made room for what wynand calls "boss zero" for the intro, and put the sprite (although not each sprite's animated parts) in the game -- will aim to get the text for that script in tomorrow, and maybe animate the phoenix and give it some behavior

added automatic movement between the intro areas when certain scripts end (i think in a few more days most of the intro to the game will be in, though the 'boss zero' graphic isn't done yet so i'll probably have to leave that out)

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/jul/07/german-trial-hijab-murder-egypt

(19:43:57) RinkuHero: not safe even in a court of law
(19:44:02) RinkuHero: if someone can just go up and stab you in one
(19:44:12) fartron: yeah, not just in court, but on the fucking witness stand
(19:44:23) fartron: stabbed 18 times
(19:50:36) Longetech: yea
(19:50:39) Longetech: and the husband ran to save her
(19:50:44) Longetech: and police mistook him for attacker
(19:50:45) Longetech: and shot him!

in a few hours it will be:

12:34.56, 07.08.09

this happens once every century

depending on your time zone it may have already happened, but here on the east coast it'll happen in a few hours

:D something posted in the ID forums:

"
Immortal Defense is made of win and awesome.
Good luck surpassing that awesomeness.

Also, I couldn't find the donations button, so I got another copy.
"

11193 (+12)

drew a map overlay; made it so scripts correctly skip lines enclosed in parenthesis (for comments/notes wynand writes); enclosed venus's dream with walls, added an invisible object there with the next part of the script;

now there's a part in wynand's script which calls for

"(Eventually the number of human beings twined in the vines starts to increase, until it's just a chain of human figures all tied together. At the end of the maze, the human figures have melded together into a complex knot of arms, legs, heads--all green and plantlike, growing, connected. When the human figures' eyes are visible, they're very alien looking--pupilless, strangely colored and shaped.)"

which requires a ton of special-case art which is undrawn just for that 45-second dream area. i'm also unsure if those things are classified as "creatures" (komera draws those) or "map tiles" (orchard draws those). so perhaps i should draw them? or ask harlock to draw them in a cutscene? or just rework that part so that the imagery in the dream is something we have drawn instead? dunno...

for now i'll use a stupid cutscene i drew of some vines and a d00d as a placeholder until we decide



let this be a lesson to wynand: don't describe stuff in words which is crazily hard and time-consuming to draw :(

my site was ruined/hacked yesterday, somehow all the index.html and index.php files were changed to include iframes (which broke the php files); i'm not sure how it happened but i changed all the passwords and such. thanks goes to 'thi3f' in the tigsource irc channel for helping me figure it out (not that he reads this).

fixed a bug where backgrounds wouldn't display in the dialogue when off view; fixed a bug that made textboxes hard to progress in, created full-room invisible (i.e. invisible areas which trigger things from anywhere in the room rather than in specific areas), created some invisible walls (for special purposes like in venus's dream where i need to keep her in one room). 11180 (+12)

this guy's indie games are overlooked, but they're great

today i just made the script cause creatures and the player to stop moving after character 20, as per wynand's / fenrir's suggestion

i've also been forgetting to count line totals! here's today's: 11169 (11142 was 2 days ago, so over the last two days, i added a paltry 27 lines)

http://bytesizebio.net/index.php/2009/07/04/from-predator-to-plant-in-one-gulp/

"Two researchers have shown a striking example of endosymbiosis forming now: in 2005 Noriko Okamoto an Isao Inouye reported on a unicellular organism called Hatena. Hatena (”enigma” in Japanese) leads a curious life cycle. Hatena is a single-cell organism, swimming around in the water, using a little feeding apparatus to eat cells and organic material smaller than itself. At some point, it would feed on another unicellular algae, the Nephroselmis. Once Hatena swallows Nephroselmis, it does not digest it. Rather, Nephrosolmis makes a rather comfortable home inside Hatena. Actually, the algae starts growing inside Hatena: it grows to about 10 times its original size, filling up most of Hatena. The alga also seems to lose most of its own organelles, except for the chloroplast. The chloroplast actually grows bigger.

"Hatena changes too as a result. Before ingesting the alga, it has a rather complex “mouth”, or feeding apparatus. After ingesting the algae, this mouth disappears. Instead, it is replaced by an eyespot from the algae. The eyespot is a light sensing organelle, a very primitive eye that guides algae to light sources. In this case, it also guides the host, Hatena, to light. Hatena has obvioulsy stopped feeding, and least through its mouth. It is now swimming to the light, letting the alga photosynthesize its food for both of them.

