go, but I have my own personal doubts about it: The regular version of Wholesale Hero has been well-received thus far, but isn’t exactly the most popular download from Mojiferous Industries (that would be Desktop Cigarette, followed closely by Atomic Combat.) Oddly, convoluted number matching games aren’t wildly popular! Who would’ve guessed?
2) I can finish Increase Speed, Drop Down, Reverse Direction – which I have been meaning to do ever since I last posted about it in January, before school got in the way. The game is pretty much done, it would just need some soundtrack love from King Thor and a little gameplay tweaking. It would be nice to get this game out of the laboratory…
3) I have an inane idea forming in my head for a new game, it’s nothing more than bits and pieces right now, but it could easily form into something magical. Right now it involves lots of drinking, talking birds, cacti, and abstract expressionist level design… It could be magical, or it could end up being a Mojiferous Industries project!
My options, therefore are:
1) I can spend another month or so testing and deploying WH iPhone so it can rot in the far reaches of the App Store.
2) Finish Increase Speed, Drop Down, Reverse Direction
OR
3) I can start up a new Quixotic quest for something else that isn’t even completely fleshed out yet!
I’m leaning towards #3, surprisingly enough. Anyone have any input out there?
A look into what I’ve been doing
Mar 27th
It’s been a busy month around Mojiferous Industries, with a ton of stuff going on and not much free time to spend on projects future or past… Never fear however, because I’ve still been busily imagining the next Mojiferous Industries title, and have a screenshot to prove it! Nothing too exciting or groundbreaking, but at least I’ve got proof that I haven’t been spending all my time slaving in the code mine and playing Modern Warfare 2. So here ya go, a single screenshot of Wholesale Hero iPhone:
Hello 2010 (an update)
Jan 5th
So I have three things to tell everyone:
1) I updated the website with a new look and feel for 2010, with a simpler update system for me, and a better system for permalinks. I also moved all the old pages into an archive folder, because after three years of updates and old links I figured it was about time to start fresh and clean. There are some CSS 3 additions and it looks fine and dandy on Safari, Firefox and Chrome, but I’m sure the 5% of my visitors using IE will be presented with something less than spectacular (I don’t have any Windows software, so it’s hard to say what they’re doing there anyway)
2) I uploaded Wholesale Hero build 263 to the website (available here) It is mostly working and ready for the world, but it definitely needs some beta testing, so if you would be so kind as to download it and send me feedback, I would appreciate it! I’ve played it pretty extensively during the build phase, but I’m sure there are still bugs that will pop up, so any help would be great.
3) 2009 was another busy year for Mojiferous Industries, with contest entries, contest wins (Most Creative Game and a bronze for Best Sound in uDev 2008 for Simoebic Dysentery), my first utility (FontUtensil), and what seemed like a never-ending build for Wholesale Hero. Atomic Combat and Desktop Cigarette continued to be the stars of the show, with 10s and over 100 thousand downloads respectively, and more and more people [and their bizarrely named countries] logging high scores in AC. The fact the “France” was finally knocked out of the top spot in the AC Top Ten amazed me, since I have never gotten anywhere close to the over 7000 mark that “Uri” achieved just last month. No one seemed to really care about FontUtensil, although the few people that have seen it in use or used it themselves seemed to value it, but I still have yet to get any feature requests or traceable bug reports (which means I should just call it a 1.0 release, but who has time for such things?) King Thor and I also entered Simoebic Dysentery another contest, and they have yet to contact me about my ability to post the new Simoebic build to the public, or for that matter, if they even received anything beyond my entry fee. We won’t see results from our efforts for another couple of months, but hopefully the time we squeezed in between school and work was enough to make a winning game of some sort… And then there was Wholesale Hero, which started as a lark and then became my semester project and now may finally see the light of day — I slaved unusually hard upon it, making sure everything not only looked okay but also functioned well, and I think the results have paid off. I wouldn’t hesitate to call WH the most complete game I’ve released: full working update system (thanks to Sparkle), a graphical theme I actually spent time refining and tweaking until I I was happy with it AND it looked okay, the start of a truly helpful help system, more than just basic sound (although music would be keen), a gameplay concept initially stolen from Motor Pants but refined and expanded to a point where my simple matching game is much more enjoyable (and with another game type added on), and a full-featured online scoring system that is much more robust and interesting than the simple one I developed for Atomic Combat. I have high hopes for Wholesale Hero in the coming year, and you’ll have to tell me what you think!
