'The Website' or Get Off My Llama .com (
link):
This was my first website on the internet to keep my interest for more than about a week. I sat down and hand-coded HTML in notepad for the site during a hurricane in October 2002. This site was my first domain-name to own, and was a site dedicated to my friends at Tulane University. Because of the domain name, we quickly picked up the title of "The Llama's". I am still surprised at the number of random people I meet at Tulane who have seen the website, or heard of "The Llama's".
The first version of the website was plain HTML, over winter-break that year, version two appeared. I refreshed my knowledge of frames, and added a menu-bar on the left side, and created background images for the menu bar in photo shop. That summer, version three reared it's truly ugly head. Inspired by the possibilities of javascript, I changed the site to tables, only I also kept the frames (stupid, yes, I know.) I used javascript to do links, which allowed me to use more than one frame at a time on a link. It was also over the summer when I embarked on my CD Project.
Somewhere around this time, Get Off My Llama.com lost my interest. The 40 or so people I had as a target audience (all my friends, their parents and relatives) had never really caught on to the idea of a website. I had fewer than 10 stable viewers, and my homework load demanded that I stop thinking about "The Website", and spend my free time relaxing or playing games instead of developing content and coding for The Llama Site.
The Llama CD: Lama Glama:
Ahh... Lama Glama, the latin name for the Llama. This was one of a few Projects where I had a clear vision of what I wanted from the start. I wanted to have a fully functional Llama themed CD with a number of features on it which would auto-run when you put it in a computer. I thought that it would be the coolest thing ever. As the features to go on the CD went, I knew I wanted to have a quiz-style game with multiple players, and I knew I wanted to reveal a new section of The Website. I also knew that I wanted to incorporate all the pictures I had taken with my digital camera over the year. Of course, as the rule went, when I conceived of this project, I had no clue how to do any of it.
I figured the hardest part would be the game, and I was right. So I started early in the summer, and Macromedia's FLASH program caught my eye. I had been thinking about learning a little FLASH animation for a while, and the time had come to dive in. This was my first introduction to Object Oriented Programming, and I had a devil of a time keeping all my variables straight and clear, not to mention trying to predict every possible action a human player could take in the game. In the end, I had learned a valuable lesson: Propper naming of variables is very important. Over the course of the whole summer I spent my days working a full-time job as a welding assistant and the evenings programming in FLASH, testing and re-working bits of code.
When I had had enough of FLASH, I would work on a different project. One saturday at 11am I started working on compiling a slide-show of pictures from the year using Windows Movie Maker, a program I had never used before. I worked straight through to Sunday at 2am with only an hour or so break for food. I slept and woke up at 9am to put the finishing touches on the movie, added some text slides and was completely finished with a 15 minute movie in less then a day and about 16 hours of work. A large part of the movie making process consisted of taking a few songs from different CD's I owned, cutting them down and splicing them together in an order I enjoyed.
At the beginning of the summer, I had rushed to put together a comprehensive survey filled with all sorts of random questions for my friends to fill out. The surveys, an online form, were filled out on the Llama website, and then submitted to my e-mail address. Half of the problem I experienced was simply getting everyone to fill out the survey in a timely and comprehensive manner. The other half was figuring out complicated HTML forms and memorizing the syntax. This survey would serve as the backbone for the Biography section on the CD and as a question pool for the quiz-show game.
With the most of the survey's filled out, I decided to start working on the next section of the website, a Biography section detailing the life and personalities of my fellow Llama's. I compiled all the surveys from individual e-mails to an excel spreadsheet, and started making a template biography using tables and a smattering of Javascript. Everything went smoothly until I tried to make an opening menu for the CD from which users would choose which feature they wanted to see. For some reason, my javascript kept messing up and mouseover commands wouldn't hold, and clicking would produce different actions. I took a little break from it all, and went back to the FLASH game.
A huge part of the flash game was it's re-playability level. I wanted my friends and family to be able to have contests and enjoy spending time playing against one another. This meant the question pool had to be dynamic and the questions had to be pulled from a database of some sort so that each time you played the game it was different questions (or at least a different order with mostly new questions). I ended up taking a code snippet from a random number generator and editing it to fit my needs. The questions and answers were in a text file on the CD. At the start of the game, all the entries (one entry = a question, four answers, and the correct answer) were pulled from the text document and loaded into an array. As the game went on, a random array element was pulled and removed from the array. That question was then asked, and another element was pulled. The FLASH game had three different categories, each with their own question set, which made for a very fun task of developing the questions, making up false answers (sounds easier then it is), and formatting it so it would work with my script.
I enlisted the help of a friend of mine to help me write some questions about real-life Llamas for one category of the game. With his help, I came up with my favorite question on the whole CD. The famous question started out being asked "Which of the following are Llama's used to heard?" We had come across a site which told us that Llama's were used to herd Cattle. My friend and I started with the possible choices being: Cattle, Dogs, Sheep, and horses. A little later on we came across another site which said Llama's were used to heard Sheep. This continued until we found out that Llama's were used to heard all of our made-up wrong answers. Our final question asked "Which of the following are llama's used to heard?" And the final answers, after finding out that Llama's have been used to heard just about anything: Cattle, Mice, Trout, and Human Babies.
Another part of the Llama Game was the music. With the help of the same friend, we worked over the summer evenings to play guitar and write a few compositions to include on the Llama CD. I had wanted to make an introduction to the CD using one song we wrote, and then use a longer version to play in background of the game while it is being played. The writing and recording process took longer than I imagined and I ended up being rushed to make introduction and finish the CD.
I had hoped to have the CD completely finished by mid-summer so I could mail it out to all my friends and their parents to see. It had come down to the day before my plane left to take me back to school in New Orleans, and I was trying to perfect the auto-run feature and fix an obscure error or two in the Llama Game as well as put the finishing touches on the introduction. My flight was leaving at noon the next day, and I was getting a ride from a friend at 9am to go out to breakfast and then to the airport. Around midnight, the auto-run feature was working, and the introduction was working. I burned a test-copy of the CD to make sure I had all the files in the right place, and as I was playing through the game I found a small obscure error. I spent the next three hours finding more obscure errors and fixing them. Somewhere around 4am I finally had what I still perceive to be a flawless game (I have received no error reports so far, besides the CD not running on older computers Whoops!). I started manufacturing CD's on all three computers in my house with CD burners. I had borrowed my friends CD stomper, and had designed and printed a CD image and insert earlier in the night. I printed 25 copies of the CD, and was done by around 6am when the sun rose, with three hours to spare before my summer in seattle was officially over.
Creation