Whatever you do, make it awesome.

For the past few years I've been intermittently helping out on The Dark Mod, an awesome Thief-inspired total conversion of Doom III.

Today, we FINALLY released our first public beta. Go download it already! (NB: Full copy of Doom 3 required. The retail and Steam builds both work.)

Here's the full announcement:

Broken Glass Studios is proud to announce the first public beta release of The Dark Mod, a medieval steampunk stealth game inspired by the Thief series.

The Dark Mod team started work on the project in September of 2004. Their goal was to take id Software's Doom 3 (id Tech 4) engine and completely transform the sci-fi / horror shooter into a medieval, steampunk, stealth experience.

With the release of The Dark Mod: Beta 1.00, we are offering the modding community a powerful, easy-to-use editing suite for creating stealth missions. All the assets and resources necessary to build playable missions are included, plus a customized editor called DarkRadiant. A branch of GTKRadiant, DarkRadiant has been designed specifically to cater to the needs of Dark Mod mapping.

In addition to the editing tools, the release also includes four playable missions (including a Training Mission) to help demonstrate the full potential of the mapping kit.

The Dark Mod is in a beta release stage at this time, which means that some minor bugs and incomplete features are to be expected.

To see screenshots, or to download The Dark Mod, please visit http://www.thedarkmod.com/ . Or visit our forums at http://www.modetwo.net/darkmod/ .

We hope you enjoy it! :)

Interesting article on Gamasutra about a guy who was involved in licencing Tetris for consoles. However, the really interesting part of the article is the bit about his four long-term goals: weaning the world off fossil fuels, ending war, creating a "backup" of the Earth by terraforming Mars, and ultimately discovering how the universe ends. Heady stuff. Worth a read.

There's a link in the article comments to these fascinating pictures of atmospheric phenomena on Mars. Clouds, dust devils, dust storms... for a place devoid of life, it's pretty dynamic. Of course, the really amazing thing is that the human race managed to build a bunch of robots and send them over to take photographs and do science. Some day humans will walk there. And this guy has the serious ambition of terraforming it!

You know what? We could bloody well do it, too. I mean, just really think about that for a minute. This is not just science fiction. We can terraform Mars if we want to.

OK, so it's late and that probably makes me more susceptible than usual to being blown away by insights which are really quite obvious and somehow mundane, and y'all may just be saying "yeah, so?", but... we can terraform Mars if we want to. How cool is that!

As a species, we really can do anything. Our time starts yesterday. What are you waiting for?

Stop reading this and go do something awesome!

So apparently my site came under a DDoS attack about 7 hours ago. Don't bother clicking that link, it's down.

The first thing that comes to mind is puzzlement. Why on earth would anyone consider my site worth DDoSing? I'm not aware of anyone I've offended. My pitiful cash flow hardly warrants any ransom money. Just what is the motive here?

Must be some uber-pathetic script kiddie testing out their new toy. If they're hoping for some kind of angry reaction, they'll be sorely disappointed. All I'm feeling at the moment is withering apathetic disgust. Honestly - what kind of a snivelling loser would you have to be to lash out mindlessly like that? Lame, lame, lame. Grow up.

Now if you'll excuse me, I'm off to get some productive work done. (Ooh! Productive work. What a novel concept. Watch and learn, kiddo.)

In February I announced I'd be making a little "company donation" of sorts to the appeal fund set up by the Australian Red Cross to help victims of the bushfires that were ravaging the Australian state of Victoria back then. In short, I promised to donate 50% of the proceeds received by yours truly from sales of this game between Feb 7th and March 14th to said bushfire appeal.

Due to the inevitable lengthy delays involved in getting money from distributors and having it wired overseas, this little thing I've got going on called "final year of university", and me not having a particular fondness for doing complicated accounting (this was harder to sort out than you'd think), I hadn't done it until today.

Well, now I have. Which means I can reveal how much money we raised:

$1,055.02. That's one thousand and fifty-five dollars. And 2 cents. In Australian dollars - it's "only" about $837 in flimsy-green-paper-money* - but still, a grand is a grand! And this is a pretty grand grand! Cue rimshot. Lame puns aside, I'm seriously impressed it got that high.

(For the record, the sales curve shows that, as expected, my sales did not double during Feb 7th-March 14th - they merely continued their steep post-Steam-release decline - meaning that I now have less money than I would have if I hadn't done this. I did it for its own sake, not as a nefarious capitalist stunt as some people have claimed.)

Unfortunately the bushfire appeal which I was intending to donate it to actually ended before I received the money (doh!), so I rounded up to $1,100 and donated the money to the Australian Red Cross's "Where It's Needed - Australia" category, that being the closest available. Mea culpa. I hope nobody is too disappointed with the category switch.

And here's my receipt for proof (somewhat redacted, for all you stalker types out there - wave to the internet stalkers, everyone!), complete with nice form letter:



* Funny story: The first time I tried to put a US bank note in my wallet, I nearly shredded it in half by accident. It was a $50 note too! Didn't even notice until I pulled it out and tried to use it. The cashier was not impressed, but I brazened it out.

So... DarkView reminded me that I hadn't posted about this here yet. Oops. My bad!

Here's the deal. Unless you've been living under a rock (and hey, that's kind of fun sometimes, so if you have been then that's totally cool with me) you've probably heard of the bushfires that have been ravaging the Australian state of Victoria. The official death toll is 181, but that's expected to rise to between 200 and 300 once authorities manage to locate and identify more of the bodies. (Apparently people don't get added to the toll until they've been positively identified.) 1,800 homes have been destroyed making around 7,000 people homeless. Hundreds of people were injured; and remember "injuries" includes victims of severe burns.

It isn't over yet, either; today marks a week since the fires started, and some are still burning.

That's why I'm pledging 50% of the proceeds from the sale of my indie game, Mayhem Intergalactic, towards the Australian Red Cross's bushfire appeal fund. Details on my Inventive Dingo news blog.

DarkView rightly points out that this is incongruous given the subject matter of the game (ruling the galaxy with an iron fist); but hey, even bloodthirsty galactic overlords need a change of pace sometimes.