Musical

Each week or so, Korg send out a newsletter, and for the past couple of weeks I've been trying to ignore their little competition, but last night after receiving yet another email about it, I figured it was about time I gave it a shot. So, I put down NeonPlat for the night, and turned to my iPad to do some mixing. ( width="100%" height="450" scrolling="no" frameborder="no" src="https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/220309050&auto_play=false&...

Developments

Yesterday I loaded up JMTrackr for the first time in .. a LONG time! I spent most of the day creating a new set of instruments for the engine, and ensuring everything still sounded .."Not awful" After that, I fiddled with the engine a bit, and am now midway through trying to figure out a way to auto-generate Monkey-Code which includes a multitude of different choons, all in one neat little bundle. ( width="420" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/RQP8L_fdX_E" frame...

Developments

Yesterday's task was to get basically collectables, items, that kind of thing to work properly. I haven't yet added the whole lot, but thought that one useful "collectable" might be a checkpoint. ( width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/TOm4G0M6BSI" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen>> A simple looking flag, which lights up and animates when touched, and is your respawn point should you die. .. Of course, in the ...

Developments

A slight issue with the vertical scrolling is that a lot of the graphics in NeonPlat rely on thin lines. Most of the time, this isn't a problem, but when it's all scrolling up and down with pixel precision, there's a ludicrous amount of flickering going on, and it's somewhat unpleasant on the eyes. I'm going to have to (somehow!) put a stop to that, but .. hmmm.. So many devices, so many pixel density's, and so many screen resolutions. I'm not entirely sure how I'm going to mana...

Developments

With the player physics in place, and a few tweaks to the screen scrolling, it's time to start work on the level builder. Now I need to focus on both designing art to fit the style of gameplay, a half-a-dozen themes, as well as making the level builder work in a suitable way to create some nice enough levels, with plenty of variety, and also ensuring that all the levels are completable. ... That last part will probably be trickiest! I think I'll have to design an AI Player to r...

Developments

Didn't get an awful lot of stuff done, yesterday. I attempted to code, but leftover migraine seemed to be hammering away. I find that my migraines come in waves.. They usually last over the course of about 3 days, with days 1 and 3 being the worst, and day 2 being the eye of the storm. A calm, easy to cope with, day. Yesterday was Day 3, and as such I ended up sitting on the couch, reading Twitter and not getting an awful lot done. ( src="https://vine.co/v/edT1ujmI7uW/embed/...

Developments

Complications occasionally crop up as you're developing a game. The current complication is one of those "Everything NOW!!" issues. See, I'd like to get my character's movement to work, and ensure my screen scrolling works as it oughta. I've got left and right movement in, as that's pretty easy, but jumping requires that the ground collision is working properly. That means I need to stop working on the character movement, and switch to working on the tilemap collision detection,...

Three years ago, I posted <a href="https://AGameAWeek.com/2012/08/home-again-home-again-jiggity-jig/">this post</a>, all about my time in and out of hospital having a rather large splodge of evil-stuff removed from the middle of my head.. It's become something of an annual ritual to post a similar blog each year.

Balance

Most of my current health problems stem from a lack of balance. The head is a fluid-filled place, and it all tends to slosh about in there, but it's all...

Developments

General rule of thumb. If you have a migraine, STOP CODING!! It took me about half an hour of confused bafflement yesterday, to figure out why a simple "Create a line of floor tiles" was completely refusing to work properly. As it turns out, I was making a completely stupid schoolboy error. I was doing (Y*Height)+X instead of (Y*Width)+X, when referencing my array, which was causing all manner of tile-based issues along the way. How incredibly silly of me! Once I realised ...

Developments

I think we can now safely say that SpikeDislike3's been a bit of a wet duck. I expected more from it, and I really did enjoy making it, but .. Meh, whatever.. It's hard to get noticed in this great big crazy world of ours. I'd expect myself to be a little more disappointed by this scenario, but oddly I instead find myself thinking "OK, Now What!?" I guess that doing AGameAWeek for so long has taught me that, whenever something doesn't work, there's still something else around the...

Developments

Yesterday I tackled something different. For a while, I've been wondering if I should attempt to create a larger PixelArf site to accommodate everybody's entries. I started by creating a barebones webpage with a couple of scrolling sections and a little bit of AJAX to hold it all together. VERY barebones! And, if I'm honest, not that great looking. Scaled up pixelart looks NASTY in a browser. (Although it looks fine on my iPad!!) (URL "https://AGameAWeek.com/wp-content/uploa...

Melodical Developments

Last night I re-rendered and uploaded the entire (URL "https://archive.org/details/PrecariousAlBum">Precarious Al Bum to Archive.org) Annoyingly, I forgot to trim the tails on the tracks, so they all end with about a half-a-second of silence. Ooops.. I'll have to poke around in Archive.org's settings and see if I can update the files, but I imagine they're probably going to have to stay like that. Aw well.. Meanwhile, I also created a new track for the Liquid A...

