Jack Ham Zero: Soundtrack Update #4 (Complete!)

The soundtrack &, with the exception of a few little details, the game itself, are finally complete. The Mp3 soundtrack will be available for download along with the game, I think that it turned out pretty well. Here's what it includes:

1. Title Theme From Jack Ham Zero
2. The AstroTurf of Destiny
3. Welcome to the Space Ham
4. 40's with George
5. Sesame Street Theme Song (Hooper Spider Mix)
6. In the Caverns of the Heart
7. Music for the Obligatory Minecart Level
8. Battle For Sainthood (Zero Mix)

It's like 20 minutes long. I mean, this soundtrack ain't no masterpiece but it's more than good enough for the game that it's accompanying. So the sounds are mixed & the bugs that I'm aware of are all squashed, just a little bit of housekeeping left. Right on track for that March 1st release.

Elegy for Jack Ham

So back in like 2006, when Nintendo's Wii first came out, my cousin Chrissy Dubs & I were getting wasted on vodka & lemonade at his parent's house & playing through like $200 worth of rented Wii games. One of them was a Madden football game, I don't remember anything about it except that the loading screens offered up bits of football history & player biographies, including that of some guy called Jack Ham. All of the ingredients were there: a sweet name, a powerful vodka buzz, & loading screen induced boredom. By the end of the game we had developed a rich Jack Ham mythology & by the end of the day we had started work on a book of poems entitled 'Elegy for Jack Ham'. So that's how the whole Jack Ham thing started, just in case anyone wants to make a Potato Clock Games expansion for Trivial Pursuit or something.

Anyway, I just came across a copy of 'Elegy for Jack Ham', here are a few of my favorite short ones. Yeah, they're all titled 'Elegy for jack Ham':

Jack Ham Zero: Soundtrack Update #3

I ended up writing (well, arranging, I guess) two songs for the two boss battles. I'm not worried about bloating the filesize with a couple of MIDI jams & they're both kind of cop outs so don't worry, it didn't put me out anything.

The first boss battle, if I haven't mentioned this, is against Mr. Hooper of "owning the bodega in old school Sesame Street" fame. He owns the liquor store that you rob with George Washington & barfs Mr. Hooper-faced spiders at you. I reworked a MIDI version of the Sesame Street theme song that I found online to accompany this brilliant sequence. I'm happy with the song but the whole fight is still buggy as shit; I haven't really looked into the code yet to see what sort of embarrassing noob mistakes I made but that's probably the biggest non-audio job left to knock out.

For the second & final battle (against Jack Ham, of course) I threw together a MIDI version of the boss battle jam from Jack Ham's Maze of Tribulations. It took like two minutes. GOOD ENOUGH. The battle sequence itself is working fine but it's more tedious than fun so I might rework it a little. Note that I'm not super concerned with the climax of the game being more tedious than fun. You must be waiting with bated breath for this one to be released.

After throwing quite a but of shit against the wall, something's finally stuck for the cavern music. It's not quite finished but I'm really happy with it so far. So I'm'a grind through some big fixin', then finish this last jam, & I think that's all there's left to do.

Potato Clock Schemes: Anticipated Release Dates

I really shouldn't do this to myself but I want to stay on track to have these all finished by the end of summer.

Release Date Goals:

Rogue Matrix ........... Finished on schedule

RGB ...................... Finished on schedule

Jack Ham Zero ......... 03.01.15

CockBlockaz ............ 04.15.15

Sunrise Sunset ......... 05.15.15

Giraffe Adventures .... 06.01.15

SquareWave ............ 08.01.15

Lucha Cerveza ......... 09.01.15

I think I'm being conservative here? I'm trying to take into account my job, school (including an accelerated summer course which I suspect will leave no time for game development), the Zygotes project &, you know, doing other shit with my life.

Oh yeah, & I added another game to the list. Forgot about Lucha Cerveza! How could I forget about Lucha Cerveza?

Jack Ham's Maze of Tribulations 2015 Update

I've made some minor updates to Jack Ham's Maze of Tribulations & uploaded the new definitive version to the Potato Clock Games website. Here's what's changed:

1. Picked some low-hanging fruit to reduce the filesize &, more importantly, loading time. I mean, the load time is still bullshit. I could do a lot more optimization & maybe I will someday, but this feels good enough for now.

2. Pushed through a bunch of little bug fixes, mostly involving the player getting stuck in walls & on George Washingtons due to cruddy collision detection. I didn't fix the cruddy collision detection, Ok, I just hacked out the bugs. Some of them.

3. Most importantly, & the reason I wanted to update the game in the first place, I rebalanced the end of the game. It's easier now, or, I think more accurately, it's less unfairly difficult now. There were occasional impossible-to-avoid fireballs, that kind of thing. The fireballs are a bit slower now & their hit boxes are a bit smaller so if you get hit it's your own damn fault.

Other than that it's the same game. I just wanted to give the fans a fair chance to experience the game in all its glory ahead of the release of Jack Ham Zero, which is very nearly complete! Give me like two weeks.

RGB Design Document

Found this in a notebook sandwiched between 2 pages of notes on floating point representation. Sort of an interesting artifact:

(Click to enlarge in case you've never used the internet before.)

This represents the first time that I bothered to plan shit out before coding a game. That's sort of  lie, I had already taken a failed crack at this game & decided to sketch out the next version, mostly because I am a rebel & was not paying attention to a lecture on floating point representation. Anyway, it turns out that a little bit of planning doesn't turn a bad idea into a good one but it does allow you to make crappy games more quickly & less buggy.

Jack Ham Zero: Soundtrack Update #2

Gonna kick this one off with a sneak peek of the Jack Ham Zero title screen & this link to download the title theme:

I just finished the minecart level music & put it into the game. The music control structure (which plays/stops the various tracks at the right times) is complete & I'm sound mixin', bug fixin' & filling in the sound effects gaps as I go.