what is the award system?
the award system is where people will get awards based on if the game i played was pretty good
thank you goodbye

we forgot to do it oops

so I'm working on my big game and decided to play some of the older FPS games for research
to see if I missed anything now that I'm old and everything

and I feel Doom3 is a good fit for this site - despite having the best graphics of it's time
the games combat is a complete trainwreck

I feel it's important to see what makes a game a total trainwreck
so we can learn from the mistakes when make our own games
and make entirely different mistakes..
which possibly other people can learn from
and make pointless blogposts about

anyway this is not a review -- just some notes I wrote:

strangely enough in BFG edition they decided to give more ambient
to the game -- which kind of ruined the one aspect
many people loved (just fixing the flashlight would have been enough)
anyway I decided to play through the original instead with a source port (dhewm3)

you can get pickups from little password protected vaults
and you supposed to get the passwords by listening to audio logs
and reading emails of PDAs you collect

of course on a second playthrough you probably don't remember these
and don't feel like listening to them again
not to mention some codes were tied to - now defunct - websites
so nearly everyone just ended up using the codes from walkthroughs
which is kind of a reminder to times when people had to look up
copy protection from manuals

PDAs seem to be like an amusing idea - but they replaced the colored keys
probably to be more realistic
they are realistically put on the floor so they are hard to see
now this is confusing so they made up for it by you only
need to get close to them to pick them up
and there is usually only a single locked door

the shotgun spreads bullets all around the corridor - to fill them
with one of the ugliest decals I ever seen

the lost souls (including the improved ones in resurrection of evil)
disappear in the most unceremonious way possible
(in a smoke poof so small you can hardly see it)

they found the most annoying pistol sound one possibly can
(you feel truly in hell after every reload )

many enemies don't react to hitting you at all
zombies do a little animation - without losing any momentum
possessed soldiers just keep shooting at you
and they dissolve into atoms with one shotgun shot
and every time they brain appears intact and falls on the floor

technical note: they still used the quake1 map format for the bsp levels
it's built into the game exe but it's pretty much just a radiant editor
this game is a technical marvel in more ways than one - I mean
for this clunky editor even making a single empty room is a challenge
people who make levels for id engine games are truly a hardcore bunch

the enemy design is the least of the problems with this game
yet the sequels seem to have this idea that the problem
was that they didn't look enough like their original counterparts from 1 and 2

in the end even with the plastic look the game still looks really good today

Wow! RPG historians have discovered the only extant copy of DREAMTREADER: SKELETON'S VOYAGE, the legendary 1996 RPG for the Bogatstvo Deluxe system. Featuring some of the most advanced systems and deepest themes ever seen in the mid-90s Balkan RPG scene, the game was thought to have been lost to history when the Bogatstvo Deluxe was recalled and banned from Western European and American markets due to the Bogatstvo corporation's alleged ties with pro-Serbian ethnic militias operating in the former Yugoslavia.

The boffins at FORTUNE PALACE are hard at work translating, restoring and archiving this iconic piece of software... Watch this space for more updates!

Hello! Big fan of Glorious Trainwrecks in the shadows, and finally encouraging myself to be active in here.

Anyway, I'm finishing my first visual (kinetic) novel, Fiestas del Pueblo. It is kind of hard for me to describe the game beyond the premise. If anything gets your attention give it a try, it will only take about 20 minutes to finish reading.

It will be out next Sunday, but I wanted to start moving it around before.

I'm open to any comment or conversation here or anywhere. Let's be friends, love you all!

https://moonlight-demon.itch.io/fiestas-del-pueblo
https://twitter.com/moonlightd3m0n/status/1564339154984603649

Stumbled across this old forum post from 2011 where someone named "ValleyBell" posted a tool called "ClickTeam Extractor" for extracting resources from ClickTeam games that seems much more advanced than my KNPUtils. Includes source code and file format documentation! Given that it's hosted as a MediaFire link from 2011 it's a miracle that it's still online, so I'm mirroring it here.

