I'm in too deep.
I can't stop!
And yet I also didn't plan ahead far enough, and will be spending most of this morning removing a bunch of stuff, and redoing it all.
Gah!



Tuesday's little sprite buildey bobby will be all nice and super, and with any luck, should build some nice sprites and tiles and things like that.
I'll pop in some nice presets for making tiles, floors, walls, baddies and whatever.
Assuming I can get it all working in time!

It's getting there, but I'll first need to redo most of those sliders/checkboxes, because having attempted to use them, I've realised I probably should've done them in a completely different way.

Aw well, lesson learned.
Captain Hindsight will be shouting at me for this one.

Currently the sprites have no shape forming, so the sprawling mass of purely random pixels on the bottom right looks pretty damn ugly. I'll be working on that today, along with the color sliders which aren't quite the way they're meant to be. .. Needs more base, and planning ahead!

I did get the color palettes working, though, and it can render sprites in "Any colour/No Palette" or one of the included retro system's colour palettes! The sprite on this screenshot is rendered in ZX Spectrum colours.
Adding a palette is as simple as making a 16x16 pixel image of color (which you can see loaded on the top left of the screen) and popping it into the palette folder.
I haven't, though, accounted for quirky retro display rules, so all are pixel based, not block/otherwise based.. That probably doesn't mean a lot to some of the folk who visit here, though, so! Whatever!!

It's time for our weekly "Post anything in your head" topic!Read More

Keeping with the classic retro theme, here's a nice and simple little 15-screen jumping platform game!

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Oops, forgot to post this, yesterday! No matter.

After last week's retro styled "random" game, I decided to go for something similarly retro, but much less random.
I've drawn some supercheap gameboy style sprites, and have been building a batch of quick and easy jumpy platform levels.
I've done 11 levels so far, and am going to go the "Start from level 1, see how far you can get" route, so theres no checkpoints or anything. Just start, and hope you don't die..
9 lives seems adequate, so far, but I might up it if I build too much into the engine!



Tuesday : GeeBee Hop (Nothing to do with the russian photographer!)

I've no idea what I'll be tackling this week, again, so pop a random thought or two below!
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A game cram packed into the space of only a day!

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This isn't important..

I just sent off a nice lengthy reply to PixelProspector.com's Authentic Kaizen, all about plans for the future of the site, the possibility of me wrapping my head around Flash, thoughts about new new new new newer NeonPlat, and some kind of unpondered random top down maze thing.
None of that's really important, just yet. It's all forward planning, and it all requires bits of learning all over the place.

Less importantly, halfway through the email, I used the term "WiLMa" when describing the types of games I'm doing, and it suddenly occurred to me that I don't think I've ever actually mentioned WiLMa, before..

So, just to clarify, incase you see it randomly dotted about the site, WiLMa is...

(Wi)ndows(L)inux(Ma)c
..
I started using it as a quickcode when compiling the Archive.

...
Told you it wasn't important..

AGAW : iPod/DS/WiLMa

Have any thoughts? I'm a bit blank, this week.
But then I was blank last week, too, and that didn't turn out TOO badly.
(did it?!)
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Stringy Things is out, for iPhone and iPod.
Slightly annoying that this didn't happen earlier.. That would've let me do a great big "First AGAW of the year, Second iPod release" thing, earlier.
No matter.
It's up, now!
Grab it from the AppStore

Hurray!
Stringy Things!!

And I'll be building it up as I go, so. .. If AGAW suddenly becomes a bit Wordgame biased.. .. um... that's purely co-incidental!

An ever so slightly shorter edition of this week's intended game, which almost didn't happen!! Nice and playable, although it's probably much more playable on Hard than on the other two levels!

This week sees the return of silly-name favourite Ted Bob, as he grabs an Amy Rose style hammer, and attacks oncoming crates.

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This week's been super jolly.
First, I couldn't settle back into the AGAW mood, then when I finally started a proper game, my Neck decided to completely screw up again, and I spent the next day and a half doing a kind of "1 line of code, 3 hours sleep" type thing.

Today, I'm coding better.

Which is probably just the right time for my PC to crap it's pants.

The world seems to be throwing everything it's got at me, in an effort to stop me from starting AGameAWeek Year 3!!!

I'm going to attempt to reboot the PC in a jiffy, and will do my best to backup all of today's work over to the other two systems.
Hopefully I get enough time before it detonates, or it's a case of opening the thing up and manually plucking out the HardDrives... I'm really not in the mood for that, right now!

Time : 15:44
AGameAWeek : 10:00
Time remaining : 18 hours, 16 mins.

Gah!!

This week I'm working with boxes, animals, and Ted Bob.

Not entirely formulated this game, yet, though, so... Could be anything!!

Today's Big News Story is that kids are texting an average of 3000 times a day!
Good gravy, that's HUGE!!!!

...
Except, of course, it isn't.

