Wednesday, September 17, 2008

Space Tile Hopper 2 is now called...


Slightly less silly name. Only slightly.

The glitch is still there, but the overall game is a lot more polished now, I've found an extension that will autochange the resolution without going to 256 colour mode and I've got a shiny new 3D logo. And it spins around really fast in the opening. It's pretty cool. No, it's waaaaay cool.

I'm hoping this will attract a publisher better than Dot Maze. Anyhoo, all I really have to do is put a bunch of cute furry animals in and the thing will sell like hotcakes.

I remember when there were many like me... super small-time game creators who nobody ever heard of... I'm the last of a dying breed, I tell ya. Now there's just Indie and casual. Indie is like what I'm doing only a lot more expensive, risky, difficult and pretentious. Casual is just like what I'm doing but your name has to be PopCap or you'll fail at it. Such is life.

- Rob

Wednesday, September 10, 2008

Fat Planet just doesn't feel right

The latest version is a massive improvement over 0.19 because you can control jump height - after some considerable bugfixes. But it feels wrong. You have control over the character's left and right movement, but not momentum. In short, it's too easy to control. I know I shouldn't make a game intentionally difficult to control, but the sense of inertia just isn't there.

Gah. I hate having higher standards these days.

I've never really dabbled in static engines before. Everything I've done so far I've taught myself, I usually end up with the same result as everyone else but 50,000 fewer events. But trying to create a static engine as complex as the one I want would be jumping in the proverbial deep end. With a satchel of bricks.

I've also never based a game on someone else's engine, I think that some engines out there are hideously overused and I don't want to get to the point where all games made with blank play exactly like blank.

I've already got my eyes on the horizon, I really want to see what I can do after Fat Planet. It'll have to wait.

Space Tile Hopper 2 still has it's fantastic glitch. I'm moving the level events over to global - that way I can make some levels and hopefully release a beta of the damn thing before I have to preoccupy myself with fixing it.

On the side note I'm continuing with my under-the-hood improvements to the website. It'd be nice if I could get some adverts on. Yes it would. That's a pipe dream though, nobody wants to advertise on my site unless it gets 500,000 pageviews a day. Such is life.

- Rob

Tuesday, July 01, 2008

Fat Planet : 4 Years in the making and the first level isn't finished yet

Yup. July '04. Fat World is finished. The game is quite poor. January '05, complete engine rewrite, game now features Mario and is called Mario Balistix. September '06, another complete engine rewrite, game is now called Fat Planet. July '08. Particles, Multiple foreground parallax and translucency. Have some victoria sponge cake.


Tuesday, June 03, 2008

Fat Planet : The considerably less glitchy game that's still unlikely to be completed in my lifetime

One day I was thinking to myself 'Hmm... you know what'd be fun? If I could stop jumping whilst in mid-air. You know what? It is fun! Much improved play control. If I consider it a significant enough improvement, I'm thinking of putting up the new version. There's now multi-layered foreground parallaxing! Because adding in a lot of graphical effects will hopefully compensate for the fact that I can't draw. Still need to tighten up the graphics.

Friday, May 16, 2008

Alarming drop-out rate of sky diving classes

Okay, the next version of Fat Planet should be around the corner soon. There's not much new in terms of features but theres about a gazillion billion bugfixes. And don't ever let me use the phrase 'gazillion billion' again. Ever. But there's also some new fancy visual effects and tweaks to the super muffin events that might make me confident enough to include a second muffin in the level.
Most of the bugs so far are related to the fact that there's a second active object for fatty when he jumps on the foomba, and that very occasionally creates two fatties. The camera has no idea where to go and usually just flies of towards the end of the level and both fatties either get killed or walk into a pit. Which is fantastic.

I'm also pleased to announce I've made absolutley no progress on STH2. The engine's just about finished, but it'd be nice if I had someone who could draw to redo the graphics. Any takers?

EDIT : I'd also like to apologize to any gamepad fans out there. TGF handles input from gamepads differently to input from keyboards, it repeats reading the buttons' state, and this causes real problems. Currently, the best solution is software like Pinnacle Game Profiler, something that can bind joypad buttons to the keyboard.

Monday, May 05, 2008

Fat Planet : The glitchiest game you'll never play

Wow, it's been a while since the last update. I've had a few setbacks somewhere along the line ofFat Planet, mainly related to my attempting to graft a static engine onto the mess of events I've created. This means that there's now bajillions of bugs that happen for no apparent reason (please do not mention the number -12 to me, ever). So my options are to write my own static engine instead of using the mallbro engine, (which will probably create even more bugs and waste a lot of time) fix all the bugs, (which will probably take years) or just use the default platform engine (like a pansy).

But at least I have Mario Kart. Although I'm putting off unlocking all the extras. Since when did video games become such a chore?

Sunday, February 17, 2008

WOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

"Graphics (1/10):
And to add the icing to the cake, welcome to sprite mixing central. This game almost makes a Sparksoft game look fun."

Link

WOOOOOOOOOOOOO