News

I finished Braid over the weekend. It’s a very hard game. I say that because I couldn’t play for more than 45-60 minutes at a time, without shutting off my Xbox in frustration. If you read the official Braid walkthrough, which is in fact a statement by the author that you should not use a walkthrough, you are told: Some of the puzzles will be hard. But when you manage to solve those hard puzzles, you will feel very good about it. The game will feel very rewarding. ...

I can’t believe I just wrote “galore” but it’s late at night and I’m exhausted. Without further ado: Stumped for ideas for your next doomsday device? Can’t figure out the formula behind the Penis-Snatcher™? Idolise Dr. Strangelove? Then unite with your fellow rejected members of the scientific community and plot the world’s downfall over the internet! You’ll be amazed at just how many ways we have of enacting revenge on those physicists who rejected your ideas, falsely stating that they “defied all moral standards of society”! ...

We got tired of always missing the deadline for creating new E-Peen(tm) when launching every fourth forum, so Jalapeno and I went nuts and created all the E-Peen(tm) for the forums you can pwn in a row through 100 as well as medals through 100. This should last you guys a while :) If you pwned 44 forums in a row and did not receive your E-Peen(tm) for it yet, please tubmail Evil Trout! Thanks! ...

It’s been a while since we’ve run a contest, so today I’d like to announce The Forumwarz Comics contest. For those too lazy to click that underlined text above, it’s a contest where our users create comics featuring NPCs from Episode 1. We are rewarding funniest comic and best art, so you can enter even if you suck at drawing!

Not everything in Episode 2 is related to new content. We’re using the development time to streamline some other things, such as the battle interface. Check out a new screenshot! The biggest difference is that we’ve re-claimed the top part of the screen. While in battle, normally the only links from the top menu you’d want are to Leave Battle or to Report a Bug. Instead of wasting inches of screen real estate on the logo and tabs, we’ve come up with a one-line version takes up a lot less room! The text “Emi” in the screenshot is the name of the test character I’m using. ...

It’s been a while since I wrote about Episode 2 stuff on the blog, even though I am spending the majority of my time these days working on it. One thing other RPGs have established is that grinding to level up your character feels a lot less like grinding when there is an objective just on the horizon. Right now, thanks to the community forums, there are more than enough forums to visit and pwn in Episode 1. However, besides levelling up your character or earning Flezz, there is little reason to visit them. ...

Software Upgrades Forumwarz is now running on Phusion Passenger instead of Nginx and Mongrel. The kicker was when I asked Zed Shaw, the creator of Mongrel, about Ruby security vunerabilities at RubyFringe, and he said “Honestly, just use Passenger.” When the creator of a piece of software (although who admittedly doesn’t maintain it anymore) suggests that I use another piece of software, I listen :) New Features Haxlrose’s resets are now always free, but limited to once every 4 days. ...

I’ve published this week’s forum buildr v2.0 Beta build, The Anarchist’s Playbook. You know what sucks? Rules. You know what doesn’t have rules? ANARCHY! Here you can trade tips on making homemade bombs, stealing tools from construction sites, analyzing Rage Against the Machine lyrics, and leaving trash at McDonald’s. You’ll be taking down huge corporations and bring down the government in no time. Our next build will be Plagiaristic Intentions: ...

In honor of RubyFringe and my love of Ruby, Rails and Open Source, i’m going to release a small Rails project I coded up on the boring airplane ride back from Las Vegas. Kawaii is like a script/console that runs in your web-browser. I’ve been using it for Forumwarz development and it’s worked great so far! Update: Kawaii is now hosted on Google Code. There is a discussion group and issue tracker there! ...

We’ve added Speed Run times for almost every forum. The two newest ones didn’t have enough statistics behind them to come up with accurate numbers. I also came up with what I think is a more statistically competant formula for calculating the speed run times for forums. It pays a lot more attention to the standard deviation of fast times, and also ignores the few people who have the Defaced Mona Lisa item from the calculations. In a few of the tougher forums, having a DML skewed the speed run times by a lot! ...