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. Stick in the disc, shuffle over to Video Library, and head into the disc to watch all your favourites. So, as lacking in...

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. If you have any crazy game suggestions, stick 'em below, and I'll probably get around to them when I run out! (.. I wonder if I could make a great big Pot of Ideas script, where folk can dump their suggestions... That'd be handy..) Meanwhile, don't forget that there's always something to do in Alien ...

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

Never assume you're right!

I tried and tested, over and over, and I couldn't find a fault. And then, this morning, I received an email, and through a couple of back-and-forths discovered that, indeed, there was something really really really quite wrong. Thanks, Nathan.. I made myself a new fresh install, and tried to find the bug. The bug happened! I saw it! I thought "WTF!?!" and then tried again, with another fresh in...

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 you'd like t...

( 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!!) Anyway, here's a nice great big list of every game (again, apart from the DS ones) that I made in 2008. It's quite a big list, too.. 31 Games. OK, so maybe not a ...

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 AGameAWeek!! Meanwhile,...

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 Regular Font to...

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.. 1. Achievements, Good, bad, Pwnage, Suckage, any and all. I just haven't gotten around to adding these yet. There's a gap on the titlescreen, that's where they go,...

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 have been 4 new ...

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. The last game ...

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.. <a href="https://socoder.net/uploads/1/ad2_shot010.png"><img src="https://socoder.net/uploads/1/ad2_shot010_thumb.png"></a> This is what happens when you turn off the death routine, fill the screen with Greenies, and then tou...

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 what it&#...

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. It's not terrible.. But it's a shame that it's not better. I'll be tweaking it along the way, and seeing what else I can come up with. I'm not sure what'll happen ingame, right now. The last game didn't really need it, so I don't think this one will...

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 fast the weapo...

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've tried to ens...

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 because Blitz is a b...

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 tileset, the odd ye...

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/uploads/1/AdaelEd...

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 through blocks o...

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 with obscure ...