Summer Schemes

I have a final exam to get through tomorrow, then it's back to work on games. Here's what's left to do:

1. Finish Giraffe Adventures
2. Finish CockBlockaz
3. Throw together Outer Space Future Battle Massacre 1997

I don't think I've mentioned Outer Space Future Battle Massacre 1997 yet. More on that later. These 3 projects all have very different sorts of to-do lists as they are very different sorts of projects so I'm thinking about working on all of them concurrently rather than lasering in one by one, just to keep it fresh. According to no study ever, multitasking is an efficient way for human beings to accomplish tasks.

Other things I'd like to do this summer if I have time:

1. Dig into Twine a little more
2. Play with PuzzleScript
3. Learn ENIGMA & maybe use it to start over with Lucha Cerveza

I also want to learn Haxe/OpenFL & Unity & I've been wanting to learn NES assembly just for kicks but, yeah. Chill out, dude. Now I'm just stressing myself out. Anyway.

Shout out to the fans in Germany!

Giraffe Adventures Update #2

Making a little bit of progress here & there on Giraffe Adventures, but I've been way too busy to really commit any time to it. So far so good, I like where it's going but there's a lot of writing left to do.

Node map update:

There are 19 different endings as of now, with exciting titles like "Exploding Dick Apocalypse" & "You Did Some Stuff I Guess." I'll keep plunkin' away, this might be finished a month or so from now.

Giraffe Adventures Update #1

I haven't started writing any new content yet, but I've got the project migrated over to Twine, just using the standard boilerplate template. I'll probably dig into Twine a little deeper this summer, but for now I'm just keeping it simple. Here's the Twine-generated node map of what the story looks like so far:

That's the title screen in the upper-left, then you can sort of trace how the story branches from there. This is way easier to make sense out of than the weirdo numbering hierarchy system I was using before.

Anyway, I'm stoked to see where this goes. It feels kind of good to be concentrating on writing & just having stupid fun instead of on programming, for a while at least.

Giraffe Adventures!

Next on the list is a little HTML choose-yr-own-adventure called Giraffe Adventures.

FIRST LINE SNEAK PREVIEW:
"You are a gay retarded baby giraffe. What will you do next?"

As fate would have it, I was recently introduced to Twine, a free & open-source HTML development tool focused on interactive text kinds of things. So I'm migrating Giraffe Adventures over to Twine; at the moment it's just a pile of .html files that I cranked out in notepad. The reason I never finished it is because it got too hard to keep track of branches & everything, but Twine pretty much handles that automatically, it looks like.

Gonna get my copy & paste on for a minute here.

Windows 8 Calamity!

Well, this is dumb. For boring reasons that I won't get into, all of my Game Maker games were crashing on Windows 8 under certain conditions; they seemed to play fine until too many sounds were played simultaneously, then BOOM they're done for. It actually turned out to be a Microsoft problem rather than Game Maker or an I-don't-know-what-the-fuck-I'm-doing problem. Anyway, I figured out how to fix it & I've uploaded updated versions of all the games to the website. #1 CUSTOMER SERVICE FOR THE FANS.

Edit: That's a lie. Only some of the games work reliably on Win8. Here are the ones that still don't:

Dog Catcher Jones of the Future
AlienSexist
Jack Ham's Maze of Tribulations
Jack Ham Zero

They work mostly but they're pretty unstable. #0  CUSTOMER SERVICE FOR THE FANS. Maybe I'll fix them someday.

Sunrise Sunset Official Release!

Sunrise Sunset is finished & available for download at potatoclockgames.com!

About that exclamation point. I'm not here to betray your trust. I'm excited because I'm done with it, not because I'm proud of it.

Like I've said, this was like the 3rd game I ever started & it's a mess. But it's playable, it's short, & I think it offers a few interesting moments, at least.

INTERESTING MOMENTS, SEE. LIKE THIS ONE.

Changing up the Gameplan

Here's what's on the docket:

Sunrise Sunset
Giraffe Adventures
SquareWave
Lucha Cerveza
CockBlockaz

Well, I just played what I've finished of SquareWave, which is very little, & it's just not much fun. So fuck it. I've also decided that, unless inspiration really hits when I get back to work on CockBlockaz, I'm going to reduce the game's scope fairly dramatically: 25 levels instead of 49, no music, boom, call it a day. Lucha Cerveza could be fun but I'm so sick of patching & working around my old shitty code that I'd rather just start over from scratch. So I think I'll make that my first project with whatever new development tool I decide to learn. Actually, I want to learn a bunch of new tools this summer. Anyway, that makes the revised to do list look like this:

Sunrise Sunset (almost done)
Giraffe Adventures (almost done)
CockBlockaz (almost done if I decide to reduce the scope)

My chances of ditching Game Maker by the end of the summer just got a lot better. I'm feeling pretty good about it.