Building yet another game…Hauler!

I’ve been working on a Flex/Flash-based space commerce game for the past few weeks. I’m taking an extended hiatus from WoW, so I have quite a bit more time to dedicate to living an actual life, and building my own games is part of that.

I’m keeping this one pretty simple. The concept is a tribute to classic commerce games like Dope Wars, Solar Wars, etc. – travel from place to place, buying and selling commodities. Make money, upgrade your vehicle, haul more cargo. Rinse and repeat. Every now and then an incident occurs at one of the locations that affects the prices of one or more commodities. There will also be occasional turn-based combat using extremely simplified stats and dice-rolls.

I had Solar Wars on my Palm Pilot years ago, and literally wore down a few spots on the screen from playing it so much. I hope to make Hauler visually appealing and just as addictive.

Once I finish it, I plan to port it to several different platforms including Silverlight, iPhone, and Android. Maybe I’ll even make a Palm Pre version…who can say? It would even be nice on a dumbphone like the one I carry.

I don’t have anything playable to show yet (it’s uuuuuugggleeeeee right now), but at this point I’m further along on this game than I have been on any game since I was a kid banging away at my TI-99/4A or C-64.

Web Services – Give more data rather than less…in moderation.

There are those that argue that XML is evil and bloated and blah, blah, blah. But if you’re building a web service, I find it’s always better to provide more information than less.

For example, you might be tempted to leave off stuff like dates/timestamps, etc. Don’t. Those little metadata tidbits come in handy. I always like saying “It’s already there.” whenever somebody asks me about that kind of stuff. (This is in sharp contrast to a certain web service I’m calling these days that returns a 1 or a 0. If there’s a failure, I have no indication as to the cause. If it’s successful, I don’t have any transaction number, etc. to refer to the call. Lame.)

Of course, if you’ve got performance issues or you need to save bandwidth, trim it back. Be reasonable.

ComboFix to the Rescue!

Where other anti-malware products failed, ComboFix triumphed.  I had a nasty, evil trojan on my computer (a DNSHijacker variant of some kind) that was redirecting me to toseeka.com (among other places) when I would click on links from Google searches.

I tried several virus and malware scanners and they either failed to detect any problems, or were powerless to do anything about it.   I tried running them in safe mode, waiting for new definitions and updates, etc…no help.

This thing I had was apparently able to hide out and rename/copy itself pretty cleverly.  ComboFix closes down all your programs (including your explorer shell!) and digs deep.  I’ve had misc. infections on my computer before, but none have ever been this tough to clear up.

I’m not sure how I got the trojan, but I have re-installed AdBlock on Firefox and I’m doing a Windows Update first thing after I whip this post out.  I took off AdBlock because I want to help support all the great sites I visit.  But until ad distribution systems become a bit safer, I’m back to blockin’.

I’m also shopping for a good all-around antivirus solution.  This computer needs a nuke ‘n pave.  The current install is about 18-20 months old, which is ancient for me.  I’m thinking about trying out Windows 7.