It looks like one of VVVVVV’s digital distribution websites, GetGames, are having an Easter Sale, including VVVVVV for 20% off! They price the game in UK Sterling, so that’s a discount from £8.99 to £7.19; and according to google’s exchange rate that’s 10.944618 U.S. dollars.

The sale is apparently running until next week, so if you’re thinking of getting the game, it’s a good chance to get it that bit cheaper – this is the first time it’s ever been on sale anywhere!

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.

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.

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!

VVVVVV is complete. You can now get it from its website http://thelettervsixtim.es/!

I apologise for how last minute this all was! I’ve just sent out the preorders to anyone who donated. If for any reason you haven’t gotten that, get in touch and I’ll sort you out.

I’ve just been told that the emails might have been marked as spam, since it got sent out to quite a few people. Be sure to check your spam filter, just in case!

I’d just like to remind you that if you like the soundtrack, Souleye is selling that separately on his own site here: http://souleye.madtracker.net/

Want to talk about the game here? I recently added a forum!

Thanks for all the support and encouragement over the last few months. I hope you enjoy the game!

I’m having some technical issues with the Linux port of the game, and unfortunately I don’t think it’s going to be ready tonight. So, I’m going to go ahead with just the Windows and Mac versions for the moment, and hopefully resolve problems with the Linux version later in the week. Sorry about this. I was really hoping to launch all three versions together.

If you have any experience with making standalone flash applications in linux, please get in touch!

I asked him to write a little about his approach to naming for the blog, and here’s what he came up with:

I take the art of naming seriously. I’m not saying that I’m some sort of expert, or even that I’m good at it, but I think I take it more seriously than most people do. I think most people think that names are just arbitrary labels we use to refer to things. I want to say a bit about why I think that those people have the wrong idea.

Creating and naming are separate skills. Creating is hard, slow work, while naming is a flourish that is completed in an instant. That’s why god had to make the animals, if you believe in such things, but the naming of them could be left to a nude man with no education.

Though naming things is instant and effortless, that doesn’t mean it’s easy to do a good job of it. And while naming is insubstantial, that doesn’t mean it’s inconsequential. When we create something we give it form. But when we name it we provide a means of apprehending and understanding that form. When we name things we communicate facts about whatever we’re naming, but we also attach new facts to those things.

In case you think I’m being silly, or just really pretentious, let me give a couple of examples. The first comes from the Sydney Morning Herald.

“One son was named Loser, the other Winner.

One became a policeman and was eventually promoted to detective.

The other fell into the life of a small-time crook, racking up at least 31 arrests before being jailed for two years.

But for the brothers Lane it was not a case of their unique names sealing their fates. “I went a totally separate route right from the start,” said Loser Lane, 41, a detective in the South Bronx.

Loser, a star student and athlete, went on scholarship to an elite prep school, on to Lafayette College in Pennsylvania, and then joined the force.

Winner’s life has gone the other way. Now 44, Winner last month completed a two-year jail sentence for breaking into a car. He is living in a homeless shelter in upstate New York, shuttling back and forth between it and the city trying to get his life on track.

Why did he commit so many crimes? “It’s just some situations I got in,” Winner said.”

Of course, Winner Lane didn’t just get in some situations. His life was mapped out for him when his genius parents decided to call him Winner.

Here’s a more practical example. (Photos courtesy of Jalopnik)

Looks like a fairly cool car. I bet the designers thought it looked chic, modern and clean. But then the guys upstairs named it the ‘Probe’.

Coming off the production line, this must have looked like a fairly macho, practical vehicle. But they called it the ‘Rural Nanny’

There is no pre-existing fact about either of these cars that makes ‘Probe’ or ‘Nanny’ an appropriate name. But now that they are named, it is a fact that the first car is for perverts and the second is for old ladies. These things are now facts about these cars, just as sure as if someone had built mirrors into the ceiling of the first car or put a valence around the tray of the second.

So naming things is Serious Business, and it’s similar to another kind of Serious Business: cutting people in half with a samurai sword.

When you cut someone in half with a samurai sword, you can do it in a long series of timid, half-hearted exploratory swipes. You can stop half-way through and start over. You can constantly second-guess yourself and adjust your progress. But when you do these things, though you end up bisecting your opponent, you will have made a mess. You will have expended more effort than necessary, and the slice will be jagged and ugly. Everyone will know you for the poor swordsman that you are.

No. When you cut someone in half with a samurai sword, it is better to do it all in one go. The same thing goes for giving things names. It has to be done decisively, or you can wind up with hamburger instead of steak.

So that’s why I’m serious about giving things names. That’s why I was honoured to be allowed to contribute names to VVVVVV, a game which needed a whole lot of names. I hope I made clean cuts of most of them.

When things go right, room names serve four distinct purposes. First, they evoke something about the room that isn’t there in the graphics. Some names are there to add more to the game world, fleshing it out and adding detail while keeping graphical clutter off-screen.

Sometimes the names need to communicate something about the room or its solution…

… or just communicate a message from the game to its victim!

Third, they’re there to help you locate yourself and remember the rooms without referring to the map. VVVVVV is a huge game, and while it’s hard to get thoroughly lost since there’s a mini-map, the names act as signposts you can read without interrupting your game.

Finally, some of the room names are just there to raise your spirits when you’re attempting that room for the 185th time!

Room names died with the advent of smooth scrolling in video games. They’re one of those once-popular features that were never obsoleted but instead were voluntarily given up in the service of smoother gameplay. Yet here we are in 2010, with a revolutionary, forward-looking flip-screen platformer. With individually-named rooms.