"Hatena reproduces by binary fission. So once it splits itself, what happens to the symbiotic alga? Well, one daughter cell gets the alga, and the other gets ot be a predator.. at least until it eats another alga. So here we are, looking at a fascinating evolutionary snapshot: two creatures, they can live apart or together. One is not quite an organelle yet, but definitely on its way."

it's funny how quotes on twitter are abbreviated, making the person quoted sound like they can't write

"What u get by achieving ur goals isn't as important as what U Bcome by achieving ur goals. -J. W. von Goethe"

http://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=7081.0

if you play indie games, go vote for the indie games you're most looking forward to. currently fez and the undersize are in the lead

worked on script/text display a bit. pondering whether to allow the player and the creatures to continue to move during dialogue or whether to pause the action.

favoring the former, but many problems arise: what to do if the player accidentally moves off the screen during dialogue (missing what is said)? how about the text getting in the way of what the player is trying to do? also, what button/click to use to make dialogue progress? if the action is ongoing, clicking to go to the next textbox will simultaneously cause some action (whatever function the player has equipped).

so it seems like it'd just be simpler to pause the action during text, despite it being fun to move around during text (i remember the first time i was able to do that was in chrono trigger, although in there you can't actually perform many actions while talking, but you can walk around)... thoughts from you guys?

worked on save file system. invisible objects can now save their width and height, as well as their script file; creatures now save their friendedness state. had a fever too

lines of code: 11142 (+17, a paltry amount!)

http://www.polyneux.de/archiv/290-im-pulverturm.html

ID review in -- german, i think

switched to gimp from psp3 as per the instructions of tuftears and making objects out of tiles went a faster today; not enough to make it enjoyable, but faster. i think the biggest improvement was just in how the selection tool works: using the magic wand selection tool is easier than using rectangular selection (although the latter is necessary when fiddling with the wand's settings aren't enough to get it to select the tile correctly). no lines of code today, just work in gimp, so still 11125 lines.

created a script for the level editor to generate a random area. it's a pretty stupid script right now, just placing a random number of random things in random locations around the area, but it can be useful when trying to get ideas for areas. unfortunately since a lot of stuff isn't in yet (lots of tiles and enemy graphics and obstacle types and special room effects (weather, etc.) and so on), the variety of rooms it can create are pretty small -- it reminds me that i need to start creating the 'obstacle' class of objects eventually (things which are not creatures but which interact with the player in some way: slowing them down for instance)

also created a few quick new areas using this feature, perhaps five areas added

as added incentive, because i like to see numbers go up, i'm going to start recording the lines of code at the end of each day, even though it's a stupid sort of motivation; i don't know the number when i started today, so i'll just start from here and post change in total lines of code starting tomorrow.

current lines: 11125

http://www.examiner.com/examiner/x-2521-Sioux-Falls-Video-Game-News-Examiner~y2009m7d1-Indie-developer-spotlight-Radical-Poesis-Games--Creations

it's basically just saying what our site itself says, and the examiner is a site where people write articles for money rather than an actual news source, but good to see nonetheless

something i miss about old jRPGs -- in the old days, you had to "talk to everyone!" in order to figure out where to go or what to do next: today, they just tell you in cutscenes, and sometimes even provide a big arrow pointing which way to go (like in Final Fantasy X) -- pleasantly, at least atlus games retain some of the "talk to everyone!" mechanic, even if no other jRPGs do

Haha: "NOBODY likes Iji. People may think they do, but it's not a fun game." -Overman on the Game Maker Community forums

put a bunch of orchard-l's flowers into the game; made a test area for them

i tried posting a few screenshots on twitter a day or so ago; one of the people there said that the game looks like 'spore for the snes, in space'

really hate piecing sprites together, very tedious work



have the feeling this will go on for a long time. i wish orchard sent them to be pre-assembled into various structures ;_;

SD work consisted of annoyingly tedious cutting and pasting of sprites and tiles into slightly larger structures as well as figuring out what's the best program to do that in (i just wound up using good ol' paint shop pro version 3); back in the snes days it was optimal to cut up stuff into little tiles (to save storage space) but now that storage space isn't as much of an issue it's more optimal to use larger pre-arranged groupings of them in order to increase render speed

just put in komera's new sprites; four new ones there. as an aside, i kind of like the underwater textures (craters) used in this pic, adds a bit of depth; maybe i can ask orchard if he'd draw more stuff like that

not much to report today: still working on having the invisible entities save and load properties and working on the creatures saving their friendliness states when you exit and re-enter a room, made some progress but not done w/ that; file systems don't make for interesting screenshots

the best let's play ever; clysm linked me to it

jason rohrer and chris crawford documentary trailer

too much game design power in one room

worked on adding invisible 'script' objects which trigger specific scripts when moved onto; not done with them yet but i am partially done with them

set up venus's dream area (for the intro) and started working on converting wynand's intro script to the game's format

