Martin Crownover

Alliteration is a good way to kick off a blog, right? No? Crap.

Well anyway, greetings everyone, and welcome to the first ever blog entry on my first ever blog (discounting 64 Digits, EO, and those other... things). As I have been quite a scatterbrain lately, I thought creating a blog would be a helpful, organizational exercise for myself, while also providing you with an exclusive glimpse into the random string of events that make up my existence.

But I don't come into this blog thing without my reservations. I'll be honest; I don't particularly care for these "deep" blogs people write. That's not to say that what I plan on entering here will be shallow, but that I'm hoping to keep this as down to earth as possible. And I absolutely refuse to use the word 'blogosphere.' That word was created be a being of sub-human intelligence.

So now that introductions are over with, let's get down to it. As some of you probably already know, I run Reflect Games (for those who don't, it's a website which provides online services for Game Maker games), and we just got done with our first game creation competition about a week and a half ago. The goal of the competition was for entrants to create an arcade game in a month and overall, things went pretty well - we had 6 entries when all the dust settled, and an equal number of judges, which turned out to be a great combination. I'm happy with how it went, and hope to continue with another contest starting October 1st.

As far as games go, I've also had some time to sit down and look over some of the code from Falcon Squad, and also begin (yet another) game. This new venture will be a departure from my "normal" game; it will be heavily sprite-based, and will be 2D. I can almost hear the gasps!

Being a kid who grew up on games like Mario World, Sonic the Hedgehog, Earthworm Jim, and a slew of other platformer games, I have had a very hard time suppressing my urge to try to create one this long. I guess my love for 3D really got the best of me at first, but I ever since I first laid my hands on Game Maker, I have wanted to make a platformer game... and the time draws nigh that I embark on that goal. Not too much is currently planned out in my mind, but I have begun spriting the main character, and the results have been great so far. There are many elements of past games that I have played that I would really like to incorporate into this game, but I will discuss it a little more in depth at a later time. Needless to say, it will probably be quite a bit of work, but I am looking forward to spending some time getting back to my spriting roots. All those hours of Mario Paint might finally count for something!

Other than all that (and playing through BioShock on my 360 a second time... gotta get those achievements!), it's been pretty much business as usual for me. Which means going to work every weekday, and squeezing every last possible amount of enjoyment out of the weekends. I'll have to talk about that stuff another time though, because I think this blog is starting to approach "short novel" territory.

So to whoever did, thanks for reading... to whoever didn't, I'm very disappointed in you. But since you didn't read it, you don't know that. Gah.