Hoo! Never use the blog feature sorry.
anyway i spent the last 3 months writing a story about a cat n mouse who fall in love!
https://twitter.com/marikeDrawinge/status/1526189120195661824
https://gisbrecht.itch.io/the-love-of-gemma-and-ofelia
please promo if you can i spent 3 months on this >w<

and comment!? on itch. or here if you'd like
and for the first time, you can pay me for a thing because im not infringing on mario...yahoo

...turning a fable on its head!

FREE (no ads/grind/shop)

iOS https://apps.apple.com/app/id1558679967
Android https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.WonderingStar.Impossible_Isles
PC & Mac https://wondering-star.itch.io/impossible-isles

Impossible Isles is an original daily turn-based map-like puzzler for everyone. Just place tiles on a map according to simple rules to create a tiny world and score.
But every day the Imp resets the world - a new pack on tiles, dealt in the same order all day. A new starter map and wildcard. Even the Imp's path is the same all day so there's no luck, everyone plays the same content each day.

The game has a few secrets up it's sleeve so check your score against friends on the daily leaderboard (iOS/Android only).

FREE (no ads/grind/shop)

iOS https://apps.apple.com/app/id1558679967
Android https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.WonderingStar.Impossible_Isles
PC & Mac https://wondering-star.itch.io/impossible-isles

Impossible Isles is an original daily turn-based map-like puzzler for everyone. Just place tiles on a map according to simple rules to create a tiny world and score.
But every day the Imp resets the world - a new pack on tiles, dealt in the same order all day. A new starter map and wildcard. Even the Imp's path is the same all day so there's no luck, everyone plays the same content each day.

The game has a few secrets up it's sleeve so check your score against friends on the daily leaderboard (iOS/Android only).

Despite my lack of updates, only some of my lack of progress is because of Elden Ring. I can't help it. The game lets me marry a living doll. I have a type.

That said, I'm 100% going to miss the deadline but I don't care because I've been enjoying working on this game. My most recent efforts have been focusing on making a vehicle controller for the hoverbike thing the protagonist is going to be jetting around on and lemme tell ya, it has been an ordeal.[i] My first attempts basically just involved using invisible wheel colliders and having those provide all the functionality I needed, but it turns out that Unity's wheel colliders are kinda... awful for that? Figuring out what their specific dampening values and everything need to be is also an arduous process because they're all expecting ranges I'm expected to just guess I suppose.

My next solution was to use raycasts and physics forces. Figuring that the best way to ensure the bike from flipping would be to have some spread out forces, I put four of them around the bike and lowered the center of mass so that it was always inclined to stay upright. This [i]kinda worked, but it meant that applying forces at positions for steering had to have special offsets, and that resulted in weird torque behaviours that were a nightmare to diagnose and even more of a nightmare to code.

Not fun.

Then, one night, as I was tossing and turning in bed, I awoke in a start. Not because of inspiration, but because I'm prone to nightmares. To work myself down from the post-nightmare anxiety, I started thinking of new ways to get this to work, and I finally settled on a hybrid solution of an idea I had the night before and a new one as well.

Instead of using four raycasts, I use two, front and back. Next, I lock the bike's rotation along the z-axis and only ever change that with direct access from code to make the steering look "cool" by giving it a bit of a banking effect. Then, on top of all this, I added some dampening physics to it all. The front raycast gets a low dampening value to make it extra bouncy, and the rear raycast gets a high one to make it more rigid. In a way, it sorta recreates the suspension of a motorcycle! Neat!

After that, I added some extra quality of life stuff. Instead of immediately losing forward thrust in the air, I made it so that if you spend too much time in the air (about half a second), you start to have the amount of thrust the accelerator gives you drop to half its strength, meaning you can't fly around forever. I also added some functionality to make the bike automatically balance to face the horizon after a second or so in the air to help keep the player from flipping around all over the place. In the end, after far too many lines of code (both included, commented out, and deleted) I finally have something I think I really enjoy zipping around on, which is all I could really ever ask for!

Motion sickness warning on this video, by the way. I'm still mucking about with the camera system.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IIZVrT5BFNA

I just think it's neat!