That shooter I said I would send to DJKlikster once it's finished. It's been sitting untouched for a while now, and I thought starting a diary would encourage me to finish it. I'm trying to fix errors on the main gameplay board before I copy it ten or fifteen times.

The attached file includes the engine screen. Please note that it's not a real level and you will easily be overpowered because all enemies are set to spawn indefinitely. The real game will NOT be this dense, except for maybe the final gauntlet. See the debug controls below for help in cleaning up this mess. (or you could wait until I upload a less cluttered WIP.)

I'm pretty sure I don't want to use any MIDI files, at least in the gameplay sections, as they cause KNP to pause. There will probably be sounds, though.

Controls

WASD: movement
Arrow keys: shoot
1-9: equip weapons
-, =, backspace, ]: more weapons

Debug:
CTRL+Z: wipe all enemies
CTRL+X: wipe all spawn points
Click on any enemy or spawn point to remove it.
CTRL+Shift+Click: Move the player
CTRL+L: add 50 life to the player

(using CTRL+Z and clicking unwanted lairs, you can set up a fight between the player and only a couple of enemy types.)

Enemies:

Main Roster

Ninja Head: the main enemy. Follows and shoots smokescreen, which affects the player's shot accuracy.

Slime: acid splashes back when you hit it.

Eye: Moves in a swirling pattern and slowly closes in on the player. Later on, they will be created 16 at a time, one every 0.2 seconds, to make a snake enemy.

Yellow octopus with eye: a sniper whose shots go through walls. weak on its own since it doesn't follow the player, but they can make being cornered by other enemies much more dangerous (or impossible to escape). They can also be boxed into areas and be used as permanent turrets. I should probably lower their starting life a bit.

Knight: moves only in the cardinal directions (NSEW), and twice as fast if aligned with the player. Knights are knocked back by the sword weapon.

Exotic

Orb: a slow ball that splits in half occasionally. these don't spawn from lairs; they're just an additional hazard.

beetle: small enemies with 1HP who spawn quickly.

rocket launchers: not implemented. periodically shoot 8-16 rockets away from the player, which slow down and then reverse course towards him.

ghosts: not implemented. they will probably just stop&go through walls.

robots: move along a set path, usually through a narrow maze. they will shoot smokescreen if you destroy them.

Weapons

(eventually i will set it up so that the player has only 3 or 4 weapon slots.)

1 - Normal

2 - Longer range, lower rate of fire

3 - Low range, passes through walls

4 - Sword, deflects projectiles except for smoke. Slimes don't counter it and knights cannot charge through it. several swords layer on top of one another making for a rudimentary charge-up, allowing the player to destroy some enemies instantly on contact.

5 - Boomerangs!

6 - eggs/pellets. for when things are chasing you in narrow corridors and you want a higher rate of fire.

7 - 'flamethrower'. high rate of fire and low range. useless in corridors as it will hit the walls and disappear. if the player runs and shoots in the same direction, this weapon will make a rudimentary shield against weak enemies.

8 - shower nozzle, very weak with a high rate of fire, only useful against 1HP enemies such as beetles. very bad against slimes.

9 - cannonball, high damage and very low rate of fire. it will pass through multiple enemies.

0 - rebounding shot

-, =, and backspace are rare combinations of the above. \ is a broken version of the normal gun, and ] is a debug weapon.

OTHER STUFF

Sliding spikes: hurt when touched. cannot be shot through.

Sokoban boulder: it can be pushed. these would basically just be used to aggravate narrow mazes.

Dynamite: can be pushed, detonates if shot by player or hit by a sliding spike

Purple walls: can be destroyed by dynamite.

...

MORE LATER!

I've been revisiting 4Noah and some other accessibility gaming ideas I've had:

4Noah TKO:
Tap button when the desired punch is highlighted. Tap twice to dodge. Hold button to block - doubles as "get up" control when your boxer has been knocked down:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=URnq9qDfU6A - Punchout
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oCTs5-n_lmc - Mike Tyson's Punchout

4Noah "Gobble":
Hold button at the beginning of a game to insert quarter and begin the game. Tap button to change direction. The direction change is not immediate - allowing some decision time. If the player has a second switch, tapping it will change the direction of the controller rotation.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HADfeU0zS-8 - Pac-man

4Noah DUI:

Hold button while desired direction is shown over 4Noah's virtual steering wheel. Tap button twice to change gears. Release button to release gas and depress the brake pedal.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kD38_DlYVNQ - Pole Position

The following might make these games more accessible for some using a mouse:

TKO Mouse "simkeymap":

Point and click over your opponent where you would like to punch. point and click to the left or right to dodge. Point and click down towards the bottom of the ring to block or "get up" when your boxer has been knocked down.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=57Y6UmAatjk - Punchout

Gobble Mouse:

Move the mouse in your direction of choice.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MsoVFayr8zU - Pac-Man

Last night I had, what I thought was, an interesting idea for a puzzle-platform game. It's a 2D playfield with multiple plains, resulting in a pseudo-3D environment. Since you can't really tell what is going on in the snapshot, here is a Youtube video of the prototype in action:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lXP7Jf-5Obc

It's probably obvious that I haven't spent any time on graphics... I wanted to see how interesting the idea would play out before I spent too much time on it. It's still too early to know if the game will be much fun. I think with some good stage design, it could be kind of interesting.

