So, I spent a while, last night, playing with the graphics.
Now that the game's out there, and since so many people are complaining about it's lack of fancyness, I decided to make nice with the special weapons..
<img src="https://socoder.net/uploads/1/whooshy.png">
The game's now officially 75% More Whooshy, with the superweapons looking much more fancypants, and the dead baddies giving off a little red "poof!" as they go.
I've also switched the ingame text from...

A more accurate title would be "Just like Windows Vista, here's a list of things I told you I'd be putting in, but haven't yet bothered to, so will be missing when I release the game.."
Except I'm one person, and have spent four weeks doing this.. Not 100 people working for 4 years...
...
*sigh* Vista sucks..

Folk who previously visited my DSBrew site will now find themselves plonked into this site.
This is AGameAWeek, and here I write a game a week! Just as it says!
I opened up my own little DSBrew site a while back, and started cataloguing DS games, but soon realised that keeping a DS Homebrew catalogue + writing a game a week didn't really work that well together, so DSBrew got left behind.
Up until today I've left it be, rotting away in an unused corner of the internet..
But.. There ...

The main menu of AD2 is still pretty much a blank screen! Albeit a red blank screen, with a couple of white rectangles sliding into place..
So is the addiction of the game at this point, that it's quite easy to click the mouse, and accidentally play for 20-minutes.. whoops!
I have managed to tweak a few ingame things, though. And the Menu -> Game -> Menu transitions are more or less working, except for one small thing.
I'm not sure how to fade in a level, at this point.

Another week working on Alien Deathmatch means another week that I've not done AGameAWeek, so it's back into the big bag of failures to see if we can dig anything new out.
No..
But, the lack of anything new, and finished, doesn't always mean nothing on this Blog.. Let's bring back the old "Experimental" tag from way back when, and show off a few random bits of unfinished garbage.

With the editor in, pretty much, full swing, I'm heading back to playing with the bugs again..

Update
Having been undecided for a while, I eventually decided that the green bad guys should explode with a nice little puff of green smoke..

I'm quite happy with the level compression, now. Things are nice and trim, and everything's fitting into a small enough area.
So, today I'm thinking about how the server should work.. Note, I've not added the server yet, but I'm definitely getting prepared! What I've decided to do is implement an Author name and Level name directly into the checksum.
This way, when the server checks your game for new levels, it can automatically dig out the new stuff, and it'll know...

To stop my head from exploding from all the compression stuff, I decided to play with the theme tune, today.
First off, I tried something different.
It was rubbish.
Next up, I tried the old theme, but rejigged.

Yesterday was spent playing with the editor some more.
As the game and editor become more closely entangled, I'm finding lots of little extra tweaks that need to be made to the game, so that the editor can be that little bit more complex.
Here's a nice list of things you can currently tweak within the editor..
The start weapon (1-16 so far.. there are 16 forms of Basic weapon, and then the Super weapons on top. I've yet to add any Super weapons, yet, though!) and also how fas...

With random spawning added, and basic weapon upgrades up and running, the game's getting much more like a game, now.
<a href="https://socoder.net/uploads/1/ad2_shot007.png"><img src="https://socoder.net/uploads/1/ad2_shot007_thumb.png">
Basic Bog-Standard Arena</a>

Haven't done a thing, today!
Actually, that's not entirely true. I spent most of this morning playing about with the Enemy Spawning layout code, and tweaking it to be a little fairer.. One of my annoyances when playing Geometry Wars is when you're running in one direction, and a bad guy spawns RIGHT in front of you, giving you a fraction of a second in which to go "Oh, FFS!" and then die horribly!
Maybe I'm just rubbish at it (so says my gamerscore), but that always pisses me off.
So, I'...

Background progress is coming along nicely.
<a href="https://socoder.net/uploads/1/ad2_shot006.png"><img src="https://socoder.net/uploads/1/ad2_shot006_thumb.png"></a>
I've currently got the level renderer to come up with a nice selection of coloured floors from 3 prerendered ones.. It can do plain, and chequered, thus giving us 6 possibilities of floors. Every room that's separated gets a random floor. Nice and simple.
(They have to be prerendered colours becau...

I spent most of last night tweaking the graphics.
For starters, I've jigged about the whole Background tileset.
If you've bothered to poke around inside the old game, you'll have noticed that bg.png contains a great big pile of unused "Inside a Wall" stuff. It was originally going to serve a purpose, and fill out the black, but eventually I decided that having plain black nothingness would be good enough, and the black stayed as black.
So, they're now removed from the tile...

