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The upgrade wasn't fast, and you do meet The Black Screen Of Worry...

"The Black Screen Of Worry" lol I know exactly what you mean, I think this new term will catch on. I'm still on Windows 8.1 but that also has this "Black Screen Of Worry" every now and then. It's usually an unannounced upgrade right at start up, without any feeback or progress bar or anything. For couple of minutes you're just staring at a black screen even though there's some HDD activity.

The first time I got this BSOW I shut the computer down after about 2 minutes thinking it had just crashed or something. But after that my sounddriver was gone and I couldn't open the configuration screen anymore.

Last few days I've been getting some spam mails from gameacadamy with a (I've got to admit) pretty slick PR campaign. It's delivered through a series of videos with a distinct kickstarter-vibe to them. You know; informal tone, inspirational music, profesionally edited.. it's all a little too slick actually.

https://www.gameacademy.com/buildbox/

They claim they are going to reveal this insanely new software development tool on 18th of august (next monday) called Buildbox. With it you can allegedly create games without any programming skills and deploy them on any platofrm (iphone, android, windows, mac, xbox, etc). I dunno, when something sounds too good to be true.. usually it just isn't true.

Anyone else hear of it, what do you think?

Ever since the first Angry Video Game Nerd video, I've seen more and more videos and photos of these huge private videogame collections.
It's pretty cool, but I never really understood this urge to collect so incredibly many consoles+games..  guess I'm not a collector.

If you really want to go old-school with procedural music generating, check out CPU Bach for the 3DO

I've tried GLBasic v12 and I still get the same results. This is frustrating, because the current version of Snake Slider in the appstore doesn't work correctly on iPads with retina screen. The game area is very small, it is a 640x960 area on a 1536x2048 screen. I recently got an e-mail from a user:

It's been almost a year since Snake Slider suddenly became unusable.... it doesn't work on any of our iPads: iPad2, iPad3, iPad mini... and even the new iPad Air because it is simply too tiny in the middle of the screen. Not large enough for adult fingers to manipulate the snakes.
Is there any chance of it being fixed sometime... or should we all just delete Snake Slider from our iPads now? It's been disappointing, as it was a game we played all the time during 2012.

What I'm trying to accomplish is this
In project I set iPhone resolution to 768x1024, and I would want it to work like this:
iPhone4 -> retina 640x960
iPad/iPad2 -> 768x1024 (even when device supports retina 1536x2048)

But what happens is this:
if I set project to 768x1024
iPhone4 -> 320x480 (not ok, resolution is too low)
iPad/iPad2 -> 768x1024 (ok)

if I set project to 640x960
iPhone4 -> retina 640x960 (ok)
iPad2 -> 1536x2048 retina (not ok, resolution is too high)

These ones are more tunned.

Wow, those sprites look so cool. Which program did you use? AC3D or Povray or 3D Studio or Rhinoceros 3D?

Can you animate this 3D model, like some simple animation for example turning 180 degrees etc.? Because when you can make a prerendered spritesheet (like Donkey Kong Country) you usually get a very cool and smooth looking sprites. I mean compared to just vector art or 2D hand drawn.

Magnetized, this is a pretty good idea for a one-button game.
http://jayisgames.com/games/magnetized/

Should be possible to work this into a game with GLBasic, maybe with levels where you have to go to an exit while collecting 3 stars, ala Cut The Rope.

Wow, I'd never heard about Krita before, it looks pretty cool. It takes some getting use to, but it's got nice options and brushes. Looks like it's geared more toward painting and creating comic-style art than to photo editing though. But still, I never really could  work with GIMP, this is a great alternative.

Btw Paint.Net (freeware) is also pretty cool, at least to do simple editing of screenshots or icons or cropping photo's.

It is all a conspiracy by Steve Jobs and Elvis!!

