Nope, not yet.
We'll call it "On Hiatus", whilst I decide what to do next.
Meanwhile, I'm not sure whether to bother with Flash.
Or at least, not Flex, anyway. 'cos BOY, that shit's messy!

The AGameAWeek 2008-2009 Retrospective

(URL "https://www.agameaweek.com/2009/08/agameaweek-2008-2009-part-one/">Part One), (URL "https://www.agameaweek.com/2009/08/agameaweek-2008-2009-part-two/">Part Two), (URL "https://www.agameaweek.com/2009/08/agameaweek-2008-2009-part-three/">Part Three), (URL "https://www.agameaweek.com/2009/08/agameaweek-2008-2009-part-four/">Part Four), (URL "https://www.agameaweek.com/2009/08/agameaweek-2008-2009-part-five/">Part Five)

Alien...

Yeay! It's Horizontal Shooter Redux!!
In this first release, there's a few pointers. Read inside for those.
Otherwise, nice and quick, here's a picture.

No new game again, this week, but here's my New Year's Resolution.
AGameAWeek
There you go!
I almost managed it for a few months, so I'm going to try and stick to it all year round next year.

You might have noticed a distinct lack of AGameAWeek, this week..
Since I'm getting little or no work done, this week, and.. what with being Xmas and all, I've decided to be lazy, and take a week off.
Nothing wrong with that!
If you feel you really need something new to play with, nip to yesterday's post, and you can grab the WhoSave thing. That's quite nice.. And you can pretend I posted that today, in time for the Xmas episode in 2 days time. Very festive!!
If yo...

( border="0"><tr><td>Blimey!
What a year, eh!
I decided to round off the year with a nice big, old fashioned list, with everything in it.
Except this doesn't have everything in it, because I've forgotten to add the DS games.. I'll do that later!! (Took me about 3 hours to do this, so I'm not going to tweak it, now!!)

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 sigh of relief, as the game is finally in an upload worthy state.
I'm sure there's plenty of bugs, mounds of forgotten features, and odd little untweaked things that aren't quite right, but what's here is plenty enough to be counted as Release 1.
<a href="https://agameaweek.com/?Game=37">
Download Alien Deathmatch 2</a> 3Mb!!!

Now I remember why the original Alien Deathmatch did this, too!
If I check a directory for files (level directory!) to compile my list of levels, and then add a level in there (Downloaded) and then recheck the directory to make a new list of levels, Blitz has managed to keep a cache of the directory, and so refuses to show up any new ones.
The only option is to close the game, and reload.
*sigh*

I'm not ignoring it!!!
I woke up late, today, and time seemed to slip away fairly rapidly.. I spent about an hour browsing online shops, buying a cheap copy of Sonic Unleashed for only £20 (Gamestation) and an el'cheapo Digital Photoframe (£30 Aria.co.uk), and then surprisingly it was time to settle down, eat, and then go to work.
Where my time went, I don't know!!
Still, I did post the demo yesterday, so that's ok.
Meanwhile I think I've figured out ...

I didn't get time to fix this up properly last night, or this morning, either.. Blame Alien Deathmatch!
So, this week's game is exactly as it was yesterday, when posted over at Socoder.
Wednesday Workshop #180 asked us to create a Darts game, so here's a quickly made one.
A target is written on the scoreboard, and with your three darts, you have to try to get as close to that target as you can.

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 ...

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.

I'm ashamed of myself!
This site's meant to be a game a week. I'm meant to be challenging myself..
True... Making Alien Deathmatch 2 is a challenge all of it's own, but I was wanting my own special little site with it's own special little gimmick, and it'll all look a little bit worse for wear if I leave a second week without a new game...
So, let's have a rummage through Jay's directory of leftover bits, and see if we can come up with something special....

Yesterday I said I'd be working on something else..
I didn't! Alien Deathmatch keeps dragging me back in
Today I played with the weapons a bit more, to try and get a nicer feel to all the different main weapons. I also messed about with Particles because unbelievably I'd forgotton to put the things in! Silly me!
After that, a teensy bit more Alien AI work, and some more background tweaks managed to keep me busy through most of today...

Since we're already up to Saturday, and there's still an amazing amount of work to be done, I think I'm going to bump the deadline for Alien Deathmatch 2.. (OMG!! Missed Deadline!! WTF?!!?)
So, with that in mind, and since we missed AGameAWeek last week, I'm quickly heading back to Wednesday Workshop for a nice quicky idea.. This week's challenge is to create a game that works just as well played with a pen and some paper, as it does ingame..
For my entry, I'm not 100% sure, but I think I'll pr...

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'...

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...

The other day I considered redoing the whole wall structure. I considered making nice wonderful multidirectional walls, and levels with all kinds of diagonals, straight, and maybe even curves.
It seemed like a good idea.
Then I started to work on it, and... well.. it wasn't exactly super fast!
In fact, things were painfully slow.
As the game struggled to draw a single wall, with nice detail like the old one, I realised that drawing an entire arena in that way would only lead to ...

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...

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.

..I got an X360, and I've really been playing the heck out of it, lately.
It's fun! I'm worried it'll RROD at any minute, but while it's still going, it's still fun.
And last week I bought Geometry Wars 2, for 800 points, as well as Geometry Wars 1 for 400 points.
Lovely stuff.

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.

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

For starters, let me just point out that Alien Deathmatch has still been slowly updating over the past couple of weeks. It's strange that a single game has taken up so much of my time. I guess that once you find the right type of game, you're more motivated than usual.
Still, more weeks playing with 1 game = less time to get some actual new games coded.
As such, there's not really been a whole lot to report over the past week or so.
No new games, no new ideas, nothing.
I had initia...

Last year I drew some graphics!
A set of sprites and background tiles for a DS game based on the classic Alien Breed on the Amiga.
The plan fell apart soon after.
<img src="https://AGameAWeek.com/windev/adlogo.png">