A couple of months ago I have finished a logical game, Trapdoorer. After unsuccessfully getting it sponsored by one flash games site, I have been contacted by a certain someone. That person turned out to be Florian Landerl, CTO of a newly created, still being developed and far from release social gaming site, Platogo. My first thought was “Whirled 2?”, but after taking a moment to get myself familiarized with their API, site and goals I quickly understood how wrong was I. Actually, I was captivated by the site cheerful looks, so when they wanted me to incorporate Platogo API with Trapdoorer I quickly said Yes :). Little did I know how much work awaits me.

Thanks to my everlasting laziness, and lack of experience in working with APIs or frameworks, in the end it took me around three months to finish. A lot have happened during that time – I’ve graduated High School, got accepted into Gdansk’s Polytechnic, met and started to go out with a fabulous girl, got lucky in life… BUT! I DID manage to finish Trapdoorer on time. It’s all thanks to the fact that the Platogo API is really easy to use and learn, much unlike the dreadful Whirled I mentioned above.

So, what is Platogo actually? It is a social-gaming site, currently aimed at single-player experience, but with level sharing, achievements, microtransactions+items and online hiscores. All of these functionality is brought to you via their API. As I said, it is surprisingly easy to learn and use. It also comes with “components”, that is premade libraries to ease most common tasks (sending score and showing hiscore table, showing level list and loading level data, uploading finished level and so on), though back when I was working on Trapdoorer they were still in the making so I made my own components and haven’t had the chance to check the “official” ones yet, so no comment about them. I personally have to say, I am proud that I had the chance to help with API development (no, all I did was report bugs) and be one of the first to use it. Surely I will work with it in the future :). In the near future Trapdoorer will be added to the site.

Other than that, I worked on a small puzzle-like game for a commision, finished Cyberix (it will be released on Platogo soon), written a very versatile platformer Engine on which I am building two games right now (and will build more) and did some other minor things. All in all, I kept myself busy, either by socializing myself or by working in the background.

Some might be wondering what I am up to now. Well, I have a couple of plans. I will make a couple of smaller flash games now. In the meantime I might (or not) be working on some bigger flash production. I wish to try my luck with Shareware gaming, but that, if happens, won’t be soon. I also am surely going to write a small coffee-break browser sandbox game in a nearby future. It seems to be popular nowadays. Anyway, I will keep you up-to-date now, one post per week at the very least :).

Well, before I tell you all good night and go to sleep, I strongly encourage all of you to grab Platogo account and play some Trapdoorer! DO ENJOY!

...Read More! and Write First Comment! »

Things have been slow lately. My highschool final exams are nearing, and I am trying to pretend that I am preparing to them – which of course I don’t, no matter how I like (or not) that. This odd state of mind, lying somewhere between “I have to work” and “I have to learn” prevents me from effectively doing either, which in the end makes me as lazy as possible.

Nevertheless, I managed to scrap some creative thinking from back of my mind and made three small (each is smaller than 16KB and less or equal to 180px in height and 180px in width), side-bar flash games, Pixelagne. I… Guess they need no explanation actually :P.

On the other news, I’ve been poking around BlitzMax lately trying to figure out why does it hate me. I noticed it first while making some levels for Poing! PC, the game was awfully slow, the FPS was somewhere between 20 and 30. Then I came up with an idea to tinker a little with my own Poing remake, and I saw one of the worst sights in my life – white screen with colored rectangles and black rectangle in the playfield’s place and it was also sluggish. I am guessing that Windows 7 or 64bits can be the reason, though I got the latest drivers. Now I consider either getting a better notebook (as soon as I pay off my Yamaha keyboard) or buying a stationary PC. If the latter I will make sure to grab two LCD screens, as that is a true pleasure to work on two, especially with pretty advanced IDE’s, like Flex, BLide or Flash.

One last thing I have in my mind is making an in-browser, flash based, platformer-shooter-RPG-like game, something not very like Kingdom of Loathing or other Browser RPGs, but that is a matter for different month. For the first time in over two weeks I feel a strong need to code now, so I shall proceed to that.

...Read More! and Read 6 Comments »

I wanted to say it two days ago, but anyway:

Week ago I have finally left Vista Ultimate 64-bit and, once again, installed Windows 7 64-bit Beta Build 7000. I wanted to say a few things about Vista after being with it for about three months – I guess I am eligible to speak about it. At first, Vista was far much better than XP – I liked the new, sleek design, shortcuts on sidebar, big icons on desktop and stuff. It wasn’t slower too! For the first ~50 days it was completely fine. Then it started to slowly… Slow down. That is probably the Only drawback on Vista I can point out.

The problem is that Vista gets slow faster than XP. On XP I could work for around half a year without reinstalling, but Vista needs it after, let’s say, one and half of a month. It is much less resistant to installing stuff on it. But that’s really it. I don’t understand people all over crying out loud “VISTA SUXORZ!!!111one” without even trying it for more than 5 seconds. I guess there is one other, hidden problem with this o/s – hardware incompatibilities. While it works fine on my hardware, it might produce nothing but gibberish on other computers/notebooks, not because they are faster or slower, but because Vista is not getting along with all drivers. But it didn’t occur to me so hey, that makes it for once I actually was LUCKY with stuff involving electricity :D.

I won’t, however, recommend it to anyone – if you feel like trying it for yourself then you are welcome! But don’t say it is [put some offending/vulgar words here] without even trying it.

So, not wanting to install Vista again, because I would end up having to reinstall it in a couple of months, I got back to Windows 7. I finally found the Show Desktop butto (^^;) but the new localization kind of sucks. More opinions about it are to come when I will be reinstalling/uninstalling it.

...Read More! and Read 2 Comments »