1) The beginnings of Atomic Combat 3.0, or “rebuilding the Pyramids”. I have a UI, and most of the basic functionality, and it’ll probably be another couple of months before this sees the light of day. I will likely release it on the app store, prepare to hear more about it in the near future.

2) I’ll soon be releasing an iPhone app in conjunction with King Thor… More on that soon, as well.

3) I’ve also started finishing FontUtensil (with an improved UI) for final release.

4) And finally, I’m prepping an overhaul of the website for 2011 (since I seem to redesign every spring) — stay tuned!

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

Lo and behold! That’s right, there’s a new piece of Mojiferous Industries software, and it isn’t a finished version of Simoebic Dysentery (quite yet)! I have just built an early beta of my latest um… “thing,” which I have taken to calling FontUtensil.

What is it and why, you may ask?
FontUtensil started as an educational project and quickly turned into something that I could see myself using fairly often, because I’m too cheap (and not a graphic artist) too pay more than nothing for a font utility. I had a particular need that none of the current font utilities filled, namely the ability to quickly decide on a font for a project without endlessly scrolling through a billion menus only to forget what the name of the font was that I wanted to use… Let’s be clear here though- I am not a graphic designer, nor do I claim to be, and FontUtensil is not designed with the designer in mind- it doesn’t do font repair (yet), it doesn’t give you tons of info about the fonts (yet), and it probably will be laughed at by the typographers in the audience, but I didn’t design it for them…

I built in some features/future bugs that I don’t exist (at least to my knowledge) in a free font utility program:
Firstly, being a game designer, I don’t always use “safe” fonts that would satisfy the editorial staff at the New Yorker… No, instead I sometimes need a medieval typeface, or something that conveys “wacky”, or a single word in three different sizes and 5 different colors. So I gave FontUtensil the ability to “lock” a piece of formatted text into place- Now I can compare and match an “ojiferous” against different M’s.

Secondly, I may be good at visualizing something, but black text on a white background doesn’t always give me a good feel for what I’m doing (which has been the main drawback of using something like Font Book,) so I built in the ability to load a background picture, set a type origin, and compare my ever-expanding font catalogue against the image that I’m actually working with.

Thirdly, I plan on keeping this project free, so that cheapskates like me can benefit from a (hopefully) useful utility program for the Mac- there’s never enough freeware or Open Source software!

That being said, everyone should download the damned thing, try it out and let me know what you like and dislike, what crashes (I tested fairly thoroughly, but you never know) and what I should add as FontUtensil progresses on towards a viable program!

–Mojiferous

Download it here , or go directly to Mojiferous Industries and get it there