The Shifting Game Maker Scene

 Martin · 14 years

A lot of other Game Maker-related events have happened since I last blogged, as well.

New Admins

Another big development over the last few months is that I am now an admin at the Game Maker Community forum.

Following the sudden retirement of longtime community leader KC LC, the GMC needed admins. Chronic, who was pretty much the sole active admin after KC LC's retirement, needed help. Xot and I talked with YoYo Games' Kirsty Scott about this, and within a few days we were given promotions. We've both previously served as global moderators, and earlier, simply moderators. And I'd also like to think that we both bring something fresh to the community's leadership.

I guess it all sounds a bit silly when you write it out. But I am happy to be a part of the community, and glad that YoYo Games trusts many of us enough to help guide the forum into the future.

Game Maker on PSP & iOS

Speaking of the future, a lot more information has come to light recently (and over the period of time where I didn't update the blog) on the continued development of Game Maker's runner.

At the beginning of the summer, we were shown a copy of Skydiver running on PSP, and much more recently, we've seen Madness Madness Madness running on an iPod and Skydiver on iPad. It's an impressive feat, and I look forward to seeing where it leads for Game Maker users.

The PSP runner wasn't as impressive to me, simply because I knew that even if they did work out all the kinks, it would never truly be easy to release GM-made games on the platform. There are simply too many hoops to jump through. For that reason alone, the iOS runner seems much more promising to me. I hope that I might get a chance to help push out some games for it early on, depending on how YoYo Games plans on publishing user-created content.

I still hate saying "iOS" out loud though. Eye-oh-ess. Does not roll off the tongue.

Oh, and I've also been really happy with all the information Mike Dailly (YYG) has been posting on his blog about the development of upcoming Game Maker releases. It's been a good read, and I like that someone so experienced is heading up that project.

Discovery Competition Entry is Go. Er... No.

A much smaller blip on the radar was the Discovery Competition entry me and some buddies (Matt "Lethalanvas" Griffin and David Perritte) were working on. It took off at tremendous pace, and then we all got a little too busy and we stopped working on it.

Originally, we wanted to keep it a secret, so there wouldn't be much hype about it if we didn't finish (good thing, right?), but now I figure we might as well show off what we've done.

Basically, it's a game about a ninja assassin type guy who's lost his memory and who wants to stop the world from collapsing around him. It features a robust platform engine, coupled a ton of slick animations by yours truly, which lets you run, slide, grapple ledges, swing from ceilings, and eventually a lot more. The gist of it was to create a story-driven platforming experience that gave players a lot of difference challenges at once, so they could work on levels in whatever order they liked, to an extent, depending on their skill level.

If we can all find the time, I wouldn't mind working on it again sometime next year, actually. We all put a lot of work into it, and although there isn't much to do in the game right now, there is a lot of stuff that we have done, including a written story, an awesome platforming engine, some killer graphics and animation, and some cool tunes. I don't want to see it go to waste.

I'll try to get a demo or something up eventually. Like I said, we don't have much of the actual gameplay hammered out yet, but it's fun to play around with.

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Homes, Websites, & Skateboards

 Martin · 14 years

I haven't been able to keep my blog up as often as I've wanted lately because I've been busy with lots of different things in both personal and professional capacities.

Home Buying

My girlfriend and I are looking at buying a house soon, and as you'd expect, it's a complicated process. We've been spending months combing through home listings online and going to view them in person at open houses or with our Realtor. We've been spending the rest of the time sorting through the details of lenders, the finances, taxes, and so on. My girlfriend has done much more than I have, and I still find it extremely exhausting.

It'll be great, at the end of all this, to go home to a house instead of an apartment, however, and that keeps me going through all the extra work.

Site Crafting

I've also been busy with website jobs. I've been contracted to work on a site for a friend of my girlfriend's uncle's son, and it is in the second revision now. Unfortunately, my laptop hard drive broke (again!) and my working files are all lost, until I have time to plug the drive into my desktop computer to see if I can recover any of it. Normally this wouldn't be much of an issue for a website, because I've usually got an online copy floating around somewhere, but this site needed a Flash element built in, and I never upload FLA files, so I'm probably going to have to rebuild it. Not fun.

I'm also working on a revision to the look of my buddy Andrew's website, noLove Skateboarding. It's coming along really nicely, but because of the increased activity in the aforementioned house hunt, I haven't been able to put as much time into it lately as I would like. "Not enough time in the day" seems to be a recurring theme for me these days.

By the way, the new site isn't live yet, so if you visit the link above, brace yourself for our original janky design.

Marty Decks

On the upside, one of the other projects I've been involved with for noLove (putting my tree painting onto a skateboard), has finally come to fruition - and I even have one of them in my possession now! All things considered, the final product looks pretty nice, and after taking an impromptu trip to one of the local skate shops, I think the art stands out a lot more than a lot of the generic crap out there.

