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!!!

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...

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...

( 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!!)

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...

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

Never assume you're right!

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

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.

And, back to the old routine we go..
This week's AGameAWeek sees our old friends the Space Monkeys, rolling around in balls, through a maze, to get the bananas.. Again!
As with Super Monkey Balls, you needn't get all the bananas, just reach the goal, and try to get through all 8 available levels.
<img src="https://agameaweek.com/completeB/2009/Space_Monkeys_Go_Bananas_20090106B_thumbb.png">

PC 1 is dead.
However, PC 1 made nightly backups from Drive 1 to Drive 2, so all my data's safe and secure.
Unfortunately, They're both SATA drives, and PC2's a really old Celeron that doesn't have a SATA connector!
So, although all my stuff's safe, I can't actually get to any of it!

Since I currently have no PC in my room, I'm down to the bare essentials.
I can use the downstairs PC to code on (and have a nice half-finished puzzle game ready for tomorrow), but all my music is sat on 2 inaccessable SATA drives.
My TV shows are on there, my codings on there, and a whole lot more.
Luckily, I found that DVDs with DivX content can actually be played on your Xbox.

A nice, quickly made game, this week.. For obvious reasons. Bah..
Still, a game created in 2 days can be just as much fun as a great big month long project.
..
Occasionally.

I've said on other forums that this year will be my Xbox Live year.
That I'd take the time to learn how XNA should work, and eventually build things up so they work nice and happily.
Unfortunately, my coding's stuck in the 80's&90's, and I can't get out of my "horrible" Basic habits.
Well, other folk call them "Horrible" habits, but honestly, I just see most Basic commands as common sense.

I'm not sure if you figured it out from the picture I posted the other day, but it seems that the project I'm currently working on in XNA will turn out to be Centipong.
To be honest, I wasn't actually planning to do Centipong!
I was actually just shoving in a basic sprite, and getting it bobbing around on the screen, in order to duplicate my basic "Blitz 2D-in-3D" command set within the XNA environment.
So far that's working out rather well, and I've near enough created...

A short and sweet game, this week.
Would've been more (extra graphical niceness) but I ran out of time! Aw well..
Here's the basic form.
<img src="https://socoder.net/workshop/dlds/184_go_left.gif">

I've had a couple of emails about the donate button already, so thought I should clarify why it's there.
I write a game a week.. Sometimes they're good, sometimes their rubbish, and sometimes they're really fun, playable, and can keep you playing for a good few hours.
I can do this, because I have a lot of free time. And by "a lot of free time", I mean A LOT of free time.
The webhost is pretty much minimal cost (GoDaddy), the programming languages range from 0 cost (DS/XN...

Every so often, I like to rant here, for no real reason.
Today, whilst playing Burnout 3 on my Xbox Classic, the whole "Customisable Soundtracks on the X360" issue appeared once again, so I figured I should rant about it.
See, on Burnout XBox, you used the game to pick the soundtrack, and then that played it in the background.
But, it ALSO stopped the music when you crashed, turned down the music when there was information to be told, and other useful things.
But, for some really biz...

I've had it in my desk's cupboard for years.
I bought the game not long after my original Playstation broke, thinking I'd pick up a PSX cheap somewhere..
I never did.
And, I never bought a PS2, or a PSP, or PS3, or anything else that could play it.

Much as expected, this week's AGameAWeek has become a Vib Ribbon style game.
To be honest, I had this idea for a moment, last week, whilst doing the Go Left game. The idea stayed in my head for about a minute, before vanishing.
But having finally gotten around to playing Vib Ribbon, this week, I figured it was time to put the plan into action, and with a nice time-saving addition (the graphics!) I managed to get it done in time.
So here's J-Walker.
<a href="https://agamea...

This week, I've been working on an Asteroids game.
On Thursday, it was a bog standard Asteroids game, that seriously needed updating.
On Friday, I changed the controls to mouse. The game plays like a cross between Asteroids and Horizontal Shooter.
On Sunday, I tweaked the controls further, and added particles.

This week's Wednesday Workshop <a href="https://socoder.net/index.php?topic=1414">#186</a> was to create a nice Asteroids game.
As I started creating it, I was planning a nice Horizontal Shooter-esque game, with powerups and all kinds of crazyness.
But I ran out of steam midway.
A shame..

I've taken onboard a few of AuthenticKaizen's suggestions, and there's now a slightly better edition of Disasteroids available.
<a href="https://agameaweek.com/?Game=33">Same download link, right here</a>
The game's pretty much the same as it was on Tuesday, except with a few added powerups to play around with.
There's also (I forgot to mention this anywhere, but it's in there!!) a "Chill" mode. Hit Tab to start the game, and you play without those litt...

Doing your homework on the back of the bus..
A crazy week of illness, busyness, and a party, have meant that this week's game had to be done..
..
um.. today!

My mum likes crosswords!!!
And, heck. I like crosswords, too!
Except, the trouble is, there's not really a decent crossword game on the DS.
Don't get me wrong, there's a fair few games, and The Times (released this week) in particular, has a cracking selection of clues/answers, and some really nice layouts.

You can <a href="https://agameaweek.com/?Game=165">Download JXW here</a>
This one's for me!!
If other folk enjoy it, then so be it, but I made this for myself because I was getting really ticked off by the lack of decent crossword games* on the DS.
There's 3479 crosswords in the game.

I say "Project", but of course, being me, I mean projectS..
#1
PRC:2 - 0%
I'm restarting Platdude's Retro Collection from scratch, and building it up a bit bigger than last time, with nicer per-game spritesheets and things like that. Bigger = Better, usually.. .. I'll make sure that's true, don't worry!
So far the selection's getting too big for it's boots, and at current rate it'll take about 3 years to finish the project, so.. going to have to whittle it down, and remember the "K...

A nice and simple game, this week.
<img src="https://agameaweek.com/completeB/2009/Storm_of_Idigidragon_20090224A.png">
Since I'm trying to decide what style Platdude Retro Collection 2 should have, I decided to try out a style in Blitz first, and see how it looks.
You might notice it's still a little Atari 2600.