December 2009 Archives

I've been mulling over the prospect of putting together a game over the past month or so.  I do this every once in a while.  I ponder and consider and think and plan.  Sometimes I actually do something about it.

Anyhow, I have this vision in my head for the game, how it will look and feel, ways to make each level feel unique yet still feel like a cohesive part of the game, etc.

So, a few days ago I did a couple sketches to start defining what the main player might look like.

I wanted a chubby, curly-headed, round-faced farmer type guy.  This was my first pass:

I wasn't very happy with this one.  He looks retarded, and of an undetermined gender.  Also, his fingers are... wrong.

So, I swung around and made another pass.  Here's the 2nd round:

I was much happier with this one.  He looks confident, yet lovable.  Cheerful, yet determined.  Just the sort of character a game might need.  I think I'll play around with him some more and see what comes out of it.

Here's a screen shot of version 1 of my ABuddy.


You can see a few symbols being highlighted in here.  In this case, the green ones are good performers, but maybe not good to invest in right now (since they just jumped up). 

The red one might be a good investment, so I would investigate it.  But it also might not since it just dropped a chunk.  Hard to say from here. 

Actually, it's not so hard -- I can see that that's a bargain stock, because of the "OB" on the end.  That means it doesn't have enough financial stability to meet SEC requirements for something or other, or something like that.  Since I don't really know what I'm doing, I stay away from those.

Check out this wicked cool drawing I just found.  I did this when I was in high school.  I can't draw this good, so I must have traced it from something...

I've tried playing with the stock market.  As a "busy person" it's very difficult for me to keep up with what's going on in the world.  The result: I lose.  I lose money, then I lose time trying to figure out how to not lose money, then I lose more time investigating dead-end stocks and funds, then I lose more time and money drinking and babbling about how many times I was almost rich and how hard it was growing up as a poor black boy in the South.


Finally, a few months ago, it dawned on me that I'm good at making computers do all my work for me.  I can spend hours getting the computer to do a 10 minute job for me, just so I don't have to do it.  So I decided to do a little experiment to see if I could get a computer to make worthy financial suggestions.

Thus was birthed ABuddy.

I slammed together version 1 as a proof of concept in an afternoon.  All it did was scrape quotes from Yahoo! pages, plunk them in a table and color code them if they dropped or rose by 5% or more.  I had it choose which symbols to look at by giving it a list of industries and having it pull the ones with the biggest market caps.

It was a complete shot in the dark, but for a first pass it did surprisingly well at narrowing down things for me to investigate.

I've now run 3 "test cycles" with this system in which I invested around $10k (of imaginary money) and tracked my success.  I learned a few things, and watched which patterns worked and which didn't. 

With those lessons under my belt, I've now started working on version 2.