i'm going to sleep now but just had a sadistic idea: you know how faqs and walkthroughs ruin games? how it's not as fun as figuring stuff out yourself before the age of the internet where you could just look a puzzle up to solve it? imagine if the game itself had algorithms to detect when you seem like you know exactly what to do without having to experiment or figure stuff out, and then punish the player for it? (or even just say: you used a faq to solve this, right? try experimenting next time ;_;) haha

reminds me of my idea to detect when the player is skipping textboxes too quickly without reading them and punish them for not paying attention to the story

of course, i don't really think serious games should do these things, but it'd be fun for joke / experimental games

the story file interpreter now it takes tags and draws bgs, i.e. the text file reads

" In the year 21XX, humankind finally realized one of its greatest dreams: to break free of the prison of the sky. To build new cities on new worlds. [mercedes-basic.png]"

and the script takes that bracketed name and draws it to screen when that sentence is displayed

this should make it easy for the other people on the team to add stuff to the game

haowan in the #tigirc pointed out that there's a new trailer to a new miyazaki film; it looks great, all hand-drawn apparently

some random baby on youtube enjoying the zombies vs plants (a casual game by popcap) music video

last call! vote! vote like the wind!



http://community.livejournal.com/lj_election_en/

she's currently in LAST PLACE; do you want her to LOSE to a guy named KYLECASSIDY? a guy famous for inventing PHOTO-BLOGGING? i do not

yay, i just got my first ever sale to russia (someone in moscow) -- who said russians are all pirates? :D

still none from china though D:

i now made it so that when the game reads text from the script files, it correctly displays the portrait for each person. i did it in a very cheap way though:

if string_count(':',argument0)
switch string_char_at(argument0, 0)
{
case 'V': portrait = 2; break; //venus
case 'M': portrait = 0; break; //mercedes
case 'I': portrait = 3; break; //ikks
case 'S': portrait = 4; break; //spare
case 'N': portrait = 1; break; //neotheo
case 'T': portrait = 5; break; //theo
case 'A': portrait = 6; break; //aphrodite
default: portrait = -1; break;
}

as you can see, if we create new characters later, we'll have to make their names begin with unique letters :)

"All your help will be thanked." -a post in the game maker community

someone named joehonkie on the tigsource forums sent me an iphone for free (well, i gave him a copy of my game in exchange). i do not know how to use it though since it didn't come with instructions, so i'm just playing around and trying to figure it out without instructions. it seems to be a very old one, one of the first types they made (4gb which they canceled production of back in 2007), but nonetheless it was nice of him since it originally cost like $500 2 years ago. i don't think i'll actually buy phone service for it just yet, since it's prolly too expensive (70$ a month?? oh, they're going to drop it to "only" 60$ apparently) which is ridiculous since that's like, almost as much as our rent -- how people can afford to pay for these things i don't know. if you make minimum wage, that's like working a full day and a half every month just to be able to pay for phone service? but i believe there's a way to play iphone games on them without paying for phone service or something, will investigate...

daphaknee managed to get the 300 'support' comments, crazily, and is one of five candidates left. go vote now (this time you use a drop-down menu to vote for your first, second, and third choice). so far daphaknee only has one vote (mine), but it was just posted a few hours ago

go to vote! -> http://community.livejournal.com/lj_election_en/31595.html

jewel's wings (they don't really look like wings, but whatever -- i'll make their motions better at another time)

muse and fleep (or whatever their current names are)

copied from a tigsource thread, this is the list of games i've worked on and whether i finished them or not, so far

01 gobbler [1995] [finished]
02 ____'s kingdom [1995] [unfinished]
03 seeker [1995] [mostly done but unfinished]
04 2nd seeker [1996] [mostly done but unfinished]
05 untitled egypt rpg [1997] [unfinished]
06 nhnt 1/5 [1998] [unfinished]
07 wingedmene [1999] [not finished but released and ~15 hours of gameplay]
08 and [2000] [finished]
09 harlock and rinku's game which includes the game never go west [2001] [finished]
10 rulers of the seven wonders [2001] [finished]
11 ziggurats for red turtle [2002] [unfinished]
12 knight of the ages [2003] [finished]
13 kinder der alter / alterpoint [2004] [unfinished]
14 troublespot [2005] [unfinished]
15 alphasix [2006] [finished]
16 immortal defense [2007] [finished]
17 fedora spade series [2007-2008] [finished]
18 saturated dreamers [2007] [currently in progress]
19 new detail [2008] [unfinished]
20 valentine's contest game [2009] [finished]
21 rainshine [2009] [currently in progress]

success rate (only counting 'finished' and counting everything else as unfinished): 9/21 or 43%