The Flea Circus Games forum is now open for discussion:

Small Talk Forum

I used phpBB because my host has a nice one-button install for it. However, phpBB represents all that was bad with the web circa 2000: labyrinthine table-based layout, overuse of icons, and pages with a million geegaws on it. So I went through and cut out a ton of stuff, mostly using CSS to hide it all.

I'd like to also streamline the signup process, but I think I should focus on making a game for people to actually talk about.

The Joystick Johnny web site is up. The screenshots are still old and there are a couple of placeholders, but the overall design is there.

The forum will probably go live when I release the next beta.

My game Non-Stop Action Hero got posted on the Independent Gaming blog.

A combination of Front Line, Gun.Smoke, Space Invaders and Ikari Warriors, Non-Stop Action Hero is a decent action game that is impossible to lose.

And from there, it got posted from there to Strategy Informer. Right now, on their Shooter page, it's listed right next to games like Splinter Cell and Battlefield 2.



It allows anonymous voting, so be sure to give it a ridiculously high score!

Oh yeah, I love this:

The following games are very similar to Non-Stop Action Hero:

* Tom Clancy’s EndWar
* Dark Messiah of Might and Magic Elements
* Rayman: Raving Rabbids 2

Here's the spreadsheet I'm using to track progress on the minigames. Each row is a game. Each column is an area of development, like the cabinet design or the Virus level.



Green = Done
Yellow = Some work to do still
Gray = Not started

(The column that is almost all gray is sound.)

They're divided into 3 groups. The top are the games I've been working with since the beginning. The middle section is what I'm working toward for the Beta coming up in the next week or so.

There are about 150 gray boxes, which I think will be about 100 hours of work. Of course there is still work to be done with the metagame, but this is my focus right now.

A fan from the Czech Republic just released a Quake 3 Arena conversion of my game Million-Dollar Game Maker! It replaces all of the graphics and sounds so you can make your own version of Quake 3, sort of.

The author, Mkem just turned 12 years old last week. Wow, when I was that age, I think all I could make was an ASCII stick man doing jumping jacks.

Check it out:
Mkem Games page

Awesome. Right now I come up on the top of the second page in a Google search for Game Development Blog.

That makes me 2 ranks better than John Carmack and hot on the heels of Jeff Tunnell.

Anyway, all I have to do now is write a book on blogging for game development, post the link on my "game development blog", optimize my "game development blog" to reach page one, and watch the money pour in!

I also just really like saying "Game Development Blog".

I didn't sleep well last night, which resulted in me fixing all of the biggest major bugs today, some of which have been around since last year. One was a cyclical reference resulting in a memory leak, but was too scary to tackle until today. It's as if my brain is too tired to realize how much bug-fixing sucks so there's no desire to put it off.

Also, the different alternate play modes are done. Mystery Mix mode was easy... it's just like the main mode but is a random selection of games taken from all of the arcades.

The more difficult one was 1-Dollar Dash, which allows the player to pick 4 minigames to play in one shorter game. This is sort of my answer to people who want to play individual games -- if they want, they can just choose the same game 4 times. It's also a simple way of giving players more control over what they're playing, and how to compete with each other.

The selection screen still looks like crap right now, but it works.

I woke up this morning to someone using a JACK HAMMER just 30 feet from my apartment. That went on for like 40 minutes.

But you know what? It didn't bother me because it was still 100x more pleasant than waking up to a pager while being on-call. Thank god for self-employment.

In other news, the website is almost done and is kicking all kinds of ass. And on the topic of hammers, I think I'll be playing around with the Jan Hammer-style boss theme tomorrow.

I'm really trying to wrap this thing up in the next few weeks, but of course there's a kajillion things left to do. I have also shaken up the design a bit, hopefully for the last time.

The biggest changes are:

Treasures. Up until the last beta, these were 8x8 awards that you got for beating each row, and it depended on which game you ended with. I never really liked this, though. Last week a better idea came up: they are now hidden somewhere in each game, and you can collect them at your own pace. For instance, in the Spy Hunter game, there is one car with a red dot on the windshield. If you run into this car, you win the Fuzzy Dice treasure.

Scaled Down. I've cut the arcade size from 16 to 14 games. This actually improves the decision-making part, gives the game a quicker pace, and makes each arcade a bit more unique. The total number of minigames will be about 40 now.

Music. Instead of doing this myself or resorting to royalty-free music, I have started working with a very talented musician. If I told you who it was, it would make your head spin, but it'll be revealed when I'm sure I can handle the inevitable tsunami of fan mail. I'll probably still do the boss and victory music, but the in-game music that he's come up with so far is very cool and totally 80's.