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.

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...

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....

<a href="https://socoder.net/uploads/1/ad2_shot009b.png"><img src="https://socoder.net/uploads/1/ad2_shot009b_thumb.png"></a>
An editor!
Today, I finally got around to making the editor. Starting nice and easily, I'll be adding bits and pieces as I go, so that .. hopefully.. when you get hold of it, it's not as empty as it currently is!

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...

I won't post a screenshot.. you wouldn't be able to tell the difference!!
But there is a difference..
Today I spent most of my day working a little more on the "Building up" stuff. That is, setting things up so that you start off easy, and things gradually get tougher.
I've put into place a huge number of little variables, all over the place, that should help decide how things progress in a level. Again, these will (somehow?!) be accessible within the editor.. once I bother...

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...

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 ...

Splatterhouse!!
<a href="https://socoder.net/uploads/1/ad2_shot002.png"><img src="https://socoder.net/uploads/1/ad2_shot002_thumb.png"></a>
So far the 6 different aliens act as follows.
(But this might be tweaked once the walls start to get in the way!)

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...

..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.

If you're slightly above the age of people who are still meant to be pissing about playing silly games, like I am, you probably remember Gearworks, from the Amiga/C64 era.
I don't know why, but the game suddenly popped into my head, this week.
So I made a quicky clone.
It's not perfect, there's loads missing, and there's no editor in sight, but as a testbed for my still growing 2D-in-3D engine, it does the job.
<a href="https://socoder.net/uploads/1/gearworks.p...

Having headed back to Blitz3D (from BlitzMax, with it's annoying incompatibilities) I decided to make something quick and easy to test it out.
Snake!
With a 1 minute timer on it.
Get all the points you can, as fast as you can.

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's Wednesday Workshop <a href="https://socoder.net/?Workshop=Challenge&Week=173">#173</a> was a redoing of an old one. Wednesday Workshop 1 asked us to make games using only 5 objects onscreen.
Rather than doing that, I opted to take my original 5 object game, and remake it, turning it into a slightly more interesting game.
It's still not anything amazing, but at least it's something!
<a href="https://socoder.net/uploads/1/ballup.png"><img src...

This week I decided to remake Centipong, this time for the DS.
It's pretty much the same as it's always been, except now it's portable, stylus playable, and has the pickups unlike the Mobile edition.
It's not all 100% yet, though.. More to come, and plenty of tweaking to be made.
<img src="https://agameaweek.com/completeB/2008/Centipong_20081202A_thumbb.png">
In the meantime, you can <a href="https://agameaweek.com/?Game=40">Download Centipong DS here</...

I spent most of this week rebuilding a few of my older games with the new Highscore stuff, so there's a couple of nice new-ish games to play.

First off, we've the 3rd version of Horizontal Shooter.. <a href="https://agameaweek.com/?Game=49">Get it here</a>. It's pretty much the same as ever, but with Mr Scouter from the original, thrown back in for good luck.
The new highscore method should help ward off nasty hackers from the scoreboard system.. Or at least for a...

Dum-dum-durrrr..
Over at Socoder, someone (Naming no names.. he knows who he is..) figured out that the encryption on my Highscore system wasn't exactly the most foolproof of encryptions, and that it's fairly easy to hack in a few fake scores.
Can't have that!
So I worked my arse off, early this week, and a new encryption method has been successfully trialled and put into place. It's no super-amazing method either, but it oughta do for a while.
The extra workload has meant that I mi...

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*