In lieu of making any actual posts in February, I've been working on getting my old, outdated games page set up on the blog, and I'm just about done with it.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.
Has it really been over a week since I've posted here? Well, my apologies for the delay – it's been a busy time for me over the last week, and I just haven't been able to find the time to write anything. I've meant to though, so hopefully I'll be getting back on track with this post. In the interest of everyone's time, here's a quick list of everything I've been up to over the last couple of weeks that has contributed, in one way or another, to my lag in blog posts:
Met my brother at a bar and watched my dad play music for a few hours; I also saw a woman drop a cake straight onto the floor of a bar
Took a trip to San Francisco for my work, got halfway there, and then realized my boss had texted me the night before to tell me the trip was off
Worked on a game that you might just see on TV someday (hopefully!)
Took another trip to San Francisco for my work, and was nearly late to the meeting because I followed my own directions wrong
Worked on a redesign for my blog, scrapped it, then started working on it again
Fixed a long-standing server bug in the Reflect system (thanks for the help, Matt!)
Worked on a redesign for Reflect Games, scrapped it, then started working on it again
Watched the two-hour long season premiere for Lost, and the hour-long preview before it
Finished Fallout 3 (goody-two-shoes style)
Went home to see my dad before he had to have a minor procedure done at the hospital (he's doing fine now, thankfully)
Played some quality Team Fortress 2 with Yourself (alltalk servers are basically Skype on steroids, eh?)
Finished Prince of Persia (need to play it again for achievements)
Got my previous landlord to drop a bogus move-out bill after catching their cheating, and exposing it to them
Released a Windows Vista/Windows 7 compatible version of Linked
Began learning Visual Basic all over again
Watched a few classic episodes of It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia with my mom
Rediscovered my love for Joe Frank (an awesome radio show)
Bought World of Goo on Steam
Almost finished reading Lord of the Rings (I'm on page 947 now!)
And probably a lot more stuff that I can't remember right now, due to the ever-growing fatigue I'm feeling from writing such a long list!
Anyway, you probably get the idea - I've been a bit busy. I'll try to get back on the blog a bit more this week though... I've got a lot of stuff I want to talk about, but which I just haven't had the time to organize into coherent sentences yet.
Thanks to everyone who continues to read my sparse posts - I appreciate it!
I just wanted to post a quick note to tell everyone about two things, the currently on-going Reflect Games Competition and WordPress 2.7.
First, the Reflect Games Competition - it began last night, and is ending at midnight PST on December 21. The challenge is to make a cut scene in Game Maker, pretty much however you want. The rules are lax and the time is short, so read more about that at the Reflect Games forum, and consider throwing something together - you could win a little holiday fun in the form of Steam games, Amazon goods, or iTunes music!
Second, I installed WordPress 2.7 RC1 a few days ago, and all went smoothly... I'm not even sure that I had more than about 30 seconds of downtime. Today, the official release of WordPress 2.7 was released, and I got my first chance to try out the automatic upgrade function. So far, I love it! Instead of having to download, unzip, and upload a bunch of files, I can now upgrade the entire blog at the push of a button. The WordPress team deserves a resounding "good job" from everyone who uses and supports their software for this - they really did an excellent job.
Anyway, I'd better get back to work for now, but thanks for stopping in to see what's going on, and good luck with the contest if you decide to enter it! The raffle for Marty Blog is still being planned, so don't miss these two opportunities to win some stuff!
I want to announce that Reflect Games has reached (and passed) the 7,000 member mark!
As I've said in the past, I am still very much surprised and excited about the success of the Reflect Games community. And though I haven't had much time as I want to devote to updating things and creating games, I'm going to try to re-focus and start planning periodic updates as soon as the holiday season is over.
I've still got a lot planned for updates to the Reflect site and community. The site update of old has been folded over into a much larger group of changes, which will hopefully include a complete re-write of the Reflect system and website. I'd like to make Reflect Games a lot more user friendly, for both developers and players, and this will be a big step towards that goal. I've written up a long list of everything that needs to be done and have already bitten off a chunk of it - hopefully I'll be able to continue plugging away at it, however slow I might be, until it all gets done.
I'm actually interested in releasing my to-do list here to get feedback and see what everyone thinks, perhaps I'll do that soon. In the meantime, if you have any suggestions about future updates/functionality to Reflect, feel free to drop them here - I will read and respond to everything.
Anyway, I kind of went off on a little tangent there for a bit, but I just wanted to thank everyone who has helped make Reflect Games a success, and I hope that you will continue to support Reflect into the future!
Sad times are here again as the weekend draws to a close and the usual grind picks up again with a week full of work looming ahead. I didn't get a whole heck of a lot done this weekend, but as always, I managed to have some fun, so here I am to share my adventures.