You can buy a noLove tree deck from my buddy Andrew. Drop him a line on Facebook or Twitter.

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Catching Up…

 Martin · 14 years

So, it's been a while since my last blog post, eh?

Well, let's ignore the fact that this seems to be a recurring theme here at Marty Blog lately, and do a bit of catching up. A lot has happened since the last time I posted anything here, and as always, I've got a lot to say about things.

Rather than putting it all in one big topic that nobody wants to read, I'm going to write up a series of posts in (what I hope will be) rapid succession that cover everything and make my blog even beefier, simultaneously.

Sound good? I hope so! Stay on the lookout for updates in the coming hours/days!

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Example Added: Path & Textured Vertex

 Martin · 14 years

Per the request of one of my Steam buddies, I've added the Game Maker file from an old visual demo I'd made to the Examples & Tutorials page.

This example uses paths, textured vertexes, particles, and a noise overlay to create a slowly changing, relaxing visual based on the Outta Space desktop wallpapers of the same name created by Philipp Antoni. You may find the flowing movement similar to the flowing home background on the PlayStation 3/PSP as well.

I originally intended to make this into a screensaver, but never got around to finishing it for that purpose. Still, I think it's a good example of an abstract visual that can be achieved with Game Maker using a few different effects in tandem.

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Team Fortress 2: Engineer Update

 Martin · 14 years

At long last, Valve has finally delivered the promised Team Fortress 2 Engineer class update!

After slogging through months of other less interesting updates like the Steam port to Mac and Valve's horribly disappointing E3 "surprise" (Portal 2 on PlayStation 3... yawn), the addition of Engineer achievements and unique class weapons is a breath of fresh air. It's the patch that fans have been clamoring for since the inception of class updates for TF2, and it looks like Valve's lost no steam (pun intended!) in providing unique, fun, and rewarding additions to the game.

In total, the new update offers Engineers a new gun, two new melee weapons, a new sentry gun, a remote for sentry guns, and the ability to move placed sentry guns. Additionally included are four maps and the requisite slew of Engineer-oriented achievements.

I'm most excited about the ability to move around already-placed turrets, as well as the sentry remote control. After building a sentry gun and upgrading it to the highest level, it stinks to have to destroy it just to place another in a more active part of the map as the action moves around. Now, you don't have to do this - you just have to be careful when you pick it up and move it, since dying while carrying the packed-up sentry will cause it to be destroyed instantly.

Controlling turrets remotely is also a great addition. Though it takes the slot of your pistol to use the remote control (dubbed the Wrangler), it can be invaluable in helping to keep your construction alive while you run off to do other things. The sentry goes offline for a few seconds when you switch back to controlling your Engineer, but this is only a minor annoyance.

You can read about the rest of the items and maps in more detail at the official Team Fortress 2 Wiki.

I played around with the new patch last night, on the new map, Thunder Mountain, but I actually haven't played as an Engineer yet. Why, you ask? A few reasons.

First, everybody is playing as an Engineer right now. It's one of my favorite classes in the game, maybe even my favorite, but I can't play on a team that is 90% Engineers. The addition of being able to move your turrets around helps make the class play a little better on the offensive, but it's still boring to sit around waiting for sentry kills when everyone else is doing the exact same thing. It also makes each round incredibly hard to win.

Second, since everyone else is playing as an Engineer, it's a great time to be other classes - particularly Spy or Soldier. I racked up quite a few new achievements last night playing as both classes, because right now there are about four times as many destroyable objects being placed in the field than normal. I actually noticed another small downside to the remote-control sentry ability here as well; as a spy, it's a lot easier to back-stab people near remotely controlled turrets because, unless the player who is controlling it is looking at you when you do it, you won't be instantly detected and can escape again much easier than before.

It was also fun to play on the new maps. Almost nobody I was playing with knew them well, so we weren't mired down in the same old tactics you see whenever you play on maps which people have ran through a hundred times.

Overall, the class updates for Team Fortress 2 have added a lot to the game, and I applaud Valve for keeping at it. I hope they continue to find interesting ways to give the game depth and add to the fun. I know one thing for sure: I'm going to have a hard time not playing in most all of my spare time in the coming weeks.

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Technnoyances

 Martin · 15 years

A list of four things in the world of tech that I find annoying, submitted for your approval in no particular order.

Unboxing videos

I've ranted about this elsewhere, but it's worth repeating; unboxing videos are awful. If there's anything more pathetic to me than sitting around wishing you had some piece of technology, it's doing so while also seeking out and watching other people open up boxes with the desired tech inside.I understand doing research on products you're thinking about buying, but I don't see where the unboxing video fits in with all that. If you want to find out what's actually inside the box, you can find that info on websites or in stores. If you want to see little bits of molded Styrofoam, you've probably got some in boxes you already own sitting around in your house or apartment somewhere.

