I just got back from City Hall.

While I was there, I was hoping to see The Comissioner slam his door to chew out a renegade cop that doesn't like to do things by the book "because those scumbags on the street don't have to play by the rules, so why should we?!"

I didn't see that, exactly, but I *did* get to pay $200 (and 11 cents) for someone to look at my address and say essentially, "Yes, you can program a computer in your kitchen."

She actually looked at my address on a map... maybe she had to verify that I wasn't trying to start a software company out of a church or dentist's office, which in Alameda is a shockingly high possibility.



Anyway, I have my permit and my business license, so Flea Circus Games is legit now.

I've decided to set the internet on fire, literally, by releasing this tantalizing screenshot of the skeet shooting minigame for Joystick Johnny.



Discuss! (but not here, obviously)

The default TileImage() function in BlitzMax doesn't take into account dynamic scaling or rotation. Unfortunately, I need scaling to give my backgrounds a chunky pixellated look. I was previously resizing them when they were being loaded, but that was taking too long.

Luckily, since BlitzMax is (mostly) open source, I was able to modify the original routine. The result is pretty trippy if you abuse it enough.

See it in Action (424k)

Until now, I've been dangerously low on office supplies, but thank goodness for the upcoming elections. Campaigning = free stationery!!



I can breathe a little easier now.

But, as usual, the campaign slogans are predictable and bland. Now if *I* was running for local office, my message would be more proactive:

There's now a Robotron-style game for Joystick Johnny:



The humans are kind of a homage to the little Bally Astrocade people, which appear in nearly all of the sports games for that platform.

With Defender done, the Joystick Johnny engine can now handle playfields that extend beyond the screen.

Also, sprites can morph into other sprites. For instance, when an alien reaches one of the humans, it morphs into a "carrier" alien that heads toward the top of the screen. Shooting a carrier will cause it to morph into a falling human that you can catch for extra points.

I just finished a Gyruss-style game for Joystick Johnny:



The 360 degree controls actually took a while to implement, and I ran into one of those bugs that suck up a lot of time during the late night, and becoming blindingly obvious in the morning. =/

Unfortunately there's not a lot of minigames I can apply this to, other than Tempest.

But at least now I can do scaling relative to a point or line on the screen. This is what achieves that tunnel effect, and should also allow me to do psuedo 3D games, where obstacles come at you from a distant horizon.

First, I have the mechanics in place for a racing game, like Sprint. There probably won't be any cars to race against, but there is a timer that makes you lose if you don't complete all of the laps in time.




After that, without having to add any new code to the engine, I created a version of Lunar Lander. Instead of landing on platforms, right now you pick up rotating Space Mints. Also, the fuel burns at a steady rate instead of corresponding to your acceleration.

In the course of my um, research, I found this bundle of Atari games.

Atari 80 Classics



A good idea for a good price, except...

The download is 500 MEGABYTES.

That's like the size of three Libraries of Congress just to play the original Centipede, which was maybe 8k. Maybe they stored all the graphics as WAV files or something?

I'm done with Asteroids, which means I also have the capability to do vector-style graphics now. Also, sprites can now spawn other sprites (e.g. so destroying a large asteroid creates two smaller asteroids.)

Another nice thing is that I can mirror the spawn points for any of the sprites. So for instance, the UFO can come in from either side of the screen and I only have to script it in one direction.



Note that all of the screenshots I will post in the next week or so will not really resemble the final games. Since my goal is not to make perfect remakes (for obvious reasons), the graphics and even some of the themes will change to be more exaggerated and ridiculous. Right now I'm using these to build out the engine.

By next week I should have the following game types covered:

Sprint - driving controls, timed play
Lunar Lander - fuel and gravity
Defender - play field that extends beyond the screen
Skeet Shoot - point-and-shoot, ammo
Mario Bros - platform-style play
Donkey Kong - ladder climbing
Pac-Man - mazes, grid movement, and enemy pathfinding
Pengo - pushable sprites
Battlezone - first-person play

Well, I figured I'd take a break from working on Joystick Johnny... to make another game. =) There's a competition on one of the dev forums to make a game in 3 hours, so I gave it a go.

Download Star Climb (784kb)



It's a remake of Zeke's Peak, an old mechanical arcade game where you try to coax a metal ball into one of many slots in the board.

This is my first game with any real physics in it, though it's really simple stuff. I actually had to use the dreaded slope/intercept formula for the first time in like 15 years.

It's also my first "finished" game using BlitzMax, which is a much better language than Blitz3D. I can finally do more polished graphics now, with things like alpha blending and real-time scaling.

Anyway, this goes on the pile of games I might finish someday, but it's actually pretty entertaining right now. My current high score is 4100.

I found a new review for Barbarian Roller Rally:

Read the Review

Any game that features a roller-skating barbarian at least deserves a look

For some reason, this is the game that everyone remembers me for. It was originally done as an entry for a weekly competition on CodersWorkshop.com. The theme was "swords" which was completely uninspiring as far as game design goes, so I decided I wasn't going to join in.

Then, at the last minute, I asked myself, "What is the stupidest game I can make involving a sword?" And thus, Barabarian Roller Rally was born unto this world.

And immediately lost the competition.

I now have the system in place for the Joystick Johnny minigames. Each minigame has a collection of images, plus a VID file, which is a plaintext configuration file.

The VID file is designed to keep the development time for each minigame to a minimum, so there are a ton of shortcuts, like inheritance between levels. For instance, in Space Invaders, I can set everything up for Level 1, and then if I want the bad guys to be a bit faster in Level 2, I can do something like this:

[1-ACTOR-0]
IMAGE "invader1"
SPEED 2.0
# plus a bunch of other fields

[2-ACTOR-0]
SPEED 3.0

Now, in Level 2, the invaders will move, look, and act the same, but will be 50% faster.

I only need to type out the fields that have changed from the previous level. The playtest application lets me refresh the VID file and images on the fly so I don't have to recompile for every change.

There is still quite a bit to add to the engine, like background collisions and platformer-style movement, but in its current state I can recreate most of the early space shoot-em-ups.

11:30a Wake up
11:31a Take nap on couch
12:04p Take shower, put on my super strength "hair glue"
12:05p Accidentally glue eyelashes shut
12:30p Watch squirrel in the tree outside my window. It must think it's a dog because it keeps making tiny barking sounds.
12:40p Consider branding myself as the Jacques Cousteau of computer games

It's not really a game (you don't actually do anything), and it technically isn't my first game EVER, but this was the first thing I made with BlitzBasic, around June 2003.

At the time, I thought, "If I can make this, I can make ANYTHING!" And I've yet to be proven wrong.

Yes, that's a green robot. Floating through space. To jazz.

Download My First Game