distractionware: devlog

It’s the first of March! Results of my game a month experiment so far: One game that wasn’t very interesting that I feel compelled to eventually finish for arbitrary reasons, and one game which is quite interesting that I feel compelled to put to one side for arbitrary reasons.

Maybe I need to rethink what I’m doing.

Ok. While I still plan to continue working on shortform games this year, I think I’m going to abandon this arbitrary game a month restriction, which isn’t really working out. It’s clear that moving on to new projects regularly is good for me, but I think I need to find a way to do it which is a better fit to the way that I actually work.

Anyway: at the very least this means that I’m going to keep working on Big Hero for a while. Here are some new screenshots!

I decided not to bother with Mini Ludum Dare or the NotGame. This week I went to Dublin and did lots of work on my main project for February, the RPG with the working title “Big Hero”.

I really, really like where this is going. Unfortunately, it looks like it’s going to need quite a lot more work before it really takes shape. I’m starting to have second thoughts about this game a month thing. I don’t really want to move onto something new on Monday!

At the start of this year, I resolved to move onto new projects every month! I thought it was time for an update on how that’s going.

My February game is Big Hero, and it’s going really well. I started this last year around June or so and only worked on it for three or four days, but it’s a project I’ve thought about quite a bit since. Over the last week or so I feel like I’ve started to get into a groove with it, and I’m excited about how it’s developing!

Unfortunately, I probably won’t have time to actually finish it this month, just because there are so many other things happening in the next two weeks that I want to do instead – Klik of the Month is tomorrow night, Mini Ludum Dare 16 is this weekend, the 371-Pirate Kart is next weekend, and at some point before the end of the month I also want to try making a NotGame. Oh well!

My January game was an untitled first person shooter. What with January being VVVVVV month and all, I never really got this project to a point where it had any momentum. All that’s really implemented here is a basic raycaster in flash.

Right at the start of the year I said that I want to make more shooters this year, and this was supposed to be a first attempt at trying out a particular approach I’m curious about. If I have the time and inclination later in the year I’ll revisit it.

I have VVVVVV news! While you will always be able to buy the game directly from me, it’s now also being sold on two other sites:

Firstly, a new UK based digital distribution site, Get Games. Get Games are the first such website to sell it – I’m hoping that it’ll appear on a few more in the coming weeks!

Secondly, in addition to the Windows and Mac versions, there is now also an Online version! It’s being sold by Kongregate using their Kreds system. This version has compressed music and can’t be played fullscreen, but otherwise it’s the same – it might be worth a look to people who would prefer to play it online!

Meanwhile: I’ve finally gotten to work on my February game. Should have something worth posting about it (and my unfinished January game) later this week.

This is quite overdue, but the Mac version of the 1.2 patch is ready!

Apologies for the size of the download, we didn’t have any luck finding a suitable patching tool for mac and thought it was better just to release it as a huge patch than delay it any longer.

Whoops! There was a small problem with yesterday’s patch. I’ve quickly fixed it, and called the new, correct version v1.2.

If you’ve already upgraded to v1.1, then you’ll need downgrade to v1.0 first, using this.

How to tell which version you’re running: The original version 1.0 has a simple main menu, version 1.1 has a more complex one with separate game and graphic options, and the new version 1.2 has a little v1.2 mark in the bottom right hand corner of the main menu.

The windows patch for VVVVVV is complete! Mac patch will follow once I can find a tool that generates a patch that isn’t 70 megabytes, heh.

[EDIT] Due to a problem with the original patch which breaks the time trials, I’m taking this patch down! I’ll have another update later today.

If you’ve installed the V1.1 patch and would like to update to V1.2, you can use this new downgrade patch to restore the game to V1.0 first.

The full list of changes is on the forum, but here are the highlights:

– You can quickly restart the time trials by pressing ENTER.
– Now supports more flexible graphic options, which may help improve performance on some machines.
– The game now starts in a window by default, which makes it easier to run on Linux through wine.
– A number of small bug fixes.

Thanks for your patience!

I’ve got some bad news for Linux users that I was hoping I wouldn’t have to announce – I’ve tried everything I can think of, but I can’t get a version of VVVVVV working on Linux. I’m out of ideas and it doesn’t look like it’s going to happen. Believe me, I’m as annoyed about this as I’m sure you are.

Flash is supposed to be cross platform, so I was under the impression that making a standalone Linux version just involved making a flash projector on Linux (like it did on a Mac). That’s not the case – I was horrified to discover on the day of the release that the Linux version was completely broken; it wasn’t displaying the graphics properly, and it didn’t take any keyboard input at all.

Since the launch I’ve optimistically tried everything I could to get it working, but VVVVVV is a flash game, and I’m completely at the mercy of how well flash works in Linux. I had some success using different versions of the standalone player, and I tried making changes to the game to hopefully work around the various problems I was having. The closest I got was by making an AIR version of the game and running it with the new (still in beta) version of AIR 2.0 – and that still had serious problems. The game had an audio lag of a couple of seconds, ran very slowly in fullscreen and worst of all, randomly called KeyUp events when you were holding down a key, which completely breaks the game’s controls.

I’m… disappointed that Flash support on Linux isn’t better than it is, but there’s nothing I can do.

There is at least some consolation, though – VVVVVV seems to work very well on Linux through Wine, at least in a window. With the patch I’ve been working on, I’m going to make the game a bit more Wine friendly by having it start in windowed mode. edit: WAIT FOR THE PATCH!

As well as that, I’ve also been looking into making an online version of the game available too which should work better (since the flash browser plug in on linux seems to be a lot better than the standalone version, for whatever reason). More on that in the next few days.

In any case, I’ll keep trying – hopefully a newer version of the Linux flash standalone player comes along at some point to fix these issues. I wish there was more I could do

(the venue; cheers to bateleur for the photo)

I’m just back from TIGJam UK 2! I was pretty exhausted for most of it with VVVVVV’s launch and everything, but I still enjoyed it a lot – met lots of new people (though unfortunately I didn’t get talking properly to everyone I wanted to), made a short game that I’m really happy with, and I got started on what’ll probably be my January game (as per the whole game-a-month thingy I’m doing this year).

Over the next couple of days, though, I’m going to do some more work on VVVVVV – I have a few things I wanna try to get the Linux port working, and hopefully I’ll have a patch that’ll fix a few minor glitches that people have found. I want to add some advanced display configuration options too that should help people who’ve had blurriness or slowdown in fullscreen modes.

I’ve got quite a backlog of emails to catch up on this week; apologies if you’ve been in touch and I haven’t replied yet!

I’m at TIGJam UK! At the last one of these things I made eight games, but I’m not really interested in trying to break that record this time. Here’s a game I made yesterday:

It’s called Bridge. It was started at one of the three hour jams for the theme “audio only”.

I used a lot of creative commons photos in this one; I’ve put a full list after the jump.

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