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...

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!!! The game, in it's current Release 1 state has quite a few new features from those in AD1. <img src="https://socoder.net/uploads/1/ad2_b...

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,...

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'll have to create my own list of files, and update it as I go.. Still, the upload and download i...

<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 scores into the gam...

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...

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. Today, however, .png is annoying me. Because my 160x160 is dow...

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 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. Except, there's something annoyingly wrong with GW2. It's all nice and glowy, but the "lovely glow" is also really really annoyingly blurry... I bought a VGA adaptor for the console, and have it hooked up so that everything'...

Another week, another pile of retro-mania! You get the idea by now, 6 extra games and the odd bugfix. I had to redo a lot of Tetris, this week, since I'd ballsed up quite a bit of it last week! But it's all working rather well now, so you can happily settle down to a nice long game on Extreme modem and it'll now actually get faster as you head up the levels! And the T shape's in it this week, too! The Joust game's as good as it should be, without being much more. There's ...

I decided to start a Dev diary here, for all my DS Developing. I figured people would eventually stumble across it, and start reading away at all the fun coding. Either that, or they'll completely ignore these bits, and just download the Experimental stuff like they usually do. Either way, this is going to be a part dev-diary, part progress report, and part release schedule for all things DS. I currently have 4 DS Projects on the go. They are Stringy Things, JNKPlat, An Alien Breed type clone, and a G...