Hi friends!

Merry Christmas and happy holidays. I’m up near Seattle for Christmas this year with my future in-laws, having a snowy time. I’ll be in warm California soon, hope you all have a good holiday. Cheers!

John

I’m sort of stunned at how much traction Achievement Unlocked is getting. It’s hit several major game media sites and has probably reaped the most hits in the shortest amount of time (over 230k plays on Armor Games alone in 3 days).

Articles have been written about it on:

• JayIsGames
• Gay Gamer
  
• Kotaku
• Press The Buttons
• The Escapist Magazine
• Destructoid
• Giant Bomb
• TIGSource
• RockPaperShotgun

I’ll keep you guys posted, but for now I’m really excited at how well it is doing .

I find it completely amusing when people spend their entire lives not playing the game. We all do it, those little badges, button, trophies and other nick-nacks we get for beating games. Stickers in LittleBigPlanet, relics from Uncharted, little stars and ranks from CoD and Halo 3.

I decided to parody all of that. Behold, a game where you do absolutely nothing but that! I call it Achievement Unlocked (remember I am holding off hosting my own stuff until I get onto the new site, things will be hosted locally soon -J).

100 achievements to unlock, all featuring our favourite little blue elephant (or pink, if you know what to do). 1 level, no objectives, no special moves, enemies, bosses, or obstacles. Pure, unadulterated achievement metagaming.

AND POLKA!

Go play it .

All the cool kids are doing it!

I got engaged last night to my girlfriend of 5 years. Carlie and I have been dating since high school, wound up at the same college, and still managed to somehow end up together after all this time. I popped the question last night and she said YES!

No date has been set, no real plans made, but it’s been quite a relationship and it’s nice to move onto the next step of it!

She’s put up with my feverish coding for all these years, is truly a best friend, and totally one-of-kind. I’m quite happy at the moment .

Hey everyone,

Last week I got wicked sick after Thanksgiving when I went to an unmentionable food location and consumed nearly 2 pounds of chili and hot dogs. I got really bad food poisoning and ended up nearly throwing up my lungs in the process (or at least it felt like it).

It’s been a strange, slow recovery. The vomiting has stopped but I still feel drained, tired, and jittery. It’s as if my body has just rejected everything I have thrown at it.

I don’t usually feel this sick but this week it’s just been awful. I typically get sick for a day or two, but never food poisoning and anything like that. It’s not stress or anything, just a strange flu.

Dark Cut 3 launched a few weeks ago, and I forgot to update the “Hey update this later” section. Dark Cut 3 was a long, tedious, amazingly difficult project to tackle. It was my largest and most complex project to date, requiring a massive amount of nitty gritty editing, reediting, and rereediting to get it to where I wanted it. Although I probably didn’t reach the solid peak of awesome (I tried really hard though!) it was a good showing, and I liked how it turned out. It was getting pretty nitpicky by the end.The new website, as always, takes longer than expected! My deadlines, even 4 years later, are never met! All the data from the site is moved over but the forums are just not quite there yet. I’m not a php/mysql programmer and it’s all very foreign ground to me, so getting it working and working right is quite a challenge (I’m having fun with it though).

Things I’m working on:

Archery Game – Probably not what you think, but it was this interesting idea I came up with once at work. Should be out either this week or early next week.

Platformer Game – Should be out sometime this month.

Red 2 Animation – Yes, I’m still working on it.

The Website – Still chugging along!

Anything not listed here is either getting worked on as soon as one of these other things goes away, but the RPG and other projects are still in line. I’m always busy, always working… so it’s not like I’m just sitting on my butt writing a long news post about it (or maybe I am because I feel sick and have no energy to do anything else!).

Hope everyone is getting a good kickstart to their holiday season.

-J