Mojiferous Industries

I know I’m a little late, seeing as how it’s already the 19th of January, but I’ve been lazy… So here it is: The 2007 Mojiferous Recap!

2007 started out rather slowly, with Mojiferous Industries in nascent form, like some kind of billowy gas cosmic gas cloud swirling around inside my mind… and then sometime in March I broke down, adjusted my programmin’ slacks, took off my top hat, and proceeded to remake/remodel Lobster Petting for the 21st century… making a OS X version that had all the charm and usefulness of the original (e.g. none.)
March was followed by a lot of other months whose names I forget and by the release of of Zoltan!, the last word in worthlessness. I would like to claim that Zoltan is some kind of deep artistic statement, but even free-associating buccaneers would find that to be a stretch… Maybe with a graphics update and some better user-interface work… Maybe in 2008…
Zoltan! prompted me to actually make a working version of Desktop Cigarette, which was promptly broken a few months later when Apple released Leopard… So I “fixed” it, realized it was more broken than before, and just ended up making it a widget, like it probably should have been in the first place. Oddly, Desktop Cigarette (in all of its forms) has generated more complaints, more stupid questions, more angry people, and more downloads than anything else I’ve made thus far… (It did make me realize that almost all hardcore anti-smoking people are complete batshit insane nutjobs. The bile, hatred, and blind anger directed at Desktop Cigarette [and me] just because it is associated with smoking is enough to make me want to smoke three packs a day just out of spite.)
Somewhere around late April through September I disappeared while furiously working on the useless monolithic thing I call Atomic Combat… Intro movies, worthless animation, a slew of excitingly byzantine options, and an AI that seemed to have a mind of its own. After three months slaving over the thing, having dreams about weird code, spending days tracking down problems within an increasingly complex labyrinth of code, I kind of gave up: No one could figure out this giant spiffy turd I had shat out, and I couldn’t even start to imagine how I would get the stink off…
The horror that was my over-zealous and complicated idea led me to trim down and look for smaller, tighter programming options… and different avenues of inspiration. My friend Kloewer suggested I make a game about locking your dog or baby in a hot car- so I did. Heat Stroke was simple, quick, and basic. I think the sound effects, opening movie, and weird 50′s TV theme are a laugh riot; the rest of the world yawned. I expected people to complain, instead Heat Stroke kind of faded off into obscurity…
Followed closely by Motor Pants, my manless pants racing game. The damned thing makes no sense. The interface could be better, but how? Do I really want to waste a whole bunch of time making graphics for a pant racing game? What is the meaning of it all in the first place? Why match coins to propel a pair of pants???? I tried making an intro movie for this one too, but nothing came out- how do you illustrate the idea of “motor pants”? 3D pants racing around like some kind of really terrible console game? My first idea involved a pantsless dancing homeless guy, a plastic lobster, and fireworks, but I scrapped it as too expensive… So I guess you’re all stuck with the steaming pile that came out instead (like some kind of gelatinous smelly afterbirth.)
Oh yeah, and some time in October I launched Mojiferous.com- so that whenever I tell someone my website address I can spell, then politely explain why I have such a bizarre site name. Nothing says confusion like “Mojiferous”! It’s kind of like having someone badly translate for me all the time- “My client would like to use the steamhorn, as he is differential and gassy. Thank you!”

So that’s 2007 in a nutshell. It probably contained peanuts. I spent way too much time slaving away making useless doodads, had some really horrible ideas, and didn’t make one thin dime! 2008 looks like it’ll be just as useless, filled with even more horrible ideas, and even costlier than 2007! I am currently in the process of making Atomic Combat a viable and interesting game- more in the vein of Battleship than whatever the hell it was like before… maybe something boring and tedious… like solving differential equations. by hand… I would say something encouraging like “look for it in the next few months,” but who am I fooling? It should be “watch out for it! It’ll probably be a disaster!” (Maybe some feature involving beards or mustaches would improve it… yes… improved beards and mustaches… hmmm.) Here’s to poverty and insanity!