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

Since the HTML edition of NeonPlat Adventures 2 will use a slightly different method to recolour the tilemap, it means I need to try and make the two different methods as close to each other as I can. Yesterday I started to tackle this issue. It's not 100% perfect, but I'm sure with a little number crunching, I'll manage to get the two editions looking "mostly" the same! (URL "https://AGameAWeek.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/NPA2_003.png"><img src="https://AGameAWeek.com...

Developments

Uhoh! Forgot about colours!!! That's going to make NeonPlat Adventures particularly tricky, should I want to include an HTML5 edition. .. and, of course, I DO want to include an HTML5 edition, so I guess I'm going to have to retackle the whole "multicoloured scenery" issue. And so I spent most of yesterday drawing some basic template scenery and getting it all ready. I added a whole new section to my re-renderer engine, and now it's spitting out high quality assets in 9 differ...

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

I didn't do a bloomin' thing, yesterday! I say that.. I'm pretty sure I did SOMETHING, I just can't remember what it was! It can't have been all that important, then... Hmm.. : *shrugs* It seems an entire day has passed me by. I watched a movie, (What We Did On Our Holiday) and listened to a lot of JPop for no real reason. I also watched episode 9 of Dark Matter, which had all manner of interesting things happen. But as for myself. Nope. Nothing to declare I'm afraid. ...

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...

Developments

I'm currently unsure what I should be doing next. I *should* be working on those new SpikeDislike3 themes, but lack of interest in the game is making that all feel a bit worthless. Instead, I think I need something else to work on for a little while. I have, after all, been working on SpikeDislike3 for about 4 months, now, and that's a LONG time for a guy who usually does AGameAWeek! I think, today, I might jump into my old habits of randomly typing keywords into Monkey-X unti...

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=...

Developments

Motivation seems to have taken a bit of a nosedive, this week. I think the lack of SpikeDislike3 sales is starting to get to me, as every time I open the folder, I spend about 10 minutes staring at the code before closing it up again. I feel like moving on to something else. Maybe that'll help kick me back into gear again. But what project to tackle? I'm not sure. My head doesn't even seem to want to consider anything else, right now. Bah, humbug.. I'm not a fan of the...

Developments

More files.. Found a whole bunch of old videos on one of my old hard drives, so spent literally HOURS, last night, copying them over to the NAS drive. Bah. Windows 10 seems to focus a lot on file transfers, meaning my laptop was practically unusable whilst the transfer was taking place. I certainly didn't have that issue last week when transferring millions of files from NAS to NAS, so it's either Win10 that's doing it, or the fact that I was transferring from a USB-based dock. ...

Hunting for Files

As I poke and prod around my new NAS drive, there are still gaps remaining. My Midi and Mod archive is entirely missing. I never did manage to get them from my old hard drives, and now I'm starting to wonder how on earth I'm going to manage to do it. For the most part, the Mod Archive can be re-grabbed from Aminet, where I originally got most of it. But there were various other sites that have been and gone in that time, which had wonderful tunes. My Mini archive was mostl...

Developments

I could've sworn I did SOMETHING, yesterday! ..but can I remember what? I should probably jot these things down, as I go! I know I had SpikeDislike3's source open for a bit, but then I also had BlastTrax's source open, too. If I want to update BlastTrax, I first need to upgrade it's framework, and then add some music. hmmm. Then I messed about with Arcade Slots. I do enjoy Arcade Slots, but other people still hate the "randomness" of it all. Weird.. So, yeah, I actual...

Developments

Last night, as I lay in bed, a silence suddenly enveloped the room. It was unlike anything I'd heard in the past couple of weeks. Total, complete and utter silence. I sat up in bed, and looked around the room. Was it a power cut? No.. Then why so little sound? What was missing!? Seems that the new Western Digital NAS drive had finally (after about 2 weeks) finished cataloguing all the files I'd thrown onto it, and was happy with it's collection of thumbnails, enough to s...

Developments

The next edition of SpikeDislike3 will come with 5 brand new themes, each with a unique playstyle. In much the same way that SpikeDislike2 had it's Barry the Bee and Sheep Goes Right themes, this one will include a batch of themes that all mess about with the controls, and do things a little differently. The first attempt is, of course, the classic "Chase the Train" mode, which you might remember from the (URL "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JcbquXypuwc">Mastertronic 8-bit cla...

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

Drawing silly pixelart characters is one thing. Having to animate a horse!? That's a whole other thing!!! Over the past week, I've animated a cat, a dog, and now a horse, too. I'll admit that, having animated the horse and got it into the engine, I then closed the laptop and opted to play games for most of the rest of the day, instead. Animating really takes it out of you, even if it was only 6 entire frames of animation!! I just don't have the stamina for animating. It wea...

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

First, I'd like to apologise for one of the new themes. It seems that in my rush to get the game out, I neglected to realise how much blank space was left in one of the sprites. What appears to be unfair collision is in fact "empty space on the upper right of the sprite". I redrew this little fella at the very last minute (He was a bit more .. shall we say.. Mouse-like before!) (URL "https://AGameAWeek.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/SD3_045.png"><img src="https://AGameAW...