The Billion Dollar Quest

Season IV of BrainBall is now underway. For this season, I made a number of improvements to the interface inculding the new languages, archives & improved navigation. This may also be my best set of tasks yet, so I am quite pleased with how things are coming along. I plan to use 2-3 more seasons to develop more good games and fine-tune the whole process before sending out a major press release and launching a PR campaign.

Last night I sat down and made a to do list with a section each for playwithyourmind.com, BrainBall & BDQ. I had a huge brainstorming session, wrote out a list of 30+ items, and decided to get right to them. But before I actually started anything on my list, I came up with a new job and set out to complete that instead. As I have learned a lot about making Flash/PHP/XMl applications in the past 6-8 months, I have decided to redo my game portal. This portal was one of my first efforts at something like that, and as such, is clumsy and inefficient. I started out last night at 9p and worked non-stop until 3 in the morning, and I plan to do more or less the same until it is done. Hopefully then, this portal will be ready within 2-3 days and I will have a spiffy new site to unveil.

Once that is done, I will continue on with my list. Among the items on there are creating new games from the best BrainBall tasks and using the Google translator tool to promote BrainBall in Spanish, French, Italian, Portugese & German.

Oh, I think I mentioned my partnership with BrainBashers.com a few posts back… well you can now see it for yourself as it has gone live! This section is already bringing new traffic to playwithyourmind.com and BrainBall.

http://brainbashers.com/games.asp

As you may have noticed from my lack of blogging, I have been a bit distracted recently. With the warmer weather here, I have taken a lot of time to enjoy the spring… While I feel like I have been slacking, I know it is important to strike a balance between work & play (more specfically, between sitting at a computer and being active) else my mind-body system will be thrown out of whack.

That being said, I hate hot weather, and as soon as the temps rise above 75/80 degrees I will be doing much less outside, unless it involves water. So this has sorta been a short summer vacation and it wont be long at all before I am back, hard at work.

Speaking of which, I kicked some ass yesterday. In addition to completing season IV of BrainBall (coding 4 new tasks), I also got off to a great start on a larger and more ambitious project. For some time (really since I first began), I have wanted to make my games/sites available in other languages besides english. I have made several efforts to find volunteers to help with this project, but nothing has come of those attempts. But now that I have discovered the Google translator, I have decided to give it a go. While the automatic translation is certainly a bit rough, a test from english to spanish and english to french convinced me that the translated text is sufficient to convey the idea. So now I am determined to make BrainBall multi-lingual, and then eventually, playwithyourmind.com as well.

So far I have made it so the main menu is available in English, Spanish, French, Italian, Portugese & German. Today I will go through and do the same with the rest of the game, including the instructions for all 10 tasks. While this is boring & mindless work, I am very excited about the end product and that should help me make it through. This multi-lingual version should be all ready for the opening of season 4 (May 30).