Game Maker Robot AI Programming Competition
Though I haven't had as much time to work on this program as I'd like so far, I have made some decent progress on getting the engine ready for a new contest. First proposed a few days ago on the Reflect Games forums, I'm hoping the new robot AI programming comp proves to be a more fun replacement for the old, more involved contests.
The idea is that I will create a base application which everyone can download and play with - essentially just a room from top-down view, and a simple "robot" object - and anyone wanting to participate in the contest will write an AI for the robot that will compete against others' creations. Movement and attack variables/objects will be the same across all entries (I'll be coding those in scripts), and once everyone's AI script is finished, we'll draw up a tournament tree, I'll have the bots compete, and then record the results and broadcast them, via either YouTube or some kind of live Podcast.
One of the goals of the new competition format is to encourage creative coding without forcing entrants to commit to an entire game, which can be both difficult and frustrating at times. I think that with an AI programming tournament, people will have more opportunity to show off good coding without being bogged down by the need for other assets, they'll have a more interesting method of feedback (watching their bot compete with another, as opposed to a "secret" judging), and expansion of the competition can evolve more naturally - if the contest proves to be fun and engaging, we can add more weapons to the bots' arsenal, more customization, etc.
Though it's taking me a long time to get things rolling, I'm very excited about this project. We've already got lots of feedback about how this competition should work - be sure to visit the Reflect Games forums to voice your opinion too!
World of Warcraft MVP
Over the last few days, I've managed to grind my way to Exalted status with two (more) factions, the Shattered Sun Offensive, and the Kurenai, netting myself a new title, some sweet additions to my gear, and a new mount that I'll probably never use.
Gaining exalted with SSO, even without visiting any instances, is pretty easy - it only took me a few days, and I only had to visit the Isle of Quel'Danas and complete all the daily quests there a handful of times. I liked the variation and overlap in the quests there though, and going from that back to grinding the other factions' reputation was a pretty rough transition. By contrast, the only quest I could take in Nagrand to gain Kurenai rep was the repeatable Obsidian Warbeads quest, which meant enduring the monotony of killing hundreds of ogres. Not exactly my cup of tea, and I will probably be looking for different quests when I start my quest for Consortium rep... even if it just means a simple change in scenery.
One good thing about grinding in Nagrand however, is that I was able to pick up a lot of mining nodes that I wouldn't have gotten otherwise. I've now got a mining bag (20 slots) almost full of stacks of Fel Iron Ore and Adamantite Ore - which I'm not sure what I should do with yet. Selling at the auction house will net me a huge sum of gold, but my blacksmithing skill is only at 300, so it might just be better spent on leveling.
My chances for scoring some decent raiding increased significantly last week as well, as I was inducted quite unceremoniously into Encore, an awesome guild which a few friends from college are pretty well-entrenched in. Though I'm not always up for 5-6 hours of raiding, the occasional run through the higher-level dungeons should be new and fun.
Ubuntu Test Drive
Though I've played with the live CD version of Ubuntu before, I finally took the plunge this weekend. I dug an old hard drive out of the closet, popped it into my older computer, and installed it. I've taken some time to play around with it this weekend, and I've mostly enjoyed my time with it.
Downloading Ubuntu and installing it was a piece of cake. All you have to do is get on the official site, download the CD image, burn it, pop it in the preferred computer, and boot from it. The live CD will load Ubuntu just like it would from the hard drive (a bit slower, of course), and once you're in the OS and you've played around with it, you can choose to install directly from a link on the desktop. The only confusion I had during this process was with which file system I should format the drive, but after doing some quick research, I settled on ext3, which seems to be holding up just fine.
So far, I am impressed with Linux. Though I couldn't see myself switching over to it for good, I like many things about it, and I will probably continue to tinker with it. The customization Gnome/Compiz provide is great, and being able to move around virtually every button on the desktop is just plain awesome. The extra effects you can perform with capable hardware are not only fun to look at - they are often genuinely useful. And although there are a few bits of oddness here and there, the OS feels mostly cohesive and with a few more generations of work, I think it really could rival the quality of similar Unix-based OS's, like Mac OS.
Another thing I am particularly fond of is that fact that Ubuntu comes with just about everything you need pre-installed. From the "Faux-toshop" (yes, I made that up), GIMP to the entire suite of OpenOffice.org tools, there's really not much aside from games that need to be installed after loading up Ubuntu for the first time. And of course, that's where the problem lies.