Nothing Alien Deathmatch related today (since Saturday's the day I work the most, and get the least actual coding done.. and sit and watch Stargate a lot.. )
However, today, a Spanish fellow named Adael made me a level editor for JNKPlat DS 08!
It's online, it's Javascript based, and it's right here. (Update : It's been nearly a decade since I posted this... It's not there, any more!!)
<a href="https://socoder.net/uplo...

No need for a screenshot tonight, as there's not really anything worth looking at!
Everything I did today was invisible background coding stuff! So nothing fancy to look at, but still some nice new things.
I started off by squeezing the whole pixel by pixel arena out into a great big map array. I'm hoping (!) that it'll make things that bit more precise once I start adding in some walls (probably tomorrow)
Basically, rather than having the player walk past/into/occasionally t...

All games must start somewhere, and Alien Deathmatch 2 starts right here!
<a href="https://socoder.net/uploads/1/ad2_shot001.png"><img src="https://socoder.net/uploads/1/ad2_shot001_thumb.png"></a>
This isn't the most entertaining shot I've ever posted, but it does show that work has now actually begun on the sequel.

Another quicky, today.. In fact, it's a little later than usual, but that's only because I'd only just thought of it, this morning!! Panic coding at it's best..
Wheel of No Prizes sees you spin the wheel, guess the place name, Hangman style, and carry on as much as you can until you've run out of lives.
Neat!
<a href="https://socoder.net/uploads/1/wheel.png"><img src="https://socoder.net/uploads/1/wheel_thumb.png"></a>
Nice and simple stuff, but...

In what can only be described as a complete disappointment, I've given up with BlitzMax.
Technically, the engine's great, the language runs fast, and things are good.
But.. It doesn't run on some systems..
And some of the features I'd really like to use run really stupidly slow on certain other systems.

This week, I haven't entered the Wednesday Workshop. Instead I had a try at the Monthly one (#013), which asked us to create a game with lots of guns, and bullets and shootyness.
Since I'd already done a decent enough shooter the other day (H~S) I decided to try my hand at something a little different.
<a href="https://AGameAWeek.com/windev/sheriffmunky.png"><img src="https://AGameAWeek.com/windev/sheriffmunky_thumb.png"></a>

Due to all manner of obscure things happening this week (A HD Crash being one of them..) this week's effort isn't anywhere near as good as last week's!!
Still, a game's a game, even without a titlescreen, music, sound, an ending, scores, or anything else like that..
..
*cough*

A while ago, I made <a href="https://AGameAWeek.com/?p=14">this</a>. Horizontal Shooter.
Fly about, shoot the bad guys, guard the good guys.
A nice enough game, lovely lines all over, but somehow lacking in something extra.
This week.. I added something extra!

A quick update, albeit not a proper one..
If you download (URL "https://socoder.net/uploads/1/jnkplat08ds.zip">this new version) of JNKPlat, you can use the inbuilt editor to play around with all the nice new features I've been adding in, lately.
I've not really gotten around to building a bunch of levels, yet, though! So you'll have to wait for that.
I'll be posting a new version next week with some new packs of levels, and maybe even a bunch more new features, too!
Head inside ...

I'm not entirely sure who came up with this idea, but it's been roaming around the internet for the past few years.
This week's Wednesday Workshop #165 was to create a game using only one button.
So, Heck, why not!
??

This week, Socoder's <a href="https://socoder.net/?Workshop=Challenge&Week=163">Wednesday Workshop (#163)</a> challenge was to create a game with Money in it.
I initially was going to create a top-down dungeon romp, but as the plan grew and grew in scale, I scrapped it and just ended up making a nice quick platformer instead!
??
<img src="https://socoder.net/workshop/dlds/163_mr_money_grabber.gif">
Mr Money Grabber features you rushing through the level coll...

I tried to keep a blog. It didn't work.
It's no surprise, though. I've never been one to keep a working active blog.
No matter, I'll try something else.
Welcome to A Game A Week.com

Tomb Raider meets Pitfall!
<img src="https://AGameAWeek.com/windev/crofty1.png">
Retro Raider took a few days to get into a decent build, and then over the course of a few weeks I added lots of extra little chunky bits.
<img src="https://AGameAWeek.com/windev/crofty2.png">