Haha. That title is so clever.

But seriously, folks, here's the next sketch of Johnny, in color.



True fans will note the Chuck Taylor motif I've imported from Non-Stop Action Hero. Still plenty to do on it... like moving the Walkman cord to make room for that sweet lightning bolt.

The great thing about having a business is getting business-specific junk mail. Actually it's my only reminder that I even have a business.

This one's a keeper, though:



I can't wait to impress the checkout girl at Long's Drugs when I whip out my Advanta(tm) PLATINUM BusinessCard (one word). Maybe all of that reflecto-shiny prestige will blind her enough that she won't see the part that says "Flea Circus."

I just found out you can microwave bacon! Why didn't anyone tell me this? All this time, I've been using the skillet but I always screwed it up.

For the next month, I'm eating nothing but bacon-and-egg sandwiches.

Unsurprisingly, I've delayed the release until mid-January. There's still a ton of work left to do, not to mention polish, which can take forever.

Right now I'm punching up the level designs for an Alpha 2 milestone for this weekend. I also took a first stab at both the music (mostly inspired by Miami Vice) and the Johnny character design:

I'm in the process of tying everything together for an Alpha 1 milestone, which I'm aiming for Wednesday. The purpose of this is to send out to other indie developers and get some early feedback on gameplay.

The arcade portion is looking a lot better. The cabinets have a more traditional shape and each game has an animated mini-screen and marquee.



I'm shooting for 15 minigames by Wednesday. I have 11 so far, which are as follows. See if you can figure out which classic games they represent:

Electro Zombies
Moon Candy
O-Type
Unwelcome Visitors
Defenger
Hail Mary!
Rifle Mania
Dude Buggy
Fritz Felcher Skiing
Pizzaroids

and... the secret boss!

I've been concentrating on sound for the past day or so. I bought two sound packs of arcade-like sounds, but unfortunately most of the sounds aren't what I'm looking for. I've pretty much decided to make most of the 8-bit sounds I need with Fruity Loops using the 3x Osc thing.



The toughest sounds so far have been for inserting a token into the arcade machines, and receiving them from the change machine. All of the coin sounds I found were for slot machines and pay phones, so I bought a couple of those and edited them with Audacity.

I should also mention that I've received the most traffic ever, yesterday... over 4000 hits for Control Tower SFO! The logs don't show a referrer, but they all seem to be coming from Brazil, assumably from a forum. I got a bunch of comments for it, so I know it's not a bot. Last week it was posted on a (I think) Brazilian blog, so that's probably where it started.

Development has been going a bit slow. In fact I was dangerously close to switching gears to start development on a Web 2.0-style application. But in the end I've decided to keep my eye on the tiger.

To get back on track, I've turned things up a notch by listening to all of my 80's MP3s. Right now I'm listening to REO Speedwagon: "Take It On the Run", which practically sums up life as an Indie developer, if you ask me.

So far, my ride in the Speedwagon has paid off. Check out this awesome penguin I just drew:

This past day has been a real pain. I uncovered two problems that at first seemed to be related. Luckily, experience has taught me that just because two bugs appear similar, it doesn't mean they are caused by the same thing, so I tackled them separately.

Bug #1: Memory Leak

I noticed that whenever I'd load a new minigame the memory would jump up by a few megs which, given the number of minigames in Joystick Johnny, would be a problem. I was up to 3AM last night trying to figure out what was going on and couldn't solve it.

Then (as these things usually go) I got up this morning, had my workout, sat down at the computer, and opened up the Blitz docs to the exact page that had the answer I was looking for. The only way I can explain the solution is that I was using a bit of self-referencing in my code, where I assumed the Garbage Collector would take care of it but didn't. (Isn't game development fascinating?)



Bug #2: Game Hanging

This one was nuts. Whenever I'd reload a minigame a bunch of times in a row, or if I got close to actually winning the overall game (doh!), it would hang without showing any errors.

After a lot of trial and error, I realized that it was hanging after exactly the *16th* minigame. (16 being a magical and suspicious computery number, of course.) I finally tracked it down to a call to WaitTimer, which is what makes the game run at a smooth rate. Apparently you can only safely create 16 timers, and I was creating a new timer for each minigame. So I've worked around it and submitted a bug to Blitz Research.