I’ve been working on a simple platforming dungeon crawler. I’m not a super game developer or an amazing artist but it’s not stopping me from building something I want to play.
In my dungeon crawler I want to do more than just whack skeletons with a big ol’ axe. I want to play with multiple people on the screen, cast spells that help my allies and hurt my foes, and I want the experience to be fun.
The EMP has an exhibit going right now that Rachael couldn’t pass up. Al and Gigi were out of school for mid-winter break and this made for an excellent opportunity to explore the vast cuteness.
I was crazy excited as soon as I heard about Final Fantasy IX re-releasing on PC with updated textures and higher resolution. Since this is my favorite Final Fantasy game I went ahead and grabbed it on iOS as soon as it came out.
I found a fantastic post here for building a parallax background in Unity.
I had a parallax background done in 5 minutes. The hardest part was figuring out if I wanted to use a plane with a texture material or something else. (I went with a plane for this one).
I found plenty of excellent articles on how to do seamless texture tiling on the web but I really didn’t need that fidelity for my project. I have a 4 color background I’m putting together that will serve as the last layer in a dungeon – it needs to be some rocks (or boulders) that will be subtle and provide depth to the scene.
So I got to work. It took awhile – maybe longer than expected but I’m happy with the result for now. I did it all manually but I rather enjoyed the process.
I noticed the site was getting a lot of traffic and couldn’t figure out what was causing my sites to eventually become unresponsive. Since I have some free time on my hands I figured it would be a good time to look into it.
cat /var/log/apache2/*.access.log | cut -d'"' -f2,3 | awk '{print $4" "$2}' | sort | uniq -c | sort -rg | head
This resulted in A LOT of requests against xmlrpc.php. This is just my dinky little site but turns out there are a lot of script kids out there that like to hack up the xmlrpc.php to do their bidding. So I shut it off completely with an .htaccess directive.
And wouldn’t you know it… my apache2 processes haven’t spun up past 12 since I did it. I’ll get some updated photos up here soon too – I’d love to share some pics of the kids (and the fur kid) and maybe keep an actual running blog for a bit.
So entry first entry in over a year – complete!