It’s been a couple of days since the last update, and I’m making good progress so far! The game looks mostly like I want it to look (except for the player ship that’s going to get a reworking tomorrow). Collision detection works, garbage collection works, the basic game script is in place. I’m still missing the final boss, and also the miniboss I’ve got so far is probably the easiest opponent in the whole game. The whole thing can be played through in about two minutes - that’ll probably go up a bit with said final boss, maybe to three minutes. But I don’t think somebody who has never played a shmup before will beat it on the first try. What’s still also missing is a scoring system that actually produces reasonable results and makes getting a high score actually challenging. So far, every run that makes it to the end will have exactly the same score - that’s not really interesting. Kongregate statistics integration is mostly there and already debugged. Music is in place, as are some sound effects - though one or two of those are still missing. In total, I have spent about 10 hours with this project, which is less than I hoped to do, but I’m still dealing with The Move™ and searching a job, which takes up some time as well and is the reason I gave me a whole week of time for this. Five hours or so are still missing until the whole thing is finished, I guess. On a side note, the script that spawns enemies is probably the worst bit of code I ever wrote and I really, really have to share it with you.

Only one devlog for the first two games of my challenge, because I haven’t gotten around to do much. It’s weekend, dammit. Also, I’m still recovering from The Move™. Progress so far: Those stars spawn one bullet every .1 second from one of their tips, and rotate clockwise through all the five tips. Also, the whole star is rotating at variable rates. They’re the only enemy I have so far and were inspired mostly by the Star brush in Gimp. THIS IS ART DAMMIT! ...

Great, just great. I missed another Ludum Dare because it coincides with moves, sicknesses or important tests every. single. time. So here’s what I’ll do: As an aspiring antisocial game dev, I’ll just do my own game jam. Until Sunday, September the 7th, I will develop a game and I will publish it whether I think it sucks or I don’t. With about eleventy RPGs, video games, board games et cetera I have started and never finished, it just seems like the thing to do. ...

This is not the first time I review Stars without Number, the old-school SciFi sandboxing RPG by Kevin Crawford (Sine Nomine Publishing), but with my growing experience in role-play gaming I feel I missed some real important things the last two times. So, again, let’s have a look at what makes SWN special. We’ll skip the boring parts, like the character creations (it’s D&D. Take 3d6 and roll them. Got it?), combat rules (Take a d20 and I’ll tell you if you hit!), gear (pistol goes bang, laser pistol goes pew, plasma rifle goes slurp and so on) and the setting (there are stars, and they don’t have numbers). Let’s instead look right at the part of SWN that receives the most praise, the star system generation. ...

There’s been a bit of discussion about VASSAL in the ASL community, started by this blog post (warning: auto-play music). The central hypothesis of this is that ASL is a social game (to which I agree) and that VASSAL gets in the way of that (to which I disagree very strongly). I am a digital native. I have been on the internet for about ten years now, I used Twitter before it was cool and IRC greatly helped me overcome my social anxieties. Some of the people I consider my best friends are people I only know from the Internet. ...

Today, I got a phishing e-mail. I hope you have never been subject to such a shocking event for yourself, and apologize if the horror of my tale gave you a heart attack. Well, this one looked a bit more legit than most of them, and it was certainly audacious: A mail claiming to be from Yahoo and sent by a Yahoo user. It somehow passed my spam filter, so I decided I might as well tell Yahoo about it, so they might unleash their mighty rage upon the morally bankrupt offender. For sure, there would be an “abuse” e-mail account, to which I could forward the mail with an appropriate one-liner. ...

Just as a heads-up for those of you who do not keep an eye on the Humble Bundle page all the time: The new offer (valid for two weeks from now) is really worth its money. You can get the whole BioShock series, SpecOps: The Line, XCom Enemy Unknown and XCom Declassified, Mafia II and The Darkness II if you pay 20$ or more, and if you pay more than the average customer (which would mean about 6$ right now), you get everything minus XCom: EU and BioShock Infinite. ...

It doesn’t shy away from asking important questions . It is highly educational. It has well-written dialogs. And it’s as incomprehensible as Metal Gear Solid 2. You might have guessed it - it’s a Pokémon bootleg, one that’s usually known as Pokémon Vietnamese Crystal. And it is probably the most entertaining video game I ever encountered, thanks to its weird, dadaist charme. Some things are barely comprehensible, some are just plain wrong, there are about five hundred items called “POLE”, about 50% of the attacks are completely misnamed (“FLAME”? It’s Water Gun, what did you think!), but every second line in the game will make you laugh so hard it hurts. There are a couple of Let’s Plays of the thing, the most famous one was done by Delicious Cinnamon, who also have some other Pokémon bootleg games in their library. You should totally go watch it right now. ...

Violence – is there anything it can’t fix? Well, history would teach us that there is indeed, but nobody likes history and it never gets invited to any LAN parties. Broforce (subtitled “Freedom Simulator”) is a very ironic indie side scroller about solving problems the only way worth the effort: by making lots of stuff explode. The gameplay is highly focused on co-op, so the only component I really tried out was the campaign because everything else appears to need other players. Because the game is one of these Early Access things that are all the rage these days on Steam, nobody in my peer group seems to own it.

This is. My regular opponent and me sat down to play S13 Priority Target, and then we played it again with reversed sides. I lost twice, which confirms the ASL Scenario Archive’s claim of perfect balance. My opponent wrote AARs for both games, which are pretty good and are really detailed in their analysis of how I managed to screw up so much.