And so 2010 is shaping up to be another banner year here at Mojiferous Industries: still no money coming in, yet more strange games (KT and I are currently working on something that could be pretty interesting) and maybe some swashbuckling adventure!
Or maybe no swashbuckling, I am getting a little too old to be running around with a sword stabbing pirates.
—Mojiferous
Minor website update
Dec 4th
In celebration of the newly re-made and transferred Mojiferblog, I rebuilt/remastered the website a little bit:
- Made pretty with the text and layout
- Added a feed of my Twits, axed the ads (as no one was clicking on the damn things)
- Rebuilt the innards to accommodate the new blog’s feed
- Finally made some minor adjustments so that Firefox users would see the same thing that Webkit users did
- Prettied up some internal code, which sounds disgusting, but I assure you it was all on the up-and-up
- Finally settled on a header logo, mostly because I was the only person excited about the rotating logos (the cartoon heads still rotate)
- Finally alphabetized the software on the software page. I’m not really sure how I organized them before but it didn’t make sense (unlike the sidebar, which is organized by download popularity. Really it is.)
- The number 8!
— The Admiral
The website is finally updated!
May 22nd
That’s right, she’s up and ready to go… New look, all pretty and fresh, check it out and let me know what you think!
I’m rebuilding the Mojiferous Industries website…
May 5th
In preparation for future releases and my annual digital housekeeping, I’m busy preparing a new look, feel and smell for mojiferous.com. Right now I have the PHP innards of the new site built, I just need to decide on a visual theme… Stay tuned!
Atomic Combat, Macbooks, and the Mojiferforums…
Dec 29th
I apologize to all the Macbook owners, the brave souls still rocking first-gen iMacs, the desperate, the crazy, and anyone else who has realized that Atomic Combat’s window can’t be resized to allow them to play the game. I actually just finished up a fixed version and will be uploading the improved app to my website tonight (after midnight, when there is a lull in downloads…) Nothing too impressive or fancy, the app just checks your vertical resolution and adjusts the app window appropriately; the only problem thus far is that instead of implementing a completely new graphics function I simply scale everything down… multiple times a second… So the game is a little sluggish when animating at the smaller resolution, but at least it works!
In other news, after this resolution debacle I decided that I needed a better issue-resolution and user-communication method, so I started the Mojiferforum… So if you need help or want to complain about whatever oddity I’ve shat out, you can do so relatively easily now. I expect the Mojiferforum to become a disaster fairly quickly, filled with nothing but spam, midget and/or turtle porn, damned kids, and the occasional googly-eyed gibbon molester. Have fun!
…and in case you didn’t know, you can view the Atomic Combat Top Ten right on my website. Right now the fine country of Sweden is beating all contenders with an amazing 5920 score! Soon enough I will publish my first list of bizarre country names that people have used, because all of you need help. Mental help.
–Mojiferous
Happy Birthday Mojiferous.com!
Nov 5th
For the first time in years, I can actually say that I’m proud to be an American… The people of this country have proven that (except for a few vocal assholes) we are not all racist, ignorant, fear-mongering, ultra-christian fascists. I’m sitting here listening to Nina Simone’s “Strange Fruit” and “Mississippi Goddamn”, hoping that we may have finally closed a dark chapter in our history. But that’s a subject for a different blog…
The real reason for my blabber today is the first birthday of mojiferous.com- One fine year of impossibly confusing games, nearly unplayable crap, weird mustache obsessions, and horrible programming! Over the last year I’ve transferred a little over 327 Gigabytes of games, and had about 54,000 unique visitors resulting in a little over 360,000 hits… Not exactly Google numbers, but pretty damned good for a guy who makes smoking ashtrays and racing pants. I’m finally putting the finishing touches on the new version of Atomic Combat and it should be ready for beta testing within a week or so (which means that King Thor and Kloewer should be preparing themselves now…) Anyway- Happy Birfdey Mojiferous.com!
I haven’t vanished!
Aug 4th
Despite all evidence to the contrary, Mojiferous Industries is still busily churning out worthless goods for all to enjoy! I’m hard(ly) at work on the Republic of Thoronia game for the iPhone, and also making steady progress on another as of yet unnamed steampunk western game. I’ve been sidetracked as of late with work, so I haven’t been able to shat out anything super fast, but rest assured that more Mojiferous hoohah will be hitting the shelves ASAP.
–Mojiferous