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.

After trying, for ages, to formulate a nice game-wide Achievement setup, Moshboy told me off, and made me just plain put the old ones in, lest I spend the next 8 years trying to figure out how to do the game-wide ones.
So the old ones are back.
They'll flag when you hit the following milestones.
<table width="350px"><tr><td width="33%">Kills

*sigh*
I must apologise..
I assumed I was right.

Never assume you're right!

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!!)

Next up, Countdown..
Or, it's meant to be, but I can't seem to get it started properly..
I've grabbed a batch of Carol's letters and numbers, and I've got the vowel/consonant packs ready, the number solver's working as it should, but so far, those bits haven't come together to make a full game.. It's just bits here and there.
Needs work, but with Xmas literally days away, I'm not sure that it'll get any.
If it doesn't turn up on Tuesday, assume I'm taking the week off, from AGameAWe...

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!!!

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..

Sometimes Copy and Paste works..

Having finally put the nice simple swooshy spawning sound back into the game, and got a couple of nice test levels up and running, and inside the scoreboard, and then got the whole "Nth position on the online scoreboard" display going, I decided to move onto more pressing matters.
I already copy and pasted most of the control scheme stuff early on in the project, so to help give the game a little consistency, and so as not to have to recode the whole th...

In the old game you could create levels simply by making little 64x64 pixel .png images. The game would load them as it found them, and convert them to levels on the fly.
This was handy, but it didn't let you control all the possibilities of spawning, weapon types, and things like that..
This new one does!
But what if you really liked your old levels?
It's an extremely complicated procedure, so I've put together this step by step guide to help folk import their old level...

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*

<img src="https://socoder.net/uploads/1/onlinegets.png">
That there's the first official online highscore!
o/ YEAY! o/
But, boo that I had to manually copy and paste bits of text to get the level into the database in the first place!!

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 ...

Today I started on the online highscore stuff.
Having sat playing AD2 for a while, again, last night, I figured I'd better get a move on and finish the basics off.
So, into the database we go, and I've set up the tables. I implimented the basic checksums to ensure each level is unique enough to qualify, and I additionally added a secondary "Bag" table, that can hold new levels until they're ready to be downloadable. Always something new, ready and raring to be sent!
Next up, ...

Today I did a few fiddly little menu based things..
Things like...
1. The menu->Level switch now plays the "Beeeoooo-weeeee!" sound as the level starts.
2. There's a progress bar whenever a level is being rendered. ('cos it takes a teensy bit longer than it should! 160x160 tiles over a 5120x5120 pixel area!!)

<a href="https://socoder.net/uploads/1/ad2_shot011.png"><img src="https://socoder.net/uploads/1/ad2_shot011_thumb.png"></a>
It's getting there! Slowly but surely.
I got the levels to doodle themselves, and everything swooshes around quite nicely (if a little blocky!)
I've had to implement a menu buffer image to keep the speed up (even if it is still a teensy bit slow) but everything's looking good for the menu.
At this point, I'll probably have a "H...

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.

<img src="https://socoder.net/uploads/1/ad2_menufail.png">
Today, I really need to buckle down, and pad out the menu a teensy bit.
As you can see, it's... a little bit empty right now!
I'm still not sure how everything's going to fit onto the screen, but I found a nice font last night so it shouldn't be too hard to get everything nice and padded out, whilst still being jam packed with menu-style goodness.
After that, I really should start to add some kind of sco...

Yesterday was my long work day, and since I didn't get up until about an hour before I was meant to go, I didn't really get much work done!
Still, no matter, today's a longer day..
Unfortunately, most of today was spent playing GTAIV
Oops!

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.

Today's work has been mostly of the external variety.
First off, compressing a level..
I'm taking 160x160 pixels, each one being around about 16 different colors (give or take, depending on what walls/floors/etc I bother to add.) and trying to bundle them up into a teensy tiny bit of data.
To me, compression's a fun time, where you get to play with lots of fiddly numbers, and chaotic maths, just to get large things down to size.