Farting Cow

This was the first game I created fully on my own. Up to this point I had been following along with online videos recreating whatever game the poster was teaching.

It was a simple concept at first, a stick man wizard stood on a wall tossing cool spells at an endless wave of attacking stick men. My goal had been to not use any images, just draw everything on the fly. I stuck to it until I got to the point of making fireballs. I just could not figure out how to make anything I was happy with. An explosion of multicolored dots was close. But I quickly realized the inefficiency of that attempt, when multiple explosions would be on the screen simultaniously the game would lag really bad.

It was about this point when I showed the game to some of my co-workers. Chad "Superfly" told me that every great game needed a cow. Brian "The Operator" believed it required some form of fart joke. And thus was born the idea to have a cow wandering the battlefield randomly "farting" a cloud of combustable stink. An exploding fireball would take down a couple enemies that were close together. But if the fireball hit a fart cloud before it faded away, the following conflagration would scorch half the invading army at once.

Though this game was never finished, it was the largest javascript project I had ever undertaken. I learned a lot from this experience and had a lot of fun with it.

Just for kicks I found a copy of it, edited out most of the parts that were incomplete or not working quite right, and posted it below for you to try. Keep in mind this was my first real attempt at anything like this. It is very basic and unpolished, but hopefully you find it as amusing as I did.

Crane and Rigging Companion

This started as a couple of simple android apps that I made and had on my phone to use at work. After giving copies to a few co-workers I decided to attempt to put it on the app store to make it easier to hand out updates, and just to figure out how. I will admit there were a lot more hoops to jump through than I initially expected but I made it happen.

Next was to figure out ads. Ads run the world now and are the main sorce of revenue for "free" anything. The biggest problem here is I absolutely HATE ads. Well, more specifically, I hate being force fed ads unexpectedly. I have played many games over the years and happily watched many ads as long as I have the choice. So that is the approach I took. I created some near useless points that you just got from using the app. Then in a menu, out of the way of all function, I allowed the option to watch an ad to get some more of those points. The points are spent on "Random bits of advice from Questionable sources" because, why not?

If there were a ranking of least profitable apps on the store, this one would rank at the top! But it was never meant to make any money. It was all about getting something legit on the store and figure out some features I had never played with before. That and to help a small fraction, of a small fraction, of people in a very niche group to be able to do something on their phone that would normally require them to open a book from under their seat. So I considered it a win.

This app is still currently on the google play store for anyone interested in looking at it.