For this past weekend's Game-in-a-Day event, I created a rather dark game, tentatively titled Dead Man's 31. It could be described as Fight Club meets Blackjack meets Choose-Your-Own-Adventure.

This GID was different in that I made it in 24 consecutive hours, as opposed to spreading the time over the course of the weekend. The weird nature of the game kind of reflects my sleep-deprived state when I was making it. All of the images are drawn by hand in colored pencil and then tweaked with Photoshop.

I got a new Dell laptop. It's fairly low end (1.4 GHz, 256 RAM, onboard graphics) because it's mainly for testing my games on a lower class machine.

Of course, the first thing I did was install my favorite OS!

Nunchuck Mode is closer to being finished!

I also fixed a performance bug that has been bothering me for at least a year. Since it only happened during the first 10 seconds of the game, I figured there was some kind of caching with the collisions in Blitz or DirectX. So, I started pretesting all of the collisions at startup and now it runs so smoothly, it feels like a different game.

I currently have 47 items left on my To-Do list for Circus Ninjas.

Since I don't have anything new to show, I figured I'd dig into my "Works in Progress" folder which, at this point, has eleven projects in it.

Space Gopher Super Nova is probably the very first game I ever started making with BlitzBasic. It began as a prototype for an animated map in a space strategy game, but was scaled back to be a catch-the-critter game.

The game play is inspired by the Wampus in M.U.L.E.: the goal is to catch gophers that live in asteroids, but they only show up as tiny dots that you have to grab before they go back into hiding.

I've experimented with a lot of control schemes on this one. The current interface involves using the mouse to drag the player's ship around on a rubber-like tether. This results in a lot of near-misses, which becomes maddening when those little bastards start taunting you.

A good ninja knows when to use the katana as an extension of his deadly skills... even if the victim is just a balloon. There will also be a variety of weapons to avoid, like spears and shuriken the size of rotary saws.

Hey, it's all about entertaining the kids, right?

I started this game almost two years ago, but it kept getting put on the back burner to finish other games. This and Funky Stars are my two main projects at the moment, so there's a small chance it will be finished by the end of the year. That is, unless I switch to something else again.

The only thing I can say about it right now is that it's a balloon-popping game inspired by "Clowns" for the Bally Astrocade (circa 1980). I've also based some of the game play on pinball machines.

Here's a portion of a screen shot:

I have most of the scenes tracked out now, but there's still a lot of polishing to do.

I made more progress on the demo today. It will be set to Funky Stars, a brilliant chip tune by Quazar of Sanxion.

Unlike most Demos I've seen, the visuals will be aligned tightly with the music, which is 2:20 long. There will be no stop points, where the user presses space to move on to the next screen.

All of the effects in the demo are based on the Oval function in Blitz.

My spider senses started tingling this morning, so I immediately jumped out of the shower -- shampoo still in my hair -- and checked my web traffic statistics.

Sure enough, I've had a huge surge in game downloads this weekend. Usually I would expect about 10 downloads for each game per day. Here are the hit counts since yesterday:

Non-Stop Action Hero -- 229 hits
Speed Thrasher -- 775 hits





According to the logs, they are coming from a site in the Slovak Republic:

http://www.plnehry.sk

These guys seem to have their most recently added games front and center on their home page. So small games like mine are displayed next to large commerical demos, like Warhammer 40k. Even considering that the traffic is higher on the weekend, I think I will reach 1000 hits for both games fairly soon.

Joe