Ubuntu has an impressive number of built-in games, like Solitaire, Blackjack, etc. but if you're like me, you want more meat on your games. Unfortunately, not many games are currently being written with a native port of Linux in mind. There are options available however, like WINE, which can run Windows applications nicely, and can even throw around a growing list of games (it ran my installation of Guild Wars flawlessly, if only a tiny bit slow).
But whatever - running my games in WINE is silly when I've got another hard drive in the same computer with Windows on it, so I'll be dual-booting my older computer on Windows and Ubuntu for now. I'm sure Linux will continue to be fun to play around with, or at least a good diversion from working on my projects and playing games.
Odds & Ends
Aside from all that stuff, I also got to spend a lot of time with my girlfriend, and we finally found some time to start researching home loans. Hopefully we end up qualifying for a decent loan, and we can find a nice place to live - I'm a little sick of the apartment life!
Oh, and it was also my brother's 24th birthday!
Anyway, it's about time I wrapped up this weekend wrap-up. Hopefully everyone else out there had a good weekend too. Thanks for reading!
I'm pleased to announce that Team Wanderlust has finally unveiled a 'public' demo of Wanderlust: Rebirth, a game that many (myself included) feel is already one of the richest experiences crafted with Game Maker to date.
The game, a solo / online action RPG, represents a re-imagining of the original Wanderlust game, of sorts. Upon starting, players can choose from a handful of classes, and can level up their character with points as they progress through the game's chapters. Each chapter that is completed unlocks the next, and can be repeated again in order to obtain a higher rating, and earn more points.
Rebirth also features an intuitive dialog system, killer retro 16-bit style graphics, customizable controls, and of course, online play. Using the Reflect account system, or by connecting directly, players can join up with each other and play through chapters as a party of up to 4 players. The co-op gameplay is actually encouraged, as the game awards alternate scores for different group sizes, so if you want to complete the game in its entirety (and have some fun to boot), gather up some buddies and have at it!
I've really enjoyed watching this game as it is developed, and it's great to see it finally released to the public and finding a warm reception therein. A lot of work has been put into this game by just a handful of talented people, and I hope to see it finished in the time to come.
Matt, Rebirth's chief programmer, has also given me some great ideas to expand the functionality of Reflect as well - you'll see some of his suggestions come to fruition in future updates.
Anyway, I highly recommend you take the game for a test drive. I'm sure you'll agree with the growing consensus that the new Wanderlust is truly an epic game, with lots to do, and lots of rewards for both the casual and the dedicated alike.
Wanderlust: Rebirth's topic at the GMC can be found here, or you can download the game directly here.
I'm proud to announce that Reflect Games has gained its 6000th member!
It's been a long journey for me, starting up Reflect, and working through a lot of ups and downs, fast times, and slow times. It's been a lot of fun, and I hope that it continues to be so as we push on into the future.
I've not had as much time to work on games recently, but I have worked on things slowly over the last few months. I've got a game in the works for the next YYG competition, and I still plan on finishing up some of my more undercooked projects at some point, and getting the site update for Reflect out eventually, too. I usually find time to visit the Reflect Games forums, to interact with the community and help people with their work, and I'm always interested in previewing projects people may want to utilize the Reflect system as well. As time goes on, I will have more time for creating things myself as well - I'm just doing a lot of commuting for work right now, and that has a habit of making my free time scarce.
In any case, this is a very happy time for the Reflect community and myself, and I hope that if you have not yet checked out Reflect Games, you will take this opportunity to do so. Many people have put a lot of hard work into making Reflect what it is today. It's a fun place to be, and I thank everyone for helping it continue to be that way.
I might be working on a special giveaway to commemorate this milestone as well - more on that later though. Thanks for reading!
I just wanted to make a quick post to point out a new feature, an upcoming addition, and to talk about what's in store in the coming months for my games and my web endeavors. I've got some neat stuff planned, and I hope that there will be something for everyone here when it's all said and done.
User Registration at Marty Blog
This was actually a request of a friend of mine. I've now opened registration up on the blog, which means that, if you so choose, you can now register as a Subscriber, login, and have the site remember your user details for when you post. Frankly, I should have done this sooner. You can still comment without registering though, so if you're not the type who likes to register, everything is just as it was before!
Games On the Way
If you've read up on the archives of this blog or poked around a bit, you've noticed that part of the reason why I created it was to replace my old games site with something easier to maintain and with broader use. You might have also noticed that, while my examples have made the jump from old site to new, my games haven't - but I aim to change that soon. Within the next week or so I'll be adding a special page to house my games, with better descriptions, control explanations, etc. so don't forget to check that out (especially if you haven't played all of the games yet!).