When I was a teen, I was on ICQ, AIM and MSN, ALL DAY!
If you racked up the number of back+forth messages I used to achieve on that, all day, every day, I'm pretty damned sure it'd be a buttload more than 3000 a day.
Except people didn't count them, because they didn't cost me 10p per message.

The news story isn't "Kids send a lot of messages to each other." What it actually should be, is "Kids are getting ripped off, left, right and center."

I'm about 90,000% certain that all these phones, and all the tariffs that Mum&Dad are paying for, would allow them to spend all day, every day using Meebo, or for FREE.. All day, every day!
They don't, and round and round the payments go.

Rip off city.

Report on that, not the fact that they're chatting.

Kids chatting isn't news.

Views 0, Upvotes 0, 15th October, 2010

Daily Blog

Arseholes.
God damned feckin' arseholes.

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A few weeks ago, my sister lost her job. She's currently in the midst of trying to get a new one, and so is hopping around site to site, grabbing Application forms, sending off CVs and all the other "Trying to get a job" types of things.Read More

"Haniff" emailed me about 4 or 5 weeks ago, just as I was starting my lazyitis month, and asked if I could do a nice big video, showing how I create a game.
I wasn't going to rush a game, there and then, so I figured I'd record my first AGameAWeek once I got around to starting things up again..
Turns out I haven't recorded my first AGameAWeek, because this game's shit!

Still, here's a game.
Linkage (Win only, but BlitzMax source is included)
It doesn't really have a name. I've been calling it "Some Game", since I didn't have a clue what I was going to make, and just kinda plodded along making random things happen, until a vague game appeared.

..
For the record, I do that a lot!

Here's a quick 10 minute flash through the whole experience.

If you hop through to the Youtube page, you can watch it in fullscreen Highdef, and roughly make out a few bits and pieces of text, here and there.

If you want more, Click Here and you'll find a nice juicy 2 hour megathon of silence and boredom!
Same video, in realtime!

I can't imagine anyone would want to watch that, all the way through.
If you do, you probably have enough time to similarly create AGameAWeek for the next year or so!!
Let me know how you get on!

As promised, a new weekly feature will be the suggestion box.
No longer will your suggestions be hidden away inside the locked box.
Instead, they'll be readable by all.

The first AGAW game (still unplanned, unless I decide to use the rubbishy game I made today) will be posted on Tuesday.
Meanwhile, suggest away!

It's not that I hated the old logo.
In fact, in many ways, the old logo fit my whole game making thing a little better than this one does.
So, maybe, at some point, I'll switch back.

The thing is, though, if you slap the old Recterange logo onto a Tshirt, it looks like a freakin' name badge!
Dumb, unoriginal, and a little childish.

So, a newer logo for a new year, and I've gone with the whole "Just some text with a Platdude on it" style, which I think looks a teensy bit less childish, and name-badgey, compared to the old one.



So, um.. There you have it.

Tuesday 19th Oct 2010 : AGameAWeek Year 3, Week 1 : Still no idea!

This is it. End of the road for Jay's relaxation time!
Today's Tuesday, no game today, kinda, sort of..

Today I submitted Stringy Things (2 games) to the AppStore for review. That should be properly done by.. um.. about December, at current Review speed!

So, what about AGameAWeek?
Well, I'm going to start that in a short while.
Maybe today, or.. given the fact that half my day's already gone (thanks for making THAT easy, Apple!) it'll probably be tomorrow.

I'm still not sure what game I'm doing, but the second I open the folder, I'll start off the Screen Capture.

.. That's going to be one hell of a big video.

Stick it in your diary!
Tuesday 19th October : AGameAWeek, Year 3, Game 1 : Not the foggiest!

In windows, to add a tab to the left of 3 or 4 lines, I've settled into the habit of doing either one of two things..

1. Up, Home, Tab, Up, Home, Tab, Up, Home, Tab, Up, Home, Tab.
Which goes up per line, heads to the far left, then places a tab.

or
2. Select all lines, hit Tab.
Which adds a tab to all the lines.

On a Mac, my fingers are exercised a little more thoroughly...
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Cee Lo Green's song, Fuck You, is probably one of the best songs I've heard in a very very very very very long time.
As such, when I was in town yesterday, (Bury!) I figured that'd be the one thing I'd aim to buy.
I've not bothered buying physical games for a while, iPhing, Steam and Wii online ones do me just fine. Music CDs are just the same. I think the last one of those I went out, specifically to buy, was probably the Relaxed Muscle album! ©2003



So, Asda then.
..
Hmm.. No singles in Asda? OK, WHSmiths!
..
WTF!? No music at all!?

OK then, let's try HMV.
..
um..

...
Singles?
Anywhere?!

They've like 1 rack with the Album chart?!
That's it!?
WTF?!

DVDs, Games, and more Headphones than you could ever possibly need, but no Singles?!

Jinkies Munkies!

I'm not going into Bolton. I've not been in Bolton for ages.
F'k you, Cee Lo. I'll have to just get it on iTunes, but that wasn't really the point.
sucks..