Donations received = 4

I must say I’m rather disappointed.

Visually I think the game is just about there now – as you can see from a comparison to the original. Hopefully it’s looking like a nice mid-80s arcade machine game or something.

Over the last couple of days I’ve added in scoring and the combo and bonus metres both work now. Bonus points aren’t added at the end of the level yet because I haven’t finalised how it will work although I have a few ideas bouncing around.

As you can see I have forgone the original game’s instant death. Although we still have just one life there is an energy/health display and colliding with the chasers won’t be instantly fatal. A tiny amount of life will be restored after each level but you will have to hold on to as much of it as you can. I hope this will make the game a bit more accessible.

I’m not finally adding in some sound effects and working on the title screen. Hopefully the game is on course for a release this month now, if I keep my head together this time.

I’ve spent the last month emailing until my fingers are raw doing my utmost best to get together an impressive prize-pool to excite you all, and I’m pleased to say I think we are almost there.

All the pieces as starting to fall into place and this is going to be most excellent!

Hopefully everyone will feel the good games have been rewarded.

The bad games on the other hand will be pelted with rotten tomatoes, virtual ones at least, because if you can’t put in the effort to make your game stand out – and at least make it playable and fun – after we have put in months of effort putting this competition together then you really need to go back to the drawing board and play more games and see what makes a game fun and enjoyable to play.

I’m wishing on a star that we get the magical 100 entries this time around as we have come close in the past but never hit that milestone. Of course I want it to be 100 great games of course, not just filler.

It’s you guys out there in internet land that can make this possible! Do us proud then there might be another competition.

There are lots of great sponsors and great prizes and my heartfelt thanks go out to each and every person and company that has put into the prize pool and helped make this look so tremendous. I can’t wait to be able to tell you and show you all the things we have on offer. “Look what you could win!” but that is still a month away I’m afraid.

Feel free to rev your engines loud and proud but be sure not to start early or the rules (which are still in draft form as I write this) might make you wish you had waited.

I’m buzzin and can’t wait to see what all you guys out there come up with. On your marks…

Please please if you have played any of my games and enjoyed them in the past. Consider donating by clicking on the Buy Me A Coffee in the sidebar. It is a paypal link – If you need a Nochex link please get in touch or let me know here and I will be able to set that up too.

I am coding again at the moment and I’m going to save the email addresses of the people who donate and they will be able to see what I’m working on first, before anyone else.

The game itself could possibly be donation-ware, and if that is the case I will consider any donations to be pre-orders. LOL

I don’t mean to sound like I have a little black storm-cloud over my head but at the moment I really do have.

I’ve had a play with it now and didn’t notice straight away that it was rotatable. I was well chuffed I can tell you when it suddenly twisted in my hand when I was adjusting the viewing angle on my desk and I realised that it could be put into portrait mode as well as landscape.

Of course as you can see the first thing I did was give MAME a little try (once I had told my video card drivers to rotate the image on the screen) and play with a few of the games that look a bit on the strange side when played on a normal landscape aspect screen, with those huge black bars to the left and right.

Galaga and Frogger and Scramble etc suddenly get a whole new leas of life. It’s really great.

I’ve wanted a twisty monitor for years and now I have one {does a happy dance}. Many thanks to the person who decided to get rid of this. I guess it was a business and they had dozens of them which they have replaced now with spanking new ones. It has a TCO’99 sticker on it so it’s definitely getting on a bit but it works a charm and I’m a happy bunny.

Now if only I can somehow get a eMac (donations plz) or some other OsX machine that will run OpenGL I will be in tech heaven and get back into coding in a big way. The Mac would not be connected to the net so there would be no distractions.

The internet is a blessing and a curse (as Adrian Monk would say) and as much as I love it dearly it does tend to be a time sink and just drains away the hours of your life. LOL

I hope it went to a good home. They said the super drive (dvd/cd drive?) was knackered but that wouldn’t have mattered a jot to me, and who needs em with networking and pen drives anyway these days?

Ah wells it was a nice dream there for a few minutes.

I wish this iMac G3 had hardware opengl graphics, it’s the only thing holding me back on the mac coding. Can compile on it but can’t test the results which is a bit of a bummer.

Freecycle is great and if you are not a member you should search for your local group on there, they are set up for pretty much every major/minor city in the world.

Yummy. It is very caffeinated too with lots of coffee beans and cups of coffee all around the site. I feel very much at home here now, even more so than before.

I hope you like the new look – Hopefully this WordPress install will be a lot easier to maintain and keep track of. Can you believe that e107 wasn’t even telling me if I had any comments, I had to plough through the posts looking for them and it ended up with some spam messages knocking around.

Hopefully too this new fresh start here will motivate me a little into maybe making some new content. 2008 is a month in already and I’ve not done a single line of coding.

I partially blame my shiny new PSP that I got from my wife for Christmas – I’ve finally been playing Cave Story (years after everyone else) and enjoying it very much.

Buy me a coffee from the sidebar and let’s hope the coding juices kick in again.

Does anyone still care about TCKSOFT or shouldn’t I bother? LOL

Don’t know why but I’m in a very sombre mood this evening, and for a little while.

Anyway, I will bugger off again before I depress you – enjoy the rest of the holidays!

I wondered why I had never got a single donation for all my games.

I just figured that everyone hates me. LOL. Please show me I’m wrong.

The button is working now thanks to a different plugin to replace the knackered one.

EDIT (Feb 2008): As I’ve moved onto WordPress, the donate button has changed again and I hope you will all decide to buy me a cup of coffee to help me code.

It’s good to see after all the months of the machine not being anywhere and rarer than a hen’s tooth it’s available here and there… Wii in stock at Amazon!

We are playing Big Brain Academy at the moment – cheap and nasty, but fun, and hopefully getting the kids to actually think a little.

Hopefully next news will have more to do with remake coding.