If you want some new thing that badly, watching someone open up its box isn't going to get you any closer to that goal. Spoiler alert: it's going to be boxed up the same as everything else you've bought. Lots of tape, lots of Styrofoam, lots of plastic. Whoopdy doo.

Purposefully misspelled website/service names

I know that this is probably something that can't really be helped, considering the ever-decreasing amount of URL's available, but there's something that really annoys me about every new website being named in some "edgy" or "cute" misspelling of a simple word.

Flickr. Digg. Pownce. Blippr. Tumblr. Mixx. The lyst goes on.

Have we completely exhausted our reserve of real words for domain names? Has the well of creativity run dry? Seriously annoying.

And you can add to this all the various websites with the words "pop", "crunch", and "mash" in their domain names. Not necessarily misspelled words, but still awful. I don't think I've ever found any site with any of those words in their URL useful in any way whatsoever.

Network searches with Finder

I work in a creative field, and have for years. Unfortunately, this means that most of the time, my employers equip me with a Mac and by extension OS X, which you probably know, is not my preferred operating system.

I don't hate OS X, and actually wish one or two of its features would creep into Windows someday, but there are many quirks and problems with it that nobody ever talks about when they're in the middle of trying to convince you it's worth buying over-priced Apple hardware for. One of those things is the fact that, if you're planning on using it over any type of network, you could be in for some frustration, especially where search is concerned.

The other day I tried searching for a file on our network at work, both of which use OS X. No results were returned, and the spinning "beach ball" appeared, signaling network wait time. So I let it run its course and got back to my work. 10 minutes later, the pinwheel was still showing, and Finder wasn't responding. I forced Finder to quit and then tried to re-open it, but no dice; OS X informed me that Finder can't re-open. And since Finder handles the file saving functions for all the programs I was running, I couldn't save any of my work for a restart. Gah.

And this isn't an isolated incident. In all my years of using OS X, the most problems I've had with it have involved network problems. The only advice I can give, if you absolutely have to work on a Mac, is that if you're planning on doing any major network activity, save your work first.

Organizing media files with Win 7

I've been happy with Windows 7 since I picked it up last year on launch day. It does just about everything better than XP did, and it's nice and snappy to boot. But one thing that absolutely annoys me to no end is the problems I've had trying to organize my music files.

Like many people out there, I've been collecting digital music files for years. A good portion of my music consists of files I ripped myself from CD's I've bought, and most of the rest is digital music I've purchased from Amazon. Over time, as I've bounced between two iPods and about four computers, all with varying amounts of storage, my music has become a bit disorganized. With big hard drives being pretty cheap these days, I've managed to consolidate most of the recent additions to my collection onto one drive, and now I've begun trying to organize it.

Problem is, about 75% of the time I try to move around my music folders, Windows 7 is telling me that there is a file in use and prevents the operation from happening.

After an hour of pure frustration, disabling all music sharing, disabling the folder from being read by Windows 7's music library, disabling Windows Media Player from scanning the folder, and disabling all folder thumbnailing the OS does, it's gotten better. But I still get this error now and then, and it still hurts every time it happens. The file is in use by the OS that is trying to move it.

Isn't it reasonable to suspend the OS from reading the file if a move is being requested? It kills me that with all the great things Windows 7 can do, it still stumbles over something so basic, and so stupid.

So now I have to choose between letting the OS thumbnail my folders, so I can see what's in them without opening them, or making the whole thing look like some kind of file system ghost town, but with the ability to easily move my music around. Awesome.

The one good thing about this is that I've discovered the Local Group Policy Editor, which offers a lot of interesting customization options for Windows 7, under the hood.

Anyway, it feels good to get all that off my chest. Some of it may be unreasonable, and you might disagree with me, but there it is. Sound off in the comments if you have any extreme likes or dislikes in my list or let me know about some of your own tech world annoyances! I'm sure I'll be back with more in the future.

Image unironically courtesy of unpluggd.com.

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The Tree

 Martin · 15 years

Just wanted to throw down a quick update here, since it's been quite a while, and I'm sure many people out there are sitting on the edge of their seats, wondering if I'm lying in a gutter somewhere. Many sleepless nights were had, courtesy of my lack of updates, and I am sorry.

Fear not, however! I am alive and well, and have just been busy with a lot of work and, of course, a lot of play.

I don't think I'd posted the above picture on the blog yet, so there it is - a tree painting I'd done some weeks ago for a contest and auction for the Sacramento Tree Foundation. Sadly, it didn't get accepted into the limited space of the show, but I'm glad to have made it, and I have more ideas for some other paintings in this style.

