Over the last week, a friend and I had been designing a contraption out of toothpicks and glue.  The project was for my physics class, and the purpose was to design and build some sort of casing around an egg so that when the egg was dropped from roughly two stories, it would survive the impact.  Hence, the name Egg Drop.

Many of the projects survived, including ours.  By projects, however, I mean the contraptions that we built, heh.  I cannot say the same about the eggs inside, however.  A majority of them broke including ours (darn).

What was great about our project, though, was that it actually would have worked (that's what everyone said after they witnessed their eggs fall victim to the cruel solid that is concrete) if we had took the time to make the cusioning around and above the egg more stable.  The whole contraption was built like a copter (with two wings), spinning quickly in the air as it glided down towards earth in 1.43 seconds.  On impact, the spring device on the bottom performed the necessary absorbtion we had planned.  Up to this point, the contraption worked perfectly, with the egg surviving, supposedly.  Though I was distracted by timing the fall with my wrist watch, my partner said that after the egg survived the fall and impact, the contraption tipped over, causing the egg to break because there was no cusioning around it.

This makes sense.  We focused only on the wings and the base spring, completely overlooking this outcome.  But at least next time we will have another possibility to look into and prepare for.

Overall, this was a great project, even if our egg didn't survive.  I'm looking forward to the bridge project coming up some time in the year...

Oh and I might post a diagram of our contraption once it gets graded (it was part of the design document).

By the way, do you have any experiences with the egg drop at your school?  Were you given different limitations than mine?  Give me a shout at bballer_gm@sbcglobal.net and I'll post your comments here.

Just wanted to let you all know that I've got two games coming up some time this month.  One is Bipsanity, which you can catch a preview of in the in.dev section.  I'm giving myself until the end of the month to finish it.  The other game is a new hiragana-based mini-game, but it should be a fun one for the hard-core typist and anyone interested in Japanese.  I've spent all day on it today, and I could actually call it complete now, but I want to really polish it and make it as presentable as possible.  I'm giving myself half the month for this one.  It's shaping up to be a good fun study tool for beginners, while those more experienced can have a lot of fun getting the high scores!

Aside from programming in GML, I've also been getting into Java through a Computer Science class at school.  It's pretty similar to GML, but it is a lot more strict on the programmer.

Until next time..

I think my english teacher goes out of her way to give us insane amounts of homework.  We've been reading a book called "A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man" by James Joyce, and our homework load has be really bad lately.  For homework tonight (due Thursday) I have to read and annotate roughly 60 pages, accompanied by seperate responses to the chapter.  Unfortunately, this means that my GM time is limited.  I try to work on Bipsanity when possible, but it's not so easy with my homework load.  With a work in two hours, I better start reading...

But first, I want to mention that I got a chance over the weekend to check out some games at the GMC.  There were four impressive works in progress that caught my attention.  I'll be posting some links to them in my next blog entry, but for now, I gotta get some homework out of the way.

Catch ya later.

Try out the demo of Bipsanity I posted in the in.dev section.  Any comments are appreciated.  You can leave suggestions at the GMC topic here.

Things have been going slow lately, and it seems like there's not much going on, but I think there's a lot of game development taking place behind the scenes at eo.  Personally, I'm working strong on Bipsanity, trying to wrap things up and release it here.  I'm also releasing a new version of Elementary Kanji in the coming weeks, and a little progress is going into my long-running project Jetpac Joe.  Until later, see you all.