In January 2014, KORG released the wonderful Gadget app onto the iPad. In the 20 months since, AL has created not one, not two, but THREE full AL Bums. Precarious is his third, and you can grab all three, for free, from Archive.org in a variety of different formats, alongside his previous two AL Bums, Conspicuous and Enigmatically. (URL "https://archive.org/details/ConspicuousAlBum"><img src="https://AGameAWeek.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/AL_Conspicuous-300x300.jpg" alt="AL_Conspicuous" width=...

The Upgrade

Yesterday's blog was about an upgrade, and that's pretty much what today's is, too! Windows 10. Initial thoughts Everything is very very very very very very very very white. Even window titlebars are white. It's like someone figured out that White Emulsion is cheapest in bulk, so bought enough to cover the planet. It's THAT white! In fact, there's too much white, and the amount of white with light-grey is really hurting my eyes. I'm having ...

Upgrades

Annoyingly, not the upgrade I was looking for. Yesterday, for some bizarre and unexplainable reason, PaintShop Pro 7 suddenly broke. I'm not sure why it did, and I spent a good hour or so trying to figure it out, including a complete delete and reinstall, only to find the same issue. It's weird, and I'd never seen it ask for a "User Directory" before, but no matter what directory I told it to try, it failed, failed and failed again. I bought PSP7 in a Game store, way way way way b...

Developments

Yesterday was a day of failed attempts. I figured it'd be nice to have my Daily Platdude Pixelarts as some form of Pebble Watch, so I tried compressing over 200 pixelarts into something that the little watch could handle. I'd rather not have it constantly trying to grab images from the server, so the best bet would be to somehow compress all those pictures down to something small enough to fit into the (I think) 100kb of space available. I tried a number of attempts, but eventual...

Developments

(URL "https://AGameAWeek.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/SyncComplete.png"><img src="https://AGameAWeek.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/SyncComplete.png" alt="SyncComplete" width="348" height="289" class="alignnone size-full wp-image-4884" /> Longest Backup.. EVER!! Finally, SyncToy has reached a point where it's no longer stumbling across oodles of random files that it somehow managed to miss on the previous 80-or-so passes. My B...

Developments

Not a very productive day, yesterday, if I'm honest. I continued to play about with that Lester&Ralph theme, but I'm hitting the same roadblock as the last time, with the Sheep Goes Right theme, in that the characters run at the same constant speed so the entire point of the Combo system is completely ruined. I'm not sure what I can add to mix it up, and am desperately playing with all manner of elements to see if I can find that one little thing that suddenly makes sense. Hmmm.....

Developments

Yesterday was one of those Lazy days. Currently my laptop is doing a (URL "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SyncToy">SyncToy) backup of my GameDev and WebDev folders, which as you can probably imagine, isn't very good for it's battery! I've had the thing plugged in permanently for about a day and a half, and the damn thing's still slaving away copying hundreds and thousands of files. Eeek! -=-=- (URL "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SyncToy">SyncToy) is a completely free too...

Developments

First up.. The SpikeDislike3 v1.5 update is LIVE on iOS. This all new update includes a lovely new menu, portrait mode, Music-Loop option (albeit a bit naff!), the ability to slide your finger on the lefthand wiggly-bar to scroll through the menu quicker, an option to turn off the Parallax, a number of background fixings.. Oh, and Five New Themes! And 50 New Levels!!! Wowsies!!! (URL "https://AGameAWeek.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/IMG_0326-1.png"><img src="https:/...

Developments

Yesterday, I finally got around to animating that cat and dog that I've been putting off for a good number of days. I knew what I had to draw, but .. Animating?! Eeek!! And so the poor cat and dog remained undrawn, until yesterday when I practically forced myself into doing it. And, I must admit, they turned out rather nice! Now I just have to decide on a nice background for them, draw some obstacles, and figure out the best scoring method. ( src="https://vine.co/v/erVZAOM5QU...

Developments

I awoke this morning to find that FileZilla had crashed. I'm using FileZilla to do a complete file transfer from my old NAS drive to the new one. I'm not sure how far it got, or why it crashed, but crash it did, so I had to restart the whole bloomin' thing. Grrr. It's been set to "Skip if identical" to that at least should speed it up a bit. Two whole smegging days, this has taken!! Once it reaches the end of the transfer, (assuming it does!!) I'm going to have to run one ...

Developments

App : SpikeDislike3 Status : Waiting for Review (URL "https://AGameAWeek.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/SD3_15Wait.png"><img src="https://AGameAWeek.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/SD3_15Wait.png" alt="SD3_15Wait" width="223" height="270" class="alignnone size-full wp-image-4848" /> Give it the obligatory 10 day wait, and you should be playing the 5 new themes in portrait mode without parallax scrolling! (or however you choose ...

(URL "https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-33502838">RIP : Satoru Iwata) As a kid, I was never a big Nintendo fan. I had a Gameboy and I LOVED Tetris, but much as is the case nowadays, I tend to code and create more than just play. I continue to buy Nintendo consoles and handhelds, even today, because theirs are the games that I get the most fun and enjoyment out of. Mr Iwata was first and foremost a developer, and I can only hope that Nintendo finds another suitably developer-minded helmsman to t...