The other thing that has been taking up some of my time recently is training.

You might remember that last year I took part in the Sick Kids Save Point – a 24 hour gaming marathon to raise money for the Sick Kids Friends Foundation. This is a great charity that supports the Royal Hospital for Sick Children in Edinburgh, by providing comforts that make a kid’s stay in hospital more bearable; more child and family facilities; extra medical equipment; and funding extra research and training. Here’s an article about an upcoming project of theirs.

It was good – playing games and also helping a charity – but I sort of felt that after sitting on my backside for 24 hours I should do something a little bit more physical this year (and no, 24 hours of Wii Fit or Sports was definitely not going to happen).

I’ve been gradually losing weight and getting fitter since moving to Edinburgh (living a five minute walk from a gym will tend to guilt trip you in to that, I think). After doing a bit of resistance training on my legs (to strengthen my knees to the point they can handle high impact exercise), I found I quite enjoy running. Not horrible treadmill running, but running outdoors.

So they idea of doing a charity run came up, and thankfully Bupa have just the thing. I entered, again to raise money for the SKFF.

All was going well (I can’t remember how much information is public on my RunKeeper page but I was doing decent 11km+ runs in May) until I went too far and my old knee problem came back. Apparently you’re not meant to increase the amount you run by more than 25% a week, but me being an idiot didn’t know this.

After a month of being in pain even after just walking 5km, things looked bleak. Gradually the injury has been healing though, and over the last month I’ve been slowly pushing the distance I can run back up again – I’m currently able to do 8km, with just a month to go before the event. Hopefully I will be fine, and the injury will hold off until I’m done.

Why am I telling you all this? Isn’t it obvious by now?

I’m raising money. I want your sponsorship. The Sick Kids Friends Foundation need your sponsorship. It’s for a brilliant cause, and involves a game developer huffing and puffing his way around the hilly Edinburgh streets.

Go on, sponsor me. Please.

(As an aside, at the time of writing I’ve raised £285. Which is great, but less than half of what I eventually raised through playing games. It seems that despite the mickey-taking at the time, people are more willing to shell out for games playing!)

Only two posts so far this month? Blimey, have I died or something?

No, I have generally been having a more relaxed month and as such haven’t seen fit to post. So I’ll sum it all up and hopefully then we’ll be up to date.

Work-wise things have been ticking along. The game that I’ve been blogging about most recently, with the scientist guy, the factory and the killer robots, has been shelved for the time being. I was hit with the realisation of how much content would be needed to finish it, and I’m not sure such an undertaking is a great idea for me at this point. I still love the idea of the game though, so I’m hoping to keep dipping in to it during quieter periods and hopefully continue making progress that way.

In its place I’ve started working on something less content heavy (I hope), that’s kind of a cross between the old arcade machine Defender, and the Amiga game Ugh! (I think there are a quite a few other “flying taxi” games of that nature too, so chances are you’ve played something vaguely similar). It’s coming along okay, so I might have a screenshot or two to show off soon.

Games I’ve been playing-wise there has been a glut of checking things out. Things like Minecraft, which you may have heard of. Also Limbo (didn’t really like it, it felt like Rick Dangerous with arty graphics and the kind of physics-based controls that I hate in platforms games and that has always eventually soured me to Little Big Planet).

I’ve also surprised myself by getting more in to Dead Rising 2 than I ever managed with the first game. It seems a lot friendlier to a casual player, though still layered with a lot of optional depth. I can see myself giving up when the time limits to do things get in the way again, though (especially the main daily one that forces you to find an item and return to your daughter every 24 hours).

And finally, because it’s August, I’ve spent what is probably an unhealthy amount of my time going to see comedy. Some people would say it’s crazy to see 48 shows (though James Parker would disagree with those people).

Obviously I’m not going to list everything I have seen (oh, the things I have seen) not least because some of it was absolute rubbish. But if you get chance to see Nick Helm’s Dare to Dream, Olver: Portrait of a Serial Killer, Tim Key’s Masterslut, John-Luke Roberts and Nadia Kamil: The Behemoth, Hannibal Buress: The Hannibal Montanabal Experience, or the Pajama Men: In the Middle of No One, you definitely should. And if you were at the Fringe this year but missed the chance to see Comedy in the Dark, The Wrestling, Comedy Countdown, and Alex Horne’s Taskmaster II, then shame on you.

Oh, there is one other thing that’s been taking up my time, but I’ll post about that separately.

Yesterday I was introduced to an iPhone game called Shadow Cities, which seemed very interesting.

It’s a location-based massively multiplayer online game essentially, where you are able to capture spirits and locations in the world for your team using a gesture-based spell system.

The presentation and style is quite funky, and though the tutorial section is a little confusing, and it often doesn’t give you a brilliant idea of your options, I played a few hours off and on. (It’s a free to play game, and as with 99% of these that means you’re limited in the amount you can play in a session unless you stump up cash for more energy refills.)

Working from home, as I do, meant that the location-based part of the game was passing me by a little. It has an ability to teleport yourself to other nearby safe points, which is nice and handy, but they teleportable places are still a little too spread out to be much use. Clearly walking around is the name of the game.

As luck would have it I had a reason to leave the house that evening, and when I got to the bus stop fired up the game.

And that’s where the problem started (and ended). Despite having a solid four bar 3G connection on my iPhone, the game was completely unable to log in to the servers. “Poor network connection”, it told me. I had a quick look on Facebook, that was updating. Twitter was updating as well (and letting me tweet). So, the connection wasn’t terrible, then.

I gave it the benefit of the doubt. I got on my bus, and sat on the top floor at the front (this has always seemed like a prime signal spot to me, usually getting an extra bar or two over pretty much any other bus seat). Over the entire 30 minute journey that passed through the middle of Edinburgh the game was never able to log in.

“Maybe moving around is a problem,” I thought. So when I reached my destination I sat clearly in the open where I had another solid four bar 3G connection. And still couldn’t log in.

I’m assuming this must be either an issue with my location (Edinburgh, UK), my hardware (iPhone 4), or my carrier (Orange) despite not having a problem with any of those before.

But even aside from that, a location-based game that requires you to be logged in to play but has flaky connection issues seems like a terrible idea to me.

Why is there no form of offline play at all? The locations of spirits in the world aren’t persistant when you teleport between two nearby places, and a little bit of intelligent caching based on my previous location and log in time would ensure the data for other things was reasonably up to date.

What I am left with right now is a location-based game where if I leave my location I can’t play it. And how long do you think that’s going to hold my attention for?

I’ve had a bit of trouble in the last week with people (or, judging by the IP address and other behaviour from that address, a person) grabbing the viral versions of my games and uploading them to Newgrounds using accounts that are almost me (ie “FreekyZoid” etc)

Obviously this is a bit of a pain in the bottom, mainly because people think that it’s me and then try and contact me through those accounts.

Thankfully the vigilant staff at Newsgrounds (Tom Fulp in particular) have been a big speedy help in recovering the games to my account and closing down the fake accounts, which is ace.

As an apology to everyone for the confusion, and for the fact that the faker posted a really old version of Tealy & Orangey, I’ve uploaded a new version.

This has Advanced mode unlocked form the start (without having to complete standard mode first), and Practice mode with all levels unlocked will become available as soon as you start a game (so click to start either mode, then press escape to return to the menu, and you’re good to go).

If you’ve ever been stuck on a level and not able to progress, now you can see the rest of the game.

Go and play it here – Tealy & Orangey on Newgrounds.