Raphael’s Website of Stuff

Last time I mentioned Lleyton Hewitt and his journey this year in Wimbledon, but another player that has often been overlooked by the popularity of players like Federer is Andy Roddick who is pretty much the King of Serves. He has an explosively fast serve that just never seems to stop even after 4 full sets, but he was also known for his attitude towards the chair umpires and line judges, which didn’t help attract a lot more new fans or boost his career much further even with his amazing skills and talent.

However, quietly in this year’s Wimbledon, Roddick pushed up through the ranks and on Sunday he will be facing Roger Federer in the finals! It feels like a new, more fully mature Andy Roddick who has mastered not only his skills, but his game plan and his mentality entering into each match, and I am absolutely loving this new Andy Roddick! Not only did he win a fantastic semi-finals match today against the British favorite, Andy Murray, but even when Murray started to lose his cool for a bit, hitting his racket into the net, Roddick kept his composure and focused on himself and the next point.

No matter what the outcome of the finals on Sunday (and it will most certainly be a splendid match that everyone should watch), I think Roddick’s won himself one more fan and this new Andy Roddick will undoubtedly pull in even more. Keep it up, Andy! I can’t wait to see what your future holds.

Hewitt wins 4th round at Wimbledon 2009

For anyone that’s been following the world of tennis the past week, the Wimbledon Championships are in its second and final week for this year and today one of the greatest matches in this year’s Wimbledon took place with the former champion, Lleyton Hewitt from Australia. (Read the article here!)

Hewitt, who won in 2002, is an amazing tennis player who has been struggling to get back to top since then, entered into the Championships this year unseeded against 23 seed Radek Stepanek in the 4th round and was down 2 full sets (4-6, 2-6) and then made an absolutely incredible comeback in the following three sets, even after a rain-delay interruption, to win the match and get to the Quarterfinals!

Although I am a huge Rafa Nadal fan myself, as Nadal had to withdraw from Wimbledon this year due to injuries and seeing Hewitt’s inspiring match, I can’t help but cheer for him in his comeback, not only from this match but from a long-awaited career comeback as well. It would be so pleasing to see Hewitt vs. Federer in the finals and if his fans keep cheering him on like they did today, it just may happen! So for now I say, GO HEWITT!

Wow, this is really cool! I’d like to know how they did this animation.

I mentioned over Memorial Day that I had been working on a Holidays-themed game. It looks like it’s been put on hiatus since my friend’s gotten pretty busy with work but I thought I would at least post screenshots of what it looks like. The idea for the game is that you are playing as Scrooge, who of course doesn’t like holidays, trying to defeat the Holiday-Bosses from Valentine’s Day to Christmas. It was the first time I didn’t do any coding for a project so that was an interesting experience for me. My friend Jay did most of the coding, we had a script (didn’t make it into the game unfortunately) by my friend Justin, and I made the models and levels.

Anyway, here are the screens!

Valentine’s Day:

Easter:

Halloween 1:

Halloween 2:

Christmas:

I think I just found a real-life pokemon while stumbling across a Pac-Man Skeleton. And I want one.

(Pygmy Jerboas: http://www.geekologie.com/2009/05/awwwh_i_want_a_million_pgymy_j.php)

Two updates in one day! Imagine that.

So I wanted to update everyone on one more piece of technology that I was skeptical about and decided to try today, and that is Bing.com. Wow was I impressed. So the thing that made me decide maybe I should try this new search engine over my former google default was this GearDaddy video:

GearDaddy: Hands-on with Bing

After watching that, I decided to do a couple of searches like my name, which brought up great results, which is pretty much expected if any search is going to try to compete with the google engine, but then I could hover over and get preview text in the exact context I needed; a huge time-saver, I could enter in addresses directly to get directions, I could ask it questions like “Why is Nadal’s uniform pink and yellow?” and have results I wanted. Holy cow. There were a couple posts linked on digg.com about Bing today like this, this, and then this image titled “Microsoft Bing is Freakin Amazing!”.

Now my favorite feature by far? Mouse-over on video results to have it start streaming automatically!

The E3 Conference was this week and working on Xbox LIVE and all, I felt the need to share this exciting Project Natal with everyone, now that it is publicly announced! I got to try it out a while back and it definitely worked very well, detecting all of my movements and gestures right away, so check it out:

Looks like I am a bit overdue on that update I promised last post. So as it turns out, I lost my tennis match after that post to the player that would eventually win the tournament. It’s been an exciting few weeks though since then and I have been playing a lot more tennis and learning a lot. The most exciting tennis-related update I have at the moment, however, is that my league team won our matches on Friday and so we will be going to regionals in Portland, Oregon! I’ll have to keep training hard until then.

As for the game development side of things, I’ve been working on a small game (engine) with my friend with a theme on Holidays and it’s been taking shape quite rapidly. Once it is more fully complete, I’ll post a screenshot to show everyone. I’ve mostly been doing the art and content while my friend has been programming, so it has been an interesting experience being quite distant from the code for a while.

Hope everyone is having a good, long Memorial Day weekend!

Happy May everyone!

So I am competing in a tennis tournament this weekend and had both my match for the tournament and for my league team today. It’s been quite an exciting day and I’m happy to say that I won both matches and will have the semifinals match tomorrow! Wish me luck!

I’ll update everyone on more stuff later. =)

Another eventful few weeks have gone by and it’s April!
With that in mind, here are some updates:

sin(Surfing)’s statistics have been released and we learned that we received ~80,000 downloads and had about a 3% conversion rate so HUGE thanks to everyone that bought the game!
BattleSweeper unfortunately did not do nearly as well so I won’t state the numbers here.

And lastly, the TIGSource Cockpit Competition (extended) deadline was today at midnight so I will reveal my entry that I have been working on recently: Detective Crash
I’ll be polishing up the game over this week but for now, it is playable so check it out. I’ll post here again once I’ve got it to a v1.0!