Ripple Effects

I managed to finish this semester up with a decent GPA (3.4). After this summer, I will be moving over to grad school.

Board Name: Splish Splash. The board resembles more like a bamboo textured water slide, with a new strat for double gaps. Yes, I am underleveled here.

TIP: People who just pursued mastery might go for cannon balls if multiplier / chrono balls are not available yet. Just make sure you create a hole in just the right place. Additionally, they can also be used to grab fruit in the corners, which is typically covered with two or three layers of balls.

Fun Fact: Post title is called what it is because 'Ripples' is its internal name, and how one of my personal blog backups and posts can change things. An example of my post to one of my friends (and my classmate) eventually propagates over to his tumblr at the time of writing. (link to post)

STC Revisited

#112E: Visit a friend’s house, apartment, or dorm in another city. (Goal Completed - the overnight stay prior to this event)

Event: Spring Training Conference 2011 (STC 2011), North California

If you know what she means, you'll get the general idea of this workshop. *(She's actually referring to the strength of a club relative to its size).

Guess what the icebreaker was called.

I've always thought that the second time at an event is better compared to the first time. I was right for one. Likewise, I am strongly considering going for a committee position in CKI. After all, you only get to live a college experience once.

This year, most if not all of the workshops that I attended were helpful. Scrapbooking workshop was a bit short, but I was given justification on that. (Yes, I am planning to apply for historian for UOP CKI next year. There also might be a newer graphics related project on this blog coming soon.)

Question of the Day: I know quite a few people in my album of my two-day coverage, but only around 61% of them are listed as friends. Should I tag people who are not yet considered friends, or should I delay my album / video postings until I get more confirmed friends?

Results: Album tagging delayed by two days, total of 21 people who I've decided not to tag, 10 tagged with black text*, 20 people tagged normally.

Finally managed to make it to a million...

Finally managed to make it to a million points in Mastery Mode. At this level it's pretty difficult to get this score since you have to rely on no powers and no extra score from critical hits / increased point value of fruit (They're around ~60% of value compared to lvl 80).

In my opinion, I think that being a master just for 'bragging' rights doesn't feel like it's good enough. For most people, there needs to be a good incentive to reset, such as powers usable when you reach certain levels of mastery, because they will be at a huge disadvantage pointwise compared to those who don't reset. After all, if you're a master, shouldn't you have better rewards?

(I'll make my own power: Time Master. Adds 9 seconds per time ball, cost is 10,000 mojo, 12 hour cooldown between uses. Requires 2nd Degree Zuma Master.)

Welcome to the Boneyard

Remember the Aqua board posted a few months back? It looked like an iron frog board. Well this week's board is the real deal. Check back on the aqua board for a few other pointers for this board. And don't get carried away with the curve clears when using sun frog...

If you looked on the Zuma Blitz page (not the app itself) you will notice a free 12-game 24 hour x3 mojo potion for use on May 8 (Sunday).

This will be the last board that I will be on level 80 for a while. At this point I will mastery reset and distribute 20,000 mojo.

By the way I checked my site stats and surprisingly enough searches (99% of the time) lead to either the level up table, the tips page, or the scoring mechanics page. Just saying.

I'm actually looking for a few more unique boards rather than flipped repeats, so...

Question of the Day: If the devs introduce a board with triple rollouts, will you find it too hectic? (Example of such a board)

90 Degrees - 4 Million Score Run

Board: 90 Degree Nightmare (90 Degrees)
Score: 4,094,150 (multiplier / timelord), lvl 80
Specifics: 2,520,320 x45 gaps, 622,200 x7 fruit, extra time 1:28

Notes: In order to save mojo, I decided to ditch out the Epic Fruit powerup. Maybe I should've used it...

100k Pageviews

The hitcounter on this blog (tip: it's on the very bottom) has finally reached 100,000, and the blog has essentially lost most of its original purpose.

As a new milestone has been reached, let me say a few things.

I remember last year when it was very difficult to get pageviews and attention towards the blog when this was first started, but it rose dramatically once I posted a few tips up. Last May, I was more or less excited about my blog hitting 1,000.

Now that I'm in the six digit hit count area, my posts get a lot more attention. Youtube videos that I feature (even to promote friends) have received a significant boost in the number of times people have clicked on it. It can be evident by going to the video and clicking on the graph button, which one my site is usually listed. One such example is Mrs. Langone Rap.

I believe my success towards this milestone was Zuma Blitz. I didn't initially expect it to be much of a success when I started it last December, but I was proven wrong when my hitcount doubled within a week. Following the level up table which I published because a person asked for it, my # of visitors rose dramatically. By the next month I noticed many people in discussion boards linking to my blog for some helpful info, as well as some sites featuring my tips and blog, such as Games.com and Hubpages. I proceeded to publish more on the topic, such as score mechanics and weekly tips. Nowadays I can't really find anything that has 'zuma blitz' as a keyword search and not land here within the first few pages of search results. (It's 90 percent of my 100k hit count, if you were wondering.)

Speaking of that, I was planning to move all of the Blitz material to a different site that I own (so that site could be more specialized, separating my personal blog with the gaming related blog), but it turns out that a lot more people are linking over here than expected.

This site, despite having lots of tips and stuff, wasn't originally very navigation friendly; this blog was more designed to host pictures of various things in life, not gaming material. I later learned what the audience was clicking on in order to navigate around the site and updated it appropriately to make it more user friendly to users. (At least I learned something out of my HCI class.)

It's good to be one of the few people to get this many hits and visitors. I learned what it feels like to run a high profile blog. Meanwhile, Brittany, who I mentored in the past, has* somewhere around 25k followers on tumblr.

Next Steps

• With the success of this blog, I intend to expand a bit. First: Most of my background images that were previously on photobucket have now been publicly released and are available here.
• Youtube / Deviantart will probably be up to showcase more of my stuff (The latter because I've picked up interest in Graphics Design / Art but haven't told a lot of my friends about this. This blog will feature some work.)
• My senior project (and finals) are finally done, so I can concentrate more time on some program development.
• I will continue Zuma Blitz related material on this blog until I can find a way to transition this to another of my sites.

Star Forge: Hold your base... forever.

Playing through Star Forge, the newest game from Hero Interactive. On Hard difficulty. (I don't typically go for easy difficulty unless I plan to rush through the game quickly.)

Essentially it's a unique form of real-time base defense where your forge is either constantly producing turrets or turret upgrades. Once the 'forge' produces a turret / powerup you drag and drop on the spot where you want it to be built, or drag a powerup on a turret to upgrade it (max 6 upgrades per turret).

I managed to complete the game in one sitting, and learned that a formation of a turret with (3-armor / 1-amplify / 1-range / 1 shock) surrounded by 2 towers with 4-armor / 1-range / 1-explosive worked quite well the entire game.

TIPS*:

• Powerups are introduced in this order: Armor, Explosive, Heal, Range (must have), Amplify, Slow, Recycle, Bomb (destroy one non-capital ship onscreen), Shock, Anti-Capital.
• Save some upgrade slots for later when new powerups are introduced.
• Range is a must-have when it's available.
• When building a turret late-game put all of its upgrades on at one time, or it might get destroyed while trying to build it up.
• Keep building heals otherwise. Do that and you can survive the last wave with around 12 fully upgraded towers or so.