Unsureness /  by Allison James

...of what exactly to make now. It Only Takes A Second and The Hilarity of Murder are both now finished (and Game Jolt's competition deadline has passed - now to see if either of them place).Referring to an earlier blog entry, which mentioned three halted WIPs, the Aargon remake is unlikely to be completed any time soon, Rotatarama never got off the ground, and Innoquous World will be a steadily-made game I'm not going to work on yet.The idea I'm most tempted by is a Pro overhaul of The Hilarity of Murder, with its gimmick removed and online play installed. I'm fairly proud of the engine I managed to make for it, and would like to see it go to better use personally.In other news, I have a job! And it's voluntary! :P I do occasional/frequent (not yet sure) 2.5 hour shifts at the village shop. The village shop in question is tiny. So, yeah. Fun.Last thing: I've changed the Song of the Moment. :)Well, that's all. Frequency of blog entries will probably be slow now, but I aim to get at least one a week written.Byee!

I got Pro back! /  by Allison James

Incase you didn't see the tweet, I got Pro back. Two days ago I sent a helpdesk ticket to YoYo Games about it, saying I'd not had a reply from Softwrap. Not so long ago, I got a reply from the helpdesk saying they'd reactivated my account.You can complain about YYG all you want, but they can be damn helpful when they need to be. As a result of this, I'll be buying GM8 regardless of its price as thanks to the company. I'm so kind.It also means IOTAS is finally back on track. Maybe it'll accompany THoM as a Game Jolt competition entry? (well, I'd be silly not to try it)So yeah. Huzzah!~NAL

Speedy update /  by Allison James

Shortenable to "Speed date" maybe.I've not been blogging much since I'm working my nuts off to finish this Lite game for the Game Jolt Competition. That brings me to some points.

- I still don't have Pro

- Softwrap remain yet to reply to my email.

- The game is now called The Hilarity Of Murder.- It's named like that as it now has one of the ten GJ axioms into it.

- The axiom is "Laughter is the Best Medicine".

- In the game, you have an illness which's deadly effects are only stopped if you're finding things funny.

- You find murder funny.

- It's doing well.

I'll blog when it's done or I know I'll have some time free to post.On another note, I plan on finishing It Only Takes A Second after this game is made and I finally have Pro again.

Filler Entry /  by Allison James

Not blogged for a couple of days, so here's a filler blog entry.I'm still working on LTW since Softwrap are still yet to respond to my email. I made a GMC WIP topic about it here with the latest demo (though not hugely new - since then, I've completed work on the rocket launcher and grenades).When I used to blog on TwilightPhantasm and 64digits, I used to include a Song Of The Blog in every entry. This basically showed the song I was hooked at at the time of making it. Well, it's partially been brought back in the form of Song of the Moment. This is located in the sidebar to the right. Clicking the song name or artist will link to the song on YouTube.That's all. Later!~NAL

Sigh /  by Allison James

Still waiting for Softwrap. They only took a day last time I needed something from them - typical that they're taking longer when I really need Pro ASAP.

Oh well, guess I'd better update on Lite Town Wars.

It's going well. Since the last blog entry, I made several improvements, including one which changes the drawing engine to incorporate perspective. Notice in the last screenshot, the tops of the skyscrapers are identical in size to the bases. Now, they're not. I'd upload a screenshot of this, but it's hard to tell since I made the skyscrapers so damn high. Making the perspective was a fairly easily calculation though - it just works out the positions of two opposite top corners separately, instead of a single calculation for the centre of the top.

I've also done the HUD, and incorporated a system to do a few things I've not really attempted before - levelling up, max. health increases, multiple weapons (pistol, Uzi, rocket launcher, grenades), and limited clips of the pistol and Uzi (so, for example, you have to reload the pistol after 8 shots).

I won't bother with an updated demo yet - I'll wait until there's at least a little extra gameplay.

Well, that's all. See you in another blog entry!

~NAL

EDIT (6:49pm GMT)

Here's a screenshot of Lite Town Wars so far.

As usual, click it to see it in full.

Stopgap game in Lite /  by Allison James

Since I'm bored of waiting for Softwrap, and can't continue with IOTAS until it's sorted, I'm now working on a stopgap game in which I'm trying to get as much out of Game Maker 7.0 Lite as I can. It's currently called Lite Town Wars, and is comparable to MINDRAPE and my Fake 3D Pyramids example.

I'm surprised lengthdir is a function available in Lite, actually. It's so damn versatile, and is way more useful in my opinion than stuff like image_angle. Its availability in Lite is one of the only reasons I'm making this game.

Anyway, here's a screenshot of what I have so far (click it to see it in full).I won't be hyping this game much since it really is just while I'm without Pro for IOTAS - if I get Pro again before this game is complete to a reasonable percentage, it'll likely be scrapped.

So, yeah. That's pretty much it for now!

~NAL

Waiting on Softwrap /  by Allison James

I was unaware, but apparently I'd hit my GM7 registration limit when I did the XP reinstallation (see previous post). So, at the moment, I'm having to wait for Softwrap to respond to my email asking for another registration.

Until then, It Only Takes a Second will have to lie untouched - I can't work with it in lite since it uses so many pro features, including D3D.A couple other weird things occurred with the new installation, mainly that Windows Media Player won't work. There seems to be a broken version in its directory that can't be deleted, and you can't specify where it should be installed (nice one, Microsoft), so it just keeps running into a brick wall. I've started to get used to Winamp, though, so meh.

Anyway, thought I'd post an update on that. Prior to the reinstallation, IOTAS was on 13 levels, so provided Softwrap help me out in the next couple of days, I should be able to finish the game for the August 31st deadline.

~NAL

Reinstalled XP /  by Allison James

...which may mean it'll be a day or so until I work on IOTAS again (progress is fine, though - three levels done in the Underwater section).My reason for reinstallation? Well, several months ago, I did a clean install of Vista over XP. A month or so later, I started to wonder what the hell I was thinking when I did that - most of my GM .exes had stopped working (GM6 incompatibility), my PS3 was incapable of connecting to the internet (the connecter I use won't work with Vista), and UAC was more depressing than the new Transformers film.Wanting to keep Vista, though, since clean installing it had killed off a lot of my lovely files and downgrading from Vista to XP won't work without a clean install, I made a 10GB partition, and put XP on that.Anyway, I very quickly filled that 10GB, and many programs still insist on installing to the default drive as opposed to asking where they should go. Earlier today, I got annoyed with it, so I put my precious files onto my 640GB external hard drive, and clean-installed XP to the 220-odd GB "main" C: partition.So, apart from the fact I'd customised the eyeballs off XP before so have to do it again, it's convenient.Anyway, there's your news. Usual, obsessive posts about IOTAS will resume shortly.Goodbye for now!~NAL