R.I.P. Fan

The hottest summer in years, and my room fan has just decided to die on me. In other words, until I get a new one, I'm living in a microwave. Great.

The Game Jolt competition results were released yesterday. Neither It Only Takes A Second nor The Hilarity Of Murder placed, but I lost to three amazing games so there's no shame in that. I'm sure, come their third competition, I'll enter again, maybe that time without the added annoyance of Softwrap screwing up on me and losing me over half the making time.

I'm currently at a stage of game making I don't really like - bouncing between a number of concepts until I find something I want to continue working on. This takes a while - I'm very indecisive. Usually, as soon as I start working on something, one of the alternatives seems like a better idea. I have the ground engine of Rotatarama done so that might end up becoming my next active project. However, I'm still kind of wanting to remake or make a sequel to Elemence AuX. I still enjoy that game, and at the time (and for quite a few months after too) it was the best game I'd ever made. The only problem is that it aged badly - looking back, I see some of the design work I put into it and just think "why?!".

I just finished my third shift at the shop I work at (literally, about half an hour ago). I don't have to do another shift until next Monday, so for this week I hope to have something to work on properly.

Despite stiff competition from Sealegs, The Shins' song "Split Needles" remains Song of the Moment. I'm really into The Shins at the moment. Infact, while working, I actually listen to their three albums on repeat.

So, yeah. That is all. Goodbye!

~NAL

Speedy update

Shortenable to "Speed date" maybe.I've not been blogging much since I'm working my nuts off to finish this Lite game for the Game Jolt Competition. That brings me to some points.

- I still don't have Pro

- Softwrap remain yet to reply to my email.

- The game is now called The Hilarity Of Murder.- It's named like that as it now has one of the ten GJ axioms into it.

- The axiom is "Laughter is the Best Medicine".

- In the game, you have an illness which's deadly effects are only stopped if you're finding things funny.

- You find murder funny.

- It's doing well.

I'll blog when it's done or I know I'll have some time free to post.On another note, I plan on finishing It Only Takes A Second after this game is made and I finally have Pro again.

Sigh

Still waiting for Softwrap. They only took a day last time I needed something from them - typical that they're taking longer when I really need Pro ASAP.

Oh well, guess I'd better update on Lite Town Wars.

It's going well. Since the last blog entry, I made several improvements, including one which changes the drawing engine to incorporate perspective. Notice in the last screenshot, the tops of the skyscrapers are identical in size to the bases. Now, they're not. I'd upload a screenshot of this, but it's hard to tell since I made the skyscrapers so damn high. Making the perspective was a fairly easily calculation though - it just works out the positions of two opposite top corners separately, instead of a single calculation for the centre of the top.

I've also done the HUD, and incorporated a system to do a few things I've not really attempted before - levelling up, max. health increases, multiple weapons (pistol, Uzi, rocket launcher, grenades), and limited clips of the pistol and Uzi (so, for example, you have to reload the pistol after 8 shots).

I won't bother with an updated demo yet - I'll wait until there's at least a little extra gameplay.

Well, that's all. See you in another blog entry!

~NAL

EDIT (6:49pm GMT)

Here's a screenshot of Lite Town Wars so far.

As usual, click it to see it in full.

Stopgap game in Lite

Since I'm bored of waiting for Softwrap, and can't continue with IOTAS until it's sorted, I'm now working on a stopgap game in which I'm trying to get as much out of Game Maker 7.0 Lite as I can. It's currently called Lite Town Wars, and is comparable to MINDRAPE and my Fake 3D Pyramids example.

I'm surprised lengthdir is a function available in Lite, actually. It's so damn versatile, and is way more useful in my opinion than stuff like image_angle. Its availability in Lite is one of the only reasons I'm making this game.

Anyway, here's a screenshot of what I have so far (click it to see it in full).I won't be hyping this game much since it really is just while I'm without Pro for IOTAS - if I get Pro again before this game is complete to a reasonable percentage, it'll likely be scrapped.

So, yeah. That's pretty much it for now!

~NAL

Waiting on Softwrap

I was unaware, but apparently I'd hit my GM7 registration limit when I did the XP reinstallation (see previous post). So, at the moment, I'm having to wait for Softwrap to respond to my email asking for another registration.

Until then, It Only Takes a Second will have to lie untouched - I can't work with it in lite since it uses so many pro features, including D3D.A couple other weird things occurred with the new installation, mainly that Windows Media Player won't work. There seems to be a broken version in its directory that can't be deleted, and you can't specify where it should be installed (nice one, Microsoft), so it just keeps running into a brick wall. I've started to get used to Winamp, though, so meh.

Anyway, thought I'd post an update on that. Prior to the reinstallation, IOTAS was on 13 levels, so provided Softwrap help me out in the next couple of days, I should be able to finish the game for the August 31st deadline.

~NAL