Starting out, I kept the colors different enough so that testing would be easier. red is the foreground platform, yellow the middle platorm, and blue the background platform. Up/Down hops from one color platform to another. Left/Right moves the character accordingly. The Ctrl makes your character jump.

As of now, there is only one incomplete stage - there's no way to win! The collectables (only obtainable from a platform with the coinciding color) were just added to give the tester an objective. I may add three more plains.

I've been in a kick of doing strange things with KnP lately. I'm working on a 2vs2 stealth action game (that requires a large piece of cardboard to enforce split screen exclusivity) and I'm probably going to finish up that HUGE KNP TECHNOLOGY BREAKTHROUGH that I've been none-too-subtly alluding to during nearly every single KOTM. But what I have here today is not that breakthrough, but rather something incredibly impractical in KnP, done for the heck of it!

I had recently seen a simple demonstration of the new version of flash drawing an isometric voxel landscape. Since I've never done anyting with voxels before, it struck me as to how simple it really was. After the idea sat in my head for a while, I decided to try the effect myself. On a whim I decided to do it in KnP. I showed it to someone once I got it to render a single static landscape. They helpfully suggested I make a flightsim. So a few events later I had a scrolling isometric voxel landscape flightsim in klik! Since it hits the active object limit almost from the start, it's a little on the small size. Press fire to keep the joust-like plane aloft! Watch out for clouds, their cold air will stall your plane!

UPDATE: NOW MAY ACTUALLY WORK

Do you love Mike Tyson's Punch-Out!?
Do you have a Wii that can run homebrew?
Do you have a pair of Gamecube bongos?

THEN PREPARE TO EXPERIENCE THE GLORY OF MIKE TYSON'S JUNGLE BEAT -- THE ONLY NES EMULATOR WITH BONGO SUPPORT!

CONTROLS
Each bongo has a top and a bottom button. These naturally correspond to high and low punch.
To dodge, clap.
To use your star punch (or to "Press Start"), hit both top buttons.
To block, hold the start button on the bongos.

Unfortunately SD card support does not work in the latest development copy of FCE Ultra that I used as a baseline, so you will have to run the included injector program with your legitimately acquired Mike Tyson's Punch-Out! ROM. Fortunately, this means that running the game from your Wii takes you DIRECTLY INTO THE ACTION!

Download mtjb.zip to get started!
mtjb.diff is the patch from the SVN trunk as of today (June 27, 2008). The hack is pretty straightforward, so it's not very large.
InjectorSrc.zip is the source code for the injector program, in case someone wanted to compile a Mac version or something.

iMovie is SLOW AS BEJESUS and my built-in MacBook webcam can't take pictures of my TV for shit :(

Hopefully you'll get the jist, or else take higher quality video footage of your own.

OH MY GOD
(hopefully not disgusting)

I think I've worked out why I've never really finished anything MMF wise. Lack of planning and I hate MMF. Didn't know that I hated it till I got Game Maker 7 Pro however. I like Game Maker 7 Pro. It's like programming for stupid people (in a way). It removes 70-90% of the hard stuff like drawing windows and graphics, and allows you to cut straight to making stuff while being powerful enough to make interesting stuff. It's removed most of the limits MMF imposed on me. I'll probably find some more later, but right now it's cool.

This is a quick and easy arcade top down shmup abstract thing based around time attacking a single boss. Right now it has no music. Was made in about a day. First Game Maker 7 Pro game.

You play a dot, and have to shoot the core. I want people to be able to play the game without much external instructions so I'll not post a wall of text.

I would like to know if anyone had any trouble understanding what was going on, if their are any bugs, if it runs well and if you think that it's too easy or hard. Or ugly. Also, scores would be nice. Be brutal. I'm not going to learn otherwise.

Link here

Mike Tyson's Jungle Beat is more or less complete! I still have to poke at it a bit to make a version that's legal to download, but it TOTALLY WORKS.

I will offer a download link at the same time as its official unveiling via YouTube. Filming is currently in progress.

Here's a little something creepy and unrelated to tide you over until then.

Last night I decided that my SECRET PROJECT is being shelved indefinitely in favour of small, fun projects that don't resemble my job so much and can be finished in a reasonable amount of time without ruining my life.

To help with the crushing disappointment surely felt by all of you, I will announce the working codename of the (non-KotMK) project I am working on next:

MIKE TYSON'S JUNGLE BEAT

Oh, yes. I see the gears turning in your mind.