This painting was done in acrylic paint and paint pen on a 15" x 30" canvas. Here's the sketch the painting is based on (ink on 5.5" x 8.5" sketch pad):

During my time away from the blog, I got to go up to my parents' house for a bit one weekend, and went out on a small vacation to Sonoma with my girlfriend too. I had a great time with both, and the time away from doing work has been refreshing.

Speaking of work, I've got more work lined up for No Love Skateboarding - along with the rat image I posted a while ago, which was used for a shirt design and then reconfigured for a skateboard design, I've done a Denver cityscape and have a few other projects for shirts and boards on deck which I'll post here eventually.

I'm also working on a disc label and CD jacket for a friend of my dad's, Johnny "Guitar" Knox, who is a local blue guitarist in the Sacramento area. That project is going a bit slower than originally planned, but it's getting done slowly.

I've also got a logo to design for my girlfriend's cousin which I have yet to start.

And finally, probably the biggest time sink of them all, I've finally completed Dragon Age: Origins, after about 60 hours of play. The game was good, long, and fun. I'm glad I finally got into it. I've already started another play-through, but I think I'm going to take a break for a while so I can finish on my aforementioned projects, as well as re-acquaint myself with some of the other games I've neglected over the months.

After the somewhat botched Gears of War 3 announcement last week, I've been thinking about running through Gears of War 2 again on Insane difficulty, so I can grab all the collectibles I missed and have some more action-oriented fun for a change. I also want to sink my teeth into some of the Mass Effect 2 DLC that came out while I was playing Dragon Age, but I'm just not in the mood for another epic gaming marathon right now.

Anyway, thanks for checking in, hope the lack of posts hasn't kept anyone away, and (again, I know!) I shall try to be better with the updates.

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Game Maker PSP Runner, NEW CTO Announced by YYG

 Martin · 15 years

Looks like the cat is finally (officially) out of the bag!

What was alluded to in a few obscure screenshots and then not very subtly in the YoYo Games Competition 5 rules has now been made official in a Glog post today; that YYG has been hard at work on a version of the Game Maker runner that works on PSP.

YYG also announced that they have hired Russel Kay as their Chief Technical Officer in charge of all future Game Maker development. Kay is the former Senior Software Architect for Realtime Worlds, and while his new post at YYG seems to imply that Mark Overmars may not be taking as big a role in future versions of Game Maker, Sandy (presumably) tries to lay those fears to rest in the announcement:

Also, don’t worry about Mark Overmars, he won’t be disappearing. Mark is too busy with his university commitments to take up a full-time role at YoYo Games, but he has recently strengthened his links with us and he has been fully involved in the process of recruiting Russell at every stage. Mark has already been working closely with Russell and he will continue to have a great influence on Game Maker and our community.

I'm pretty excited for YYG and Game Maker - I think that if they can successfully make the jump to consoles/handhelds they could become a very lucrative company (almost like Steam for consoles/handhelds). I also think that with new talent on board, we might see larger advancements in the power of Game Maker, and sooner.

Of course, if they can't make that happen it could spell the end of Game Maker. But with a lot of smart, talented people on board, I'm not concerned about that. Interesting news, anyway.

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No Love for Rats

 Martin · 15 years

Lately I've been working with Andrew Gelber, a buddy of mine, to help get his skateboarding company off the ground. So far this has included creating a logo, re-skinning a WordPress theme, and doing lots of other various graphic projects. It's not a lot of work, and it's been fun and challenging to see how creative we can get.

The above rat image was created to be screened onto the bottom of a line of skateboards Andrew will be putting out soon. I sent it off to him yesterday, and I'm excited to see the final product. It's a remake of the lino-print below, that I made in college for one of my art classes:

The no Love website can be found here. it's still pretty basic, and definitely a work in progress, but it's getting better all the time. If you're in the Denver, CO area and are interested in this sort of thing, give it a look.

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New Games & Programs Page

 Martin · 15 years

In lieu of making any actual posts in February, I've been working on getting my old, outdated games page set up on the blog, and I'm just about done with it. All that's needed to do is add a few more games to the list, dress things up a bit, and maybe convert all the old games to GM8. You can find the link to the new page in the header menu, or by clicking here.

And yes, I've also been working on the Reflect Games re-design again. It's slow-going, as always, but it's coming. CSS always gets me down when it comes to turning a Photoshop comp into a working design, but I'm getting better at it. There's a lot to like about CSS - and in my opinion, a lot to hate too.

Anyway, I just wanted to explain my absence and point out the new section above - hopefully this turns out to be a better home for my games than the old site. I'll be shutting that site off and linking the "games" subdomain to that page soon. Consolidation is good.

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