Reflect Games Site Update
It's been a long time in the making, but I am slowly moving closer to releasing the new version of the Reflect Games website. The changes are a mixed bag of functional and aesthetic improvements, and will include a friends list, credit store, highscore page, improved stats and profiles, and a lot more. Though all the new features will not justify the amount of time it's taken me to finish, I think the site will look more professional and will offer more reasons for people to create and use Reflect accounts. I'll post more about this when I draw closer to the update.
Cross-Site Mayhem
My buddy Dandri, the guy who requested registration here, currently runs the Official PlayStation 3 blog at MySpace, and is looking to expand his operations to a whole new site this summer. We've been talking about doing some cross-site promotions, and since we both have extreme opinions about certain aspects of the gaming world, we thought it'd be interesting to do some interviews and other things along those lines, so keep your eyes peeled for that stuff as well. Again, I will post more about this as the details emerge.
What About Game Maker?
Depending on when the upcoming YoYo Games Competition 3 is announced, and exactly what they decide to do with the user-created theme, "co-operation," I might just be entering. I liked that they gave developers more time to work on games for the second competition, and I've got a couple of ideas that might prove to be fun if they work out correctly.
I'd also like to be getting in more Game Maker in general, but with the Reflect Games website revamp, Grand Theft Auto 4 (aswellasothergames), my job, and my girlfriend, I've not had too much time lately to work on anything significant. Hopefully I'll be able to turn that around this summer, as I finish the website and the games up. I've got a few small projects I've had floating around on my computer for a while that I am considering just releasing the source code for as well.
In any case, I'm trying to get things rolling a little more swiftly than they have been, and to get things out the door. I'll be publishing more What's New with Marty to show my progress in the coming weeks / months, providing there is anyway.
If you've got anything to add to my to-do list, feel free to let me know with your comments - my head hasn't exploded yet!
I guess it's a bit late to announce this here, 5 days after I actually submitted the game to YoYoGames for judging, but what the heck - I feel much more energized after a nice relaxing holiday at my parent's house, and I figure it's time to push the game a little bit. So without further ado, my YYG Winter Competition is finally finished!
I present to you the winter-themed SHMUP, Sun Sun Der! Here's a quick link to play at YoYoGames.com, more information below!
The spirits that govern the balance of hot and cold on the earth are in turmoil - on the Winter Solstice 2007, the sun's summer spirits refuse to leave. The goddess spirit of the winter, Friga, is sent to battle the summer and bring about the cold of winter once again!
Play the game here, directly at YoYo Games. If you like the game, I would appreciate it if you'd rate it accordingly... seems the YYG bury brigade has already hit many of the competition entries particularly hard.
Controls are as follows
Z - Shoot
X - Attract power-ups
C - Special attack (when meter is charged)
P - Pause the game
F1 - Restart the game
F4 - Toggle windowed / full screen display modes
Esc - Exit the game
Anyway, enjoy the game, and thanks to everyone who plays and / or votes. I appreciate all the support I get from the community!
Well, I had planned on doing a pretty extensive write-up about my thoughts on the integrity of some of the game media websites as of late, but for now I'm going to put this off. I am working very exclusively on my entry for the YoYo Games Winter Competition, trying to get everything finished for the December 23 deadline. It's been quite hectic, and I'll be glad when I can finally use my spare time to relax again!
That said, the game is coming along well. It's not quite as big as I had hoped it might be in the beginning, but procrastination and other obligations have kept me from making it something huge for the sake of the competition. Depending on how well the game is received, I might just give it the Reflect treatment after all the dust has settled. And despite the frantic development schedule, it's definitely been fun so far - I will be glad to have participated in the first YYG contest, regardless of the outcome (providing I finish, of course). At the very least, it's been fun carving out a game in a genre I haven't yet explored very much.
I'm finally ready to spill the beans on what exactly the game is though, so here goes! The name of the game is Sun Sun Der, and though it's a pretty standard kind of "shmup," I've been using the game Imperishable Night (a "bullet hell" style game) and some friendly advice from Cactus to mold the idea into something (hopefully) more memorable.
Not to overdo anything, I've kept the story for the game relatively simple, to reflect the relatively simple gameplay. This is all subject to change, but basically, you play as Friga, the spirit / guardian of winter. Every winter solstice, the spirits of the sun / summer must leave the earth to make way for the winter spirits to take over. Predictably, this year those spirits have refused to leave, so Friga must fight them and force the winter season to begin. Sure, it sounds a little silly... but I think setting up a serious and involved story for a game where a flying woman with blue hair kills hordes of fireflies would be infinitely worse.
So there you have it. Maybe not a particularly ground-breaking experience, but hopefully a visually pleasant, fun, and somewhat challenging game will await! Enjoy the screenshots above, comment, and thanks for reading!