And don't forget the illuminati Btw this also reminds me of that joke:

"Hello! Welcome to the mental health hotline!"
"If you are obsessive-compulsive, press 1 repeatedly
"If you are co-dependant ask someone to press 2 for you"
"If you have muliple personalities press 3, 4, 5 and 6"
"If you are paranoid, don't worry; we know who you are and what you want, stay on the line so we can trace your call"
"If you are delusional, press 7 and your call will be transfered to the mothership"
"If you are schizophrenic, listen carefully and a small voice will tell you which number to press"
"If you are manic-depressive, it doesn't matter which number you press since no one will answer"
"Thank you for calling the mental health hotline!"


Seriously though, sound like just a coincidence but a pretty cool one..

[Pivot]

Pivot by Podbot (Flash/webgame)
http://jayisgames.com/archives/2013/09/pivot.php

An excellent platform puzzle game. You have to collect all treasure chests spread out over a grid of 7x7 screens. You can rotate a screen when you're in a platform corner. The catch is that you can only pick up treasure chests when you are aligned with the treasure.

A great game, although I think it's sorely missing an in-game map or radar. It's a little too difficult to navigate the maze without any map (I used this map), and all the rotating makes it extra disorientating. Btw you have to collect 49 treasures which is 98%, at first I was wandering aimlessly looking for that last 100% but the last one is located after the exit.

I've entered my game in a promotion action site for dutch/belgium audiences: http://appevent.com/08/31/snake-slider

So if you haven't tried it yet, you can get the full game for free today (31 august). Fair warning; the price will be reset to €0,89 at the end of the day .

GLBasic in its current state is an awesome tool for creating games for OpenGL/c++ based platforms. But I think HTML5/Javascript is a different beast altogether because it requires a different development approach compared to native OpenGL stuff where you "just" write to the screenbuffer. You need more control over the separate canvases, and which ones you are drawing to, classes work differently (prototype-based) etc.

The way I look at it, a HTML5/Javascript tool or framework would be better off being its own separate project (which ofcourse is easier said than done). I've tried compiling my GLBasic games to HTML5 and it outputs a 10MB html file of about 300.000 lines which both Chrome and IE can't execute. I haven't looked into it but I *suspect* I would have to do some substantial re-writing before my game works as a HTML5 project.

I still have some ideas for new games (don't we all? ) but I don't know what to do next. GLBasic is lacking some crucial things for iOS and Android such as gamecenter support or in-app purchases or an easy way to include banners. On the other hand HTML5/JavaScript has the potential to run on iOS, Android, Windows Phone and also Chromestore (and possibly even as a Facebook app). So now I'm thinking about doing just a HTML5 game, but the problem with that is I don't know how I would eventually package that as an iOS or Android app.

Heres a small and simple example:

It isn't *just* a sinus wave. The path of the aliens is also influenced by the player position, and also sometimes they do a small looping and go back upwards a bit. So it's a little more complicated..

[Gunforce 2]

Metal Slug is pretty cool, I remember when it came out in arcades 3D games where all the rage. Metal Slug was one of the few 2D games but it had such fine pixel art, they probably used pretty sophisticated techniques to create it (maybe even 3D modeling?).

If you like Metal Slug then also see Gunforce 2 and In The Hunt they have the exact same graphics style.
http://www.hardcoregaming101.net/irem/irem.htm

TBH Space Hawks was jut a Galaxian clone. Gameplay improvement wise you could add new enemies, attack waves, power-ups and maybe a boss or two. Obviously the graphics could be improved and smoothed and the sound could be redone from scratch. But doing all of that would make it a new game entirely...

I don't know Space Hawks, but if it's a Galaxian clone then you can improve it by making it more like Galaxian

Seriously, play the MAME version, or the NES port is pretty good too, and see how the Galaxians swoop down with gracefully smooth (sinus?) patterns. The trick is to cross their path as they attack, that is; when they swoop from left to right, you should move from right to left passing underneath them and shoot. You get extra points for shooting them in mid-air and this is a very subtle risk-reward system, which makes Galaxian such a great game.

The "swoop down" algorithm is pretty subtle but I think it can be done using bézier curves. If you can get that to work nicely you've got half of the game done.