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

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

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.

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.

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.

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?

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

Space Tile Hopper 2

I really need to think of a new title.

I'm kinda worried about STH2 at the moment. Every so often, upon opening the file, TGF will freeze, or start to run very slowly for no apparent reason. Every time I open TGF, it asks if I want to recover a version of the game from much earlier in development. And things aren't helped by the fact that my home key fell out, and while I tried to replace it, my laptop display flipped 180 degrees for no apparent reason. I must have accidentally pressed a key combination.

STH2 is also proving quite hard to develop, using a step based system, but also including animation. I'm quite pleased with the end result, though. 2.5d!

Screen :
















The perspective's pretty impressive, especially as TGF1 only lets you move objects to the front and back. I'm just thankful I didn't make it isometric.

I've also got some ambient music from mark and edgen over at flashkit.com. I didn't make it. My music doesn't have the kind of feel I wanted.

I might be having one of my friends do level design. Yay! Level design is always the tedious bit.

Look out for STH2 over the next few months, years, decades...

So, how did Dot-Maze-Ultra go?

Well, Reflexive still haven't replied. Which is annoying.

RealArcade declined. They complained about several things. They didn't like the 'bland' gameplay. Which is a fair enough thing, provided you actually mean something by it.
They also, rather interestingly, complained about 'a lack of storyline'. Then they reamed off statistics about '80% of our users are female' that are already plastered all over their website. You can't just throw statistics at me and call it a review. It was only about a paragraph long.
Hear this, RealArcade, I submitted the game as an 'alpha'. It's not a finished game. It's not supposed to have a story. It's not supposed to have super-awesome graphics. And it's not supposed to 'resonate'.

I guess their reviewers missed all of the mindless Zuma clones and match 3 games.

I'll leave you with this quote. I swear to god this is what they said.

"In playing the game we found it to be to centered on logic and our users are 80% female"

I guess female users just won't understand logic, huh. They're not the only ones.

Microbes

It's on the great games experiment, too, as well as EGP.

Here's a badge. Go download it!

N-n-n-nnn... No.

Blogger fails. Completely. It tells me there's a problem with the XML in the custom template I want to upload.

Ugh.

"Tag is not allowed"

It made all of this a link, for no reason. Then it said there was a problem in the HTML of something that I didn't tell to be a link.

It does this every time i copy and paste anything.

I swear, one day, as soon as I can be bothered to install wordpress.

Dot maze ULTRA

It's not just regular dot maze... not just Next-Gen. ULTRA. ULTRA. It's the cooler dot maze. It's the super-polished Dot-Maze, with shiny bits. With another implementation of that velocity physics engine - coded from scratch. The dot is shiny. The logo is shiny, and the menu buttons light up when you mouse over them.

This is going to be ONE AWESOME GAME.

I'm also doing quite well with Jovinez. Hey, I haven't seen a game where you have to push a block and redirect a lazer for waaay to long. The world needs more of those.

New fat planet now out!

It's 0.19 and it's a major improvement from 0.14, with shaded graphics, new music (IN MP3 FORMAT, WOO HOO!) Plenty of bugfixes and new features. Kudos to pistonsoft for their excellent MP3 conversion software. Now how the hell do I stop this link? Thank you blogger. I hate you blogger.

EDIT : I stopped the link by using the little eraser tool. I'm thinking of trying to implement a CMS on my website, blogger seems to have an awful number of little quirks these days.

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAARGH!!!! What I meant to say was :

I'm thinking of trying to implement a CMS on my website, blogger seems to have an awful number of little quirks these days.

Ya know what, it does. Google, why don't you make blogger Opera Compatible? (aka : not crap)

OMG SHADING, BLOCKS, NEW THINGS

As well as some cool new graphics, the next version of fat planet wall also contain... (drumroll)

A (very basic) velocity based physics engine
Shading, oh yeah!
Slower gameplay (fatty ran too fast)
MOAR music!
Coin blocks, re-made coin block engine.
Dirt Blocks
Many small bugfixes

Now that I have this engine, I intend to go completely nuts with it.

New site, new FTP software...

NEW GAME!!!

And it's a biggie, too. It's the alpha of Fat Planet, complete with all of the music composed so far, and an entire level! Please report bugs to me.

The new site design is called Aqua and was designed by Wink Hosting. It looks wonderful, and it's easy to edit, too. The brix balistix engine is up there too (woo!) and it's free to use with my permission!

With dreams officially canned, and many games scrapped, I thought I should begin work on a new game, a fiendish logic puzzler currently named 'Jovinez', and it serves as a showcase for cool graphical effects, as well as an excellent game!

For the last two summer holidays, I've brought you a new DotMaze game, so keep your eyes peeled. Not to say there'll be one, but there might.

I'm not procrastinating

I'm giving fat planet time. I want to make sure the engine is just right before I rush off and make levels. I still need to implement coin blocks. Meh, i'll do it later.

I've been thinking recently... how about a brain training game that leans itself to being experimental? One like wii fitness, that you test yourself on every day? I'll mull on it some more.

I had an air-hockey experimental game in the works, but I quit about halfway through. I didn't think it was working.

I finally got MAME working on my computer, so I might try my hand at some old-school arcade remakes.

I'm still picking designs for sparksoft. Several have caught my eye, and I think I have a winner.

Stretchmyson has expired. I'm not going to renew it, it sucked.

Supercrazygonuts

The EGP pack 2 is nearly complete. The last game to be added, titled Supercrazygonuts, is a strange cross between Geometry wars, Asteroids, Spheres of Chaos, Neon, Veck, and many more. It's built on the Omiton Ball engine, and I can say I think it's going to be great. The whole game is styled with state of the art vector-ish graphics in glorious 2 colours. Like fat planet, and possibly most future Spark Software games, all the music has been composed by me.

More to come...

Work on Fat Planet IS continuing

Yes, I know there hasn't been much news recently, but I've been busy working major bugs out of the engine and... composing music? Yep. Fat Planet will feature midi music, all (hopefully) created by me, and It's sounding pretty good so far.

http://www.hotlinkfiles.com/files/1306_varoc/fatplanetskyhaven.mid
http://www.hotlinkfiles.com/files/1307_c11mc/fatplanetboss.mid
http://www.hotlinkfiles.com/files/1308_qhlak/fatplanetdesert.mid
http://www.hotlinkfiles.com/files/1309_mlxbq/fatplanetseashore.mid
http://www.hotlinkfiles.com/files/1310_hl011/Fatplanettheme.mid
http://www.hotlinkfiles.com/files/1311_o71lo/fatplanetwoods.mid

Also, I've finished 6 experimental games (two that I will not be uploading) and Smart.Fun vol 2 is completed and features an impressive 27 toys to play around with, including full support for smart boards (duh) as well as ordinary computers. I'm also uncovering a new project today... dreams. It's a game about... well, dreams. It's a Wario Ware game like Christmas Minigame Extravaganza, only not so rushed like that one was. Here's tasters of both Fat Planet and Dreams.

N...n...new site design?

Yes, a new site design^_^ It's not ready yet, i'm trying to get it to work with frames or tables, so i can update it without changing the graphics, it's hard, I don't know any decent web design programs. Visually, it's about finished. Looky! Smart-fun vol 2 is about 99% done, but i'm waiting for a bit till I upload, so I can upload it together with ExperimentalGamesPack 2.